A Few Things on Theory

Personal Effects and Vital Matters Property and Personhood in Eighteenth-Century Satiric Fiction Klemp McLeod, Ann-Sophie Publication date: 2015 Document license: CC BY-NC-ND Citation for published version (APA): Klemp McLeod, A-S. (2015). Personal Effects and Vital Matters: Property and Personhood in Eighteenth- Century Satiric Fiction. Det Humanistiske Fakultet, Københavns Universitet. Download date: 28. Sep. 2021 FACULTY OF HUMANITIE S UNIVERSITY OF COPENH AGEN PhD Thesis Ann-Sophie Klemp McLeod Personal Effects and Vital Matters Property and Personhood in Eighteenth-Century Satiric Fiction Academic advisor: Prof. Charles Lock Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies University of Copenhagen Njalsgade 128 2300 Copenhagen S Submitted: 21/04/2015 Contents Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................. 4 Abstract .............................................................................................................................. 5 Resumé ............................................................................................................................... 6 I. Introduction .................................................................................................................. 7 i. A Thing or Two on Theory .................................................................................................. 7 ii. Historicizing the Fetish ..................................................................................................... 13 iii. The Matters to Come ......................................................................................................... 21 II. Thinking Things and Collecting Persons ................................................................ 28 i. "That conscious thinking thing": Vital Matter and the Problem of Personal Identity ... 28 ii. The Mixing of One's Own: John Locke on Proprietorship and Personhood ................. 40 III. Dressed Selves and the Luxuries of Personhood ................................................. 49 i. Martinus and “the Category of Having”: Curing Consumption in the Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus ........................................................................................................... 49 ii. “Objects of mutability”: Self-Fashioning and the Problem of Luxury in Early Periodicals ......................................................................................................................... 66 iii. Dressing Room Anatomies: Swift’s Dissections of Fashioned Selves ......................... 76 iv. “And keep good humour whatever we lose”: ................................................................. 92 Hypotyposis and Details that Matter in Mundus Muliebris and The Rape of the Lock .. 92 IV. Writing Things, Object Authors and Literary Property ....................................... 116 i. “...when the subject is utterly exhausted, to let the pen still move on...”: Authority and the Tale of Textual Waywardness .......................................................... 116 ii. Immaterial Scribbling and Writing Things in Mid-Century Hack Writing ..................... 135 V. Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 150 2 Appendix: Seizing Sentiments and Mixing Feelings .................................................. 158 i. Sympathetic Objects: Sentimental Exchange in Late-Century It-Narratives ............... 158 ii. The Love of Things: Touching Things and Constructions of Sympathy ..................... 166 iii. Shoe Buckles and Sentimental Happenstances: The Scandal of Impassioned Things .............................................................................. 178 Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 195 Print Sources ......................................................................................................................... 195 Online Sources ...................................................................................................................... 220 Note that a final chapter entitled “Seizing sentiments and Mixing Feelings” has been omitted from the thesis due to space restrictions. The chapter now appears as an appendix to the thesis. Focusing on the on the role of things in sentimental constructions of sympathy, the section includes analyses of selected passages from Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768) as well as from from late eighteenth-century it-narratives. Occasional references to these works and the contents of this chapter that occur in the thesis will be marked by an asterisk (*). 3 Acknowledgments I would like to extend my profound gratitude to Professor Charles Lock whose help, advice and encouragement have been invaluable, and to the academic and administrative staff at the Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies at the University of Copenhagen who have generously helped the project along. In the early stages of research, inspiration and theoretical insight were afforded by Professor Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and the rest of the faculty at the 2005 School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University as well as presenters at the 2004 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference. In addition those offered by The Royal Library in Copenhagen as well as by the British Library, the original resources afforded by databases such as Eighteenth Century Collections Online and Early English Books Online have been instrumental to the project. In later years, colleagues and management at Virum Gymnasium have also offered helpful opinions, comments and moral backing. Last but not least the project would not have reached its belated completion without my parent's relentless support, my brother's inestimable advice and encouragement and my husband's unfaltering patience. 4 Abstract This thesis examines the representation of personhood and property in eighteenth-century satiric literature. Theoretically the thesis pits the thing theories of Martin Heidegger, Bruno Latour and Jacques Derrida against Marxist theory of alienation and fetishization of commodities so prevalent in treatments of possessive individualism that favour the subject. The main tenet of the thesis is that the literary constructions of proprietorship rehearse philosophical, scientific and legal tensions between aggregate and unitary notions of personhood. Although embedded in different discursive practices, what characterizes the literary satiric avatars of eighteenth-century possessive personhood are their aggregate nature, their tendency to fall to bits with the loss of their properties and their precarious position as assembled fictions or material compositions. The dual status of personal effects as both illusory surfaces and material possessions is explored in analytical discussions of satiric literature ranging from The Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus (1741) though Jonathan Swift’s dressing room poems and satirical dressings and undressings in Mary Evelyn’s Mundus Muliebris and Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1712; 1714) to it-narratives such as The Adventures of a Quire of Paper (1779). Revisionist readings of contemporary notions property and personhood in - among others - John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (1758) are used as points of departure in uncovering the pressures exerted on unitary constructions proprietorship satiric versions of the aggregate self. The analytical bulk of the thesis falls into two parts. The first part centres on the impasses inherent in Locke’s concept of property in the person as these surface in the debate on luxuries and necessities taken up by early eighteenth-century divestmental satires and dressing room poems and brought to bear on the discussion of the poetical device of hypotyposis. The second part of the thesis considers the role played by versions of aggregate personhood in legal and literary debates on the nature of authorship that anticipated the legal establishment of copyright. Stressing the nature of books as compound works, material as well as ideational compilations, satires on authorial writing question the partition between disembodied originality and material concretion that guarantees the indivisibility of authorial possession his work. As is evident from the appendix*, these finding are supported by the role of personal property in satires on sensibility in the second half of the century. Thus, the early eighteenth-century waywardness of personal property might be retraced in in the degree to which things resist possession even within the strictures of ownership by turning to literary constructions of sympathy in the sentimental barter of personal effects. Following this, a reading Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768) as a parody of the sentimental entanglement of porous selves and vital matters supports the conclusion that the satiric enactment of sensibility figures sympathy less as the deliberately staged substitutions of pictorial imagination than as the scandalous outburst of passion that arises in the unexpected physical encounter with things. The thesis ends by calling for a complication of theories of the Enlightenment

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