A DOUBLE CAPACITY: SELF-PARODY IN BRITAIN’S 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 William Joseph Cordeiro August 2014 © 2014 William Joseph Cordeiro A DOUBLE CAPACITY: SELF-PARODY IN BRITAIN’S LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY William Joseph Cordeiro, Ph. D. Cornell University 2014 Although parody has long been recognized in Swift, Sterne, and mock epic poetry, self-parody has received scant critical attention, despite its pervasive use in many types of eighteenth-century texts. My dissertation defines self-parody as a mode in which the multiple implied reader positions suggested by a text mutually critique each other. I argue that these incommensurable reader positions reveal the era’s divergent political valences encoded within—and contested through—the development of generic norms. Many eighteenth-century genres responded to a cultural context that witnessed the overlap of residual Christian ideals, still-dominant aristocratic paradigms of authority, and emerging structures of the early capitalist marketplace; as these ideologies displaced one another, they nonetheless inherited and revised previous social and literary formations. This overlap allowed formal cleavages in texts so that seemingly conservative works could be inscribed by and give expression to the values of new, often marginalized, communities of readers. Novels by Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve, and Jane Austen demonstrate that the merger of realist and romance traditions in Gothic opened a space for queer counter-narratives that defied a hetero-normative and increasingly positivistic judicial system. Similarly, pastoral poetry shifted the identification of its shepherd-figures from the upper- to the lower- classes in works by Alexander Pope, John Gay, and George Crabbe, producing irresolvable class-based subject positions that precipitated Romanticism’s protest against industrial exploitation. Likewise, the demise of heroic drama and the rise of bourgeois drama created generic fissures, through which plays by John Dryden, John Gay, and George Lillo explored the failure of competing gender archetypes, especially the masculinity of their putative heroes. Finally, the reception of nominally sentimental novels is often divided between sentimental and satiric interpretations; against both these views, I claim that texts by David Hume, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and Frances Brooke display a dramatic conception that ironically exteriorizes character into social role-playing aligned both with and against an early capitalist marketplace. My analysis of self-parodies challenges traditional readings of the Enlightenment as enacting a consolidation of hegemonic discourses that reinforced already privileged perspectives; instead, I argue, these texts demonstrate a countervailing development of more pluralistic readerships and viewpoints. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH William Joseph Cordeiro studied philosophy and cognitive science as an undergraduate at Franklin and Marshall College. In addition, he has an M.S. in Education from Brooklyn College and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Cornell University. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to Laura Brown, Rick Bogel, and Nicholas Salvato for their generous support and encouragement, incisive comments on my work, tireless efforts on my behalf, and general enthusiasm throughout my academic career at Cornell. In addition, special thanks is owed to Harry Shaw for his judicious advice, intrepid spirit, level head, and kind heart. I have immeasurably been aided from other professors along the way, too, including Philip Lorenz, Kenneth McClane, J. Robert Lennon, Alice Fulton, Phyllis Janowitz, Denis Johnson, Mark Doty, Martha Collins, Rayna Kalas, Samantha Zacher, Cary Howie, Lisa Pincus, Claudia Lazzaro, Anna-Lise François, Catherine Roach, Keller Easterling, Roger Gilbert, Thomas Hill, Andrew Galloway, and Jenny Mann. Darlene Flint and Michele Mannella deserve recognition for their friendly, prompt, and indefatigable efficiency. Many fellow graduate students and friends who have assisted my intellectual and personal growth should be thanked here, as well: Leslie Hunter, Jared Harel, Christopher Kempf, Nicholas Friedman, Meredith Ramirez Talusan, Christopher Hicklin, Aeron Kopriva, Philip von Maltzahn, Abraham Burickson, Laurel Lathrop, Benjamin Garcia, Ted McLoof, Cybele Knowles, Dan Sinykin, Stephanie Gehring, Ezra Feldman, Alex Papanicolopoulos, Adhaar Desai, Matthew Bucemi, Sarah Eron, Bryan Alkemeyer, David Aichenbaum, and Jess Kaiser. I owe unspeakable debts to M.S. Coe. Thanks are due to my family and grandparents for their humoring my intellectual endeavors. Last but perhaps not least I should thank Tiki “Dog” Coco for her unflagging insistence that I take walks and play-time. These and others too numerous to mention here have been my community of readers without whom this work would not have been possible. Thanks also for institutional support from Ora Lerman Trust, ART 342, Blue Mountain Center, and Cornell University. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter One Queering Authority: The Emergence of the Gothic Novel 29 Chapter Two Pastoral, Pastiche, and the Neoclassical Impasse 119 Chapter Three Mock Heroic Drama and Competing Concepts of Masculinity 196 Chapter Four Affect and Affectation: Economies of Performance in Sentimental Novels 301 vi A Lawyer is an honest Employment, so is mine. Like me too he acts in a double Capacity, both against Rogues and for ’em; for ’tis but fitting that we should protect and encourage Cheats, since we live by them. —John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera, Act I, Scene 1 A man’s enemies will be those of his own household. —Matthew 10:36 (New King James Version) I have come to debase the coinage. —Diogenes (trans. Guy Davenport) vii Introduction I. Toward a Definition of Self-Parody While parody has long been a topic of considerable debate, in eighteenth century scholarship and beyond, relatively few studies have examined the subject of self-parody, despite the currency of the term in both popular culture and critical theory. Linda Hutcheon’s intervention in her seminal work, A Theory of Parody, is to claim that parody is not necessarily a mode of ridicule, but one of establishing a critical difference that can range tonally anywhere from homage to debasement: a parody such as Picasso’s Las Meninas is closer to a “take” or “version”—akin to a translation or redaction of Veláquez’s work into a new visual idiom—than the binaries of mockery and imitation might suggest. Indeed, the parodic text may offer an implicit commentary on and dialogue with its source text that is far more nuanced than simply an attack or an appreciation. Hutcheon’s theory of parody, however, relies predominantly on an analysis of twentieth-century texts, and part of her thesis is that the use of parody underwent a transformation with Modernism. She writes that a “definition of parody as ridicule that developed in tandem with the art of Pope, Swift, and Hogarth doesn’t necessarily feel right today” (xii). A major contention of the present study is that the use of self-parody in eighteenth- century texts shares at least the complexity of critical response that Hutcheon discovers in her twentieth-century examples of parody. Frederic Jameson would differentiate postmodern pastiche that does not take a determinate stance on its appropriated source text—the contemporary prevalence of which, he asserts, demonstrates the “waning of affect”—from traditional eighteenth- and nineteenth- century parody, which he claims relies on a stable background of values. Because part of my 1 argument is that there was not a stable background of values in the eighteenth century, I favor Hutcheon’s claim that parody may take a variety of positions vis-à-vis its source texts. Jameson’s analysis of postmodernity as symptomatic of a cultural transformation largely due to late capitalist logics may nonetheless have relevance to the similar transformation that took place in the eighteenth century during the emergence and consolidation of early mercantile capitalist institutions: if “Postmodernism” corresponds to what Raymond Williams meant by his fundamental cultural category, a “structure of feeling” (and one that has become “hegemonic” at that, to use another of Williams’s crucial categories), then it can only enjoy that status by dint of profound collective self-transformation, a reworking and rewriting of an older system. (xiv) If wide-spread economic and cultural transformations require a “reworking and rewriting” of older systems, then parody (in Hutcheon’s sense) would be a particularly apt mode to express the ambivalences and anxieties experienced during such a time. Parody’s appropriation of previous textual conventions allows its reworking and rewriting to reference the values inscribed by its source texts while critically responding to the ways that those values have been rendered incongruent by a new cultural logic that inscribes or imposes other values onto texts. In this light, moments of societal transformation are imbricated with residual, dominant, and emergent ideologies. Parodies, by reworking older or established models, often prove capable of engendering a parallel transformation in literature by which a text contests various cultural norms and assumptions. Margaret Rose argues that: 2 In work such as Don Quixote, in which parody has had the function of both