Copyright by Paul Grafton Neimann, Jr. 2010
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Copyright by Paul Grafton Neimann, Jr. 2010 The Dissertation Committee for Paul G. Neimann, Jr. Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Mechanical Operations of the Spirit: The Protestant Object in Swift and Defoe Committee: Katherine Arens, Co-Supervisor Lance Bertelsen, Co-Supervisor John Bender Elizabeth A. Hedrick John P. Rumrich Mechanical Operations of the Spirit: The Protestant Object in Swift and Defoe by Paul Grafton Neimann, Jr., B.A., M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin December 2010 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my committee chairs and mentors Katherine Arens and Lance Bertelsen. Both have my special gratitude for their intellectual and personal generosity, beginning with allowing me to attend their seminars as an unenrolled citizen considering a return to academic work. Katie kindly and patiently guided my progress through graduate training in more ways than I can recount. Her influence on this project and my thinking runs deep. Lance shared his expertise and enthusiasm (in the best sense) on enough material for several dissertations. He has been a trusted friend. Thanks, also, to my other readers at UT: Beth Hedrick helped spark an interest in religious politics and allowed me to join her classes; John Rumrich has always been willing to review new material and offered valuable responses to work in progress. John Bender has been a vital influence over the years and his willingness to engage with this study is only the most recent instance of his longstanding support. His colleagues at Stanford, Bliss Carnochan and Charles Fifer, have my appreciation for showing me scholarship and teaching in this field in the best possible light. Katie Little has been my devoted partner, constant companion and keen reader. Her grace and skill as mother to our wonderful Charlotte made this work possible. My parents and Mary Beverly have always encouraged our small but growing family. Finally, I am grateful for a timely one- semester dissertation fellowship from the UT English department. iv Mechanical Operations of the Spirit: The Protestant Object in Swift and Defoe Publication No._____________ Paul G. Neimann, Jr., Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2010 Co-Supervisors: Katherine Arens and Lance Bertelsen This study revises a dominant narrative of the eighteenth-century, in which a secular modernity emerges in opposition to religious belief. It argues that a major challenge for writers such as Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe, and for English subjects generally, was to grasp the object world—including the modern technological object—in terms of its spiritual potential. I identify disputes around the liturgy and common prayer as a source of a folk psychology concerning mental habits conditioned by everyday interactions with devotional and cultural objects. Swift and Defoe therefore confront even paradigmatically modern forms (from trade items to scientific techniques) as a spiritual ecology, a network of new possibilities for practical piety and familiar forms of mental-spiritual illness. Texts like A Tale of a Tub (1704) and Robinson Crusoe (1719) renew Reformation ideals for the laity by evaluating technologies for governing a nation of souls. v Swift and Defoe‟s Protestantism thus appears as an active guide to understanding emotions and new experience rather than a static body of doctrine. Current historiography neglects the early modern sense that sectarian objects and rituals not only discipline religious subjects, but also provoke ambivalence and anxiety: Swift‟s Tale diagnoses Catholic knavery and Puritan hypocrisy as neurotic attempts to extract pleasure from immiserating styles of material praxis. Crusoe, addressed to more radical believers in spaces of trade, sees competent spiritual, scientific and commercial practice on the same plane, as techniques for overcoming fetishistic desires. Swift‟s orthodoxy of enforced moderation and Defoe‟s oddly worldly piety represent likeminded formulae for psychic reform, and not—as often alleged—conflicts between sincere belief and political or commercial interests. Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) also link mind and governance through different visions of Protestant polity. Swift sees alienation from the national church—figured by a Crusoe or Gulliver—as refusal of common sense and problem solving. Defoe points to religious schism, exemplified by dissenters‟ exclusion from state church statistics, as a moral and medical failure: the city risks creating selfish citizens who also may overlook data needed to combat the plague. vi Table of Contents List of Figures ........................................................................................................ ix Introduction: Belief and Its Vicissitudes.................................................................1 Overview .........................................................................................................1 Spiritual Technology .......................................................................................4 Belief at a Distance .......................................................................................10 Disenchanting the Disenchantment Narrative ..............................................18 Idols of the Marketplace (Not Modern Things) ............................................31 A Brief Summary ..........................................................................................41 PART I: DISAPPOINT AND PUNISH: ENGLISH PROTESTANTISM AND THE PSYCHOLOGICAL OBJECT 46 Chapter 1: The Long Reformation and the Object World ....................................47 Beyond Religious Style.................................................................................47 Reformation and Micro-History ...................................................................49 Protestant Discourse Around Objects ...........................................................54 Maladapted Subjects: The Insufficiency of the Object .................................63 On the Psychological Via Media ...................................................................77 Chapter 2: Swift‟s A Tale of a Tub, Adiaphora and Folk Psychology .................89 Things Indifferent and Indifference to Things ..............................................89 Swift‟s Predecessors and Liturgical Psychology ..........................................95 On Spiritual Machines as Dead Technologies ............................................106 Objects, or Idols? ........................................................................................111 Material Culture and Moral Psychology .....................................................115 Obey, But Only Obey .................................................................................122 Folk Psychology and Sectarian Identity .....................................................127 PART II: MODERNITY AS LITURGY 130 Spiritual Ecology in Swift and Defoe .........................................................130 vii Chapter 3: Robinson Crusoe‟s Primitive Church................................................136 Defoe and the Religion of Disenchantment ................................................136 Robinson Crusoe and Disposition of Mind .................................................139 Hypothetical Training: If I Had … I Should Have … ................................146 Being-Toward Being Eaten .........................................................................150 A Great Many Things: Reconfiguring and Repetition ................................155 Internal Exile: How Like a King I Din‟d Too All Alone ............................165 The (Really) Primitive Church....................................................................168 Chapter 4: Gulliver’s Travels as Anglican Critique ...........................................175 From Robinson Crusoe to Gulliver‟s Travels .............................................175 Idols of the Marketplace: The Grub Street Liturgy ....................................184 On the Testimony of Conscience: Gulliver and Styles of Cultural Faith ....187 The Courtly Object and the Middle Class Thing ........................................198 Technocratic Innovation: It‟s Actual, But Not Factual; Everything is Artifactual ............................................................................................................206 Conclusion: On “Epistemological Crisis” ..................................................212 Chapter 5: Reading the Spiritual City: Dissenting Hermeneutics and Governance in Defoe‟s A Journal of the Plague Year ........................................................218 Beyond Crusoe ............................................................................................218 Regulating the Soul .....................................................................................219 Competing Discourses in the Journal .........................................................226 The London Bills of Mortality ....................................................................236 The Bills as Providential Signs ...................................................................243 London as Symbolic Community ...............................................................250 Conclusion: A City of Souls ......................................................................255