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Cadenus and Vanessa: the Self-Conscious Muse

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Daniel Cook The University of Dundee Cadenus and Vanessa: The Self-Conscious Muse Abstract. Readers have always viewed Cadenus and Vanessa as an uncomfortable poem. Much of the unease surrounding the text, even now, concerns the ten-line passage in which the speaker ever so coyly hints at the sexual union of Swift and Esther Vanhomrigh: “But what Success Vanessa met, / Is to the World a Secret yet.” Lord Orrery, among others, interpreted this as an attack on Esther’s honour, whereas more recent critics have dismissed it as a non-conclusion. This essay revisits the textual, critical, and emotional issues long associated with the passage. In particular, it suggests that Swift attempts to deconstruct the inefficacy of conventional love-language and, in its place, outlines a fortified rhetoric of friendship. I Set largely in the Court of Love, as presided over by a disheartened Venus, Cadenus and Vanessa tells the tale of a “tutorial-erotic friendship”1 between a clergyman “Grown old in Politicks and Wit” and a “wond’rous Maid” rendered too perfect for modern society (as the poem’s speaker puts it). Written at least in part as early as 1712 or 1713 but widely circulated in print throughout 1726, we might call it a posthumously published proto-eulogy for Esther Vanhomrigh, who on 2 June 1723 had died, “a martyr to love and constancy” (in the words of Deane Swift, the poet’s junior cousin).2 Critics have long admired Cadenus and Vanessa for its technical accomplishments. Herbert Davis, for instance, considers it to be perhaps 1 Claude Rawson, “Rage and Raillery and Swift: The Case of Cadenus and Vanessa,” Pope, Swift, and Women Writers, ed. Donald C. Mell (Newark, New Jersey: University of Delaware Press, and London: Associated University Presses, 1996), pp. 179–91 (179). 2 Deane Swift, Essay upon the Life, Writings, and Character of Dr. Jonathan Swift (London: Charles Bathurst, 1755), p. 264. W.H. Dilworth extends this idea further, calling Esther “a martyr to love and constancy, whose honour was spotless, and character unsullied” (The Life of Dr. Jonathan Swift, Dean of Saint Patrick’s, Dublin [London: G. Wright, 1758], p. 91). For the compositional history, see Poems, ed. Williams, II, 683–86; John Irwin Fischer, “ ‘Love and Books’: Some Early Texts of Swift’s Cadenus and Vanessa, and a Few Words about Love,” Reading Swift: Papers from The Fourth Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift, eds Hermann J. Real and Helgard Stöver-Leidig (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2003), pp. 285–310. 402 Daniel Cook Swift’s “best work in verse.”3 As early as 1751, Lord Orrery had observed that, “As a poem, it is excellent in its kind, perfectly correct, and admirably conducted. Swift, who had the nicest ear, is remarkably chaste and delicate in his rhymes.”4 In the main, though, readers have struggled to reconcile their intellectual re- sponses to the text with their emotional reactions. Patrick Delany, for one, recoils at “these vile verses,”5 and Claude Rawson, for another, similarly finds that the poem “leaves a sour taste.”6 Jonathan Smedley, one of Swift’s most forthright enemies, gleefully insists that Swift “ought to have buried it in Silence; for, whatever Joy he perceives from this Poem, as a well-writ thing … the Subject of it can never afford him any thing but Matter of Shame and Sorrow.”7 Gareth Jones has put it more diplomatically but no less forcibly: Cadenus and Vanessa is not a “comfortable” poem.8 For many commentators, the work represents an audacious stroke of self- exculpation; for others, it is a fitting if discomfiting tribute to one of the Dean’s dearest devotees. Perhaps Oliver Goldsmith best captures the faint queasiness of eighteenth-century readers: “This is thought one of Dr. Swift’s correctest pieces; its chief merit, indeed, is the elegant ease with which a story, but ill conceived in itself, is told.”9 Much of the unease surrounding the poem, even now, concerns the passage in which the speaker ever so coyly hints at the sexual union of the tutor and tutee: “But what Success Vanessa met, / Is to the World a Secret yet.”10 More specifically, the speaker seems to insinuate that if it had taken place it is the young woman who took the initiative in this act of gross transgression, a transgression that “Must never to Mankind be told, / Nor shall the conscious Muse unfold” (ll. 826–27). Orrery set 3 Herbert Davis, Jonathan Swift: Essays on his Satire and Other Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 66. F. Elrington Ball feels likewise that Cadenus and Vanessa is “perhaps the best metrical piece written by Swift” (Swift’s Verse: An Essay [London: John Murray, 1929], p. 134). 4 John Boyle, fifth Earl of Orrery, Remarks on the Life and Writings of Dr. Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick’s, Dublin (London: A. Millar, [1751]), p. 104. 5 Patrick Delany, Observations upon Lord Orrery’s Remarks on the Life and Writings of Dr. Jonathan Swift (London: W. Reeve and A. Linde, 1754), p. 116. 6 Rawson, “Rage and Raillery and Swift,” p. 187. For David Nokes, “[Cadenus and Vanessa] is a curious poem with uncertain, embarrassing dips of tone” (Jonathan Swift, a Hypocrite Reversed: A Critical Biography [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985], p. 161). For James L. Tyne, by contrast, it is “perhaps the most interesting, but certainly the most tantalizing poem Jonathan Swift ever wrote” (“Vanessa and the Houyhnhnms: A Reading of Cadenus and Vanessa,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 11 [1971], 517–34 [p. 517]). 7 Jonathan Smedley, Gulliveriana: or, A Fourth Volume of Miscellanies. Being a Sequel of the Three Volumes Published by Pope and Swift (London: J. Roberts, 1728), p. xxix. 8 Gareth Jones, “Swift’s Cadenus and Vanessa: A Question of ‘Positives,’ ” Essays in Criticism, 20 (1970), 424–40; reprinted in Essential Articles for the Study of Jonathan Swift’s Poetry, ed. David M. Vieth (Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1984), pp. 155–71. 9 Oliver Goldsmith, ed., The Beauties of English Poesy, 2 vols (London: William Griffin, 1767), II, 175. 10 Poems, ed. Williams, II, 712 (ll. 818–19). All further quotations from Cadenus and Vanessa follow this edition and appear in parentheses within the text..
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