Raw Metaphors: Cannibal Poetics in Early Modern England by Amanda

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by ETD - Electronic Theses & Dissertations Raw Metaphors: Cannibal Poetics in Early Modern England By Amanda M. Lehr Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in English August, 10, 2018 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Kathryn Schwarz, Ph.D. Leah S. Marcus, Ph.D. Lynn Enterline, Ph.D. Beth A. Conklin, Ph.D. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This work would not have been possible without the support of the Vanderbilt English department. I thank my peerless dissertation committee ̶ Kathryn Schwarz, Leah Marcus, Lynn Enterline, and Beth Conklin ̶ for their insights and support throughout this process. Thank you for challenging me and for enriching my intellectual life in countless ways over the past years. I would also like to thank my colleagues in early modern literature, Deann Armstrong and Kirsten Mendoza. Your brilliance inspires me, and I am honored to call you not only my colleagues, but dear friends. Thank you to Ruth Evans of St. Louis University for your encouragement and faith in my writing, as well as for introducing me to Kristeva’s Black Sun, which proved crucially illuminating for my fourth chapter. Thank you to the ladies of Thistle Farms, especially Ashley, Taylor, Erica, and Yolanda. Your generous spirits buoyed me up every morning, and I am grateful for every conversation and every pot of green tea. Profound thanks to Stephanie Straub, Martin Brown, Shelby Johnson, Sari Carter, Don Rodrigues, and Lauren Mitchell for being such sources of joy in my life. Thank each of you for being you. Thank you to my loving parents, Bruce and Emily Lehr, for getting me this far. Thank you to Eric Lehr ̶ even if you weren’t my only brother, you would still be the best. I would also like to thank Sel Jenkins; I’m so glad to have you as part of my family. I would like to thank my feline editors, Beatrice and Baldwin, for their extensive, if fleeting additions to my manuscript. Most of all, thank you to my partner in everything, Henry Gorman. You are my heart. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .............................................................................................................. ii Introduction ......................................................................................................................................1 Tropes with Teeth: On the Violence of Poetic Rhetoric .....................................................6 One Flesh?: Cannibalism, Individualism, and the Socio-Political Sphere .......................11 Verse Off the Bone: Raw Poets of the Early Modern Period ............................................13 Chapter 1. “His Owne Sinews Eat”: Spenser’s Ireland, The Book of Holinesse, and the Carcass of Allegory ........................................................................................................................................19 A View of the Present State of Ireland ...............................................................................21 “The Legend of Holinesse” ...............................................................................................38 Errour’s Maw .....................................................................................................................45 The Learned Cannibal ........................................................................................................50 2. “So Let Us Melt”: Anatomy, Cannibalism, and the Contingent Body in the Work of John Donne .............................................................................................................................................55 Rotten Knowledge: Anatomy and its Discontents .............................................................58 “Worke on Them as Me”: Anatomy and the Permeable Body ..........................................63 Cannibalism and the Problem of Resurrection ..................................................................71 The Cannibal and the Conqueror Worm: Deaths Duell and Predatory Mortality .............73 Of Meat and Metaphor: Re-Thinking Figurative Language and Textuality ......................86 3. To Serve Man: Cannibal Translation and the Crashavian Eucharist ........................................94 The Barren Banquet: Crashaw Reads Marino .................................................................101 Crashaw’s Sacred Translations ........................................................................................105 “Eates himself Dead”: Crashaw on the Faux Eucharist ...................................................107 To Serve and Be Served: Crashaw’s Fleshly Bread ........................................................114 Blood, Sweat, and Tears: Crashaw’s Transparent Transubstantiation ............................120 Conclusion: “And the Word was made Flesh” ...............................................................128 4. “My Viscera Burdened”: Melancholy Hunger and Cannibal Poetics in Paradise Lost ..........133 Shit from Heaven: Divine Abjection and the Melancholy Cannibal ...............................135 Darkness Edible: Satan’s Melancholy Cannibalism in Paradise Lost .............................137 iii “A Paradise Within Thee”: Human Redemption and the Stirrings of Poetry ..................143 Eating Our Words: Milton as Digestive Marvel ..............................................................145 Cannibal Canon: The Currency of Allusion in Paradise Lost .........................................148 Sights Unseen: Milton’s Cosmos and the Limits of Accommodation .............................150 “My labour will sustain me”: Cannibal Arts and the Felix Culpa ...................................157 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................168 iv INTRODUCTION Reading the Raw This project concerns the cannibalistic tropes of four major poets in early modern England. Let me begin, however, with the story a Protestant cleric on a mission in Brazil.1 In 1556, Jean de Léry accompanied a small group of French Calvinists to “France Antarctique,” an island in the Bay of Rio de Janeiro.2 In his extraordinarily detailed records, Léry recounts the both the development of the colony and his anthropological observations about local indigenous tribes. While Léry’s writings are perhaps best known for their documentation of Tupi ritual cannibalism, his History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil contains passing commentary on two more cannibal societies in the New World which he perceives as more savage. The first, the “devilish Ouetaca,” are portrayed as “among the most barbarous, cruel, and dreaded nations that can be found in the West Indies and the land of Brazil” in part because “like dogs and wolves, [they] eat flesh raw” (de Léry 29). The second “tribe,” by contrast, could be found within the French settlement: Catholics. Following a string of rancorous debates over the nature of the Eucharist, Léry railed against Nicholas Durand de Villegagnon, founder of France Antarctique, and the Dominican friar Jean de Cointa with this polemical comparison3: they wanted not only to eat the flesh of Jesus Christ grossly rather than spiritually, but what was worse, like the savages named Ouetaca, of whom I have already spoken, they wanted to chew and swallow it raw (41). Léry’s rhetorical posture of equating Catholic transubstantiation with cannibalism is nothing new.4 The cleric’s literacy in cannibal practices, however, makes this specific instance remarkable. Léry does not condemn Catholics for being cannibals, but for being cannibals like 1 the Ouetaca. His relatively friendly and respectable relations with the Tupinambá documented in his History demonstrate that, for Léry, eating human flesh is an insufficient reason to condemn an entire people as evil.5 The cannibal practices of the Tupinambá, however, differed in one key dimension from those of their foils: the Tupinambá cook their meat, whereas, in Léry’s estimation, both the Ouetaca and French Catholics relish eating it “raw” (29, 41). Even taking his rhetorical aims into account, Jean de Léry’s fixation on raw flesh in this passage is revealing. In early modern English as well as French, the word “raw” was used not only to refer to uncooked or unprocessed meat, but to identify human beings as “uncivilized,” “coarse,” or “brutal” (“raw, adj., 5b.”).6 (Indeed, one 1611 English dictionary even differentiates between anthropophago, “an eater of men,” and cannibal, “an eater of man’s raw flesh,” suggesting that the cannibal’s preference for raw human meat necessitated its own analytical category.)7 Using the logic that “you are what you eat,” Léry infers that only the rawest of people prefer raw flesh, thus designating Villegaignon’s people and the Ouetaca to be “the most savage of savages” (Whatley “note 7,” p. 236). By contextualizing Léry’s passage as a response to Eucharistic debate, however, his words yield another, subtler critique of Catholic “rawness.” When the Calvinist cleric claims that Villegainon and Cointa “wanted to chew and swallow [Christ’s flesh] raw,” he uses visceral language to deride a “grossly” literal reading of scripture (41). By adhering to transubstantiation over consubstantiation, his fellow colonists reject the “spiritual” and symbolic in favor of “raw” material flesh. In other words, Catholics eat both their Christ and

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