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Figures of appetite and slavery from Milton to Swift Item Type text; Dissertation-Reproduction (electronic) Authors von Sneidern, Maja-Lisa, 1945- Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 06/10/2021 20:33:58 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/289300 INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly fi-om the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. 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Contact UMI directly to order. UMI A Bell & Howell Information Company 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor MI 48I06-I346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 FIGURES OF APPETITE AND SLAVERY FROM MILTON TO SWIFT by Maja-Lisa von Sneidem Copyright © Maja-Lisa von Sneidem 1997 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 1997 DMI Number: 9729529 Copyright 1997 by von Sneidem, Maja-Lisa All rights reserved. UMI Microform 9729529 Copyright 1997, by UMI Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA ® GRADUATE COLLEGE As members of the Final Examination Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by Maja~Lisa von Sneidern entitled Figures of Appetite and Slavery from Milton to Swift and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy s1 Date I <?./^7/•? / Date Date Y I 'l ^ Date Date Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate's submission of the final copy of the dissertation to the Graduate College. I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement. f ? ^y Date 3 STATEMENT BY AUTHOR This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at The University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library. Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgment of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the copyright holder. SIGNED: DEDICATION For my mother and father. 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT 6 INTRODUCTION 8 2. CHAPTER 1: "Geographic Is Better Than Divinitie" 27 3. CHAPTER 2 76 The Spirit of Pleasure 77 Matters of Waste 101 4. CHAPTER 3 132 "Race": The Variable 134 Milton on Unnatural Oppression 140 Samson Agonistes and "Race" 147 5. CHAPTER 4 164 Royal Slave: The Villain 166 Royal Slave: The Victim 184 Priceless Possessions 204 "Lacker-Fac'd Creoleans" 219 6. CHAPTER 5 235 Anamorphosis 238 A Taste for Monsters 244 Monstrous Authorship 248 Monstrous Property 253 Property in Persons 259 Cohabitation 269 7. AFTERWORD 283 8. WORKS CITED 289 6 ABSTRACT Here, employing materialist and colonial discourse theory. I contend that the reality of the "new world," so tightly bound to new appetites and new servitudes, pervasively informed literary works which have been traditionally immune to interpretations asserting their complicity with and critique of English, later British, colonialism. While scholars have always known that Milton was Secretary of Foreign Languages for an English ruler with an aggressive colonial policy, and they have identified Samuel Purchas and Peter Heylyn, churchmen turned geographers, as sources for Milton's geography, and have even argued that Satan is a colonizer, my work addresses the colonial situation at the center of Paradise Lost. Positing that England experienced "culture wars" (epistemic and ideological, as well as political and social, instability) during the period between the beheading of Charles I (1648/9) and the publication of Linnaeus' Systema Naturae (1735), in subsequent chapters I address a group of interrelated paradoxes: How was it that acquisitiveness and consumerism expanded among the middling sort who concurrently cultivated the pleasures of deferred gratification and the "paradise within? How was it that God's Englishmen could pride themselves as defenders of "Liberty herself while they aggressively enslaved millions? How was it that the 7 Augustan age so concerned with decorum and taste could produce literary works so obsessed with deformity and excrement? By placing non-literary texts (travel accounts, geographies, natural histories, dictionaries, dispensatories, philosophical transactions) alongside Miltonic texts and later literary texts, we can partially account for what have been vexing interpretive problems: Raphael's astronomy, Samson's misogyny, the "coarseness" of the Restoration stage, the eighteenth- century "taste" for "monsters," Swift's scatology. We can recognize a historically specific strategy for containing the oddities and commodities issuing from the "American experience." Relying on Scripture for justification, early agents of the First Empire appropriated land and controlled bodies; relying on Science, the Second Empire sought to appropriate and control hearts and minds. This study addresses the mechanisms and literature of that shift 8 Introduction: The Tyrant Within in Spirit perhaps he also saw Rich Mexico the seat of Montezume. And Cusco in Peru, the richer seat Of Atabalipa. and yet unspoil'd Guiana whose great City Geryon's Sons Call El Dorado: but to nobler sights ... -Milton, Paradise Lost. 1667- So geographers, in Afric maps With savage pictures fill their gaps. And o'er unhabitable downs Place elephants for want of towns. -Jonathan Swift, "On Poetry, a Rhapsody," 1733- The two poems separated by over a half century have very different visions of uncharted continents. Milton's surveyor, Adam, fills the gaps in geographical knowledge with fabled cities of legendary wealth while Swift's anonymous "geographers" draw "savage pictures" and see elephants. Curiously, Milton and Swift might have been looking at the same set of maps published by Henrici Seile and included in Peter Heylyn's massive Cosmographie: In Four Bookes (1652). In the emptiness of Brazil, south and east of Guiana, is a drawing that could signify El Dorado, and sure enough we find elephants south and east of Guinea. Both Milton and Swift were religious men, as was Heylyn, who with excruciating detail carefully plants Noah's descendants in the four parts of the earth to account for seventeenth-century human populations. In 9 the year of Swift's birth, the non-conformist Milton adjusted the reality of the New World to the authority of divine words, those "nobler sights" the poet extracts from the Bible, while the Anglican dean conforms to a secular geography. We cannot, I believe, attribute the differences solely to different temperaments and poetic intentions. To do so is to underestimate the impact of geographical discoveries in the middle centuriei^ of the second millennium on the European imagination. Furthermore, we cannot dismiss a fundamental distinction between a "new world" discovered "to" Europeans and Europeans discovering new worlds. The former essentially adheres to a conception of "divine geography"--the previously unknown has been revealed-and the latter capitulates to "secular geography'-discoverers have found what was previously unknown. We need also to understand that Europeans had no knowledge of the material reality of nearly three-quarters of the earth (everything south of the equator and the entire western hemisphere) prior to 1450; indeed, for the educated European, the Mediterranean Sea was the geographical and ideological cradle of human existence, and to a remarkable extent that understanding has survived Milton and Swift, I will argue, challenged that construction by representing "new worlds" as locations "unspoiled" by Europeans, educated or otherwise. I will consider the New World and literary representations

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