Authorship and the History of Sexuality, 1740-1820
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Plagiarists, Sodomites, and Cannibals: Authorship and the History of Sexuality, 1740-1820 A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in English by Julia Kark Callander 2017 © Copyright by Julia Kark Callander 2017 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Plagiarists, Sodomites, and Cannibals: Authorship and the History of Sexuality, 1740-1820 by Julia Kark Callander Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Los Angeles, 2017 Professor Helen E. Deutsch, Chair Romantic-period authors, reviewers, and critics persistently invoked sodomy and cannibalism when criticizing literary ‘perversions,’ the most significant of which was plagiarism. This dissertation accounts for this cluster of associations and elucidates their meaning for the histories of sexuality and authorship more broadly. First, I trace how critical discourse in the Romantic period projected older anxieties about sodomy and other kinds of ‘perverse incorporations’ onto authorship. Second, I contend that features of late eighteenth-century authorship actually prefigure structures integral to modern sexuality. In the eighteenth century, Britons and Americans used authorship as a primary concept with which to articulate the relationships between subjects, between a subject and the public, and between a subject and the law. By the end of the nineteenth century, heterosexuality had taken precedence as the defining feature of subjectivity in these relationships. Over the course of the Romantic period, authorship underwent a ‘straightening’ that paradoxically involved the incorporation and assimilation of the very textual and corporeal perversions—particularly plagiarism, cannibalism, and sodomy—against which normative authorship, and normative masculinity, continued to be defined. This project ii thus makes two broader claims: it argues that incorporation and subsequent disavowal form the basis by which modern masculine subjects define themselves, and it describes and analyzes the incorporative structure of perversion in modern Anglo-British culture more generally. This project focuses on the work and reception of authors with uneasy or contested relationships to their source texts, and whose own sexual sensibilities were richly unconventional: Thomas Gray, Matthew Lewis, and Charles Brockden Brown. These figures are instructive not because their work reveals some essential ‘gayness’ or ‘queerness,’ but because their blackmailability (in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s well-known formulation) both as men and as authors allows us to see more clearly the logic underlying masculine sexuality and authorship in the period more generally. iii The dissertation of Julia Kark Callander is approved. Christopher J. Looby Saree Makdisi Felicity A. Nussbaum Michael Meranze Helen E. Deutsch, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2017 iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments vi Vita vii Introduction 1 1. Thomas Gray: Masculinity, Melancholy, and Disavowal 38 2. ‘Perverted Genius,’ Cannibals, and Crypts in Matthew Lewis 87 3. “The Perilous Precincts of Private Property”: Closets, Circulation, and Sterility in Charles Brockden Brown’s 1799-1800 Novels 140 Coda and Conclusion: “An Appetite for Being Buried”: Consumption, Contagion, and the Thingness of the Body in Matthew Lewis’s Journal of a West India Proprietor 175 Bibliography 196 v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am fortunate to have received a great deal of support throughout the process of writing this dissertation. The time, patience, and critical acumen of my committee members—Helen Deutsch, Felicity Nussbaum, Chris Looby, Saree Makdisi, and Michael Meranze—have helped to make this project what it is. I am grateful also for feedback I received from other readers, including Anahid Nersessian, Olivia Bloechl, members of the graduate 18th century and romanticism working group, the Early Modern Research Group, and the UC Multi-Campus Research Group on “The Material Cultures of Knowledge, 1500-1830.” This project would not have been possible without the financial support of the UCLA English Department, UCLA Graduate Division, the Center for the Study of Women, and the Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies. Finally, to all the friends and family members who supported and encouraged me over the past few (or more than few) years, I am exceedingly grateful. vi VITA 2007 B.A., English and music, summa cum laude Lawrence University Appleton, Wisconsin 2011 M.A., English University of California, Los Angeles 2011-2012 Research Assistant Department of English University of California, Los Angeles 2012-2013 Research Mentorship Graduate Division University of California, Los Angeles 2013-2014 Collegium of University Teaching Fellows University of California, Los Angeles Research Assistant Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies University of California, Los Angeles 2014 Kanner Fellow in British Studies William Andrews Clark Memorial Library University of California, Los Angeles 2015-2016 Dissertation Year Fellowship Graduate Division University of California, Los Angeles 2016-2017 Dissertation Research Fellowship Department of English University of California, Los Angeles Publications “Cannibalism and Communion in Swift’s ‘Receipt to Restore Stella’s Youth.’” Studies in English Literature 54.3 (Summer 2014): 585-604. “‘Attended by a whole nation’: The Americas in The Female American.” 1650- 1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 18 (2011): 129-49. vii INTRODUCTION “sodomy—that utterly confused category”1 “The whole problem of poetic borrowing clearly remained highly confused, as indeed it has to the present day”2 For years after the publication of The Monk (1796), Matthew Lewis’s critics persistently and creatively emphasized how his “talents [were] strangely perverted.”3 His 1801 miscellany Tales of Wonder, which borrowed from many authors, earned the nickname ‘tales of plunder’ and led Irish poet Thomas Dermody to ask, “Did I discover the mysterious hole, / From whence your putrid carcases [sic] you stole?”4 Invoking the historical definition of plagiarism as kidnapping and seduction, Dermody compares plagiarized texts to dead bodies, likening Lewis not only to a grave robber, but also potentially a necrophile. The emphasis on pillaging dead corpses for parts also hints at cannibalism, and the phrase “mysterious hole” would have resonated particularly with readers who by 1801 were already familiar with Lewis’s reputation as a lover of men. In short, Dermody condemns Lewis’s textual misdeeds by insinuating something “perverted” about Lewis’s sexuality as well. 1 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 101. 2 Roger Lonsdale, “Gray and ‘Allusion’: The Poet as Debtor,” Studies in the Eighteenth Century IV, ed. R.F. Brissenden and J.C. Eade (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1979), 31-55, 47. 3 Rev. of Tales of Wonder, The Antijacobin Review VIII (1801): 322-23, 323. 4 Thomas Dermody, “More Wonders!” in The Harp of Erin: Containing the Poetical Works (London: Richard Phillips, 1807), 1:108-24, 116. 1 Romantic-period critics closely associated sexual, textual, and alimentary transgression. The anonymous “Printed by Mistake” (1823) compares the literary marketplace to the famously homoerotic cannibal shipwreck scene in Canto II of Byron’s Don Juan. The author equates intertextual borrowing with the cannibalization of other writers: “this prodigious multiplication of Magazines and Periodicals can never endure,” he writes, “for how can their myriad and insatiable maws be replenished without generating a literary famine in the land? . we are beginning to be driven to the cannibal repast of the shipwrecked Don Juan.”5 But that material soon grows scarce, and authors “tear . open our own bosoms to supply flesh and blood to the ravenous brood of the public. Nay, we even join in their repast. Autophagi that we are! in the voracity of our egotism, we find a perpetual feast in our own heart and head.” The essayist becomes both guest and host, “dish[ing himself] up” to the “ravenous” public, but also eating himself.6 Satires and reviews like these both construct and criticize an ideology of solitary masculine genius, characterized by Maggie Kilgour “the desire for absolute self-reliance and independence from all external influences [which] would be best satisfied by self-cannibalism, in which one doesn’t even need to rely on the world outside for food.”7 Perhaps the most iconic instance of this phenomenon occurs in Samuel T. Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, in which the Mariner must bite and drink from his own arm before he can speak: “Through utter drought all dumb we stood! / I bit my arm, I sucked the blood, / And cried, A sail! a sail!”8 This desire for independence—even at the cost of autophagy—reaches its apex in the Romantic 5 “Printed by Mistake,” in The New Monthly Magazine VII (1823): 529-32, 530. 6 “Printed by Mistake,” in The New Monthly Magazine VII (1823): 529-32, 530. 7 Maggie Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 150. 8 Samuel T. Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner (rev. 1834), in Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Nicholas Halmi et. al (New York: Norton, 2004), 58-99, ll. 159-61. 2 period, with important implications for our understanding of both authorship and the history of sexuality. This dissertation charts the entwined histories of sexuality and authorship in Anglophone writing from