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Prosthetizing the Soul: Reading, Seeing, and Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Devotion

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Prosthetizing the Soul: Reading, Seeing, and Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Devotion University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses July 2016 Prosthetizing the Soul: Reading, Seeing, and Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Devotion Katey E. Roden University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2 Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons Recommended Citation Roden, Katey E., "Prosthetizing the Soul: Reading, Seeing, and Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Devotion" (2016). Doctoral Dissertations. 684. https://doi.org/10.7275/8437962.0 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/684 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations and Theses at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Prosthetizing the Soul: Reading, Seeing, and Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Devotion A Dissertation Presented by KATEY E. RODEN Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY May 2016 English © Copyright by Katey E. Roden 2016 All Rights Reserved Prosthetizing the Soul: Reading, Seeing, and Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Devotion A Dissertation Presented by KATEY E. RODEN Approved as to style and content by: ______________________________________ Joseph L. Black, Co-Chair ______________________________________ Jane Hwang Degenhardt, Co-Chair ______________________________________ Brian Ogilvie, Member ___________________________________ Jenny Spencer, Department Chair English DEDICATION To Mike This has been your journey as much as mine. Words fail to capture the depth of my gratitude for your patience and steadfast support. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to begin by acknowledging the immense debt I owe to the friends who have offered me immeasurable support over a stretch of many years. Chief among this set of spectacular individuals is Cathy Esterman, my dearest friend who has never failed to offer a sympathetic ear, a reassuring comment, and libations when needed. Special thanks and appreciation are also due to my graduate student colleagues Meghan Conine, Ann Garner, April Genung, Jess Landis, Nathaniel Leonard, Matteo Pangallo, Phil Palmer, Greg Sargent, Tim Watt, John Yargo, and Tim Zajac. You are some of the best and brightest people I have ever met. I know it is customary to thank one’s dissertation committee, but my gratitude runs much deeper than any formulaic note of appreciation could ever articulate. My choice to work from afar presented many challenges, all of which you each met with unparalleled grace and generosity of spirit. Thank you, Joseph Black, Jane Degenhardt, and Brian Ogilvie for your continued support, mentorship, and guidance. I am forever in your debt. My family also deserves more than a brief note of thanks. If my parents had not read to me and supplied me with loads of books, I would have never found a profession that suits me so truly. My siblings, Rachel and Cody, have offered me love, support, and camaraderie. Mike and Linda Roden have also supported me in ways too innumerable to mention. I thank you all for patiently bearing my absence and considerable distraction over the years. I love you all—thank you. Finally, the deepest thanks are owed to my husband, Mike. You have held my hand through this journey, and I am a better person for having you by my side. v ABSTRACT PROSTHETIZING THE SOUL: READING, SEEING, AND FEELING IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY DEVOTION MAY 2016 KATEY E. RODEN, B.A., COASTAL CAROLINA UNIVERSITY M.A., WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Co-Directed by: Professor Joseph L. Black and Professor Jane Hwang Degenhardt My dissertation proposes a new context for reading early modern devotional writing’s rich engagement with the language of the body in its focus on the relationship between gendered representations of devotional desire and spiritual ability in the religious poetry of seventeenth-century England. By tracing how somatic speech and bodily conditions are portrayed in the devotional poetry of John Milton, Richard Crashaw, Thomas Traherne, and An Collins, this project examines how these writers fashion spiritual states through the language of a sometime sorrowful and sometime ecstatic, but always desiring body. My project reveals how early modern authors manipulate or respond to gendered and bodily hierarchies to craft liturgically rich devotional scenes that exceed and overwhelm sensations of spiritual lack written on and within the bodies of the devotional figures presented therein. Through my focus on the body of the text and also the ways in which bodies are represented within devotional texts, I posit a new way of looking at early modern devotional writing: as prosthetics. The term prosthesis is most often associated with a medical appendage supplementing a bodily lack, but my project takes seriously the animating capacity of language as I demonstrate the ways in which early vi modern devotional writing exhibits a “prosthetic impulse” that blurs mind-body divides via the amplified register of highly affective somatic speech. Far from mere metaphor, this dissertation shows how the prosthetized devotional text materializes and makes known the spiritual abilities of authors who actively frame divine desire around bodies in opposition to the normative cisgendered and ableist body so widely celebrated in religious discourses of the period. Reading devotional texts as prosthetics that supplement the spiritual lack experienced by early modern believers struggling to articulate their relationship with the divine reveals the problematic interplay between self and society in its blurring of the boundaries between immaterial soul, the material body, and the literal pages before us. My project thus demonstrates how the prosthetized text actively reframes dualist constructions of the body and soul, men and women, and also spiritual health and ability. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………………………………...v ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………...vi CHAPTER INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………...1 1. DISABLED DESIRE: READING AND WRITING REDEMPTION ON THE BODY IN AN COLLINS’ DIVINE SONGS AND MEDITACIONS (1653) .....17 2. REFLECTIONS OF A DIVINE (M)OTHER: THOMAS TRAHERNE AND THE GENDERING OF DESIRE……..……………………………………….....……..69 3. WHO'S HOT FOR CRASHAW?: GENDER ILLITERACY, INTERSUBJECTIVTY, AND THE IDEAL READER IN "THE FLAMING HEART"…………………………………………………………117 4. DISABLING THE GAZE: RECONCILING MILTON'S BLINDNESS WITH A MONIST VISION OF DEVOTIONAL DESIRE……………………………166 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………207 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………211 viii INTRODUCTION DESIRING BODIES AND THE PROSTHETIC POWER OF DEVOTIONAL VERSE With every tool, man is perfecting his own organs…by means of spectacles he corrects defects in the lens of his own eye; by means of the telescope he sees into the far distance…. With the telephone he can hear at distance which would be unattainable… Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all of his auxiliary organs, he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times. —Freud, Civilization and its Discontents1 In the epigraph above, Sigmund Freud suggests that technological innovation is tantamount to godliness. Our technologies allow us to conquer time, space, and also extend the range of our bodily abilities beyond what was previously thought possible. As each piece of adaptive technology allows us to more fully master our bodies and the material world that surrounds us, human beings become less creatures of the earth and increasingly godlike. The psychic unity and sense of autonomous agency Freud alludes to in the claim that mankind is “a kind of prosthetic God” rests entirely on the plethora of auxiliary devices that supplement humanity’s shortcomings and emphasize our lack of wholeness. Freud’s provocative image thus reveals something about the desire to 1 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated and edited by James Strachey (1961; New York: Norton, 1989), 43-4. 2 Burkhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore, ed. Peter Burke (1860; New York: Penguin, 1990). 3 Will Fisher notes that the OED first records individual as referring to “A single human being, as opposed to Society, the Family, etc.” in 1626. See Materializing Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (New York: Cambridge UP, 2006), 201 n.2. 4 Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (1980; Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005). 1 5 I borrow the term “prosthetic impulse” from Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra, who use it to describe the relationship between the modern Western subject and an increasingly technologized word. See Smith and Morra, eds., The Prosthetic Impulse: recognize in the self a sense of unfractured subjectivity, but it also acknowledges the reality that we most often come up wanting. His description of mankind as inching our way closer to the type of ontological wholeness envisioned in a divine Other like the Christian God, one prosthetized device at a time, is in many ways a reflection of the ideal modern subject.
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