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"Rank Corpuscles": Soil and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Representations" (2014)

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Western University Scholarship@Western Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository January 2015 "Rank Corpuscles": Soil and Identity in Eighteenth- Century Representations Nina Patricia Budabin McQuown The University of Western Ontario Supervisor Alison Conway The University of Western Ontario Graduate Program in English A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree in Doctor of Philosophy © Nina Patricia Budabin McQuown 2014 Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons Recommended Citation Budabin McQuown, Nina Patricia, ""Rank Corpuscles": Soil and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Representations" (2014). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 2625. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/2625 This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship@Western. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Western. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. “RANK CORPUSCLES”: SOIL AND IDENTITY IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY REPRESENTATIONS (Thesis format: Monograph) by Nina Budabin McQuown Graduate Program in English A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies The University of Western Ontario London, Ontario, Canada © Nina Budabin McQuown 2014 Abstract In this dissertation, I analyze scenes of encounter between human beings and human dust in eighteenth-century texts. Ploughmen exhume bones and armor in the arable, consumers taste other people’s excrement in their vegetables, and improvers lime the soil to break down ancient corpses. In process, I find that eighteenth-century British authors recognized the soil as an agent of continuity, with the capacity to preserve, mobilize, and disseminate the material constituents of identity from one body into another. At times, the soil’s powerful co-operative agency is threatening to the integrity of the human self, but I argue that authors negotiate between the threat posed by dirt’s unknowing agency, and the opportunities that such a mediator affords for bridging the devastating aporia wrought by death, partition, and forgetfulness. This dissertation engages with new-materialist perspectives on literary history, arguing that eighteenth-century authors saw in soil not just a symbol for regeneration or fragmentation, but a material agent in the production of identity. At the same time, it offers historically focused readings of each text, showing how authors rely on the agency of soil to resolve particular challenges to continuity. In my introductory chapter, I discuss the controversy between Locke’s metaphysics of matter and late seventeenth-century theologians who wanted to defend the identity of human bodies with the dust into which they decay. Sometimes poets and ploughmen alike greet the agency of dirt with pleasure. My second chapter looks at how early eighteenth-century authors imagine the British earth fertilized with the corpses of British and Saxon ancestors in order to create an alternative physical relation to the national past. What harmonizes competing historical claims in the early eighteenth century, however, endangers the integrity of personal identity as mid-century authors i imagine consumers who fail to distinguish between soil, and the undigested matter of others. In chapter three, I look at how mid-eighteenth-century authors used the traffic in urban nightsoil to delineate both the dangers and joys of the economic interdependence of urban consumption and rural production. Finally, in chapter four, I argue that treatises advocating for agricultural improvement of British wastes describe a literal unearthing of the relics that constitute identity, in order to seize control of the agency of soil and render wastelands into pristine fields for the projection of future value. Keywords Soil, Dirt, Earth, Georgic, Agricultural Improvement, Materialism, Long Eighteenth Century, George Powell, John Philips, Daniel Defoe, Jethro Tull, Robert Dodsley, William Ellis, Tobias Smollett, Arthur Young, William Godwin, Charlotte Smith. ii Acknowledgments My supervisor, Alison Conway, has ministered to this project with indefatigable generosity. I thank her for rigorous and stimulating conversations at Western and across the continent, tireless attention to every draft, all-day grading marathons, kindness, integrity, and commitment. It is a joy to owe so much to such a teacher. My second reader Mary Helen McMurran has been another spectacular mentor and model. I want to thank her especially for many integral conversations and recommendations, and for a wonderful introduction to the pleasures and pitfalls of research. Conversations with Sean Silver in 2012 were foundational for the direction of this research; thanks to him and to Christina Lupton for their guidance. My thanks to M.J. Kidnie for her staunch advocacy and lessons in pedagogy, to Madeline Bassnett for her expertise, her book lists, and her recipes, to Mark McDayter for shared books and ideas, to Kim Solga for warmth, energy, and direct access to a compost pile, to Donna Masini for teaching me to teach, and to revise, and to John Leonard and Lynne Greenberg, who prepared me to see Milton everywhere. Thanks, too, to my undergraduate mentors, Lisa Haines Wright, whose principled and passionate engagement with intellectual life has inspired me as long as I’ve known her, and Tamara Ketabgian, who tapped a deep source when she led me and others in a brilliant seminar on dirt, dust, and trash in Victorian arts and literature. I have been privileged to work with the English department’s gifted faculty administrators, Bryce Traister and Steven Bruhm, and wonderful staff, Leanne Trask, Vivian Foglton, Ann McFarland, Teresa MacDonald, and Beth McIntosh. This project has received institutional support from Western University in the form of a Graduate Research Scholarship and the Routledge fellowship, which allowed iii me to travel to the UK for research, from the Province of Ontario Graduate Scholarships program, and from the Newberry Renaissance Consortium, which funded a research trip to the Newberry Library in Chicago. This work owes a vast debt to online archives, but it is also a project about touching, smelling, and taking in materials. The chance to consult original manuscripts and printed books made it rich. My thanks, too, to the librarians, archivists, and staff who deftly managed all those quiet rooms at Western, the Newberry, the London Metropolitan Archives, the Cornwall Record Office, the Edinburgh City Archives, the Museum of English Rural Life, the Royal Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland, the University of Maryland, and the Library of Congress. This project also belongs to my wife Rebecca Wenstrom, who has gamely become expert in eighteenth-century soil and georgic poetry, brought her years of expertise as an educator to bear on my undergraduate tutorials and classes, and supported me through this work. She is a partner and a teacher in these as in all things. I would also like to thank my colleagues and friends at Western: Emily Sugerman, Wu Yanxiang, and Tina Northrup talked parts of this project over with me, read parts of it, and with Ahmad Kamal, Lucia Cedeira, Patrick Gavin, and the brew crew, made life good in London. Thanks to my mother, my sisters and brothers who got married, went back to school and started businesses, and still found time to call—I’m so proud to be yours. My friends at home in the States, the gals, the Beloiters, the Hunter poets, Helen, Emily, and Kile, there is no doing without. You were all the kind-hearted heiresses, staunch philosophers, and swiftly riding smugglers to my stranded gothic heroine in graduate school’s shifting sands. Last of all, to George and Lillian Budabin, I dedicate the hours and days and years that this text represents, as a token of lessons learned from pride in work, and faith in art. iv Table of Contents Abstract ................................................................................................................................ i Acknowledgments.............................................................................................................. iii Table of Contents ................................................................................................................ v 1 Introduction: Disclosing Soil, Digestive Soil ................................................................ 1 Dirt as the Instrument of Ownership ............................................................................ 18 “every day unknowingly”: The Agency of Soil ........................................................... 25 2 Blood-Fatted Fields: Soil as Matter of the National Past ............................................. 38 “Britain-gulf”: Bonduca and the British Earth ............................................................. 48 “Upon that Treacherous Tract of Land”: Cyder, Saxon Matter, and the Herefordshire Soil ........................................................................................................................ 71 “No Marks, No Monument”: The Road Past Towton and the Nation as Text in Defoe’s Tour Thro’ The Whole Island of Great Britain:.................................................... 93 3 “The Smell of Gain”: Nightsoil in the Mid Eighteenth-Century Imagination ..........
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