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ENGL exam 1

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Terms

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Round he surveys, and well might, where he stood
So high above the circling canopy
Of night’s extended shade.
Paradise Lost 3:555-57
"english poem, god references. divinity, nature"
Anne Broadstreet, contemplations
*puritan "rapt were my senses
Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind, That from the nunnery Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind To war and arms I fly….
[stanza ii: war as “new mistress”]
Yet this inconstancy is such As you too shall adore; I could not love thee, dear, so mu
Cavalier Writing: Lovelace, Lucasta
1. Division Reconciled via Wit: Great love impossible—in this version of Cavalier code--without an even greater devotion to honor.

2. Honor trumps (but doesn’t conquer) love. Wit revalues honor as the pre-condition that makes greatest love possible. By contrast, in the heroic code, duty and honor conquer love. Not here.
Stiffly resolved, ‘twould carelessly invade Woman or man, nor ought its fury stayed; Where’er it pierced, a cunt it found or made--
Libertine Writing: Rochester. "Disabled Debauche"

Sexual politics: the libertine asserts a power to “invade” at will. Freedom = desire: total sexual and verbal license.
Senusal pleasure is the single goal of libertine poetics. No transcendence. No inspiration. Borders on proto-nihilism.
Libertine sees social manners as cultural constructions: false & illusory. He throws off the invisible chains of custom & folly
Hail holy Light, offspring of Heav’n first-born… Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers Irradiate, there plant eyes….
Milton, Paradise Lost
I now must change/ These notes to tragic … If answerable style I can obtain Of my celestial patroness, who deigns Her nightly visitation unimplored, And dictates to me slumb’ring, or inspires Easy my unpremeditated verse….
Milton, Paradise Lost
Puritan characteristics
inwardness focuses on personal sin and salvation
What shall I do⬦ to be saved?
A spiritual question
What pleasures will promote (or not obstruct) salvation?
Cavalier characteristics
inwardness is social: love, honor, friendship
CAVALIER
What shall I do⬦ to live a good life?
A moral question
What pleasures will promote (or not obstruct) virtue?

1. Divided Time: Golden Age vrs Now / Spring vrs. Summer
2. Divided Space: Prison vrs. Freedom / Here vrs. There
3. Mind over Circumstance: The Need for Consolation
4. Political Sub-texts
5. Imperfect Resolutions & Dys-consolation: Trouble in Paradise
Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage; Minds innocent and quiet take That for an hermitage. i.e., prison If I have freedom in my love, And in my soul am free, Angels alone, that soar above, Enjoy such liberty.
Lovelace, lUCASTA
The mind redefines freedom and liberty as internal states. Political division of space into imprisoned & free is transcended. Space is re-marked. For Lovelace, in effect, “the mind is its own place.”
When, like committed linnets, I With shriller throat shall sing The sweetness, mercy, majesty, And glories of my king; When I shall voice aloud how good He is, how great should be, Enlarged winds, that curl the flood, Know no such liberty.
Lovelace, Lucasta
Imprisonment cannot constrain his praise of Charles I. Prison can fetter his body but not chain his spirit. He praises the king and not--as in Puritan writings—nature or God. The birds are mere similes.
LIBERTINE characteristics
1. One unconfined; one at liberty

2. One who lives without restraint or law

3. One who pays no regard to the precepts of religion
Nor shall our love-fits, Chloris, be forgot, When each the well-looked linkboy strove t’enjoy, And the best kiss was the deciding lot Whether the boy used you, or I the boy.
Rochester. “The Disabled Debauchee”
Our Sphere of Action, is lifes happiness,
And he who thinks Beyond, thinks like an Ass
Rochester. "Satyr against mankind"
“But whatsoever is the object of any man’s appetite or desire, that is it which he for his part calleth good; and the object of his hate and aversion, evil.... …there being nothing simply and absolutely so [i.e. simply and absolutely good or evil]â
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651),
Ev’n so thy brutal valor is displayed, Breaks every stew, does each small whore invade, But when great Love the onset does command, Base recreant to thy prince, thou dar’st not stand
Rochester. “The Imperfect Enjoyment”
And now I was both a burden and a terror to myself, nor did I ever so know, as now, what it was to be weary of my life and yet afraid to die. Oh how gladly now would I have been anybody but myself!
J. Bunyan
“I am for certain informed that this our city will be burned with fire from heaven, in which fearful overthrow both myself, with thee, my wife and you, my sweet babes, shall miserably come to ruin, except (the which yet I see not) some way of escape ca
J. Bunyan, Pilgrim's progress
“[A]t this fair are all such merchandise sold, as houses, lands, trades, places, honors, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms,
lusts, pleasures, and delights of all sorts, as whores, bawds, wives, husbands, children…and what not.”
Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress
-wives & children are vanities compared with “the truth.” For seeking the truth in Vanity Fair, Christian is beaten, besmirched, and put in a cage as a public “spectacle.”
The true confinement is original sin. Christian’s deliverance comes at the river. Hopeful: “Jesus Christ maketh thee whole.”
Whigs
pro-exclusion of catholic king (Dissenting, parliamentary, city, liberal)
Tories
anti-exclusion of catholic knig (Anglican, royalist, landed, traditional).
“[H]e had heard of the late civil wars in England, and the deplorable death of our great monarch, and would discourse of it with all the sense and abhorrence of the injustice imaginable. He had … all the civility of a well-bred great man. He had noth
aphra behn, oroonoko
-The execution of Charles I, which the narrator represents as unjust and deplorable, in effect haunts the text: destabilizes it as a ghostly reminder of civilized barbarity, interrupting the flow of romance time
“certainly had his late Majesty, of sacred memory, but seen and known what a vast and charming world he had been master of in that continent, he would never have parted so easily with it to the Dutch. ‘Tis a continent whose vast extent was never yet
aphra behn, oroonoko
-Charles II (“of sacred memory”) died in 1685. Oroonoko (1688) openly expresses the narrator’s Stuart/Royalist ties.
What kind of hero—if he’s a hero—is Oroonoko?
1. A divided hero: love & honor occupy him only by spurts. He lurches from extreme to extreme. No Lovelace-like or Cavalier reconciliation of love & honor seems possible now.
2. High-mindedness as a virtue & tragic flaw? His Cavalier code of honor ill suits a new post-Cavalier commercial world.
3. His passivity (after he kills Imoinda and mourns for eight days) is matched by near-opposite manic bursts of fighting.
4. His failure to revenge himself against Byam is due not to Hamlet-like scruples against revenge but to ⬦ entropy? He dies calmly in a near-suicidal execution that seems willed.
end of oroonoko
1. The Grotesque: Imoinda’s severed head & stench. At the end, romance is extinguished.
2. Theater of horror: Oroonoko cuts off piece of his own neck; he is executed by being dismembered alive.
3. Colonialism: the text supports it, but also highlights its potential for brutality. In exposing the brutality, Behn’s text holds out the possibility of a “good” colonialism (as in Trefry) –colonialism and slavery without or minus the brutality.
4. Tragedy: as a noble figure sacrificed to colonial brutality and to his own outmoded code of honor, Oroonoko stakes some claims as the doomed Restoration aristocratic hero.
POSSIBLE ALLUSION TO CHARLES I
“The very Wood of all these trees has an intrinsic value above common timber, for they are, when cut, of different colors, glorious to behold, and bear a price considerable, to inlay withal. Besides this they yield rich balm and gums so that we make ou
Aphra Behn, Oroonoko
“Now I see, the Lord had His time to scourge and chasten me. The portion of some is to have their affliction by drops, now one drop and then another; but the dregs of the cup, the wine of astonishment, like a sweeping rain that leaveth no food, did the
—Mary Rowlandson
“I can remember the time I used to sleep quietly without workings in my thoughts, whole nights together, but now it is otherwise with me.”
—Mary Rowlandson
“The Fable is always made for the Moral, not the Moral for the Fable.”
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
-Both Daniel Defoe & Samuel Richardson are Dissenters. They focus in different ways on ⬦ Interiority.
’Tis a little wonderful, and what I believe few people have thought much upon, the strange multitude of little things necessary in the providing, producing, curing, dressing, making and finishing this one article of bread.
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
“I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, ’tho not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull.”
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
-Crusoe reinventsWhig England
“If ever the story of any private man’s adventures in the world were worth making publick
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe...preface
Narrative Patterns in Robinson Crusoe
1. Conversion/Captivity Narrative: Island as Prison
2. Voyage Out/Voyage In: Heart of Darkness / Darkness of the Heart
3. Education of the Hero: Self-Construction
4. On the Road: Loner/Buddy Adventures
5. Survivor! Human Being at the Edge
6. Rags to Riches: Ultimate Capitalist Fantasy
’twas amazing to imagine where … he got that real greatness of soul, those refined notions of true honor, that absolute generosity, and that softness that was capable of the highest passions of love and gallantry” (2174)
Behn, oroonoko.
-oroonoko as last cavalier
“he had nothing of barbarity in his nature, … as if his education had been in some European court”
An aristocratic, royalist hero who cannot / will not live in a new non-heroic era.
Let us then suppose the Mind to be, as we say, white Paper, void of all Characters, without any Ideas; How comes it to be furnished?⬝ To this I answer, in one word,
from Experience.⬝
locke. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
“…having money in my pocket, and good clothes upon my back, I would always go on board in the habit of a gentleman; and so I neither had any business in the ship, or learn’d to do any”
Crusoe = 3RD son of a merchant, destined for the middle station of life. His father advises him to thrive by “application and industry”—as only men of desperate or superior fortunes go on “adventures” to rise by “enterprize.” Crusoe combines both adventure & application.
“I smil’d to my self at the sight of this money, O drug! said I aloud, what are thou good for? Thou art not worth to me, no not the taking off of the ground, one of those knives is worth all this heap, I have no manner of use for thee, e’en remain
defoe. crusoe
“I had once a mind to have gone to the Brasils, and have settled my self there…but I had some little scruple in my mind about religion…. [A]s I had made no scruple of being openly of the religion of the country, all the while I was among them; soâ€
defoe. crusoe.
-Crusoe for convenience turns Papist in the Brasils. His own religious experience on the island—transmitted to Friday—is pure Dissent: individual Bible reading; a conviction of sin; emotional conversion; and a hope of Christian deliverance.
“I told him, I look’d upon him as a man sent from Heaven to deliver me …; that such things as these were the testimonies we had of a secret hand of Providence governing the world….” (p. 215)
defoe. crusoe.
-Robinson Crusoe links with conversion narratives, providential narratives, and with Puritan spiritual autobiography (the last crucial for recognizing in retrospect the ways and moments when God intervenes in human lives).
“it happened providentially the very day that reading the Scripture I came to these words, He is exalted a prince and a saviour, to give repentance, and to give remission: I threw down the book, and with my … my hands lifted up to Heaven, in a kind o
defoe. crusoe
Backslidings: Dissenting spiritual life is not a straight path
“I have been, in all my circumstances, a memento to those who are touch’d with the general plague of humankind, whence, for ought I know, one half of their miseries flow; I mean, that of not being satisfy’d with the station wherein God and Nature h
defoe. crusoe.
-Yet at the end he is grown immensely rich. Dissatisfaction with his “station” paid off. Are the religious/ideological & secular/material aspects of the novel in tension or at odds?
Crusoe as a New Pragmatist Hero
1. lower class (not prince in disguise)
2. private life (vrs public figure)
3. survives by his wits
4. a “maker”/inventor: manual arts
5. interiority: voice-over monologue (vrs. modest external action)
6. love & honor not at issue
“[I]t was a merry reflection … how like a king I look’d. First of all, the whole country was my own meer property…. Secondly, my people were perfectly subjected…. [T]hey were of three different religions. My man Friday was a Protestant, his fat
defoe. crusoe
AUGUSTAN IDEALS
Order and Regularity
(moderated from Cavalier hierarchies, rigid social stratification)
Self Awareness
(fusing Puritan self-scrutiny and Cavalier modes of self-creation)
Progress
(moderated and secularized from Puritan providential paradigms)
Care of the Body
(Cavalier sensuality + Puritan fastidiousness)
Romance of Commerce
(Replaces Cavalier Romance of Monarchy and Puritan Sacred Mission)
Reason
(Supplants Puritan faith in God and Cavalier trust in Tradition)
Sociality
Politeness, Gentility
Morals by way of Manners
But where’s the man, who counsel can bestow,
Still pleased to teach, and yet not proud to know?
Unbiased, or by favor, or by spite:
Not dully prepossessed, nor blindly right;
Though learned, well-bred; and though well-bred,
si
—Alexander Pope, from “An Essay on Criticism”
“It was said of Socrates that he brought philosophy down from heaven, to inhabit among men; and I shall be ambitious to have it said of me that I have brought philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell at clubs and assembli
—Joseph Addison (1711)
“We address those Vices which are too trivial for the chastisement of the Law, and too fantastic for the cognizance of the Pulpit.”
—Richard Steele
“I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection.”
Jonathan Swift. a modest proposal
Sudden he viewed, in spite of all her art, An earthly lover lurking at her heart.
Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock,
Augustan:
Applied to writers from Dryden through Pope who link improvements in literature to cultural & national grandeur.
Neoclassical:
An Essay on Criticism (1711) claims native English “freedoms” versus strict French rule-bound neoclassicism.
“Communicative rationality”:
art of conversation & public use of reason. Open conflict replaced with tolerance & wit.
Dialogical:
No solitary nightingales // social language
Performative
Appearances Are Realities / / Wit is Power
False eloquence, like the prismatic glass, Its gaudy colors spreads on every place.
pope. Essay on Criticism
But true expression, like the unchanging sun, Clears and improves whate’er it shines upon….
pope. Essay on Criticism
Some, to whom Heaven in wit has been profuse, Want as much more to turn it to its use; For wit and judgment often are at strife, Though meant for each other’s aid, like man and wife.
Pope. An Essay on Criticism
True wit is Nature to advantaged dressed, What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed; Something whose truth convinced at sight we find, That gives us back the image of our mind.
Pope. An Essay on Criticism
On Life’s vast Ocean diversely we sail, Reason the Card, but Passion is the Gale:
Pope, An Essay on Man
Pleasure, or wrong or rightly understood, Our greatest evil, or our greatest good.
Pope, An Essay on Man
Men must be taught as if you taught them not, And things unknown propos’d as things forgot.
Pope. An Essay on Criticism
“The pleasures of the imagination have this advantage above those of the understanding, that they are more obvious and more easy to be acquired. It is but opening the eye, and the scene enters.”
Joseph Addison, Spectator
Thence arts o’er all the northern world advance, But critic-learning flourished most in France: The rules a nation born to serve, obeys; And Boileau still in right of Horace sways, But we, brave Britons, foreign laws despised, And kept unconquered—an
An Essay on Criticism
“[A]s God has set some Things in broad day-light; as he has given us some certain Knowledge, though limited to a few Things in comparison…: So in the greatest part of our Concernment, he has afforded us only the twilight … of Probability…; wherei
John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding
And now, unveiled, the toilet stands displayed, Each silver vase in mystic order laid⬦. A heavenly image in the glass appears; To that she bends, to that her eyes she rears⬦.
Pope. The Rape of Lock
Then gay ideas crowd the vacant brain, While peers, and dukes, and all their sweeping train, And garters, stars, and coronets appear, And in soft sounds, ‘your Grace’ salutes their ear. ‘Tis these that early taint the female soul, Instruct the eyes
Pope. The Rape of Lock
The Rape of the Lock: The Inescapability of Loss
Belinda’s lock a metaphor for other losses
Woman’s loss of power, youth, & beauty
Poet’s losses: art/poem/beauty as flawed
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