Francis Bacon and the Seventeenth-Century Intellectual Discourse

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Francis Bacon and the SeventeenthCentury Intellectual Discourse

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Francis Bacon and the SeventeenthCentury Intellectual Discourse Anthony J. Funari

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francis bacon and the seventeenth-century intellectual discourse Copyright © Anthony J. Funari, 2011. All rights reserved. All quotations from John Donne’s poetry come from The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne, ed. Charles M. Coffin (New York, NY: Modern Library, 2001). All quotations from John Wilmot’s poetry come from The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. David M. Vieth (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962). All quotations from Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum come from Novum Organum with Other Parts of The Great Instauration, ed. Peter Urbach and John Gibson (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1994). First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010 Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978-0-230-11684-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Funari, Anthony J. Francis Bacon and the seventeenth-century intellectual discourse / by Anthony J. Funari. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0-230–11684–9 1. English poetry—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. 2. Nature in literature. 3. Bacon, Francis, 1561–1626—Influence. 4. Donne, John, 1572– 1631—Criticism and interpretation. 5. Marvell, Andrew, 1621–1678—Criticism and interpretation. 6. Rochester, John Wilmot, Earl of, 1647–1680—Criticism and interpretation. 7. Empiricism in literature. 8. Literature and science—England— History—17th century. 9. England—Intellectual life—17th century. I. Title. PR545.N3F86 2011 821'.409—dc22

2011012453

Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: September 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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For my father, John, my mother, Jane, and my wife, Kim.

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Contents Preface

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction

1

1

An Inheritance Recovered

17

2

Nature’s Confession: Baconian and Anti-Baconian Narratives in Donne’s Devotions

39

“Companions of My Thoughts More Green”: Damon’s Baconian Sexing of Nature

61

A “Fantastic Mind” and a “Fix’d Heart”: Rochester and the Disciplining of the Mind

87

Conclusion: Promethean and Postscientific Narratives

113

Notes

129

Bibliography

159

Index

171

3 4

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Preface Many of the ideas for this book have morphed and evolved, been reconsidered, revised, and rewritten over the past four years. While preparing my dissertation proposal, I originally thought to examine how Francis Bacon’s call to cleanse the mind of its “idols” to establish a “dry light” frustrated the project of metaphysical poetry. Through the insightful guidance of my peers and mentors at Lehigh University, the best of whom I could not distinguish between, I came to see the central tension in the narratives that emerged when reading the scientific treatises of Bacon against the poetry of John Donne, Andrew Marvell, and John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester. In essence that is the focus of this book—the narratives that inform how we conceptualize our relationship to the natural world. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Bacon wrote about humanity’s recovering a lost inheritance. By adopting an empirical, inductive engagement with the natural world, humanity, Bacon envisioned, could restore the dominance over Nature that Adam once possessed. Humanity would again become the prevailing character in its environmental story. Against Bacon’s tale of scientific advancement and restoration there arose a counternarrative, one that saw the return to an Edenic relation with Nature as beyond our ability. Furthermore, those writers who voiced this counternarrative warned against the hubris of the new scientific mind and the potential danger of human disruption of the natural world. Though this struggle over how humanity’s ecological future will be written occurred four hundred years ago, the pivotal question of how to achieve harmony between the human and more-than-human worlds still motivates current “green” conversations. Will ecological salvation come

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with technological advancements that will lessen the burden we place on the environment? Or must we appreciate that the new environmental narrative will be coauthored with Nature? This book argues for the value of turning to those who resisted Bacon’s scientific narrative to help us write a new tale between humanity and Nature.

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Acknowledgments This book would not exist without the institutional support that I received during my doctoral studies at Lehigh University. For the funding that allowed me to devote two uninterrupted years to researching and writing the initial version of this book, I would very much like to thank the College of Arts and Sciences. I was extraordinarily fortunate to find in the English Department at Lehigh an intellectually stimulating and personally supportive atmosphere that is so rare in doctoral programs. I would like to thank Ed Lotto, Kate Crassons, Pete Biedler, Betsy Fifer, Jan Fergus, Donna Reiss, Viv Steele, Deep Singh, and Ed Whitley. In particular, I would like to single out Carol Laub, whose dry wit helped me keep things in perspective. For her seminar on modern and postmodern feminist theory, for the door that she left open to her students, and for the immensely productive workshop on academic publishing, Dawn Keetley deserves my appreciation. I am indebted to those who participated in the workshop and whose critiques helped to shape Chapter 2: Bob Kilker, Jennifer Hyest, Colleen Martell, Abby Aldrich, Tom O’Connor, and Wes Atkinson. This book, as well as my understanding of early modern cultural studies in general, has benefited from those who shared their work and vigorously discussed that of others in the PreModern Colloquium: Nicole Batchelor, Marie Molnar, Kim Racon, Rebecca Lynn Willoughby, Kurt Douglass, Elizabeth Dolan, and Suzanne Edwards. In the community that I became a part of at Lehigh, Elizabeth Wiggins stands out for her commitment as a friend and her brilliance as a reader; I have been privileged to take advantage of both.

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Acknowledgments

For helping to prepare the final manuscript, gathering the necessary permissions, aiding in compiling the index, and showing such professionalism, I would like to thank Gabrielle Roman, with whom any author would be lucky to work. My sincerest thanks to Barbara Traister for serving on both my exam and dissertation committees; to David Hawkes for reading numerous drafts of this work in its earlier stages, for helping me to transition from a student to a scholar, and for finding potential insights that I overlooked; and to Scott Paul Gordon, for his patience, for his mentorship, for his friendship, for his willingness to critique drafts of this book despite many other obligations, and for the comments that challenged me to reconsider and locate my own argument. Chapter 3 first saw the light of publication in Early English Studies (December 2010). I would like to thank Amy Tigner, the editor of EES, from whom I gained insight into my own writing and found guidance in my thinking on Andrew Marvell. I am also grateful to the editorial staff at Palgrave Macmillan, especially Brigitte Shull and Joanna Roberts. Finally, thanks to my family—Mom, Dad, Grandma, Linda, Doug, Carroll, Jackie, Jay, and, our newest member, Jack—for their support, emotional and financial, and all the times they were there to celebrate. To say the very least, this book would never have come into being without all of them. Most important, I thank my wife, Kim, who helped me talk through ideas on the small couch in our study, who knew that the best conversations happen over a beer, who encouraged me to see the larger implications of my thoughts, and who reminded me that there is more to life than just this book.

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Introduction

M

odern science has always claimed to have a monopoly on truth—that it alone possesses the path to accessing the real, the objective, the accurate. To create valid knowledge, to gain access to the empirical truth of an object, scientists presume that they exist in an objective vacuum, having cleansed themselves of any potential sympathetic attachment to the object and particularities of their sociohistorical position that might obscure their appreciation of the distinctness of the object of their investigation. Moreover, the production of scientific knowledge has until recently perpetuated a narrative, a heroic tale of ever-expanding control over our environment. The appeal of scientific thought comes not merely from the surety it offers, but from the story it creates, which locates humanity always on the cusp of greater enjoyment of command over the natural world. However, Western epistemologists have begun to question whether this era of scientific certainty is now coming to an end. In his chronicling of the epistemological shift that Western thought is experiencing, John Lukács finds himself at the conclusion of an intellectual period defined by scientific positivism: “For a long time I have been convinced that we in the West are living near the end of an entire age, the age that began nearly five hundred years ago.”1 For Lukács, the twentieth century saw the erosion of the appeal of scientific surety— the belief that science through progressive generations of its practitioners would give ever more insight into Nature and gain increasing control over its processes:“The notion that the subjects of Science are ‘reality’ itself, outside of us, to be discovered by present and future scientists, driving out every working morning with their ever more advanced instruments, returning every night after having hacked at the Mountain Range of Science, bringing back either tiny or larger but in any case bits of it, is alas, still widespread—but it is also silly.”2 Though the thought that science is always moving toward a progressively more accurate, truthful account

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of reality while gaining greater control over the natural world may still be commonplace, Lukács argues that this view of science is becoming gradually more untenable. The epistemological work has commenced to chip away at the sacrosanct role modern science has held. Lukács traces the beginnings of this challenge to the foundation of scientific thought to Werner Heisenberg and his uncertainty principle, which disputed the notion of a stable reality that could be observed and measured objectively. As Lukács succinctly states, “The study of the ‘reality’ of matter was inseparable from the interference (and from the mind and the purpose) of the scientist.”3 If observation itself altered the thing being observed, then any account of the thing would necessarily be tainted by the observer and, therefore, not objective or stable truth. Late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century epistemologists have begun to theorize alternative ways of knowing that abandon or hold up for scrutiny the hallmark of modern scientific thought—objectivity—as well as rewriting the drama that structures humanity’s perception of its relationship with Nature. The work of Donna J. Haraway opens a path for this new mode of thought. In her conception of situated knowledges, Haraway comes to an epistemological impasse between her rejection of the traditional notion of objectivity and the equally untenable alternative, relativism. Haraway’s critique of modern scientific objectivity reveals science as a rhetorical practice, one with its own particular social agenda: “From this point of view, science—the real game in town, the one we must play—is rhetoric, the persuasion of the relevant social actors that one’s manufactured knowledge is a route to a desired form of very objective power.”4 From this social-constructionist point of view, facts presumably discovered through objective inquiry are moments in which a particular social agenda is being advanced. The scientists’ search for truth is merely a disingenuous attempt to present a politically implicated worldview as natural. In this sense, Haraway recasts the work of the scientist as an act of manufacturing rather than of discovery. While the epistemological foundation of modern Western science fosters the belief that truth is a recoverable artifact, Haraway reveals knowledge as an object of production. No longer are scientific data innocent. Haraway, however, does not outright reject the possibility of giving an accurate account of reality: “So, the further I get with the description of the radical social constructionist programme and a particular

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version of postmodernism, coupled to the acid tools of critical discourse in the human sciences, the more I get nervous.”5 Haraway finds in the relativism a return to the same rhetorical sleight of hand that modern science practices—that of the observer who assumes a position of being nowhere: “Relativism is the perfect mirror twin of totalization in the ideologies of objectivity; both deny the stakes in location, embodiment, and partial perspective; both make it impossible to see well.” Both positions presented to the knower through relativism—that all perspectives are equivalent—and totalization—that there exists one “true” perspective for all—promise sight from “everywhere and nowhere,” thus their attempt to recreate the vision of God, the “common myths in rhetorics surrounding Science.”6 To surmount this impasse, Haraway offers a doctrine of feminist objectivity, or situated knowledges, in which she argues the position of the knower must be accounted for and that his or her perspective grants access to partial truth that must be circulated in “webs of connection called solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology.”7 For Haraway, this new epistemology demands the knower acknowledge that any comprehension of reality is foremost intimately connected to one’s cultural position: a person may speak provided that she does so knowing any utterance is circumscribed by her subject position. Haraway’s program of situated knowledges recognizes the urgency for conversation: unlike modern science, which allows a subject to assume a totalizing position to speak for all other positions, the new epistemological program here validates the contribution that a situated perspective can make to the search for an accurate account of the universe. “I am arguing for politics and epistemologies of location, positioning and situating, where partiality and universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims”: multiplicity and heterogeneity come to replace innocence and uniformity of perspective.8 Haraway successfully accomplishes the disruption of the monopoly on vision and knowing that modern science has maintained for centuries. We can only ever have a piece of the puzzle that must be shared with others, who likewise have access only to partial truth. Through this recognition, Haraway argues Western thought can move beyond the pretense or rhetorical trick of traditional objectivity. An important aspect of Haraway’s new epistemological agenda is the urgency to recognize the agency within the object. Rather than

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perpetuating the scientific imbalance of power between the knower and the thing to be known, Haraway demands that modern conceptions of subjectivity, based on the subject’s dominance over the object through knowledge of it, must be relinquished in favor of a more equitable model: “Situated knowledges require that the object of knowledge be pictured as an actor and agent, not a screen or a ground or a resource, never finally as slave to the master that closes off the dialectic in his unique agency and authorship of ‘objective knowledge.’”9 Haraway’s methodology here applies the techniques of the social sciences to those of the natural sciences: “The point is paradigmatically clear in critical approaches to the social and human sciences, where the agency of people studied itself transforms the entire project of producing social theory . . . But the same point must apply to the other knowledge projects called sciences.”10 Though the more prevalent tendency has been to adopt the paradigm offered by the natural sciences, particularly the imperative of objectivity, Haraway sees that the subject-object relation that predicates modern scientific inquiry must be supplanted with the recognition of the agency of the Other, a subject-subject relation. In a sense, Haraway appears to advocate for a type of animism, in which Nature is not taken simply for raw material, but is “an active entity.”11 To this end, Haraway points to the American Southwest Indian mythic depiction of Nature as Coyote, or Trickster. The call for the recognition of the world as Coyote has profound implications for the basic tenets of knowledge production. Feminist objectivity replaces the fundamental trope of the interrogation with that of the “non-innocent conversation”: Haraway envisions a scenario of knowledge production in which the human knower does not control the terms of engagement.12 While most modern scientists would conceive of their efforts in much the same way—perceiving the object on its own terms—the scenario that Haraway depicts here differs in that, rather than extracting knowledge from a passive object that can be manipulated, the new scientist must understand the subject of inquiry as a participant in the conversation. While the modern scientist merely reads Nature, the ecofeminist scientist converses with Nature. One can never assume to be in control of a conversation with Coyote. Power must be relinquished. In addition, Haraway understands Nature as an active agent and so challenges the literalism of modern science. As opposed to existing in an isolating, solely material universe, Haraway

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suggests an imaginative construction. Feminist objectivity conflates “science, science fantasy, and science fiction.”13 Haraway’s epistemological project harkens back to a premodern depiction of our environment, in which Nature was understood as an agent and not just a thing.14 Haraway begins the project of revising the narrative that has informed modern science for the past four hundred years by outlining a new dynamic between the human knower and the natural object to be known. The imperative toward domination, exploitation, and totalization, rather than bringing humanity ever-increasing understanding of the natural world, has simply confused the terms of the conversation. To equate knowledge with power and conquest misrecognizes the human observer’s vulnerable position and subjection to Nature. In reversing the power dynamic of the relationship between the scientist and Nature, Haraway challenges one of the pillars of scientific thought— that humanity is the sole actor in and author of its encounter with the natural world. Haraway rewrites the undergirding narrative of modern science, one that this study traces back to a foundational voice of the Scientific Revolution—Francis Bacon. At the beginning of his central treatise outlining and advocating for the new scientific method, Novum Organum (The New Instrument, 1620), Bacon emphatically sets up a new power structure between humanity and the natural world: “Human knowledge and human power come to the same thing, for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. We can only command Nature by obeying her, and what in contemplation represents the cause, in operation stands as the rule.”15 Here Bacon claims as the end of investigating natural processes the ability to recreate them and so make them serviceable to humanity. It would be a mistake to read Bacon’s admonishment to “obey” Nature as indicating his advising any sense of humility or submission on the part of the human knower. Instead, to “obey” Nature within Bacon’s vocabulary suggests more the ability to read her objectively, to cleanse one’s mind of the fictions that obscure its perception of reality. In a sense, to “obey,” for Bacon, is synonymous with to “observe.” Ultimately, through the new tool that Bacon devises for the mind, one could begin to “obey” Nature: “And just as instruments improve or regulate the movement of our hands, so instruments of the mind provide suggestions or cautions to the understanding.”16

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It is interesting to note that this power Bacon foresees humanity gaining through “obeying” Nature is something to be recovered or restored as opposed to newly acquired. Throughout his writings on the new science, there is a pervasive sense that Bacon realizes the new science as returning humanity to its original, Edenic condition with Nature. In his unfinished work outlining the scope of his epistemological reformation, Instauratio Magna (Great Instauration), Bacon most clearly articulates his narrative of advancement and restoration. His new tool of the mind, the new scientific method, offers a means of regaining what was lost: “That the sciences are in an unhappy state, and have made no great progress; and that a path must be opened to man’s understanding entirely different from that known to men before us, and other means of assistance provided, so that the mind can exercise its rightful authority over the nature of things.”17 In this passage, Bacon articulates the seemingly paradoxical nature of the narrative he uses to undergird his call to adopt the new empirical thought. While he conceives of the new science as a break with past learning, seeking a “path . . . different from that known to men before us,” Bacon foresees at the end of the road that he looks to open for humanity the reclaiming of an “authority” that had always been promised but was lost. Humanity’s scientific progress, forever advancing in its knowledge of and mastery over the natural world, is finally concerned with restoration. Further, his idea of reclaiming humanity’s “rightful authority” comes through a Christian narrative: “Therefore, Oh Father, who gavest us the light to see things as Thy first work of creation . . . guard and govern this work, that, begun by Thy goodness, returneth to Thy glory.”18 It is not that the new science, as Bacon conceives it, offers any novel power to mankind, but rather returns humanity to a prelapsarian relation with the natural world. Bacon’s epistemological project was to return to the dominion over Nature that humanity enjoyed in Eden. In The Word of God and the Language of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine (1995), James Bono remarks on the religious implications Bacon claims for the new science, “Man’s nature, like that of Adam, is to exercise power and enjoy dominion over all creatures. Knowledge of creatures is licit; knowledge of God’s nature is beyond man’s ability.”19 Bacon even more adamantly articulates how he perceives science as granting all humanity its lost prosperity in Book I, Aphorism 129 of Novum: “Let the human race only recover its God-given right over Nature, and be given the

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necessary power.”20 As Bacon realizes it, the domination of the natural world through scientific investigation possesses immense religious import: to bring Nature under human subjection is to essentially remedy the Fall of Adam and Eve. In light of the theological significance Bacon invests in the mandate that humanity must adopt the new scientific mindset and wield once again Adamic mastery, Haraway’s revising the dialogue between the scientist and Nature even more profoundly challenges the foundation of modern science. That is, Haraway’s “non-innocent conversations” between the human knower and the elusive natural world directly rebut this presumption that through conquest of Nature a restoration of Paradise may be achieved. While modern science as it is practiced today has lost the theme of return and redemption, the bravado and entitlement that marks our contemporary exploitation of Nature finds its roots within the narrative on which Bacon undergirds the new science. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to claim Francis Bacon as the most controversial intellectual to emerge from the English Renaissance. For twentieth- and twenty-first-century critics of Bacon, the question of Bacon’s culpability for our ecological crisis—to what extent Bacon can be charged with instigating the mindset that has allowed for the exploitation of the natural world—generates much debate. In her recent article, “The Secrets of Nature: The Bacon Debates Revisited,” Carolyn Merchant identifies Bacon as the pivot for the way one assesses the legacy of the Scientific Revolution: “A deep divide exists between Bacon’s supporters and detractors . . . The deeper roots of this divide lie in perceptions of the Scientific Revolution as a grand narrative of progress and hope versus one of decline and disaster.”21 Since the publication of Merchant’s The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (1980), scholars have consistently returned to the question of whether Bacon should be indicted for having set humanity on the path toward the ruination of the earth. In Reflections on Gender and Science (1985), Evelyn Fox Keller examines the guiding metaphor Bacon employs in his scientific writings. According to Keller, Bacon reads the scientist’s conquering of Nature as a “forceful and aggressive seduction” that “leads to conquest.” Keller’s discussion of Bacon’s tropology centers on the confusion between his simultaneous calls to obey and to conquer Nature: “There remains something of a puzzle. Nature is commanded by being obeyed, revealed by being enslaved, hounded, and vexed.”22 In her feminist critique of modern science, Whose Science? Whose

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Knowledge? (1991), Sandra Harding charges Bacon for originally authorizing humanity’s destruction of the natural world. Harding exposes the sexism that underlies the tropology of modern science, tracing its origins to Bacon, who “appealed to rape metaphors to persuade his audience that experimental method is a good thing.”23 The indictments of Bacon made by ecofeminism have not gone unchallenged. Recent feminist scholars have complicated the clear gender roles—the masculine scientists and the feminine natural world—that earlier ecofeminist scholars read in Bacon’s scientific writings.24 Further, some modern Baconian scholars reject the accusation of Bacon’s having provided the fundamental voice in human devastation of the planet. In his rebuttal of the charges leveled against Bacon by ecofeminist critics, Perez Zagorin reminds us contemporary human conditions for Bacon were such that most lived in fear of Nature’s unpredictability. Nature was not perceived as vulnerable or susceptible to human endeavors as much as human beings were subjugated to Nature’s whims: “Physicians were nearly helpless to diagnose or treat illness and to alleviate pain. Cities were unhealthy from poor sanitation and danger of infection. Food supply was precarious and regularly affected by scarcity and death due to periodic harvest failure.”25 It is in this context that Zagorin argues Bacon’s call to subdue Nature to humanity’s needs must be understood. Likewise, Nieves Mathews, one of Bacon’s staunchest twentieth-century apologists, finds Bacon actually admonishing against the unethical exploitation of the natural world: “Yet, alone among the forerunners of modern science, Bacon had foreseen the potential dangers of man’s dominion over nature.” For Mathews, Bacon becomes almost prophetic in his warning “against the dangerous ‘fruits of mechanic inventions.’”26 Other scholars have defended Bacon vigorously, arguing the ecofeminist assault on his scientific treatises is based on misinterpretation and anachronistic readings.27 For the last thirty years, many scholars have analyzed the “objective science” that Bacon (and his “method” to purge the mind of illusions) claimed to have established, and some have critiqued the consequences of this “scientific mind” on the natural world and the narrative of recovery Bacon uses to undergird his scientific program. While critics debate the environmental implications of Bacon’s epistemological agenda, this book examines a less considered space of opposition to the narrative of

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restoration Bacon uses to promote the new science—that voiced in the works of John Donne, Andrew Marvell, and John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester. My work in this book attempts to complicate the cultural reception of the new science by recovering the resistance Donne, Marvell, and Rochester offer to Bacon’s tale of restoration. I believe there is a counternarrative, which emerges alongside Bacon’s, voiced by these writers throughout this century. It is vital to recover this poetic challenge to Bacon’s belief that humanity may regain Adamic mastery over the natural world through progressive scientific thought so that a fuller picture of the intellectual reaction to the new science may emerge. In the chapters that follow, I look to unearth the epistemological and psychological turmoil each writer finds in Bacon’s narrative of recovery. “It Is Rather a Pleasure or Play of Imagination than Work or Duty”: Bacon and Poetic Sensibility

Before I continue to my discussion of Donne’s, Marvell’s, and Rochester’s resistance to Bacon’s narrative of advancement and recovery, it is necessary to touch on the controversy in regards to Bacon’s influence on English poetry. As further discussed in Chapter 4, Bacon relegates poesy to an inferior position in the hierarchy of knowledge: he renounces poesy as mere ornamentation, having “nothing to do with matter.”28 Yet some contemporary poetic voices, such as George Herbert, find a new poetic sensibility in Baconianism. Herbert celebrates in his laudatory poem, “In Honorem Illustr. D. D. Verulamij,” the publication of Bacon’s Instauratio Magna.29 In his position as public orator at Cambridge University, it would have been incumbent on Herbert to compose such a poem in honor of the Lord Chancellor; however, as William A. Sessions observes, Herbert’s poem goes beyond the appropriate level of praise to delve into “excessive hyperbole.”30 Sessions rightly characterizes the adulatory nature of “In Honorem”: the poem is a catalog of epithets to describe Bacon’s pivotal role in intellectual history. Here Bacon becomes “the mediator of experience and speculation” (9–10); “a literary Brutus stripping the tyranny of authority” (15–16); “an Atlas-scientist, under whom Hercules-Stagirite yields” (18); and “the unique priest of universe and living beings” (25–26). Early in the poem, Herbert refers to Bacon’s rejection of the importance that words came to possess of material objects, “the unique teacher of things, though not arts” (6). This

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forgoing of eloquence in favor of substance, the need to weigh rhetoric down by adherence to materiality, comes through in Herbert’s own poetics. Rather than poetry for poetry’s sake, Herbert draws on Bacon’s antipoetics, his plain style, to wed form to matter.31 The import that Bacon’s thought has on poetry becomes more emphatically declared by nineteenth-century writers. Samuel Taylor Coleridge cites Bacon as one who actually breaks down the divide between science and poetry: “Nor have I forgotten the words of that illustrious man, by whom SCIENCE was married to POETRY, and in whose writings she always appears in the company of the Graces. Need I mention Lord Bacon?”32 For Coleridge, Bacon’s Instauratio Magna not only rehabilitated the sciences but likewise reformed poetry to establish a principle of decorum, “in shaping the conceptions of the poet, and preserving those fine proportions whose combination makes harmony of a structure.”33 Like Herbert, Coleridge finds in Bacon’s admonishment against valuing linguistic eloquence in its own right a means to correspond tenor and vehicle. In A Defense of Poetry (1821), Percy Shelley’s praise of Bacon goes as far as to see in his writing a poetic style: “His language has a sweet and majestic rhythm which satisfies the sense, no less than the almost superhuman wisdom of his philosophy satisfies the intellect; it is a strain which distends and bursts the circumference of the hearer’s mind and pours itself forth together with it into the universal element with which it has perpetual sympathy.”34 It appears ironic when we consider Bacon’s renunciation of style over subject, for Shelley appears to prize Bacon’s tropes and use of aphorisms, while neglecting the actual substance of his writings.35 Even Bacon’s harshest nineteenth-century critic, Thomas Babington Macaulay, acknowledges Bacon as a poet: “The poetical faculty was powerful in Bacon’s mind.”36 While Macaulay notably acknowledges Bacon’s “poetical faculty,” he adds that Bacon did not allow this aspect of his mind to usurp authority over his reason. Not until L. C. Knights’s essay, “Bacon and the Seventeenth-Century Dissociation of Sensibility,” do scholars of Bacon begin to appreciate his condemnation of poetry. Knights relies on T. S. Eliot’s declaration that seventeenth-century England experienced a “dissociation of sensibility,” which Eliot defines as a loss of the intellectual ability to integrate emotion and experience to create a unifying worldview. “When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating

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disparate experience”: Eliot characterized the early modern mind as one that reconciles thought and experience, in contrast to the modern mind that fragments its experience of the world.37 Knights locates Bacon at the vanguard of this “dissociation of sensibility”: “He was, in ways less obvious though intimately related to his philosophy, an early representative of that deeper change occurring in English life in the seventeenth century—a change in sensibility.”38 For Knights, Bacon cleaves imagination and reason, the knower from the thing to be known, and so effects irreparable damage to English poetry. Rather than extolling Bacon as having bridged the divide between science and poetry, Knights recognizes that Bacon sees in poetry a “temporary relief from the discipline of the sharply contrasted ‘reason.’”39 As a modern apologist for Bacon, Mathews challenges Knights’s claim that Bacon “was to have a bad effect on English poetry.”40 Matthews cites the numerous literary references with which Bacon peppers his scientific treatises as evidence of his “poetical urge”: “Who but the author of The Wisdom of the Ancients could have offered a preview of the Second Law of Thermodynamics in terms of a battle between Cupid and Eros?”41 Undoubtedly, the question of Bacon’s conception of poetry is complex: whether his writings reveal a friend or an enemy of poetic thought informs a great deal of the conversation that has developed over the centuries. Though I discuss the metaphorical nature of Bacon’s writings in Chapter 4, this study does not look to determine his thoughts on poetry. Instead, this book focuses on the question that grows out of this controversy: instead of what Bacon has to say about poetry, I propose and address the question of what seventeenth-century poets, particularly Donne, Marvell, and Rochester, have to say about Baconianism. Resisting Bacon’s Tale of Recovery

This study focuses on the struggle over the narrative of humanity’s intellectual future as it was contested throughout seventeenth-century England. Alongside the Baconian tale that envisioned humanity as at last having a potential path back to Eden, a counternarrative emerged that placed in doubt the potential recovery of a prelapsarian moment. In the works by Donne, Marvell, and Rochester that constitute the body of this study, the possibility of return or restoration—the predominant theme in Baconian scientific rhetoric—is denied. Further, these poets not only

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reject the project to regain Paradise but, I argue, each identifies a mindset similar to the one that Bacon describes as leading humanity further away from an Edenic condition or, as is the case with Donne, misconceiving humanity as the dominant player in the drama with Nature. By adopting a Baconian mind, these writers find not redemption, but alienation, uncertainty, and destruction. Chapter 1, “An Inheritance Recovered,” unpacks the complex historiography that informs Bacon’s narrative of scientific advancement and the recovery of Eden. Contrary to Baconian scholars such as Perez Zagorin, who read in his works an emphasis on the modern, this chapter reasserts Bacon’s goal for the new science as being a journey back to our prelapsarian moment. Unlike the linear conception of modern scientific progress, which displaces the fruition of science onto an always unattained future, Bacon envisions a circular movement for humanity’s intellectual development. The narrative project Bacon engages in also troubles the understanding of Baconianism as a purely secular endeavor. Though Bacon demands at times in his epistemological writings the situating of theology and science into discrete realms of knowledge, he realizes his renewal of the sciences within a Judeo-Christian context of the Fall. As Bacon reimagines the story of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden, the postlapsarian mind was plagued by fictions, or idols. The power that would come from cleansing the mind of its idols was not unfamiliar to mankind, for Adam had enjoyed it awhile in Eden. While readers of Bacon have analyzed and debated his use of religious terms and images, Chapter 1 explores how Bacon’s religiously framed narrative troubles the view of Baconianism as preoccupied with the new. On this basis, Chapter 1 then turns to Bacon’s utopian work, New Atlantis (1626). My reading of New Atlantis argues that contemporary advancements in navigation, for Bacon, actually bring European society closer to a state that human civilization enjoyed nearly two thousand years earlier. This pivotal text for understanding Bacon’s epistemological agenda does not allow for us to securely situate Bensalem, Bacon’s utopian civilization, as either in the past or in the future in relation to contemporary Western civilization. The chapter finally examines the import of Bacon’s narrative of advancement and restoration, particularly the seemingly contradictory understanding of scientific progress as a recovery of a lost inheritance, for those later seventeenth-century

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proponents of the new scientific thought, examining such texts as Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665) and Abraham Cowley’s “To the Royal Society,” which opens Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667). Chapter 2, “Nature’s Confession: Baconian and Anti-Baconian Narratives in Donne’s Devotions,” examines the conflation of torture and science. For Bacon, truth could not be achieved cooperatively. To make the natural world legible and available for human consumption, one needed to treat Nature in a hostile manner. Baconianism characterizes matter as deceptive and resistant to revealing its secrets. Bacon predicates truth on the vexation of the natural object: only when vexed does Nature’s confession hold any validity for the scientist or the interrogator. Bacon’s entire epistemological project reaffirms the scenario played out in the torture room. Within the Baconian paradigm, truth is reached only through coercion and vexation. Bacon blurred the roles of the scientist and interrogator, viewing the two as essentially engaging in the same act. The epistemological validity of torture held unique significance for John Donne. This chapter reads in Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions and Several Steps in My Sickness (1624) Donne’s questioning the imperative to torture the thing to be known. While most scholars consider Devotions to be a religious text, I propose that Donne, in his account of his bout with relapsing, or “spotted,” fever comes into dialogue with Bacon over the issue of truth and torture. Instead of sanctioning the vexing of the body at the hands of his physicians so it may reveal its disease, Donne’s text expresses ambivalence on this point. There is a tension in Devotions between coerced confessions, which Bacon demands, and complicit ones, which Donne consistently returns to. Is it epistemologically sound for force to be used to generate knowledge? Or does the “vexation” of the thing to be known actually inhibit one’s understanding of it? Chapters 3 and 4 find Marvell and Rochester critiquing the scientific mind that Bacon formulates in a different way from Donne. While Donne appears as a liminal figure between premodern and scientific thought, Marvell and Rochester depict through their speakers’ mental anguish what it feels like to inhabit the new scientific mind. These later seventeenth-century poets depict through their speakers a mind that embodies Baconian thought, a materialistic, objective perspective. However, where Bacon promises prosperity, Marvell and Rochester reveal

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only isolation and despair. For these poets, it is not that the mind comes to grasp and consequently suffer from the true emptiness of materiality, but rather the scientific mind is the source of their speakers’ despair. In the poems that these two chapters focus on, both poets retell versions of the story of humanity’s Fall that challenge Bacon’s narrative of restoration: first, in both tales the Fall is irredeemable, and, second, it is the scientific, literal mind that forever puts Paradise beyond humanity’s grasp. Marvell and Rochester present their respective protagonists as entrapped within a Baconian perspective, so they can experience the world only on a material basis, inhibiting them from accessing any greater sense of unity between the self and the other. Chapter 3, “‘Companions of My Thoughts More Green’: Damon’s Baconian Sexing of Nature,” contextualizes Andrew Marvell’s Mower poems within Bacon’s sexualizing of nature. Published posthumously in 1681, but mostly likely written during his time as tutor to the daughter of Lord Fairfax (1649–53), Marvell’s Mower poems (“Damon, the Mower,” “The Mower’s Song,” and “The Mower to the Glowworms”) depict the torments Damon, Marvell’s pastoral protagonist, endures due to his love for Juliana. These poems come to herald the end of the English pastoral tradition: Marvell abandons the harmonious relationship between humanity and the natural world, the hallmark of the pastoral genre, leaving Damon alienated from his environment. This split between Damon and the meadows he tends results from his emerging sexuality. Though critics of the poems have noted this correspondence, my account intervenes in this critical conversation by arguing Damon’s isolation from Nature comes from his need to read Nature as a sexual being. Prior to Juliana, Damon understood sexuality as a preternatural force, but with his sexual maturation Damon comes to see Nature as sexualized. Damon’s transition parallels the one Bacon advocates. Bacon grounds the new science on the tropology of male sexual maturation: the new scientific mind will finally confront Nature as sexualized. For Bacon, such a tropological shift is recuperative, restoring humanity’s prelapsarian dominance over the natural world. However, through Damon’s thoroughly alienating experience, Marvell directly undermines the tropology undergirding the new science. The Baconian interpretation of Nature as sexual other meant to be controlled does not enable Damon to recover an Edenic mastery

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over his environment, but causes him to wish for an escape from such an alienated world through death. In the final chapter, “A ‘Fantastic Mind’ and a ‘Fix’d Heart’: Rochester and the Disciplining of the Mind,” I turn to the most infamous figure of Charles II’s court, John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester, and the implications of the new scientific language. A major part of Bacon’s instauration was his materialist reforming of language. In both The Advancement of Learning (1605) and Novum, Bacon attempts to establish a materially regulated language. In doing so, Bacon relocates linguistic authority externally onto a universally experienced and accessible material reality. Bacon warns that through an improperly policed language—one that grants the authority of meaning to the mind—the imagination would project itself onto one’s experience of reality and so obscure it. Thomas Hobbes adopts this disciplining of the mind through a materially oriented language when constructing his political theory. Though Hobbes did come to reject experimentalism, he predicates his sovereign’s power and the prevention of civil unrest on circumscribing words to physical reality. For Hobbes, it is when words detach themselves from the material world, when a gap opens between the res (the thing) and the verba (the word) that the state deteriorates into social upheaval. Hobbes co-opts Bacon’s scientific language for his own political program. Chapter 4 then moves on to argue that Rochester explores the psychological implications—that is, alienation and despair—that accompany a Baconian language. While the ribald, bawdy tenor of his poetry is undeniable, Rochester does not celebrate the libertine lifestyle. In “A Satyr Against Mankind and Reason” and “Absent from thee,” Rochester’s speakers voice an intellectual and emotional frustration with the material world, which constantly results in disappointed expectations. However, the tragedy for Rochester’s speakers is not in the external truth they believe themselves to have discovered, but in the mindset that leads them to believe materialism is the inevitably “true” perspective.

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CHAPTER 1


T

he epistemological project Francis Bacon outlines in his scientific treatises calls for no less than an entire renewal of all human learning. For Bacon, learning had failed to bring humanity any closer to the dominion over Nature once enjoyed in Eden. What Bacon finds in contemporary natural philosophy is unproductive scholastic arguments, a fetishizing of words, an unwarranted veneration of classical authors, and disdain for the sensual experience of the world.1 The path Bacon envisions to lead humanity out of its intellectual morass of frivolous philosophical disputations consisted of a new intellectual program, one that would privilege the experiential over the abstract, that would look to bring the mind in contact with things themselves, and that demanded the cleansing of the mind of all its fictions. Bacon subordinates intellectual endeavors to the amelioration of humanity’s physical existence. This chapter focuses on the narrative Bacon employs to present his scientific program as a form of restoration. In his influential study of Bacon’s epistemological program, Perez Zagorin sees in Bacon a herald of the new, claiming that “an awareness of novelty and of opening an entirely untraveled road for the human mind is exceptionally strong” in his philosophical works. For Zagorin, a “very marked consciousness of innovation and modernity” runs throughout Bacon’s writings outlining the new science. Further, Zagorin writes that in Bacon’s renewal of the sciences “the motif of innovation is much more prominent than that of restoration.”2 However, as this chapter posits, Bacon formulates a complicated narrative for the development of science: he places at the end of scientific progress the return to an original and pristine moment in human intellectual history, prefigured in Adam’s

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knowledge and dominion over Nature. Contrary to our modern understanding of the production of scientific knowledge as a matter of discovery and innovation, Bacon sees the advancement of science as an act of recovery. This chapter participates in the scholarly work that has begun to focus on how Bacon saw scientific progress as paradoxically regaining a prelapsarian knowledge of Nature. In addition, this chapter illustrates how pervasive Bacon’s tale of advancement and restoration was in seventeenth-century epistemological discussions. Initially, though, it is necessary to unpack the complex historiography Bacon constructs for humanity’s intellectual development. Bacon commences his rescuing of the sciences from their “unhappy state” by limiting human knowledge to that which may be sensually perceived: as he states in Aphorism 1 of the first book of Novum Organum, “Man, the servant and interpreter of Nature, only does and understands so much as he shall have observed, in fact or in thought, of course of Nature; more than this he neither knows nor can do.”3 Though later in Novum he identifies the “dullness and inadequacy and deceptions of the senses” as the “greatest impediment” to human learning, Bacon bases knowledge on sensual experience. Nature, for Bacon, is no longer composed of signs whose metaphorical import was to be properly interpreted; rather, Bacon demands a literal encounter with the universe.4 The scientist must labor through sensual experience to arrive at the thing itself. Bacon’s scientific method tries to ensure one encounters only the object in itself rather than the object contaminated by the mind’s projected desires. Bacon sets up his epistemological agenda as a rejection of the premodern search for resemblances, or similitudes, between the subject and the object. The effort to organize the universe according to resemblance created correspondences that exist solely within the imagination, for Bacon: “The human understanding on account of its own nature readily supposes a greater order and uniformity in things than it finds. And though there are many things in Nature which are unique and quite unlike anything else, it devises parallels and correspondences and relations which are not there.”5 As opposed to generating an accurate description of the world, Bacon argues that the postlapsarian mind actually obscures proper observation by superimposing an artificial schema on Nature: “It is rather the case that all our perceptions, both of our sense and of our minds, are

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reflections of man, not of the universe, and the human understanding is like an uneven mirror that corrupts the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.”6 Bacon devotes a significant portion of his scientific treatises to exposing the status of the premodern way of metaphorically reading Nature as a symptom of a corrupting human imagination. Bacon’s effort to bring the observer to the thing itself initially evacuates any imaginative, sympathetic connection between the two. However, according to Bacon, the experiential knowledge of Nature derived from the senses was not readily available to the mind. Particularly, in Novum, the mind becomes that which disrupts humanity’s ability to access a true comprehension of the natural world. The source of humanity’s mental corruption is the fictions, both external and internal to the mind: “Now the idols that dwell in the mind are either adventitious [i.e., coming from without], or innate. The adventitious migrate into men’s minds either from the doctrines and sects of philosophers, or from faulty laws of demonstration. But the innate are inherent in the very nature of the understanding.”7 Bacon laments that contemporary thought has also been corrupted by a tradition of classical knowledge that obscures the investigation of Nature. Obsequious attention paid to bookish learning confuses humanity’s grasp of Nature. Not only is the mind beset by misleading types of knowledge, but it also offers a subjective interpretation of Nature. Human imagination is inherently distorted, for Bacon: “The human understanding is not a dry light, but is infused by desire and emotion, which give rise to ‘wishful science.’ For man prefers to believe what he wants to be true.”8 Here we might think of Bacon’s conception of the postlapsarian mind as a feedback loop. The mind’s flawed perception of material reality creates the false doctrines that then feed the mind’s corruption: “The human understanding, once it has adopted opinions, either because they were already accepted and believed, or because it likes them, draws everything else to support and agree with them.”9 Bacon warns the restoration of knowledge he hopes to inaugurate is threatened by the idols of the mind: “The idols and false notions that have hitherto occupied the human understanding, and lie deep-seated there, have not only so beset men’s minds that their approach to truth becomes difficult; but even when access to it is given and conceded, they will present themselves and interfere in that very restoration of the

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science, unless men are forewarned and protect themselves against them as far as possible.”10 To come to an accurate understanding of Nature, one must be aware of and ever vigilant against these tendencies of Fallen human intellect. Bacon categorizes these tendencies, or idols as he terms them, into four types: (1) the idols of the tribe, those that are common to human nature; (2) those of the cave, distortions based on idiosyncratic biases; (3) those of the marketplace, the inability of language to describe accurately physical reality; and (4) those of the theater, which pertain to misleading philosophies and means of demonstrations.11 Most important, though, for understanding Bacon’s doctrine of idols is that he suggests these mental fictions are the consequences of the Fall. Bacon sees the expulsion from the Garden as allowing the mind to delve into false, prideful perception of Nature: “And lastly with knowledge rid of the poison instilled by the serpent, where by the human mind becomes swollen and puffed up, we may seek truth in Christian love.”12 By noting the idols of the mind as postlapsarian symptoms, Bacon invests his epistemological agenda with a religious valence.13 It should be noted that Bacon is eager to draw a line between theology and science. On one hand, the intermixing of science and theology has led to the corruption of both. In Masculus Partus Temporum (The Masculine Birth of Time, 1603), a posthumously published text in which an elderly guide directs his student away from the traps of ancient philosophers, Bacon demands a split between theology and science: “By mixing the divine with the natural, the profane with the sacred, heresies with mythology, you have corrupted, O you sacrilegious impostor, both human and religious truth.”14 Bacon reiterates this division of natural and spiritual knowledge in Novum: “And the treatises of those who have dared to deduce the truth of the Christian religion from the philosophers . . . celebrate with much pomp and solemnity this union of faith and sense, as it were a lawful marriage.”15 To arrive at Christian truth through a physical sign, to presume acquaintance with God by properly reading Nature, misrecognizes the Fallen state of the mind.16 Such privileged awareness of the Divine was lost to humanity, and to suppose that knowledge of God could be attained in our postlapsarian state mistakenly makes an idol of the mind. Still it would be a mistake to label Bacon’s renewal of the sciences as a purely secular endeavor. In his preface to Novum, Bacon does

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acknowledge the potential for the new science to jeopardize religious belief: “And this also I humbly ask, that things human may not run counter to things divine, and that from the unlocking of the paths of the senses and the more intense kindling of the natural light there will arise no unbelief or darkness in our minds towards the divine mysteries; but that rather, as from an understanding pure and purged of empty phantoms, yet nonetheless obedient and wholly submissive to the divine oracles, we may give to faith that which is faith’s.”17 Bacon sincerely sees the rescuing of religion from superstition as a corollary to the promotion of material science.18 The concern that investigations into Nature might challenge religious doctrine, for Bacon, “shows an insubstantial kind of wisdom” that predicates faith on sensual perception.19 Beyond identifying distinct yet complementary spheres for science and religion, Bacon places his renewal of learning within a millenarian context, suggested in his use of the word instauratio to describe his epistemological agenda. Scholars have debated how to interpret Bacon’s entitling his scientific project Instauratio Magna. Charles Whitney reads Bacon as alluding to the rebuilding of King Solomon’s Temple of Jerusalem. Whitney advises that Bacon’s use of instauratio should be translated as reedification, implying an architectural context for the term: “To know is to construct a building in the mind; to innovate is to reconstruct, ‘instaure’ that building and, through technology, the architecture of nature as well.”20 Also significant is Whitney’s acknowledgment of the elusive meaning of instauratio: “the word’s doubleness of meaning (restoration/new beginning) embraces many of the paradoxes of change with which Bacon is deeply concerned.”21 Bacon’s use of the term has become a pivot between critics who understand Bacon as stressing the new and those who find him advocating a return to original condition through scientific advancement. As has been mentioned, Zagorin reads the term as connoting Bacon’s “consciousness of innovation and modernity.” In contrast, Stephen A. McKnight notes that by using instauratio Bacon signals to his “reader that [Instauratio Magna] concerned apocalyptic restoration.”22 McKnight reads the term as implying “the promise of restoring humanity to its primordial, prelapsarian state of excellence.”23 I agree with those scholars who find in his use of instauratio Bacon’s grounding the scientific progress on the idea of restoration. Bacon’s instauration was to herald a return to the dominion over Nature humanity

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enjoyed in Eden. In the proemium to Instauratio Magna, Bacon identifies the power achieved through the adoption of the new scientific method as an “original condition”: “[Bacon] thought that every effort should be made, by whatever means, to restore to its original condition, or at least to improve, that commerce between Mind and Things.”24 This restoration of human sovereignty is suggested in The Masculine Birth when the elderly guide wishes to “stretch the deplorably narrow limits of man’s dominion over the universe to their promised bounds.”25 Through a scientific encounter with Nature, Bacon foresees humanity reclaiming a lost inheritance. Certainly the Baconian narrative of advancement and restoration offers quite a few conceptual obstacles for modern readers of his scientific treatises. One of these difficulties is the finality of scientific progress that Bacon suggests by turning science into a narrative. It is important here to turn to the analogy Bacon constructs between scientific investigation and expanding exploration of the globe. The analogy of science to exploration implies that the scientific investigation of the natural world will be completed someday. For Bacon, there is an end to science, one that he locates in Eden. Again, Bacon’s employing of religious imagery and language, especially his use of the story of humanity’s expulsion from the Garden, goes beyond mere convention: Adam’s knowledge and mastery over Nature serve as the very conceptual foundation of science for Bacon. The biblical account of humanity’s prelapsarian condition gives Bacon the framework for imagining the end state of humanity’s scientific renewal. Baconian science is teleological. As science and technological advancement are conceived of today, Bacon’s tale of an inheritance recovered is becoming more and more untenable yet perhaps even more desired. In Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and Its Meaning (1992), Mary Midgley laments science forgoing participation in myth making. As Midgley points out, modern science’s initial appeal was the promise of salvation: “Nature was God’s creation, and to study it was simply one of the many ways to celebrate his glory. That celebration was understood to be the proper destiny of the soul, the meaning of human life.”26 However, with the secularization of science, argues Midgley, came a crisis of imagination. Though science offers to meet our material needs and wants with ever more efficient technological means, it fails to provide any imaginative conception of its larger purpose. Scientists, as Midgley realizes, no longer see their work as providing for

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any existential needs. In a way, Midgley demands that scientific ambitions go beyond the immediate and the utilitarian, that science return to its original project of storytelling: “What makes [science] troublesome today is that it leaves unserved the general need for understanding, and whatever spiritual needs lie behind it. The promise of satisfying those spiritual needs has played a great part in establishing the special glory of the abstraction ‘science’ in our culture, and in forging the idea that we are a scientificallyminded people. It has built up a string emotive and romantic conception of ‘science’ as a spiritual power—a most ambitious estimate of what this abstraction is and can do.”27 Midgley conceives of the twofold function that science is meant to play within the layperson’s life, addressing our material-imaginative and physical-spiritual needs. Whether modern scientists would like to admit to it or not, their work is looked to by the general public as promising salvation, a responsibility that has been shirked with what Midgley identifies as the contracting of science. As sciences became increasingly specialized, the cost was any “conceptual background,” or guiding narrative, against which to contextualize scientific projects. In other words, science no longer gave a picture of the utopia toward which it was leading humanity. What motivates Midgley’s critique is a cultural hunger for a grand narrative of scientific progress. Midgley, I find, speaks to a fundamental difficulty that modern readers of Bacon have in comprehending his narrative of recovery: that there is an end point. Though current science may have lost it, Bacon gives us a way of conceiving the final state to which science is meant to lead humanity.28 Innovation and Restoration in New Atlantis

While this tale of advancement and restoration informs Bacon’s promotion of the new science throughout his epistemological writings, it is his utopian work, New Atlantis (1627), that makes the paradoxical historiography on which he rests scientific progress most readily apparent. In this unfinished text, Bacon chronicles the fictional account of a Spanish merchant ship’s crew lost in the South Seas that encounters an unknown, highly advanced civilization, Bensalem. Though they are at first denied landing, the crew are brought to the Stranger’s House, an institution meant to aid and comfort those who find themselves cast upon Bensalemite shores. Through a series of conversations with various members of Bensalemite community—the Governor of the Stranger’s

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House, a Jewish merchant named Joabin, and the Father of Salomon’s House—the narrator constructs a picture of a highly rigid, patriarchal society whose scientific knowledge and technological achievements far surpass those of contemporary Europe. Bacon depicts a culture where intellectual energies are not distracted by scholastic disputation and fruitless battles over words, but are engaged in a materially productive encounter with the world, where the domestic space has been completely subordinated to the state, and where religious polemics and strife do not exist. In the note that opens the first printing of New Atlantis, William Rawley, Bacon’s chaplain and literary executor, comments on the grand vision that Bacon offers: “Certainly the model is more vast and high than can be possibly imitated in all things; not withstanding most things therein are within men’s power to effect.” Rawley accurately captures the cautious optimism that pervades the text. Despite being posthumously published in 1626, New Atlantis has an important place in Bacon’s corpus.29 While his scientific treatises, such as The Advancement and Novum, are prescriptive in tone, advising how European thought must change through adoption of the new scientific mindset, New Atlantis offers a look at what Bacon envisions as the ultimate fruition of his instauration. This text pictures Bacon’s dream of a society organized around his epistemological and social agenda. In many ways Bacon’s utopian text is a cumulative work: the predominant themes Bacon consistently returns to throughout his intellectual life—the dominance over Nature through experimentalism, the notion of a charitable form of knowledge, and the complementary relationship between religion and science—are very much foregrounded in New Atlantis, becoming the pillars of Bensalemite culture. The following reading of New Atlantis explores how the Bensalemite seafaring capability situates Bensalem chronologically to contemporary Europe. I contrast Bacon’s utopian text to Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), a comparison the text itself sets up. While More’s Utopians have little awareness of the rest of the world prior to Hythloday’s arrival, the Bensalemites have been gathering knowledge of other cultures’ scientific achievement over the past nineteen hundred years. I read this difference between Bacon’s and More’s utopian texts as showing how Bensalem reflects Bacon’s own epistemological project. Further, the scientific development—particularly navigation—of Bensalem reflects the

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paradoxical historiography of Bacon’s tale of scientific advancement and restoration. On the one hand, Bensalemite science is far beyond that of contemporary Europe. On the other hand, Bacon’s utopia is situated in the distant, mythical past. Bensalem as a civilization dates to approximately three thousand years ago, during which the Bensalemite ability to navigate the globe has been maintained. Bensalemite technology actually marks the society as earlier than that of seventeenth-century Europe. So the question arises whether, for Bacon, utopia is a state that humanity may advance toward or be restored to. Bacon’s narrative undergirding his promulgation of scientific thought blurs the line between innovation and restoration. As with Bacon’s treatises that advocate the new science, the seemingly contradictory tale of scientific progress reclaiming for humanity a lost inheritance comes through in New Atlantis. In many ways Bacon’s utopian text might appear less complicated than More’s. Rather than the complex framing with which More surrounds Hythloday’s description of Utopian society—More actually gives the reader an account of Utopia that is thrice removed—Bacon creates an unproblematic perspective of Bensalemite society. Moreover, some twentieth-century readers of Utopia see the potential irony with which More saturates his text.30 Critics in this line of interpretation see in Hythloday’s name, which translates into “peddler of nonsense,” More winking at his readers. Also, despite Hythloday’s claim to have left Utopia so he might “reveal that new world to others,” he seems to have done little to accomplish this goal. It is More’s fictionalized self who takes down his description and sends it to Peter Giles. Whereas More uses the utopian text ironically to undermine the genre, to show how utopia is perhaps that which we cannot and should not strive for, Bacon’s work displays a near naïve optimism. The critical consensus sees Bacon as earnest in his depiction of Bensalemite society, so New Atlantis appears as a piece of propaganda for Bacon’s social and epistemological reform.31 While scholars have analyzed the significance of Bacon explicitly contrasting the Bensalemite and Utopian courting customs, Bacon sets up other points of departure between his and More’s texts.32 In Hythloday’s account of Utopia, he tells of the last encounter the Utopians had with the outside world. Like the Bensalemites, the Utopians have voluntarily sequestered themselves to their island. Prior to Hythloday, the Utopian knowledge of other cultures was based on the happenstance meeting of

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a shipwrecked crew of Romans and Egyptians that had landed on their shores twelve hundred years earlier. As Hythloday tells it, from this one encounter, the Utopians were able to deduct nearly all Roman technological achievements: “Notice how their diligence turned this single occasion to their advantage. There was no useful skill in the whole of the Roman empire which they did not learn from the explanations of the strangers or did not manage to discover from the hints and clues they were given. Such was the enormous gain they made on this occasion when some men from here were driven to their shores.”33 The knowledge the Utopians develop of another culture is based not on experience, but on deduction. From one chance occasion, the Utopians were able to construct a near-complete picture of Roman technological achievements. The Bensalemite project of systematically accumulating other cultures’ scientific knowledge and technological achievements is in stark contrast to this moment in Utopia. As a corollary to King Solamona’s prohibition that essentially isolated Bensalem, the king stipulated that every 12 years a mission of three members of the House of Salomon be sent out to “give us knowledge of the affairs and state of those other countries to which they were designed, and especially of the sciences, arts, manufactures, and inventions of all the world.”34 Juxtaposing the Utopian accidental encounter with Roman culture and Bensalemite reconnaissance of other countries and their scientific developments illustrates Bacon’s call in Novum for learning to come from experience that is systematic, not haphazard: “There remains simple experience which, if taken as it comes, is called accident: if it is deliberately sought, it is called experiment.”35 According to Bacon, chance experience does more to lead the mind to grasp too quickly at false conclusions, whereas “when experience proceeds in accordance with a definite rule, in due order and without interruption, we can hope for some improvement in knowledge.”36 King Solamona’s decree establishing the 12-year cycle of expeditions by the Brethren of Salomon’s House to other countries exemplifies Bacon’s vision of a structured scientific program. The Brethren’s traveling and gathering scientific knowledge ties together Bacon’s call to organize a cataloging of scientific experiments and the metaphor he uses for humanity’s scientific advancement, the expanding exploration of the new world. As the frontispiece to Instauratio Magna implies, Bacon understood the expansion of European

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navigation of the world and the developing investigation of Nature as analogically connected. The frontispiece depicts ships sailing beyond the Pillars of Hercules, the boundary to the classical world. Underneath, the caption quotes Daniel 12:4: “Multi pertransibunt & augebitur scientia” (“Many will pass through and knowledge will increase”).37 Bacon’s epistemological writings employ the Pillars of Hercules as a symbol of not only of the geographical but also the intellectual confines of the ancient world. In the literal way European exploration has moved beyond the geographical limits of the ancients, scientific knowledge now “sails past” the epistemological boundaries of classical philosophy. Given the metaphorical import of the Pillars of Hercules for Bacon, the governor’s seemingly offhand reference to them carries all the more weight: “And for our own ships, they went on sundry voyages, as well to your straits, which you call the Pillars of Hercules, as to other parts in the Atlantic and Mediterranean Seas.”38 The Bensalemite project brings to fruition the caption to Instauratio Magna’s frontispiece, demonstrating the analogy of exploration and science.39 Bensalemite seafaring capability also evinces Bacon’s understanding of technological innovation as a restorative act. Does Bacon offer Bensalem as a vision of what Western culture may progress to through the implementation of his scientific program? Or, given Bensalem’s selfimposed isolation, does Bacon present a state to which English society may return? In New Atlantis, Bacon imagines an alternative intellectual history, one that diverged from Europe approximately nineteen hundred years prior to the narrator’s landing on Bensalem.40 The moment the governor identifies as the point that Bensalem isolated itself from the rest of the world is, as Bacon claims in Novum, when Western science became stagnant: “If, therefore, those doctrines had not been torn like plants from their roots, as plainly they have been, but had stayed attached to the womb of Nature and drawn nourishment from her, that would hardly have happened, which we see after two thousand years has not come to pass; namely, that sciences have stuck fast in their tracks and remained in virtually that same position.”41 Interestingly, Bacon complicates the chronological relationship between Bensalem and contemporary Europe even more: while European science has remained static for the past two millennia, Bensalemite learning has progressed as Western intellectual history should have. From the Bensalemite perspective, the

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visit of the Spanish crew is a glimpse into the past. Bacon pursues the hypothetical of what the contemporary state of science would be had it not been derailed by Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy. Bacon grants the reader a dual historical perspective through his detailed account of Bensalemite past and scientific advancement: in one sense, Bacon illustrates the intellectual moment he would have Western thought return to and anticipates the state he would have natural philosophy progress to. New Atlantis suspends the tension of restoration and innovation. Bacon suggests the question of whether to place Bensalem in preSocratic past or scientific future through the history given by the Governor of the House of Strangers, recounting the commerce that Bensalem had with the rest of the world nearly three thousand years before the narrator’s landing. In this picture of the mythical past that Bacon creates, which draws on Plato’s story of Atlantis, there existed global navigation.42 The Governor describes a world in which ancient nations of Phoenicia, Egypt, China, and Atlantis (the Americas) had regular voyages to and established trade routes with one another. The Governor mentions how knowledge of this period is lost to Europe but preserved within Bensalem.43 Moreover, the Governor notes how this ancient yet advanced state of navigation has been maintained by the Bensalemites: “For I cannot say (if I shall say truly,) but our shipping, for number, strength, mariners, pilots, and all things that appertain to navigation, is as great as ever.”44 By marking their sophisticated seafaring capability as an artifact from an era lost to Europe, Bensalem appears more as a society in stasis. Also pertinent to Bacon’s tale of restoration through scientific advancement is the Governor’s prefacing his lecture on the ancient world’s navigation by commenting on the past century of European exploration: “Do not think with yourselves, that I know not how much it is increased with you, within these six-score years: I know it well: and yet I say greater then than now.”45 The New Atlantis positions Europe on the cusp of regaining the mastery of the ocean through navigation that the ancient world possessed in its golden age and that Bensalem still maintains. Again, here is the paradoxical movement Bacon foresees for scientific advancement: through innovation, humanity can return to an earlier state. Bacon’s eliding of innovation and restoration is further revealed when we turn to his essay, “Of Innovation.” Here Bacon suggests an extremely cautious advocacy of innovation and argues for the inevitability of

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change: “All this is true, if time stood still; which contrariwise moveth so round, that a froward [self-willed] retention of custom is as turbulent a thing as an innovation; and they that reverence too much old times, are but a scorn to the new.” Bacon holds up time as a model innovator, who “innovateth greatly, but quietly, and by degrees scarce to be perceived.” To resist change out of hand becomes as disruptive as to innovate. However, Bacon admonishes against change for change’s sake. He predicates any innovation on the hope of reform: “and well to beware that it be the reformation that draweth on the change, and not the desire of change that pretendeth the reformation.”46 For Bacon, what authorizes innovation then is the goal to reform or to restore, to bring back to a more original condition. Bacon in New Atlantis sees the improvement of navigation over the past “six-score years” as moving Europe closer to the state of navigation nearly three millennia earlier.47 The thought experiment Bacon conducts in New Atlantis—the imagining of a society whose intellectual past diverges at a crucial moment from that of Europe—does, as some critics point out, open the text to unintentional irony. By displacing his vision of a Western scientific utopia onto a fictional society, Bacon depicts an intellectual tradition that did not include the moment when, according to him, Plato and Aristotle mired Western thought in a fetishism with words and abstractions, as opposed to an active engagement with material reality. The question arises then if in order for Bacon to realize the fruition of his instauration he must rewrite Western intellectual past, how realizable is the scientific agenda he hopes to implement?48 Similarly, the unproblematic transmission of religious truth that the Bensalemite culture experiences through the quasi-Pentecostal moment excuses Bacon’s utopian society from the religious polemics that have marred European intellectual history. During one of their conversations with the Governor of the House of Strangers, the Spanish crew learns of how Christianity came to Bensalem. Twenty years following the Ascension, an ark with a large cross of light floating above it was discovered off the shore of Bensalem. This ark contained a letter from St. Bartholomew and both the Old and New Testaments, including the book of Revelations and other biblical texts that had not yet been written. This episode speaks to the confused temporal space in which Bensalem exists. Further, these texts themselves miraculously do not need to be translated. As the governor recounts,

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“There was also in both these writings, as well the Book, as the Letter wrought a great miracle, conform to that of the Apostles, in the original Gift of Tongues. For there being at that time in this land Hebrews, Persians, and Indians, besides the natives, every one read upon the Book, and Letter, as if they had been written in his own language.”49 Bensalemites are privileged to have immediate, transparent access to biblical texts, and are not bogged down with matters of exegesis and philology. Again, Bacon frees his utopian society to pursue scientific mastery over the natural world by excusing it from abstract disputations that have disrupted Western epistemological progress. However, this raises yet a similar question: if what has allowed for Bensalem’s near restoration of Adamic mastery over Nature has been a religious miracle, how plausible is it for Europe to implement the scientific reform that Bacon spends his intellectual life promoting? Bacon must resort to the realm of fantasy to imagine the realization of his scientific agenda.50 In a way germane to my analysis of Bacon’s undergirding narrative of advancement and restoration, New Atlantis rescues itself from the potential irony that comes with his locating his scientific utopia in the realm of fantasy. Though Bensalem, through its self-imposed isolation and highly censored knowledge of Europe, has saved itself from Western thought’s obsession over words that Bacon laments, the text does suggest the possibility for European learning to remedy the mistakes of its past. Following the Governor’s tale of Bensalem’s origins and seclusion, the narrator opens his account of Bensalemite domestic life by noting the overwhelming preference for Bensalem the castaway sailors feel over their homeland: “as was enough to make us forget all that was dear to us in our own countries: and continually we met with many things right worthy of observation and relation: as indeed, if there be a mirror in the world worthy to hold men’s eyes, it is that country.”51 Bacon’s employment of the mirror trope here does not realize Bensalem as a mere reflection of the world, but instead identifies it as that which other countries may become. While Bensalem may be Bacon’s hypothetical scenario of what could have been the state of European science had it not been hampered by classical philosophy or theological controversy, all is not lost. In his outline to Instauratio Magna, Bacon sets out a goal for his renewal of all learning: “For I thought it best to spend some time on what is already accepted, so that it might be easier both to bring the old to perfection and to lead on to the new. For I am just as eager to refine the old as to

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reach after things beyond.”52 As much as he envisions his program as opening a path forward, Bacon realizes there must be a correcting of the past that has led to the current stagnation of the sciences. Bacon, through his epistemological agenda, seeks as much to free Western learning from the burdens of its Socratic and Aristotelian past as to rebuild the foundation for its scientific future. The narrative Bacon constructs for his instauration—that through the advancement of scientific knowledge humanity may be restored to its prelapsarian mastery over Nature—very much troubles any easy attempt to characterize his epistemological program as solely innovative. Bacon in New Atlantis suggests the development in European navigation and exploration as both a break from the past, physically journeying beyond the geographical limits of the ancients—the Pillars of Hercules—and a return to a moment prior to when human intellectual history was led astray into fetishizing words. Following the logic of this interpretation, we can read Bensalem in three nonexclusive ways: (1) as a culture preserved, whether it is from the great flood or from Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy; (2) as a society whose technological achievements and scientific learning reflect the future Bacon envisions contemporary science reaching; and (3) as a civilization whose state of scientific knowledge is where that of Europe should be. “Unforfeited by Mans Rebellious Sin”: The SeventeenthCentury Scientific Project to Recover Eden

Bacon’s conception of scientific advancement as a restorative act holds currency for those writing about the new science in the decades following his death. Bacon’s narrative of a return to an Adamic mastery over Nature especially blended with Puritan millenarianism. In his study of Puritan scientific thought, Charles Webster places Bacon at the center of intellectual life both during and immediately following the English Civil War: “It is therefore only a slight exaggeration to regard Baconianism as the official philosophy of the Revolution.”53 Webster finds the appeal of Baconianism for Puritanism resides in Bacon’s call for restoring humanity to Adamic dominion over Nature: “The Puritans genuinely thought that each step in the conquest of nature represented a move towards the millennial condition.”54 Most important, Webster demonstrates that the development of scientific thought in England during the 1640s and 1650s was little interrupted by the outbreak of war. New Atlantis itself

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saw 15 editions throughout the seventeenth century, 8 of which appear between 1626 and 1658. Baconianism was very much circulating within the intellectual atmosphere of these decades, as is evident from the fact that during the 1640s Bacon’s essays were reprinted three times (1639, 1642, and 1648), while Novum was reprinted in a pocket-size edition in 1650.55 Through the adherence to Baconian principles, Puritan intellectuals sought to manipulate Nature for the amelioration of humanity’s physical condition, particularly in the realm of agriculture. According to Webster, Puritan social reform sought to revolutionize agriculture “by applying Baconian experimental philosophy to an area which Bacon himself had expected to exemplify the great utilitarian value of his methods.”56 The treatises on agriculture in the early 1640s express the belief that humanity is on the verge of fully taking advantage of the world’s natural resources. In The Treasure of Traffike (1641), Lewes Roberts admonishes that, while the Earth “yields thus naturally the richest and most precious commodities . . . the search and inquisition thereof, in these our days, is by man too much neglected and omitted.”57 Likewise, Gabriel Plattes articulates the Baconian imperative to harness Nature’s full bounty through dissemination of scientific knowledge and experimentation. In the dedicatory epistle to A Discovery of Infinite Treasure, Hidden Since the World’s Beginning (1639), Plattes suggests England could be transformed into “the Paradise of the World” through the implementation of a scientific program: “No Lawyer can make an estate so indefesible as an approved and profitable experiment.” For Plattes, this agricultural revolution can “turn Plow-men into Philosophers; and make them to excelleth their predecessors even as a learned Physician excels an Empiric.”58 Roberts’s and Plattes’s texts reflect a changing perspective toward Nature, which saw the natural world once again being subjected to human control through scientific inquiry. Still, this restorative potential for the new science appears in the writings of those who did not participate in Puritan millenarianism. Peter Harrison uncovers the significance of Bacon’s conception of his instauration as remedying the effects of the Fall for those seventeenth-century advocates of the new science. Bacon’s characterizing the scientific knowledge and mastery over Nature as recovered, not innovated, according to Harrison, provided the rhetorical foundation for “legitimizing” the new experimentalist philosophy: “Indeed the program of the Royal Society

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of London from its inception in 1660 explicitly relied upon Baconian rhetoric of the restoration of the human knowledge and dominion over nature which Adam had once enjoyed.”59 Harrison cites Joseph Glanvill perpetuating Bacon’s narrative, humanity’s correcting the mistakes of the past and recovering Adamic knowledge. (In the address that opens his Scepsis Scientifica, or, Confest ignorance [1665], Glanvill identifies Salomon’s House in New Atlantis as a “Prophstick Scheam” of the Royal Society.60) Glanvill outlines a similar epistemological program of restoration to that of Bacon: “And therefore besides the general reason I gave of our intellectual disabilities, The Fall; it will be worth our labor to descend to a more particular account: since it is a good degree of Knowledge to be acquainted with the causes of our Ignorance.”61 For Glanvill and other empiricist proponents of the narrative of recovery, the mind’s potential to access truth was not lost after the Fall, but philosophy merely had meandered away from knowledge based on the senses. Consequently, through adopting an experimentalist approach, humanity will cleanse itself of the intellectual impediments to Adamic knowledge.62 We can also observe Bacon’s tale of advancement and restoration in Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665). In the preface to his influential text, Hooke realizes his work in near identical language to that used by Bacon throughout his scientific tracts. Like Bacon, Hooke finds scientific experimentalism as countering the effects of Adam and Eve’s transgression: “And as at first, mankind fell by tasting of the forbidden Tree of Knowledge, so we, their Posterity, may be in part restor’d by the same way, not only by beholding and contemplating, but by tasting too those fruits of Natural knowledge, that were never yet forbidden.”63 Here Hooke offers a similar interpretation of humanity’s fall as Bacon does in the preface to Instauratio. For Hooke, the knowledge offered through scientific investigation is not to be confused with that which God prohibited to Adam and Eve. To have knowledge of Nature’s hidden processes, that which was enjoyed in Eden is both divinely sanctioned and recoverable for humanity. The distinction that Hooke makes in the passage above between the knowledge that precipitated the Fall and that which will redeem humanity reflects Bacon’s own legitimizing of scientific inquiry: “For it was not that pure and spotless natural knowledge, by which Adam gave names to all things according to their kind, that was the origin of the Fall, but that ambitious and headstrong greed for moral knowledge—of telling good from evil—so that man might desert God and make his own laws, that was the ground

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and manner of this temptation.”64 As Bacon retells the story of Genesis, the knowledge of and subsequent control of Nature that Adam possessed God had sanctioned; it is the “moral knowledge,” which lies outside the proscribed realm of mankind’s contemplation—the natural world—that Adam sought and so transgressed against God. Through depicting scientific advancement as a project of recovery, Bacon and Hooke rebut the potential charge, that any investigation of Nature should be prohibited on the basis that it exceeds the divinely authorized limits of humanity’s knowledge. For Hooke, technology plays a vital role in restoring humanity to its Adamic knowledge and dominion over Nature. In Hooke’s reiteration of Bacon’s narrative, the microscope becomes a corrective of humanity’s postlapsarian condition. In claiming the knowledge of the natural world that the microscope makes available is actually restored to humanity, Hooke would appear to have trapped himself in a contradiction. How can a piece of technology meant to supplement our sense be understood as restorative? Hooke answers this question by characterizing our senses themselves as imperfect. The path back to Eden, to “tasting those fruits of Natural knowledge,” demands a remedying not only of our memory and reason but also of our senses: “As for the actions of our Senses, we cannot but observe them to be in many particulars much outdone by those of other Creatures, and when at best, to be far short of the perfection they seem capable of.” Hooke depicts humanity’s fallen state as not only cerebral but physical: in addition to failing to interpret Nature properly, our sensual experience of the natural world is narrowed from Adam’s.65 The technological becomes essential in returning humanity to Eden. The only means to remedying our imperfect sense is artificial: “The first thing to be undertaken in this weighty work, is a watchfulness over the failing and an inlargement of the dominion, of the Senses . . . The next care to be taken, in respect of the Senses, is supplying of their infirmities with Instruments, and as it were, the adding of artificial Organs to the natural.”66 Hooke slightly revises Bacon’s narrative of scientific advancement and restoration by perceiving humanity’s original relationship with Nature as that which can be reclaimed by supplementing the sense with technology. Turning to Abraham Cowley’s “To the Royal Society,” which prefaces Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667), Bacon’s narrative

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finds another reiteration. In the first three stanzas of the poem, Cowley dramatizes Bacon’s instauration as restoring philosophy to its “vast Estate.” Philosophy, heir “of all that Human Knowledge which has bin / Unforfeited by Mans rebellious Sin,” has been kept in a state of “Nonage,” a perpetual immaturity and so unable to exercise his “own Natural Powers” (2–3, 8). Instead of coming to maturity and assuming his inheritance, Philosophy has been distracted by those “Guardians and Tutors” who “amus’d him with the sports of wanton Wit, / With the Desserts of Poetry they fed him . . . With painted scenes, and Pageants of the Brain” (20–21, 30). As Cowley realizes, since the Fall and prior to Bacon’s instauration, philosophy has failed to produce “a science so well bred and nurst” due to the “negligent” and “ambitious” men who have led the mind into “the pleasant labyrinths of ever-fresh Discours,” the fetishism of words that Bacon accuses Aristotle of (24). As Cowley imagines the story of Philosophy recovering its true inheritance, Bacon occupies a heroic, iconoclastic role. As he “whom a wise King and Nature chose / Lord Chancellor of both their Laws,” Bacon in “boldly” undertaking “the injur’d Pupils caus” breaks the image of “Autority” that had stood in the way of humanity’s fully accessing Adamic control over Nature (38–40). There are two facets of Cowley’s retelling of the emergence of the new science that deserve particular attention here. First, Cowley’s realizing the state of philosophy prior to the intellectual moment of the seventeenth century as one of stunted maturation would have been familiar to readers of Bacon. As Chapter 3 elaborates further, Bacon counters the humanist veneration of classical philosophers by repositioning them as representing the “boyhood” of learning. Second, Cowley’s tale, like the narrative with which Bacon undergirds his promotion of the new science, relies on a paradoxical historiography of scientific advancement. Through adoption of a Baconian, experimentalist method, Cowley notes that the power and knowledge gained are the inheritance of Adamic mastery that was “unforfeited” by humanity’s expulsion from Eden. Here again we see that the dominion over the natural world obtained through scientific investigation is not a matter of innovation, but of recovery.

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Undoubtedly, Bacon’s narrative of scientific advancement and recovery of Adamic knowledge of Nature held currency for seventeenth-century advocates of the new science. However, alongside this tale of scientific optimism, a counternarrative emerges that directly challenges the very grounds used to legitimize the Baconian project, the possibility of recovery. The counternarrative to Bacon’s grand tale of humanity regaining Eden rewrites the consequence of adopting the new scientific mindset not as a return to but a further removal from a prelapsarian condition. In The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), John Bunyan offers a glimpse of this rewriting of the Baconian narrative through the character of Atheist. Early on in the first part of The Pilgrim’s Progress Bunyan sets up the central tension between those experiential and allegorical modes of knowledge: “There is therefore knowledge and knowledge; knowledge that resteth in the bare speculation of things, and knowledge that is accompanied with the grace of Faith and Love.”67 The tension between empiricism and allegory comes to a head in Christian’s brief encounter with Atheist. Upon hearing of Christian’s pilgrimage to Zion, Atheist claims such a search to be futile: “When I was at home in mine own country, I heard as you now affirm, and from that hearing went out to see, and have been seeking this City these twenty years, but find no more of it than the first day I set out.”68 The failure of Atheist’s pilgrimage is his criterion of physical experience, which has led critics to understand Atheist as being aligned with the new empirical science. In essence, the meeting between Christian and Atheist becomes a competition over how to see: while Atheist avers that he has come to see that Zion does not exist (“I am going back again, and will seek to refresh myself with the things that I then cast away, for hopes of that which I now see is not”), Hope reminds Christian that they did “see from the Delectable Mountains, the Gate of the City.”69 Adopting a Baconian empirical perspective misdirects Atheist away from Zion. Counter to the redemptive potential that Bacon espoused for the new scientific mindset, Bunyan, through his depiction of Atheist, portrays the danger of perdition that Baconian empiricism posed. The following chapters examine the counternarrative to Bacon’s tale of restoration that Donne, Marvell, and Rochester each articulate. These writers look to undermine Bacon’s claim for the redemptive potential of the new science from within the very mindset Bacon constructs. That

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is, these writers—whether through their poetic speakers or, as is the case with Donne, autobiographical voice—occupy a perspective that recreates a Baconian worldview. They explore the new scientific viewpoint by inhabiting it. To the degree Bacon’s narrative of regaining Adamic knowledge of and dominance over Nature informed seventeenth-century discourse of the new science, it is difficult to imagine these writers were not aware of the tale of recovery that undergirded the promotion of Baconianism. Donne, Marvell, and Rochester do not affirm the optimism characteristic to Baconianism; much to the contrary, they find the new scientific mindset leads to uncertainty and futility, destruction of the natural world, and the alienation of the self and other, and finally distances humanity from Paradise.

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CHAPTER 2

Nature’s Confession Baconian and Anti-Baconian Narratives in Donne’s Devotions

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ometime in late November of 1623, John Donne succumbed to the epidemic of “spotted” or relapsing fever that had been plaguing London for the past month. Striking him suddenly, the illness confined Donne for the next month to his chambers in the Deanery at St. Paul’s, essentially bedridden. During this time, he suffered a prolonged fever, insomnia, and severe physical weakness—he would later describe his diseased body as “iron fetters” imprisoning him to his bed. As the disease progressed, Donne’s physician expressed great concern for his recovery. King James I even sent his own physician to consult with those already attending to Donne. His physicians would administer cordials and eventually apply dead pigeons to Donne’s feet in an effort to draw the ill humors from his body. After weeks of being isolated from all except his doctors, Donne began to show signs that the worst of the sickness had passed. Enduring a regimen of purgatives, which appears to have been as incapacitating as the disease, Donne was able to leave his bed only with great effort and assistance. While his body suffered from terrible physical hardship, Donne’s mind remained as lively and alert as ever. As one of his twentiethcentury biographers, R. C. Bald, notes, “[Donne’s] mind remained remarkably active throughout his illness; it was working literally at a fever heat.”1 John Stubbs points out that while leaving the victim physically weakened, the relapsing fever also “induces a frightening schism between mind and body. The sufferer remains lucid but is left physically

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helpless, scorched and bewildered.”2 Though denied any social contact and prohibited from reading, Donne was allowed pen and paper. So while his body endured the ravages of the disease, Donne kept a diary detailing the bodily torments the disease caused, the actions taken by his attending physicians, and the psychological and spiritual turmoil he underwent. Following his recovery in early January, Donne gathered his notes, gave a more coherent frame to his journal, and submitted Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions and Several Steps in My Sickness for publication in early January of 1624.3 Dedicating it to Prince Charles, Donne divides the work into 23 stations, each consisting of an opening meditation exploring through conceit a moment in his illness, an expostulation that looks to resolve the anxiety that comes from the meditation, and a prayer for peace of mind. Much of the power of Devotions comes from the urgency that drives Donne’s thoughts; writing from what he, as well as his physicians, believed could be his deathbed, Donne offers an intimate look into the anxiety and vulnerability he experienced. He appears at moments throughout the text nearly frantic to resolve the spiritual doubts that plague him. Much of the critical conversation of Devotions focuses on the text’s theological import, how Donne uses this period of illness as an opportunity to read his own spiritual iniquity through his diseased body.4 Departing from that discussion, this chapter considers the relevance Donne’s text has for early seventeenth-century discussions of science, particularly Bacon’s narrative of restoring Adamic mastery over Nature. Donne’s participation in or rejection of the new science has been a source of much scholarly debate.5 In her provocative essay, Catherine Gimelli Martin reads Donne’s The First Anniversary against Bacon’s The Advancement to argue that Donne rebuts Bacon’s progressive tale of human history. In contrast to the optimistic outlook of intellectual advancement that Bacon posits, what Martin terms the “decay theory” of human history saw “the world’s imminent decline into final destruction preceding the arrival of a wholly new heavens and earth.”6 As Martin reads it, The First Anniversary directly challenges Bacon’s foundational belief that through adoption of empirical science humanity may regain Edenic sovereignty over Nature. Donne, according to Martin, identifies the new science as symptomatic of the general decay of human knowledge, as well as of the world: “Not only are the individual and aggregate tools of these

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disciplines alike corrupt, but their objects—physics, metaphysics, and experimental advances in medicine or other related arts—only advance man’s decay.”7 Not only does the new science challenge the conservative model of history, but it also confirms, for proponents of this historiography, the decline of the human mind by evincing our inability to understand the universe properly.8 Martin initiates an important direction for the critical conversation of Donne and the new science. As Martin’s essay reveals, Donne rejects the historiography Bacon envisions for intellectual advancement and amelioration of humanity’s present state. This chapter attempts to build on Martin’s reading of Donne and Baconian science by examining how in Devotions Donne engages Bacon’s tale of advancement and restoration. I propose that in Devotions Donne constructs two narratives through which he reads his physicians’ diagnosis and treatment of his body: one that adheres to and one that undermines the tale of humanity recovering Edenic dominance over Nature through experimentalism. On one hand, Donne depicts his physicians as engaging in a struggle to overcome his body’s resistance to their efforts. In this line of Donne’s interpretation, the unruly body must be coerced into giving over the secret of its illness while the physicians seek to dominate it. In his study of the rise of anatomical science in early modern Europe, Jonathan Sawday briefly analyzes the language Donne employs to describe his diseased body. For Sawday, Donne’s body appears in Devotions not only as an entity distinct from himself but even as “the rebellious subject” that refuses to give over its knowledge and so must be tortured into doing so: “The language of treason, rebellion, conspiracy and physical torture—a torture deployed not by the disease but by the physicians—was now determining the progress of the disease. In order for the body to be saved, it had to be made to speak and confess.”9 Contrary to modern germ theory that positions the body in the role of victim, for Donne the body acts as an accomplice with its sickness. I argue that this one narrative Donne explores reflects a Baconian epistemology. Bacon finds Nature adverse to his project of restoring humanity to Adamic mastery. The encounter Bacon conceptualizes between the scientist and the natural world becomes a drama of resistance and conquest. Not only does Nature refuse to reveal its secret processes, but it also hinders the endeavor to explore them.

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On the other hand, Donne simultaneously offers an anti-Baconian narrative that positions his physicians in a contingent position to the body. Contrary to seeing his physicians’ diagnosing of his body as an imposition, Donne reads his body as complicit with their efforts. Furthermore, this complicity of the body actually becomes necessary to assure the success of the doctors’ treatments. In place of the Baconian scene of the heroic scientist forcing the recalcitrant Nature into submitting to his will and confessing its secrets, Donne reimagines the drama being enacted between his physicians and his diseased body as predicated on human submission and Nature’s willingness. Indeed, Donne abstracts outward from his own experience to generalize on the state of humanity and Nature. We might see the submissive role that Donne realizes himself in as anticipating the “non-innocent conversations” with Coyote that Haraway sets out as the postmodern model for production of knowledge of Nature. Like Haraway’s Nature, who retains control over the conversation with the postmodern scientist, Nature in Devotions “will not admit prevention, nor anticipation, nor obligation upon her, for they are precontracts, and she will be left to her liberty.”10 Donne challenges the prospect of recovering Adamic control of the natural world that Bacon holds out as the promise of the new science. The end of Devotions does not find Donne secure in the knowledge of his physicians having disciplined his rebellious body, but instead he expresses anxiety over his possible relapse. Baconian Experimentalism and Nature Vexed

A fundamental theme of the Baconian narrative is the untrustworthiness of Nature. Beyond warning against viewing the natural world as participating in the recovery of Eden, Bacon cautions those seeking Adamic knowledge to be always vigilant regarding the fact that Nature sets out to frustrate scientific investigation. In attempting to adumbrate Bacon’s tale of restoration, we can identify the obstacles that humanity must overcome as both internal—that is, the imagination—and external, Nature’s unwillingness to reveal its hidden processes. Undoubtedly, for Bacon one of the mistakes of natural philosophy thus far has been the expectation that Nature can be trusted to take part in humanity’s gaining knowledge of it. In Redargutio Philosophiarum (The Refutation of Philosophies), one of his earliest writings to sketch out his break from Platonic

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and Aristotelian learning, Bacon lays out a new dynamic between the scientist and Nature, one marked by resistance.11 Bacon suggests the knowledge sought of Nature cannot be obtained through mere passive observation: “We have no right, sons, to expect nature to come to us. Enough if, on our approaching her with due respect, she condescends to show herself.”12 Initially, one might read Bacon here as granting agency to Nature in the production of scientific knowledge. Bacon would appear to characterize the empirical investigation of the natural world as almost needing to solicit Nature’s consent. The scientific project then becomes a mutual endeavor between the human knower and the natural unknown. Yet the Baconian encounter with Nature is predicated on its resistance to the scientific gaze.13 How Bacon depicts the treatment of Nature within the new science has become an extremely contentious point among his modern readers, who generally divide into ecofeminist critics—viewing Bacon as the founding voice authorizing the “rape” of Nature—and his twentiethcentury apologists—finding Bacon as prophetic in warning against the exploitation of Nature. In Speaking for Nature: Women and Ecologies of Early Modern England (2004), Sylvia Bowerbank navigates between these two camps by reading Bacon’s use of the marriage metaphor as his depicting the harmony the new scientific method would establish in Nature. While not directly rebutting the charges raised by Merchant and other feminist critics of Bacon, Bowerbank asserts that the goal of Baconian science is not conquest but harmony: “Bacon’s project aimed at both theorizing and discovering a modern process by which the liberal and mechanical arts would not only create but sustain ‘natural harmony’ under man’s hegemony.”14 Bacon metaphorically realizes the new state to which the scientist will bring Nature as a marriage; as Bowerbank writes: “Bacon continues to reiterate that his method is not to seek a fleeting, barren, conquest, but a voluntary, licensed, and continual subjugation of the wild to the will of man.”15 Important here is that the harmony sought must be brought about by artificial, human means. Nature itself is in an imperfect condition of chaos and rebellion, and only through humanity’s actions can Nature be restored to its original state. As Bowerbank notes, “Bacon’s lifelong work can be understood as an attempt to demonstrate that man’s intervention far from disrupting harmony,

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actually brings savage nature to her true order.”16 Within the Baconian view, Nature cannot be left to its own devices. Bowerbank opens up a provocative way of reading Bacon’s vision for the relationship between humanity and Nature, which may be extended by analyzing the role Bacon assigns to Nature in the production of scientific knowledge. Not only does obtaining “natural harmony,” according to Bacon, necessitate human intervention, but Nature cannot be conceived of as compliant in the project to restore such harmony. Returning to The Refutation of Philosophies, Bacon loses the pretension of the need to seek Nature’s acquiescence in his admonishment that the adherents to the new science must be active in their investigations: “All this tardy subtlety and meticulous care after the time for observation is gone permits one only to clutch at Nature, never to lay hold of her and capture her.”17 As opposed to “approaching [Nature] with due respect” so that she might “condescend” to facilitate the production of knowledge, Bacon adopts a new trope that realizes his method as overcoming Nature’s will. While premodern natural philosophy, as Bacon sees it, accepted the image Nature offers to the senses, the new scientist will reject the terms on which Nature presents itself. Rather, Bacon’s method suggests a means to discover the truth of Nature that comes when things “are either laid bare to sense or forced into light by evidence.”18 Nature’s true self then is made available only when the readily apparent picture it offers is brushed aside in favor of the understanding of Nature obtained against its will. “Nature presents to their gaze a certain picture of herself, or a cloudy semblance of a picture, in which all the minute differences of things, on which the practice and the prosperity of men rest, are blurred by distance”: Bacon explicitly rests his narrative of restoration on resisting the appearance that Nature gives of itself.19 Bacon reiterates this caution against trusting Nature to participate in the construction of scientific knowledge in Novum Organum.20 Indeed, it is here Bacon employs one of his most controversial tropes for describing his empirical method, the torture metaphor. To the feminist scholars citing Bacon’s torture metaphor as evidence of the underlying misogyny of his epistemological agenda and, by extension, modern science, Zagorin dismisses such criticism as “a huge misunderstanding as well as a grave injustice. It is a doctrinaire misjudgment due to gross anachronism and to irrational hostility and fear of science.”21 While Bacon might have

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seen the new relationship between humanity and the natural world as ultimately harmonious—one that is still on humanity’s terms—his tropology suggests the scientist’s actions are initiated by distrust in Nature. In Aphorism 98 of Novum, Bacon analogizes his new method of investigating Nature through experiment to the interrogation of a prisoner through force and coercion: “And just as in ordinary life the true personality of a person and his hidden thoughts and motives show themselves more clearly when he is under stress than at other times, so things in Nature that are hidden reveal themselves more readily under the vexation of art than when they follow their own course.”22 Bacon predicates truth on the vexation of the object, whether the interrogatee or Nature; only when the object is tortured does its confession hold any validity for the scientist or the interrogator. In order to access this truth, the interrogator-scientist must provoke the object’s resistance to his efforts; only once the interrogator-scientist has overcome the object’s resistance can the information discovered be considered truthful. In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1978), Foucault articulates this paradigm for knowledge production undergirding the act of torture. Foucault argues that the ritual of torture came not only to draw the truth out from the criminal but to confirm the validity of the evidence received: “The search for truth through judicial torture was certainly a way of obtaining evidence . . . but it was also the battle, and this victory of one adversary over the other, that ‘produced’ truth according to ritual.”23 In overcoming the interrogatee’s resistance, in winning the struggle, the interrogator validates the former’s statements. So only after the ritual has been completed can the interrogatee’s utterances be accepted. This same model of knowledge production informs the Baconian drama of the scientist and Nature. Bacon’s most explicit iteration of the analogy between experimentalism and torture comes in his reading of the myth of Proteus. In 1609, Bacon published The Wisdom of the Ancients, a collection of his interpretations of 31 Greek myths in light of the new science. Bacon reads these myths as fables for his scientific program. The myth of Proteus serves, according to Bacon, to adumbrate the path to extracting truth from matter. In his interpretation of the myth, Bacon finds Proteus to symbolize all matter in the universe: “For the person of Proteus denotes matter, the oldest of all things, after God himself; that resides, as in a

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cave, under the vast concavity of the heavens.”24 Much of Bacon’s explanation of the myth deals with Proteus’s ability to elude his would-be captors by morphing into various forms: “But if any skillful minister of nature shall apply force to matter, and by design torture and vex it . . . it, on the contrary . . . changes and transforms itself into a strange variety of shapes and appearances . . . so that at length, running through the whole circle of transformations, and completing its period, it in some degree restores itself, if the force be continued.”25 Within the model of knowledge production that Bacon constructs, enforcing Proteus to cycle through his many different forms is the only confirmation that Neptune’s herdsman has revealed himself. Notably, Bacon subtitles this section of The Wisdom “Proteus, or Matter. Explained of Matter and its Changes.” The paramount characteristic that both Proteus and matter share is the resistance to the human gaze. Like Proteus, matter itself initially defies revealing its true form to the scientists; both appear to possess a trickster-like quality. To approach Proteus in a passive, nonviolent manner would only result in the knower’s being deceived—to expose his true form necessitated Proteus’s “vexation.” Bacon’s conception of vexing here reflects the epistemological function it began to serve during the late sixteenth century: what confirms that Proteus has assumed his true form is the struggle that precedes it.26 Those who would consult Proteus must provoke an antagonistic reaction from him. The scientist’s investigation of matter quintessentially reenacts this confrontation between Proteus and his tormentors. Matter left unmolested and unrestrained does not provide the surety of knowledge that Bacon seeks here through the “vexation” of it. In the above description of the torment of matter at the hands of the “skillful minister of nature,” two aspects of this encounter deserve to be emphasized. First, Bacon remarks the vexing of matter must be to such an extent that might bring about its “annihilation.” Though Bacon reserves the power of annihilation to God, to provoke matter into its true form the threat of destruction must be present: “And that method of binding, torturing, or detaining, will prove the most effectual and expeditious, which makes use of manacles and fetters; that is, lays hold and works upon matter in the extremest degrees.”27 Bacon here removes any sense of an ethical treatment of the object; as with the victim of torture, any means are sanctioned so that matter becomes workable to

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the human will. In this sense, the act of the “skillful minister of nature” disrupts the natural order. Second, as a corollary, the result of the scientist’s labors is the objectification of matter. As with the interrogator who encounters the other’s agency as that which must be negated, the tormentor of Proteus, or matter, defuses the object’s volition. This scenario foregrounds matter’s will as an obstruction to knowledge acquisition.28 The Body’s Complicity and Resistance in Devotions

Throughout Devotions there is a pervading sense of Donne’s attempt to come to terms with the radical epistemological changes of the early modern period. One episode particularly stands out as Donne’s realizing the liminality of the intellectual moment he is living through. In Meditation 21, Donne recounts his physicians’ efforts to get him out of the bed he has essentially been confined to for weeks. Although the worst of the disease had passed, Donne describes himself as still severely weakened: “I cannot rise out of bed till the physician enables me, nay, I cannot tell that I am able to rise till he tell me so. I do nothing, I know nothing of myself; how little and how impotent a piece of the world is any man alone?”29 Donne’s thoughts on being assisted in moving from his bed eventually lead him to seeing his state as analogous to a Copernican cosmology: “I am up and I seem to stand, and I go around, and I am a new argument of the new philosophy, that the earth moves round; why may I not believe that the whole earth moves in round motion.”30 However, as is characteristic of the text, there is an ambivalence here: how should we read Donne’s seeing a sickly man’s ambling about his room as an argument for the new astronomy? Devotions is a challenging text for modern readers. The experience of reading Donne’s ruminations on his disease can be disorienting: often Donne’s thoughts appear random or to be composed of non sequiturs, leaping from one line of conceit to the next. To a degree, this near incoherence of Donne’s thinking gives Devotions an intense realism: rather than a text that clarifies his mind’s ramblings during his sickness, Donne grants an immediate and intimate glimpse into his frantic psychological state. Further, part of the text’s difficulty comes from Donne’s inability to formulate a unified narrative for his illness. As he tries to write the story of his bout with relapsing fever, Donne keeps returning to the question of his body’s complicity in his sickness. As Ramie Targoff remarks

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about Donne’s characterization of his body, “The body, moreover, is at once the victim and the perpetrator of the disease: the description is of disease not from without, but from within.”31 The unresolved duality that Donne gives to his body, casting it as both “victim” and “perpetrator,” sets up the two different narratives the text simultaneously explores, which I read as Baconian and anti-Baconian. This split in the narratives comes early on in Devotions, Meditation 9, where Donne’s account of the physicians’ diagnosis of his body is suggestive of and contrary to the Baconian encounter between the scientist and Nature: “They have seen me and heard me, arraigned me in these fetters and received the evidence; I have cut up mine own anatomy, dissected myself and they are gone to read upon me.”32 Although Donne’s remark begins with what seems a straightforward (and witty) use of the rhetoric of Baconian torture, he sets up contrasting modes of inquiry that suggest different narratives for understanding his physicians’ engagement with his body. The first half of the sentence depicts Donne’s diseased body as the seditious object that must be “fettered” in order to give over its “evidence.” The second half, however, grotesquely portrays Donne as the cadaver in the anatomy theater, willingly pulling back its own skin to aid in its dissection. For Donne, the two scenarios are similar in that like the anatomist, who, searching for the truth of the body probes the corpse, the magistrate seeks out the disease within the body politic. Yet a close reading of this sentence reveals each allusion denotes a radically different relationship between the physician and the body. In the first half of the sentence, Donne employs the same paradigm that informs Bacon’s epistemology of coercion: the body must be made to resist the physicians’ attempts to penetrate its secrets, and only when forced into submission can the body be properly read. Though Donne’s physicians have “seen” him and “heard” him, only after he is placed in “fetters” can they trust the body’s utterances; the body here can provide data for a proper diagnosis only after the physicians have vexed it. Yet Donne also offers an alternative relationship between his body and the physicians, which is that the body must be complicit for the physicians’ diagnosis to be successful. The second half of the opening sentence to Meditation 9 casts Donne in a more active role in the physicians’ consultations. Donne speaks from a disembodied perspective in his offer to carve his own body so the physicians may examine his anatomy.

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In his claim that he dissects his body so that his physicians may read it, Donne draws on the new discourse of anatomy emerging in the early modern period. In his work analyzing the rise of public dissections in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, Sawday maps out how the cultural understanding of dissection changed from one that condemned the anatomizing of bodies as a violent intrusion to seeing the corpse as participant in the project of dissection. Noting that the cadavers supplied to various universities and colleges were those of executed criminals, dissection within the popular conscious came to be seen as an extension of the juridical authority: “But anatomy, in the early modern period, was a spectacle at least as compelling—though far more ordered—as the tumultuous spectacle of execution. Indeed, it is more accurate to think of the relationship between execution and the anatomy demonstrating as two acts in a single drama.”33 The work of the anatomist, far from appearing as purely removed from the actions of the state, became conflated with the exertion of the sovereign’s power on the criminal’s body. The anatomist’s actions appear as a transgression against the body. Yet Sawday argues there was an attempt to rehabilitate this image of dissection. Turning to Andrea Vesalius’s De humanis corporis fabrica (On the fabric of the human body, 1543), Sawday suggests that the text’s illustrations depict the corpses as taking part in their own dissections, many holding open their own skin to reveal their anatomies: “The anatomist and the corpse have become one, merging into one another.”34 The function of these illustrations is rehabilitative, to supplant the conception of the dissection as an unnatural violation of the body with a harmonious interaction between anatomists and cadaver. In his anatomy allusion (“I have cut up mine anatomy, dissected myself ”), Donne occupies the roles of both anatomists and corpse.35 Through his claim to carve his own body, to make it legible for his physicians, Donne challenges the equating of torture and diagnosis that he had already suggested in the first half of the sentence. Coercion and vexation in this latter scenario become antithetical to the generation of knowledge. Whereas the judicial metaphor, his physicians’ fettering and then taking down his body’s “evidence,” validates the diagnosis through the body’s vexation, the anatomical metaphor does so through the patient’s involvement. Donne foregrounds the question of whether vexing the object can produce knowledge of it within this pivotal moment.

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By doing so, Donne places himself in conversation with Bacon. As has been discussed above, the Baconian schema for the production of knowledge demands the object be seen as frustrating the knower’s attempts to grasp its truth. Though we might accept that Bacon ultimately sought a more harmonious relationship between humanity and the natural world, his narrative of advancement and restoration begins with overcoming Nature’s obfuscating of the scientific gaze. In one sense, Donne would appear to endorse the drama that Bacon lays out as the core of knowledge production: the body, complicit in its own corruption, must be made to submit to the physicians’ investigation. Like the Baconian empiricist who looks to access the secret workings of Nature in order to manipulate them and so restore the world to Edenic harmony, the physicians overcome the body’s opposition so that they might restore it to health. Conversely, Donne also rejects the imperative that truth is based on the object’s resistance. In the latter model of knowledge production, the success of his physicians’ diagnosis depends on his body’s acquiescence. Donne challenges the foundational tenets of Bacon’s epistemology, the conflation of knowledge and power. Whereas for Bacon the truth of an object comes only as a consequence to conquering it, Donne’s reading his physicians’ interactions with his body through the anatomical conceit disconnects truth and domination and replaces it with consent. Whether his physicians’ diagnosis of his body should be conceptualized as an act of torture plagues Donne in the contemplation of his own illness. In sustaining the dual narratives of the body as either resistant to or complicit with his physicians, Donne also considers the extent to which his body is implicated in its own disease. In Meditation 11, Donne comes to the question of whether the disease’s origin should be located internally or externally to the body: “How little of a man is the heart, and yet it is all by which he is; and this continually subject not only to foreign poison conveyed by others, but to intestine poisons bred in ourselves by pestilential sicknesses.”36 The humoral theory of disease attributed the cause of the body’s sickness to an imbalance in the humors of which it is composed, hence the humoral physician’s efforts through purging or bleeding of the body to restore its original harmony. However, the initial cause of this imbalance in the body’s humors seems indeterminate. In Meditation 12, Donne returns to the question of whether

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to locate the origins of the disease within or without the body: “But what have I done, either to breed or to breathe these vapors?”37 The humoral body possesses the potential to create its own disease and is also susceptible to external influence. It is in this meditation that Donne appears obsessed with the question of culpability: “Or if this vapor were met withal in an ambush, and we surprised with it, who lament who would accuse, when we had nothing to accuse, none to lament against but fortune, who is less than a vapor? But when ourselves are the well that breathes out this exhalation . . . that it was his neighbor, his familiar friend, his brother, that destroy him, and destroy him with a whispering and a calumniating breath.”38 The possibility that he himself is the source of the illness drives Donne into profound self-doubt. He writes of his physicians’ telling him that his own melancholy, his excessive study, or his “thoughtfulness” may have contributed to his body’s imbalance of humors and thus the internal “vapor” producing his sickness. For Donne, the threat of self-destruction becomes of great concern: has he inadvertently through his lifestyle caused his body’s disharmony of humors? Yet still Donne suspends any resolution on the issue of parsing out blame: “But I do nothing upon myself, and yet am mine own executioner.”39 Donne allows for contradicting understandings of the origins of his disease. The issue of his body’s guilt relates directly to how its diagnosis and treatment should be conceptualized, as well as, I argue, speaking to the larger epistemological concern of how to produce knowledge that drives Devotions. Should the body appear as seeking its own destruction and so authorizing the physicians’ vexation of it? Or does the body appear more as the victim and so complicit with the physicians’ ministrations? How these questions are answered entails two antithetical means by which knowledge is validated—either through vexation of the object or through its cooperation. If the disease is understood as laying siege to the body, as an external foe, then the body does not become an actor hostile to the physicians’ efforts. However, if the illness is internally “bred,” the physicians must be understood as working against the body to cure it. The crux of the matter is if the endeavor to rid the body of its disease should be considered opposed to the body’s own will. This question of the efficacy of coercion as a means of accessing truth has explicit relevance to Donne’s larger project in Devotions—interpreting

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the experience of his illness and the physician’s treatment as an allegory for his soul’s sinful state and God’s intervention. In an important way, Donne’s disease allowed him to align the body and the soul, to experience physically what he took to be his soul’s suffering. In Expostulation 9, Donne imagines the same drama of his sickbed replayed in God’s dealings with his soul: “Yet, O blessed and glorious Trinity, O holy and whole college, and yet but one physician, if you take this confession into consultation, my case is not desperate, my destruction is not decreed.” As with his physicians, who have just interrogated his body, the members of the Trinity likewise diagnose Donne’s spiritual well-being. Both situations rely on the confessional trope: the physicians and the Trinity extract the truth of Donne’s body and soul, respectively. The only agency left to Donne in either case is to submit to their inquiry and to offer his confession. At moments in the text Donne portrays himself as willingly objectifying and laying out his secrets to the analytical gaze, both of his physicians and of the Trinity: “How much more must I apprehend that all you blessed and glorious persons of the Trinity are in consultation now, what you will do with this infirm body, with this leprous soul, that attends guiltily, but yet comfortably, with your determination upon it. I offer not to counsel them who meet in consultation for my body now, but I open my infirmities, I anatomize my body to them. So I do my soul to thee, O my God, in a humble confession.”40 Here, as with the anatomical metaphor earlier in Meditation 9, Donne retains a sense of agency in making himself readable to his divine physicians. While “offer[ing] not to counsel” those considering his condition, Donne does volunteer his “confession” to facilitate the Trinity’s “anatomiz[ing]” of his soul. Conversely, though, Donne’s confession of the iniquitous state of his soul at other points in Devotions comes across as the forced outcome of his illness. The disease that Donne suffers is God’s vexing of Donne that acts similarly to the physician’s cordials, which are meant to render readable his spiritual corruption and redemption. In Expostulation 11, Donne depicts his confession of his soul’s sickness as coerced. At this stage in his illness, Donne’s physicians have administered cordials, which he later identifies in Meditation 13 as being intended to make the body confess its disease. Donne translates this theme of a forced confession to his disease’s spiritual import. Donne questions whether the admission of

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his sinful state is due to God’s acting upon his body. Expostulation 11 particularly suggests the necessity of God overcoming his initial resistance: “This is a melting heart, and troubled heart, and a wounded heart, and a broken heart, and a contrite heart; and by the powerful working of thy piercing Spirit such a heart I have.” The effects of God’s intervention appear at this moment as humbling or breaking down Donne’s opposition so he may be made ready for God’s saving grace. Donne’s spiritual restoration depends on God’s “melting,” “wounding,” and “breaking” his heart. Donne even goes as far as to claim God has given him “wormwood,” presumably to be read as his illness, to break him and ready him: “Thou hast cleared a morning to me again, and my heart is alive.”41 The narrative of Donne’s physicians racking his body into confessing its disease is reenacted here in how he conceives of God’s almost violent imposition on his soul. As he does with his body’s problematic role in his physicians’ ministrations, Donne does not allow a unified understanding of his own role in the spiritual drama unfolding. This tension in how to realize the relationship between the subject and the object—must the object be completely dominated by the subject—is one Donne explores further in Holy Sonnet XIV (“Batter my heart, three-personed God”).42 Here Donne envisions God’s redemption of his soul as exceptionally violent, as a process in which his own involvement appears ambivalent.43 The opening lines of the poem find the speaker requesting God’s active, brutal attempts to save him: Batter my heart, three-personed God; for you As yet—but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new. (1–4)

The wording of these lines reflects the paradoxical nature of Donne’s thoughts: to “rise, and stand” he must be “o’erthrow[n].” Likewise, the speaker positions himself in an ambiguous role in his petition to God to “break, blow, and burn” rather than to “knock, breathe, shine.”44 In one sense, the speaker appears complicit in his salvation, authorizing God’s more violent treatment of him. However, contrarily, the speaker’s initial resistance to God’s placid endeavors to mend him requires more aggressive means. This tension over the speaker’s resistance or compliance

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continues in the subsequent simile between the speaker’s soul and an occupied town: I, like an usurped town, to another due Labor to admit you, but, oh, to no end Reason your viceroy in me, me should defend, But is captived, and proves weak or untrue. (5–8)

In this conceit the speaker admits to his inability to give himself over to God’s solicitations, yet the speaker also reveals in lines five and six an intrinsic desire to seek redemption. Though the speaker’s salvation is now dependent on God’s conquest of him, the poem suggests this conquest will be welcomed by the speaker. Donne defuses any possibility of resistance on the part of the speaker, who believes that he must be vexed to be saved. However, the poem reasserts the uncertainty of the speaker’s complicity. The speaker’s questioning of whether his reason “proves weak or untrue” restores the central tension of the poem: to claim his reason is “weak” implies that the speaker’s salvation will be a mutual affair, while to indict his reason as “untrue” portrays the speaker’s salvation as God’s assault on his usurped soul. If his reason, God’s “viceroy,” is seditious “or untrue,” then resistance engenders God’s actions. The concluding lines of Holy Sonnet XIV do not resolve this dilemma: Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I Except you’ enthrall mee, never shall be free Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee. (12–14)

How can the speaker be imprisoned but willingly so? To what extent can the speaker find freedom in enthrallment?45 The undecided relationship between God and the speaker, the issue of the speaker’s resistance or compliance toward the subject’s will, parallels the tension with which Donne contemplates his confession in Devotions: is Donne the living dissection that willingly submits himself to God’s gaze or must he be fettered and tortured to extract his evidence? Nature’s Liberty and Humanity’s Subjugation

While sustaining what I read as Baconian and anti-Baconian narratives throughout Devotions, Donne directly challenges the Baconian belief

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that Nature can be made submissive to humanity’s will. Bacon conflates the search for the truth of the thing with the discovering of the utility of it: “In this respect, therefore, truth and utility are the very things themselves; so works themselves are of a greater value as pledges of truth than as comforts of life.”46 To wed the mind to things themselves is, for Bacon, to be able to control and employ them for human consumption. For Donne, to make an object of inquiry legible, whether through coercive means or not, does not necessarily yield control over that object. Donne’s position as a patient affords him the insight that humanity, far from dominating Nature, is really subjugated to it. Through contemplations on his bout with relapsing fever, Donne counters the optimistic spirit that defines Bacon’s instauration. Meditation 13 reaffirms Donne’s skepticism about humanity’s reexerting domination over Nature. Here the spots that manifest on Donne’s body present an interesting problem for him: “In this accident that befalls me, now that this sickness declares itself by spots to be a malignant and pestilential disease, if there be comfort in the declaration, that thereby the physicians see more clearly what to do, there may be as much discomfort in this, that the malignity may be so great as that all that they can do shall do nothing.”47 Though the disease progresses to reveal itself through these spots, Donne finds no solace or relief from the uncertainty of his health. That his physicians may now begin to diagnose his condition, take his body’s evidence, does not signal dominion over the disease. Instead, Donne suggests these spots might indicate his physicians’ impotency or inability to remedy the sickness. In his contemplation of these spots, Donne returns to what I argue is the central epistemological crux of Devotions concerning coercion and truth: “In intestine conspiracies; voluntary confessions do more good than confessions upon the rack; in these infections, when nature herself confesses and cries out by these outward declarations which she is able to put forth of herself, they minister comfort; but when all is by the strength of cordials, it is but a confession upon the rack.”48 Are these spots signs that the body is voluntarily confessing its disease or have these spots manifested due to his physicians’ ministrations, their use of cordials?49 If it is the former scenario, Donne is then able to find a sense of security. Yet if the latter, Donne proposes that such a confession from the body is analogous to those elicited from the political dissident placed on the rack. Though torture may have made the dissident readable to his interrogators, Donne argues against the presumption that

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such knowledge leads to complete control over the interrogatee.50 The practice of torture may expose the extent of the disease plaguing the state, yet such methods prove ineffectual to remove the root of the infection. As we have seen with Bacon, the ability to read Nature properly, to penetrate the false image it offers, necessarily leads to the recovery of Edenic mastery. In Devotions Donne disconnects the object’s legibility and its domination. This skepticism that Donne articulates in Meditation 10 defines the vulnerable position humanity occupies in relation to Nature, which he puts forth in Meditation 19. In contrast to the Baconian project “to overcome Nature by action,” or to “bind [Nature] to your service and make her your slave,” the natural world, for Donne, does not suffer human impositions to alter its course: “Nature (if we look for durable and vigorous effects) will not admit prevention, nor anticipation, nor obligations upon her, for they are precontracts, and she will be left to her liberty. Nature would not be spurred, nor forced to mend her pace; nor power, the power of man, greatness, loves not that kind of violence neither.”51 Donne offers a conception of Nature impervious to human interruption. He explicitly rejects the mastery over Nature achieved through the discovery of her hidden processes and schemas, by emphasizing humanity’s submission to the natural world. Though the secret working of Nature may become discernible through either complicity or coercion, for Donne, the endeavor to employ this knowledge to reassert dominance over Nature is futile. The story Donne tells in Devotions does not offer the conclusion that Bacon locates at the end of humanity’s struggle with Nature—restoration of a promised authority. Instead, Donne denies such a sense of victory and rather suggests his is a cautionary tale: “Though you have by physic and diet raked up the embers of your disease, still there is a fear of a relapse; and the greater danger is in that.”52 Ultimate control over Nature, pivotal in Bacon’s narrative, Donne withholds from humanity. Donne’s Rejection of Torture: Easter Sermon, 1625

A little more than a year after the publication of Devotions, the question of torture and its epistemological validity was still on Donne’s mind. On Easter Sunday, Donne delivered one of his more controversial sermons. In his explication of John 5:28 and 29 (“Marvel not at this; for the hour

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is coming, in which, all that are in the graves, shall hear his voice; and shall come forth, they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation”), Donne outlines the dual resurrection that all humanity will experience at the end of times, not only of the spirit, but of the body as well. From his central argument, the dignity of our earthly body, Donne moves to argue his most polemical point in the sermon, the condemnation of state-sanctioned torture.53 Donne’s rejection of torture here is twofold. First, such violence perpetrated on the body defiles the “Organ in which God breathes”: “Transgressors in the first kinde . . . are those inhuman persecutors, who with racks, and tortures, and prisons, and fires, and exquisite inquisitions throw downe the bodies of the true Gods true servants.”54 Donne’s speech implicitly reveals his own personal connection to the victims of torture. Having been born into a Catholic recusant family, the Dean of St. Paul’s was keenly aware of the dangers that the Elizabethan regime posed for dissidents. His mother, Elizabeth Donne née Heywood, came from a family with a long tradition of recusancy: her brother, Jasper, was a Jesuit priest banished from England, and the Heywoods could claim Sir Thomas More as an ancestor. John Carey hypothesizes that Elizabeth looked to indoctrinate her sons into the cult of Catholic martyrdom, and Stubbs finds that despite Donne’s father’s “pragmatism” regarding recusancy, “Donne was brought up amid a spirit of resistance to this oppression.”55 Perhaps an even more personal context for Donne’s condemnation of torture was his brother Henry’s experience. Arrested in 1593 for harboring a Jesuit priest, William Harrington, Henry was racked into confessing Harrington’s identity. While Harrington would experience the brutal execution reserved for recalcitrant Catholic priests, Henry would not live to see the end of his imprisonment, dying of the plague. Stubbs recounts that the conditions Henry endured in Newgate Prison, after he was moved from the Clink, were a death sentence in themselves, particularly during the outbreaks of the plague: “Most of the inmates, however, found themselves in the ‘common side,’ packed together in chains, untried and convicted alike . . . Grubby candles had to burn all day, and no fresh air got in.”56 It is interesting to note that Donne lists, along with torture and the rack, prison as a means of defiling the body.

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Beyond the ethical repugnance he expresses for torture, Donne objects on epistemological grounds to the practice of extracting truth through coercive means. Donne notes that for proponents of torture the object of inquiry, the interrogatee, cannot willingly give over knowledge of itself, that any degree of complicity on the interrogatee’s part necessarily invalidates his utterances. For creditable knowledge to be gained, torture must precede any information obtained: “He that is but questioned, whether he be guilty or not, before that be knowne, is without all question, miserably tortured.” Unlike the ambivalence Donne expresses over the epistemological merits of torture, in his 1625 Easter sermon, Donne vehemently challenges the belief that coercion leads to truth: “And therefore, because Storie abounds with Examples of this kinde, how uncertain a way of tryall, and conviction, torture is.” What Donne once held out as a possible means of ascertaining truth now results only in uncertainty. The ritual of torture, the drama of the subject’s eliciting and surmounting the object’s opposition, Donne rejects as outright fallacious now, finding the torturer misrecognizing his role in the production of the knowledge generated. Later in his Easter sermon, Donne cites an epistle from St. Hierome that recounts the story of a young man tortured into falsely confessing to an adulterous relationship. The accused woman, likewise tortured, resists bearing false witness against herself. As Donne’s recounting of the tale indicates, though the woman reiterates her innocence truthfully, the young man’s confession is privileged because it confirmed the hypothesis, the accusation of adultery, that initiated the investigation. The question of truth, of guilt and innocence, appears brushed aside in favor of the erroneous evidence, privileged for its having been successfully elicited by torture. In this sense, the distance that engenders the torturer’s acts is exposed as a fallacy; the end of the torturer’s efforts is not the achievement of objective knowledge, but rather the imposition of his own preconceptions. In Donne’s Easter sermon, the practice of torture does not discover a truth external to the subject; rather, the object being interrogated merely becomes the medium through which the subject can manifest and then misrecognize his presumptions as not his own. My goal in this chapter has been to explore Donne’s thinking on torture’s epistemological validity and his posing a counternarrative to the

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one that underlies Bacon’s instauration. In the preceding discussion of Devotions, I looked to reveal the complexity of Donne’s realization of the drama occurring between his body and his physicians. Rather than being simply the antagonistic relationship that presumes the body’s legibility as reached only after the physicians have provoked and suppressed its resistance to their investigation, Donne writes simultaneously a counternarrative in which the body actually becomes complicit in the efforts to diagnose its disease. Donne suspends in Devotions final endorsement of either account—whether coercion or complicity grants access to truth; however, Donne departs from the Baconian premise that equates legibility with domination. Donne problematizes the assumption that Bacon predicates the new science on—that once one has made the truth of Nature readable, then one can begin to manipulate it. Turning to his 1625 Easter sermon, Donne appears still focused on the issue of the use of coercion to produce truth. Yet while Devotions appears ambivalent, Donne’s sermon clearly rejects torture, particularly directing his attack on the very surety to which contemporary and current proponents of the practice lay claim.57 Eventually in his thinking and writing on the topic, Donne offers a considered rebuttal to Bacon’s pretense to Adamic mastery over the natural world through coercion.

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CHAPTER 3

“Companions of My Thoughts More Green” Damon’s Baconian Sexing of Nature

I

n the last chapter, we saw how Donne, through recounting his bout with relapsing fever, challenges Bacon’s situating humanity in a dominant position to Nature. While Bacon holds out the promise that humanity could make the natural world mendable to its own ends, Donne reasserts humanity’s submissiveness to Nature. As Donne reveals, any control humanity might seem to gain over Nature is finally predicated on Nature’s own complicity. Donne offers a narrative that resists the anthropocentricism that is the hallmark of the Baconian narrative. In this chapter, I continue to analyze the resistance to Bacon’s narrative of humanity’s scientific conquest of the natural world, now as it is reiterated by Andrew Marvell. The return to a pristine, Edenic state with Nature and the human perversion of the natural world are two significant themes Marvell explores in pastoral poetry of the 1650s. Most likely written during his time at Appleton House, Marvell’s pastoral poems realize the paradisiacal space, marked by an intrinsic harmony between humanity and Nature, as beyond our ability to return to. Often Marvell concludes his pastoral poetry with a perspective looking to a prelapsarian moment that has been irretrievably lost. Moreover, Marvell depicts human intervention into the natural world as a corruption, one he realizes in highly sexualized language. This chapter reads the pastoral journey of Marvell’s protagonist, Damon, against Bacon’s narrative of advancement and restoration. As ecofeminist scholars have successfully pointed out, the trope of male sexual maturation plays a fundamental

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role in structuring Bacon’s conception of his instauration. The new scientific engagement with Nature signaled, for Bacon, that humanity had begun to read Nature properly as a sexualized other meant to be brought into a (re)productive relationship. For Bacon, to perceive the natural world as metaphorically sexual is foundational to his project of returning humanity to Adamic mastery. However, as I argue in this chapter, Marvell reimagines the pastoral genre to tell a narrative in which humanity loses Paradise by viewing Nature through a sexualizing lens. In her work as an ecofeminist critic, Carolyn Merchant has done much to promote a reassessment of the legacy of the Scientific Revolution. Her eminent study of the rise of the new science in seventeenth-century Europe, The Death of Nature, reveals the tropological shift that authorized an aggressive treatment of the natural world. Transitioning from a mother-earth image toward the figurative realization of Nature as an erratic, sexualized female other, Merchant argues that the predominance of modern science was predicated on an exploitative and misogynist tropology: “Female imagery became a tool in adapting scientific knowledge and method to a new form of human power over nature.”1 For Merchant, Bacon is the key intellectual figure behind the grand narrative for the emerging scientific thought, in which the natural philosopher sexualizes Nature metaphorically to advance human prosperity and so return mankind to a prelapsarian dominance over the natural world. While her work has immense value for Baconian scholars, Merchant’s rereading of the Scientific Revolution also opens the door to the reexamination of other seventeenth-century literary production. Though Marvell might not necessarily have had Bacon’s narrative as an immediate context in his depiction of Damon’s alienation from and hostility toward his natural surroundings, Marvell does confront Bacon, if indirectly, on the question of whether humanity can recover Adamic mastery over Nature by conceptualizing it as a feminine other available for sexual exploitation. Bacon and Marvell arrive at opposite conclusions: while Bacon promises through the implementation of his scientific program that humanity will usher in an era of prelapsarian sovereignty, Marvell’s Damon, encountering his environment through a Baconian lens, destroys the meadows and himself. Rather than resulting in another Eden, Marvell prefigures Damon’s actions as a second Fall. Demonstrating the anguish and destruction Damon experiences by adopting a perspective essentially

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“Companions of My Thoughts More Green”

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Baconian, Marvell resists the narrative of the Scientific Revolution that came to predominate in seventeenth-century intellectual discourse. Juxtaposing Marvell’s Mower poems with the tale that Bacon tells of humanity’s intellectual development, the value of the youthful mind appears as a point of friction between the two narratives. The pastoral is primarily a nostalgic poetic mode, retrospective in lamenting the loss of an ideal, youthful state.2 For Bacon, though, youth is a dangerous period intellectually. In “Of Youth and Age,” Bacon expresses anxiety over the youthful mind, which he finds to be impetuous, prone to flights of fancy, and possessing a vitality that must be checked: “And yet the invention of young men is more lively than that of old, and imaginations stream into their minds better, and as it were more divinely. Natures that have much heat, and great and violent desires and perturbations, are not ripe for action till they have passed the meridian of their years.”3 The danger of the young mind, for Bacon, lies in its susceptibility to the imagination, which provokes the intellect into rashly latching onto its initial thoughts as opposed to subjecting them to sober scrutiny. Bacon appears much concerned over this period in one’s intellectual development: though energetic, without the proper guidance and temperance, the youthful mind might fail to act productively. The intellect in this early stage will move hastily, supposing too much from its preliminary impressions: “Young men, in conduct and [management] of actions, embrace more than they can hold; stir more than they can quiet; fly to the end, without consideration of the means and degrees; pursue some few principles which they have chanced upon absurdly . . . and, that which doubleth all errors, will not acknowledge or retract them; like an unready horse that will neither stop nor turn.”4 Here the quintessential aspect of the young mind, as Bacon portrays it, is the lack of a methodical, inductive investigation of Nature. Yet, as readers of Bacon’s Essays are aware, the essays themselves do not offer an unequivocal stance on a topic, but rather demonstrate Bacon’s own unstructured mental explorations. Bacon goes as far as to contradict his opening assessment of the young mind; he posits the notion that the youthful mind itself should be privileged in its being closer to God than the mature mind. In consequence, the mature mind is corrupted through its trafficking in the social world: “And certainly, the more a man drinketh of the world, the more it intoxicateth; and age doth profit rather in the powers of understanding than in the virtues of the will and affections.”5 Bacon appears to

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espouse a proto-Romantic idealization of youth: here, for Bacon, society’s intrusion obscures one’s pristine encounter with the natural world. Though in “Of Youth and Age” Bacon does not offer a final conclusion on the value of the youthful mind’s impetuosity, the corpus of his scientific writings unreservedly advocates for the progressive nature of human learning. Throughout Novum Organum, there is a sustained distrust of youth; in essence, the program Bacon envisions for scientific progress primarily looks to curb the instinctual habit of the immature mind “to leap and fly from particulars to remote and nearly the most general axioms (such as the so-called first principles of arts and of things).”6 Bacon portrays his instauration of learning as the transitioning from a juvenile mindset to one more disciplined. In The Masculine Birth of Time, the elderly guide admonishes his student that he need not feel ready to explore Nature without his guidance yet: “But, my son, if I should ask you to grapple immediately with the bewildering complexities of experimental science before your mind has been purged of its idols, beyond a peradventure you would promptly desert your leader.”7 Without his elderly instructor, the youthful student would succumb to the “idols of the road.” Bacon reiterates again and again his conception of youth not as a privileged time of innocence and intellectual-spiritual clarity, but a perilous moment through which one must be carefully guided. Bacon’s apprehension of youth becomes a pivotal facet of the tropology of his instauration. Intellectual maturation for Bacon will paradoxically restore humanity to its original authority over Nature, a point Marvell challenges through Damon’s pastoral journey. As Bacon envisions the future path of human learning, the transition from a premodern, allegorical worldview to a modern scientifically based mode of learning parallels the sexual maturation of the male youth. For Bacon, mankind may reclaim Edenic mastery over Nature once it has abandoned its intellectual childhood. This mental transition or maturation entails the imperative to sexualize Nature, to perceive the relationship between humanity and Nature as one in which the latter is subject to sexual domination by the former. Merchant identifies Bacon’s significant contribution to modern scientific thought to be the development of a language that “reduc[ed] female nature to a resource for economic production.”8 Only when the encounter with Nature is read through the metaphor of sexual reproduction can humanity hope to generate proper

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knowledge of the natural world. For Bacon, when learning enters into its sexually mature adulthood, humanity will prosper and enjoy a return to an Edenic state. Though, as noted in the introduction to this book, Bacon does not allow for an easy gendering of the male scientist and female Nature, he does at moments in his scientific treatises code the new science as a sexual maturation. Within this Baconian discourse that realizes the new science as both a metaphorically sexual encounter with Nature and a restoration of humanity’s prelapsarian supremacy, Marvell composes what may be considered a dirge to the English pastoral genre, “The Mower’s Song.” This poem is generally considered the conclusion to Marvell’s Mower poem sequence, the other poems of which are “Damon the Mower,” “The Mower to the Glowworms,” and “The Mower Against Gardens.” Though these poems were initially published in 1681, consensus among Marvellian scholars is that the Mower poem sequence was written during Marvell’s tenure as Mary Fairfax’s tutor, between 1649 and 1651.9 Linda Anderson contends the Mower poems do form a thematic sequence focusing on a single personality: “Whether or not Marvell intended the poems as a sequence, he is at least consistent throughout out all four poems in presenting a single individual who defines himself in a special relationship with nature while at the same time hinting that the reader should question that definition.”10 Extrapolating even further from the order of the poems in the 1681 folio edition, Susan Snyder reads the Mower poems as chronicling Damon’s maturation as he relinquishes his childish conception of Nature.11 Because the poems themselves suggest this development of their shared protagonist, I agree with Anderson and Snyder and predicate my own reading of the poems on this presumed order.12 Though primarily focusing on “The Mower’s Song,” with references to “Damon the Mower,” this chapter also touches on Marvell’s other poem concerning sexuality and Nature, “The Garden.” The composition of this poem, according to Nigel Smith, is in the same period as the Mower poem sequence.13 In “The Garden,” Marvell expounds on how sexuality occludes humanity from a natural, Edenic experience, which makes these poems vital to my reading of “Damon the Mower.” At the end of his journey in the Mower poem sequence, Damon experiences sexuality as alienating, entrapping him in an unfamiliar world where he can no longer enjoy the unity he once had with the meadows.

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Beyond Damon’s isolation, I find that Marvell’s pastoral protagonist enacts a tropological shift similar to that at the center of Baconianism: Damon makes an intellectual transition from reading his environment as asexual and reflective of his own inner world, as depicted in “Damon the Mower,” to seeing the meadows as a sexual entity that must be dominated in “The Mower’s Song.” As opposed to reentering Eden, Damon suffers another Fall. The sexualizing metaphor that Bacon claims will open up the path to improving humanity’s material existence leads to Damon lashing out against the meadows. The poem sequence dramatizes Damon’s journey from a prelapsarian to a postlapsarian perspective, which is made evident by the changing tropes through which Damon perceives the meadows. In “Damon” Marvell describes the meadows as maternal, whereas in “The Mower’s Song” the Mower labels them as “luxuriant,” a sexually charged word in Marvell’s lexicon. Sexual and intellectual maturation does not provide the escape from our postlapsarian state that Bacon proposes. This reading of Damon’s alienation from the meadows builds on and complicates how scholars have generally understood his crisis. Critics of the Mower poems argue for the intersection between Damon’s emerging sexuality and his relationship with the meadows. Juliana’s entrance into Damon’s world, which becomes the catalyst for his sexual awakening, provokes his loss of the harmonious relationship he once enjoyed with Nature. In Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance (2006), Robert N. Watson traces the loss of a symbiotic relationship with Nature to Damon’s heterosexual desire. The poem, argues Watson, acts as an admonishment against men involving themselves with women, who act as “a marker of otherness . . . the desire for her produces (or reflects) a recognition of a loss of symbiotic presence in the universe that is a perpetual fact for the human creature, despite the impulse to hide it behind a particular erotic betrayal.”14 Likewise, Judith Haber finds that Juliana’s presence forces Damon into recognition of his own individuality and separateness: “Romantic love makes Damon acutely aware of the separate existence of another; he therefore becomes aware of both his individual isolation and his desire for union.”15 For Watson and Haber, the sexual awakening causes Damon to recognize Juliana’s uniqueness from himself, which in turn causes him to perceive his own isolation from his environment. According to these critics, sexual

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maturation brings the recognition of isolation. However, I argue that Damon’s new post-Juliana experience of Nature reflects a profound and complex metaphorical transition. Rather than interpreting the meadows as resistant to sexuality, as they appear in Marvell’s other pastoral poetry, Damon in “The Mower’s Song” reads his environment as a sexually autonomous and dangerous character. His reimagining Nature as a sexual entity redefines the dynamic of Damon’s relationship with his environment: what had once secured his sense of self through a maternal trope he now perceives as jeopardizing his agency, and so it must be subdued. While critics identify his alienation from the meadows as a consequence of Damon’s entrance into sexuality, Damon’s sexual maturation also causes him to perceive the meadows as a sexualized other whom he seeks to dominate. The poem positions the reader as witness to the intellectual tragedy Damon endures. While Damon perceives the drama as occurring externally, the reader observes the Mower entrapping himself in a mindset that causes him to destroy his environment. This chapter looks to recover “The Mower’s Song” as a space in which Marvell questions the possibility of regaining an Edenic relationship with the natural world through sexualization and domination, two central aspects of Baconianism. Leaving Behind “The Boyhood of Knowledge”

As discussed in Chapter 1, Bacon undergirds his instauration with a paradoxical or circular historiography. On the one hand, Bacon understands the new science as a distinct break with classical philosophy; on the other hand, Bacon locates as the end to scientific progress the return to an original, prelapsarian moment. Bacon sets his project of recovering Adamic knowledge and dominion over Nature against the humanist linguistic recovery of ancient learning. The closer one could come through philological exploration to the original past text, the more one could access a pristine, possibly Adamic language. However, as James Bono notes, Bacon finds such an endeavor fruitless: “Man’s traffic with words . . . are vain, idle, and unproductive. The link between words and things has been shattered by the legacy of the Fall, and to attempt to retrace or repair that chain by attending to the languages of man is a prideful, futile effort.”16 Following the episode of the Fall, the link between words and things was irrevocably severed. Bacon directly challenges the presumption that the

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ancients occupied a privileged position intellectually in contrast to the present. For Bacon, the present moment was actually closer to obtaining a prelapsarian condition than the past. Much of Bacon’s epistemological agenda advocates for the reorientation of our historical outlook. As opposed to venerating the ancient learning, Bacon calls for prizing the present. This reversal of history, in which the past becomes merely a prelude to the present, demands a new ontology of truth: “As regards authors, it is utterly feeble to grant them so much but to deny his rights to Time, the author of authors and indeed of all authority. For Truth is rightly described as the daughter of Time, not of Authority.”17 Here Bacon’s iconoclasm is most pronounced: he sets “Time” and “Authority” as antithetical, each one denoting an opposed epistemology. While “Authority” suggests a textual-based learning that discourages deviation from ancient writings, Bacon’s claim that “Truth” is “the daughter of Time” liberates the mind from obsequious devotion to the past. Richard Foster Jones summarizes Bacon’s perspective on the relationship of the moderns to the ancients: “In knowledge the moderns should be superior, for they are the heirs of all that has been discovered, and because knowledge grows by increments, those who come last are more fortunate than their predecessors.”18 While we might understand him as adopting a linear model of scientific progress—the past as prelude to the present—Bacon saw the new science as a project of reclamation, a dual act of advancement and restoration. The distrust of youth figures predominantly in Bacon’s revaluing the modern over the ancient. In his paradox antiquitas sæculi, juventus mundi (the age of antiquity is the youth of the world), Bacon realizes classical authors as representing humanity’s intellectual immaturity. As Bacon states in Novum: “For the world’s old age is its true antiquity and should apply to our own times, not to the world’s youth, when the ancients lived. For their age from which our own point of view is ancient and older, from the world’s point of view is new and younger.”19 Bacon reevaluates the past and repositions the early seventeenth-century subject not in a diminished present, but on the cusp of an era of discovery. Bacon cites recent innovations and the exploration of the New World as evidence for his historiography: “And surely it would be disgraceful in a time when regions of the material globe, that is, of earth, the seas and stars, have been opened up far and wide for us to see, if the limits

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of our intellectual world were restricted to the narrow discoveries of the ancients.”20 The achievements of Columbus and Galileo necessitated a conception of intellectual present as a time of hope, not one of despair.21 Bacon’s rejection of youth becomes an important theme for his condemnation of the preoccupation with words as opposed to things, with which Bacon charges Aristotle as being the original instigator. Notably, in The Masculine Birth, Bacon’s elderly guide commences his diatribe against ancient philosophers with Aristotle, who initially leads, for Bacon, the human mind awry by turning its attention toward words: “Just when the human mind, borne thither by some favoring gale, had found the rest in a little truth, this man presumed to cast the closest fetters on our understandings. He composed an art or manual of madness and made us slaves to words.”22 As Bacon develops further throughout his scientific treatises, Aristotle’s crime of duping the intellect into the belief that words possess an intrinsic connection with Nature confused the subjective and the objective. The mind’s fixation on words leads to its mistakenly reading the objective world through its own linguistic constructions. Aristotle, rather than holding the venerable position in which humanist tradition had placed him, becomes the origin of humanity’s intellectual fall. Through textually based learning—as opposed to experientially based learning— Bacon finds that words have become autonomous: instead of facilitating the generation of knowledge, words actually obstruct one’s ability to access an objective reality. This epistemology reflects, for Bacon, the immaturity of the prescientific intellect, for the “Greeks seem merely the boyhood of knowledge, with the characteristic of boys, that it is good at chattering, but immature and unable to generate.”23 The overarching trope Bacon employs in describing the new stage of human intellectual history is that of male sexual maturation. In considering the above quotation from the preface to his Novum, the “boyhood of knowledge” that classical authors represent is marked by impotency: their knowledge, linguistically based, lacks the ability to encounter Nature sexually, to engage in a (re)productive relationship with a recognized other. This conflation of intellectual and sexual maturity comes through in The Masculine Birth. The text identifies the goal of the elderly guide’s instructions as the student’s ability to engage in a (re)productive relationship with Nature: “My dear, dear boy, what I propose is to unite you with things themselves in a chaste, holy, and

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legal wedlock.” Although, as the text presents it, the student has not yet reached that point of intellectual and sexual maturity, the elderly guide assures him that once he has properly distanced himself from Nature he will then be able to bring forth “a blessed race of Heroes and Supermen who will overcome the immeasurable helplessness and poverty of the human race.”24 Bacon, through his character of the elderly guide, defines sexual-intellectual maturation as not just the penetration of the female other, or Nature but also the realization of the social function of this copulation. For Bacon, the sexually and intellectually mature male subject is one who moves beyond the personal and views his efforts in a public context. Like the young male who must separate himself emotionally from the female other to copulate properly for the benefit of society, the mind must cleave itself from Nature in order to generate productive knowledge.25 Bacon further defines his ideal of a distanced (re)production in his essay “Of Love,” in which he admonishes against the incapacitating effect that “wanton love” can have. Throughout the meditation, Bacon reiterates the opposition between romantic love and participation in the public realm: “You may observe that amongst all the great and worthy persons (whereof memory remaineth, either ancient or recent) there is not one that hath been transported to the mad degree of love; which shows that great spirits and great business do keep out this weak passion.”26 The language here depicts love as threatening to compromise the integrity of the individual, attempting to invade, commix with, and so threaten male agency. This theme of contamination continues as Bacon argues for the need to segregate attachment to women from worldly affairs: “They do best who, if they cannot but admit love, yet make it keep quarter, and sever it wholly from their serious affairs and actions of life; for if it check once with business, it troubleth men’s fortunes, and maketh men that they can no ways be true to their own ends.”27 The sexually mature male must ensure his public agency through a selfimposed quarantine from romantic involvement. He has completely given himself over to the affairs of state and can subordinate every aspect of his life toward its welfare. Bacon concludes his essay by formulating three distinct categories of love—nuptial, friendship, and wanton. The first possesses value only in its reproductive capacity; the second contains an intrinsic worth in

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creating the very fabric of society; and the third if uncontrolled renders man unsuitable for public life. Pertinent within Bacon’s tripartite division of love is that the first two types are publicly oriented—either perpetuating the state or reaffirming the homosocial bonds among its agents—while the third allows for an indulgence in personal gratification. As a corollary to this rendering the male subject unsuitable for public life, “wanton love” inhibits the objective experience of the female other. “It is a strange thing to note the excess of this passion and how it braves the nature and value of things, by this: that the speaking in a perpetual hyperbole is comely in nothing but love.” The infection of love, for Bacon, disrupts the male subject’s ability to come to the beloved as she is. The man given over to romantic love creates a “little idol” to which he “make[s] himself subject.”28 Bacon admonishes against romantic love for it allows the mind to indulge in a fetishistic project. To offer a general observation, Bacon maps the reproductive and the nonreproductive onto materialism and linguistic fetishism.29 The trope of sexual maturation Bacon uses to conceptualize his instauration, Merchant reveals, was not innocent, but sanctioned an aggressive, exploitative treatment of Nature. In moving from a conception of the world as living organism to the world as machine, Merchant identifies a shift in the predominant trope for Nature, from the earth-mother figure to the unpredictable female other who must be sexually subdued. With this new image of Nature, as Merchant notes, came the loss of any ethical restriction that had previously guided humanity’s interaction with its environment: “The new image of nature as a female to be controlled and dissected through experiment legitimated the exploitation of natural resources. Although the image of the nurturing earth popular in the Renaissance did not vanish, it was superseded by new controlling imagery. The constraints against penetration associated with the earth-mother image were transformed into sanction for denudation.”30 To turn the natural world into a vast depository of resources meant for human consumption required a complex tropological and accompanying ethical shift that situated humanity in a dominant position toward Nature. As Merchant remarks, “Disorderly, active nature was soon forced to submit to the questions and experimental techniques of the new science.”31 Within the emerging scientific mindset of the seventeenth century, Nature required intervention so that humanity could reap its full benefit.

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Since the publication of her study of the Scientific Revolution, Merchant’s thesis has sparked a controversy between ecofeminist scholars and modern apologists for Bacon. In the latter camp, critics of Merchant’s thesis dismiss her claims as anachronistic. For example, Iddo Landau finds that Merchant places too much significance on Bacon’s gendering of Nature, which he describes as being more conventional than anything else: “However, this frequently seems to be a ‘dead metaphor’ for him . . . One characteristic of dead metaphors is that they occur in contexts where their primary connotations are irrelevant.”32 Despite this resistance, Merchant’s work has left an immensely important legacy to feminist critics of modern science in hypothesizing a counternarrative to the grand narrative that informs many historians of early modern science. Katharine Park cites Merchant’s revaluation of the Scientific Revolution as the foundational contribution that The Death of Nature has made to ecofeminist scholarship: Merchant’s rereading of the Scientific Revolution made available for analysis the “deep current of misogyny” that would underpin “the view of nature associated with the mechanical philosophy of Descartes, Hobbes, and others.”33 As Bacon would have the seventeenth-century subject comprehend his contemporary moment in history, learning, particularly natural philosophy, is about to experience a sexual awakening. No longer will the presexual mindset of the ancient authors confine humanity to mediating its encounter with Nature through solipsistic fantasies. In his Cogitata et Visa de Interpretatione Naturae, sive de Scientia Operativa (Thoughts and Conclusions on the Interpretation of Nature or A Science of Productive Works), an unpublished text written before 1605, Bacon succinctly articulates his identification of ancient Greek philosophy with immature sexuality: “Now of this philosophy Aristotle is by universal consent the chief, yet he left nature herself untouched and inviolated, and dissipated his energies in comparing, contrasting and analyzing popular notions about her.”34 Bacon indicts Aristotle for condemning human learning to a perpetual childhood: in being obsessed with his own mental constructions of Nature, Aristotle directs the human mind to confuse its own fantasy with objective reality and to forgo any material engagement with Nature. Bacon’s charge that Aristotle had “left nature untouched and inviolated” marks the adherent of the new science as one who would violate and deflower Nature.

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Bacon’s imperative for humanity to interpret Nature through a sexualized trope, to perceive the natural world as a sexual other who must be dominated into a reproductive relationship, is evident throughout many scientific writings of the mid-seventeenth century. In Certain Philological Essays (1661), Robert Boyle, a predominant and founding member of the Royal Society, articulates the control of Nature for human benefit in a way that implies a sexual conquest: “For some Men care only to Know Nature, others desire to Command Her: or to express it otherwise, some there are who desire to Please themselves by the Discovery of the Causes of the known Phenomena, and others would be able to produce new ones, and bring Nature to be serviceable to their particular Ends, whether of Health, or Riches, or sensual Delights.”35 Boyle here imposes a hierarchy between those who merely seek knowledge of Nature, what Bacon would label “light-bearing,” and those who work to render Nature conducive to their own desires, what for Bacon would be “fruit-bearing.”36 The authority these latter practitioners of natural philosophy assert over Nature comes through not only in their knowledge of hidden “causes of the known Phenomena” but also in their ability to manipulate and reproduce them. To engage productively with Nature is to make her “serviceable” to one’s own needs, even those “sensual Delights.” Boyle echoes Bacon’s goal “that Nature should serve the affairs and convenience of man” and also realizes this dominance over Nature in terms that suggest Bacon’s claim for the new science as the sexual maturity of the mind.37 Even in his treatise challenging the Galenic paradigm of reproduction, On Generation (1651), William Harvey (Bacon’s physician) conceives of scientific investigation of Nature as “penetrate[ing] into the heart of her mystery.”38 In Harvey’s reduction of the mother’s role in reproduction to that which is solely material and passive, Merchant finds the “new scientific values based on the control of nature and women.”39 What emerges in these texts is evidence of the influence of Bacon’s rhetoric in how the new engagement between humanity and Nature will be realized. The “Luxuriant” Growth of Nature

The correspondence between sexual maturation and humanity’s relationship to Nature is a central theme in Marvell’s Mower poems; however, sexuality inhibits Damon’s ability to establish a prelapsarian

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encounter with the meadows. Whereas Bacon locates the means back to Eden as being a sexually mature mind, Marvell cites such a perspective as perverting humanity and Nature. As Damon becomes more sexually aware of himself, he makes the transition from interpreting himself in an intimate relationship with the meadows to one in which his environment becomes alien and must be subjugated to his will. Snyder offers a compelling reading of Damon’s anxiety about being alienated from Nature that points to the transition of the human subject from a presexual, imaginary state to the recognition of sexual individuality: “The overall metaphoric system casts suspicion on sexuality itself. The favored condition here is presexual, with no desire and in fact no discernible differentiation into he and she.”40 The typical Renaissance pastoral journey, according to Snyder, follows the male protagonist as he leaves a time of unity and allegory to enter into a world of sexuality and death: “The journey is now a familiar passage from an Edenic state of natural wholeness through sexual awakening that is also an initiation into individual mortality, which here concludes in a new, negative relation with nature based this time on alienation and death.”41 The end of the journey is separation. Snyder locates this break from the imaginary stage for Damon in his sexual awakening brought about by Juliana: “Damon’s song makes apparent the connection between feeling desire and realizing a separate identity.”42 Sexual awareness forces one to recognize otherness, and, consequently, the unity of the past, presexual stage is irretrievably lost. The pastoral journey contrasts with the path Bacon lays out for humanity’s scientific progress: while the Baconian narrative suggests a return is possible through empiricism, read as sexual encounter with Nature, the pastoral mode denies any such possibility due to sexual maturation. In “The Mower’s Song,” Marvell not only depicts the loss of an Edenic space due to the entrance into sexual maturity but portrays a mind that reads the natural world through a sexualizing lens. With sexual awakening comes an intellectual transition that interprets Nature as a sexual character. It is this tropological transition, as Marvell dramatizes, that inhibits the possibility of return. While in “Damon the Mower” Damon experiences sexuality as preternatural and even inimical to the meadows, in “The Mower’s Song” he comes to read Nature through a sexualizing trope. “Damon the Mower” finds its protagonist viewing Nature as asexual. Damon imaginatively creates a world that is

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populated by a personified Nature: the sun that “licks off [his] sweat,” the “ev’ning sweet” that bathes his feet in cowslip water, or the “deathless fairies” whom he leads in dance (“Damon the Mower,” 45–48, 61– 64). Yet with Juliana’s entrance and the recognition of his own sexuality, Damon no longer finds himself coeternal with his environment. Juliana brings with her the imperative that Damon must come to grips with his own individuality. Yet, as I read it, this account is only half of the story. Damon’s tropology, through which he creates his relationship with the meadows, alters in such a way as to have him recognize Nature as an autonomous sexual being. Damon’s interpretation of Nature as the meadows goes through a fundamental shift along similar lines to those Bacon demands for human learning. Damon of “The Mower’s Song” finds Nature as possessing a sexual autonomy. My reading of “The Mower’s Song” centers on Damon’s labeling the grass’s growth as “luxuriant.” While Damon is not completely aware of his mental transition, Marvell means for the reader to notice and question the new terms on which Damon encounters the meadows. It is not that we are meant to perceive Damon as reaching a truer account of Nature—that is, as a sexual other to be dominated—but instead to witness the consequences of a mind that perceives Nature this way. On this basis, I bring to light Marvell’s rejection of Baconian thought: whereas Bacon finds the sexualizing of Nature as restorative, through Damon’s tragedy Marvell avers such a path as isolating and destructive. Ultimately, in “The Mower’s Song” Marvell challenges the project to reclaim Edenic mastery over Nature, which underlies the rhetoric of the proponents for the new science. The opening stanza of “The Mower’s Song” finds Damon mourning the loss of the union that once existed between his internal reality and his environment: My mind was once the true survey Of all these meadows fresh and gay (1–2)

In this idyllic state of correspondence, Damon could read his world as merely himself writ large: the grass became a symbol of his own joy. The meadows appear reflective of Damon’s subjectivity and, when interpreted properly, reveal the correspondences between the human subject and the natural world. Damon is preoccupied with their metaphorical import: the grass’s greenness has significance for him solely when he can see it as

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connoting his interiority. Notable, also, is the narcissism that underlies Damon’s worldview. The fundamental belief of Damon’s earlier worldview suggested in the lines above—that Nature is simply composed of signs through which Damon can read himself—creates a knowledge that is inwardly directed. The harmony between the mind and the world, the internal and the external, that Damon claims to have once experienced was imaginatively imposed onto the meadows. Damon creates the correspondence between himself and his environment. Much like Bacon’s warning that the mind takes the “parallels and correspondences and relations” it “devises” as natural, Damon fails to recognize the artificiality of this relationship with his natural surroundings.43 The materiality of the meadows themselves disrupts Damon’s imaginative project. These opening lines of the poem would seem to position Damon in postlapsarian perspective. Damon locates himself as having left an earlier, truer state of mind in which he could easily perceive the unity between himself and the meadows. Damon, however, does not appear fully cognizant of the intellectual transition he has undergone. To claim that his “mind was once the true survey” of the meadows raises concerns as to the intellectual state from which he is presently speaking. If in what seems to be the unrecoverable past Damon could read Nature “correctly,” how is the new relationship that he constructs between Nature and himself to be understood? Damon’s opening lament at the loss of his earlier mindset removes the reader from the drama that Damon perceives between himself and the meadows. Damon is ignorant of the full implication of his statement; that is, for him, his intellect has not altered; rather, it is the meadows that have abandoned the “fellowship” between them. The meadows’ materiality, which resists Damon’s attempt to read a relationship between himself and Nature, becomes for him a betrayal. Damon’s centric worldview cannot sustain a being that exists without reference to himself. What has been lost to Damon is not the fidelity of his environment to his internal state but, as Marvell would seem to have the reader believe, instead his ability to perceive such a relationship. So whereas Damon projects the drama of the poem outwardly onto the meadows, the poem relocates the crisis internally within the mind. Essentially, Damon makes the same mistake as he does when he first meets Juliana: he misreads his own inner turmoil as an external phenomenon. Damon participates in a new tropological project, which leads to destruction of both the mower and the

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meadows. Marvell makes available for the reader’s critique Damon’s new conceptualizing of the meadows as a sexual, independent character. In “Damon the Mower,” the initial poem in the sequence, Damon figuratively realizes Nature itself as an asexual space; furthermore, sexuality becomes a destructive, alien force to Nature. Here Juliana, for Damon, appears as external to the natural space he inhabits. Damon portrays Juliana as emitting a preternatural heat, which appears destructive for both the Mower and the environment alike: This heat the sun could never raise, Nor Dog Star so inflames the days. It from an higher beauty grow’th Which burns the fields and mower both: Which mads the dog, and makes the sun Hotter than his own Phaeton. Not July causeth these extremes, But Juliana’s scorching beams. (17–24)

As typical of Damon in this earlier stage of consciousness, the internal and the external blur together: Damon projects back onto Juliana his nascent sexual passion for her—the heat that he misperceives as emanating from her—only to have it threaten the fields and himself. Ironically, Damon’s confusion that this heat emanates from “the hot day, or hot desires” leads him to seek refuge in the external, a “cool cave” or “gelid fountain” (25–32). His fictional world appears resistant yet vulnerable to the sexual passion Juliana provokes in him. The asexual, fantastical environment that Damon creates, and with which he reads himself in union, must exclude Juliana’s presence. Marvell, like Bacon, appears to raise concerns over premodern metaphorical perspective as being solipsistic and nonreproductive. Damon’s gift to Juliana of a “harmless snake . . . / Disarmed of its teeth and sting” speaks to this asexuality: Damon’s feckless courting in offering the snake, rendered impotent, denotes how alien Juliana and the mature sexuality she represents are to his childlike mind (35–36). Linda Anderson interprets the toothless serpent similarly in suggesting that the gift emblematizes a Nature “rendered harmless, thus safe for children.”44 Yet the “harmless snake” further suggests the inability of Damon’s presexual mind and the fantasy he creates to incorporate sexuality into his world.

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Likewise, “The Garden” creates this same dichotomy between the sexual and the natural, which reiterates Marvell’s skepticism as to whether humanity can reassert Adamic dominance over Nature, particularly through what appear to be Baconian terms. Here Marvell glimpses at paradisiacal engagement with Nature, one resistant to sexuality. The recovery of this Edenic experience comes with the mind’s retreat into itself, a disengagement with the material world. The poem suggests that regaining a prelapsarian condition, the notion of “green thought,” comes through regressing to an earlier, presexual state. Bacon suggests that by adopting a sexualizing tropology humanity may once again bring the natural under its sway; for Marvell, it is sexuality, along with the accompanying mental transition, that precipitates man’s loss of Paradise. In the poem, the speaker imagines entering into an Edenic space that is emphatically marked as presexual: “Such was that happy garden-state, / While man there walked without a mate” (57–58). Stanza III emblematizes this division between sexuality and Nature in the image of the tree scarred by lovers’ inscriptions: No white nor red was ever seen So am’rous as this lovely green. Fond lovers, cruel as their flame, Cut in these their mistress’ name. (16–20)

Sexuality again appears as an annihilating force that seeks the ruin or perversion of Nature. As with Juliana’s supposed preternatural heat, the passion of the “fond lovers” becomes a “cruel” ruinous “flame” inimical to a presexual, symbiotic communion with pristine Nature. Jonathan Crewe correctly points out that “sexual desire is foreign to the first pastoral world, and is in effect overwritten on it.”45 In this sense, sexuality becomes an imposition on Nature. Marvell further explores this theme of sexuality being external and detrimental to Nature in “The Mower Against Gardens,” where the speaker castigates the “luxurious” gardener whose lustful acts abuse the natural world. Here the gardener’s intervention into the natural world, which Marvell depicts as a sexual imposition, turns Nature into a gaudy parody of itself. When humanity interacts with its environment on sexualizing terms, the result is the corruption of Nature. Given that in “Damon the Mower” sexuality seems alien from Nature, “The Mower’s Song” marks a stark transition in Damon’s metaphorical framework. Damon’s ability to take solace in an interpretation of Nature

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meant entirely for his comfort is obliterated by the imagined indifference of the meadows. Damon now realizes himself as isolated from Nature, recognizing the boundary between the self and the other. However, rather than giving himself over to a solely material universe, Damon delves into a new tropological project. The loss Damon grieves, the inability within this interpretation of Nature to blur the subjective and the objective easily, becomes an emotional betrayal by his environment: the growth of the now “unthankful meadows” signals that they have forgone “a fellowship so true” (13–14). Watson claims that Damon continues to anthropomorphize his environment, only now by engaging the meadows confrontationally: “He has ceased to intervene with his blade, but his mind is still subjugating the grasses to human purposes: they are mocking him only because he has ceased mowing them, but in another sense, they are mocking him only because he has made them volitional and conscious creatures.”46 For Watson, what primarily denotes Damon’s shift is the recognition of Nature as possessing a separate will, inimical to Damon’s own. Yet an important, though overlooked, facet of Damon’s mental transformation is that the meadows have now become a sexual entity for him: But these, while I with sorrow pine, Grew more luxuriant still and fine (7–8)

This moment when Damon finds the lack of correspondence between his internal turmoil and the grass also suggests sexuality as now being part of Nature. The perceived antagonism between Damon and the meadows comes out of his sexualizing of them. The growth of the grass becomes “luxuriant,” a word that possesses sexual implications for Marvell.47 In “The Mower Against Gardens,” Marvell notes how “luxurious man” perverts the natural world through his own sexuality: Luxurious man, to bring his vice in use, Did after him the world seduce: And from the field the flowers and plants allure, Where Nature was most plain and pure. (1–4)

As with “Damon the Mower” and “The Garden,” this realization of Nature implies a dichotomy between the sexual and the natural. However, this dichotomy is lost to Damon in “The Mower’s Song,” where

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Nature appears “luxuriant” for Damon. From Marvell’s prior use of “luxurious,” Damon’s characterizing of the grass as “luxuriant” signals that Nature itself becomes sexual. To state this more bluntly, wherever Damon will look now, he will see sex through his new tropological lens: That not one blade of grass you spied, But had a flow’r on either side (9–10)

The lines here suggest that Damon sees sexuality throughout all the meadows: the image of the blade of grass between two flowers may recreate the penis and testicles.48 Stanza III outlines the danger for Damon of his newly sexually charged engagement with Nature. Here in a reversal of positions, Damon perceives himself as objectified by the meadows: Unthankful meadows, could you so A fellowship so true forgo, And in your gaudy May-games meet While I lay trodden under feet? (13–16)

As the poem progresses, Damon’s hostility toward the meadows intensifies. The supposed indifference of the meadows to Damon’s anguish, found in the grass’s “luxuriant” growth, now becomes the meadows’ intentional threatening of Damon’s selfhood. Damon sees himself in a struggle with his environment for dominance: not only has his environment betrayed him, but it also seeks to invert their roles and trample upon him. Yet, the fact that Damon reads the grass’s continued “luxuriant” growth as its enjoying “May-games” further emphasizes that Damon interprets the meadows as a sexualized other. As the above stanza portrays it, Nature assumes the role of the wanton participant in the May-game festivities, which often carried sexual associations, as in Robert Herrick’s “Corinna’s Going A-Maying”: Many a green-gown has been given; Many a kiss, both odd and even; Many a glance too has been sent From out the eye, love’s firmament; Many a jest told of the keys betraying

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This night, and the locks picked, yet we’re not a-Maying. (51–56)

As Herrick depicts here, the May festivities center on a robust sexuality, one that celebrates the lustfulness of the natural world. The gown stained green from rolling in the grass, presumably in an amorous embrace, symbolizes the participants devolving into a more natural state of sexual liberality. In contrast to the orgiastic, joyous tone of Herrick’s account of the May festival, Marvell’s mower finds in a sexually aware Nature a threat to his own subjectivity. As Damon now interprets Nature, his environment looks to reverse the roles of subject and object. The “gaudy May-games” of the meadows threaten Damon in reducing him to the position of grass. Beyond being supposedly apathetic toward Damon’s unrequited passions, Nature further betrays its fellowship with him through its sexual behavior that jeopardizes his very being.49 In charting the roles of the meadows in the Mower poems, Damon’s environment changes from the nurturing mother to the sexualized other.50 This tropological shift necessitates the violence that Damon wreaks on the meadows in stanza IV: But what you in compassion ought Shall now by my revenge be wrought. (19–20)

The final act of mowing here is an attempt at self-preservation, the urgency for Damon to restore his selfhood through dominance and objectification of Nature. During the presexual period of unity with Nature, Damon’s self was secured by passive observation: he could read his environment as being solely for him, much like the infant’s perception of the mother. Within this new tropology, Damon must force his will onto Nature. In interpreting Nature through a sexualizing lens that authorizes a violent and exploitative encounter, Marvell’s protagonist must now seize the meadows and bind them to his will. In the fourth stanza, Damon desperately lashes out at his environment, in the effort to reestablish the correspondence that he once was able easily to perceive between himself and Nature. Harmony now can only come with human intervention into natural processes. The companionship he created linguistically with the meadows Damon must now aggressively assert through the mowing of the grass:

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But what you in compassion ought, Shall now by my revenge be wrought; And flow’rs, and grass, and I, and all, Will in one common ruin fall. (19–22)

On a literal basis, Damon is performing the same act as he had before— mowing. Damon’s conception of his labor, however, has changed from “Damon the Mower”: though his function as mower was formerly part of his oneness with the meadows, his mowing is now a way of imposing on his environment. The unity passively enjoyed between himself and the meadows must now be achieved through his violent intervention into Nature. This change in the way harmony is established between the human subject and the natural world further reveals Marvell’s rejection of the Baconian mindset. In this sense, Damon enacts part of Bacon’s project, to establish harmony with Nature forcefully; however, such an imposition results in a “common ruin” for him and the meadows, a universal destruction. The poem’s refrain depicts Damon’s accusing Juliana of destroying the Edenic harmony that he once had with Nature: When Juliana came, and she What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me. (5–6, 11–12, 17–18)

As Damon analogizes his mowing of the grass with Juliana’s effect on him and his mind, he conflates his labor with sexuality on the basis that as Juliana alters and perverts his thoughts so too will his mowing become an imposition on the meadows. In “The Mower’s Song,” the act of mowing now connotes the disruption of the human actor in the natural world. As his reading of his environment changes, his understanding of his interaction with it does as well. In “Damon the Mower,” Damon interprets the meadows as succoring him during his labors: ‘I am the mower Damon, known Through all the meadows, I have mown. On me the morn her dew distills Before her darling daffodils. And, if at noon my toil me heat, The sun himself licks off my sweat.

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While, going home, the ev’ning sweet In cowslip-water bathes my feet (41–48)

Whereas Damon once saw mowing as his function within the natural order, in “The Mower’s Song,” his mowing becomes an assault on his environment. Damon’s place outside of Nature, what he sees in the “luxuriant” growth of the grass, provokes his violent reaction: his mowing now is a way of subduing the rampant sexuality he finds so threatening throughout the meadows. The sexual autonomy that Nature possesses, suggested by Damon’s depiction of the meadows as participating in the “May-games,” Damon brings to an end with his scythe, which results in the destruction not only of the meadows but of himself as well. Heraldry of His Tomb

Marvell engages with Baconianism on the question of whether humanity can ever regain a prelapsarian mode of thought. For Bacon, through the mind’s abandoning its presexual way of encountering Nature, humanity may commence to lay the foundation for a productive knowledge that will usher in an era of Edenic prosperity. However, Marvell expresses doubts as to whether such a return is even possible. I would like to turn briefly to the lines from which the title of this chapter comes: Companions of my thoughts more green, Shall now the heraldry become With which I shall adorn my tomb (26–28)

As is his common mistake, Damon consistently interprets his internal turmoil as an external event: here his mental transition becomes, for Damon, the drama of the meadows’ betrayal. The first line of the section just cited speaks to this tension: Damon sees the dissonance between his mind and the meadows as an emotional one. Yet the line can also be taken to indicate the intellectual and sexual maturation Damon has undergone: when his thoughts were youthful, innocent, virginal, his mind could read Nature “properly,” that is, as a sign of himself. This “green” way of thinking is no longer available to Damon. Damon’s postlapsarian sexual state alters his reading of Nature, a crisis that Marvell dramatizes. The sign, or “heraldry,” of his new mind will be the decaying grass he has freshly cut. The finality of this last act of mowing mirrors

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Damon’s unrecoverable loss of the presexual state with which he charges Juliana. Damon’s new tendency to sexualize the meadows is not restorative, as Bacon espouses, but damning. In this chapter, I have sought to reveal how Marvell rewrites through Damon’s tragedy Bacon’s grand narrative for the new science. Carolyn Merchant’s counternarrative for the Scientific Revolution, whose movement is not toward prosperity but decline and devastation, helps bring to light this anti-Baconian sentiment Marvell voices in “The Mower’s Song.” For Merchant, Bacon’s scientific writings are a pivot for two different narratives of the development of modern science: Bacon either set Western epistemology on the path to a new era of abundance and well-being or led it to an ecological crisis. Merchant’s identifying of these two opposing narratives of the Scientific Revolution helps to address a concern that has motivated much of the critical discussion of Marvell’s Mower poems. As Edmund William Tayler notes: “The central tenet of pastoral verse, the idyllic correspondence between man and Nature known as the pathetic fallacy, has apparently been deliberately violated, and yet there is no overt explanation of why Marvell departed so radically from the pattern of traditional pastoral.”51 Tayler here raises the central question that has energized modern scholarship on Marvell’s pastoral sequence: what changed in the mid-seventeenth-century English worldview that made the concept of a mystical harmony between humanity and the natural world appear untenable for Marvell? Part of the answer, I suggest, rests in the contemporary changing cultural attitude toward Nature embodied in Baconianism. With the rise of seventeenth-century scientific thought, Nature became that which must be systematically studied, manipulated, and exploited. Humanity’s further prosperity depended on the ability to investigate scientifically and harness Nature’s potential. The central tension that emerges when juxtaposing Bacon’s tale of restoring Edenic harmony and Damon’s tragedy of annihilating the meadows through imposing his will is whether human intervention into the natural world inevitably leads to its destruction. Marvell in “The Mower’s Song” rejects the potential for humanity’s return to a prelapsarian period through the conquest of Nature and so offers a counternarrative to that on which Bacon predicates his epistemology. Where Bacon promised that the sexualization and domination of Nature would bring knowledge “to perfection in charity, for the benefit and use of life” and so allow humanity to recover Eden, Marvell’s Damon finds

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only his grave.52 Eric Katz’s discussion of the modern project of restoring Nature has direct relevance to contrasting Bacon’s and Marvell’s narratives. According to Katz, any human endeavor at the restoration of the natural world inevitably, even ironically, produces not a pristine, original environment but an artifact: “The re-created natural environment that is the end result of a restoration project is nothing more than an artifact created for human use.”53 Katz sees the distinction between the natural object and the human artifact as the former existing without any regard to human purpose and the latter being defined by its function. To intervene in natural processes, to reassert a “harmony” on human terms, is to “have created an artificial reality, in a sense a false reality, which merely provides us the pleasant illusory appearance of the natural environment.”54 When Nature is unable to pursue its own ends, then it no longer exists. To an extent, Katz may be seen as redirecting Bacon’s indictment that the prescientific mind confuses its imaginative constructions of Nature as innate—that is, natural—back onto him. To apply Katz’s thesis to Bacon’s claim that harmony may be obtained through human management of Nature, we find Bacon leaves us within an artificial environment. Eden becomes a human construct. Marvell, through the destruction Damon wreaks on the meadows, speaks to the danger of humanity’s effort to restore harmony to Nature. The harmony Damon seeks to impose demands the negation of the meadows existing independent to his will. Marvell, like Katz, exposes that the anthropocentric restoration of Nature ends with our natural environment’s, and even our, extinction. The past two chapters have examined the counternarrative to the Baconian tale of advancement and restoration. Donne and Marvell challenge the anthropocentricism undergirding Bacon’s claim that the new science will allow humanity to recover Adamic knowledge of and mastery over the natural world. Donne rejects the hubris that Nature will suffer any “pre-contracts” placed on its processes, while Marvell denies the potential for humanity’s return to an Edenic condition with Nature through our own intervention. The final chapter of this study turns to the poetry of John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester. Though not dealing with the relationship between humanity and Nature, Rochester takes up the theme of the restoration of Eden. Like Marvell, Rochester finds the new scientific mind as inhibiting the recovery of a prelapsarian condition. For Rochester, materialism disrupts the ability even to imagine Paradise.

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CHAPTER 4

A “Fantastic Mind” and a “Fix’d Heart” Rochester and the Disciplining of the Mind

I

n the dedicatory epistle to John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester in Love in the Dark (1675), Francis Fane praises the earl for his intellectual prowess that so properly balances “judgment and fancy” in the “highest degree that ever was allow’d the Soul of Man.”1 Fane’s acclamation of Rochester goes on to distinguish him as one of the lights of knowledge for their time, placing him on par with Bacon: “What was favorably said of my Lord Bacon in his time, may much more justly be affirmed of your Lordship, in yours; that if ever there were a beam of Knowledge, immediately deriv’d from God, upon any Man, since Creation, there is one upon yourself.”2 Part of what may be interpreted from the comparison Fane offers is the venerable position Bacon came to hold for the intelligentsia during the Restoration. With the formation of such scientific organizations as the Oxford Experimental Philosophy Club and later the Royal Society, Baconianism formed the foundation of the prevailing intellectual tenor during both the Interregnum and the Restoration. Although he did not produce the scientific treatises that Bacon did, Rochester’s conversations with Fane must have left such an impression as to suggest his more than passing familiarity with the tenets of Baconianism: Fane cites the “charming and instructive conversations” with Rochester as having “improv’d” him “in all those Sciences that ever I coveted knowledge of.”3 Inferring from Fane’s remarks on their talks, the regard Rochester held for Bacon and his scientific program must have been high enough to warrant Fane’s extolling the earl as Bacon’s

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intellectual heir. However, Fane’s dedication may also speak to how fashionable Baconianism was within Rochester’s circle. James William Johnson, in hypothesizing the scholarly environment of Wadham College at the time of Rochester’s matriculation in 1660, notes that talk of the new science would have percolated throughout the coffeehouses in Oxford: “Young Rochester entered Wadham at a time of burgeoning ideas and experimentation.”4 Johnson notes that such foundational figures of the late seventeenth-century scientific community as Christopher Wren, John Wilkins, and Thomas Sprat were associated with the college. In his chronicling of the increased interest in experimental science during the 1650s, Charles Webster points out how pervasive the new philosophy was at Wadham College, where the Oxford Experimental Philosophy Club held meetings. In The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine, and Reform 1626–1660 (1975), Webster remarks that much of the grounds of the college were devoted to the fervor for the new scientific thought: “In the gardens were plants of botanical curiosity or agricultural relevance, waterworks and experimental beehives. Hence experimental philosophy must have impinged upon most aspects of life at this college.”5 Furthermore, Webster counters the claim that the Oxford club discontinued its meetings in 1659, positing that the group continued with a more “informal existence.”6 The intellectual atmosphere that young Rochester entered is reflected in his satirical declaration of materialism, “A Satyr Against Mankind and Reason”: But thoughts are given for action’s governance; Where action ceases, thought’s impertinent. Our sphere of action is life’s happiness, And he who thinks beyond, thinks like an ass. (94–97)

Here the “Satyr” speaker’s sentiment echoes the wedding of learning to the improvement of humanity’s condition, a central ideal of Bacon’s narrative of scientific progress and restoration. As Bacon notes in The Advancement of Learning (1605), “And if any man be laborious in reading and study, and yet idle in business and action, it groweth from some weakness of body or softness of soul.”7 Absent from Rochester’s materialist outlook are the religious overtones that Bacon ascribes to the new

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A “Fantastic Mind” and a “Fix’d Heart”

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science; however, Rochester’s poem articulates the Baconian imperative of a material, efficacious type of learning. Yet, as this chapter will argue, Rochester’s adherence to the materialism of the new science was troubled. His poetry reveals a mind acutely aware of the perspective lost to him within this literal, scientific worldview, and it is this confinement to the scientifically disciplined mindset that makes escape into an emotional solace, or Edenic space, intellectually unavailable to Rochester’s speakers. Critical discussion of Rochester’s libertine poetry constantly notes the despair and frustration that mark his speakers’ experiences with human sexuality. Carole Fabricant locates the source for the irony of Rochester’s poetry—rather than a celebration, Rochester offers a condemnation of sexual liberty and promiscuity—in the poems’ material reductionism. “Consistently the poems reflect a conversion of spiritual and philosophical phenomena into concrete objects and actions: kind of a counter ‘transubstantiation’ which exposes the wine as nothing but water after all”: Rochester, according to Fabricant, evacuates all sexual relations of any pretense toward the immaterial, the spiritual, or the idealistic.8 The material reality of human sexuality disappoints Rochester.9 Melissa Sanchez likewise discusses this tension between the ideal and the material within Rochester’s love poetry. For Sanchez, the recurring dilemma Rochester’s speakers find themselves in is that through attempting to divorce the physical from the ideal, to expose the romantic overlay of human sexuality as being just an imposition, they discover how necessary such a pretense is: “Beyond mere shock effect or satiric moralization, the expletives that permeate Rochester’s writing depict libertine materialism’s doomed endeavor to divest things of the romantic pretensions that inevitably disappoint.”10 Both Fabricant and Sanchez trace the anguish that defines Rochester’s experience of sex to its materiality. Warren Chernaik provides one of the most in-depth and insightful accounts of Rochester’s relation to the new scientific materialism. Rochester’s “pursuit of vain pleasure,” his constant need to debase himself and flaunt conventional morality, appears, for Chernaik, as his attempt to provoke a God who has become too removed from the material universe. The freedom offered through libertine materialism ironically imprisons Rochester in a reality devoid of meaning: “The delicate balance of belief and unbelief, the yearning for a transcendence for which the analytical intellect, trained in habits of skepticism, can find no rational grounds,

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marks Rochester as the child of his time.”11 Chernaik argues that for Rochester, as an adherent of the new science, any wish to seek transcendence is crushed by the material world. It is not the perspective from which he views the world that denies him the emotional fulfillment he wishes for, but rather the world itself, which he discovers through his scientific mindset, that does not allow for his escape. Chernaik further develops this claim that Rochester perceives materialism as inevitable in his reading of Gilbert Burnet’s account of his conversation with Rochester on his deathbed. The Rochester that comes through in Burnet’s text, according to Chernaik, is one so indoctrinated within materialism that he is unable to take an intellectual step outside of this mode of thought: “Rochester is not so much presenting arguments for materialism as appealing to materialist assumptions, taken as self-evident, in order to deflate what he considers cant or self-deception.”12 The glimpse into Rochester’s mind that Burnet offers, as Chernaik reads the account, shows a person dogmatic in his thinking. However, this conception of Rochester as one whose thoughts are entirely materially determined is a mischaracterization. As is the consensus among Rochester scholars, the despair of his poetry focuses on the lack of meaning he finds within the world. The material does not offer the solace or comfort for which Rochester searches. His poems articulate the tragedy of those who look for satisfaction in the material only to find that it comes up lacking. Within this line of argument, the anguish of the poems is externally focused. Yet such an understanding of Rochester’s intellectual life fails to appreciate the sophisticated, complex thinker that emerges through his poetry. Rochester directs his attacks not on material reality, but rather inwardly on a mindset that is completely materially preoccupied. It is not that Rochester finds materialism an inescapable fact of human existence, but that he is strongly aware of what is lost through adopting such a perspective. The tragedy of his speakers is not their futile search for that which the material simply cannot provide; rather, the crux lies in the speakers’ assuming a materialist view that deprives them of discovering the transcendence they desire. Rochester faults his speakers’ own minds for reducing the world to its materiality, not, as critics argue, that the world itself is the source of their anguish. His poetry is not externally, but internally oriented: the way the speaker interprets the world causes the problems from which

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he suffers. In both “A Satyr Against Mankind and Reason” and “Absent from thee,” Rochester locates the cause of the speakers’ downfalls not within their fruitless search for comfort in the material, but rather in the very mindset, one reflective of the new scientific principles, that the speakers adopt. Whereas Chernaik finds Rochester lamenting the fact of the world’s materialism that Bacon and Hobbes reveal, I argue that Rochester critiques Bacon’s and Hobbes’s epistemology as limiting the mind and so causing the speakers to find themselves in a disappointing material reality.13 This chapter brings Bacon’s circumscribing of the imagination, a project that his secretary Thomas Hobbes continues, to bear on the alienation from a paradisiacal space the speakers suffer in “A Satyr Against Mankind and Reason” and “Absent from thee.” Chernaik identifies Hobbes as the fashionable philosopher for Charles II’s court. Turning to Rochester’s own take on Hobbesian thought, Chernaik suggests a direct connection between the “right reason” articulated in “A Satyr Against Mankind and Reason” and Hobbes’s reduction of human action to selfpreservation. Yet Chernaik complicates the relationship between Rochester’s depiction of sexuality and Hobbes’s materialism: while Rochester might identify the highest achievable human aspiration being sensually defined, he does expose a darker side to this belief—the state of perpetual restlessness.14 Though Chernaik claims that Rochester appears to reject libertinism, as well as Hobbesian materialism, as an empty, terrifying prospect, the question remains of why Rochester is unable to contemplate a means of escape. The first section of this chapter fleshes out Bacon’s and Hobbes’s linguistic reform. Regarding Bacon’s semiotics, Baconianism inhibits the solipsistic tendency of imagination that is nurtured by nonmaterially determined language. From his anxiety over poesy in The Advancement of Learning to identifying words as “idols of the marketplace” in Novum Organum, language is central to Bacon’s new science. To establish his scientific utopia, in which mankind’s “rightful authority” has been regained, words must not allow the mind to be internally preoccupied. Words need to find their referent externally, in an objective reality. Bacon’s motivation for establishing a materially based language is due to the corrupting influence of the imagination. To clarify, within Bacon’s tripartite ontology of the mind—reason, memory, and imagination—it

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is the imagination that filters representation of reality through desire. Poesy opens a gap between the res (thing) and the verba (word) in which an unfettered imagination creates an egocentric conception of the world. A scientific language, in contrast, restricts the mind by locating legitimacy of words externally in a universally experienced, objective reality. Bacon predicates his instauration on the policing of the imagination through a concrete language. In a similar manner, Hobbes condemns nonsensical or immaterial thought for its potential political subversion of nonregulated language. My reading of Hobbes’s linguistics primarily focuses on the first two books of Leviathan. It is here Hobbes most clearly articulates his assault on nonmaterially determined language and the threat it poses to the commonwealth. As with Bacon, Hobbes’s ultimate concern is with the mind’s inability to distinguish between subjective and objective experience. The individual mind’s untrustworthiness to self-regulate or guard itself from the abuses of dissidents leads Hobbes to confer authority onto the sovereign. For Bacon and Hobbes, the imagination’s proclivity for immaterial speech is the source of both epistemological perversion and political instability. In regard to Bacon’s narrative of scientific progress and restoration, only through a material encounter with Nature can humanity hope to regain Adamic dominance. While not directly participating in Bacon’s tale of science and Eden, Hobbes locates materialism as the foundation to his ideal political state. Only once the populace has been purged of the false shadows of insubstantial thought can the harmony that the absolute sovereign brings be realized. This chapter then reads “A Satyr Against Mankind and Reason” and “Absent from thee” as Rochester’s depiction of an imagination brought under the epistemological control Bacon and Hobbes demand. In turning to “A Satyr,” Rochester’s clearest engagement with Hobbesian materialism, the speaker’s notion of “right reason” reflects a mind that is scientifically disciplined. As the “Satyr” speaker notes, the human mind tends to mire itself in abstract thought, to suppose itself capable of contemplating the infinite as opposed to being subjugated to the body’s appetites. The “Satyr” speaker’s argument denaturalizes “right reason”: rather than being instinctual, the speaker implicitly marks his “right reason” as the result of a “reforming will” (103).15 To what extent, however, does the poem privilege the speaker’s voice? Is the speaker’s “right reason” endorsed or critiqued by the poem? How these questions are addressed informs how critics read the relationship between the two sections of the poem. Does

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the epistemology the speaker advocates force him to adopt a cynical, bleak outlook on humanity? Does the poem undercut materialism by revealing a world governed by such a principle? While through his “right reason” the speaker claims to expose the self-interestedness of humanity, the poem’s real focus is on the speaker’s own mindset that compels him to read society as truly corrupt. It is his empirical perspective that causes the speaker to create a dystopia, which he misrecognizes as the “fact” that a properly disciplined mind comes to. The critical divide on the question of whether the second half of the poem endorses the speaker’s “right reason” either finds that the speaker expresses despair at now seeing humanity in its complete depravity or finds that he is a liberated individual. I suggest a different answer to this question: the latter half of the poem dramatizes the results of the intellectual baggage that comes with the speaker’s “right reason.” The poem does not see humanity as morally bankrupt, but grieves for a mind that can only read it as such. “Absent from thee” likewise depicts the mind circumscribed by materialism. That is, the speaker’s inevitable loss of the Edenic bliss that his beloved offers results from the limits of his “fantastic mind”: Dear! From thine arms then let me fly, That my fantastic mind may prove The torments it deserves to try That tears my fixed heart from my love. (4–7)

The speaker’s internal conflict of being aware of true love yet knowing his unavoidable transgression is not depicted as a division between bodily lust and emotional longing, but instead as the incompatibility between the scientific mind and the poetic heart. The mind turned away from intangible comfort torments the speaker, whose only hope to achieve peace is to die in his beloved’s embrace. The poem dramatizes the cost of a mind subjugated to materialistic thought. Rochester’s speaker endures an experience analogous to Damon’s in “The Mower’s Song,” discussed in the previous chapter. While Damon’s sexualizing mind provokes his reenactment of the Fall, the “Absent” speaker attributes his downfall to the materialism to which his mind is confined. Both Rochester and Marvell present in their respective speakers the anguish of occupying the new scientific perspective. Through adherence to what can be considered a Baconian lens, Rochester’s speakers in both “A Satyr” and “Absent” further distance themselves from an Edenic state.

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“Joining at Pleasure Things which in Nature Never Have Come Together”: Bacon’s End to Linguistic Play

Though the central thrust of Bacon’s scientific renewal is to turn men’s minds away from a preoccupation with words that leads their gaze toward the heavens as opposed to material reality, Bacon’s treatises establish a linguistic basis for the new science. The aligning of the verba and the res becomes a primary urgency for Bacon: the potential danger of postlapsarian human language is to obscure the mind’s ability to conceptualize reality. When words are liberated from things, or take precedence over them, all human knowledge risks tumbling into vain abstractions, misrecognizing words as possessing an innate rather than a conventional relationship to things. As Bacon notes in the preface to Novum, the linking of words to things is foremost: “If therefore the very notions of the mind (which are, as it were, the soul of words, and the basis of the whole system and structure) are badly and carelessly derived from things, and vague, inadequately defined and circumscribed, in short, if they are defective in many ways, then everything collapses.”16 Here Bacon articulates urgency in wedding words to things themselves: knowledge, without words determined through reference to a universally, empirically experienced reality, allows for subjective, idiosyncratic desires to efface themselves as objective. Bacon foresees a materially saturated language as policing the mind’s innate tendency to fetishize its own linguistic constructions. Bacon displaces authority of meaning outside of the mind. However, such a shift from an epistemology of words to one of things is not easily accomplished, since it demands a circumscribing of desire. While Bacon expounds much on the abuses of words, it is the human imagination that must be fettered by a materially determined language. Words that have divorced themselves from materialism allow for the infiltration of desire into the mind’s conception of reality. Poesy, according to Bacon, liberates words from the burden of material referents and caters to the imagination’s narcissism. As Bacon warns in De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum (Of the Dignity and Advancement of Learning, 1623), the appeal of poesy is the space it opens for the imagination to insinuate its own desire on reality: “For as the sensible world is inferior in dignity to the rational soul, Poesy seems to . . . satisfy the mind with shadows of things when the substance cannot. For if the matter be attentively considered, a sound argument may be drawn from Poesy to show

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that there is agreeable to the spirit of man a more ample greatness, a more perfect order, and a more beautiful variety than it can anywhere (since the Fall) find in nature.”17 Imagination, rather than instinctually seeking out true and accurate accounts of Nature, thrives in the lacunae between the verba and the res so that it may enact a linguistic play. It is interesting that Bacon delegitimizes poesy as a branch of human knowledge by dismissing it as an act of play: “For as for poesy, it is rather a pleasure or play of imagination than work or duty thereof.”18 Regarding the issue of Bacon’s condemnation of poesy, critics remark that to understand Bacon as rejecting figurative language outright neglects to consider Bacon’s own use of tropes in his writing.19 Instead, the risk of poesy’s free-floating language exists in the mind’s generating knowledge. In the second book of The Advancement, Bacon outlines this distinction. Poesy used as merely a “character of style” does not pose a great threat; however, when the representation that poesy offers usurps that of reality, knowledge is corrupted: “[Poesy] is taken in two senses in respect of words and matter. In the first sense, it is but a character of style, and belongeth to arts of speech, and is not pertinent for the present. In the latter, it is—as hath been said—one of the principal portions of learning, and is nothing else but feigned history, which may be styled as well in prose as in verse.”20 Bacon further argues poesy’s revising of history, “feigned history,” trumps actual history in presenting “acts and events greater and more heroical” that “satisfieth the mind of man.”21 Poesy’s appealing to the imagination’s desires locates the final referents for words internally, while philosophy and history demand a vocabulary both public and objectively constructed. Robert Stillman claims that Bacon realizes the work of the poet as a dangerous parody of that of the student of Nature: “By joining and severing the matter of nature at will, the poet, in turn, parodies the work of the natural philosopher. It is a case of lawless imagination against lawful reason, antiphilosophy against true philosophy.”22 The liberty that the poet takes, “joining at pleasure things which in nature never have come together” suggests a value of words in themselves over things and so frustrates the efforts to create a productive material science.23 Only by reducing poesy to play and establishing a language of things can Bacon hope to cordon off desire from learning. For all that Bacon outlines the abuses of language by classical philosophers and humanists, he rests the final fault on the imagination. To clarify, it is not the poetical license taken with words, but rather the imagination’s

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tendency to exploit the gap poesy renders between words and things. In The Advancement, Bacon posits a scenario within the mind: the imagination acts as the sovereign, while reason and appetite compete to sway it. Further explicating the relationship between reason and imagination, Bacon cites Aristotle’s analogy of the two faculties of the mind to the authority a magistrate has over a free citizen. The imagination possesses a significant degree of autonomy: “Neither is the imagination simply and only a messenger; but is invested with, or at least wise usurpeth no small authority in itself, besides the duty of the message.”24 The imagination is not a passive faculty of the mind that is acted upon by figurative speech, but rather may wield control over the mind’s perception of reality. However, the imagination’s proclivity to restructure reality according to its desires inhibits the mind’s rational capacity: “The part of human philosophy which is rational is of all knowledges, to the most wits, the least delightful, and seemeth but a net of subtlety and spinosity.”25 Prior to detailing his doctrine of the idols of the mind in Novum, Bacon catalogs the foibles of human understanding and reiterates his earlier fear of the imagination: the human mind creates a fiction, based on its own desires, that it assumes for reality and reads all else as confirming this fantasy. Bacon crystallizes his anxiety over the imagination in refusing to see the human mind as capable of producing a “dry light”: “The human understanding is not a dry light, but is infused by desire and emotion, which give rise to ‘wishful science.’ For man prefers to believe what he wants to be true. He therefore rejects difficulties, being impatient of inquiry; sober things, because they restrict his hopes . . . the light of experience because of his arrogance and pride, lest his mind should seem to concern itself with things mean and transitory.”26 Bacon’s materially determined language seeks to discipline the mind, to relocate linguistic authority externally in a universally experienced reality since the imagination cannot be trusted. Bacon passes on the urgency of containing the mind within a scientific language to his former secretary, Thomas Hobbes. Throughout Leviathan, Hobbes defines the initial step for establishing a harmonious commonwealth as securing words.27 As with Bacon, Hobbes rejects the humanist fetishizing of words—the focus on eloquence and tropes— and expresses suspicion, though of a different kind, toward the effect such idolatry of language has on the imagination. Also, as with Bacon, Hobbes emphatically circumscribes human thought to the material world. In Book I of Novum, Bacon constantly reiterates his fundamental

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distinction between the “idols of the human mind,” which prove to be vain fictions, and “the ideas of the divine mind,” which have an empirical existence. Likewise, Hobbes ascribes to all thought a material basis: “Also because whatsoever (as I said before,) we conceive, has been perceived first by sense, either all at once, or by parts; a man can have no thought, representing any thing, not subject to sense.”28 Only in the abuses of language does there exist a space in which thought mistakenly strays from materiality. That speech, which proposes an escape from the senses, merely opens a realm of error: “And words whereby we conceive nothing but sound, are those we call Absurd, Insignificant, and Nonsense.”29 Hobbes reiterates Bacon’s anxiety of the humanist’s preoccupation with words here: the words that signify “nothing but sound” possess the autonomy that Bacon finds resulting from the humanist “Pygmalion frenzy.” Hobbes distances his assault on words that denote immateriality from Bacon’s in several ways. First, Hobbes pushes his materialism further to adopt a plenist view in positing that the universe is entirely materially constituted: “For the Universe, being Aggregate of all Bodies, there is no reall part thereof that is not also Body.”30 While Bacon cordons off human thought from an incorporeal space, Hobbes obliterates the possibility of such a space existing. Rather, the immaterial, for Hobbes, becomes a delusion perpetrated on the populace by a deceptive clergy, whose design is to subvert the legitimate authority of the sovereign, whose power is limited to the body.31 In addition, Hobbes locates the final referent for language not in an objective reality experienced by all, but places the sovereign in the position of stabilizing words. That is, instead of adopting an empirical view, Hobbes appears more as a social constructivist in that the meaning of words rests in a politically constituted authority. Hobbes offers a scenario in the first book of Leviathan of when an agreed-upon arbitrator is called on to resolve a controversy, for only when others invest one with such authority can doubt be alleviated. Beyond these departures from Bacon’s linguistic project, Hobbes identifies a more sinister aspect to metaphorical language. Hobbes ascribes to such abuses of speech an underlying motivation of deception and manipulation: “And on the contrary, Metaphors, and senseless and ambiguous words, are like ignes fatui; and reasoning upon them is wandering amongst innumerable absurdities; and their end, contention, and sedition, and contempt.”32 Within this nebulous space that metaphor opens, those who would promulgate dissent have the freedom to obscure the thoughts of

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the populace in order to impose their own political agenda. Controversy breeds uncontrollably when those disrupting the state power are able to confuse thoughts with language that signifies nothing. For Hobbes, the imagination provides fruitful grounds for such deceivers to practice: “If this superstitious fear of Spirits were taken away, and with it, Pronostiques from Dreams, false Prophecies, and many other things depending there on, by which crafty ambitious persons abuse the simple people, men would be much more fitted than they are for civill Obedience.”33 Dreams, which are the result of the imagination, potentially confuse the naïve, “of how to distinguish Dreams, and other strong Fancies, from Vision and Sense.”34 Both Bacon and Hobbes share the necessity of policing the imagination so that desire or fancy and material data are distinct. To Lose Paradise through the “Right Reason”

“A Satyr Against Mankind and Reason” offers a bridge between Bacon’s and Hobbes’s need to protect the imagination from abstract language and Rochester’s intellectual frustration with the materially saturated scientific mindset. In general, critics read the poem as Rochester’s clearest articulation of Hobbesian materialism: the first half of the poem (1– 110) rehearses Hobbes’s rejection of abstract reasoning and the redirecting of thought toward the body. The “right reason” that the speaker advocates subjugates the mind to the body’s appetites: My reason is my friend, yours is a cheat; Hunger calls out, my reason bids me eat (106–7)

The “your” in these lines being the “Satyr” speaker’s imagined interlocutor (“But now, methinks, some formal band and beard / Takes me to task. [46– 47]). As opposed to the figurative reasoning of “formal band and beard,” who would employ the mind to “take flight beyond material sense, / Dive into mysteries” (67–68), the speaker regards such aspirations as leading humanity into “error’s fenny bog and thorny brakes” (15) and misrecognizing his authentic bestial nature. Thomas H. Fujimura understands Rochester’s speaker as echoing Hobbes’s rejection of transcendence and the indictment of those thinkers who would attempt to mystify with incomprehensible speech: “Like Hobbes, Rochester has nothing but contempt for vain speculations about matters that transcend sense; the works . . .

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confound the mind with mere words.”35 The abuses of language Hobbes so vociferously condemns throughout Leviathan enable the forays of the mind into the “flaming limits of the universe” (69). Fujimura also notes that the speaker’s “right reason” divorces logic from any moral considerations other than self-preservation, which he ascribes to Hobbes’s materialism.36 Underlying the dialogue between the speaker and his interlocutor is the dispute over humanity’s ontology. That is, while the “formal band and beard” depicts human beings as essentially dualistic, conceptualizing the mind as giving one access to an incorporeal space, the speaker adopts Hobbes’s characterization of the human as solely body. The highest ambition that the speaker’s “right reason” affords him is the satiation of his appetites. According to Chernaik, this “right reason,” predicated on instinct, reduces all human behavior to “the natural desire for self-preservation,” which Hobbes saw as “the fundamental law of nature.”37 Chernaik reads the speaker’s liberating of human desire from ethical concerns as reflecting Hobbes’s “materialist psychology of appetite and aversion.”38 Much of the critical discussion of the poem’s epistemological concerns focuses on the mock debate between the speaker and the “formal band and beard.” In doing so, scholars tend to mischaracterize the target of the speaker’s diatribe. For example, Fujimura reads the poem as presenting a dualistic struggle for epistemological dominance over the mind: “In attacking speculative reason but subscribing to right reason, Rochester is more or less in accord with Hobbes.”39 Yet, though Hobbes identifies forces looking to draw the minds of the people into dangerous figurative thinking, ultimately, as I argue, it is the human imagination itself that is the locus of his concerns. For Hobbes, as well as for Bacon, the potential of intellectual corruption is not social and external but innate to the mind. Likewise, the “Satyr” speaker does not initially direct his attention toward the “pathetic pen of Ingelo,” “Patrick’s pilgrim, Sibbes’ soliloquies” or the teachings of Diogenes the Cynic (73–74, 90–91); instead, the speaker perceives the human mind as that which leads us astray by becoming preoccupied with its own musings: Reason, an ignis fatuus in the mind, Which, leaving light of nature, sense, behind, Pathless and dangerous wandering ways it takes Through error’s fenny bogs and thorny brakes (12–15)

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The speaker exposes the mind’s proclivity to delve into abstractions as what must be guarded against. The speaker argues that the most daunting obstacle humanity confronts in obtaining “right reason” is the instinct of the mind to climb “mountains of whimsy” only to tumble “headlong down / Into doubt’s boundless sea” (17–19). Following the speaker’s logic, figurative thinking is that which is most natural to the mind. The tendency “that makes a mite / Thinking he’s the image of the infinite” is what marks the natural human intellectual condition (76– 77). The mind’s capacity for reasoning will inevitably devolve into collective insanity: This busy, puzzling stirrer-up of doubt That frames deep mysteries, then finds them out, Filling with frantic crowds of thinking fools Those reverend bedlams, colleges and schools (80–83)

Within this cynical outlook presented by the speaker, the mind creates its own downfall, entrapping itself in the delusion that comes from the mysteries it supposes to exist. The speaker implicitly inverts the terms of the argument: while condemning the “formal band and beard” for indulging in what is instinctual to the mind, the speaker’s adopting of “right reason” presents a mind that is disciplined. The speaker’s description of his reformed reasoning evinces a regimented intellect: only when the reason is bound to the senses can it presume to give “us rules of good and ill from thence” (101). It is a mistake to confuse the speaker’s “right reason” with instinct, because rather than giving in to the mind’s urges the speaker “bounds desires with a reforming will” (102). Bacon, Hobbes, and the “Satyr” speaker all voice the same anxiety about the human rational capacity and offer materialism as a means of policing our diseased minds, of which speculative reasoning is a symptom. More controversial than the issue of Hobbes’s influence on the speaker’s worldview is whether the poem comes to endorse the speaker’s “right reason” or scrutinizes Hobbesian materialism. Much critical ink has been spilled over this question: while some scholars caution against viewing the poem as privileging the “Satyr” speaker’s espousal of “right reason,” others find Rochester’s own adherence to Hobbesian materialism echoed in the speaker’s voice. In arguing for either side of this

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polemical aspect of the poem, critics turn to its second half (112–231), reading here either the speaker’s own implicit despair in discovering the depravity central to mankind or his further deflation of humanity’s pretention to exist beyond its bestial nature. My own answer to the question of whether the poem ultimately endorses the speaker’s “right reason” agrees with the line of thought that finds in the speaker’s condemnation of humanity’s moral pretense an indictment of the epistemological position he posits in the first half. However, the poem does identify the speaker’s tragedy not as his accurately seeing that “man, with smiles, embraces, friendship, praise, / Inhumanly his fellow’s life betrays” (135– 36), but as his inability to perceive society any other way. After adumbrating his “right reason,” the “Satyr” speaker launches into a grand ethical indictment of humanity’s moral superiority. In an elaborate rhetorical maneuver, the speaker chides all human endeavor for being predicated on fear: For fear he arms, and is of arms afraid, By fear to fear successively betrayed; Base fear, the source whence his best passions came (141–43)

Within the speaker’s moral outlook, any ennobling act becomes sheer hypocrisy, for these endeavors suggest a lack of conviction to reveal one’s innate cowardice: For which he takes such pains to be thought wise . . . Leading a tedious life in misery Under laborious, mean hypocrisy (149, 151–52)

The logical consequence to the speaker’s assertion is that the open coward is the truly brave individual, for he has shed the fear of appearing afraid. From this ethical position that the speaker carves out, he preemptively obliterates the ground on which rests humanity’s “wisdom, power, and glory . . . / The good he acts, the ill he does endure” (154–55). The speaker circumscribes an examination of human nature to the issue of duplicity: And all the subject matter of debate Is only: Who’s a knave of the first rate? (172–73)

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The speaker walls off his stance from any exception to his debasement of human behavior. However, as Chernaik notes, the poem’s epilogue (174– 222) exposes a chink in the security of the speaker’s materially reductive view: “Indeed, the closing lines exemplify a striving after spirituality which the earlier part of the poem castigates as arrant folly.”40 The speaker does, as Chernaik claims, betray his own dissatisfaction with the realization he arrives at from the perspective of his “right reason.” There is a moment of epiphany implicit for the speaker in “discovering” the “fact” of the selfinterestedness that undergirds human action. For Chernaik, it is as if the “Satyr” speaker comes at the end of his diatribe to find a world devoid of any moral worth, completely materially driven. Yet Rochester makes a further rhetorical maneuver: it is not that the reader is to come to grieve with the speaker for the state that humanity is truly in, but instead the poem distances the reader to find that the problem rests with how the speaker perceives the world. The poem does not finally locate humanity’s lack of moral conviction as objective knowledge, but attributes it to the speaker’s own mind. This circular argument that the “Satyr” speaker constructs—the terms of his “right reason” make him blind to that which could counter his materialist depiction of humanity—becomes apparent in his calls for his imagined interlocutor to find evidence of mankind’s virtue. The epilogue suggests a tension for the speaker between his epistemology and a desire to escape his perspective. The speaker seems to open his moral critique to the possibility of humanity’s ethical redemption: as he claims, if a genuinely pious man may be found. If upon earth there dwell such God-like men, I’ll here recant my paradox to them, Adore those shrines of virtue, homage pay, And, with the rabble world, their laws obey. (216–19)

The tone of the speaker’s admission appears glib and flippant: for the speaker, anyone able to sustain a truly moral life becomes “God-like,” which already negates the possibility of such a person existing. The speaker even further secures his stance by rebutting any potential opposing evidence, which he cites as more an exception than the norm: “If such there are, yet grant me this at least: / Man differs more from man, than man from beast” (220–21). However, despite the speaker’s protest

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to the contrary, his taunts to his reader to show him moral exemplars betray a sense of despair. Though he might appear cynical, the speaker demonstrates dissatisfaction with how he looks at people. Part of this frustration with his materialist perspective comes through in his account of the corruption endemic to the realms of the court and the church. Regarding his impression of the court, the speaker constantly takes apart any hypothetical example of ethical merit: If so upright a statesman you can find, Whose passions bend to his unbiased mind, Who does his arts and policies apply To raise his country, not his family, Nor, whilst his pride owned avarice withstands, Receives close bribes through friends’ corrupted hands (185–90)

Here, through the conditions he places on identifying any such “statesman,” the speaker preempts the possible existence of such a person at court. For the speaker, behind every political act would appear the hope of personal advancement, material gain. Likewise, the speaker’s diatribe against the clergy indicates the impossibility of sustaining a moral position. The hyperbolic nature of the catalog of grievances the speaker levels against the clergy already disposes him to finding “avarice, pride, sloth, and gluttony” (199) underlying the churchman’s pretense. The “Satyr” speaker’s tragedy comes in his ascribing to an epistemology that entirely incapacitates him to locate virtue in humanity: every act of altruism will necessarily be read as a false sign of the essential self-interest that lies below. This hermeneutics within which the speaker confines himself problematizes the “out” that he proposes: But a meek, humble man of honest sense, Who, preaching peace, does practice continence; Whose pious life’s a proof he does believe Mysterious truths, which no man can conceive. (212–15)

Chernaik reads these closing lines of “A Satyr” as evidence of the speaker’s religious guilt and a “yearning of deliverance from the prison of the flesh.”41 Again, for Chernaik, the crux of the poem is the consequence

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that comes with the speaker’s discovering what humanity is truly like with his privileged perspective. The grief implied in the speaker’s condemnation is located external to him. To summarize, as Chernaik would have us read the speaker’s tragedy, through his “right reason” the speaker reveals the true character of mankind. His dilemma is not one he creates, but rather is one he discovers. It is at this point that I diverge from Chernaik’s interpretation of the “Satyr” speaker’s crisis. Rather than depicting his speaker as a soul tortured with the truth he discovers, Rochester critiques the epistemological position to which the speaker confines himself. The speaker formulates a mindset that holds any external sign toward immateriality as already suspect: the speaker’s “right reason” already invalidates as false the hypothetical “humble man’s” “pious life.” His intellectual bind is that the speaker demands empirical evidence for that which is counter to such a materialistic perspective. Rochester should not be conflated with his speaker: the poem removes the reader from the speaker’s point of view to realize that such a perspective actually engenders the speaker’s grief. This concern over a mind that is entirely weighed down by materialism is a plight shared by the “Satyr” speaker and the philandering lover in “Absent from thee.” While the “Satyr” speaker predicates all thought on serving bodily appetites and, perforce, sees humanity as irredeemable, the speaker in “Absent” is conscious of the consequences of his materialistic mind. Both of Rochester’s speakers confront the same epistemological bind of no longer being able to sustain intellectually any escape from the material. The “Satyr” speaker implicitly and the “Absent” speaker explicitly express a comparable anguish at the disjunction between the scientifically disciplined mind and the desire to access a realm beyond the sensual. The “Absent” speaker’s “fantastic mind” in many ways reflects the “Satyr” speaker’s “right reason.” In both poems, the speaker’s mind is limited to the immediate and the literal, privileging present sensual satisfaction over abstract contemplation. The “Satyr” speaker circumscribes the terms of contentment: “Our sphere of action is life’s happiness / And he who thinks beyond, thinks like an ass” (96–97). Here “life’s happiness,” for the speaker, becomes a material phenomenon, and his castigation of speculative philosophy reflects the Baconian and Hobbesian imperative of inhibiting the mind’s proclivity to delve into abstraction. While the new scientific mind, properly secured from the ignis fatuus

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of the imagination, devotes itself to satiating the sensual appetite, the “Absent” speaker identifies the cost to be the eradication of any solace he may hope to find. The poem emblematizes the speaker’s internal turmoil between his desire for emotional fulfillment and his insatiable lust that leads him to lose his “everlasting rest” (16) as a schism between his “fantastic mind” and “fix’d heart”: “That my fantastic mind may prove / The torments it deserves to try / That tears my fixed heart from my love” (6–8). The poem offers a metacontemplation of the speaker’s corrupting mind: the “Absent” speaker, unlike the “Satyr” speaker who situates the problem as external to his mind, is conscious of the ruin his mind will lead to and portrays himself as unable to resist such temptations and occupy the paradisiacal space that he views in his beloved. Though the poem may seem a bit self-serving considering Rochester’s own infamy for his affairs, the speaker realizes the cost of the materially disciplined mind that Bacon and Hobbes theorize. In “Absent,” the speaker’s lament of his beloved’s absence becomes an indictment of his materially dependent mind. In the first stanza, the source of the speaker’s anguish is not his separation from his beloved, but rather his inability to find comfort in the contemplation of a mystical bond that may sustain him. The speaker’s relationship with his beloved is only enjoyed by him through her physical presence; the speaker does not have recourse to a metaphorical appreciation of their relationship. Marianne Thormählen notes that “Absent” departs from the typical convention of the love poetry dealing with this topic in how the speaker experiences the absence of his beloved: “In [‘Absent’], the speaker deliberately seeks the pain of absence. More than that he begs to be excused from adding to it by having to think about absence as a fixed period of time.”42 As Thormählen correctly reads the speaker’s dilemma, absence does not offer the speaker the opportunity for poetic meditation, but is only experienced as negative. There is nothing to fill the void for the “Absent” speaker. While I agree with Thormählen’s claim, I posit further that the reason the “Absent” speaker experiences the beloved’s absence as entirely negative is because he cannot comprehend it in any other way. The “Absent” speaker’s literal mind is spatially and temporally oriented, so the absence of the beloved can only distress rather than prove enlightening: Absent from thee, I languish still; Then ask me not, when I return?

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The straying fool ‘twill plainly kill To wish all day, all night to mourn. (1–4)

Notably, the speaker actually excuses himself from dwelling on the separation from his beloved. Here the speaker demonstrates the literal conception of their period of parting to which he is confined: to suggest an end point would compel the speaker to realize the time till their reunion. Paradoxically, conceiving of their separation within in a given span of time causes the speaker further torment, due to the speaker’s imaginative inability to escape time. While for the more abstract thinker time is fluid, the “Absent” speaker is subjected to a rigid experience of time. This necessity of presence also comes through in Rochester’s “The Mistress”: But oh, how slowly minutes roll When absent from her eyes, That feed my love, which is my soul (5–7)

Like the epistemological failing of the speaker in “Absent,” the speaker of “The Mistress” entirely defines love through the physical. However, in “The Mistress” the speaker reads the pain incurred through the absence of the beloved in a manner contrary to that of the “Absent” speaker; though the anguish is inescapable, it becomes an opportunity to affirm the devotion between the lovers: Kind jealous doubts, tormenting fears, And anxious cares, when past, Prove our hearts’ treasure fixed and dear, And make us blest at last. (33–36)

Both “The Mistress” and “Absent from thee” offer comparable yet opposing accounts of separation: while neither speaker alleviates absence through poetic contemplation, the torment endured for the speaker in “The Mistress” testifies to the sincerity of their love (“Love raised to an extreme: / The only proof ‘twixt her and me / We love, and do not dream” [26–28]).43 Pertinent to this discussion, the experience of absence as depicted in Donne’s poems on this topic reveals the contrasting epistemological positions that each poet’s speakers occupy. For example, in Donne’s “The Anniversary,” time becomes escapable for the speaker:

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All other things, to their destruction draw, Only our love hath no decay; This, no tomorrow hath, nor yesterday, Running, it never runs from us away, But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day. (6–10)

The metaphysical meditation on love here exempts the lovers from a quotidian adherence to time; the speaker’s thoughts are liberated to conceive of a space outside of time. Yet Rochester’s speaker does not possess the intellectual ability to transcend days and nights. The speaker’s mind reflects Hobbes’s circumscribing human knowledge to the finite: “Whatsoever we imagine, is Finite. Therefore there is no idea or conception of anything we call Infinite.”44 Being subjugated to time, absence, for the “Absent” speaker, is only pain, not a moment of transcendence or insight. Consequently, the speaker’s literal mind demands the beloved’s physical presence. The speaker reflects Hobbes’s ontology of the mind in his dependence on the physical presence of his beloved. For Hobbes, imagination, which he conflates with memory, is a material phenomenon: it is a residual effect on the physical experience of the pressure from external objects on the senses. Hobbes’s account then circumscribes this faculty of the mind. Without the physical presences of the object, the imagination decays: “And any object being removed from our eyes, though the impression it made remains with us, the Imagination of the past is obscured, and made weak; as the voyce of a man is in the noyse of the day. From whence it followeth, that the longer the time is, after the sight, or Sense of any object, the weaker is the Imagination.”45 Again the mind’s processes are no longer immaterial, but entirely materially determined: the intellect inevitably succumbs to the tangible span of either time or distance. In “Absent from thee,” Rochester critiques Hobbes’s materialist conceptualization of the mind’s workings through the speaker’s lament of the absence of his beloved. The poem’s crux is the speaker’s inability to sustain intellectually his bond with his beloved; Rochester dramatizes Hobbes’s claim of the imagination as being a “decaying sense.”46 Contrarily, the lover in Donne’s “A Valediction: forbidding Mourning” liberates his thoughts from the dependency on the beloved’s presence: “But we by a love, so much refined . . . Care less eyes, lips, and hands to miss” (17, 20). To unfetter the mind of the lover from a fetishistic preoccupation with the body allows the speaker of “A Valediction” to mitigate the separation from his beloved through

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the intricate conceits he constructs, to bypass both time and matter. In this poem Donne appears almost to anticipate the pain of Rochester’s materialist speaker in “Absent”: Dull sublunary lovers’ love (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit Of absence, because it doth remove Those things which elemented it. (13–16)

The imagination Donne’s speakers possess is unavailable to the speaker in “Absent”; he is unable to mitigate the anguish of their separation by constructing a metaphysical connection that is not dependent on the body. “Absent from thee” dramatizes the cleaving of the intellectual from the emotional, how the mind of the speaker proves incapable of sustaining and even inimical to his secular paradise. Critics of the poem note this internal struggle that plagues the speaker. David M. Vieth argues that the poem can communicate the speaker’s dilemma only by employing religious tropology: “His condition of psychological perversity, knowing the good but being powerless to choose it, which is nearly unintelligible in secular terms, becomes clear enough in religious terms by analogy to the spiritual paralysis of sin and despair.”47 Only through religious trope—that is, depicting the speaker’s condition as a postlapsarian state—can the poem begin to come to grips with the speaker’s self-ruin, according to Vieth. For Chernaik, the speaker realizes the union with his beloved as a path toward spiritual redemption. The poem’s depiction of the Edenic bliss of the beloved’s bosom signals the speaker’s “contemplation of divine grace”: “As such, [the poem] represents a step further on the road to conversion than the passages in Burnet which show Rochester unable to cross over the line separating doubt from faith.”48 Yet Chernaik mistakes the speaker’s vision of paradise as a space that the speaker is able to occupy; though he may briefly enjoy the solace of his beloved’s embrace, only in death can the speaker maintain such tranquility. “Where love and peace and truth doth flow” (11) represents an irrational space that the speaker’s materialistic mind threatens. The speaker portrays himself as at the mercy of the caprices of his materially saturated thoughts, which mislead him to recognize coitus as a means of satisfying his desires. The poem suggests as much in the

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word “fantastic.” In “The Mistress,” “fantastic” connotes the tendency toward confusion and misrecognition: Fantastic fancies fondly move And in frail joys believe, Taking false pleasure for true love But pain can ne’er deceive. (29–32, emphasis added)

The alliteration of “f ” in the stanza connects “fantastic” with “frail” and “false.” The overarching argument of “The Mistress” is against the fictions created to circumvent the beloved’s absence. In this sense, the “fantastic fancies” refers to the narrative that the mind constructs to substitute for the pain of separation. The speaker in “The Mistress” would have one embrace the sorrow of separation, for it is materially based as opposed to finding comfort through the imagined transcendent bond with the absent beloved. In contrast, while “fantastic” in the context of “Absent” similarly implies that which is misleading, it is now the material that obstructs the speaker’s joy. The “Absent” speaker’s “fantastic mind” cannot be reconciled to the desire of his “fixed heart.” (Here the alliteration is meant to suggest contrast.) “Absent” reverses the evaluation between the material and the imaginary that “The Mistress” sets up: the “fantastic” mind’s pursuit of physical pleasure the “Absent” speaker labels as fraudulent. In referring to his “fantastic mind,” the “Absent” speaker demonstrates his own awareness of his epistemological dilemma. Within a larger scope, the speaker’s indictment of his materially oriented mind indicates Rochester’s own condemning of the scientific mind as fetishistic, directing one to make an idol out of the physical. While characterizing “Absent” as a “prayer for deliverance,” in which the inevitably sinful speaker abases himself in the hope for redemption from his beloved, Chernaik distinguishes the poem as unique in Rochester’s corpus in that here the poet is able to reconcile the two modes of experience, the literal and the figurative. In the final stanza, the choice facing the speaker is whether he will forgo the “restless sexual freedom which excludes salvation.” Overall, Chernaik identifies the speaker’s own body, the temptations of the flesh, as that which frustrates his existing within his beloved’s “safe bosom.”49 As the preceding discussion of “Absent” indicates, I locate the source for the speaker’s ruination in his scientific mind.

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The refuge the beloved provides is an irrational space, one beyond the scope of the material: When, wearied with a world of woe. To thy safe bosom I retire Where love and peace and truth doth flow, May I contented there expire (9–12)

The first line marks the beloved’s “safe bosom” in contrast to the public sphere in which the speaker is compelled to participate in following the whims of his “fantastic mind.” The speaker elevates the beloved above the instability and transience of physical reality; that is, while the speaker subjugated to materialism is forced into an endless series of sexual encounters, always searching for his next fix, the beloved provides permanence. Stanza III suggests a place exempt from adherence to time and so intellectually unsustainable for the speaker, who is restricted to the finite. I need to remark here that the speaker demonstrates two conflicting modes of cognition: though his “fantastic mind” cannot conceive of a metaphysical union with the beloved, the speaker also is aware of the anguish to which he is led. The crux of “Absent from thee” is the speaker’s epistemological tension. The final line of stanza III indicates that a resolution between the speaker’s scientific mind and metaphysical heart is not possible, for death is merely an escape, not a reconciliation. In his essay on metaphysical poets, T. S. Eliot praises Donne, for whom there was no dissociation between thought and feeling: “A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.”50 For Eliot, Donne’s verse reflects the poet’s intellectualizing of his emotions, the defining aspect of an “amalgamating” mind: he thought his feeling and felt his thoughts. Such is the opposite of the “Absent” speaker: his is an intellect that cannot take that necessary step into the ideal to sustain the desires of his “fixed heart.” The glimpse of a secular paradise is all that the speaker can ever hope to achieve. In the final stanza, the speaker analogizes his infidelity to his beloved to the postlapsarian human condition. The speaker’s philandering becomes not a question of if, as Chernaik suggests, but rather a matter of when. The redemption for the speaker must come from the beloved, since he admits any agency as being part of his fallen nature. “Lest, once more wandering from that heaven, / I fall on some base heart unblest” (13–14). Though due to his “fantastic mind” the speaker cannot permanently live within the

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metaphorical “bosom” of his beloved, he will undoubtedly lose the chance at such bliss when left to his own devices, when his mind is deprived of the physical that sustains it. The demand that the speaker places on his beloved is to allow him his freedom and yet also forgive his sexual indiscretions. Though God may be looked to for constant forgiveness, the beloved cannot be expected to possess the same capacity for the speaker’s self-destructive philandering. Pertinent to the issue of the poem’s critique of the scientific mind, the source of the speaker’s propensity to sin, his materialistic mind, alienates him not only from his beloved but also from himself. “And lose my everlasting rest” (16): a mind so incapable of contemplating transcendence damns the speaker; even the word “everlasting” here requires speculative reasoning that intellectually is unavailable to him. The “Absent” speaker’s materially oriented mind is the source of his perdition. To Misrecognize Paradise: Milton and Rochester

Unlike Bacon’s project to regain humanity’s Edenic dominance over Nature through a science of things, the “Absent” speaker condemns materialism as fetishistic, though he cannot break free from it. The last two stanzas of “Absent from thee” depict the speaker’s philandering as reenacting the Fall. In contrast to Rochester’s other poem dealing with the theme of humanity’s postlapsarian state, “The Fall,” where the result of Adam and Eve’s transgression is the body’s irresponsiveness to the will, “Absent” portrays the results of the Fall as epistemological. To a degree, the plight of the “Absent” speaker is analogous to that of Milton’s Adam and Eve. In deceiving Eve into tasting the fruit in Book IX of Paradise Lost, Satan relies on experiential logic in forming his argument: “look on me, / Me who have touch’d and tasted, yet both live” (687–88). Satan’s deception depends on Eve’s confining her reasoning to her senses; Satan acts as the protoscientist. Stanley Fish recognizes in Satan’s temptation of Eve Milton’s own indictment of empirical science: “By making Satan an empiricist, Milton dramatizes for the seventeenth-century projectors the traditional warning against intellectual pride.”51 Having eaten of the fruit, Eve begins to reveal her own empirical mind: Experience, next to thee, Best guide; not following thee I had remain’d In ignorance (807–9)

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The notion that truth is accessible to sensual experience marks Eve’s intellect as fallen; her mind understands her reality only on a literal basis, hence her claim that heaven might not even note her transgression being so physically far away: “heaven is high, / High and remote to see from thence distinct / Each thing on earth” (811–13). Milton realizes the fall in epistemological terms: Adam and Eve begin to participate in the same flawed logic of Satan, whose mind cannot conceive of a space beyond sensual experience. Likewise, in “Absent from thee” Rochester indicts the materially oriented mindset for jeopardizing the speaker’s ability to exist within the Edenic space of his beloved’s bosom. The “Absent” speaker identifies his adoption of scientific perspective as that which denies him Paradise.

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CONCLUSION

Promethean and Postscientific Narratives

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his book is about stories, specifically the two narratives that emerged around the seventeenth-century epistemological shift from the premodern to the scientific. The first is the narrative of promised recovery, which becomes the undercurrent in Bacon’s advocating of the new science: an empirical, inductive, experiential methodology would reveal the secret workings of Nature that were at one time immediately available to the prelapsarian mind. Nature’s rebellious state could be overcome and made accommodating to humanity’s wellbeing. The knowledge and mastery over the natural world Adam had once enjoyed had not been forfeited by his Fall. Baconian science, at its core, is salvific. As this study argues, Donne, Marvell, and Rochester deny that the return Bacon proposes is possible. The resistance launched by these writers to the new science, primarily Baconianism, occurs within narrative. By understanding the epistemological work these writers accomplish through their literary texts, we can begin to appreciate two important facets of the intellectual atmosphere of seventeenth-century England: first, how the profound shift that Bacon inaugurated was experienced psychologically, and second, how narrative was a site for epistemological struggle. In Devotions we can see this tension between environmental narratives contained in a single text. Donne offers two opposed narrative readings, which I identify as Baconian and anti-Baconian, for the events surrounding his bout with relapsing fever. Each one entails a different conception of humanity’s relationship to Nature. Donne’s text shows the extent to which narrative structures our interaction with Nature. In

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their iterations of the counternarrative to the tale of humanity’s regaining Eden through scientific dominance of the natural world, Marvell and Rochester reveal through their poetic resources what it feels like to possess (or be possessed by) the new scientific mind. Occupying a mindset aligned with Bacon’s, their protagonists lament the alienation of a materialist perspective. Marvell and Rochester perform a similar epistemological task by exposing how the quasiscientific mind of their speakers creates the problems from which they suffer. Marvell and Rochester critique the scientific mind from within: we are not to grieve with their speakers for the emptiness of the world revealed, but rather for the perspective within which they are trapped. An undergirding premise of this study is that epistemological controversies manifest in conflict between narratives. The way we come to know Nature is informed by the stories we adhere to, particularly the roles we assign to ourselves and to the nonhuman actors. Or, as Carolyn Merchant eloquently states, “Narratives form our reality. We become their vessels. Stories find, capture, and hold us.”1 In Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture (2004), Merchant explores the power of narrative to promote epistemology. Tracing the tale of recovery that structures Western civilization’s conception of Nature, Merchant writes, “To the extent to which people believe in or absorb the story, it organizes their behavior and hence their perception of the material world. The narrative thus entails an ethic and the ethic gives permission to act in a particular way toward nature and other people.”2 Narrative, for Merchant, is a form of “idealist philosophy,” in which reality is filtered through and made to conform to a predetermined ideological lens. Until now the tenor of this study has been descriptive, unearthing what I take to be the seventeenth-century counternarrative to the Baconian tale of advancement and restoration. In the last pages of this study, I will focus on how the preceding discussion of the conflict between narratives has relevance for the current tension and debates in how we think of our relationship with Nature. Over the past two decades, two different environmental narratives have emerged, each offering contrasting paths for humanity’s engagement with the natural world. On the one hand, an environmental tale is being told that positions humanity in the role of caregiver of Nature. Albert Borgmann articulates this conception of humanity as responsible for the

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maintenance of the environment: “While once we humans were as children over against nature in its exceeding force, we are now as young adults, entrusted with the care of parents whom we have surpassed in physical and perhaps in mental power as well.” Borgmann argues that due to the Scientific Revolution Nature appeared to become dependent on humanity. Borgmann even further labels the resistance to acknowledging this caregiver position as akin to a Peter Pan complex, in which one “resolutely refuses to leave the charmed world of childhood.”3 To an extent, Borgmann picks Bacon’s tropology of science as a type of maturation. In his polemical look at the modern environmental movement, Green Delusions: An Environmentalist Critique of Radical Environmentalism (1992), Martin W. Lewis launches an attack on what he terms “ecoradicalism.” Under this umbrella title, Lewis groups various disparate strains of environmentalist schools of thought, such as “antihumanist anarchism,” “eco-marxism,” and “eco-feminism,” all of which, for Lewis, propose naïve regressivism and are ultimately a potential threat to the survival of humanity and the natural world. According to Lewis, these radical environmentalisms indict technological progress for obstructing the “simple” relationship between humanity and Nature. These subversive “greens” advocate a program of reversion, a return to a more primitive condition, “calling for the total deurbanization, economic autarky, a ban on most forms of high technology, and complete dismantling of capitalism.”4 Lewis warns that such a program would bring about the very ecological disaster most of us would seek to avert: “To return to preindustrial ‘harmony’ would necessarily entail much more than merely decimating the human population. Yet unless our numbers could be reduced to a small fraction of present levels, any return to nature would be an environmental catastrophe.”5 As opposed to finding the catalyst for the destruction of Nature in modern technological advancement, Lewis argues it is only through technology that we will make compatible human and nonhuman needs. In Lewis’s vision, the harmony between the economic and the ecological will only come through an active human management of the natural world, which requires the expansion of our technological prowess. Lewis terms his program “Promethean environmentalism,” in which he foresees our future lying “not in the abandoning of technology, but in harmonizing it to the new environmental vision.”6 It is interesting to note that an

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essential corollary to the techno-environmental utopia Lewis promises is the further conceptual removal of humanity from Nature: “In a Promethean environmental future, humans would accentuate the gulf that sets us apart from the rest of the natural world—precisely in order to preserve and enjoy nature at a somewhat distant remove.”7 Working against what he sees as the misguided efforts of the “eco-radicals” to break down the divide between humanity and the natural world, Lewis calls for a further “disembedding” of humanity from Nature, which would not be able to accommodate the burden of our current population without technological aid. But it is only through technology that humanity will be able to achieve sustainability. Moreover, Lewis weds capitalism and environmentalism, suggesting the former will allow for the aspirations of the latter: “Only a capitalist economy can generate the resources necessary for the development of a technologically sophisticated, ecologically sustainable global economy.”8 Overall, Promethean environmentalism offers a reassuring, even comforting, scenario in that it sees humanity dictating the terms of its ecological survival. Lewis constructs a narrative in which humanity retains control of the encounter and Nature becomes dependent on our technological development. In many ways, the narrative Lewis sets up is a revision of Bacon’s salvific tale of science. Both Promethean and Baconian narratives foreground technological advancement as opening the path toward humanity’s ecological salvation. Through our intervention and management of Nature, Bacon claims that humanity can regain a paradisiacal harmony. For Bacon, science allows for a way of remedying the chaos the natural world fell into following Adam and Eve’s transgression. Likewise, Lewis finds technology as redeeming humanity for its own ecological transgressions: “Prometheans maintain, however, that for the foreseeable future we must actively manage the planet to ensure the survival of as much biological diversity as possible. No less is necessary if we are to begin atoning for our very real environmental sins—for our fall from grace that began at the end of the Pleistocene epoch.”9 Like Bacon, Lewis tells a narrative of redemption achieved through humanity’s own scientific endeavors.10 I do not mean, however, to suggest that these two narratives completely map onto one another. As discussed in Chapter 2, Bacon characterizes Nature as aggressive and resistant to human endeavors of restoration, presenting obscured images of itself to the scientific gaze. In

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contrast, Lewis recognizes the human potential to bring about ecological annihilation. Lewis, unlike Bacon, sees the possibility for humanity to victimize Nature, and on this basis, technology becomes a way actually to protect the nonhuman world: “The prospect of humankind someday coexisting easily with the earth’s other inhabitants . . . can best be achieved through gradual steps that remain on the track of technological progress.”11 Still, I find that Lewis and Bacon share a strong commitment to the theme that harmony between humanity and the earth requires technological progress.12 A different narrative, what I term the postscientific, has emerged against Lewis’s Promethean environmental tale. For proponents of this narrative, the belief that harmony between the human and the morethan-human worlds may come only through the technological evinces the very hubris on humanity’s part that has led to our present environmental crisis. At its center, the idea of a “techno fix” is anthropocentric, again conceiving of humanity as the dominant player in its story with Nature. Writing against the presumption that Nature can be “improved” upon, Eric Katz admonishes that “environmental policy or environmental ethics” predicated on the “techno fix” promotes a “world view, in which human interests shape and redesign a comfortable nature.”13 Here we might see Katz as challenging Lewis’s claim that his program is environmental in that the natural for Lewis is still a subordinate, submissive player—a thing ultimately made available to human manipulation. According to the perspective Katz’s claim offers, the ethics Lewis posits are still on human terms. Likewise, Val Plumwood avers that “techno fix” environmentalism participates in the same rationalist mindset of subject-object, human-Nature, and active-passive. The presumption that humanity has the ability to remake Nature in a way that our encounter with the environment is more sustainable, transforms the natural world into “a passive field for human endeavor, a malleable order that has no agency or autonomy of its own and imposes no real constraints on us. It is only totally available for its owners’ remaking as they see fit into a more rational and marketable form, but better so remade, ‘improved.’”14 As Plumwood explains, the danger of the belief that humanity can stave off environmental disaster through technology resides in the fact that the story written is one sided, or “monological.” What techno-environmentalist thinkers, such as Lewis, fail to grasp is

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that the nonhuman is rendered mute within their narrative. The ethics of Promethean environmentalism become an imposition on Nature, ultimately determined by only one actor. In Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (2002), Plumwood finds that environmental salvation will come not through the increasing technology, but through a cultural shift in perspective: “So the problem is not primarily about more knowledge or technology, it is about developing an environmental culture that values and fully acknowledges the non-human sphere and our dependency on it, and is able to make good decisions about how we live and impact on the non-human world.”15 For Plumwood, the effort to further decouple the human and the more-than-human worlds fosters the false perception that human survival is less contingent on Nature. The peril of this misperception, or what Plumwood terms the “Illusion of Disembeddedness,” is the potential to make the natural world more available to unethical treatment: “Dependency on nature is denied, systematically, so that nature’s order, resistance and survival requirements are not perceived as imposing a limit on human goals or enterprises.”16 While Lewis argues that to “disengage humanity from nature” through “technological progress” is the only way that we may ethically “manage” the natural world, Plumwood counters that by making Nature nonessential if we open it up to unethical treatment. What inhibits our ability to engage Nature in a communicative and ethical manner is the illusion of our independence that comes with overvaluing our technological prowess. The postscientific environmental narrative recasts the human and natural characters as equals, through the recognition of the limitations of human capacity to comprehend Nature. Merchant hopes our and Nature’s future will be guided by a “partnership ethic.” While admitting to the importance of developing technologies that will allow for a more sustainable relationship between humanity and Nature, Merchant also admonishes human players to perceive the natural world as autonomous. Merchant locates Nature’s autonomy at the moment when scientific rational models fail to comprehend it. To recognize Nature as an independent actor necessitates that we appreciate the natural world as inexplicable, not available to reductive thinking. Only when we have done so can an ethical engagement begin: “Humans, as bearers of ethics, would acknowledge nonhuman nature as an autonomous actor which cannot

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be predicted or controlled except in very limited domains.”17 Merchant’s “partnership ethic” undercuts the security and comfort that come with the mechanistic view of Nature and embraces the skepticism of chaos theory, where “the human ability to predict the outcome of [natural] processes is limited.”18 To base our environmental future on the “techno fix,” or management, model reinforces the belief that the outcome of any human intervention into the natural world is knowable and so controllable. Conversely, a “partnership ethic” demands our acceptance that an ecosystem is so complicated any human manipulation of it can never be fully predicted. For Merchant, this new postscientific environmental narrative replaces the monological with the dialogical, the universal with “the situated and the contextualized,” interrogation with conversation, the dictatorial with the consensual.19 I would like to suggest here the relevance of the counternarrative that has been the focus of this study for our current attempt to write a new environmental tale. Though I do not wish to abstract either voice from its particular intellectual milieu, I find Donne’s and Marvell’s depictions of the human engagement with Nature, whether through the physicians’ diagnosing of and ministering to Donne’s body or Damon’s vengeful mowing of the meadows, speak to the postscientific environmental narrative. In Devotions, Donne dramatizes the type of encounter between humanity and Nature that both Plumwood and Merchant envision, one in which we no longer control the terms of the conversation. Donne offers a glimpse into what it would be like psychologically to abandon an anthropocentric view of Nature. Donne locates humanity in a discomforting subject position, marked by an anxiety that comes from accepting that Nature is uncontrollable. His experience as a patient allows Donne to inhabit a decentered perspective and so tell a story in which the human character does not occupy a distanced, privileged role in its encounter with Nature. On this basis, I find that Donne realizes in his narrative the repositioning of humanity in relation to the natural world Merchant calls for. In outlining her notion of the “partnership ethic,” Merchant admits the security that accompanies a modern scientific worldview must be relinquished: “In such situations, nature is a dynamic actor, a force encountered on terms not as comfortable to the Enlightenment ideal of the control of nature.”20

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The tragedy Damon endures in “The Mower’s Song” touches on the concern that Plumwood expresses over the anthropocentric view of the more-than-human world. As Chapter 3 discusses, Damon, by adopting what I identify as a Baconian lens, interprets himself as being in an antagonistic relationship with the meadows. Finding the meadows have disrupted his egocentric worldview—that they do not mirror his emotional turmoil—Damon looks to impose violently his will onto his environment. To an extent, Marvell in “The Mower’s Song” speaks to Plumwood’s critique of the anthropocentricism that undergirds the modern engagement with Nature. Part of the logic of anthropocentricism, according to Plumwood, is the denial of agency to that which is other than human: “Anthropocentric culture endorses a view of the human as outside of and apart from a plastic, passive and ‘dead’ nature which is conceived in mechanical terms as completely lacking in qualities such as mind and agency that are seen as exclusive to the human.”21 Plumwood notes that through adhering to this human-centered view we are unable to “empathise” or relate “dialogically” with Nature.22 Plumwood identifies a potential danger of anthropocentricism as the easy destruction of that which is Other. Both Plumwood and Marvell expose the destructive nature of the mindset that cannot accept an autonomous nonhuman realm. It might seem more difficult to find the relevance that Rochester possesses for the conflict in narrative driving current environmental discourse. As we saw in Chapter 4, Rochester’s iteration of the counternarrative to the increasingly predominant promotion of the materialistic mindset departs from that of Donne and Marvell. Whereas Donne and Marvell challenge the anthropocentricism that undergirds the Baconian drama of humanity and the natural world, Rochester reveals the despair and alienation that accompany a solely material view of the world. However, if we accept that Rochester in “A Satyr” and “Absent from thee” reveals not the true emptiness of reality, but the torment of the perspective that can only see reality as so, then his poems tangentially touch on a critical task of the postscientific environmental narrative—the resistance to the dualism of mind and body, spirit and matter, and idealism and materialism. The crux of the tragedy that Rochester’s “Absent” speaker suffers is the internal division between his “fantastic mind” and “fix’d heart.” The speaker’s materially disciplined mind denies to him the

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paradisiacal, figurative space of his beloved. In outlining the philosophical work that lies ahead in conceptualizing a new environmental narrative, Plumwood demands we overcome the binary between spirituality and materialism that has plagued Western thought. In its place, Plumwood proposes a “materialist spirituality” that “does not invoke a separate spirit as an extra independent individualized ingredient but rather posits a richer, fully intentional non-reductionist concept of earth and the material.”23 Plumwood sets forth a path to move beyond the spiritmatter rationalist binary that plagues Rochester’s “Absent” speaker. Western culture now appears again to be caught between two possible parts to enact in our environmental narrative: whether we will actively “manage” the environment through technology (Promethean) or accept Nature as finally beyond scientific comprehension (postscientific). We can see this conflict between Promethean and postscientific narratives manifested in the literature on the worst ecological disaster of the twenty-first century so far, the 2010 Gulf oil spill. On April 20, the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil rig experienced a massive explosion, resulting in the tragic death of 11 rig workers and the cracking of a pipeline approximately five thousand feet below the ocean surface. Over the next four months, the American public, along with most of the world, watched as crude oil spewed into the Gulf of Mexico. Estimates as to the rate of the spill were contested vociferously, ranging from five thousand to sixty-eight thousand barrels a day.24 Pictures of pools of oil miles long floating on the ocean’s surface permeated the media coverage, while the live feed of the leak became the iconic image of the disaster. Eightysix days from the initial explosion, on July 15, the Macondo well was successfully capped.25 Then, as Naomi Klein reporting for The Nation notes, “Most of us moved on to the next telegenic disaster.”26 However, what emerged in the months following the killing of the well is a debate as to whether this story has been concluded or not. The tension among scientists as to the extent of ecological damage perpetrated is, I believe, as much about a conflict in narrative as it is in empirical data. Has the ecosystem of the Gulf of Mexico survived this human-made, or anthropogenic, catastrophe? To what extent can we assure ourselves that our industrial carelessness has not irreparably ruined this community of the natural world? To survey the reporting since the “capping” of the leak is to witness the struggle between those wishing to write a tale

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of environmental restoration and those resisting the belief that the full extent of damage may ever be known. In a New York Times article, “Oiled Gulf May Defy Direst Predictions,” Leslie Kaufman and Shalia Dewan offer a picture of the Gulf on the verge of recovery. Though acknowledging the scientific community is in disagreement regarding the scope of the disaster, the article cites various statistics and firsthand accounts to suggest the extent of damage did not reach the levels of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill. Further, a narrative emerges of a “crisis averted.” Leland Hale, an environmental scientist inspecting the Gulf Coast marshlands, is quoted as observing that the oil has long been washed away: “I would have expected rapid die-off, but that’s not what’s out there.”27 Regarding the subsurface oil plumes, feared for producing oxygen-depleted “dead zones,” Terry Hazen, head of the ecology department at Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory, remarks that the plumes have become undetectable. Hazen avers that the oil spill “was an ecological disaster.”28 However, against the declaration of Nature being restored, there is another articulated narrative, in which the lack of closure of this environmental disaster is emphasized. In their New York Times piece examining the scientific controversy over the environmental damage, Brian Skoloff and Harry R. Weber caution that the preliminary reports of the Gulf ’s environmental recovery might be causing us to unjustifiably imagine a conclusion of this tale: “The doomsday scenarios feared during the worst period of the gushing well did not play themselves out, as much of the oil is believed to have evaporated or been dispersed, marshes have sprung back to life and fewer dead animals than feared have been found. But that good news does not mask concerns that the country might be turning its attention away prematurely, considering the very real damage that has been done.”29 The predominant concern in Skoloff and Weber’s piece is that the US public might be too easily ascribing to a comforting belief that the scope of the disaster is known and the damage is remediable by human intervention. Klein strikes a similar cautionary note in challenging the rush toward closure to the DWH oil spill. Klein points out the catalyst behind each stage of this disaster is the rationalist belief that the nonhuman world is both knowable and the outcome of human intervention can be predicted: “First came the fateful decision to drill in parts of the earth we do not understand, taking risks that are beyond our ability to comprehend. Next, when disaster struck, came

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the decision to use dispersants to sink the oil rather than let it rise to the surface, saving what we do know (the coasts) by potentially sacrificing what we don’t know (the depths). And now here we are, squeezing our eyes shut before the results are in, hoping, once again, that what we don’t know can’t hurt us.”30 Klein very much echoes the critique that both Plumwood and Merchant launch against the modern scientific narrative of human domination of the natural world: humanity’s assuming a managerial position toward Nature promotes a false sense of our ability to produce comprehensive knowledge of the more-than-human world.31 In his report commissioned by the Gulf Coast Claims Facility, John W. Tunnell Jr. lays out the difficulty in knowing the scope of the ecological damage and recovery of the Gulf environment. Tunnell identifies three variables in determining the extent of the detriment suffered by a marine environment due to an oil spill: (1) the amount of crude oil spilled, (2) the environmental conditions at the time of the catastrophe, and (3) the type of environment affected. In particular, Tunnell cautions against focusing merely on the quantity of crude oil spilled: “This has been revealed time and time again in many spills, showing that the ‘dose’ (the exact amount in a specific location at a particular time) of petroleum hydrocarbons into a particular habitat or on a particular species is the key element, not the total volume spilled. This, of course, is very difficult to measure over a wide area in a major spill.”32 Tunnell’s report consistently reinforces the complexity of the environment that is the Gulf of Mexico and so at times attempts to resist easy, definitive conclusions as to either the magnitude of the damage or the duration to be expected for ecological restoration. Tunnell notes “the near impossibility in accurately predicting the environmental impact or time of recovery.”33 However, within Tunnell’s report there is a conflict in narrative. While at moments Tunnell emphasizes the inappropriateness of ascribing any finality to the environmental impact, circumscribing it to knowable parameters, the report acknowledges that its purpose is to offer a conclusive statement on the effect on and recovery of specific commercial species: “The purpose of this report is to provide an expert opinion to the Gulf Coast Claims Facility regarding the duration of any negative biological effects of the DWH oil spill on those species commercially harvested in the Gulf of Mexico (primarily shrimp, crabs, oysters, and finfish).”34 Here we can see the attempt of the economic to dictate the

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terms of the ecological: that is, the ecological damage is reduced to the consequences suffered by those aspects of the environment that are commercially viable. Though positing estimates as to how long it will take for these commercially harvested species to return to prespill levels, Tunnell withholds offering any sense of an overall picture as to the recovery of the Gulf environment, especially for those inhabitants not considered in an economic perspective: “The effects of oil on plankton (food for larvae of fish and invertebrates) are currently unknown, or may be ever known. The effects of oil on trophic cascades and ecological interactions are also unknown.”35 To summarize the tension that marks Tunnell’s text, on the one hand, the report allows for a sense of closure demanded for economic purposes, yet, on the other hand, belies any such conclusion as a human imposition.36 The moment in the four-month disaster of the DWH oil spill that put this struggle between narratives into acute relief was British Petroleum’s use of Corexit EC9500A and EC9527A. Either sprayed from the air over surfaced oil or applied directly at the wellhead, these chemical dispersants produce a physical and chemical change that reduces the oil droplets to ten microns, ten times smaller than naturally dispersed droplets. The treated oil, rather than forming what is termed a “mousse” on the surface, is pulled, or entrained, into the water column.37 Once it sank, the oil became open to narrative interpretation. One interpretation portrayed what was occurring below the waves as a harmonious relationship between technology and Nature. Quoted in the Times-Picayune, Hazen offers a reassuring account of the microbial degradation of deepwater oil plumes: “That the oil-munching bacteria were able to consume tiny droplets of oil could validate the use of the Corexit chemical dispersant for helping to speed the biodegradation of the oil . . . although the long-term effects of Corexit on the ecosystem in the Gulf remains to be seen.”38 Hazen reifies the Promethean environmental narrative: humanity can redeem itself for its ecological transgressions through technology. Part of what the dispersants achieved was to allow for the advancement of the “crisis averted” storyline by removing the oil from the readily observable to the contestable. As Klein remarks, “When the oil sank, it didn’t disappear; it just joined so much else that the waves are hiding; so many other secrets we count on the ocean to keep.”39 In his article detailing the use of chemical dispersants, Charles W. Schmidt notes, “Whereas

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undispersed oil floats on water, smothering birds and marine mammals and fouling coastal resources, dispersed oil is transported throughout the water column, where it’s more available to marine life.”40 The ecological effects of the oil spill could no longer be seen (i.e., oil-drenched pelicans or sea turtles) but had to be inferred (i.e., poisoned zooplankton). To a degree what enabled BP’s use of Corexit was the lack of knowledge that surrounds the long-term effects of these chemical dispersants.41 Still, in opposition to the Promethean interpretation of the use of chemical dispersants, ecologists argue for a counternarrative that depicts the potential tragedy unfolding below the waves. Rather than viewing technology as enhancing the Gulf ecosystem’s restoration, environmental scientists found humanity’s misguided perception that Nature was a controllable system available to our successful intervention. In her testimony to the House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment, Samantha Joye problematizes BP’s spraying of chemical dispersants on the surfaced crude oil.42 Joye ascribes the use of dispersants to the “desire to keep the beaches clean and minimize the impact of the spill on coastal environments,” those parts of the Gulf “where the direct human impacts are perceived to be the greatest.” Beyond this anthropocentricism, Joye notes two other drawbacks to dispersing the oil: first, the application of dispersants at the wellhead made it difficult to accurately estimate the amount of crude oil gushing into the Gulf, and, second, instead of being cleaned up, entrained oil and dispersants remain and “are likely to influence oceanic ecosystems for years to come.” Joye speculates that the biodegradation of the entrained oil might lead to long-term dangerous alteration in the Gulf ecosystem. Joye notes that impact of oxygen depletion from microbial breakdown of the oil will produce different effects in surface water than in deep water: “While surface water hypoxia/anoxia [oxygen depletion] might be short-lived, deepwater hypoxia/anoxia could persist for years.” One of the possible consequences of deepwater hypoxia is the production of sulfidic water. While inhabiting an increasingly oxygen-depleted environment, deepwater microbes may switch to sulfate reduction, hence generating toxic water that might “be pushed into the coastal zones.”43 What emerges from Joye’s testimony is an unsettling narrative that challenges the belief that humanity can intervene and successfully restore Nature. As opposed to the Promethean environmental tale where

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technology becomes a means to humanity’s ecological salvation, Joye postulates a scenario in which our technological manipulation of Nature results in further environmental devastation. We might see Eric Katz as almost presciently speaking to Joye’s warning against the use of chemical dispersants when he cautions that “we must not misunderstand what we humans are doing when we attempt to restore nature . . . We are not restoring nature; we are not making it whole and healthy again.”44 Joye looks to explode the misperception that through our technology we have returned the Gulf ecosystem to an original, pristine condition. Underlying her testimony is an admonishment against the hubris inherent in the human endeavor to restore the natural environment: the decision to employ chemical dispersants requires seeing Nature as a closed system, hence both knowable and amendable. Joye implicitly demands a view of the natural world as an open system and the realization that the effects of our technological meddling may very well be beyond our control. *

*

*

My purpose in surveying the literature being generated about the DWH oil spill has not been to cast aspersions on those researching the ecological ramifications of this disaster. Rather my intent has been to suggest that the scientific debate over whether we can find comfort in the promise of the Gulf ecosystem’s recovery or realize that the consequences of our actions may not yet be fully known has as much to do with narrative as it does with empirical data. This is not to trivialize the work assessing the extent of the environmental damage. The environmental narrative we choose to promote has material consequences: it constructs our perception of the natural world, authorizes our actions, and, therefore, becomes responsible for the crises it engenders. I see the DWH oil spill, along with BP’s subsequent attempts to contain the disaster, as an imperative to abandon Bacon’s narrative of advancement and restoration that has directed the modern interaction between humanity and Nature. While writers on this disaster find BP’s arrogant treatment of Nature evincing a Baconian mindset, I would further suggest that what happened and is still occurring in the Gulf is a disruption of Bacon’s scientific tale of recovery.45 In attempting to fulfill Bacon’s narrative, we misrecognized the Gulf of Mexico as both known and available to our intervention. Moreover, the decision to use chemical dispersants was

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materially and ideologically implicated. The dispersants achieved the desired effect of sinking the oil below the waves. Yet the use of dispersants also sought to recuse and reestablish the Baconian narrative: humanity could once again reassure itself that it inhabits a world to be remade or improved upon through its technological advancements. I believe it is apparent in the discussions surrounding the ecological recovery of the Gulf of Mexico that we are at the pivotal moment regarding our environmental narrative: are we to adhere to the anthropocentric tale of Nature as open to scientific investigation and technological manipulation, or do we accept the story in which the natural world is not finally dependent on us? The DWH oil spill reveals the Baconian narrative that engenders human disruption of Nature is no longer sustainable. The new narrative we choose to pursue must require our abandoning the comfortable, dominant position that we create. Part of the intellectual work to be done is realizing that narratives are open to revision. As Merchant points out, “Once we identify ideology as a story—powerful and compelling; but still a story—we realize that by rewriting the story, we can begin to challenge the structure of power. We recognize that all stories can and should be challenged.”46 Yet to leave one narrative for another also demands a reimagining of our reality, involving such questions as how might we experience the natural world from a nonanthropocentric perspective, what would it be like to exist in a relationship with Nature that we don’t control, and how should ecological harmony now be redefined. By turning to those seventeenth-century writers who voiced the counternarrative to Bacon’s, we can begin to answer these questions and set out the conceptual framework for a new environmental tale.

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Introduction

1. John Lukács, At the End of an Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 3. 2. Ibid., 95. 3. Ibid., 97. 4. Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 184. 5. Ibid., 185. 6. Ibid., 191. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., 195. 9. Ibid., 198. 10. Ibid. For a history of the natural sciences’ influence on the social sciences, see Richard Olson, The Emergence of the Social Sciences, 1642– 1792 (New York: Twayne, 1993), 10–25. Also Sal Restivo, Science, Society, and Values: Towards a Sociology of Objectivity (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 1994). 11. Haraway, Simians, 198. 12. Ibid., 199. 13. Ibid., 201. 14. Susan J. Heckman dismisses Haraway’s model for the creation of scientific knowledge based on an intercourse with Nature theorized by Haraway as being reactionary, an attempt to revive a premodern system: “That alchemical model is a poor choice for a model for feminist science seems clear without liabilities. To hark back to a prescientific model merely reinforces the charges that feminist science is ‘irrational’ and ‘illogical.’” For Heckman, an epistemology based on conversation between the knower and the known, one that emphasizes connectivity, simply replicates the sexist binary of female/emotional/imaginary and male/rational/literal.

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15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

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Susan J. Heckman, Gender and Knowledge: Elements of Postmodern Feminism (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990), 131. Francis Bacon, Novum Organum—With Other Parts of The Great Instauration, ed. Peter Urbach and John Gibson (Chicago: Open Court, 1994), bk. 1, iii. Further citations from this text will include the book (bk) number followed by the aphorism number. When referring to the preface of Novum Organum, only the page number(s) the quotation appears on in this edition will be cited. Ibid., bk. 1, ii. Ibid., preface to The Great Instauration, 7, emphasis added. Ibid., preface to The Great Instauration, 30, emphasis added. James Bono, The Word of God and the Language of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 217–18. Bacon, Novum, bk. 1, cxxix. Carolyn Merchant, “The Secrets of Nature: The Bacon Debates Revisited.” Journal of the History of Ideas 69, no. 1 (2008): 148. Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 37. Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 43. Ultimately, Keller concludes that the Baconian scientific mind is hermaphroditic, which is established by the co-opting and denial of the feminine (Reflections, 41). Catherine Gimelli Martin adroitly resists interpreting Bacon’s instauration as based on the struggle between an easily identified male scientist and feminine Nature. Rather, Martin reads Bacon as often confusing gender designations. For example, Martin points to the gender ambiguity in Bacon’s scientific mind in The Masculine Birth of Time: “At this point in Bacon’s complex dialectic, the masculine impulse of conquest gives way to the birth of a receptive feminine mind in both partners, as ‘true’ sons of science guide an ambiguously gendered ‘nature’ by assuming ambiguously gendered minds.” Further, Martin turns to Bacon’s interpretation of the myth of Atalanta to challenge the clear gender assignments inappropriately ascribed to him: “even his ‘sons of science’ are at times identified as female and their opponents as masculinized forces of nature.” “The Feminine Birth of the Mind: Regendering the Empirical Subject in Bacon and His Followers,” in Francis Bacon and the Refiguring of Early Modern Thought, ed. Julie Robin Solomon and Catherine Gimelli Martin (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 71–73. See also Ruth Gilbert,

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Notes

25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

31.

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“The Masculine Matrix: Male Births and the Scientific Imagination in Early-Modern England” in The Arts of 17th-Century Science: Representations of the Natural World in European and North American Culture, ed. Claire Jowitt and Diane Watt (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002), 109–24. Perez Zagorin, Francis Bacon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 122. Nieves, Mathews, Francis Bacon: The History of a Character Assassination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 411. See Iddo Landau, “Feminist Criticism of Metaphors in Bacon’s Philosophy of Science,” Philosophy 73, no. 283 (January 1998): 47–61; and Peter Pesic, “Wrestling with Proteus: Francis Bacon and the ‘Torture’ of Nature,” Isis 90, no. 1 (March 1999): 81–94. Francis Bacon, De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum Libri IX, ed. Richard Foster Jones (New York: Odyssey Press, 1937), 390. This poem is one of three Herbert wrote to celebrate the publication of Novum. Sessions suggests Herbert’s overenthusiastic poem might have been in part due to Herbert’s own ambition: “On the one hand, it is clear from the occasion of the poem (and others to Bacon) that Herbert went beyond the necessity of his position as Public Orator to praise the Magna Instauratio. Was it a desire to ‘use’ Bacon, in the way that the Lord Chancellor himself had suggested all men should in his essay ‘Of Negotiation’?” William A. Sessions, “Bacon and Herbert and an Image of Chalk,” in “Too Rich to Clothe the Sunne”: Essays on George Herbert, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980), 170. Cristina Malcolmson briefly touches on the relationship between Herbert and Bacon. Discussing the two Latin letters and three Latin poems Herbert wrote in honor of Bacon’s gift of his Instauratio Magna to Cambridge, Malcolmson sees Herbert going beyond his duties in his effusion for Bacon: “Even the most dedicated of Herbert’s admirers would have to admit that this outpouring of attention from Herbert suggests his interest in future patronage from the prestigious Bacon.” From their correspondence and Herbert’s translation of The Advancement, Malcolmson further concludes Herbert to have been very versed in Bacon’s scientific theories. George Herbert: A Literary Life (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 81–86.

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32. Samuel T. Coleridge, “Francis Bacon,” in Coleridge on the Seventeenth Century, ed. Roberta Florence Brinkley (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1955), 54. 33. Ibid., 55. 34. Percy B. Shelley, “A Defense of Poetry,” in Shelley’s Prose, ed. David Lee Clark (London: Fourth Estate, 1988), 280–81. 35. See also William O. Scott, “Shelley’s Admiration for Bacon,” PMLA 73, no. 3 (June 1954): 228–36. 36. Thomas B. Macaulay, “Lord Bacon,” in Critical, Historical, and Miscellaneous Essays (New York: A. C. Armstrong & Son, 1860), 487. 37. Thomas Stearns Eliot, Homage to John Dryden: Three Essays on Poetry of the Seventeenth Century (London: Hogarth Press, 1927), 30. 38. L. C. Knights, “Bacon and the Seventeenth-Century Dissociation of Sensibility,” in Explorations: Essays in Criticism Mainly on the Literature of the Seventeenth Century (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1947), 122. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Mathews, Francis Bacon, 422. Chapter 1

1. See also Bacon’s discussion of scholastic contempt for experimentalism: “One evil that has grown to an extraordinary degree comes from a certain opinion . . . that it is beneath man’s dignity to spend much time and trouble on experiments and particulars that come under the senses and are materially bounded, especially since they are usually laborious to look into, too base for serious thought, awkward to explain, degrading to carry out, endless in number and minute in subtlety” Novum Organum—With Other Parts of The Great Instauration, ed. Peter Urbach and John Gibson (Chicago: Open Court, 1994), bk. 1, lxxxiii. 2. Perez Zagorin, Francis Bacon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 76–77. 3. Bacon, Novum, bk. 1, i. 4. Western epistemology up to the end of the sixteenth century, as Michel Foucault describes, was based on resemblance, the guiding principle that “made possible knowledge of things visible and invisible, and controlled the art of representing them.” The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 17. Foucault identifies four types of similitudes: convenientia, aemulatio, analogy, and sympathies. These similitudes look to negate any visible

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5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

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distinction or difference, always moving toward a unified universe. For example, aemulatio overcame perceived distance to bring things into reflective contact with each other: “There is something in emulation of the reflection and the mirror: it is the means whereby things scattered through the universe can answer one another.” In this sense, reality acts as a mirror that allows the human observer to see himself reflected everywhere: “The relation of emulation enables things to imitate one another from one end of the universe to the other without connection or proximity: by duplicating itself in a mirror the world abolishes the distance proper to it; in this way it overcomes the place allotted to it” (19). As opposed to modern scientific epistemology that effaces the observer in the world, the search for similitudes demanded recognition of one’s presence and relationship to, not distance from, the universe, which is composed of a “series of concentric circles reflecting and rivaling one another” ad infinitum (21). The demand placed on the knower was not to separate but to join with the thing to be known. Within this episteme of resemblance, the micromacrocosmic paradigm provided a foundational model. Foucault suggests precise ways that the micromacrocosmic paradigm functioned in this epistemology: first, by providing assurance of a connected, unified reality and second, by circumscribing the universe. Ultimately, contemplation of the external would lead the knower toward self-discovery, blurring the very lines between self and other that Bacon would work so hard to make clear. Instead of a distanced observer, the premodern natural philosopher would eventually discover the macrocosm within the self. It was the knowledge of these analogies that would enable the human imagination to provide order and unity to a chaotic universe. This epistemology incorporates the self into the world. Bacon, Novum, bk. 1, xlv. Ibid., bk. 1, xli. Ibid., preface to The Great Instauration, 23. Ibid., bk. 1, xlix. Ibid., bk. 1, xlvi. Ibid., bk. 1, xxxviii. For further discussion of Bacon’s doctrine of idols see Foucault, Order of Things, 50–58; Zagorin, Francis Bacon, 62–68, 82–86; William A. Sessions, Francis Bacon Revisited (New York: Twayne, 1996), 126–29; and Julie Solomon, Objectivity in the Making: Francis Bacon and the Politics of Inquiry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 44–46, 133–36.

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12. Bacon, preface to The Great Instauration, Novum, 15. 13. Stephen A. McKnight cautions against those critics who do not read Bacon’s use of the term idolum as denoting false idols of religious worship: “Bacon is arguing that humanity is guilty of focusing on its own creations or fantasies and that this prevents the study of God’s Creation.” The Religious Foundations of Francis Bacon’s Thought (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 79. 14. Francis Bacon, The Masculine Birth of Time in The Philosophy of Francis Bacon, trans. Benjamin Farrington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 66. For discussion of dating of The Masculine Birth, see Farrington’s introduction to his translation. 15. Bacon, Novum, bk. 1, lxxxix. 16. James Bono finds Bacon constantly insisting that the human knower acknowledge “the tendency of man’s mind to distort the world” as “a central legacy of the Fall.” The Word of God and the Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 225. 17. Bacon, preface to The Great Instauration, 14–15. 18. Bacon further elaborates the idea that superstition comes from an intermixing of religion and natural philosophy in his discussion of the idols of the theater: “There is also a third kind who out of faith and piety mix theology and tradition with their philosophy; among these, the vanity of some has led them astray to look for and derive science from spirits and supernatural beings. Thus the root and cause of error and false philosophy is threefold, Sophistical, Empirical, and Superstitious” (Novum, bk. 1, lxii). 19. Bacon, Novum, bk. 1, lxxxix. 20. Charles Whitney, Francis Bacon and Modernity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 24. 21. Ibid., 23. 22. McKnight, Religious Foundations, 49. 23. Ibid., 53. 24. Bacon, preface to The Great Instauration, 3. 25. Bacon, Masculine Birth, 62, emphasis added. 26. Mary Midgley, Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and Its Meaning (New York: Routledge, 1992), 1. 27. Ibid., 2. 28. Martin Carrier analyzes the tension between two seemingly conflicting models of scientific progress, those of scientific realism and of unlimited progress. The former envisions an end point for the accumulation of

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scientific knowledge. If science’s purpose is to make available the “truth” of our universe, then eventually such knowledge will be achieved: “The issue rather is conceptual in nature: the view that science gets more and more things right entails—or appears to entail—the view that the endeavor of disclosing nature will be brought to completion at some time.” “How to Pile up Fundamental Truths Incessantly,” in Science at Century’s End: Philosophical Questions on the Progress and Limits of Science, ed. Martin Carrier, Gerald Massey, and Laura Ruetsche (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), 94. According to scientific realism, the scientific mind possesses the ability to completely map out Nature’s most minute, intricate workings and that a time will inevitably come when science’s work is done. Such a view does posit a stable, finite, knowable universe. It is interesting to note that Carrier finds scientific realism depicts a model of scientific progress as a “geographic picture”: “You chart the surface of the earth, and if you are successful you inevitably reach a point at which no pristine territories are left” (97). This metaphor for science is evinced by Bacon’s linking his instauration to Columbus’s exploration of the New World. Carrier contrasts scientific realism to the postmodern realization of science as a limitless project, espoused by Thomas Kuhn. As Carrier summarizes the view of science as unending task, science is no longer seen as building toward a final point, hence no longer teleological. Science as the steady accumulation of ever increasingly accurate pieces of data about Nature is supplanted by science as a series of conceptual models overthrown. However, by unhitching science from any teleological ambitions, Carrier argues that science becomes more concerned with propagating itself than with progress. I would add that the postmodern critique denies to science its ability to sustain myth, which is central to the Baconian conception of science. 29. Among Baconian scholars, there is discrepancy as to when Bacon actually wrote New Atlantis. Along with other major works, Rawley dates the composing of New Atlantis between 1621 and 1626. Lisa Jardine and Alan Stewart, Hostage to Fortune: The Troubled Life of Francis Bacon (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999), 476. Rawley’s dating finds support in the fact that this is the period following Bacon’s impeachment and exclusion from court politics. However, twentieth-century scholars argue for a much earlier dating of the text’s composition. See Graham Rees, introduction to The Oxford Francis Bacon, vol. 6: Philosophical Writings 1611–1618 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); and Catherine Drinker Bowen, Francis Bacon, The Temper of a Man (New York: Fordham University Press, 1993), 167.

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30. For discussion of More’s use of irony in Utopia, see Clarence H. Miller, introduction to Utopia (New Haven, CT: Yale Nota Bene, 2001); Hannan Yoran, “More’s Utopia and Erasmus’ No-place,” English Literary Renaissance 35, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 3–30; Eric Nelson, “Utopia through Italian Eyes: Thomas More and the Critics of Civic Humanism,” Renaissance Quarterly 59, no. 4 (2006), 1029–57; and Thomas S. Engeman, “Hythloday’s Utopia and More’s England: An Interpretation of Thomas More’s Utopia,” The Journal of Politics 44, no. 1 (February 1982): 131–49. 31. Denise Albanese sees New Atlantis as actually revising the genre of utopian literature by putting itself forth as a blueprint for social reform. As Albanese remarks, “The New Atlantis belies the Utopia even as it invites juxtaposition with it: unlike More’s, Bacon’s text is ready, as the Virginian colony is, to take on all voyagers, to convert all readers.” “The New Atlantis and the Uses of Utopia,” English Literary History 57, no. 3 (Autumn 1990): 505. 32. Scholarship contrasting Utopia and New Atlantis has explored the significance of Bacon’s rejection of More’s Utopian custom of a bride and bridegroom being permitted to see each other naked prior to marriage. In contrast to this custom, the Bensalemites have the institution of the Adam and Eve’s pools: in place of the engaged couple viewing each other naked, a surrogate for each party examines the bride and bridegroom naked separately. Moreover, while the Utopian practice is meant to ensure sexual compatibility, the Bensalemites look to confirm either person’s fertility, to reveal any “hidden defects in men and women’s bodies.” Bacon, New Atlantis, 44. Through this comparison, critics of New Atlantis identify the urgency for Bacon to contain personal desire that jeopardizes the state’s co-opting of the domestic realm. See Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980), 173; Sessions, Francis Bacon, 157; Solomon, Objectivity, 98; Susan Bruce, “Virgins of the World and Feasts of the Family” in English Renaissance Prose: History, Language, and Politics, ed. Neil Rhodes (Tempe, AZ: Medieval & Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997), 125– 46; and Whitney, Francis Bacon, 199–201. 33. Thomas More, Utopia, ed. Clarence H. Miller (New Haven, CT: Yale Nota Bene, 2001), 49. 34. Francis Bacon, New Atlantis (London: Dodo Press, 2006), 34. 35. Bacon, Novum, bk. 1, lxxxii. 36. Ibid., bk. 1, c.

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37. Bacon, according to Steven Matthews, cites this passage as the “most prominent Scriptural support” for his belief that God had sanctioned his Instauration. Matthews quotes a passage from the Valerius Terminus in which Bacon interprets Daniel 12:4 as prophesying his own age when navigation and science will flourish together: “so to interpret that place in prophecy of Daniel where speaking of the latter time it is said, Many shall pass to and fro, and science shall be increased; as if the opening of the world by navigation and commerce and the further discovery of knowledge should meet in one time or age.” Quoted in Steven Matthews, Theology and Science in the Thought of Francis Bacon (London: Ashgate, 2008), 90. 38. Bacon, New Atlantis, 29. 39. For further discussion of the analogy that Bacon sees between European exploration and scientific knowledge as represented in the frontispiece to the Great Instauration see McKnight’s Religious Foundations, 47–53. 40. According to Whitney, Bacon circumvents the perennial problems that other Western writers of political utopias face, that of “how to overcome the flux of historical change and achieve stability, or how to achieve development in the face of historical degeneration,” by cordoning his utopia off from the “ages civil a moral philosophy” that have marred the past two millennia of Western intellectualism. Francis Bacon, 197. 41. Bacon, Novum, bk. 1, lxxiv, emphasis added. 42. Stephen McKnight elaborates on how Bacon draws on Plato’s myth of Atlantis from Critias and Timaeus. McKnight suggests, “Bacon apparently wishes to augment the apocalyptic religious images associated with the New Jerusalem with the prospects of the renewal of Atlantis.” McKnight concludes that texts confusing classical and Christian past speak to Bacon seeing England’s religious reforms as intimately joined to his restoration of scientific learning. Religious Foundations, 31–37. 43. Travis DeCook offers an insightful analysis of ark imagery in New Atlantis. According to DeCook, the ark that appears off the coast “epitomizes the Bensalemites’ special election”: in contrast to the centuries of religious controversy that has plagued most of Christendom, Bensalem experienced an immediate transmission of biblical truth. Further, DeCook reads Bensalem as serving as a quasi-ark: “Bensalem is the sole survivor of a glorious, ancient world: we are told that, ark-like, it remained unscathed from a flood, the divine revenge leveled on its militant neighboring nation Atlantis.” “The Ark and Immediate Revelation in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis,” Studies in Philology 105, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 109.

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44. Bacon, New Atlantis, 30–31. 45. Ibid., 26–27, emphasis added. 46. Francis Bacon, “Of Innovation,” in Francis Bacon, The Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 388. 47. In his discussion of modernity and Bacon, Whitney examines the tension between the themes of innovation and tradition in Bacon’s writing. What marks Bacon as modern, according to Whitney, is the apparent discontinuity between his desire for the new and his being tied to a “traditional matrix” of change, one grounded in reform: “Bacon’s modern discontinuity (oversimplifying for now) results from this circumstance: in places Bacon calls clearly for a revolution in thinking that will lead to radical changes in culture, but in the process of definition and elaboration the call comes to be opposed by the recalcitrant older ideas of change as reform that are used to grasp at it.” Francis Bacon, 12. The contradiction Whitney sees between the old and the new, the struggle for the novel but the dependence on the familiar, distinguishes Bacon as participating in modernity. On this basis, Whitney rebuts the claim that Bacon’s religious language was merely clever rhetoric but reads the pervasive Judeo-Christian symbolism in Bacon’s writings as speaking to the roots of modern secular thought in religion and mysticism. 48. Christopher Kendrick, “The Imperial Laboratory: Discovering Forms in the New Atlantis,” English Literary History 70, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 1033. 49. Bacon, New Atlantis, 24. 50. DeCook articulates exceptionally well the potential for unintentional irony that New Atlantis might fall into. According to DeCook, Bacon predicates his scientific utopia on the fantasy of the transparency of scripture: “He employs this fantasy primarily to express his dreams of an instauration of natural philosophy unencumbered by the consequences of Christian history’s perennial problem of the temporality of its sacred text.” “Ark and Revelation,” 122. 51. Bacon, New Atlantis, 35–36. 52. Bacon, preface to The Great Instauration, 18. 53. Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform 1626–1660 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1975), 25. 54. Ibid., 506. 55. For further discussion of the convergence of Baconianism and Puritan millenarianism and utopian projects, see Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 366–71; and Carola Scott-Luckens,

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56. 57.

58.

59.

60.

61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66.

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“Providence, Earth’s ‘Treasury’ and Common Weal: Baconianism and Metaphysics in Millenarian Utopian Texts 1641–55” in The Arts of 17th-Century Science: Representations of the Natural World in European and North American Culture, ed. Claire Jowitt and Diane Watt (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002), 109–24. Webster, Great Instauration, 469. Lewes Roberts, The Treasure of Traffike (London, 1641), 9, http://eebo .chadwyck.com.ezproxy.lib.lehigh.edu/search/full_rec?SOURCE=var _spell.cfg&ACTION=SINGLE&ID=13028924&ECCO=N&FILE=../ session/1304700198_24476&SEARCHSCREEN=CITATIONS &DISPLAY=AUTHOR&SUBSET=1&ENTRIES=2&HIGHLIGHT _KEYWORD=default (accessed March 12, 2010). Gabriel Plattes, dedicatory epistle to A Discovery of Infinite Treasure, Hidden Since the World’s Beginning (London, 1639), http://eebo .chadwyck.com.ezproxy.lib.lehigh.edu/search/full_rec?SOURCE=var _spell.cfg&ACTION=SINGLE&ID=99850059&ECCO=N&FILE=../ session/1304700512_25984&SEARCHSCREEN=CITATIONS &DISPLAY=AUTHOR&SUBSET=4&ENTRIES=10&HIGHLIGHT _KEYWORD=default (accessed March 12, 2010). Peter Harrison, “Original Sin and the Problem of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe,” Journal of the History of Ideas 63, no. 2 (April 2002): 240. Joseph Glanvill, Scepsis Scientifica (London, 1667), http://eebo.chadwyck .com.ezproxy.lib.lehigh.edu/search/full_rec?SOURCE=var_spell .cfg&ACTION=SINGLE&ID=11839211&ECCO=N&FILE=../ session/1304699817_23002&SEARCHSCREEN=CITATIONS &DISPLAY=AUTHOR&SUBSET=1&ENTRIES=2&HIGHLIGHT _KEYWORD=default (accessed September 10, 2010). Ibid. Sarah Irving argues that Bacon’s narrative of recovering Eden served not only as a foundation for seventeenth-century epistemological endeavors, but also authorized the British imperial project. See Natural Science and the Origins of the British Empire (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008). Robert Hooke, Micrographia, or Some Physiological Description of Minute Bodies (London, 1665). Bacon, preface to The Great Instauration, 15. For an overview of seventeenth-century views on Adam’s state in the Garden, see Harrison, “Original Sin,” 241–45. Hooke, Micrographia.

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67. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. David Hawkes (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2005), 96. 68. Ibid., 153. 69. Ibid., emphasis added. Chapter 2

1. R. C. Bald, John Donne, A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 450. 2. John Stubbs, John Donne, The Reformed Soul (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 399–400. 3. For biographical accounts of Donne’s illness, see Bald, John Donne, 450–55; David L. Edwards, John Donne, Man of Flesh and Spirit (New York: Continuum, 2001), 127–30, 172–74; and Stubbs, John Donne, 399–405. 4. See Terry Sherwood, Fulfilling the Circle: A Study of John Donne’s Thought (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 180–82; and Ramie Targoff, John Donne, Body and Soul (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 130–54. 5. For discussion of Donne and the new science, see Michael Francis Moloney, John Donne, His Flight to Medievalism (New York: Russell & Russell, 1965), 53–67; Deborah Aldrich Larson, John Donne and Twentieth Century Criticism (London: Associated University Press, 1989), 143–60; and Anthony Low, “Love and Science: Cultural Change in Donne’s Songs and Sonnets,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 22, no. 1 (1989): 5–16. David Hawkes discusses Donne’s reaction to Baconianism in Idols of the Marketplace (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 143–68. 6. Catherine Gimelli Martin, “The Advancement of Learning and the Decay of the World: A New Reading of Donne’s First Anniversary,” The John Donne Journal 19 (2000): 165. 7. Ibid., 189. 8. For further discussion of this tension in late sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury England between progressive and decay models of history, see Richard Foster Jones, Ancients and Moderns: A Study of the Rise of the Scientific Movement in Seventeenth-Century England (St. Louis, MO: Washington University Studies, 1961), 22–40. In his chapter outlining this debate, Jones cites Godfrey Goodman’s The Fall of Man, or the Corruption of Nature proved by the light of his Natural Reason (London, 1616) as representative of the historical view of the world’s and humanity’s perpetual decline. Goodman, as Jones summarizes, perceived the world in a ubiquitous state of degeneracy: “As man through his fall

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9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

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brought death upon himself, so he imposed death upon all nature. In general, Goodman’s idea is that the course of man and nature has been one of continual decline from a perfect state to the decay of old age.” Jones, Ancients and Moderns, 26. Goodman further perceives a parallel relationship between the inferior present state of Nature in its “fruitlessness” and “bareness” and the degeneration of the arts and science. As the earth has more and more lost the plenty of Paradise, mankind has experienced an analogous deterioration in its intellectual capability. In contrast to Bacon’s devaluing of ancient learning, Goodman declares that “for the Ancients, what so ever you shall observe in practice amongst them, you shal find that it stood with great wisdome and prouidence, if you please to have relation to the time and the occasion.” Quoted in Jones, Ancients and Moderns, 27. Also see Carolyn Merchant, Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004), 65–71. Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995), 34. John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions and Death’s Duel, ed. John F. Thorton and Susan B. Varenne (New York: Vintage Spiritual Classics, 1999), 117. Scholars date the composition of The Refutation of Philosophies to the first decade of the seventeenth century. Perez Zagorin suggest Bacon to have written the text between 1606-1607 (Francis Bacon [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998], 34). Benjamin Farrington dates the composition of this text to 1609. See Farrington’s preface to The Philosophy of Francis Bacon, trans. Benjamin Farrington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1964). Francis Bacon, The Refutation of Philosophy in The Philosophy of Francis Bacon, trans. Benjamin Farrington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 129. See also Merchant, Reinventing Eden, 74–75. Sylvia Bowerbank, Speaking for Nature: Women and Ecologies in Early Modern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 11. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 9. Bacon, Refutation, 130. Ibid., emphasis added. Ibid., 129. In the preface to Micrographia, Robert Hooke characterizes the empirical investigation of Nature in terms nearly identical to those of Bacon: “The footsteps of Nature are to be trac’d, not only in her

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20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

27.

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ordinary course, but where she seems to be put to her shifts, to make doublings and turnings, and to use some kind of art in indeavoring to avoid our discovery.” Micrographia, or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies (London, 1665). In Aphorism 66, Bacon attributes Aristotle’s false doctrine of primary elements to conclusions drawn from hastily observing the natural world in its “free state”: “Again when man looks at Nature in its free state, he comes upon species of things, of animals, of vegetables and of minerals, and so slips easily into the thought that there are in Nature certain primary forms of things which Nature is striving to bring forth.” Novum Organum—With Other Parts of The Great Instauration, ed. Peter Urbach and John Gibson (Chicago: Open Court, 2000), bk. 1, lxvi. Without resisting the ready picture that Nature presents of itself, the mind will produce an understanding of the natural world that bears no resemblance to material reality and create fantasies that reflect its own flawed perception. Zagorin, Francis Bacon, 122. Bacon, Novum, bk. 1, xcviii. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 41. Francis Bacon, “Proteus, or Matter. Explained of Matter and its Changes,” in De Sapientia Veterum (The Wisdom of the Ancients) (1605; repr., London: Dodo Press, 2008), 29. I wish to acknowledge here that in the original Latin version Bacon uses the phrase “vexet, atque urgeat” [vexing and urging]. Yet, “torture” has been used as accepted translation. See John Devey’s translation of Bacon’s “Proteus” in The Moral and Historical Works of Lord Bacon (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1888), 227. Ibid., 30. In her article examining the contemporary polemics surrounding the use of torture in late sixteenth-century England, Elizabeth Hanson contextualizes Elizabeth I and her Privy Council’s resort to torture as “conceptually allied” to the epistemology of the new science. Hanson discovers a homology between the work of the interrogator and that of the scientist: in both scenarios the “paradigmatic activities” position the knower as distanced from the hidden truth that the object of inquiry possesses. For Hanson, the use of torture during Elizabeth I’s reign exposes not the exertion of the sovereign’s will on the body of the accused, but rather the emerging method of accessing truth. “Torture and Truth in Renaissance England,” Representations 34 (Spring 1991): 53–84. Bacon, “Proteus,” 30.

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28. For an alternative reading of Bacon’s “The Myth of Proteus,” see Peter Pesic, “Wrestling with Proteus: Francis Bacon and the ‘Torture’ of Nature,” Isis 90, no. 1 (March 1999): 81–94. 29. Donne, Devotions, 132. 30. Ibid., 133. 31. Targoff, John Donne, 139. 32. Donne, Devotions, 52. 33. Sawday, Body Emblazoned, 63. 34. Jonathan Sawday, “The Fate of Marsyas: Dissecting the Renaissance Body” in Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culture c. 1540–1660, ed. Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn (London: Reaktion Books, 1990), 126. 35. Donne speaks to this issue of torture and truth—whether the body is to be compelled or coerced into giving over its truth—in “Love’s Exchange,” where he further differentiates between dissection and torture. Donne here presents torture as having nothing to do with the pursuit of truth at all. In the final stanza the speaker conceives of himself as a tortured, “racked” body splayed for anatomical examination: For this Love is enraged with me, Yet kills not. If I must example be To future rebels; if th’ unborn Must learn, by my being cut up, and torn: Kill, and dissect me, Love; for this Torture against thine own end is, Racked carcasses make ill anatomies. (36–42)

Torture serves as a demonstration of political power. Due to his defiance of Love’s tyrannical rule, the speaker realizes the emotional torment Love inflicts as serving a pedagogical function: through the torture of the speaker’s emotional being, those who might resist Love’s authority, “future rebels,” find admonishment. Yet Love’s plans backfire, in that the speaker’s brutalized corpse will not strengthen Love’s reign, but ultimately prove its undoing. Ironically, the torment that Donne’s speaker suffers, evidenced by his mutilated body, will act as a sign of Love’s cruelty and despotism and so enervate Love’s regime. To read the stanza this way understands torture as a spectacle, concerned not with the extraction of a confession from the criminal, but with the reassertion of the monarch’s power. That is, the value of public torture lies in how well it affects the intended audience. Furthermore, the hostile treatment of the speaker

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36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

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through the act of torture disrupts the ability to glean truth from the body through dissection. The poem also resists seeing dissection as a further punishment visited on the criminal. Donne’s speaker, envisioning himself as the cadaver, embraces his own dissection. Despite the violent imagery connoted in the use of “torn,” Donne separates torture and dissection. While on a literal level the mutilated corpse presents practical difficulties to the anatomist, epistemologically the speaker’s claim that “racked carcasses make ill anatomies” suggests the imperative for the body’s collusion in its dissection. The speaker distinguishes between the body mutilated by the state authority and those suitable for anatomical exploration. In this sense, torture, realized as a repressive act, and dissection are antithetical projects: the former, a method of objectification; the latter, a mutual affair that blurs the subject-object dichotomy. The depiction of dissection in “Love’s Exchange” evinces the willing submission and collusion on the part of the corpse that engenders their anatomy. Donne, Devotions, 66. Ibid., 72. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 55. Ibid., 68. All quotations from John Donne’s poetry come from The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne, ed. Charles M. Coffin (New York: Modern Library, 2001). Critical discussion of Holy Sonnet XIV centers on the issue of the speaker’s agency, particularly in regard to the religious framework underlying the poem. John N. Walls Jr. reads the spiritual bind of Donne’s speaker as referencing the paradoxical position that the Christian is in as described in the Psalms. The speaker’s lament in Holy Sonnet XIV and that offered in Psalm 13 share similar elements, “including the lamenter’s description of himself and his need, his naming of his enemies, his recognition that he has no power over them, and his demand that God act on his behalf against his enemies.” Walls articulates the dilemma Donne’s speaker finds himself in as being one who is “powerless to effect that which he desires.” “Donne’s Wit of Redemption: The Drama of Prayer in the ‘Holy Sonnets,’” Studies in Philology 73, no. 2 (April 1976): 200. Barbara Lewalski, in Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric, reads the speaker’s utter powerlessness to admit God’s intervention as Donne’s espousal of Calvinism: “The Calvinist sense of man’s

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utter helplessness . . . could hardly find more powerful and paradoxical expression than in this declaration that Christ be liberator of the soul only by becoming its jailer.” Protestant Poetics and Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyrics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 272. However, Anthony Low rebuts Lewalski’s argument, noting that no Calvinist would actually ask of God to take him from a “state of hopeless reprobation to election.” “John Donne: ‘The Holy Ghost Is Amorous in His Metaphors’” in New Perspectives on Seventeenth Century English Religious Lyric, ed. John R. Roberts (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994), 218. While I agree for the most part with Walls’s account of the speaker’s predicament, I read the speaker’s plea to God to be more complex. That is, it is the speaker’s ineffectualness that engenders God’s forceful retaking of him. My interpretation foregrounds the ambivalent sense of agency that the speaker possesses: he is unsure as to whether he is compliant or resistant to God’s efforts to save him. Donne asserts an ambiguity as to whether the speaker is “untrue” to God, hence opposing his salvation, or merely weak, and so eventually complicit in God’s attempts to rescue him. 44. Arthur L. Clements offers an insightful discussion of the paradoxical imagery Donne employs to describe God’s intervention. Clements’s reading challenges the tripartite division of the poem according to the different tasks of members of the Trinity: the Father who knocks, the Son (Sun) who shines, and the Spirit who breathes. However, as Clements cautions, such an easy allocation of jobs is not allowed for in the poem: “that each of the other Persons is ‘involved’ in the activity as any one; in other words, the paradox of three-in-one is truly and profoundly a paradox and is operative as such in the poem.” “Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV,” Modern Language Notes 76, no. 6 (June 1961): 484–85. Clements looks to reassert the paradoxical nature at the heart of the speaker’s depiction of his request for God to both destroy and re-create him, “the paradox of death and rebirth” (487). Rather than a three-fold framework to the poem, Clements discovers the poem’s dual structure as juxtaposing marriage and destruction. This tension within the poem explains the position that the speaker conceives of himself regarding his salvation: “He will never be essentially free unless God enthralls him and never chaste, this pure, innocent, holy, unless God ravishes him” (489). 45. Certain critics of the poem argue the speaker’s declaration that God must forcefully take him as related to the speaker’s resistance to the feminine role that he must assume. Low locates the rhetorical power of the poem in the speaker’s reluctance to take on the role that “he knows

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46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53.

54.

55.

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he must but cannot play: that of spouse to God” (“John Donne,” 218). That is, for Low, the speaker’s hesitancy to effeminize himself necessitates God’s more aggressive intervention. Elizabeth Hodgson likewise identifies the speaker’s reluctance to assume a feminine position to a masculine God as central to spiritual bind: “If the speaker is insistently and sexually masculine in the poem, he also fears his own bridal virginity to God’s saving grace.” Gender and the Sacred Self in John Donne (Newark, DE: University of Delaware, 1999), 105. Bacon, Novum, bk. 1, cxxiv. Donne, Devotions, 78. Ibid., 79. Targoff remarks that for Donne the spots that manifest on his body in Meditation 13 become signs of God’s presence: “The very spots that had seemed leprous and tainted become ‘markes’ of God’s grace, and he pities the cleaned skinned man as he who overlooked or disregarded” (John Donne, 142). While I agree with Targoff, I find that the spots pose more of a dilemma for Donne in whether they are signs of a compliant body or evidence of its insurmountability. Donne, Devotions, 79. Bacon, preface to The Great Instauration, Novum, 19 and “The Masculine Birth,” 62. Donne, Devotions, 117. Ibid., 145. Stubbs identifies Donne as one of the few outspoken Jacobean critics of torture, who condemns the practice as a “threefold offense against the dignity of God’s greatest creation, the human form, against the Christian Messiah, Jesus Christ, who was incarnated in that form, and finally against the Holy Ghost, who also inhabits and inspires it.” John Donne, 18. For further discussion of the practice of torture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, see John Langbein, Torture and the Law of Proof (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 82–90, 137–38; James Heath, Torture and English Law: An Administrative and Legal History from the Plantagenets to the Stuarts (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982), 109–40; and Edwards Peters, Torture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 79–80. John Donne, “Easter Sermon, 1625,” Harold B. Lee Library Digital Collection, http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/cdm4/document.php?CISOROOT=/ JohnDonne&CISOPTR=3215&REC=7 (accessed August 23, 2009). John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind and Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 19; and Stubbs, John Donne, 10.

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56. Stubbs, John Donne, 45. 57. In addition to the ethical arguments, recent critics of state-sanctioned torture have attempted to evaluate the practice of its scientific pretense. Chronicling the development and promotion of modern psychological torture methods, Alfred McCoy exposes the “scientific patina” that proponents of torture ascribe to the practice: “Testing has found that professional interrogators perform within 45 to 60 percent range in distinguishing truth from lies—little better than flipping a coin.” A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 194. Similarly Steven Kleinman and Matthew Alexander decouple the terms “science” and “torture.” In their New York Times editorial, Kleinman and Alexander disabuse the public of the misconception that “enhanced interrogation techniques” possess any scientific legitimacy: “One might think that any interrogation method considered legal must also be effective . . . In fact, none of the methods contained in the current Army manual on interrogation have ever been scientifically tested for effectiveness.” “Try A Little Tenderness,” New York Times (March 10, 2009), accessed July 15, 2009, http://www.nytimes .com/2009/03/11/opinion/11alexander-1.html. Chapter 3

1. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980), 165. 2. See Susan Snyder, Pastoral Process: Spenser, Marvell, Milton (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998) 11, 16. 3. Francis Bacon, The Essays, in Francis Bacon, The Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 187. 4. Ibid., 187–88. 5. Ibid., 188. 6. Francis Bacon, Novum Organum—With Other Parts of The Great Instauration, ed. Peter Urbach and John Gibson (Chicago: Open Court, 2000), bk. 1, civ. 7. Bacon, Masculine Birth of Time in The Philosophy of Francis Bacon, trans. Benjamin Farrington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 72. 8. Merchant, Death of Nature, 165. 9. Nicholas Murray, World Enough and Time: The Life of Andrew Marvell (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 48. 10. Linda Anderson, “The Nature of Marvell’s Mower,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, Winter 1991, 131.

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11. Snyder, Pastoral Process, 61. 12. For accounts of the scandalous circumstances surrounding the publication of Miscellaneous Poems, see Murray, World Enough, 253–55; and John Dixon Hunt, Andrew Marvell: His Life and Writings (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), 184–85, 189–90. 13. Andrew Marvell, The Poems, 131, 152. In the Penguin Classic Edition of Marvell’s complete poems, Elizabeth Story Donno suggests a similar dating of “The Garden,” “The Mower Against Gardens,” and the Mower Poem sequence. Andrew Marvell, The Complete Poems, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 100–110. 14. Robert N. Watson, Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 124. 15. Judith Haber, Pastoral and the Poetics of Self-Contradiction: Theocritus to Marvell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 114. 16. James J. Bono, The Word of God and the Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 217. 17. Ibid., 92. 18. Richard Foster Jones, Ancients and Moderns: A Study of the Rise of the Scientific Movement in Seventeenth-Century England (St. Louis, MO: Washington University Studies, 1961), 45. 19. Ibid., 92. 20. Ibid. 21. Recently, Baconian scholars have realized the historiographical dimension to his instauration. Denise Albanese succinctly outlines the humanistic and the new scientific views of the present. The humanist tradition devalues the present as the youth of human learning, yet the proponents of the new science recast the classical authors as representing the infancy of our intellectual development: “Classical antiquity is not the parent of the present moment, but instead its infancy, and authoritative eloquence as the generator of culture is reduced to unproductive childish prattle.” New Science, New World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 34. Also see Jones, Ancients and Moderns, 41–61. 22. Bacon, Masculine Birth, 63. 23. Ibid., 8. 24. Ibid., 72. 25. Interestingly, Luce Irigaray makes much the same point regarding the imperative of procreation as obstructing any emotional closeness between heterosexual couples: “‘Mother’ and ‘father’ dominate the

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26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

33. 34.

35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

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couple’s functioning, but only as social roles. The division of labor prevents them from making love. They produce or reproduce.” “The Sex Which Is Not One,” in From Modernism to Postmodernism, ed. Lawrence Cahoone (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 256. Bacon, Essays, 88. Ibid., 89. Ibid., 88. For further discussion of Bacon’s fear of desire disrupting the reproduction of the state and scientific knowledge, see Peter Pesic, “Desire, Science, and Polity: Francis Bacon’s Account of Eros,” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 26, no. 3 (Spring 1999): 333–52. Merchant, Death of Nature, 189. Ibid., 164. Iddo Landau, “Feminist Criticism of Metaphors in Bacon’s Philosophy of Science,” Philosophy 73, no. 283 (January 1998): 54. Also see Peter Pesic, “Wrestling with Proteus: Francis Bacon and the ‘Torture’ of Nature,” Isis 90 (1999): 81–94; and Perez Zagorin, Francis Bacon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 121–24. Katharine Park, “Women, Gender, and Utopia: The Death of Nature and the Historiography of Early Modern Science,” Isis 97 (2006): 490. Francis Bacon, Thought and Conclusions, in The Philosophy of Francis Bacon, trans. Benjamin Farrington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 83. Robert Boyle, Certain Physiological Essays and Other Tracts (London, 1661), 41–42. Carolyn Merchant offers a similar reading of this passage from Boyle’s essay in The Death of Nature, 189. Bacon, Novum, bk. 1, cvii. Ibid., bk. 2, xxxi. William Harvey, The Works of William Harvey, trans. Robert Willis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 153. Merchant, Death of Nature, 156. Snyder, Pastoral Process, 53. Ibid., 48–49. Ibid., 55. Bacon, Novum, bk.1, xlv. Anderson, “Marvell’s Mower,” 133. Jonathan Crewe, “The Garden State: Marvell’s Poetics of Enclosure,” in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Burt Richard and Jonathan Michael Archer (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 273.

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46. Watson, Back to Nature, 125. 47. Tayler finds the syntax of the line ambiguous: “luxuriant” modifies either the grass in the meadows or Damon’s own thoughts. Edward William Tayler, Nature and Art in Renaissance Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 157. My reading of the line argues that Damon, through his own sexually aware perspective, sees the meadows as sexual. 48. Leah S. Marcus remarks on how the image of the blade of grass abutted on both sides by a flower recreates the phallus. The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell, and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 234–35. 49. Marcus finds in Damon’s condemnation of the meadow’s “gaudy Maygames” the Mower’s failure to appreciate the religious import that Archbishop Laud attempted to instill in such festivals. As Marcus argues, Damon’s reaction to perceiving himself as betrayed by the “unthankful meadows,” which continue the festivities without him, reveals his failure to adopt Laud’s interpolation of such festivals as “humble acknowledgement of his individual inadequacy, a recognition of the vastness of the political and religious design of which he is a part.” Marcus, Politics of Mirth, 236. I agree with Marcus’s assertion that in “The Mower’s Song” Damon’s egocentric worldview is jeopardized by the meadow’s participation in the “gaudy May-games” without him, yet I also read here Damon’s recognition of Nature’s sexual autonomy. In “Damon,” the allusion to the May-games festivities appears, as I interpret these lines, sanitized, childlike, and not overtly sexual; however, in “The Mower’s Song,” the May-games possess more sexual connotation for Damon’s sexually aware perspective. 50. My reading of Damon’s journey from “Damon” to “The Mower’s Song” employs a psychoanalytic model of maturation, that of the infant’s transition from a stage of perceived unity with the mother to its recognition of separateness. On this basis, I am indebted to Snyder, who likewise argues for the applicability of psychoanalysis in reading the pastoral protagonist’s development. Snyder, Pastoral Process, 3, 11, 16, 17. 51. Tayler, Nature and Art, 154. 52. Bacon, preface to The Great Instauration, 15. 53. Eric Katz, “The Big Lie: Human Restoration of Nature,” in Environmental Ethics: An Anthology, ed. Andrew Light and Holmes Rolston III (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2002), 392. 54. Ibid., 396.

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Chapter 4

1. Francis Fane, “From the dedication to Love in the Dark,” in Rochester, The Critical Heritage, ed. David Farley-Hills (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1972), 36. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid., 37. 4. James William Johnson, A Profane Wit: The Life of John Wilmot (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2004), 30. 5. Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform 1626–1660 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1975), 159. 6. Ibid., 158. 7. Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1605; repr., London: Dodo Press, 2005), I.ii.6. 8. Carole Fabricant, “Rochester’s World of Imperfect Enjoyment,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 73, no. 3 (July1974): 338. 9. Fabricant concludes that the earl’s poetry reveals human sexuality as entrapped in a cycle of automated, mechanized motions that dull any vitality or pleasure that may be anticipated. For Fabricant, Rochester’s prevailing metaphor for the human body is that of a machine, one that is “slowly but surely falling apart”: “I do not randomly choose the image of disintegrating machine. For throughout Rochester’s poetry the sexual takes on increasingly sinister overtones until it finally emerges as mechanical grotesquerie.” Ibid., 345. Predicated on such frail grounds, sex at best provides a transient solace. Also see Sarah Wintle, “Libertinism and Sexual Politics,” in The Spirit of Wit: Reconsiderations of Rochester, ed. Jeremy Treglown (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1982), 133–65; and Jonathan Brody Kramnick, “Rochester and the History of Sexuality,” English Literary History 69 (2002): 277–301. 10. Melissa Sanchez, “Libertinism and Romance in Rochester’s Poetry,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 38, no. 3 (2005): 442. 11. William Chernaik, Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 81. 12. Ibid., 90. 13. My analysis of Rochester’s critique of the scientific basis of libertinism draws on that offered by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. In their chapter “Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality,” Horkheimer and Adorno examine the libertine ethos as a manifestation of the Enlightenment’s scientific mindset. Horkheimer and Adorno find libertinism as reflecting this same corruption in evacuating sexual relations of transcendent potential. Efficiency and utility

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14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

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inform the libertine’s sexual exploits. Romantic love, with its attending emotions of compassion and sympathy, is a delusion that only the naïve or unenlightened fall for; for the libertine, no degree of love ever escapes its physicality. Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of libertine ethics, I find, echoes Rochester’s own despair voiced in his verse; Rochester deconstructs the materialism of the libertine outlook from within this mindset. Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1972), 100–140. Chernaik, Sexual Freedom, 30. All quotations from Rochester’s poetry come from The Complete Poem of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Edited by David M. Vieth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962). Francis Bacon, preface to Novum Organum—With Other Parts of The Great Instauration, ed. Peter Urbach and John Gibson (Chicago: Open Court, 2000), 39. Francis Bacon, De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum Libri IX, ed. Richard Foster Jones (New York: Odyssey Press, 1937), II.13. De Dignitate is the expanded Latin version of The Advancement of Learning. Bacon, Advancement, II.xii.1. See Kate Aughterson, “Redefining Plain Style: Francis Bacon, Linguistic Extension, and Semantic Change in ‘The Advancement of Learning,’” Studies in Philology 97, no. 1 (2000): 96–143; and Ryan Stark, “From Mysticism to Skepticism: Stylistic Reform in SeventeenthCentury British Philosophy and Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 34, no. 4 (2001): 322–34. Bacon, Advancement, II.iv.1. Ibid., II.iv.2. Robert E. Stillman, The New Philosophy and Universal Languages in Seventeenth-Century England (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Press, 1995), 96. Bacon, De Dignitate. Bacon, Advancement, II.xii.1. Bacon, Advancement, II.xii.2. Bacon, Novum Organum, bk. 1, xlix. For further discussion of the centrality of language and Hobbes’s politics see Fredrick G. Whelan, “Language and Its Abuses in Hobbes’ Political Philosophy,” The American Political Science Review 75, no. 1 (March 1981): 59. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. McPherson (London: Penguin Books, 1985), 99.

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29. Ibid., 113. 30. Ibid., 428. 31. Hobbes writes further on the source of the abuses in language and thought, as well as their political consequences, in his treatise on the English Civil War, Behemoth (1681). 32. Hobbes, Leviathan, 117. 33. Ibid., 93. 34. Ibid., 92. 35. Thomas H. Fujimura, “Rochester’s ‘Satyr Against Mankind’: An Analysis,” in John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester: Critical Essays, ed. David M. Vieth (New York: Garland, 1988), 208. 36. Ibid., 206. 37. Chernaik, Sexual Freedom, 30. 38. Ibid., 31. 39. Fujimura, “Rochester’s ‘Satyr,’” 209. 40. Chernaik, Sexual Freedom, 86. 41. Ibid. 42. Marianne Thormählen, Rochester: The Poems in Context (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 74. 43. Thormählen likewise juxtaposes “The Mistress” to “Absent from thee”: “In both poems, then, pain is actively sought and envisaged as the preliminary to uninterrupted bliss.” Ibid., 75. My contention with this reading is that the “Absent” speaker does not construct a correlation between the absence he experiences and the paradise of his beloved’s “safe bosom” (10); rather the speaker’s time away from this other Eden loses him this bliss. 44. Hobbes, Leviathan, 99. 45. Ibid., 88. 46. Ibid. 47. David M. Vieth, “‘Pleased with the Contradiction and the Sin’: The Perverse Artistry of Rochester’s Lyrics,” in John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester: Critical Essays, ed. David M. Vieth (New York: Garland, 1988), 183. 48. Chernaik, Sexual Freedom, 114. 49. Ibid., 114–15. 50. Thomas Stearns Eliot, Homage to John Dryden: Three Essays on Poetry of the Seventeenth Century (London: Hogarth Press, 1927), 30. 51. Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 251.

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Conclusion

1. Carolyn Merchant, Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004), 3. 2. Ibid., 37. 3. Albert Borgmann, “The Nature of Reality and the Reality of Nature,” in Reinventing Nature? Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction, ed. Michael E. Soule and Gary Lease (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1995), 36. 4. Martin W. Lewis, Green Delusions: An Environmentalist Critique of Radical Environmentalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 7. 5. Ibid., 8. 6. Ibid., 15. 7. Ibid., 18. 8. Ibid., 19. 9. Ibid., 251. 10. Sylvia Bowerbank also compares Lewis’s stewardship model of environmentalism to Bacon’s call of humanity to control Nature. Bowerbank finds that both Lewis and Bacon offer a program directed toward achieving “sustainable development” that “will be created, not by nature, but by humanity.” Speaking for Nature: Women and Ecologies of Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 10. 11. Lewis, Green Delusions, 19. 12. As with Lewis, the character of Prometheus held symbolic importance for Bacon’s epistemological agenda. In Wisdom of the Ancients, Bacon devotes more time to his interpretation of the myth of Prometheus than any other. For Bacon, the story of Prometheus conceptualizes humanity’s privileged position within Creation: “The principle cause is this: that man seems to be a thing in which the whole world centers, with respect to final causes; so that if he were away, all things would stray and fluctuate, without end or intention, or become perfectly disjointed, and out of frame; for all things are made subservient to man, and he receives use and benefit from them all.” Francis Bacon, The Wisdom of the Ancients (1605; repr., London: Dodo Press, 2005), 56.

Two aspects of Bacon’s interpretation have unique relevance in the context of Lewis’s idea of “Promethean environmentalism.” First, Bacon reads in the myth humanity’s role as caretaker of the natural world. Harmony between humanity and Nature comes only through our active management of it; without human control, Nature would revert to chaos and disorder. Second, not only does Bacon find in the myth humanity’s centrality, but also its entitlement to utilize the natural

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13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

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world for its benefit. While Lewis does caution against human reckless dependence on the natural world, both he and Bacon use the symbol of Prometheus as a trope for an anthropocentric worldview. Eric Katz, “The Big Lie: Human Restoration of Nature,” in Environmental Ethics: An Anthology, ed. Andrew Light and Holmes Rolston III (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2002), 391. Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (New York: Routledge, 2002), 26. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 108. Merchant, Reinventing Eden, 226. Ibid., 230. Ibid., 241. Ibid., 228. Plumwood, Environmental Culture, 107. Ibid., 120. Ibid., 222. By May 20, British Petroleum estimated that the rate at which crude oil was leaking from the Macondo well was 5,000 barrels, or 155,000 gallons, per day. However, this number was contested for grossly underestimating the amount of crude oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico. Finally, on September 23, Timothy Crone published the first peer-reviewed article estimating the rate of the leak. Observing the live feed of the gushing wellhead, Crone calculated the rate of leak from April 22 to June 3 to be between 56,000 and 68,000 barrels a day. “Magnitude of 2010 Gulf of Mexico Oil Leak,” Science September 23, 2010, accessed February 22, 2011, http://www.sciencemag.org/content/330/6004/634.abstract). The final estimate of the amount of crude oil that spilled into the Gulf of Mexico has been set at 6.6 million barrels, or 206 million gallons. In the report commissioned by the Gulf Coast Claims Facility, John Tunnell Jr. places this number in perspective by contrasting the DHW oil spill to the 1979 Ixtoc oil spill, which spewed 4.5 million barrels into the Gulf. Though the area affected by the Ixtoc spill was considerably greater—1,500 linear miles to the 400 linear miles affected by the DWH oil spill—Tunnell cautions that such numbers may be deceptive. Tunnell notes the difference in environmental sensitivity between the two areas impacted: “Ecologically the DWH spill occurred in a very sensitive area of the Gulf, which includes the highly productive coastal wetlands and marshes of the Mississippi Delta. These salt and brackish marshes are a

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25.

26. 27.

28.

29.

30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

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number 10 on the ESI [Environmental Sensitivity Index], being sensitive to oiling and difficult to clean up . . . By comparison, regarding the Ixtoc oil spill, the fine-grained sand beaches of the western and southern Gulf are a number 3 on the ESI scale, so they are not as sensitive, and they can recover more quickly.” The qualitative difference in the environments affected suggested the greater gravity of the DWH oil spill. John Tunnell Jr., “An Expert Opinion of When the Gulf of Mexico Will Return to Pre-Spill Harvest Status Following the BP Deepwater Horizon MC 252 Oil Spill,” Report commissioned by Gulf Coast Claims Facility, Washington, DC, 2011, 19–21. After successfully intersecting with the main pipeline and sealing it permanently with cement, the Macondo well was declared killed on September 19. Naomi Klein, “After the Spill,” The Nation, January 31, 2011, 11. Leslie Kaufman and Shalia Dewan, “Oiled Gulf May Defy Direst Predictions,” New York Times, September 14, 2010, accessed January 26, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/scienceearth/14spill.html?n=Top %2fNews%2fScience%2fTopics%2fAnimals. Rebecca Mowbray, “Microbes Make Oil Vanish, Scientist Says,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, August 25, 2010, accessed January 26, 2011, http://iw.newsbank.com; emphasis added. Brian Skoloff and Harry R. Weber, “6 Months After Oil Spill, Much Remains Unknown,” Huffington Post, accessed January 26, 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/20/6-months-after-gulf-oil -s_n_769358.html. Klein, “After the Spill,” 18. For further discussion of the unknown long-term effects of the DWH oil spill, see David Biello, “Lasting Menace: The Deepwater Spill’s Unwelcome Legacy,” Scientific American, June 1, 2010, accessed February 3, 2011, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=lasting-menace. Tunnell, “An Expert Opinion,” 12. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 22. In “The BP Oil Spill: Economy versus Ecology,” Merchant speaks to the same tension between the economic need to view the natural world as a closed system and the ecological reality of Nature as an open, “unpredictable,” “chaotic” system. Merchant finds in the Gulf oil spill disaster the parable admonishing against the hubris of treating the nonhuman world as

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37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

43.

44. 45.

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controllable: “The problem as BP has tragically and belatedly discovered is that Nature as an active force cannot be confined. The pressures created by deep sea oil cannot be contained in mechanized, engineered systems isolated from the environment.” American Society for Environmental History 21, no. 2 (Summer 2010). In addition to the long-term concerns over the entrained crude oil in the water column, concerns emerged over the toxicity of the dispersants used. Charles W. Schmidt offers a concise overview of this issue. See “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Dispersants in the Gulf of Mexico,” Environmental Health Perspectives 118, no. 8 (August 2010), A341–43. Mowbray, “Microbes.” Klein, “After the Spill,” 17. Schmidt, “Between the Devil,” A340. Schmidt points out that a 2005 report for the National Research Council notes the “mystery” surrounding the long-term effects of chemical dispersants in the marine ecosystem. “Between the Devil,” A341. US House Committee on Science and Technology, Subcommittee on Energy and Environment. Testimony of Dr. Samantha B. Joye (June 9, 2010), accessed February 28, 2010, http://democrats.science .house.gov/Media/file/Commdocs/hearings/2010/Energy/9jun/ Joye_Testimony.pdf. For further discussion of Joye’s testimony, see Schmidt, “Between the Devil,” A344. Elizabeth Kujawinski, Melissa C. Kido Soule, David L. Valentine, Angela K. Boysen, Krista Longnecker, and Molly C. Redmond published the first peer-reviewed study of the use of chemical dispersants during the DWH oil spill. Though their findings confirm that the oil was biodegrading at an expected rate, Kujawinski and her team of researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution concluded that the dispersants used have not degraded, but remain in the water column, posing a significant threat to marine life in the Gulf. “Fate of Dispersants Associated with the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill,” Environmental Science and Technology 45, no. 4 (2011): 1298–1306. Katz, “Big Lie,” 396. In her initial report about the Gulf oil spill, Naomi Klein turns to Bacon’s writings to help explicate the mindset that led to the recklessness exhibited by BP toward the environment. Klein suggests that BP’s “Initial Exploration Plan” “reads like a Greek tragedy about human hubris” in that Nature appears in the document as both “predictable and agreeable” to industrial aspirations. Klein argues the view that allowed BP to conceptualize Nature as a willing partner in industrialism grows out of

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Bacon’s mechanization of the natural. Citing Merchant’s The Death of Nature, Klein writes, “In 1623 Sir Francis Bacon best encapsulated the new ethos when he wrote . . . that nature is to be ‘put in constraint, molded, and made as it were new by art and the hand of man.’ Those words may as well have been BP’s corporate mission statement.” “A Hole in the World,” The Nation, July 12, 2010, 17. 46. Merchant, Reinventing Eden, 241.

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Index “Absent from thee,” 93, 104–12 Adam, 6–7, 18–20, 22, 31, 33–35 Creation and Fall, 6–7, 20, 22, 34–35 knowledge of Nature, 18–19, 22, 31, 33–34 Adorno, Theodor, 151n13 Advancement of Learning, The, 88, 95–96 Anderson, Linda, 65, 77 anthropocentricism, 85, 117, 119–20, 125 destruction of other, 120 antiquity, veneration of, 68 Aristotle, 35, 69 “boyhood of knowledge,” 35, 69 “A Satyr Against Mankind and Reason,” 88, 92, 98–104 Bacon, Francis, 5–11, 28–30, 42, 44–46, 56, 63–64, 67, 70–72, 91–92, 94– 96, 116 and Aristotle, 72, 96, 142n20 ecofeminist critique of, 7 Great Instauration, The (Instauratio Magna), 6, 30 and language, 30, 67, 91–92, 94, 96 myth of Prometheus, 154n12 myth of Proteus, 116 “Of Innovation,” 28–29 “Of Love,” 70–71 Of the Dignity and Advancement of Learning (De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum), 94 “Of Youth and Age,” 63–64 and poetry, 9–11, 94, 95 Refutation of Philosophies (Redargutio Philosophiarum), 42, 44 Thoughts and Conclusions on the Interpretation of Nature or a Science

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of Productive Works (Cogitata et Visa de Interpretatione Naturae, sive de Scientia Operativa), 72 torture of Nature, 44–46, 56 See also Baconianism Baconianism, 6–8, 17, 19–20, 21–35, 68–71, 73, 95–96, 126–27 Eden, 17 and exploration, 22, 26–28, 31, 68 Genesis, 6–7, 20, 22, 34 Gulf of Mexico oil spill (2010), 126–27 historiography, 18, 21, 23, 25, 27–29, 31, 68, 138n47, 148n21 and imagination, 19, 95–96 impediment of knowledge, 18–19, 41–43, 50, 55, 69, 94–96 male sexuality, 69–71, 73 modern defense of, 8, 11 modern science, 5–6, 18, 22–23, 134n28 narrative, 6–7, 17–18, 31, 33–35 and objectivity (self-distancing), 18–20 Puritanism, 31–32 rejection of humanism, 24 and religion, 20–21, 29–30, 137n37 Bensalem conversion of, 29–30 courting rites, 136n32 discovery of, 23–24 early history, 27–28 exploration of other countries, 26, 27 Borgmann, Albert, 114–15 Bowerbank, Sylvia, 43–44 Boyle, Robert, 73 See also Royal Society of London Bunyan, John, 36 Burnet, Gilbert, 90

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Index

chemical oil dispersants, 124–26, 157n43 See also Gulf of Mexico oil spill (2010) Chernaik, Warren, 89–91, 102–4, 108–10 See also Rochester John Wilmot, Earl of: scholarship on cognition productivity of, 18, 69–71 and sense perception, 18, 19, 33–34 See also mind Coleridge, Samuel T., 10 See also Bacon, Francis: and poetry “Corinna’s Going A-Maying,” 80–81 See also May festivals Cowley, Abraham, 34–35 See also Royal Society of London decay theory of history, 40, 140n8 Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil spill. See Gulf of Mexico oil spill (2010) Devotions, 40–41, 47–52, 55–56 disease, 41, 48, 51, 53 as assault on body, 51 as form of rebellion, 41, 48, 51 as metaphor, 53 dissection/anatomy, 48–50, 52 dissociation of sensibility, 10–11 Donne, Henry, 57 Donne, John, 39–42, 47–59, 106–8 “Anniversary, The,” 106–7 anxiety over spiritual salvation, 52–54 body, 41–42, 47–49, 51, 55 Catholic recusancy, 57 dissection as metaphor, 52 Easter sermon, 1625, 56–59 humoral theory of disease, 50 “Love’s Exchange,” 143n35 Nature’s sovereignty, 56 sickness, 39–40, 47 torture, 50, 53, 55–59 “Valediction: forbidding Mourning, A,” 107–8 ecofeminism, 2–4, 7–8, 72, 115–16 Bacon and gender, 8 critics of, 8, 72, 115–16, 129n14 critique of modern science, 2–4

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See also environmentalism; Haraway, Donna; Merchant, Carolyn; Plumwood, Val Eden, 17–18, 21–22, 31–35, 83, 85, 108 recovery of, 17–18, 21–22, 31–35, 83, 85 Rochester, 108 See also Fall, effects of Eliot, T. S., 10–11, 110 See also dissociation of sensibility empiricism See Baconianism environmentalism, 115–21, 125–27 Donne, 119 Marvell, 120 postscientific, 117–19, 121, 125–27 Promethean, 115–17, 121 Rochester, 120 See also ecofeminism Fabricant, Carole, 89, 151n9 Fall, effects of, 7, 20, 33, 110–11 and Bacon, 7 human mind, 20, 33 Rochester, 110–11 See also decay theory of history; idols, doctrine of Fane, Francis, 87 fetishism of words, 69 Foucault, Michel, 45, 132n4 See also torture Gulf of Mexico oil spill (2010), 121–27 reporting on, 121–22 scope of environmental devastation, 123–25, 155n24 See also chemical oil dispersants Haber, Judith, 66 Hanson, Elizabeth, 142n26 Haraway, Donna J., 2–5, 7, 42 and Donne, 42 subject-subject relations, 4 See also ecofeminism; environmentalism Harvey, William, 73

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Index Herbert, George, 9–10, 131n30, n31 See also Bacon, Francis: and poetry Hobbes, Thomas, 91–92, 96–100, 107 Leviathan, 92, 96–99 materialism, 91, 98, 100 memory and imagination, 107 See also Bacon, Francis: and language; Rochester John Wilmot, Earl of: rejection of materialism Holy Sonnet XIV, 53–54, 144n43, 145n44, 145n45 Hooke, Robert, 33–34, 142n19 See also Royal Society of London Horkheimer, Max, 151n13 idols, doctrine of, 19–20, 134n13, 134n18 See also Fall, effects of imagination. See Baconianism: and imagination; Hobbes, Thomas: memory and imagination induction, 63 innovation, 17–18, 21, 28–29, 31 Instauratio, interpretation of, 21 Joye, Samantha, 125–26 See also chemical oil dispersants Katz, Eric, 85, 117, 126 See also environmentalism; Nature: restoration of Klein, Naomi, 121–24, 158n45 Knight, L. C., 10–11 See also Bacon, Francis: and poetry Landau, Iddo, 72 See also ecofeminism: critics of Lewis, Martin W., 115–17 See also environmentalism: Promethean libertine (libertinism), 89, 151n13 love, 70–71, 108–10 Bacon’s anxiety over, 70–71 physical vs. metaphysical, 108–10 types of, 70–71 See also “Absent from thee”; Bacon, Francis: “Of Love”; Donne,

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173

John: “Valediction: forbidding Mourning, A” Lukács, John, 1–2 See also modern science: objectivity marriage, 69–71, 136n32 See also Bacon, Francis: “Of Love”; Bowerbank, Sylvia Martin, Catherine Gimelli, 40–41, 130n24 See also decay theory of history Marvell, Andrew, 61–62, 65–67, 74–85, 93 “Damon the Mower,” 75, 77, 82–83 “Garden, The” 78 “Mower Against Gardens, The” 78–79 “Mower’s Song, The” 67, 74–76, 79–83, 93 pastoral genre, 61–62, 74, 84 rejection of Baconianism, 83, 85 scholarship on, 65–66 sexual immaturity, 75–77, 81, 83 sexualizing nature, 74–76, 78–82 Masculine Birth of Time, 20, 22, 43, 64, 70 materialism. See Hobbes, Thomas: materialism; Rochester John Wilmot, Earl of: rejection of materialism May festivals, 80–81, 150n49 See also Nature: sexualized Merchant, Carolyn, 7, 62, 64, 71–72, 84, 114, 118–19, 127, 157n36 Death of Nature, The, 7, 62, 72 influence on ecofeminism, 71 “partnership ethic,” 118–19 See also ecofeminism; environmentalism millenarianism, 31–32 mind, 18–19, 91–92, 99, 100, 104–5, 107 Bacon’s conception of, 18–19, 91 Hobbes, 92, 107 materialist vs. speculative reasoning, 99–100, 104–5 See also imagination modern science, 1–5, 7–8, 22–23, 113, 126–27 Bacon’s influence on, 5, 7–8, 113, 126–27

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174

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Index

modern science (continued) critique of, 1–5 objectivity, 1–5 postmodern science, 22–23, 134n28 See also ecofeminism; environmentalism: Promethean, postscientific Nature (natural world), 5–6, 41–43, 50, 62, 64, 71–73, 75, 82, 85, 114–15, 118–19, 125–27 autonomous, 118–19, 125–27 Edenic condition, 6 humanity’s imposition on, 71, 82, 85 investigation of, 5 resistance to scientific gaze, 41–43, 50, 55 restoration of, 114–15 sexualized, 62, 64, 72–73, 75, 79–81 New Atlantis, 23–31, 136n31, 136n32, 137n43 New Organon, The (Novum Organum), 5, 18–20, 27, 44, 55, 64, 94, 132n1 objectivity (self-distancing), 2–5, 7, 18–20 critique of, 2–5, 7 Oxford Experimental Philosophy Club, 87–88 Wadham College, 88 See also Royal Society of London Paradise Lost. See Rochester John Wilmot, Earl of: and Paradise Lost Pillars of Hercules, 27, 31 Plattes, Gabriel, 32 Plumwood, Val, 117–21 “Illusion of Disembeddedness,” 118 See also ecofeminism; environmentalism poetry. See Bacon, Francis: and poetry Proteus, myth of, 45–47 Puritanism, 31–32 relativism, 2–3 res and verba, 92, 94, 95 Roberts, Lewes, 32 Rochester, John Wilmot, Earl of, 87, 89– 90, 92–93, 98–111 “Fall, The,” 111

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“Mistress, The,” 106, 109 and Paradise Lost, 111–12 rejection of materialism, 89–90, 93, 102–5, 109, 111–12 “right reason,” 92–93, 98–102, 104 scholarship on, 89, 99–101, 105, 108, 151n9 Royal Society of London, 87 Sawday, Jonathan, 41, 49 Schmidt, Charles W., 124 Shelley, Percy B., 10 See also Bacon, Francis: and poetry Snyder, Susan, 65, 74 See also Marvell, Andrew: pastoral genre Targoff, Ramie, 47–48, 146n49 Taylor, Edmund William, 84 Thormählen, Marianne, 105, 153n43 time, 106–7, 109 See also “Absent from thee” torture, 42, 45, 50, 53, 55 of the body, 50 modern critics of, 147n57 of Nature, 42 See also Bacon, Francis: torture of Nature; Donne, John: torture Tunnell, John W., Jr., 123–24 See also Gulf of Mexico oil spill (2010): scope of environmental devastation Utopia, 24–26 and irony, 25 utopianism, 23–30 Vieth, David M., 108 Watson, Robert N., 66, 79 Webster, Charles, 31–32 Whitney, Charles, 21, 137n40 youth, 63–64, 68 Zagorin, Perez, 8, 17, 44 See also ecofeminism: critics of

7/21/11 9:50 AM

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