Camp Parody in the British Long Eighteenth Century

GREAT AFFECTATIONS: CAMP PARODY IN THE BRITISH LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Sarah Lynn Cote January 2014 © 2014 Sarah Lynn Cote GREAT AFFECTATIONS: CAMP PARODY IN THE BRITISH LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY Sarah Lynn Cote, Ph.D. Cornell University 2014 My dissertation explains that, despite the nominal anachronism, camp has always inhabited literature of the long eighteenth century, namely those examples that were created from and, to some degree, for those experiencing the world from a socially or sexually marginal perspective. To interpret as camp is to not only account for the excesses of style that often infuriate and discompose aesthetic and generic categories of the time period, although it can provide an explanatory motive for noticeably disruptive and even flamboyant literary style. A camp reading can also bring together seemingly disparate texts under the umbrella of alterity. It provides an ideal and common language for discussing formal and generic literary styles alongside feminist, queer, and cultural interpretations. Camp in the eighteenth century is particularly well-positioned to make important contributions to ongoing discussions about the public sphere, the shifts in audience and reception among all media, and the influences of realism, especially relating to the bourgeois representations of affects and emotions. To me, camp is a parodic project, which means that it must bear a symbiotic relationship to the normative text or value that it plays up. Its parody is reliant on those modes opposed as “other” to their marginalized selves; in my examples, the target ranges among the heteronormative family, the orderly body, the sexual object, temporal mastery, aesthetic ownership, sentimental empathy, and even the self. I discuss Walpole’s gothic obsession with the deadly influences of time and family; Charke’s marketing of her own shame as a reparative autobiographical project; Pope’s peevish but excessive and starstruck affection for the womanly things he mocks; and the forms of gendered excess produced by the sentimental novel’s hypocritical erasure of its own self-centered pretense of nature. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Sarah Cote was born in Korea and raised in rural Vermont. She earned an A.B. in English and Psychology and an M.A. in English from Boston College. She began doctoral studies at Cornell University in 2004 and received her second M.A. in English in 2007. She currently lives in Allegany County, New York, with her husband, son, and two cats, and she is a visiting lecturer of English composition at Alfred University. v This dissertation is dedicated to Steve and Jackson. i carry your heart[s] with me. vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation has been a long time coming. I cannot adequately verbalize my appreciation for my special committee, but I must try. Thank you, Rick Bogel, for your comprehensive and achingly smart comments on dissertation drafts and seminar papers alike. Although I am probably not doing you any favors by saying so, no one or nothing has taught me more about satire and its form. Thank you, Ellis Hanson, for your shrewd wit and brilliant theories about desire’s influence on culture and history. I am especially grateful for your pedagogical models and sincerely admire and wish to emulate your classroom style. Thank you, Nick Salvato, for teaching my only official class on camp. You were an early and supportive encourager of my inchoate ideas, and I would not have finished my project in this form without learning from your extraordinarily sharp insights. Finally, a thank you to my chair, Laura Brown, for all you have taught me about the eighteenth century and modernity. I started thinking about my dissertation during your class about the modern eighteenth century and redactions of its texts, and I would not have finished the dissertation without your guidance, attention, and thoughtful feedback. I am grateful for the reading groups you sponsored and the collegiality you encouraged among the small circle of dix-huitièmes. I chose Cornell to learn from you, and I learned more than I hoped. I am also in debt to the astounding and sometimes intimidating intelligence of my graduate cohort, those beginning the PhD in 2004, especially Karen Bourrier, Chad Bennett, David Coombs, Colin Dewey, Jessica Metzler, and Sarah Weiger. I am also grateful for the Gender & Sexuality Reading Group and all of its members, namely Peter Bailey, Ashly Bennett, Corinna Lee, and Anthony Reed, who inspired such memorable discussions about queer theory. I am grateful to Cornell’s libraries and the exceptional space provided for graduate vii research. I am also thankful for the time and resources provided through the Sage Fellowships. I would have been kicked out of this program years ago without the assistance of Michelle Mannella, the English Graduate Program Coordinator. She makes things happen. Thanks are also in order for the other Goldwin Smith administrative supporters: Vicky Brevetti, Darlene Flint, and Marianne Marsh. Truly, I fell in love with English as a scholarly discipline while at Boston College. Here, I owe everything to the charismatic and frighteningly insightful Beth Kowaleski Wallace, who directed my undergraduate honors thesis and mentored me through the M.A. program, thus guiding me toward my doctoral studies at Cornell. She taught me how to apply to and present at academic conferences, and I still marvel at her adept skills at networking. I would not have chosen to study the eighteenth century if I never met and learned from Beth. I must also acknowledge graduate faculty Caroline Bicks, Mary Crane, Kevin Ohi, and Andrew Sofer for their courses and mentoring on feminist theory, early modern literature, queer theory, and performance theory. Thank you, too, to my undergraduate English major friends, especially Susan Cook, now deservedly a member of the English professoriate, and also Angela Apodaca, Hayde Castillo, Julie Ciollo, and Erika Chen. Thank you to my beloved parents, Bob and Denise Cote, who read to me from the very start, who supported my bookworm behaviors by letting me go wild in the mall Waldenbooks, paying for those pastel Sweet Valley Highs and Baby-Sitters Clubs just to satisfy a ten-year-old with middlebrow taste. But you were unworried about my choices because at least I loved to read, and your encouragement never wavered. I am so grateful to be your daughter. Thank you, too, to my family-in-law, Jim, Eileen, and Maeve Byrne, for quickly learning to not ask why I did not finish my dissertation when a certain someone finished his five years ago. (And thank viii you, in all honesty, for your unconditional love and support.) Finally, thank you to my partner, Steve Byrne, for everything: for moving with me to the Binghamton area so we could both attend doctoral programs within an hour’s commute, for driving with me to attend scholarly (and unscholarly) events in Ithaca, for helping me manage my time when I was on fellowship, for consoling and supporting me when life got in the way of my initial plans to finish, and for, well, just loving me when I was not so lovable. Thank you for always cracking jokes about how you could never tell the difference between the author of an eighteenth-century novel and the title of an eighteenth-century novel. (Tom Jones? Henry Fielding?) And thank you, of course, for our Jackson. ix TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch……………………………………………………………………….……v Dedications………………………………………………………………………………....….vi Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………....…vii Chapter 1: Setting Up Camp: Satirical Excess and Modernity…………………………………1 Chapter 2: Staged Fright: The Castle of Otranto’s Gothic Excess…………………………….23 Chapter 3: In Passing: The Performance of Memoir in Charlotte Charke’s Narrative………..73 Chapter 4: Good Hair Day: Surface Pleasures in The Rape of the Lock………………….…..107 Chapter 5: Striking Camp: Sentimental Antisociality and Modernity……………………...…152 x LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Aubrey Beardsley, “The Morning Dream” (1896)…………….……………….…..143 Figure 2: Aubrey Beardsley, “The Baron’s Prayer” (1896) ……………………………….…145 xi CHAPTER 1 SETTING UP CAMP: SATIRICAL EXCESS AND MODERNITY “No sooner have [the mollies] ended their Feasts and run through all the Ceremonies of Theaterical way of Gossiping, then they begin to enter upon their Beastly Obscenities, that no Man who is not sunk into a State of Devilism can think on without Blushing.” Edward Ward When Evelina Anville goes “a-shopping” in glam London with Mrs. Mirvan, she gets an eye-opening show at the milliner’s, one that nearly rivals the Garrick she took in the day before. Apparently unused to male mincing in her less cosmopolitan home environment, Evelina confesses, “What most diverted me was, that we were more frequently served by men than by women; and such men! so finical, so affected! they seemed to understand every part of a woman’s dress better than we do ourselves; and they recommended caps and ribbands with an air of so much importance, that I wished to ask them how long they had left off wearing them!” (Burney 73). Burney, of course, means to sketch a fop, the overtrussed woman-man that seemingly vexed nearly every opinionated writer in the long eighteenth century from Addison to Wollstonecraft. But even though this is not exactly a “gay”1 slur, we are certainly meant, with Evelina, to register and remark upon these men’s showy difference. They are drolly and imaginatively feminized by a hypothetical drag, but the epicene subjectivity Evelina depicts exceeds any gender role she knows. Physical masculinity is reduced to persnickety affectation, a performance that is much too much to pass without notice. 1 In “Historicizing Patriarchy,” Michael McKeon claims that “[b]y the middle of the eighteenth century, an adult effeminate male was likely to be taken…as an exclusive sodomite or molly.” By 1778, then, at least according to this model, the milliners’ effeminacy is more closely related to Freudian inversion, not to the mode of effeminacy that denotes overzealously heterosexual – or omnisexual – libertines.

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