Satire and Secrecy in English Literature from 1650 to 1750

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Satire and Secrecy in English Literature from 1650 to 1750

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Satire and Secrecy in English Literature from 1650 to 1750

Melinda Alliker Rabb

SATIRE AND SECRECY IN ENGLISH LITERATURE FROM

1650 TO 1750

Copyright © Melinda Alliker Rabb, 2007. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–8434–0 ISBN-10: 1–4039–8434–4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rabb, Melinda Alliker. Satire and secrecy in English literature from 1650 to 1750 / Melinda Alliker Rabb. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index. ISBN 1–4039–8434–4 (alk. paper) 1. English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. 2. English literature—18th century—History and criticism. 3. Satire 4. Secrecy in literature. 5. Great Britain—Intellectual life— 17th century. 6. Great Britain—Intellectual life—18th century. I. Title. PR431.R33 2007 820.99004—dc22

2007016424

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: December 2007 10

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Printed in the United States of America.

In memory of my parents Mollie Hollander Alliker and Morris Joshua Alliker

The Screen: A Simile, 1741

Behind that SCREEN there stands a Wight, Safely conceal’d from public Sight: ........................ And by his secret Strings he still Governs the others as he will. —The Screen: A Simile (1741)

Contents

Preface Acknowledgments

ix xi

Introduction: Public versus Secret, Not Public versus Private 1 A History of Secrecy 2 Toward a Theory of Satire I: Gossip and Slander 3 Toward a Theory of Satire II: Secret History 4 Contracts and Promises: Speech Acts, Sex Acts, and Don Juan 5 Satire and Secrecy: Rereading The New Atalantis, Gulliver’s Travels, The Rape of the Lock, and The Dunciad 6 ‘A Life by Stealth’: Autobiographical Satire in Manley, Swift, and Pope Conclusion: Postmodernizing Satire: Irony, Conspiracy, and Paranoia

1 21 47 67

177

Abbreviations Notes Select Bibliography Index

189 191 207 225

91 115 145


Preface

While writing what I thought was to be a book specifically on Delarivier Manley, the general concept of secrecy, prominent in her writing, began to change my perception of her contemporaries and of the period in which she worked. Dissatisfaction with the critical paradigm of public (political, masculine) versus private (domestic, feminine) yielded to a new set of terms: public versus secret. After showing my manuscript to my friend and former teacher Michael V. DePorte who agreed on the importance of the idea, I made the decision to set Manley aside temporarily and to discover the secret history of satire. Over the years of work that have resulted in this project, the relationship between secrets, aggression, and authority has asserted itself repeatedly in current events. Who could have known, while I was in a library, safely writing about the efficacy of secrecy as a means of attack in literature, that my own country would fall victim to a fiendishly clandestine terrorist plot, or engage in its own damaging secret practices? A sense of many parallels between the two periods and cultures (“Augustan” and “Postmodern”) will be perceptible to my readers. It has not been possible to represent directly all of the research or every secret history of the hundred or so I have read. While many other texts might have been included, many also resist my mode of analysis, which I offer as a key, but not the only key for unlocking the “hidden springs” of satire. A few discussions of secrecy appeared after my argument was already well-developed [Harold Love, English Clandestine Satire 1660–1702 (Oxford, 2004); Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Hopkins, 2005)], and I now publicly join my voice to the critical debate.


Acknowledgments

Thanks are due to a number of colleagues, friends, and students who read parts of this project as it evolved and who offered information, criticism, and support in matters large and small: Michael DePorte, Heather Dubrow, William Keach, Susan Staves, George Landow, James Engell, Laurence Stanley, Marie Henson, Kevin Sparks, Sarah Eron, and Patrick Louis. I also would like to express appreciation to the staffs of Houghton Library and Child Memorial Library. Passages from chapters 5 and 6 appeared in ELH 73 (2006): 325–354. Earlier versions of my introduction and conclusion were included in The Blackwell Companion to Satire Ancient and Modern, edited by Ruben Quintero (2006) and in Reading Swift: Papers from the Fifth Munster Symposium on Jonathan Swift, edited by Hermann Real (Wilhelm Fink, 2008). I am grateful to these publishers for permission to reprint material here. Permission to reproduce the image for the cover illustration was kindly granted by Houghton Library, Harvard University. A book about secrecy cannot issue forth into the public domain without full disclosure of those whose support and love has never been concealed, even during the occasional dark hour: Daniel, Sam, Sophia, and especially Jim.


Introduction Public versus Secret, Not Public versus Private

No doubt an analysis of the kinds of knowledge that it is felt needful to cover in secrecy would tell us much about a given culture. —Miller, The Novel and the Police, 206

Information and Secrecy Satires in post–civil war England, claims Samuel Butler, “are found to conteine more wit, and Ingenuity then all other writings”: So much Power has Malice above all other Passions, to highten Wit and Fancy, for malice is Restles, and never finde’s ease until it has vented it self. And therefore Satyrs that are only provok’d with the Madnes and Folly of the world, are found to conteine more wit, and Ingenuity then all other writings, whatsoever, and meet with a better Reception from the world, that is always more delighted to heare the Faults and vices though of itself bee describd, then all the Panegyricks that ever were, which are commonly as Dull as they are false, And no man is Delighted with the Flattery of another.” (S. Butler, 60)

Jonathan Swift claims that the same era is distinguished by its penchant for secrecy: “I am deceived if in history there can be found any period more full of passages which the curious of another age would be glad to know the secret springs of” (PW 8:108). Satire and secrecy share the potential for aggression. Effective strategies of attack sometimes depend on what Swift

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Satire and Secrecy, 1650–1750

calls the satirist’s “life by stealth” (JS 2:203) in which stunned victims are taken by surprise and rendered ineffectual. At the same time, satire and secrecy can produce intimacy: sharing hidden meanings—ironies, confidences, allusions, inside jokes—creates a sense of community, what Swift calls “friends laughing in a corner.” Perhaps the most dangerous weapon that satire deploys is disclosure of secrets that contradict sanctioned realities and thereby destabilize them. “[W]hoever has . . . some knowledge of Secrets of State, must compare what he hears from severall great men . . . at severall Times, which is equally different,” observes Swift. Satire’s “restles” energy can reveal competing versions of the same thing because secrets, of necessity unregulated, have the license to multiply information without proving its truth. Satire and Secrecy will challenge the prevailing binary of public and private spheres by considering satire not as a strictly public mode but as a sometimes clandestine act; not as a strictly masculine discourse emulating classical precedents, but as inclusive of women and popular culture. 1 Many have concurred with Terry Eagleton (and Jürgen Habermas) that “the hallmark of the English public sphere was its consensual character” (11); however, this book will explore the forces working against consensus. Other familiar assumptions about satire—the significance of Menippus, Horace, and Juvenal, or the manliness of a genre that makes war with words, or the engagement of satire in topical issues—are tested and revised. Satire and Secrecy offers a new vocabulary and a new conceptual framework within which to read both canonical (here principally by Behn, Dryden, Manley, Swift, and Pope) and noncanonical texts. The practice of writing secretively, and of writing about secrets, performs cultural work by creating subjects who experience the world with suspicion and themselves as repositories of exclusive knowledge. Pope distinguishes the “good” satirist’s relationship to secrecy: “Law can pronounce only on open Facts, Morality alone can pass censure on Intentions of mischief: so that for secret calumny or the arrow flying in the dark, there is no publick punishment left, but what a good writer inflicts” (TE 5:14). The critical paradigm I am constructing may not pertain equally to every satire, but it will bridge gaps between certain satires of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the cultural history in which they were produced, and the evolution of satirical practices into the postmodern age. Several groups of theorists have contributed to this project. Work by J. L. Austin, Shoshana Felman, and Judith Butler on the “speech act” figures significantly in my discussion of satire as aggressive language that actively “does something with words.” Felman, Butler, and also Eve Sedgwick move speech act theory into the realm of gender, a move that supports reconsideration of satire’s presumed masculinity. Gender theory provides an analytical model for assessing satire’s male characters, especially what Felman identifies as the

Public versus Secret

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Don Juan figure, whose clandestine actions often determine the exercise of power in the world. I also position my project in tension with Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault: Habermas as a source of the public/private binary, and Foucault as an analyst of the modern subject as a sexualized disciplined being. On the concept of “being” a self, my thinking was strongly influenced by D. A. Miller’s discussion of secrecy in The Novel and the Police. Ultimately, Satire and Secrecy will expand the issues raised in earlier chapters by investigating satiric themes of succession, conspiracy, and paranoia. The final chapter draws on postmodern theory, principally by revisionists of Freud (and Lacan), including Sedgwick, John Farrell, and Slovaj Žižek. Most definitions of satire agree that it attacks someone or something, and therefore depends on prior phenomena to parody, ridicule, or reform. This evidence of engagement with the world has encouraged an emphasis on satire’s public status and has deflected attention away from its secretiveness. But in 1700, “the way of the world” was symbolized by William Congreve as a mysterious box, carried on stage at last (The Way of the World 5.i.) in order to establish power and distribute wealth: the box’s contents, hitherto unseen and unknown contracts, had always been governing the characters’ fortunes in love and money. If, during the unsettled political history of post–civil war England, a document legitimizing the king’s bastard could be hidden in just such another box, as many contended with respect to Charles II’s illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, or if the heir to the British throne could be concealed in a warming pan, as rumor reported of James II’s son, then surely the world’s clandestine ways would not be lost among the satirists. A facetious “Bookseller’s Advertisement” precedes Swift’s Discourse concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit (1710) with the claim that he had “kept it . . . some years, resolving it should never see the Light” (PW 1:169). The Mechanical Operation begins with a revelation: “It is a good while since I have had in my Head something . . . that the World should be informed in. For, to tell you a Secret, I am able to contain it no longer” (171). John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera ends with concealment: “As for the rest . . . But at present keep your own secret” (Act 3. xvii). Alexander Pope shares the impulse to expose what is hidden behind the dull opacity of the “age of lead”: “Out with it Dunciad! Let the Secret pass, / That Secret to each Fool, that he’s an Ass” (TE 5:79–80). Minor satirists, too, value stealth. John Oldham warns: “Let [blabbers] for safety and prevention die / And learn in the grave the art of secrecy” (71). Lady Mary Worltey Montagu believes “[s]atire shou’d, like a polish’d Razor keen, / Wound with a Touch, that’s scarcely felt or seen” (“Verses Address’d to the Imitator of Horace” ll. 25–26; EP 267) and promises her collaborator Lord Hervy that she will “disclose to you alone / Such thoughts as n’ere were thought upon” (Collected Letters 2:99). These disclosures

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affirm Mikhail Bakhtin’s belief that the literary theme of unmasking, developing from “the most complex theme of folk culture” (39–40), becomes in the seventeenth century specifically secretive. Surreptitious aggression and surprise enable devastating strategies. Public harangues might attract attention. But how much more terrifying is Pope’s “arrow flying in the dark” from an attacker who is privy to our secret weaknesses, and who is concealing the precise mode and timing of the eventual onslaught on those vulnerabilities? Effective satirists are praised for their skill at sleight of hand. Dryden hints at the fine art by which words inflict damage: “a Man is secretly wounded, and though he be not sensible himself, yet the malicious World will find it for him” (D 4:71). We, as citizens of a post-9/11 world, are prepared to reconsider the relationship between the ideas of attack and of secrecy, a relationship that is particularly visible from a postmodern perspective because, among other reasons to be explored on these pages, we have recently been reminded of the efficacy of stealth and conspiracy in acts of aggression. Thomas Hobbes had remarked on this exercise of power in 1651: “For as to the strength of the body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machinations, or by confederacy with others” (Leviathan, 3:110). The Stuart era, like our own time, was an ‘information age.’ Print culture and the flourishing marketplace allowed wide dissemination of texts, a process only recently surpassed by electronic communication and digital encoding. Information, however, may be profuse and accessible without being meaningful or true. Technology would seem to promise greater documentation and openness. But both cultures raise alarms about the ‘virtuality’ of their texts, selves, and spaces. If technology permits greater connection between its users, it also can isolate the individual from interactive social endeavors. Both cultures witness horrific failures of communication, and struggle over the control of “facts.” Samuel Johnson’s antipathy toward satire cannot be separated from his insistent longing for “the stability of truth” (“Preface to Shakespeare” SJ 7:62). He recalls the destabilizing print revolution of the seventeenth century as mercurial, as “the tumult of those unhappy days”: “This mode of conveying cheap and easy knowledge began among us in the civil war, when it was much in the interest of either party to raise and fix the prejudices of the people. At that time appeared Mercurius Aulicus, Mercurius Rusticus, and Mercurius Civicus” (Lonsdale 3:7–8). Then as now, experimental forms of communication—periodicals and broadsides, blogs and zines—proliferate partisan texts clamoring for attention. The Battle of the Books sums up the irreconcilable “disputes, arguments, rejoinders, brief considerations, answers, replies, remarks, reflections, objections, confutations” that profess “impartial truth” (PW 1:144). Aptly, both historical periods fix on the term hack or hacker to label the abuser of information. In cyberspace, as in the print


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marketplace, anonymous and unregulated publication could translate into irresponsible junk, or worse, into predatory seduction and crass market opportunism. Grubstreet has found its postmodern site in Grubnet. Crucial to these comparisons is information’s ‘other,’ secrecy. Eve Keller writes: “secrets function to articulate a boundary: an interior not visible to outsiders, the demarcation of a separate domain, a sphere of autonomous power” (40). Revelations of sordid but entertaining misdeeds of prominent citizens and high-ranking government officials in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Manley’s The New Atalantis, and Pope’s Dunciad, for example, compare readily to scandals that ushered in and characterize the new millennium. Adulterous ministers, greedy business moguls, pedophilic clergy, and terrorist conspirators have riveted public attention with shocking disclosures, and have proven that secrecy informs what is most precious and what is most dangerous to the survival of a social order. If freedom is epitomized by ‘good secrecy,’ such as the right to cast a closed ballot or to remain silent in a court of law or to conceal passwords of bank accounts or credit cards, so loss of freedom is epitomized by ‘bad secrecy,’ such as clandestine human traffic, hidden corporate ledgers, identity theft, or suicide bombers. Thus we understand eighteenth-century suspicion of “Kings, Statesmen, or Commanders”: “the Reader will perhaps conceive a greater Idea of him from those Actions done in Secret, and without a Witness, than of those which have drawn upon them the Admiration of the world” (Spectator No. 622, 5:127). The satirist, who attacks and exposes, must answer in kind by manipulating “secrecy [as] central to the planning of every form of injury to human beings” (Bok, 26). Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers link information with espionage in popular publications like Ned Ward’s London Spy, Joseph Addison’s and Sir Richard Steele’s Tatler and Spectator (tattle: “to reveal other people’s secrets; tell tales . . . to reveal [a secret] through gossiping” [Webster’s Dictionary]). The narrator of Manley’s New Atalantis bears the name Intelligence, a word defined in Johnson’s Dictionary as an “account of things distant or secret.” The title of Thomas Sheridan and Swift’s periodical The Intelligencer similarly signifies a messenger or spy. Today every computer and program seems filled with real and metaphorical spies and spyware, engaging us in a constant struggle to outwit the secret agents whose ‘cookies’ of surveillance pry invisibly into our lives. The advent of print encouraged the belief that “valuable data could be preserved best by being made public” (Eisenstein 1:116), but public access to information did not always have this effect. A dedicatory poem to John Wilkins’ Mercury, or the Secret and Swift Messenger (1641) notes the paradox: “Secrecie’s now publish’d; you reveal / By Demonstration how we can conceal.” Early modern schemes for a universal language, which was supposed to enable broad and easy communication, have certain similarities to international computer-based

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codes (Knowlson, 26). Wilkins’ An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668) asserts that shared language would “facilitat[e] mutual commerce . . . improv[e] all Natural Knowledge . . . [and] sprea[d] the knowledge of religion” (“Epistle Dedicatory”). But ironically, universal language schemes grew out of seventeenth-century systems of secret writing. That is, political motives to conceal meaning vie with religious motives to regain pre-Babel clarity of expression (Knowlson, 15–27). Cave Beck (Universal Character 1657) transmutes the Old Testament commandment “honor thy father and thy mother” into “leb2314p2477 and pf2477” (63). But Wilkins encrypts a much more political phrase—“The souldiers are almost famished; Supply us, or we must yield”—into “teolor aelmsfmfesplvoweutelhfudefralotaihd,upysremsyid” (26). Every language (as computer users who do not know the “hidden springs” of programming can attest), “looks like a secret code to the person who does not know its rules” (Potter, 42).2 In a study of the moral and ethical dilemmas of secrets in the contemporary world, Sissela Bok contextualizes practices such as government surveillance, investigative journalism, and industrial espionage within the traditions of law, religion, and philosophy. Secrets determine power relationships because they “protect the liberty of some while impairing that of others” (xvi): “In this exploring secrecy and openness, I have come up against what human beings care most to protect and to probe: the exalted, the dangerous, the shameful, the sources of power and creation; the fragile and the intimate” (xvii–xviii). Citizens are endangered by concealment, yet she admits (citing Pandora’s box, the Sphinx’s riddle, and Faust’s quest for knowledge) that some secrets are better kept. Georg Simmel summarizes a problematic dynamic: “the secret is surrounded by the possibility and the temptation of betrayal; and the external danger of being discovered is interwoven with the internal danger, which is like the fascination of an abyss, of giving oneself away” (334). Keller contrasts the seminal modern discoveries of the double helix of the genetic code and of atomic fusion: “Watson and Crick described themselves as embarking on a quest that they themselves described as a ‘calculated assault on the secret of life’ . . . The Manhattan Project . . . was a secret kept by men—an equally calculated assault on the secrets of death” (42).

Satire and Intimacy Satirists of the Restoration and early eighteenth century indicted society and humankind with an intensity that has earned them a role in the democratization of public discourse.3 Yet satirists like Swift and Pope


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could and did refer to their ‘attacks’ as “laughing with a few friends in a corner,” an image of (not particularly democratic) camaraderie with a membership limited to those perceptive enough to penetrate the secrets and concealed meanings of satiric allusions and insider jokes. “[T]here is no Mystery in it, but the Mystery of I —— y [irony]” was the dry assessment of The Secret History of Queen Zarah and the Zarazians (1705).4 Those who survive the attack find themselves members of a conspiratorial cabal. They experience “privity,” or knowledge of secrets shared with others (Zarah 2:A4). Satire also demarcates an intellectual space where irreverence, grossness, and even madness are tolerated, where interpreters of enigmas like Gulliver’s fourth voyage meet and join the club of “wit and malice.” With respect to the excluded, foolish “mob of Criticks” who mistakenly “apply Satire to those that they envy for being above them,” Pope assures Swift “that you needed not to have been so secret upon this head” (Corr 2:412). And Swift responds by referring to correspondence with another friend, Mrs. Howard: “writ in such mystical terms, that I should never have found out the meaning, if a Book had not been sent me called Gulliver’s Travellers” (C 3:189). Or he reminds another ‘insider’ that “faithfull Silence hath a sure reward: Within our Breast be every Secret barr’d” (Poems 1:210, ll. 15–16). If public texts can occasion personal intimacy, texts that point repeatedly at ‘the world,’ urging it toward ideals of rationality and moral order, can engage in idiosyncratic games of obfuscation and uncertainty. Popular verse satire “explicitly directed at public figures and institutions first appears in England as the Civil War breaks out” (POAS 1:xxvii). Over 3,000 works of satiric verse alone provided “clandestine information . . . [that] helped to satisfy a deep hunger” for certain kinds of knowledge. While satirists may have attacked public affairs, stealth often becomes their modus operandi. 5 Before 1688, most satire circulated in manuscript, the “great majority . . . issued anonymously . . ., copied by nameless scribes . . . [and] distributed surreptitiously” (xxxii). The Licensing Act of 1662 concerned printed texts only, thus encouraging a secret manuscript trade. A man could go to the scaffold for possessing a manuscript that he merely “dispers’d . . . all over his closet” (xxxvii). Samuel Pepys’s closet contained handwritten copies of the satirical second, third, fourth, and fifth “Advice to a Painter” poems (1667). After 1688, satire’s covert practices and its “gossipy interest in everything that happened” (xliii) appear increasingly in print. When Swift’s narrator tells “the World . . . a Secret . . . [he is] able to contain . . . no longer,” going public is here qualified; the narrator has “been perplexed for some time [as to] the proper Form to sent it abroad in” and decides at last on the intimacy of “A Letter to a Friend ” (171).

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As the result of influential studies like Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962 [1985]), which designates England as the origin of a “fourth estate,” and Roger Chartier’s A History of Private Life (1989), which designates England as “the birthplace of privacy” (3:5), we often contrast the public sphere of marketplace, theater, or coffeehouse to the private sphere of home, nuclear family, or closet. Such dichotomous terms have informed critical paradigms for the ‘rise’ of the novel. However, in satire, the counterpart to the public sphere is not domestic, familial, or architectural, but often secretive, psychological, and textual: what is “in [Swift’s] Head” will become “a [personal] Letter.” Habermas’ challengers include Michael Warner and Christian Thorne.6 Warner argues that the story of print as the vehicle of democracy and rationality is deeply flawed: “Politics and human agency disappear from this narrative, whether the agency be individual or collective, and culture receives an impact generated outside itself ” (Warner, 6).7 Enlightenment culture emerged from contradictory discourses that ascribe cultural capital not only to illumination and knowledge, but also to concealment and mystery. The confidant to the Queen, the priest at the confessional, the voyeur at the keyhole, the mistress in a minister’s bed, the inside stock trader, the Rosicrucian brother—all establish positions from which power may be exercised. Secrets can bind their sharers together with furtive intimacy, arguably with stronger social or emotional glue than many public avowals of solidarity. Indeed, the early eighteenth century was noteworthy for the meaninglessness of its public oath-taking, as Swift implies in An Argument against Abolishing Christianity (1708).8 Defoe, a government spy, wrote secret histories in which power accrues to those who know most and conceal best. His fictional protagonists learn this lesson. Moll and Roxana are “fortunate mistress[es]” because they never commit anything (caches of money but also bigamy and murder) to paper. Both tell their stories to an editor and they never tell all (“But that I kept to myself,” Moll confides). Defoe’s realism tolerates Roxana’s two-year disappearance as a prince’s mistress. Penelope Aubin carries things further. The heroine of The Life of Madame de Beaumount (1721) “lived in a Cave in Wales above fourteen years undiscovered.” Characters put on and off a series of false identities from within which they form and sustain relationships, and even bear children. We almost forget that we never know their real names. Such figures suggest the double bind of the public/private binary, to which D. A. Miller refers in his discussion of “open secrets” in The Novel and the Police. To a degree, the ability to conceal information within oneself (about oneself or about other things) is an essential component of selfconscious modern subjectivity. Addison describes the interiorized pleasures


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of the imagination as “secret Satisfaction,” “secret Delight, and “secret Ferment.” But although this “hidden innerness” would seem to empower, to distinguish, and to give value to the individual, a secret is “worth nothing as soon as it has been removed from circulation and exchange” (Miller, 204): [S]ecrecy would seem to be the mode whose ultimate meaning lies in the subject’s formal insistence that he is radically inaccessible to the culture that would otherwise entirely determine him. [We] cannot, therefore, resolve the double bind of a secrecy that must always be rigorously maintained in the face of a secret that everybody already knows, since this is the very condition that entitles . . . subjectivity in the first place.9 (Miller, 195)

The new rationality of private people engaged in public debate cannot be separated from the new subjectivity of individuals constituted by secrecy and will. Thus we see that the very satirists invoked by Habermas resist as much as they exemplify “print culture” and “the public sphere.” Christian Thorne has articulated the paradoxes that impede any attempt to thank Swift, Pope, and Gay for contributing to “the idea that a ruling body could be criticized publicly, in print, as part of a sustained debate about the legitimacy of authority . . . for if there is one feature of modernity that Tory skepticism consistently targets, it is the very idea of a public sphere and a critical press” (533). Swift wrote to William King and the Duke of Argyle that he was a “stranger” in such settings: “I have left off going to coffee-houses” (C 1:221, 330). Other “public” phenomena are equally loathed and attacked by these writers. The free press (after 1695), party politics, and the financial revolution are transmogrified by satire into the exhalations of a dunghill, bestial faction, urban nightmares of corrupt monied interest, and worthless paper credit—that is, into an almost hallucinatory world of imaginative fertility but of political impotence and moral sterility. Such satire does not constitute rational public debate. In certain ways, it is intensely private and unfathomable except to a select few who share its secret meaning. “Such a jest there is,” Swift writes, “that it will not pass out of Covent Garden; and such a one, that is nowhere intelligible but at Hide-Park Corner” (PW 1:26). Or, he contends, “If I ridicule the Follies and Corruption of a Court, a Ministry, or a Senate, are they not amply paid by Pensions, Titles, and Power, while I expect, and desire no other Reward, than that of laughing with a few Friends in a Corner?” Satire may attack public targets, but, as Thorne observes, the text is represented as “essentially private” and its only noteworthy effects are “wholly

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intimate” (537): “indeed the satirical text is not even a proper text here. It is virtually a spoken act.” Swiftian metaphors for satire come to mind that are non- or antitextual: a trick mirror, froth, a bandied ball, whacks on the obdurate posteriors of the world. We might include as well satire’s idiosyncratic distortions of textual format: digressions upon digressions, multiple prefaces, nonsense languages, ellipses, baroquely mixed metaphors, spurious footnotes—to support the claim that “satire is a kind of publishing that is not public” (539). The narrator of Queen Zarah scornfully refers to the coffeehouse scene: “Carmen and cobblers over coffee draw up articles of peace and war and make partition treaties at their will and pleasure; in a word, from the prince to the peasant everyone here enjoys his natural liberty.” While carmen and cobblers amuse themselves, clandestine acts on the backstairs and in the bedroom determine national policy. If we revise claims about the history of satire’s role in the establishment of the bourgeois public sphere, we must extend that revision to include questions of gender. In Johanna Meehan’s Feminists Read Habermas (1995) and Joan Landes’ Feminism, the Public and the Private (1998) feminist critics challenge his ideas about the masculine coffeehouse world. Landes notes that the idea of private persons discoursing reasonably in public places was a highly exclusive one, that the assumption of shared values in the eighteenth century effaces documented dissent and difference (Women and the Public Sphere, 1988). Habermas (and most other readers of satire) exclude women from an analysis of the effects of textual production. Through a new analysis of the satiric mode that acknowledges its intimacy, this book develops a theory of satire as an alternative and supplement to traditional masculinist ones that depend on terms of public domination and open warfare. My approach positions ‘manly’ satire along a spectrum of aggressive language beginning in gossip and slander. That gossip and slander are traditionally associated with women opens satire to feminization of various kinds. A feminist retheorization of satire responds to a persistent need, articulated in Fredric V. Bogel’s The Difference Satire Makes: “the absence of more than glancing attention to female satirists is regrettable, particularly because such work has not yet been very seriously or extensively undertaken” (viii). Most scholars have assumed that “women, traditionally victimized by satire, have themselves historically preferred to write and read the harmonious comedy of manners” (Snyder, 215 n. 2). Or they assume that “the organization of culture has made it difficult for women to write and publish satire . . . because women were long permitted little knowledge of the world outside their own domestic domain; because until recently women have been trained not to develop or display


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aggressiveness” (Griffin 1994:190). Those critics who have noticed satire’s potential for intimacy see it as a male club where homosocial bonds connect the satirist to his colleagues. Robert Elliott hypothesizes that the “dishonouring shaft” of satire— that which wounds, pierces, severs, cuts, and stings—originates in ancient fertility rites. “Phallic songs” supposedly invoked the power of the phallus to subordinate others, to expel “evil influences through the magical potency of abuse” (5, 58–59). The songs used violent language in order to frighten away demons with invective, obscenity, and ridicule. It is not too great a leap to extrapolate the influence of the dishonoring phallic shaft to include the sexual abuses that dramatize struggles for power in satires by women (and men). The dishonoring shaft—both the piercing line of verse/curse and the penetrating penis—appears in satiric fictions of seduction, rape, and political/sexual domination in Behn, Manley, Haywood, and others. 10 The fatal curse of the ancient priest may echo in the reputation-killing whisper of a belle. People ‘die’ in the field and in bed. Ironic language exposes people as falsely ‘happy’ rather than as falsely ‘great.’ The attribution of magical powers to the satirist takes the form of the uncanny knowing of the secrets of others through gossip and secret-sharing. Although Judith Butler argues that injurious language interpolates and constitutes a subject (2) and Elliott argues that satire’s injurious language “always kills” or deconstitutes its subject— that is, one constructs and one destroys—both really refer to the same power of aggressive words to determine, in crucial ways, linguistic being. Although comparisons have been made between satire and the cannibalistic rites of primitive warriors, the heaping dish of lanx satura is also a gossip’s feast. This book will not only investigate satire by women. It will challenge the belief that a “female satiric tradition” is simply “parallel” to a male tradition (Bogel, viii). It argues for a perspective informed by gender that applies equally to canonical and noncanonical texts. Understanding “secret memoirs” like Manley’s New Atalantis or Memoirs of Europe can change the way we read Gulliver’s Travels and The Dunciad. Early modern women writers have received unprecedented attention recently. Yet their work has been scrutinized largely for its relevance to critical paradigms about the relation between private domesticity and the public print marketplace, about representations of love, or about the rise of the novel. Few women writers have been considered worthy of membership in the clubby world of satire.11 Carole Pateman writes: “In mainstream political theory, the public sphere is assumed to be capable of being understood on its own, as if it existed sui generis, independently of private sexual relations and domestic life” (1989:3). Satire transgresses these boundaries.

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Secrets of Madness and Sex In Swift’s Tale an inmate of Bedlam whispers, “Hark in your ear” (PW 1:113); he offers a confidence, yet his secret is withheld from the text. He is one of satire’s many irrational lunatic characters who teeter on the edge of madness or plunge in. Madness and irony make a powerful combination of two kinds of unstable meaning. The verbal intricacies of great ironists like Swift and Pope contribute to the intimate quality of their work. While expository uses of language are available to anyone who knows that language, irony is comprehensible by a much more limited group.12 It requires supplementary information in order to be ‘gotten’—and even to insiders, the full purport of ironic statement may not be clear. Swift admonishes Pope that, in the world beyond the confines of London, no one will understand the allusions of The Dunciad, although perhaps neither really cared. Almost three centuries of debate over the ironic meaning of Gulliver’s fourth voyage is a further case in point. Madness, like irony, is exclusive. It directly challenges the notion of common sense (the reasonable arguments shared by a social group) with the powerfully individuating delusions of unique madmen. Critics have made much of satire’s madness theme,13 and examples are abundant: MacFlecknoe reigns over nonsense; Gulliver whinnies and trots like a horse; hordes of mentally padlocked dunces cheerfully undo centuries of civilization; a former Bedlamite explains all systems of religion, philosophy, and government. 14 Satiric fictions of madness achieve striking effects when behaviors ordinarily hidden from polite society are thrust before the reader, such as defecation (Gulliver, the dunces), bodily mutilation (the severed head, the beau and woman flayed), belching and farting (Aeolism) or cannibalism (the modest proposal). Certainly these examples resist the idea of rational public discourse in a coffeehouse. But if we look even earlier in the century we will find prior examples of secret behaviors as the basis for satiric fictions, and here my argument shifts again to women writers and to an equally powerful satiric fiction denoting social, political, or moral disorder—that of sexual promiscuity. As a consequence of pioneering work by Toni Bowers, William Warner, and Ros Ballaster, the ‘fathers’ of the novel appear to have overwritten, at least to an extent, popular narratives by women. Does satire, in comparable ways, also have a secret history? Manley’s New Atalantis, written seventeen years before Gulliver’s Travels, was the most popular satire of the first quarter of the eighteenth century. While male satirists found a metaphor for social and moral disorder in madness, Manley (and before her, Behn) had found an equally powerful metaphor in sexual promiscuity. While sex as


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politics was not a new metaphor (many poems on affairs of state represent a lewd ‘body politic’), women satirists transform the imagery of crass misogynistic lampoon into a vehicle for complex irony. Pat Rogers argues that the “great stroke of the Augustan satirists was to make the world of low literature serve as subject and setting of their works” (1973:3). The world of bad writing is one of squalor and competition, and so is the world of bad sex. Behn and Manley situate commodified public space not in Bedlam but in the bedroom. The end of Part 2 of Behn’s Love Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister conflates political, moral, and sexual disorder: when Silvia commits herself fully to a life of sexual transgression—by yielding to Octavio she removes the last restraint from Philander’s antimonarchical plots and adds bigamy and promiscuity to her own incest, adultery, and illegitimate pregnancy—she feels “all the madness that ever inspired a Lunatick” (LL 251). The themes of madness and sexuality are central to the work of Michel Foucault (Madness and Civilization and The History of Sexuality). Against Habermas’ dialectical social criticism of enlightenment rationalism, my later chapters will test Foucault’s more radical and political critique of humanism, the deployment of power through norm-governed social practice, and the historical evolution of sexuality and the subject. We also recall that the Panopticon (Discipline and Punish) exerts social control by coopting the power of secrecy. In a system in which everything is known to be known (such as Jeremy Bentham’s prison), discipline of any behavior one would wish to hide becomes internalized. Yet Foucault also writes of the resistant interplay between the knowable and the hidden: “there is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say;. . . . There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses” (1978, 1:27). Modernity then is marked by struggle for control over secrets: “What is peculiar [about transgressive sex] to modern societies . . . is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret” (1:35). Foucault claims that in the early seventeenth century “a certain frankness was still common . . . Sexual practices had little need of secrecy” (3). He looks past this “bright day” to the nineteenth century when “twilight soon fell . . . followed by the monotonous nights of the Victorian bourgeoisie. Sexuality was carefully confined; it moved into the home.” Foucault contends that “[o]ne could plot a line going straight from the seventeenth-century pastoral to what became its projection in [nineteenth-century] literature, ‘scandalous’ literature at that” (21). He does not refer to writing by women in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but to a late Victorian account of male erotic adventures, aptly entitled My Secret Life. Satire and

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Secrecy will interrupt that straight line by analyzing the important elision in Foucault’s history. Feminist revision of Foucault objects to claims in the first volume of The History of Sexuality that the meaning of sex changes during the eighteenth century from a contingent feature to an essential—perhaps the essential—feature of identity. 15 Butler writes of the relationship between sex and discourse: “When sex becomes a site of power, it becomes an object of legal and regulatory discourses; it becomes that which power in its various discourses and institutions cultivates in the image of its own normative construction. . . . in attending to sex, in monitoring sex, the law constructs sex, producing it as that which calls to be monitored and is inherently regulatable” (Hekman, 64). Butler’s focus on the legal and social ramifications of constructions of sex in the twentieth century may be put to the test of history. The discussion of political satire in later chapters of this book will reframe these points, as the representation of bodily functions and desires is one of satire’s most inventive strategies. Feminist revision of satire’s masculinity also must take into account homosexuality (what Foucault and Sedgwick mean by the secret) and postmodern gender theory. Michelle Cohen points out that “the analysis of the history of traditionally excluded groups, the history of women and of homosexual men in particular” have led to “increasing awareness of the diversity of ways in which men constructed themselves, and deployed those facets of self-identity” (Foyster, 2). What Alan Bray describes as relevant to the eighteenth-century novel—a “long period of contest and anxiety centered on masculine identity” (20)—has everything to do with the underlying patriarchal crises of power, morality, and succession in satire. Domna Stanton has argued that in satire an “incorruptible masculine self” is neurotically affirmed “through the creation and debunking of an image of phallic female power” (Ballaster “Manl(e)y Forms”; Brant and Purkiss, 218–219). But much more may be said about the satirist and his or her fictions of confused genders, compromised patriarchs, and conspiratorial fantasies.

How to Do Things with Secrets Texts analyzed in later chapters of this book show that the dissemination of information associated with ‘print culture’ generated its own resistance and was accompanied by an urge to conceal. We recall that the intimate quality of satire can privilege speech over print: “the satirical text is not even a proper text here. It is virtually a spoken act” (Thorne). This


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perspective is historically corroborated by documents like the Treason Act of 1660, which effaces differences between spoken, written, and printed words by lumping together “all printing, writing, preaching, or malicious and advised speaking calculated to compass or devise . . . injury” (POAS 1:xxxiii). I will be using the ideas of “excitable speech” and of “the politics of the performative” as they have evolved in speech act theory from J. L. Austin through Shoshana Felman (The Literary Speech Act: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seductions in Two Languages) and Judith Butler (Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative), two important responders to Austin’s How to Do Things with Words. The aftermath of Austin’s ideas, which has involved eminent thinkers such as Emile Benveniste (Problems in General Linguistics), John R. Searle (Speech Acts), and Jacques Derrida (Margins of Philosophy), has been called “a carnivalesque echolalia of what might be described as extraordinarily productive cross-purposes” (Parker and Sedgwick 1995: 1).16 Scrutiny has fallen on the unexplored (or perhaps intentionally avoided) implications of Austin’s concept of ‘performativity,’ and performance as they relate to theater, law, and literary text. Austin’s playful analytical approach proliferates categories and terms. Language may be constative or performative. Speech acts may be locutionary, illocutionary, or perlocutionary. Illocutionary speech acts are subdivided into five categories: verdictives, exercitives, commisives, behabitives, and expositives. Austin’s essential philosophical and linguistic insight, of course, is that words can constitute acts, and more specifically, that the value of language is not to be judged on its ability to convey truth, but on its ability to accomplish meaning, exert force, and achieve effect. Since every speech act evokes a miniature social situation (the implicit interlocutionary relationship or force exerted between ‘I’, ‘you’, and ‘they’), it becomes possible to see language constructing, statement by statement, complex societies and personalities. Austin tests his categories by formulating first-person cases (“I do,” “I promise,” “I describe,” “I urge,” “I order”). I would ask, how is saying something doing something with respect to the aggression of satire and the subterfuge of secrecy? Austin does not include among his many examples of speech acts either “I satirize” or “I tell (or keep) a secret.” Both of these cases challenge the boundaries of his “kinds,” since he does not dwell on speech acts that can injure. In a sense, the act of satirizing falls into the “baggy” category of “behabitives”: “Behabitives include the notion of reaction to other people’s behavior and fortunes and of attitudes and expressions of attitudes to someone else’s past conduct or imminent conduct” (160). To resent, deprecate, censure, curse, grumble about, complain of, criticize are among the performative utterances he mentions that we might apply to satire (79,

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160). Here is also a possibility for theorizing irony, since Austin writes, “In the field of behabitives, besides the usual liability to infelicities, there is a special scope for insincerity” (161). The second speech act (“I tell/keep a secret”) would belong to the “fascinating and powerful class of negative performatives” in which action is resisted (resistance defined as a kind of acting) and in which consensus and authority are unclear. These cases are “much less prone to becoming conventional than positive performatives” (Parker and Sedgwick 1995:9). Although Austin does not pursue this idea, it seems to me the inevitable test case of his theory, since secrets and secret-keeping have such important roles in the discursive formations of modern culture. I am interested in the ways in which we do things with words in order to hide and withhold (a practice distinct from silence or absence of words), by controlling their dissemination or by internalizing their significance, without the need for (or by stringently curtailing) public utterance. In some cases, extraordinary, elaborate, and multiple speech acts must be performed merely to avoid uttering another one. This book will press on to utterances not mentioned specifically by Austin such as “I gossip,” “I slander,” and “I libel.” Satire, by definition an attack, is a speech act intended to wound and offend others. Drawing on theoretical insights from Butler and Felman, I hope to demonstrate new ways of thinking about the relationships among gender, satire, and both linguistic power and vulnerability: “We ascribe an agency to language, a power to injure,” Butler observes: “Could language injure us if we were not, in some sense, linguistic beings, beings who require language in order to be? Is our vulnerability to language a consequence of our being constituted within its terms?” (1–2). Swift once jokingly imagined Manley reaching into a bag of words and strewing them on pages—a provocative counterimage to the bags of things hauled around on the backs of ineffectual and incommunicative Laputans in Gulliver’s Travels (PW 11:169). Other self-conscious representations come to mind. In the “Epistle to Arbuthnot,” the infant Pope was baptized in ink and lisped in rhymes (TE 4:104); the playwright Behn hung women’s texts up for sale like the sign of the prostitute Angellica Bianca in The Rover; Dryden challenged his enemies to “let your Verses run upon my feet, . . . turn my own lines upon me, and in utter despaire of your own Satyre, make me Satyrize myself” (“The Medall,” D 2:41). These and other satirists figure themselves as “linguistic beings” whose words act or perform. However, just as Butler arrives at her analysis of excitable speech by coming to terms with “gender troubles,” so questions of gender must accompany the idea of satire and secrets as speech acts. By reassessing aggressive language to include more (culturally encoded) feminine discursive practices


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such as gossip’s secret-mongering, we can reassess the aggressions of satire. This book will bring together three kinds of gendered speech acts: the political contract, the seductive promise, and the secret conspiracy. Austin grounds his theory on the consensual statement, “I do.” Similarly, the texts considered in this book are preoccupied (almost presciently) with the idea of willing consent, in government and in love, as the quintessence of the modern subject for whom language can provide or deny power. Without consent, government becomes tyranny and seduction becomes rape.

From Secrets to Satire Chapter 1, “A History of Secrecy,” represents the Restoration and early eighteenth century as a culture of secrecy. I argue that in major categories of cultural analysis, we find evidence that contradicts many assumptions about the evolution of ‘enlightenment’ beliefs and practices. Among them are architecture (secular and religious) and landscape (rural and urban), commerce and finance (including colonialism and slavery), education and social formations (such as learned and secret societies), the founding of the ‘subject’ (with respect to ‘love’ and sexuality), and politics (the restoration of monarchy, the Exclusion Crisis, the Glorious Revolution, and the Hanoverian Succession). Chapter 2, “Toward a Theory of Satire I: Gossip and Slander,” explores the implications of gender and speech act theory for satire, allowing a reevaluation of the ways in which aggressive language works. Gossip is implicated in issues of secrecy: ‘telling’ on people, constructing ‘confidants,’ enjoining silence—these and other attributes of gossip contribute to ‘the gossip paradigm’ of communication. Gossip—its history, its practice, its multiple functions of building community and challenging authority— raises questions that may then be asked of other kinds of derogatory language more typically associated with satire, such as slander and libel. Although gossip and slander/libel at first suggest binarisms and contrasts (one is ephemeral, the other, legally binding; one is feminine, the other masculine; one is trivial, the other dangerous), both contribute to the work of satire. Analysis of other injurious uses of language such as the broken promise, vow, oath, or contract will prepare us to reconsider satire’s crucial discursive practice: irony. Don Juan, arch promise-maker and seducer comically on his way to Hell, also plays a role in the generation of scandal and the performance of speech acts. Chapter 3, “Toward a Theory of Satire II: Secret History,” examines the relationship between secret histories, memoirs, or anecdotes and satires.

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Sometimes sober and earnest, but often erotic, violent, and irreverent, secret histories provide alternative versions of people and events represented in ‘official’ or ‘public’ venues. The concept of alternative truths has a destabilizing function useful to satirists. Secret histories suffuse the print marketplace with an atmosphere of suspicion because contradictory accounts of the same thing cannot all be true. A particular scandal that may seem obscure or trivial to us—for example the murder of a member of the Duke of Monmouth’s cabal, Thomas Thynne —could inspire many secret histories over several decades, that is, long after newspapers and journals had exhausted their coverage. Their reiteration suggests that they were performing important cultural work.17 Several groups of secret histories will be examined in Chapter 4, “Contracts and Promises: Speech Acts, Sex Acts, and Don Juan.” These texts explore the relationship between promises, seductions, and the Don Juan paradigm of speech act theory with respect to the crucial satiric preoccupation with succession. The figure of the reckless but attractive male aristocrat, motivated by secret desires, is a principal performer in works like Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel and Behn’s Love Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister, and Manley’s History of Europe. Each text retells the same events from a radically different perspective. Chapter 5, “Satire and Secrecy: Rereading The New Atalantis, Gulliver’s Travels, The Rape of the Lock, and The Dunciad,” assesses the importance of secrecy and secret history in major works. The satirist wishes to expose the secrets of (and perhaps to reform) the world; but the satirist also is a lover (and sometimes a keeper) of secrets. An analysis of The New Atalantis establishes a paradigm for the integration of the amatory practices of secret history with the ironic aggression of satire. The chapter then demonstrates the extent to which Swift and Pope participate in these strategies and conventions. The scandal of seduction and faithlessness is at the heart of much eighteenth-century satire. The concept of inconstancy pertains to the issues most often satirized: faction, patriarchy, succession, credit, abuses of religion and learning, women, and the perilous founding of a public sphere on secret desires and beliefs. Chapter 6 focuses on autobiographical satire, that is, on those works in which the satirist makes his or her own life and character an integral part of an attack on something. Manley, Swift, and Pope perform this autobiographical gesture. Just as secret histories activate contradictory versions of the same events, so the autobiographical satirist resists textual embodiment of the self as representative, coherent, or fully knowable. To the narratives that compete for credibility in the world, satirists add their own stories. Manley’s “Delia” and The Adventures of Rivella, Swift’s Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, Pope’s Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, Horatian poems, and Dunciad


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Variorum are the basis for a discussion of satire’s final intimate act of revelation and concealment. My concluding chapter, “Postmodernizing Satire: Irony, Conspiracy, and Paranoia,” takes the further step of asking how postmodern critical discourse (and satire) and its pervasive hermeneutics of suspicion can open doors of understanding into eighteenth-century satire’s strategies and fictions of secrecy. One of the most compelling commonalities between the great age of satire and our own is the conspiratorial imaginary that sees “the world as constructed of a web of hints to hidden meaning” (Bywater, 80) and paranoia as “a necessary product of all information systems” (Bersani, 103). The human subject produced by those (paranoid, suspicious, conspiratorial, self-aggrandizing) systems “taunt[s] us with the secrets of his own hidden. . . . orders” (107) like Swift’s Tale-teller persuaded that “something very useful and profound is couched underneath” (PW 1:46). On the topic of challenges to patriarchal authority, a recurrent theme of my earlier chapters, Žižek’s work on the paranoia of noir allows a final insight into satirical representation of the father. By engaging us in multiple versions of truth, secret knowledge enables an ironic perspective on things that, in Swift’s words, “strike us with immediate conviction.” To the satirist, the best strategy for challenging abuses of power against society or against oneself is sometimes to allow the “conscious Muse” to taunt us with things that “[m]ust never to Mankind be told.”


Chapter 1 A History of Secrecy

Secrecy is concerned above all with what human beings want to protect: the intimate, the dangerous, the profane, the fragile, the sacred, and the forbidden. —Mary Mulvey Roberts, Secret Texts

Locating Secrecy Historical evidence supports a distinction between privacy and secrecy as counterterms to public. According to Raymond Williams, eighteenth-century rural England was transformed from an “intricate land of mystery and surprise” into “a predictable land of wide views, sweeping sameness, and straight lines,” that is, into “knowable communities” (Williams 1973:165). Enclosure acts, planned highways, and ‘modern’ farming techniques, instigated by motives of efficiency and profit, seem to replace irregularly shaped groves, caves, hollows, and hamlets obscurely connected by winding footpaths. Human intervention into the natural world, Williams implies, increasingly puts everything on display as if to accommodate consumerism and merchandising. Douglas Hay and Nicholas Rogers object that the “planned countryside of straight lines” and open views, oversimplifies agrarian change: “the process none the less was in part a closing-in” (4). By the time Jane Austen wrote Persuasion, for example, some 200,000 miles of hedges had been planted, “at least as much as in the previous 500 years” (4), creating the blind corners and barriers that would allow Anne Eliot to overhear without detection a conversation between Frederick Wentworth and Louisa Musgrove.

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Urban growth seems to follow a similar process of rationalization and integration, of increasing openness and coherence congenial to geniuses of architectural design like Sir Christopher Wren. Defoe extols London as “the most glorious sight without exception that the whole world at present can show since the sacking of Rome . . . and the burning the Temple of Jerusalem” (Tour, Letter 2:61). But the urban landscape equally was made up of “unknown rookeries” of “anonymity and crime”: “well-dressed men and women were often robbed in daylight, their goods rapidly fenced through a network of receivers, their assailants . . . lived in the innumerable alleys and courts that abutted the main thoroughfares” (Hay and Rogers, 8). Thus Defoe’s city was both a place of manifest beauties and a sink into which transgressive outcasts like Moll Flanders could disappear. The secret urban underworld is inseparable from the public sphere. Both country and city undergo changes that maintain and invent new hidden spaces; the processes of modernization seem to heighten their persistence and necessity. The phrase “to be let into the secret,” idiomatic in scores of texts, implies a desirable space. A character in Eliza Haywood’s The British Recluse: Or, the Secret History of Cleomira “would have given almost one of her eyes to have been let into the secret of the whole Affair” (13). Places of public assembly like the coffeehouse and the theater also change. If groups of literate men gathered in Addisonian ‘little senates’ to discuss the latest publications and participate in the democratizing effects of print culture, some important secrets challenge the coffeehouse as a setting for liberty’s growth, among them “the invisible commercial sinews” (Walvin 1997:10) of the English economy. Men who debated political authority also sipped the products of slavery—coffee, tea, and sugar. Trafficking in women’s bodies through prostitution, according to recent research, also complicates the picture of Habermas’ “fourth estate.” The theater, where “between 1637 and 1737, stage and state were scarcely a letter apart” is another important public venue, perhaps even more inclusive in terms of gender and class. Politically charged performances could provoke government retaliation: prosecution of authors or theatre closure.1 However, the technology of the stage was newly reconfigured to accommodate a special platform, “now accompanied by painted scenes that could be rolled away to reveal an upstage, ‘internal,’ or ‘discovery’ space” (Lowenthal, 121). Or props, like the box containing the crucial secret of Congreve’s Way of the World, serve as visual metaphors for the ways of a world governed by the unseen. These visual metaphors have epistemological significance. The physical stage was redesigned to hold in view the promise of a secret that might eventually be revealed. Members of the audience themselves attended performances in masks. Is such a place less indicative of emerging enlightenment culture?

A History of Secrecy

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Robert Markley has argued that the period’s most glowing myths—the golden age of plenty and the retreat to an uncorrupted country estate—are in fact results of “the economic unconscious” and “repressed recognition” of deprivation, material scarcity, national debt, and war (Gill, 122–123). That is to say, a culture may be deeply invested in denying its own central qualities, in “the secrets that everyone hides because everyone knows,” in both real and open secrets. On certain crucial points, Alan Marshall’s analysis of the changing architecture of the Stuart court coincides with Hay and Roger’s analysis of the tension between open and secret spaces in English country and city: “it was a conflict between emergent ideas of privacy and political theatre which merged and blended” (Marshall, 19). During this time, secrecy as a concept is enmeshed in complex ironies, compromised and imprecated by emerging technologies of materiality and selfhood. The history of architecture documents the production of spaces conducive to secrecy in three distinct arenas—spiritual, domestic, and political—each associated with the closet.

A History of Closets Closet-like spaces—Swift’s lady’s dressing room, Pope’s grotto, and the bedrooms of Manley’s libertines—house ironic meaning in satire. Earlier metaphors of enclosures-within-enclosures, like those in George Herbert’s poetry, had figured the sincerity and complexity of spiritual life: “within my heart I made / Closets, and in them many a chest; And like a master in my trade, / In those chests, boxes; in each box, a till” (“Confession,” ll. 2–5). By 1709, Manley and Swift were using similar imagery for layers of self-delusion and impenetrable meaning: madmen’s cells in Bedlam, starving poet’s garrets in cheap Grubstreet buildings, empty tubs on sinking ships, vile chests in filthy dressing rooms, curtained beds in jessaminescented chambers, veiled seraglios in sultan’s palaces. Gulliver lives inside a dollhouse kept within Glumdulclitch’s room within a larger building. The narrator of the Tale recommends taking “seven of the deepest scholars” in order to “shut them up close for seven years, in seven chambers, with . . . seven ample commentaries,” not to reach enlightened knowledge, but because things “pass for wondrous deep” when they are “wondrous dark” (PW 1:133). Lawrence Stone argues that domestic privacy in sixteenth-century England had been “neither possible nor desired” (6). Interlocking suites of rooms necessitated constant trafficking through communal areas. But domestic architecture begins to define interior boundaries with corridors and specialized

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rooms: “as far down the social scale as the farmer or tradesman, more bedrooms, studies, closets, and withdrawing-chambers were built” (8). The subsequent “striking change” (253) permits individuals to be alone, and extensive solitude means that a portion of one’s life has reality only outside the knowledge of others. The importance of the new space is evidenced in a variety of publications. Some are manuals of domesticity, such as John Partridge’s Treasury of Hidden Secrets Commonly Call’ d the Good Huswives Closet (1653), Hannah Woolley’s Queen-Like Closet or Rich Cabinet (1681), or The Queen’s Closet Open’ d (1698). Others offer advice or entertainment to men or women, such as John Shirley’s Accomplish’ d Ladies Rich Closet of Rarities (1691) or William Burkitt’s Poor Man’s Help and Young Man’s Guide (1694), which enumerates “religious duties . . . publick in the congregation, private in the family, secret in the closet.” Some are political, such as Addresses Importing an Abhorrence . . . Seized in the Earl of Shaftesbury’s Closet Laid Open and Detected (1682). The vogue of situating a topic of public interest in a concealed space included business (Abraham Liset’s Amphithalami or the Accountant’s Closet, 1660, 1684), medicine (Thomas Bonham’s Chyrurgian’s Closet, 1630), and equestrianism (Gervase Markham’s Faithful Farrier . . . in All Those Principal and Approved Secrets of Horsemanship, 1687). The term is common in religious tracts extolling the benefits of solitary prayer: Thomas Brooks, Privie Key of Heaven or Twenty Arguments for Closet Prayer (1665); Edward Wettenhall, Enter into Thy Closet or . . . Private Devotions (1684); William Howell, Common Prayer Book the Best Companion in the House and Closet (1689) and Prayer in the Closet (1689); Oliver Heywood, Closet Prayer, a Christian Duty (1687); Samuel Hardy, Closet Companion for Such as Want the Comfort and Benefit of Church Communion (1684), and William Dawes, The Duties of the Closet (1693). Secluded chambers facilitate the emergence of modern ideas of secrecy.2 Richard Rambuss discusses the dual significance of the closet as a material structure and as a set of subjectifying structural relations. The seventeenthcentury closet becomes a place to converse intensely with God, although more mundane introspection and self-awareness follow: “the door of the prayer closet opens onto an incipiently modern figuration of selfhood, the work of the closet likewise hinging upon a more individuated self conceived to reside at an inward remove from outward deed and public expression” (Rambuss 1998:105). Thus Thomas Brooks claims in The Privy Key to Heaven: “Every man is that really which he is secretly” (162). The place of personal retreat can also shelter sexual activity. Rambuss notes the eroticism of solitary devotions, such as Samuel Dawes’ metaphoric love tryst between the soul and God: “What place can be so proper for the soul to meet her Beloved, as the closet . . . where there shall be nothing to disturb or interrupt their Heavenly conversation? . . . Here she may enjoy him, as


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fully as possibly she can in this life” (138) or Thomas Brooks’ ecstatic imaginings of “the secret kisses, the secret embraces, the secret whispers, . . . that God gives to his people when alone . . . Christ loves to embrace his spouse not so much in the street, as in a closet” (176–177). John Donne’s Holy Sonnets and Devotions participate in this transgressive self-discovery. Not sexual bliss but a battered heart and ravishment, abjection and disorientation characterize his closet encounters with God, and as representations of spiritual yearning they are erotically charged and self-defining. A second chamber of secrets moves us from the prayer closet to the secular space of the secretary (a male employee, entrusted with maintaining and transcribing records and documents, and with knowledge of the employer’s affairs). Adapting Foucault’s phrase, ‘the secretary function,’3 and citing Angel Day’s The English Secretary (which went through thirteen editions between 1586 and 1639), Rambuss sees Edmund Spenser epitomizing the dual role of a secretary to great men: he takes “poetic dictation from his muse” but is also “busily employed in the management of secrets” (Rambuss 1993:28). Day and others connect the secretary to secrets, and to the production of texts (28). Secret knowledge conveys authority, just as letter writing conveys authorship, to the man who mediates between his employer and the world. No mere servant, the secretary participates in a subtle power dynamic.4 This power dynamic is not the only indication of the potential ironies of the closet, ironies that make it congenial to satire. The secretary is himself a living chamber or repository, the “keeper and conserver of the secret to him committed” (Day, Pt. 2, 102–103). Like a series of Chinese boxes, his mind and soul, contained within his body, are in turn enclosed, along with private texts, within his closet/study. Trust binds the relationship almost to the point of consanguinity: the secretary is his master’s “owne penne, his mouth, his eye, his eare and keeper of his most secret Cabinett” (Faunt quoted by Rambuss 1993:47). His body becomes the physical mechanism through which the abstract and the spiritual are literalized. The tropes for this homosocial relationship have an erotic edge as well. He is “but the closet, whereof another hath both the key, use, and commandment,” and he ought to be “as a thick plated doore, where no man may enter, but by the locke which is the tongue, and that to be of such efficacie, as whereof no counterfeite key should be able to make a breach” (Day, Pt. 2, 124). Herbert uses similar imagery in which “closets are halls to them; and hearts, highways” (“Confession,” Herbert 126: l.14). The trusted secretary’s peculiar power remained an operative paradigm as the official title of government employees entrusted with specific affairs of state. Manley, Swift, and Pope all performed the “secretary function,” yet they had superior literary powers to the people they served.5 Spiritual and secretarial closets offer a safe place for faith, friendship, self-knowledge,

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eroticism, and spiritual and social yearning. Surprising opportunities for power can occur there. How do these qualities survive in a third domain: the state closet of kings and queens during a period of succession crises? Lois Potter provides background to an association between the state closet and monarchical power, beginning with the abolition of the Star Chamber, an event that ignited an explosion of clandestinely written and published texts. Parliamentarians and Royalists at times relied on cipher or other obscurantist, elusive language, and for the first time personal correspondence was published specifically as propaganda. The interception and eventual publication of Charles I’s (sometimes encoded) letters (The King’s Cabinet Open’ d, 1645) was a decisive turn in the path leading him to the scaffold (Potter, 59). To the king’s supporters, the unlicensed printing and selling of his hidden ‘property’ travestied a sacred ideal. If Charles I’s letters made him vulnerable, his Eikon Basilike (thirty-five English and twentyfour foreign editions in a single year [1649]) made him a martyr. Potter writes: “On the one hand, the king’s book is a literary masterpiece; on the other, it is totally private—‘secret’—work” (170). Charles I lost his head, but his secret self survived as a royalist hero. This third domain of closet life can be an unsavory place. The royal closet in Secret Memoirs of . . . the King of Poland (1691) contains a “hidden and secret Minister [Father Vota, a Jesuit], near the King’s person . . . brought up to the Intrigues of the Closet, as well for managing of Sovereign princes, as Republicks” who becomes the King’s “most intimate Secretary” (325, 327): I have seen him . . . a hundred times upon the Floor of an Anti-Chamber, that he might not miss his Opportunity of conferring with the King. By this means he made himself useful; insomuch that that Monarch could have no peace, if he had not spoken with him. He had a Hand in all Nice Affairs, and became the only Channel through which the Nuncio’s of the Pope and the Ministers of the Emperor arrived at the Cabinet of his Polish Majesty, and he became the Master of all Secrets and Business. (327)

Father Vota really works for the court of Vienna, which has sent him “to keep the King of Poland . . . in their Interest.” English readers would have recognized the political allegory of such dangerous hidden intimacy. Focusing on architectural changes in the early modern palace, Marshall analyzes the political significance of the growing physical distance between monarch and subject in eighteenth-century England: “As the outer rooms became ever more public, the inner or privy chambers became more private and select . . . The further one could penetrate into the multitude of ‘privy,’ or private rooms, the more status one had” (Marshall, 19). Access to the King’s private closet beyond the bedchamber became “very restricted indeed . . . it remained very much a holy of holies, an inner sanctum which,


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with the exception of the Groom of the Stole [or stool] . . . and the Page of the Backstairs, only those specifically invited by the king could enter. They processed either through the bedchamber or via the more secretive route of the backstairs” (22). This alternative configuration of authority is literally (one might say biologically) ‘privy,’ and functions well screened from public sources of authority, such as print, coffeehouse, or Parliament. These facts will resonate with readers familiar with the scatological and erotic tendencies of the period’s satire. If “[t]he more significant office developments at the court actually took place in the bedchamber . . . [t]he Groom of the Stole (or Stool) was one of the most important offices of all at the court,” then the scenes of sex and defecation (intimate actions usually performed in secret) are also scenes of power. More than a little irony accrues to the fact that the political “holy of holies” held a chamber pot. To the satirist, the closet of the monarch’s close stool held more than one form of ‘secret’ corruption (Marshall, 25).

Secret Commerce of the Coffeehouse In contrast, Mr. Spectator hoped to bring politics and “[p]hilosophy out of Closets” (Spectator No. 10, 1: 44 ) by relocating them in the coffeehouse, where some believe the middling classes learned to broker power through political debate: “The coffee-house has a privileged status in accounts by historians and sociologists of the early eighteenth century, in which it figures as the paradigmatic social institution of the profound and various transformations in English society in this period” (Eger et al., 27). The Tatler locates its discourse (gallantry, poetry, learning, and news) in specific coffeehouses (White’s, Will’s, The Graecian, and St. James’s). Partisan journals like the Tory Examiner and the Whig Guardian are associated with coffeehouse discussions about royal prerogatives, succession issues, monied interest, national identity, and the war of Spanish Succession. But a concealed subtext of these debates corroborates Miller’s view that “the social function of secrecy is not to conceal knowledge, so much as to conceal the knowledge of the knowledge” (206). Coffeehouses also participated in less edifying phenomena of “gallantry,” “foreign and Domestic” affairs, and commerce, namely, prostitution and slavery. Edward Ward’s The London Spy (1698–1700) describes the coffeehouse as a chaotic place stinking of tobacco, congested with tawdry objects, and jangling with the din of disreputable voices. Objecting to Habermas’ representation of “coffee-house manners” (31) as “rational and polite” or “quiet” and “business-like,” Markman Ellis offers a counterview of a more raucous

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world with much to hide, “one that is vulgar, popular, subversive, grotesque, and sexual.”6 Samuel Pepys, whose diary records over eighty visits, remarks that rumors originating in this environment “spread like leprosy”: “I believe ‘tis these Places that furnish the Inhabitants with Slander, for there one hears Accounts of everything done in town, as if it were but a village” (Walvin 1997:42). The site of rational debate was also a hotbed of gossip, complicit in the inequities and iniquities of clandestine behavior. The business of coffeehouses was to make money, and not merely from selling beverages. People came “both for Coffee and Intrigue,” claims the biographer of Anne Rochford in The Velvet Coffee-Woman (1728). Evidence suggests that the coffeehouse was less exclusively masculine than has been supposed and that gender has “the greatest power to disrupt Habermas’ model of the public sphere” ( Markman Ellis in Eger, 31).7 Women owned, staffed, but also prostituted themselves in coffeehouses. The Velvet CoffeeWomen, James Miller’s play The Coffee-House (1737), and The Life and Character of Moll King, Late Mistress of King’s Coffee-House in Covent Garden (1747)—“something between a whore’s biography and a scandalous memoir” (Eger, 34)—reveal a sexual underworld beneath respectable appearances. Ellis compares the industry of illicit sex to “organized crime”: “the trope of the coffee-woman expresses the transgressive characteristics of the new coffee-house sociability” (39). Later representations, textual and graphic, suppress these characteristics so that “the construction of the coffee-house in official culture came increasingly to represent the coffeehouse only in its polite mode” (43).8 Further, coffeehouses owed their existence to colonial commerce. As the number of such establishments in London rose from 83 to approximately 500 between 1663 and 1720, so did the demand for production on plantations in Jamaica and elsewhere that depended on slave labor.9 In short, the concealed prop of coffeehouse (and tea table) culture was the triangular trade route, “the invisible commercial sinews of British banking and insurance” (Dabydeen, 10) that moved exotic goods and slaves between East and West, or between Africa and colonial ports and England. Dabydeen asks, “But who, in the convivial comfort of their smoky London coffee-house, gave so much as a thought to that ironic fact?” (46). Defoe did, for one, and he writes that the true born Englishman, “plants the distant colonies of Hell. / By them his Secret Power he well Maintains / And binds the world . . . / [D]raw a silent Veil, / The Native England’s Vices to conceal” (True Born Englishman, POAS 6:259–309, ll. 77–79, 89–90). Commerce was celebrated publicly as an agent of liberty and prosperity. Yet only an unseen foreign labor source could enable hundreds of coffeehouses to spring up in London and provincial towns, tea imports to rise from 9 million to 20 million pounds, and sugar consumption to increase


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2500 percent.10 Evidence of slavery’s open secrets was close to home although the public conscience was “blinded to the moral issue by the widespread participation in dividends” (Moore, 133): “No fewer than 15 Lord Mayors, 25 sheriffs and 38 alderman of the City of London were shareholders in [the Royal Africa Company, founded in 1672] between 1660 and 1690” (57). According to Trevor Phillips, London’s own black population was “an underground society” that would grow to 20,000 by the end of the eighteenth century, although “the presence of Black Britons so far back seems more like a mystery than a history” (Martin, 2–3). Coffeehouse habitués could promote ideas of progress that linked material prosperity to individual freedom and to a free labor system, even while they invested in human cargo—a moral contradiction explicable only by a willed determination to treat the horrors of slavery as something that was not known, as an open secret (Ellis and Walvin, 26–27). The secrets of a colonial economy have political ramifications. Realizing that a long war against Bourbon power might embroil England in a conflict with the Hapsburgs, Secretary of State Bolingbroke met secretly with Jean Baptiste Colbert, marquis de Torcy to negotiate the Treaty of Utrecht, eventually celebrated publicly by war-weary Whigs and Tories. However, the terms of peace included the morally compromising Assiento, a lesspublicized contract granting England the exclusive right to traffic in slaves to the Spanish West Indies. Pope’s “Windsor Forest,” with its pastoralracist image of Africans pursuing “sable loves,” praises the treaty for spreading civilization around the globe, “with no hint of the real barbarity of the Assiento monopoly” (Dabydeen, 44). Swift’s The History of the Last Four Years of the Queen (1713) is more explicit about the need to downplay this prize of war: “The English shall have the Assiento . . . These Demands and all other Proceedings between Great Britain and France, shall be kept inviolably secret until they be published by the mutual Consent of both Parties” (PW 7:43–44). During the decade following the treaty, “[c]ontemporaries who were prepared to scream out against Louis XIV’s use of Protestant galley slaves were mute on the lot of ever-increasing numbers of plantation slaves” (Hoppit, 268). The history of slavery recalls the metaphor of closeted enclosure within enclosure. The Assiento became the right of the South Sea Company, stock shares of which were the darling investment of thousands of Britons until the ‘South Sea Bubble’ burst in 1720. Because the national debt was tied to the company’s stock, both the Bank of England and the national economy were discreetly tied to slavery. Despite its legal monopoly, the Assiento did not prevent illicit slave trade, an even more secretive business. Colin Palmer describes this clandestine traffic: “The illicit private traders of British nationality . . . kept no records, so it is impossible to calculate the number of

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slaves they sold to the Spaniards. There are indications, however, that the trade was considerable and that it was increasing during the years when the South Sea Company held the Assiento” (84). So one layer of hushed-up traffic covered another, for which no documentation exists. Although the Court of Directors lambasted agents at PortoBelloe for not enforcing the company’s trade rights, they admitted that “Private traders sell their negroes almost without fear of seizure” (Palmer, 88). In 1714, a “series of inquiries into [company director] Arthur Moores’ secrets [uncovered] hidden, illicit trade using a company ship” (Ehrenpreis 2:752). When disaster struck in 1720, Swift condemned the “sly directors”: “Thus when by Rooks a Lord is ply’d, / Some Cully often wins a Bet / By vent’ring on the cheating side, / Tho’ not into the Secret let” (P 2:248–259, ll. 161–164). A few years later, Daniel Templeman claimed to expose their “injurious” machinations in A Secret History of the Late Directors of the South-Sea-Company (1735). Secrets associated with the slave trade “gave a cloak of legitimacy to other types of commerce” (Palmer 1981:136): “In 1725 the Spanish officers at Buenos Aires intercepted a very discreet letter . . . informing them that a quantity of silver was being forwarded to London on the Sea Horse ‘on the account of the secret commerce’” [Archivo General de Indias: Indifferente General, 2785; cited by Palmer, 143]. In England, the coffee and tea trade operated through an anonymous network of smugglers that “created a more genuinely national system of distribution for tea than that shaped by the East India Company, whose import trade centered on London. . . . By the mid-eighteenth century a clandestine war was being waged on the south coast and in the West Country, between customs officers and the irregular army of local smugglers” (Walvin 1997:18). Even polite society seems engaged in furtive behavior with respect to the drinks of public sociability: “Ladies had their coats and petticoats adapted to enable them to carry secret pockets filled with tea” (19). More egregious examples ascend to Parliament: “it was found that in the books of the East India Company there were entries made of great sums for secret services done the company, . . . and it was generally believed that the greater part of it had gone among the members of the house of commons” (Burnet 1838:611). New economic practices seem steeped in concealment. Secrecy and exclusion were not entirely new economic practices: medieval guilds, for example, prevented the disclosure of certain kinds of knowledge. But competition in a world of rising capitalism and financial opportunity raised the value of ‘inside’ information to a much broader and less regulated population. ‘Paper credit,’ the elusive vehicle of commerce, comes to symbolize the undisclosed truth about many stocks, shares, and promises of profit: “that in the inside they are good for nothing” (PW 1:109). The new money endorsed ‘value’ through anonymity and


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uniformity: any one-pound note was like any other. While at first this uniformity seems to promise equal opportunity, there is a dangerous aspect to money if we do not know from whence it comes. Fielding’s Tom Jones is nostalgic for earlier forms of credit. A handwritten note for fifty pounds, given by Squire Allworthy to Tom, lost and found by Black George, coopted by the evil Blifil, and ultimately restored by the lawyer to Allworthy (who recognizes his note), triggers the revelation of all the secrets of the plot in ways that the new system of money would not allow (Thompson, 21–42). The secrets of commerce—slavery, smuggling, inside stock trading, paper credit—introduce a new anxiety about the hidden economy of the material world.

Secrets of Nature and Philosophy Power accrues through knowledge as well as money. Enlightenment learning supposedly favors rational principles of demonstration and proof. The newly invented encyclopedia idealizes a complete and accessible ‘circle of knowledge.’ Increased literacy, greater availability of books, founding of new schools, and new interest in selfhood and childhood as sites of subject formation—all are familiar attributes of print culture. John Locke was a leading advocate for the importance of empirical education. Some Thoughts concerning Education (1693), published in twenty-one editions and five translations during the eighteenth century, urges parents: “Pray let this be your chief care, to fill your son’s head with clear and distinct ideas.” Locke considers the youthful mind to be malleable, and his image for it, the tabula rasa of An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690), becomes even more pliant in Concerning Education: “I imagine the minds of children as easily turned this or that way, as water it self” (Axtell, 115). Other voices join Locke’s. “‘Tis education forms the common mind / Just as the twig is bent, the tree’s inclined,” Pope cautions in Epistle to Cobham (TE 3:ii.22, ll. 149–150). The intensity of Swift’s, Manley’s, and Pope’s attacks on abuses of learning in A Tale of a Tub, The Battle of the Books, The New Atalantis, and The Dunciad suggests the cultural stakes invested in education’s social and economic ramifications. Yet even an educational meritocracy requires stealth. Locke recommends skill in cipher: “shorthand . . . may perhaps be thought worth the learning, both in dispatch in what men write for their own memory, and concealment of what they would not have lie open to every eye” (Concerning Education, 265–266). Bernard Mandeville’s An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue (Fable of the Bees 1:41–57) cynically analyzes the education of

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children: they are indoctrinated into a system of enveloping secrets by which adults control them. Mandeville narrates an episode in which a mother and a nurse lavish praise on a child learning to curtsy. The jealous older sister Miss Molly “[who] knows how to make a very handsome curtsy, wonders at the perverseness of their Judgment, and swelling with Indignation, is ready to cry at the Injustice done her, till, being whisper’d in the Ear that it is only to please the baby, and that she is a Woman, she grows proud at being let into the Secret.” “[T]he Secret” is contained within further-reaching secrets that extend to family, community, and enveloping political system. Molly’s feelings of superiority ironically maneuver her into “repeat[ing] what has been said with large additions, and insult[ing] over the Weakness of her Sister, whom all this while she fancies to be the only Bubble among them” (Fable of the Bees 1:53). “Bubbles” lack intelligence in Johnson’s sense of the capacity to perceive “things distant or secret. “An intelligencer understands the ‘way into the inmost closets of princes’ (Howel).”11 Milton had written of knowledge being “sequestered out of the world,” as if by stealth, and this hint of transgression (who knows what young upstarts are learning?) continues. Experimental science was officially endorsed by the founding of the Royal Society, an institution whose practices would be emulated widely. Gulliver observes that the Balnibarbians “fell into Schemes of putting all Arts, Sciences, Language, and Mechanicks upon a new Foot. . . . [T]here is not a Town of any Consequence in the Kingdom without such an Academy” (PW 11:161). However, the academies of new learning in Balnibarbi exist in close proximity to Glubbdubdrib, the island of magicians and sorcerers. Evidence suggests that “dark” learning (esoteric material that now strikes us as belonging to an arcane intellectual fringe) was widely familiar in the early eighteenth century. Like the air-born Rosicrucian sylphs in Pope’s Rape of the Lock, ideas about “Chymicall secrets,” the “Invisible College,” “Nature’s Mystick Book,” “secret wittie devices,” “heiroglyphicall figures,” “Paracelsist alchemy,” and other Cabalistical or hermetic enigma are unverifiable but familiar. Of all the secret societies, the ne plus ultra was the so-called Invisible College or Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross, a group so remarkably clandestine that neither a single member is known, nor its existence proven despite allusions to it. Hugh Ormsby-Lennon writes of this most elusive open secret: “The Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross may never have existed—. . . but its ethos and mythos . . . pervaded England” (25). Spectator No. 379 “assumed in 1712 that all educated people were well-versed” in the existence of such groups (cited in Roberts, 98). Sir William Temple reports that even a friend’s servant was “a keeper deep in the Rosycrucian Principles” (98). Swift joked to Bolingbroke that occult scientists might have been


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laughed at or driven out of some countries, but that many of them reside in Ireland (C 2:472–473). Sir Richard Steele, a regular contributor to the public discourse of the coffeehouse, engaged in alchemical experiments at home. Pope’s editor and friend William Warburton wrote Divine Legation of Moses (1738), a book that explicates Virgil’s Aeneid (VI) in terms of ancient female mystery cults dedicated to Isis and Ceres (Brooks-Davies, 121). Elias Ashmole and Charles Wilkins, cofounders of the Royal Society, and other members including Kenelm Digby, Robert Boyle, and Christopher Wren also belonged to secret societies (Roberts, 103). Even Sir Isaac Newton (despite Pope’s “God said, Let Newton be, and All was Light”) “shuttled between the high sciences of astronomy and mathematics and the low science of alchemy” (Roberts, 72). Scholarly interest in the coexistence of secret and enlightened knowledge often responds to Frances Yates’ provocative The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. While some of Yates’ extensive claims about the indebtedness of modern science to occultist philosophy have been discredited, few doubt that a relationship existed. Roberts observes that “the role of magic in the Newtonian revolution has been devalued owing to the tendency to overstate the relationship between science and rationality” (103). Charles Webster argues that “[S]ecrecy . . . connects the Renaissance with the . . . scientific revolution. The great mathematical and scientific thinkers of the seventeenth century have at the back of their minds Renaissance traditions of esoteric thinking, of mystical continuity from Hebraic or ‘Egyptian’ wisdom . . .” (Webster 1982:219). There was a “continuing if paradoxical interaction of occultism and the new science”: Boyle’s Law and Newton’s Principia Mathematica could coexist with bizarre experiments, like the fantastic but actual projects in Laputa. The Royal Society did not simply replace older forms of learning—which were steeped in occultism and secrecy—with a new one constituted by empiricism and rationality.12 One of the most significant carryovers from the old learning to the new is the value placed on discovery, that is, on the belief that the deepest secrets will be revealed only to the most deserving inquirers. Cultural capital in education—which rewards scholars who work for meaning—reinvests a value fundamental to alchemy and hermeticism. The secrets of knowledge, claims the Basilica Chymica, cannot be known by “sluggish, slothfull, or sottish” inquirers who “want the spirit of wisdome and are not quick of understanding” or who are “prophane, lewd, and unworthy” (Croll, A2). The secret arts claim purification and reformation as their purpose—literally, for example, the alchemical reformation of sulphur and mercury into gold, and figuratively, the moral reformation of humankind. What begins as an affiliation of science with religion becomes, in an increasingly secular culture, an affiliation of education with morality. Thus secret societies justify

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themselves. Cloaking themselves in enigmatic behaviors or initiation rites, occultists, alchemists, emblematists, hermetic philosophers, cabalists, Rosicrucians, Jacobites, and Freemasons boast secret knowledge of “something covert, subtil, pleasant, and significative” (Estienne, 8): “[T]hose, whose fancies are not altogether blunted with want of knowledge” will find “some secret meaning” (10), and such men “ought to be of a very eminent quality, or of an extraordinary vertue” (14). The old quest for the elixir of life and the philosopher’s stone goes “into underground channels” (103). Pride in secret erudition is satirized, for example, in Gulliver’s and the Taleteller’s grandiose intentions to reform the world.13 However, while satirists ridicule ephemeral Rosicrucians and corporeal Freemasons, they practice their own brand of elitist obscurantism; their own dark ironies are fully and easily comprehensible only to a select few.14 Evelyn Fox Keller describes “two motifs in the language of modern science—the one concerned with the secrets of life and the other with the secrets of death” (40). What mystical and modern sciences (and satiric irony) hold in common is a belief that the “book of nature” cannot be taken at face value, that appearances conceal a mysterious but truer meaning available only to the persevering, diligent, worthy observer. A drop of water under a microscope could reveal an invisible world of animal life; a prism could demonstrate that clear light was really composed of seven different colors. These facts did not seem incompatible with the alchemical idea that base metals could be refined into gold, or with the mystical belief that divine mysteries were contained in the same drop of water and ray of light. Thus Pope’s Rape of the Lock can merge into one poetic image both Rosicrucian sylphs and the Newtonian rainbow (TE 2:162, ll. 65–68). Galileo watched the heavens, recording in a notebook the positions of what seemed to be stars moving horizontally back and forth over time. But like the practitioner of secret learning, he assumed that his evidence concealed another meaning, and eventually posited four moons orbiting at different speeds around the planet Jupiter, an inference later proven true. Although Thomas Sprat urged fellows of the Royal Society to write objectively, the language of learning seductively promised its readers penetration of the secrets of nature.15 Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665) describes experiments using a microscope; yet the effect of reading the work is to stimulate voyeuristic curiosity about the hitherto private parts of small or hidden creatures or things. Scientific writing encourages this peeping-tom attitude in readers “who are desirous of surveying the extensive beauties of minute creation” (Adams, title page). Hooke conjectures that “there may arise many admirable advantages . . . [from] the deepest discoveries” of the microscope: “we may perhaps be enabled to discern all the secret workings of nature.” Walter Charlton claims that through his


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amalgam of scientific method and magic “he beheld Nature face to face, and freely gazed upon all her beautiful parts in the nakednesse of their Essences, and Formes devested of all corporeity” (Vindiciae Academiarum, 22). Mark Akenside’s Hymn to Science (1739) echoes these views: “Give me to learn each secret cause, / Let Numbers, Figures, Motion’s Laws, / Reveal’d before me stand” (19–21). The language becomes undeniably erotic: “The ferreting out of nature’s secrets, understood as the illumination of a female interior, or the tearing of Nature’s veil, may be seen as expressing one of the most unembarrassedly stereotypic impulses of the scientific project. . . . Scientific enlightenment is in this sense a drama . . . between female procreativity and male productivity—a drama in need of constant reenactment at ever-receding recesses of nature’s secrets” (Keller, 41). Susan Pucci compares the observations of the experimental scientist and the voyeurism of the harem visitor: “The harem topos functions to enact the fulfillment of pleasure through its voyeuristic simulacrum. . . . It is precisely the notion of vicarious experience that coincides . . . with the eighteenth-century agenda of experimental science, converting, translating sexual desire in libido sciendi (the desire to know)” (Pucci, 157).16 The erotics of science are reaffirmed by Diderot’s Les Bijoux indiscrets. The sultan Mangogul’s magic ring is the catalyst for a series of vagina monologues, in which each courtesan’s hidden ‘jewel’ reveals her sexual secrets. In the middle of the work, however, Mangogul dreams about a voyage to “the Region of Hypotheses” where Socrates and Plato, the colossus of “Experiment/Experience,” the works of Newton, Galileo, and Pascal, the telescope, prism, and test tube, contribute to an anxious fantasy about the instability and potential incoherence of a world in which the desire to know, to see, and to penetrate will be frustrated. Pucci writes, “The female figures organized by the metaphor of the harem . . . enhance the paradoxical aspect of Diderot’s model for experimental science. . . . the impenetrability of women’s difference stands for that of the material object world and for the impossibility of resolving these experiences into a systematic philosophy” (160). The familiarity of satirists like Swift, Manley, and Pope with secret learning and secret societies is evidenced in their ironic reworking of its latent (and sometimes aberrant) eroticism. Swift associated enthusiasm and hermetic philosophy with poorly sublimated sexual desire. Pope’s sylphs and gnomes in The Rape of the Lock enact sexual frustration and consummation inspired by Abbe de Montfaucon de Villars’ Rosicrucian Le Comte de Gabalis (1680[1714]). The Dunciad has been called an “an alchemical cryptogram” as well as is a parody of the “moon goddess of veiled mysteries” Isis/Ceres (Brooks-Davies, 140, 122) who transports Tibbald/Cibber to her

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secret Temple where she “reveals herself, . . . unfold all her arts, and initiates him into her Mysteries” (TE 5:54). In Manley’s Memoirs of Europe, Damareta (Mrs. Jennings, mother of Sarah Churchill) performs ‘dark’ experiments. She falls under the influence of Timias (Royal Society founder Kenelm Digby), “a Chymist [who] lov’d mysterious Study” (2:44) and who instructs Damareta in “the Secrets of Philosophy and the Cabalistical Art.” She, researching the secrets of sexual orgasm, becomes an independent experimenter worthy of the Royal Society or the Academy of Projectors: “She refin’d upon Timius’s Scheme, turn’d Chymist in her Pleasure, extracted the Spirit of Delight, and found the Art of improving the Lovers moment to a height unknown before” (2:47). The ‘new cabal’ of lesbians in The New Atalantis furthers the association of sex with secret societies. Sir Frances Bacon’s program for the ‘advancement of learning’ and his utopian narrative The New Atlantis bear some relationship to Manley’s and Swift’s dystopian narratives The New Atalantis and Gulliver’s Travels. All three imagine a visit to an island where invisibility, secrecy, power, political reform, and spying are key features. Bacon’s educational schemes interested both occultist groups and the Royal Society (Yates, 179).17 Bacon’s governor describes Atlantis “as . . . a land of magicians, that set forth spirits of the air into all parts” (3:140). The “benevolent brothers [of Salomon’s House] . . . and their great college” could disappear (183), like Manley’s ‘sisterhood’ of narrators (Intelligence, Astrea, and Justice) and Swift’s inhabitants of Glubdubdrib. The idealizing fictions of Bacon’s utopia and the satiric fictions of Swift’s and Manley’s dystopias share a commitment to reform. Bacon’s ideal world, like the satirist’s flawed one, is dedicated to intelligence in its double meaning (understanding and spying). Salomon’s House sends out secret agents, who travel in order to return with “both scientific knowledge and knowledge of affairs of state.” Thus, “a state apparatus of scientific investigation . . . depends partly on the techniques of political intelligence-gathering” (Archer, 1). Such a practice of secrecy disperses power among many unseen individuals, unlike models of surveillance that locate power in one all-seeing and highly visible consciousness. The offer to put power in many unseen hands accords well with Locke’s emphasis on the value of education.18 Knowledge and learning intersect, then, with both gender and politics.

Secret Loves Foucault argues that desire for sexual knowledge accompanies the reconfiguration of the modern individual through the regulation of desire,


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evidenced by “a political, economic, and technical excitement to talk about sex” (Foucault 1978:1:4). The need to know whose ‘secret parts’ were committing which ‘secret acts’ is driven by a changing politics of identity in which sexual practice is becoming the central determinant of selfhood and in which certain sexual practices are perceived to affect civil order. Robert Bataille, Thomas Laqueur, Eve Sedgwick, Roy Porter, Alan Bray, and Randolph Trumbach have questioned the ways in which categories of sex and gender evolved during the early modern period, away from classical and medieval notions of self, and toward the nineteenth-century bourgeois subject. Foucault’s assertion would seem corroborated by John Dunton’s compendium of knowledge Athenae Rediviae, or The Athenian Spy (1704). Its title page promises the “ Secret Letters . . . By the Most Ingenious Ladies of the Three Kingdoms . . . Being a intire Collection of Love-Secrets” that will disclose “The Way of a Man with a Maid: Or, the Whole Art of Amour.” The pursuit of this kind of information, the reader is told, has always been important to Athenian Society: “A Secret Correspondence between the Athenian Society and these celebrated Wits has been continued ever since the First Publication of the Athenian Mercury, (which is twelve years since)” (a3). From the perspective of gender theory, Eve Sedgwick extends Foucault’s argument about the relationship between cognition, transgression, and sexuality: “[M]odern Western culture has placed what it calls sexuality in a more and more distinctively privileged relation to our most prized constructs of individual identity, truth, and knowledge, it becomes truer and truer that the language of sexuality not only intersects with but transforms the other languages and relations by which we know” (1990:3). In the homo/heterosexual crisis that becomes a defining feature of European culture, “secrecy itself becomes manifest as this secret” [i.e., homosexuality]: it was “obvious to Queen Victoria . . . that knowledge meant sexual knowledge, and secrets, sexual secrets, there had in fact developed one particular sexuality that was distinctively constituted as secrecy” (73). But what were the terms of such discourse around 1700? For Sedgwick, ‘the closet’ is fundamentally an aspect of gay life, in ways not applicable to earlier centuries in which closets held religious supplicants, secretaries, housewives, and heroines writing epistles about heterosexual love. Queen Victoria expressed love for her husband Bertie by building a lavish public monument to their private joys. But in 1702 public awareness seems more focused on (but not horrified by) Queen Anne’s love relationships with the women who shared her intimacy: with Sarah Churchill (the Mrs. Morley/Mrs. Freeman affair) and Abigail Masham (Donoghue, 158–164). Blenheim Palace is as much a monument to Anne’s devotion to Sarah as it a reward for John Churchill’s military victories. ‘Propriety’ is a contentious and historically inconsistent concept. In An Outline of a Theory of

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Practice, Pierre Bourdieu refers to “the naturalization of its own arbitrariness” (164) of an established social order, a process of mystification by which social constructions are treated as inevitable and natural. In times of rapid change, this process appears less inevitable and inescapable. If the creation of the modern subject is crucially determined by codes of licit and illicit sexual practice, the age of satire coincides with a period of contention between views of sexuality as particular acts (performing a same-sex act, for example) and as identity (being a homosexual).19 Out of the political upheavals occurring between 1650 and 1750 emerge “virtually all modern Western notions of equality . . . [and] natural justice,” a process simultaneous with the rise of “an unusually prominent and public sexual culture” that proves “less . . . an age of erotic pleasure than . . . a new era of sexual anxiety” (Porter 1985:2). Does a ‘poetics of transgression’ (as defined by Peter Stallybrass and Allon White) make it necessary to know the secrets of libertines, prostitutes, polygamists, and rapists, to visit molly houses, brothels, and orgies (or their representations) in order to know what is ‘normal’? Or must desire be more and more hidden and repressed? Here the discursive power of sex and the discursive power of secrecy coincide. Medical literature in this period refers to human (especially female) genitalia as “secret parts” (Porter 1994:48), and many medical and nonmedical texts were produced to describe the ‘secret acts” in which they could engage. Roy Porter observes that a “genre that assumed special significance in the early modern period, notably towards 1700, was printed sexual advice literature” (135), the most popular of which were popular Aristotle’s Master-Piece (1684) and Nicholas Venette’s Tableau de l’amour conjugal (1696). Aristotle’s Master-Piece went through at least forty-three editions during the eighteenth century, and a translation of Venette, The Mysteries of Conjugal Love Reveal’ d (1702), was a rival best seller for over two hundred years (136). Sexual problems are referred to as “secret infirmities” in John Marten’s Gosologium novum: or, a New System of All the Secret Infirmities and Diseases, Natural, Accidental, and Venereal in Men and Women (1709). Some books specifically promised to disclose female secrets to men who “are kept in the dark” (Buchan, xvi), as in Rare Verities, The Cabinet of Venus Unlocked (1658). By 1700, women were contributing to printed literature about the female body, especially in manuals on midwifery (Porter 1994:94). But in diaries, journals, and letters, women guard the secrets of sexual experience closely. Most texts on sexuality focus on the need to perpetuate the human species, but they acknowledge the complexity and waywardness of human desire: “The mysteries of generation thus formed the key to the secrets of one’s very being” (139).


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Other texts focused on marginalized or prohibited sex. Curiosity about what people might be doing behind closed doors generated a quantity of reading material: Eunuchs, hermaphrodites, homosexuals, lesbians and transvestites were the objects of treatises, satirical attacks, moral diatribes, and erotic fiction which, despite their different literary origins, had one common denominator. This was the calculated effort on the part of publishers to meet and exploit the prurient interest of readers in a notoriously scabrous subject matter whose mysterious and occasionally frightening aspects literally invited comments, reaching from enlightened speculation to satire and deliberate fabrication. (DiPiero, 56)

Several scholars (Laqueur, Jordanova, J. Stengers, Van Neck, and Fox) analyze fear of masturbation, “the heinous sin of self-pollution,” as politically motivated, like claims that homosexuality is a foreign import: “Britons, for shame! Be Male and Female still. / Banish this foreign Vice; it grows not here” (Armstrong; quoted in Porter 1994:147). Sexual secrets also express economic anxieties. Behaviors that avoid procreation are suspect. Pious exhortations to multiply the species reflect not only religious doctrine but also the need for a labor force, armies, and a stable population. But publicly sanctioned forms of sex did not lessen curiosity about hidden loves, sometimes hidden violence, in the closet, boudoir, or bower. Secret histories of the court of Charles II, Rochester’s widely circulated and often-quoted poems about “buggeries and rape,” and other forms of promiscuous “swiv[ing]” had a significant readership. Pepys’ diary records his choices of pornography, and Frances Barker argues that the ‘private body’ is enabled by such closeted scenes of reading where a man like Pepys could sanction his consultation of L’ecole des filles “for information’s sake.” Examples of ‘secret love’ sometimes reached English readers in translations and adaptations of French romance. These narratives are full of devices for concealing (and intensifying) desire: curtained beds, masquerades, billet-doux tucked in unseen places, body language—blushes, sighs, and gazes—signifying covert thoughts. Lovers attempt to conceal and penetrate one another’s feelings and bodies. The unhappy denouement of Madame de Lafayette’s Princess of Cleves depends on the revelation of a sexual secret. The princess lives honorably, despite an illicit passion for the noble Nemours, until her confession destroys both her spouse and herself. Nathaniel Lee’s adaptation of this romance for the stage abjures the delicate feelings of the original text and crudely but clearly focuses on the problem of secrecy. The prince, wrongheadedly urging his wife to “[t]rust [her] dear Husband” (Lee, 20), wheedles out the ‘bosom Secret.” Neither of them realizes that Nemours (now

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grossly libertine) secretly eavesdrops on their conversation—of which he is the hidden secret. The princess “rashly told the secret of her heart, / Which the fond man would evermore impart” (4:iv. 46–47), and soon “the Secret . . . blazed at Court.” The Cleves’ marital problems are not exceptional but symptomatic. The jaded women of the court prefer “Gallants [who] are the closest lovers, so good at keeping a secret—For a Secret Lover’s like a Gun charged with white Powder, does Execution but makes no Noise” (2:ii. 17). Women, outwardly “grave” but inwardly “libidinous beyond example,” stealthily “love wild men . . . like melancholy birds, that ne’er peep abroad by day, but they tu whit and tu whou it at night.” Nemours longs to “catch a woman in the undress of her soul,” discovering “the Secrets of [her] Nature” (5:ii). Misogynists and cynics inhabit a sordid world in which illicit behavior occurs beneath the surface of daily routine: “There was nothing like slipping out of the crowd into a corner, breathing short an ejaculation, and returning as if we came from church” (Lee, 36). The social order tolerates such open secrets of promiscuity as long as it does not have to sanction them. Lip service is paid to honesty, yet honesty repeatedly undoes its practitioners. In Lee’s ‘tragedy’ things fall apart because people talk too much. Secrets, here and elsewhere, test the characters’ power over others. Finally, a source of secret love could be found in the colonial ‘other.’ Travel, empire, and trade aroused local English curiosity about the unknown: “The terraquaceous globe was itself yielding us such astonishing secrets—new continents, people, flora and fauna” (Rousseau, 8). Exoticism was often perceived as erotic. Two well-known souvenirs, Behn’s Surinamese costume and the Turkish dress of Defoe’s Roxana, are brought back to England where they attract the desiring gaze of men. Popular heroic plays are cast in exotic garb. Travel writers describe secrets of the Orient, including harems, eunuchs, sultans, and slaves. Even Swift’s Gulliver reports salacious games at the courts of Lilliput and Brobdingnag, and libidinous behavior of female Yahoos. The production of travel books increased from 1665 to the end of the eighteenth century (at least four new volumes every three years). Popular works like Marana’s Memoirs of a Turkish Spy and Rycaut’s Turkish History, ostensibly about trade, also indulge in the revelation of sexual escapades of lush decadence, and fantasies of violent domination.20 The revelations of the harem encourage writers to contrast Western conventions of love to mysteries of the East: “in other stories the Knight consumes himself with combats, watchings, and penance, to acquire the love of one fair damsel; here an army of virgins make it the only study of their lives to obtain the single nod of invitation to the bed of their great Master” (Rycaut 2:18–19). Other ‘others’ contributed to the comparison: “discoveries such as the


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innocent promiscuous sexual conduct of the Tahitians” led “writers as diverse as Swift and Diderot . . . to regard the sexual prohibitions of the Europeans as merely arbitrary” (Sexual Underworlds, 2). Montagu’s letters unveil Turkish women and expose the secrets of the bath. Edward Gibbon describes his youthful fascination for “Mahomet and his Saracens . . . the Dynasties of Assyria and Egypt were my top and cricket-ball.” Porter observes: “it was the vicarious enjoyment of sex and violence in The Arabian Nights which drew him, and so many others . . . to their lifelong fascination with tales of the Orient” (Memoirs of My Life, 15).21 In Diderot’s rewriting of oriental secrets in Les Bijoux indiscrets, the invisible male voyeur and eavesdropper controls women’s sexual organs. Pucci notes, “it is to enter the boudoir of the unsuspecting women and through this proximity to the place of sexual encounter to appropriate in less ambiguous terms her intimate, secret sexuality” (156). Narratives about the sexualized body, projecting fantasies of domination and desire onto others, reinforce the argument that secrets remain fundamental to the operations of power. Scenes of violence and subjugation accompany sexual episodes, so that acts of physical torture and coercion may occur on the very same pages that expose sensual indulgences in lavish detail.

Secret Politics Political secrets directly challenge theories about democratization and the foundation of the public sphere. George Simmel grounds his study of the sociology of secrecy on an inverse relationship between the rise of democratic political systems and the openness (and the public comprehensibility) of government: [I]n the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, governments kept anxiously silent about the amounts of state debts, the tax situation, and the size of the army. . . . It has been said about English court history that the real court cabal, the secret whisperings, the organization of intrigue, did not occur under despotism, but only once the king had constitutional counselors, that is, when the government was, to this extent, an openly revealed system. Only then, the king began . . . to form, against these co-rulers who somehow were foisted upon him, an unofficial quasi-subterranean circle of advisers, which in itself, as well as through the efforts to enter it, created a chain of concealments and conspiracies. (336, n. 4)

The Restoration alone could not guarantee the future of English monarchy: “In order to secure the government, a wide network of spies was

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established across Britain and abroad.” The new term “secret services” denotes “service rendered to a government, the nature of which cannot be disclosed to the public, but which are paid for by funds set aside for that purpose.”22 The secretary of state was literally a repository of secrets who was “sent a constant stream of intelligence from correspondents in every city and from ‘evidences’ [spies] or informers eager to prove their loyalty, lessen their punishment or denigrate their personal enemies. Hence the reign of Charles II was sustained by these ‘evidences” (LL, 5). James II “called secretly for the Great Seal” of England with him in his escape boat “as intending to make a secret use of it, for pardons and grants,” although its weight caused him to toss it overboard, and it was found in the Thames by a fisherman (Burnet 1834:534). Suspicion surrounded the pregnancy of his queen because “all things about her person were . . . managed with a mysterious secrecy,” and the birth of a pretender to the throne was widely represented “as an imposture” to fulfill a Catholic conspiracy (498). Under William and Mary, as Burnet observes of Daniel Finch, Earl of Nottingham, “secretaries of state have a particular allowance for such spies, as they employ to procure intelligence . . . he spared no cost or pains to have an account of all that passed in the city” (526). Swift suggests that matters were no less clandestine during the reign of Queen Anne. In the School of Political Projectors, the rage for coded meanings finds a senate in a flock of geese, a revolution in a broom, and a committee of grandees in a chamber pot: “Papers are delivered to a set of Artists very dextrous in finding out the mysterious meanings of Words, Syllables, and Letters” (PW 11:175–176): By transposing the Letters of the Alphabet, they can lay open the designs of a discontented Party. . . . if I should say in a letter to a Friend, Our Brother Tom hath just got the Piles; a man of skill in the Art would discover how the same Letters which compose that sentence, may be analysed into the following Words; Resist, —— a Plot is brought home —— The Tour.

John Wilkins suggests a significant industry of “Cryptographers . . . and Deciphers [who] know / Such secret Ways to write” (Aa3) following the execution of the Charles I. Of Cromwell’s rule, the Venetian ambassador Sagredo observed that “[they] keep their secrets so closely that no effort can discover the true substance of their deliberations . . . and [they] maintain secret spies everywhere.” Wilkins describes messages rolled up in wax candles, concealed in loaves of bread or in “the Belly of a Hare” (14), encoded by knots tied in a string, written in “the distilled Juice of Gloworms (21) or the “gummy Juice . . . [of] Entrails” (22). Secret letters, he explains, have been placed “into two Bladders, betwixt which a common Soldier in the Disguise of a


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Sea-monster, was appointed to swim into the City” (17). Other messengers have been “sent away in coffins as being dead” (15), or sent “in the Disguise of Brute Creatures . . . who crept out of the City by Night like Dogs” (15). Instructions are offered on ways to encode messages in ingenious secret alphabets, hieroglyphics, and diagrams. Military strategy, political espionage, and diplomatic persuasion are abetted, presumably, by these inventive if crude technologies of stealth: “The Art of these was so to imply a secret Argument, that the Adversary might unawares be brought over to an Acknowledgement and confession of the thing we would have” (9). Wilkins’ treatise first appears at the outbreak of civil war and continues in three further editions until 1708, that is, through the succession settlement. No wonder Sagredo believed that “no government on earth discloses its own acts less and knows those of others more precisely than that of England” (Thompson, 85). In 1672, Charles II signed the Secret Treaty of Dover with Louis XIV, which promised England’s return to Catholicism in exchange for enough financial and military support from France to make him independent of the English Parliament (Owen, 8). Andrew Marvell’s An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England (1677) reflects widening suspicion of the monarch’s covert allegiance with French expansionism and Roman Catholicism. The Treaty of Dover was real, but rumors of other secret conspiracies were circulating as well: Titus Oates’s spurious yet consequential discoveries of a Popish Plot were eagerly accepted by a public ready to believe “absurd tales of large Papist armies, mysterious movements by night, secret papers scattered in the highways” (J. R. Jones, 22). Bedlow’s A Narrative and Impartial Discovery of the Horrid Popish Plot persuaded many that Catholics secretly had contrived to set all fires since 1666. A Short Narrative of the Discovery of a College of Jesuits (1679) contributed to the same fear of hidden plots and cabals. Such ‘discoveries’ now appear fantastic, but public credence seems less strange if we understand the extent to which secrets actually determine politics. The Lord Treasurer Thomas Osborne, Earl of Danby, and the Prince of Wales James Stuart were exposed as secret Catholics, triggering the Exclusion Crisis (1678). The first Exclusion Parliament appointed a committee on secrecy to monitor plots more effectively (J. R. Jones, 51). In 1679, Shaftesbury, although the head of the Opposition faction seeking to exclude James from the throne, was willing to enter into secret negotiations with him, in case “he [Shaftesbury] might now be tempted by the fruits of office to reverse this course” (75). Spies, double agents, informers, and conspiracy enlivened the Meal-Tub Plot (109). When the Whigs petitioned the king after the prorogation of Parliament, many feared that “Portsmouth, Lauderdale, Sunderland, and the Secret Cabal [the king’s mistress and Tory ministers] . . . will use these petitions as a handle to effect their other designs”

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(118). Four years of political tumult eventually removed James from the throne, but not before several disturbing revelations: the murder of Sir Edmund Bury Godfrey (October 17, 1678); the disclosure of the Popish Plot allegations to Parliament; the discovery of treasonable correspondence of James’ confessor, Father Coleman; and the Earl of Montagu’s (a former ambassador to Paris) dramatic disclosure of written evidence of the Earl of Danby’s secret negotiations with France. A popular story claimed that the Duke of Monmouth’s mother Lucy Walters had secretly married Charles II, and that the discovery of documents in a hidden box would prove Monmouth’s legitimate right to the throne. Under James II, Robert Spencer, second Earl Sunderland, interfered in a private negotiation between the king and Louis XIV. Eventually, both James, his queen, and his infant son (supposedly hidden in a warming pan) made their escapes in disguise and by night. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, William III appointed John Macky as ‘Inspector of the Coast’ between England and France “in order to prevent treasonable correspondence.” His duties apparently were to leave nothing unsearched, even dirty underwear, for he discovered many concealed political documents, including “seventy letters in a false Bottom of a Box with foul Linen; which Letters gave the first Insight into the second Invasion intended from Calais, which terminated in an Assassination” (Macky, v–vi). Whigs and Tories accused each other of selling national secrets to foreign countries. In 1711, Spectator No. 85 advertises “Letters and Instructions from the French King to his Ministers . . . wherein are several Secret Transactions between the courts of France and England.” By this time, Harley had organized an efficient secret service to keep tabs on incipient intriguers and troublemakers. Even so, Queen Anne was suspected of secretly sending funds to support her father (The Old Pretender) in France.23 While much has been made of the ‘crisis of patriarchy” that followed the execution of Charles I, at least that bloody event was upon open scaffolding before thousands of witnesses. Was it not as unsettling (and perhaps more so) to a sense of stability, to exist in an untrustworthy world in which political events had gone undercover, in which shocking secrets might at any moment be revealed? In the cases of Behn, Dryden, Swift, Manley, and Pope, clandestine politics are formative. The very possibility of Anne’s reign seems predicated on the timely revelation of William III’s secret attempts to sabotage her. The Earl of Jersey, after William’s death, “secured that Prince’s closet”: “‘William was hardly cold in his Death-Bed’ before the rumor began to circulate ‘That there were some Papers found in his strong Box, whereby it appear’d, that he had formed the Design of Advancing the Elector of


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Hanover to the Crown, to the Exclusion of Queen ANNE’” (Boyer, Annals 1703:33). Even the lowest social groups—the homeless, the mob, and the laboring poor—have recourse to their own stratagems. While ‘the mob’ implies a public demonstration of will—the riot in the street or public square—the eighteenth century also saw increasing examples of power asserted by the poor through secret means, such as anonymous threats and malicious damage. With rising literacy came not only the ability to read novels of sentiment (like Richardson’s Pamela) and to proliferate printed texts, but to write and circulate anonymous letters from disgruntled laborers and servants to their masters and ‘betters.’ Examples of sabotage and property damage, often performed under cover of night, begin at this time and escalate after mid-century: arson, animal maiming, destroying fences, cutting the bark from trees were actions that allowed some power to the disenfranchised (Hay and Rogers, 142–144). Technology, space and place, politics, commerce, learning, sexuality, and the subject offer opportunities to reimagine the sometimes-veiled face of the great age of satire. Some of the period’s most familiar utterances seem, in contrast, to celebrate extreme obviousness and simplicity: “WHATEVER IS, IS RIGHT” (the culmination of Pope’s Essay on Man) or things “that strike you with immediate conviction” (the Houyhnhnm concept of truth in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels). But satire, when it attacks enemies or consolidates alliances, sometimes avails itself of secretive practices to which we now turn.


Chapter 2 Toward a Theory of Satire I: Gossip and Slander

[T]he conversation had been meanwhile vacillating . . . [It] came finally to rest on the last topic, that is, ill-natured gossip. . . . and the conversation crackled merrily like a burning faggot. —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina There is another foule puddle that ouzeth from the same corrupt gogmire . . . which is libelling, secret slandring, or defaming of another. —Ferdinando Pulton, De pace regis and regni

(Speech) Acts of Aggression This chapter considers the dynamics of verbal attacks through gossip, slander, and libel—three important ways of exposing information, and three modes of discourse with significant relationships to satire. Leo Tolstoy likens gossip to the merry crackle of fire in a hearth; Ferdinando Pulton calls slander a foul puddle oozing from a quagmire. Gossip and slander, both generally derogatory, have critically distinctive etymologies. Gossip derives from god (god) + sibb (kinfolk, the same root as sibling). The medieval godsib “often appeared as a validating witness at infant baptisms . . . absolutely necessary when, as was often the case, the real father was absent” (Gordon 1988:14). Hints of sex (necessary for pregnancy) and transgression (why is the father absent?) are implicit in the history of the word. Slander, in contrast, derives from the same etymological root as scandal (G. skandalon,

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L. scandalum, ME sclaundre): a stumbling block or trap. It recalls the injunction against clandestine malice that accompanies the Old Testament ‘golden rule’ (to treat one’s neighbor like oneself): “Thou shalt not place a stumbling block before the blind” (Leviticus, 19). Chapter 1 proposes a revision of the ‘founding of the public sphere’ by viewing it through concurrent practices of secrecy. In a culture of secrecy, gossip and slander operate in counterpoint to official public discourse. Although writers like Martial and Juvenal, or Jonson and Marston include aspects of gossip and slander in formal verse satire and epigram, their work does not account for the increase of such texts at the end of the seventeenth century. Seven volumes of Poems on Affairs of State between 1660 and 1714 attest to a dramatic rise of political and personal satire. Not only are the tattling footnotes of Pope’s Dunciad far longer than the poem itself, but a collection of four volumes of scandalous attacks on himself by various authors, the so-called Popiana, provoke and are absorbed into his own satiric practice. Gradations of aggressive speech, each gradation escalating the repercussions of the relationship between secret and public information, form a kind of continuum, from the most private whisper to the most widely read satire: “Scandal occurs when hidden motives in conflict with public objectives are exposed to public scrutiny. A scandalous deed is normally carried out under the cloak of mysterious privacy, then passed into that in-between zone of private and public called gossip, but eventually it comes into full public view through its excessive reduplication in writing, print, and graphic art” (Ross, 105). The gradations from gossip to satire also seem to move from feminine to masculine. The gossip is more commonly figured as a woman; the satirist, as a man. Personal letters by women in the Public Record Office are catalogued as “gossip about private friends,” while gossipy letters by men are dignified as “private news” (Hoffman and Rosenfelt, 27). When Eliza Haywood claimed that The Female Spectator would be a source of news, she was told that she “should be taken for an idle, prating gossiping Old Woman, fit only to tell long Stories by the Fireside” (McKeon, Origins, 601). Both gossip and satirist reveal information without their subject’s volition: both can ‘kill’ reputation; both can have effects—both can perform—in the ‘real’ world. Yet the gossip has low status (George Meredith calls gossip “the beast of prey that does not wait for the death of the creature it devours”), while the satirist nears heroic heights. “Satire’s my weapon,” boasts Pope “arm’d for Virtue when [he] point[s] the pen” (TE 4:11–14, ll. 69, 105).1 Conventional views of satire agree that it is a verbal attack, censure, or exposure by means of a manifest fiction, conveyed either in poetry or in prose.2 Moreover, this fiction is imitative, transformative, or parodic.3 For example, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels attacks, censures, and exposes English depravity through the

Theorizing Satire I: Gossip and Slander

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imaginary beings called Yahoos and Houyhnhnms within a framing narrative that imitates travel writing. A new relationship between the effects of gossip, and slander and the effects of satiric attacks is illuminated by speech act theory as developed by J. L. Austin, Shoshana Felman, and Judith Butler. How to Do Things with Words brings the concept of performativity to bear on the reforming impulses of satire and its involvement with “things” in the real world.4 “[In] some cases and senses . . . to say something is to do something; or . . . by saying or in saying something we are doing something,” Austin writes (12).5 Austin begins his classification of speech acts with the promise, a linguistic maneuver that Felman and Butler recognize for its dangerous potential and for its paradigmatic relationship to the performance of aggressive uses of language such as the curse, the libel, or the seductive oath.6 Felman aligns Austin’s philosophical categories more closely with literature, with representations of speech that signify “the indissoluble relation between the physical and the linguistic, between body and language, act and discourse” (94). In some instances, acts can be understood only as the effect of language; words prevail over physical deeds. In the Oedipus story, “the source of the tragic consists not in the act . . . but in the encounter between act and language” (Felman, 95). That is, Oedipus does not fear the act of killing Laius but the curse against Laius’ murderer. Similarly, Hamlet suffers not from the act of his father’s wrongful death, but from the oath he swears to remember the crime. Hamlet’s plight is discursive: he can only experience the retelling of a murder by a questionable (because phantasmic) narrator, yet he must promise to remember that version and to create a revenge ending for it. Significantly, the ghost’s narrative, while it claims to be the ‘correct’ account of a king’s death, acknowledges (and in fact is prompted by) the existence of other competing versions of the same event. Satire also privileges ‘acts’ as language effects. Its verbal ‘stab’ has encouraged theorists such as Elliott to associate the genre with the ritual killing of an enemy.7 And indeed, the almanac writer Isaac Bickerstaff dies in effect because Swift publishes his death notice. Felman pursues the significance of the promise, Austin’s primary speech act, in light of Neitzche’s observation that humans are promising animals and that promises are a crucial exercise of power. Competing narratives, violated contracts, broken pledges, insincere vows, and foresworn seductions inform the peculiar aggressions of satire (although satire is not Felman’s focus). By disclosing and receiving secrets, satirist and audience form a contract that supersedes the accuracy of the specific content of the attack. We do not care if Bentley, Wotton, or Temple is correct about the epistles of Phalaris, once we have tacitly agreed to accept the narrator’s unheroic version of the controversy.

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In the encounter between act and language, the secret history of anything is offered as the real deal, as the fulfillment of a promise to deliver the goods on someone or something. If humans are distinguished by the ability to promise, so are they distinguished by another fundamental speech act: to name (and rename—an act of linguistic creativity—and name-call—an act of linguistic aggression). With respect to name-calling, Butler helpfully speculates on the consequences of language’s performative power to injure. In a discussion of contemporary homophobic and racist hate speech, she notes that “verbal assaults” also “wor[k] to constitute a subject through discursive means” (19). Butler articulates a philosophical problem traceable back to Locke, who expanded An Essay concerning Human Understanding, to include a third volume on “words” and “abuses of words” and whose work coincides with the great outpouring of English satire. Locke’s image of the human subject as an empty page upon which experience writes and postmodern ideas of scripted identity are both responsive to Butler’s further questions: “Is our vulnerability to language a consequence of our being constituted within its terms? If we are formed in language, then that formative power precedes and conditions any decisions we might make about it, insulting us from the start, as it were, by its prior power” (2). As we consider various categories of aggressive language, we also bear in mind the connection between vulnerability and secrecy, and between secrecy and the power/knowledge nexus. To be vulnerable is to be susceptible to wounding (from the Latin, vulnus, wound), to be unprotected and uncovered. Western myths represent exposure as weakness (Adam and Eve unable to hide from God) and concealment as strength (the Trojan Horse). One cannot wound what is hidden or unknown, although strategies exist to remove protective veils and coatings: “The secret puts a barrier between men, but, at the same time, it creates the tempting challenge to break through it, by gossip and confession—and thus challenge accompanies its psychology like a constant overtone” (Simmel, 334). We begin to assess the speech acts that constitute satire by considering the “challenge” posed by gossip.

The Gossip Hypothesis Gossip causes both pleasure and pain. It can build alliances, entertain, and claim a kind of authority within communities. But it also damages personal reputation, encourages paranoia, and threatens established systems of (patriarchal) power. Early advocates for its pleasures highlight its general social function. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath values her “gossyb dame Alys”


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[“So often tymes I to my gossyb wente, / For evere yet I loved to be gay” (D 3:544–545)]. Shakespeare ends A Comedy of Errors with “a gossips’ feast” (5:i. 407). In Chapman’s comedy Eastwood Ho, the God-sibs are all male, and Sir Francis Bacon writes that men who “want Friends to open themselves unto, are Canniballs of theire own Hearts” (Essays, 83). Johnson’s Dictionary defines the word as a “tippling companion,” but also as “one who runs about tattling like women at a lying-in,” thus associating the word with settings of cooperation, of friendly intoxication, and of the production of life.8 Modern scientific studies of the evolution of human language propose “the ‘gossip’ hypothesis of language origins” in primate behavior and in the primitive stages of human evolution: “The pressures on group cohesion . . . led to a new development in vocal communication, whereby spoken language facilitated exchange of information about third parties” (Power in Hurford, 114). Among the more compelling aspects of these linguistic theories about ‘individuals talking about other individuals’ are the essential roles of ‘trust’ and ‘privacy,’ which fix the need for (or practice of ) secrecy in the very earliest stages of communication by means of language.9 Work by Chris Knight, Camilla Power, Ib Ulbaek, and Robin Dunbar proposes that “the design hallmarks of ‘conspiratorial whispering’” emerge with (what the eighteenth century liked to call) the ‘speaking animal’: “Where cognition is sophisticated, ‘Machiavellian’ deception will be an ever-present threat. . . . [E]xploitative and competitive social relationships . . . [are] fundamental building blocks to the emergence of speech-like complexity” (Knight in Hurford, 15). Intersecting at various points with Austin’s philosophy of the speech act (which challenges the view that ‘successful’ language fundamentally ‘names’ or represents ‘truth’), the ‘gossip hypothesis’ posits primal circumstances in which internal conflict and power-seeking have always entailed a desire to ‘do things’ to (and with) listeners. These primal circumstances establish models of community in which linguistic privacy or intimacy have significance in relation to a public sphere of common knowledge that can be manipulated. Charles Briggs sees this fundamental dynamic operating in contemporary society: “Gossip narratives . . . play a prominent role in everyday talk among adults in shaping everyday understanding of social conflict” (3). Strategic information-sharing about third parties, according to these linguistic models, brings language systems from an inchoate stage to the highest level of sophistication.10 Some locate ‘woman power’ in gossip. A recent study of gender and language asserts that “[g]ossip is essentially talk between women in our common role as women” (Jones, 195). In contemporary women’s “speech communities,” Jennifer Coates claims that gossip is “cooperative [in] the establishment and maintenance of social relationships, the reaffirming and

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strengthening of friendship” (98). Patricia Spacks’ Gossip further genders gossip and analyzes its relationship to novels as “a mode of power, of undermining public rigidities and asserting private integrity, of discovering means of agency for women, those citizens deprived of public function. It provides also the substance and the means of narrative” (170).11 Otherwise voiceless women find an outlet for aggressive impulses. Confidentiality, alliance, and exchange organize the gossipers’ economy in which secrets supply ‘goods’ and commodities. Their circulation enriches a marketplace in which women exercise control. Christine Roulston departs from Spacks by claiming that “gossip functions as a form of social control, where the individual discovers not only the act of desiring but also learns who to desire. . . . [It] momentarily undoes social and gendered hierarchies by implicating everyone in the speech community” (Roulston, 56).12 Gossip, though ‘unauthorized,’ gives women a kind of power recognized by men. Mr. Spectator admits that he “permit[s] . . . Talebearers”: “I cannot wholly suppress them no more than a General would discourage Spies” (Spectator No. 390; 3:466). Men who cross-dress in women’s language seem ridiculous: the trivial peers in Pope’s Rape of the Lock, fops such as Etherege’s Sir Fopling Flutter or libertines like Rochester’s bedizened drunkards discoursing about “who f——s who.” If gossip weakens patriarchy, it is also the case that weak patriarchs gossip. In Austen’s Persuasion, both Nurse Rook and Sir Walter Eliot are inveterate gossips; but while Sir Walter’s tattling demeans him, Nurse Rook’s reveals crucial knowledge for the resolution of the plot. In contrast, manly men, exemplars of patriarchal order like Squire Allworthy and Fitzwilliam Darcy, have an aversion to gossip. Darcy cannot abide being talked about, instinctively knowing (because language constructs social and power relations) that a competing version of himself might circulate in his place and devalue him. Even ‘good’ communal gossip has an aggressive parasitic quality: “gossip consolidates and uses social power to affect status and opinion as a community. . . . [G]ossip gets its power by the illusion of mastery gained through taking imaginative possession of another’s experience” (Knight in Hurford, 22). The exultant sense of knowing things about persons without their volition or presence—of possessing secret knowledge—can shade into paranoia. According to the ‘gossip paradigm,’ users of language in a world of exploitation and competition “will have little incentive to divulge private knowledge or externalize their intimate thought processes” (15). In the rhetoric about gossip’s threat, Spacks notes, “moral [warnings about] the secret life of words parallel warnings about the secret life of the body.” The Gentleman’s Library articulates the danger: “the Curiosity of discovering another Man’s secret Pleasures, and the Itch of knowing what is


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hidden . . . is (as it were) a Rape and Violence committed upon other Peoples Privacies” (336).13 Gossip’s “surreptitious aggression” (Samuel Heilman quoted by Spacks, 29) arouses anxiety because it erases or confuses the boundaries between private and public, not only as abstract ‘spheres’ but also as personal intactness (18). Roland Barthes observes that when two people discuss an absent third, “the third person . . . [becomes] a wicked pronoun; it is the pronoun of the nonperson, it abstracts, it annuls” (185). Austen’s Edward Tilney mistakenly idealizes a network of voluntary spies who circulate private information in order to regulate and protect society, who preserve the common good by prying into and communicating other people’s business. But Georg Simmel reminds us of the ambiguous power dynamic in “that purposive hiding and masking, that aggressive defensive, so to speak, against the third person, which alone is usually designated as secret” (330). Gossip can be a repressive social practice, disciplining the subject, in Foucault’s sense, and participating in social conditioning that permeates laterally through all areas of experience in which the power/knowledge dynamic exists. Paradoxically, the most common means of undermining gossip’s power is to associate it with idle chatter, weak minds, and lascivious tendencies: “In every known culture, men have accused women of being garrulous. . . . The chattering, ranting, gossiping female, the tattler, the scold, . . . is older than fairytales” (Steiner, 41). Conduct books for gentlemen warn against ‘blabing’: “Blaze neuer anie man’s secret” (Kerrigan, 71). Austen’s Mr. Knightley, who likes everything to be “in the open” contrasts the “minute particulars” of women’s gossip with male conversation dealing “only in the great.” But if gossip is the discarded waste of discourse to some, it nevertheless recycles and circulates, and its hidden contents resist repressive cultural enforcements of feminine silence and invisibility. Gossip also is suspect because its effects are unpredictable. It begins with ‘real facts,’ trivial or profound, and not with imaginary events or beings, but its dispersal follows no proscribed plan. Facts are never objective; each comes with a charge, emotional or moral. Brian Stovel notes the fertile topicality of gossip in Tristram Shandy: “If gossip claims as its subject what Tristram calls ‘the whole secret’ or what we might call the bare facts, the facts are only a starting point for detached speculation, hypothetical connections, possible explanations” (1:iv). Because of its volatility, a little gossip can go a long way: “Even the most private forms of gossip . . . often have effects in the larger world. The anxiety aroused by gossip derives partly from its incalculable scope” (Spacks, 6). Tristram Shandy’s epigraph from Epictetus is especially true of gossip: ‘It is not

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actions, but opinions concerning actions, which disturb men’” (Stovel, 117). Action is supplanted by the gossip’s version of it, so that people who have not feared committing a misdeed have feared its translation into a circulating story. Condemnations of derogatory talk are fundamental to the JudaeoChristian tradition. In the ritual recitation of sins on the Jewish Day of Atonement various kinds of injurious talk constitute the largest single category of misdeed. Leviticus attributes the affliction of leprosy to evilspeaking. The Christian Church condemns gossip and slander as evidence of three deadly sins: pride, anger, and envy. Secular condemnation is more political. Malicious talk could be an outlet for disenfranchised groups, arousing “justifiable anxiety of the dominant about the aggressive impulses of the submissive” (Spacks, 30). Gossip has a “politics” because “it legitimizes and distributes its authority in competition with that valorized by other claimants” (Gordon 1988:29–30). Most social historians agree that the cultural capital of reputation—for men and women (especially sexual reputation in the case of women)—increased with early modern opportunities for social mobility. A ‘good name’ is a language effect that can supplant tangible means of conferring status: bloodline, land, or money: “We live upon the Credit and Report of Others” (De Britaine, 53). But gossip can supplant words with more words: malicious gossip can destroy marriage prospects, a ‘good name,’ or a career. ‘Prying words’ violate individual rights to privacy and can ‘assassinate’ character. Gossip can also decenter narrative authority, a consequence noted by critics of the novel. “[G]ossip . . . mimes the absentee authority of infirm patriarchal [men] by surreptitiously multiplying authorship. Authority becomes plural . . . the attempt to trace it, to make it directly ‘respons-ible’ is equally difficult” (Gordon 1988:18). Gossips parody or even travesty the idealized deployment of power operative within a given culture. Since the abiding agenda of patriarchal institutions in the eighteenth century (including primogeniture, legal effacement of women’s property, fetishization of female virginity before marriage) was dedicated to ensuring the certainty of a single ‘true’ patrilineage, gossip offered a counteragenda: disregard for origins, haphazard proliferation, and dispersal of alternative ‘truths.’ Gossip’s secretive whispers have a potentially democratizing effect. Although gossip decenters narrative authority from a single source, it nevertheless acquires a new form of authority, a hidden source of consensus, a collective notion of many people permitted to speak and to share in what is “generally known.” This consensus is not delivered from the prominence of a great mind, but circulated behind doors along with the weather and


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the price of muslin. Strategically participatory, gossip’s stories cannot be ‘owned’ by an authority: the radical aspect of gossip is that it momentarily undoes social and gendered hierarchies by implicating everyone within the speech community. . . . [When the] infirm patriarch seeks to maintain authorization of those who join his family, gossips and their talk are repetitions of centrifugal forces, establishing families of constant interpretation rather than those striving to maintain or recuperate an historically determined meaning. (Roulston, 56)

Gossip’s social and moral aftereffects, insofar as they inflict pain, give pleasure, and broker power, have implications for satire. Satire can enlist the triviality of gossip as a means of attack. In the assembly room, tongues may wag over the tasteless addition of too much lace on a jacket. But in Swift’s Tale frills and brocade also signify the debasement of language (“the dress of thought”) and the fate of Christianity. In satire, gossipy details—things we have no business knowing–are memorably vivid: Hudibras’ favorite food, the minutiae of Belinda’s toilette, Gulliver’s bathroom habits, Macheath’s drunken profligacy, King David’s marital problems, Count Fortunatus’ bedroom escapades–serve as “bare fact” or “historical particular.” Deceptively ephemeral compared to weighty discourse on ‘public’ affairs, gossip serves as glue and solvent, incurring both social cohesion and social change without needing to prove its authority. At her trial for seditious libel, Manley claims to have exonerated herself by recasting her satire as a woman’s chatter about amours. By claiming to “writ[e] for her own amusement,” she could “confound and embarrass the prosecution” and “vindi[cate] discredit as a literary practice” (Gallagher, 90, 137). As a literary speech act, gossip provides the discursive link between romance/sex and satire/politics. Manley’s stories of promiscuous couplings remind us that the original God-sib] bore witness to illegitimate births in place of the authoritative father, that the act of witnessing released the illegitimate into society. Gossip can mimic its own subject matter by proliferating stories about proliferating.

Gossip and Promises: Don Juan Gossip, seductive and unfaithful, pledges confidentiality in the very act of betraying “the veiled, the racy, [and] the naughty” (Stovel, 116). It tests the limits of authorized speech with stories that are mutable, unreliable, and aggressive. Gossip’s breach of the sanctity of confidentiality is illuminated

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by Felman’s analysis of the paradigm of Don Juan as a promise-breaker. Don Juan breaches the sanctity of the marriage vow by seducing and penetrating women (and, through them, men). An aristocratic carryover in an era of bourgeois ascendancy, he is an emblem of emerging modernity, a locus of changing modes of patriarchy from feudal to capitalistic. Felman’s original title, Le Scandale du corps parlant, ‘the scandal of the speaking body,’ conflates physical and verbal desire for domination of another. Don Juan compulsively promises marriage and performs illicit sex with a series of women, each woman supplementing and replacing the prior one. Married love is spoken of but never achieved. As a speech act, the promise of marriage ‘does something’ central to the organization of western culture: it forms the family. But Felman, citing Nietzche’s Genealogy of Morals, understands promise-making as contradictory and potentially injurious: “To breed an animal with the right to make promises—is not this the paradoxical problem nature has set itself with regard to man? And is it not man’s true problem? . . . In what way is the very logic of promising a sign of the fundamental contradiction which is precisely the contradiction of the human?” Don Juan “lavishes promises right and left, and breaks them repeatedly” (9, 10); his violation is not so much of women, but of the pledges made to women. The scandal of seduction, then, “seems to be tied to the scandal of the broken promise” (11). Don Juan’s seductions ‘hurt’ women not by what he does but by what he says— not by making love to them, which is pleasurable, but by constituting a fraudulent self in language. The gossip and the seducer both use language against another’s will in order to establish a transient intimacy. Both feign sincerity toward a pledge (of confidentiality or of marriage) that repeatedly is broken, dispensing both pleasure and pain. Of course, the implications of Felman’s equivalency between broken words and broken women are troubling. We remember that Don Juan ultimately is punished for his seductions by a reasserted patriarchal order, by a reanimated murdered father, and by appropriation in Hell by Satan, the ‘Father of lies.’ In adapting Austin’s theory of speech to issues of gender, she stops short of testing the possibilities of women talking back. Gossiping and promising are speech acts that can have destabilizing effects that are always in dynamic interplay within a generally stable social order.14 Breach (of confidence and of contract) is inherent to both, although both strategically conceal it. Both the seducer and the gossip circulate most freely when patriarchy (which in theory should dictate behavior, exercise control over information and belief, and serve as principal repository of knowledge) has been weakened. Both assume a false (but practically efficacious) authority. Both mimic (yet remain outside of) legitimate systems of order and meaning. Both have the effect (in the face of an inadequate or


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ineffectual authority) of splitting or multiplying authority among many others, of decentering power from a secure source. They tend to efface individual integrity or identity. Both the gossip’s wagging tongue and the seducer’s roving phallus generate stories that supplement and repeat without closure. These issues of reduplication and reproduction inform satires on political succession, ‘conceived’ as the breeding of rulers and stories. Don Juan’s promises and seductions undermine the authority of the fathers and husbands who are the official managers of their daughters’ and wives’ sexuality. He, at the same time, refuses to become the head of a family. Felman emphasizes his principle of infinite substitutability. Because for Don Juan, any one (woman) will do (Felman, 37), order and hierarchy are irrelevant. Not only is every woman a supplement to the last, but the order in which one replaces the other does not matter. By deconstructing the value of the ‘first,’ Don Juan subverts the institution of patriarchy and testifies to the failure of the father in his role as constative, cognitive authority (38). The paternal promise is a speech act on which Don Juan founders. The only consummation or closure imagined by Moliere for Don Juan is descent into Hell. But we can see how his story links the speech acts of the seducer, the gossip, and the satirist. Compare, for example, Swift’s satiric version of the father’s paternal promise as a founding speech act. I refer to the Father’s speech and will, which begin A Tale of a Tub’s account of the origins of Christianity. In satire, the phenomenon of infinite iterability is complicated by the instability of ironic language. Repetition/replication may devalue meaning: there are three sons, each at first nameless and interchangeable. But meaning also may elaborate and evolve: three identical sons become Peter, Martin, and Jack. Their individuation is directly tied to language practices: each differently distorts the promises in their father’s will; each begins to challenge the belief that signs and referents have consistent meanings. They prove instead, as Felman puts it, that “language is as faithless as men.” In the Tale, three sons and three broken pledges presumably will be followed by countless seductions of body and mind—the “secret history” of Europe, according to Swift and many others. The ultimate effect of repeatedly broken promises is loss of credibility in the systems of representations that convey them; in their stead arises a pervasive suspicion, and even paranoia, about the hidden purport of any pledge of truth. Replication/multiplication can serve as a key narrative strategy in satire: multiple narrators, fractured form and authority, the revelation of secret or confidential information, the predominance of opinion over fact.15 Don Juan’s phallus is an agent of disorder rather than consolidated power, comparable to Rochester’s use of the disorderly phallus in his libertine satire

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(popular among women readers and writers, perhaps because of its antipatriarchal tendencies). The symbol of male power is represented as thoughtlessly, promiscuously, scattering its seed—like King David/Charles in Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel, Wilmore in Behn’s The Rover, or Macheath in Gay’s Beggar’s Opera. These texts produce families of interpretation and reinterpretation, rather than a single line of ‘descendents’ who strive to maintain or recuperate a historically determined meaning. “Illegitimate offspring reinterpret ‘the law’ in order to vie for power; multiple possibilities for the truth contend for the reader’s attention, insinuate their appeal as possible readings” (Gordon 1997:210). The possible consequences of this kind of aggressive speech for satire will be clearer after considering some intermediary language acts in slander and secret history.

Slander: Injurious Speech and Censorship “[I]t lies in the power of scandalous Tongues to carry the World before them,” warns Mr. Spectator (Spectator No. 390 iii. 464). Pope called slanderous speech “th’ignoble Mind’s Delight” (TE 1:420, l. 233). ‘Slander’ denotes derogatory language that is understood to be both more injurious and less historically feminized than gossip. In the Old Testament slanderers are punished with leprosy, and the Babylonian Talmud poses the question, “What is the most dangerous part of the body?” in order to answer, “the tongue.” Thomas Aquinas voices the Christian perspective: “I answer that, As Jerome observes . . . the Greek skandalon may be rendered offense, downfall, or a stumbling against something” (Summa Theologiae II.II. qu 43, a.1, response). In Dante’s Inferno (where sexual transgressors merely inhabit the first circle of Hell), slanderers suffer in the ninth circle a hideously scatological penance: “cleft from the chin to the part that breaks wind; his entrails were hanging between his legs, and the vitals could be seen and the foul sack that makes ordure of what is swallowed . . . all the others whom you see here were in their lifetime sources of scandal” (Canto 28:22–27). M. L. Kaplan describes early modern attitudes toward slander: “The power of defamation lies in its ability to disseminate effectively and anonymously its poison to all members of society, regardless of status” (24). In contrast to a relatively benign view of gossip, slander historically appears in images of poisonous bloodsuckers, rabid monsters, mad dogs, vipers, leeches, and asps’ tongues. Evil speakers like Edmund Spenser’s Blatant Beast “did seeme a thousand tongues to have, / That all in spite and malice did agree” (The Faerie Queene 6:12:ll.242–243). In Shakespeare’s


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plays the process through which false secrets damage reputation is likened to theft, murder, plague, rebellion, rape, witchcraft, and abortion. Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (1529 [1561]) depicts government struggling against a backdrop of court mudslinging. Thus Iago poisons Othello’s mind against Desdemona. Ferdinando Pulton’s De pace regis and regni (1609) identifies “bitter words” as “the very roote and principall cause” of perils to the kingdom: “from whence do ensue sometimes Assaults, Batteries, Riots, Routs, Unlawfull assemblies Forces, and Forcible entries: some other times Forgeries, Periuries, and Oppressions, and ofttimes maihmes, manslaughters, and murders . . . and we seldome heare of any of the said enormities effected, but they tooke their beginnings of menaces, threats, slanders, or other euill words” (Br–Bv; Kaplan, 21). The concept of secrecy is fundamental to slander’s aggression. Tudor Royal Proclamations attempt to outlaw “lewd and light tales told, whispered, and secret spread abroad by uncertain authors” (1:387). Obviously, no one would stumble on a block placed out in the open. The verbal act that is a hidden trap or trick, is precisely what disturbs Pulton who would prefer the boisterous threats of “the cholericke menacer in his furie” to the concealed machinations of the “priuy” defamer who hides in his closet: “for this priuy backbiter doth not my words impeach his aduersaries in so manifest and turbulent manner, . . . but seeming to sit quietly in his study, he doth more deeply pinch him, and fixeth a more durable wound into his fame, and credit, than the other boisterous fellow doth in his bodie” (Pulton, Bv). The history of slander repeatedly suggests its surreptitiousness for writers “who whisper with their pens, and darkly bring their thoughts to light” (The Life of a Satyrical Puppy, Call’ d Nim, 63). As in gossip, intimacy and hostility comingle. Just as “supple knees” can have “secret ends” in relation to authority, so defamation of one character can forge alliance with another: “Lady Flattery [is] kinswoman, cosen germain to Dame sclaunder” [Dame Sclaunder, sigs. F3v, C4v; McRae, 389]. The connection between hostility and community is further insisted upon in the comparison of slander to an army taking a town by stealth, not to pillage it, but to create new confederacies of tellers and listeners to “the tale”: “For sclaunder undermineth and casteth down the foundation of true judgment in the outward parts, and within, trayterous confederate with their enemies, helpeth them when they brake in and receive them, and open the gates, and so endeavour themselves that Madame Sclaunder may make the hearer of the tale her servant” (Dame Sclaunder, 14–15). Slander’s habitus is not the birthing room of the God-sibling, but the law court. In England, scandalum magnatum law dates back to 1275 during the reign of Edward I. Court records from the Tudor period document the seriousness with which spoken words were deemed to have power

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destructive to the social order, not only against the sovereign but also ordinary neighbors.16 Queen Elizabeth’s conflicts with Mary I and Mary Stuart, to the extent that utterance alone has damaging consequences, “eerily repeat aspects of [illiterate] village women’s quarrels” (Levin, 79). By the sixteenth century, the need to police scandalous conversation increases: “In early Stuart times an average county might have as many as twelve professional informers working in cooperation with the clerk of the peace, each bringing twenty or so prosecutions to quarter-session, and some directing rudimentary detective agencies” (Harding 1973:76–77).17 Slander is connected to the history of censorship, a phenomenon of some importance to satire, which Samuel Johnson defined as “a censorious work.” Recent discussions of censorship point out that an act that seems at first to silence, negate, and deny, can in fact have the opposite effect of provocation, affirmation, and empowerment. Rather than silence aggressive language, censorship sometimes produces more of it, like the broomstick of moral reform in Swift’s “Meditation” in which the agent that seeks to sweep away hidden dirt inevitably stirs it up. As a performative speech act, the injunction to silence (censorship) also interpellates a subject. Judith Butler puts the problem in contemporary terms: “Never fully separable from that which it seeks to censor, censorship is implicated in its own repudiated material in ways that produce paradoxical consequences” (130). Pope describes the haphazard recklessness of slander in the notes to the Dunciad Variorum: “The three chief qualifications of party writers; to stick at nothing, to delight in flinging dirt, and to slander in the dark by guess” (2:n. 264, 265, 266). Kaplan writes: “[t]he slipperiness of slander, both in identifying it and prosecuting it, shows the real difficulty of policing transgressive speech on all social levels in early modern England” (10). J. A. Sharpe invokes the same metaphor: In the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, slander develops as a central, powerful, and unstable concern for most segments of English society. Anxiety over reputation made verbal public humiliation an effective tool of the state, but the slipperiness of defamation made it impossible to control; thus it could be wielded as an equally dangerous weapon against the state. Its close association with poetry demands not only an investigation of the political and social significance of slander for early modern literature but also of the literary and li nguistic import of defamation on English politics and culture. (Sharpe, 3; Kaplan, 33, emphasis added)

Slander’s performativity is also essential and strategic, as it replaces one version of an event or of a subject with another. A striking feature of the records of early modern slander is the potential to organize them around particular topics. Many defamatory variations on the


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same subject circulated both in manuscript and print. Together they destabilize truth and replace it with effects or consequences. Andrew McRae discusses “notable” collections of slanderous accounts of the life and death of Buckingham (British Library Sloane MS 826; McRae, 383) and the marriage between Carr and Howard (Bodleian MS Rawlinson D 1048, fol. 64R–V). These clusters of scandal have surprising longevity. “Carr’s Ignomynie” was still current in 1709 when it appeared in episodes of Manley’s New Atalantis, served as a metaphor for Whig political corruption, and continued to command interest in the satirical footnotes to Pope’s Dunciad in 1728. Thus slanderous stories offer “a model of contestation, rather than repression and regulation” (Kaplan, 9). Circulating accounts resist regulatory mechanisms; they do things with words, rather than having things done to them. The circulation of slanderous accounts establishes “a model crucial for the analysis of power relations between poets and state” (1). Despite attempts at censorship, the government could not quell criticism. In fact, “the state’s own employment of a range of defamatory practices to control, humiliate, or demonize its populace and its enemies implicates it in the very transgressions it ostensibly seeks to silence” (2). During the years between civil war and the settlement of the succession, significant legal ramifications of injurious language develop, including the confusing but important distinction between slander and libel. Defamation law is more fully written and enforced at this time (the thirteenth-century codification of scandalum magnatum had been a rarely prosecuted injunction against defaming the king or his ministers): “owing principally to the great changes effected by the introduction of printing . . . this branch of law is, perhaps, more distinctly than any other, the creation of these two [sixteenth and seventeenth] centuries” (Plucknett, 378). In the eighteenth century, “political developments necessitated important changes . . . [especially] the division of the tort into libel and slander—a division due historically to the need for finding some remedies for the mistakes made by the common law.” The confusion of these supposed “remedies” has influenced the study of satire, and “still disfigures the law” (378). Swift complains in the Preface to A Tale of a Tub that the satirist “must expect to be imprisoned for Scandalum Magnatum, to have Challenges sent him; to be sued for Defamation; and to be brought before the Bar of the House” (PW 1:32). Pope, in To Fortescue, consults his lawyer friend on the same problem of threatened prosecution for libel, and Manley, her publisher, and her printer, were charged with scandalum magnatum in 1709. Foucault has argued that censorship was a weapon used by the powerful against the weak, and that such censorship is internalized, producing the ‘coerced subject.’ However, it seems that the weak resisted coercion at times, and participated in defamatory practices.

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The Libel Problem Slander and libel were not exclusive terms before the seventeenth century (a crime in the Star Chamber and a tort in the common law courts); no hard and fast distinctions are maintained between speech and writing, although seditious language was punishable by “loss of ears for words and of the right hand for writings” [I Elizabeth, c. 6]. During the seventeenth century, the number of cases based on defamatory language, still called both ‘slander’ and ‘libel,’ rose precipitously in English courts. One explanation of this phenomenon is that socioeconomic mobility increased the importance of personal reputation. J. A. Sharpe (1–3) and Laurence Stone (22) note the relationship between a “good name” and the ability to advance socially, arguing that individual prestige began to supplant other traditional forms of status (titles, wealth, land). Another explanation is that government (also undergoing change) wished to curb the growing influence of print culture (Kropf, 153). A published slur could reach anywhere and could circulate seemingly forever. Yet a further explanation is that modern subjectivity—a phenomenon enabled by language—required identifying categories of legitimate and illicit discourses. Ironically, the need to control language (by state-sanctioned legal authority) increased with the escalating impossibility of ever doing so.18 To some degree, however, libel’s gradual differentiation from slander seems to have occurred by “accident.” According to A Concise History of the English Law, There are few chapters in our legal history which illustrate so many different aspects of historical development as does the history of defamation. Germanic elements, Roman elements, the rise and fall of courts, constitutional conflicts, mechanized printing, and later still mechanized distribution of printed matter, have all played their part in producing the body of law which historical accident has divided into the two categories of libel and slander. (Plucknett, 483)

By the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, two features commonly are delineated: (1) the damage libel causes must be materially proven; (2) the form it takes should be tangible, such as a written or published text. The insistence on materiality seems an attempt to solidify or, like censorship, to control meaning.19 In terms of speech act theory, libel is perlocutionary, according to Austin’s distinction between an illocutionary speech act (in which words immediately perform their effect—‘I do’ means the couple are wed) and a perlocutionary speech act (in which the effect of words is delayed (I call


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you—or circulate a defamatory document calling you—a ‘cheat’ and may trigger a divorce, a damaged reputation, or a business loss). Why is the concept of demonstrable aftereffects so important in eighteenth-century libel law and why did it make the law so ineffectual? Here is where the notion of ‘excitable’ speech offers some options to the reader of eighteenthcentury libel and satire.20 In legal terms, ‘excitable’ speech is inadmissible in court because it is spoken by someone who is out of control—who is irrational, overly emotional, or under duress. Butler notes that Austin’s and Felman’s theories of the speech act allow for the subject’s lack of control over language (Austin, 21; Butler, 15). This “[u]ntethering the speech act from the sovereign subject founds an alternative notion of agency and, ultimately, of responsibility, one that more fully acknowledges the way in which the subject is constituted in language, how what it creates is also what it derives from elsewhere . . . agency begins where sovereignty wanes” (15–16). The prosecution of libel cases during the eighteenth century, complicated by attempts to affix responsibility, prove consequences, and assign retribution cannot be explained only as a symptom of a growing public sphere. Libel suits repeatedly are stymied by angry outbursts, blurted confessions, irrational behaviors. Language that is out of control does not conform to established rules of discourse. It is not admissible; it escapes the law. Libel, then, shares some qualities of other discursive practices in which control over meaning must be relinquished, in which meaning is not easily controlled, such as irony and satire. The history of libel and satire depends on the subject’s evolving relation to power and knowledge. This relationship allows us to further historicize the legal status of libel/slander within debates about Enlightenment practices of censorship and discipline.21 The earliest English law against slander (1275) was enacted at precisely the time that cultural historians such as Foucault, Habermas, Horkheimer, and Adorno posit as the beginning of Western Europe’s conceptualization of power as sovereign power: The great institutions of power that developed in the Middle Ages— monarchy, the state with its apparatus—rose up on the basis of a multiplicity of prior powers, and to a certain extent in opposition to them: dense, entangled, conflicting powers, . . . If these institutions were able to implant themselves . . . this was because they presented themselves as agencies of regulation, arbitration, and demarcation, as a way of introducing order in the midst of these powers, of establishing a principle that would temper them and distribute them according to boundaries and a fixed hierarchy. (Foucault 1978:86–87)

The early law against slander attempts to determine whether certain speech is legitimate (and thereby to determine what constitutes a legitimate

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‘subject’), in direct relation to the figure of the sovereign or monarch. This paradigm of justice would prevail for centuries, even as the actual sovereign is supplanted by a more diffuse principle of sovereignty. Thus, over time, the law presents itself as not merely protecting the king from malicious speech by his subjects, but as protecting his subjects from one another. This paradigm, with its dependence on principles of hierarchy and coherence, conflicts fundamentally with the discursive practices of aggressive speech, which we have seen to be “slippery,” resistant to discipline, and accessible across class boundaries. Legal historians recognize that defamation law has everything to do with ideas of sovereignty and the subject’s relation to it: Two different views may be taken of the relation between rulers and their subjects. If the ruler is regarded as the superior of the subject, as being by the nature of his position presumably wise and good . . . it must necessarily follow that it is wrong to censure him openly, that even if he is mistaken his mistakes should be pointed out with the utmost respect, and that . . . no censure should be cast upon him likely or designed to diminish his authority. (Plucknett, 9).

This view, according to Plucknett, was current before the civil wars: “[B]oth the rules relating to the censorship of the press and the manner in which the Star Chamber administered the law of defamation” (338) support it—although surely both were challenged by events following the beheading of Charles I. But by the eighteenth century, a second view “was gathering strength.” The concept of the social contract implicitly (if inadequately) explains the difficulty the courts faced in clarifying and enforcing defamation law: If . . . the ruler is regarded as the agent and servant and the subject as the wise and good master who is obliged to delegate his power to the so-called ruler . . . Every member of the public who censures the ruler for the time being exercises in his own person the right which belongs to the whole of which he forms a part. (Plucknett, 338)

Although the contractual relation to monarchy seems to empower “[e]very member of the public,” there must be more compelling explanations for the escalation of, indeed the popularity of, libelous texts. By 1688, the government felt that it needed ‘book police,’ in the form of Messengers of the Press who secretly visited bookstores looking for libelous texts. Far less attention seems to have been paid to obscene publications; few prosecutions were brought against authors, booksellers, and printers for licentiousness. In 1709, two books instigated prosecution for obscene libel,


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but both cases were adjourned: “the category of obscenity remained unrecognized as a punishable offense at the Queen’s Bench” (McGhee, 44). Yet in the same year, Manley, her bookseller, and her printer were prosecuted for scandalum magnatum. The first successful king’s bench prosecution for obscenity was not until 1728 (54). The special dynamic of eighteenth-century libel owes something to innovative print technologies of reading and subject formation. These technologies sidestep censorship. They alter the effect of injurious language from an attack by one author on one victim into a more communal experience, reminding us of the relationship slander (of all kinds, including libel) bears to gossip. An exemplary practice is seventeenth and eighteenth-century libel’s use of ellipsis, dashes, and lacunae—the printed spaces in which inadmissible words are acknowledged but omitted (such as Lord M—— and Lady B——). This practice protected the author, printer, publisher, and bookseller from legal culpability. Technically, no names are named. But even more importantly, in these spaces the author/speaker ostensibly, even flagrantly, relinquishes control over language. Or, rather, the author/ speaker relinquishes demonstrable responsibility, thus asserting a kind of ‘secret’ control over his/her interlocutors. The reader must perform the injurious speech act of filling in the blank or completing the rhyme: The word doesn’t have to hide behind the dash, it simply isn’t there. It exists only in the mind of the reader, who then becomes responsible—accountable—for the meaning produced; it is the reader’s voice that violates tact and discretion in the enunciation of these words. If it is a crime to utter these words, then it is the reader, not the publisher or the printer, who is the criminal. (McGhee, 54)

If a thousand readers ‘complete’ the text, then one aggressive speech act has triggered a thousand more. Further, every reader may not fill in the blank in the identical way. The discursive ‘slipperiness’ of slander (the quality that makes one trip and stumble over the ‘block’) causes discursive ‘slippage.’ As a satiric strategy, irony can add further meanings to language that is ex-citable—not admitted into the text/courtroom, not uttered by a reliable narrator, but activated nevertheless. Robert C. Elliott has led the critical exploration of “the relation of satire to the law [which] has had considerable importance in determining the forms satire takes and the methods it uses” (263). But in privileging (in Pope and Mulgrave’s words) “shining satire” over “loose writ libels” he and others have promoted the idea that satire was “a sub-category of heroic poetry” (Seidel 1998:36). The limitation of such a view is that it overlooks the gradations of aggressive speech acts that connect the performance of libel to the performance of satire. While satire’s themes of warfare and

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revenge are common to epic and tragedy in the high style, its themes of ironic stealth and intimate revelation are common to secrecy and slander in the familiar (or low) style. In fact, the history of defamation and the laws that respond to it reveal the instability of categories of illegitimate and legitimate speech (Kaplan, 9). Slander and libel imply access to secret information, and convey a sense of intimacy with events and people. The language of slander and libel, like ‘hearsay,’ is characterized as ‘excitable’ and indeterminate. It shares qualities typically associated with women (as cultural lacunae), such as enforced silence, lack of control, “loose[ness],” and concern for reputation. By showing that libel bears some relation both to gossip—its feminine manifestation of aggression, its communal involvement, its dispersal and implication of many in its own proliferation—and by reconsidering libel’s relation to satire, we now turn to a kind of writing that flourished briefly, just at this period of transition, that combines gossip, libel, satire, and women writers: the secret history.

Chapter 3 Toward a Theory of Satire II: Secret History

‘Secret Springs’ Gossip and slander are not the only means of releasing competing stories into the world. ‘Secret histories,’ ‘memoirs,’ and ‘anecdotes are another way of giving birth to a succession of hidden possibilities. “Truth is the daughter of time, was the saying of old ” is Thomas Hooker’s nostalgic observation (A2r). But truth now propagates haphazardly because sometimes God “opens and shuts the womb of truth from bearing, as he sees fit.” Hooker gropes for a justification of the relativism of representations of the past: “Not that there is any change in the truth, but the alteration grows, according to mens apprehensions, to whom it is more or less discovered, according to Gods most just judgement, and their own deservings.” Noting that Hooker cannot separate “the notion of historical ‘truth’ or ‘fact’” from “mens apprehensions” of it, Anthony Kemp argues that by the eighteenth century “Western comprehension of historical time reversed itself, from an image of syncretic unity . . . to one of dynamic and supersessive change spawning schism after schism from the inherited text of the meaning of the past” (v). Textuality is central to this change: “History can be no more than conceptions recorded in an immense palimpsest of historical texts: literary inventions, reinterpretations, attempted erasures” (vi). Skepticism and even contempt for the past tend to “increase as the past history and present society multiply competing ideologies until the faintest remnants of the ideal unity in objective truth are lost” (178). In such aggressive, competitive circumstances, texts of secret history flourish.1

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The late Stuart and early Georgian periods produced many texts that promise special insider information. Considerable historical evidence corroborates the frequency with which alternative versions of the same event compete for readers’ credibility. Controversies associated with late Stuart politics (court intrigues, wars, succession) coalesce in this experimental form, which allows print culture to give derogatory talk another marketable and literary shape.2 Between 1650 and 1800, more than 500 editions were published with ‘secret history’ (or with the related terms ‘secret memoirs’ or ‘anecdotes’) in their titles. This new category of historiography permits special license: ‘memoirs’ are partial and personal; the words ‘anecdote’ and ‘secret’ literally mean unpublished or unpublishable [Greek, anecdota: ‘things unpublished,’ secret, private; or, ‘any item of gossip’; Latin, secernare, to separate, “kept from knowledge or observation” (OED)]. Secret history often rewrites the past with hearsay, gossip, and slander; it becomes performative by relying on sex acts and speech acts, seductions, and promises.3 Authority figures like Charles II have much to hide: “Twas his Practice to be a Papist in his Closet, and a Protestant in his Chappel” (Phillips, 150). At court the symbolic ‘father’ of his people, he was under the covers, the careless procreator of bastards. Secret history’s popularity beginning in the seventeenth century follows closely “the very time,” according to Michael McKeon and others, “when patriarchalist theory was receiving its fullest airing in England” (“Historicizing,” 30). Along with other experimental modes, it participates in the national crisis of authority. Just as gossip and slander require rationalization and excuse, so do secret histories. Fernand Spence both defends and apologizes for his translation of Antoine Varillas’ Les Anecdotes de Florence, ou L’Histoire secrete de la maison de Medicis which contains “such matters as were neglected and flung aside by the Historian” but which nevertheless “have been the Origine or occasion of the greatest Matters” (a7). What others have cast aside as waste and chaff—unsubstantiated rumors, sordid love affairs, petty jealousies, private obsessions, bodily habits and taboos—the secret historian “gleans.” Not only subject matter but also methodology is idiosyncratic: “I have here not followed any exact method of Chronology in this Treatise, not proposing so much to give an idea of facts as that of men” (Oldmixon, 66). In The Secret History of White-Hall, the author promises “new Discoveries of State-Mysteries” while he anticipates and rejects “the Objection that I foresee would be made upon this subject, That all that could be writ has been written already, concerning the late Reigns, I should dismiss it.” The text will “promiscuously . . . call to mind ” a “Private League,” a “secret correspondence,” a “Wife’s petition [and suicide],” the prevention “of the late queen’s being married,” “unseasonable boasting,” “censure,” and other

Theorizing Satire II: Secret History

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tidbits that “had, in all likelihood, been forever buried in the profoundest Oblivion . . . [in] Dark and almost inscrutable Recesses” (A4–5, italics in original). What might seem mere tabloid exposure of dirty secrets is transformed by satirists (who sometimes read “trash” and sometimes appeared in it, Pope especially). Secret histories illustrate a relationship between popular culture and literary art. Because crass texts claim the authority to re-imagine respectable and important events or people, they help the satirist by constructing a readership willing to entertain more than one possible meaning to appearances, a readership that could think ironically, that could tolerate the difference between information and truth, and that could read complex satire. Secret histories also raise questions about gender and genre. Women produced many of them. Eliza Haywood’s secret history of Mary Queen of Scots, for example, probes the idea of women and power. Mary’s attractiveness influences every man who looks at her; she also participates in international politics shaped by the ambitions and actions of two other women: Catherine de Medici, “the brain and spirit of that kingdom” (55) and Elizabeth Tudor. Prevailing critical views of “feminine” (usually Tory) secret history place it in relation to the novel. One of this chapter’s goals is to reposition it in the development of satire.4 Men also wrote secret histories, and these “masculine” (often Whig) texts have interested new historicists with respect to the rise of political liberalism. This chapter will show that secret history accommodates Tory and Whig, feminine and masculine, and conservative and liberal. Its strategic appeal arises precisely from qualities inclusive of parties and genders. In secret history, multiple versions of crucial events jockey for attention. Events were reported variously in different newspapers and periodicals. Records were kept of parliamentary and court proceedings, and the same events might be represented in pamphlets and broadsides. They were narrated in books like The Late History of Europe (1698) and A Compleat History of Europe (1698), renarrated in The Secret Memoirs of Europe (1710), narrated yet again in The Secret History of Europe (1711). The Secret History of the White Staff (1714) (on Robert Harley, Francis Atterbury, and Simon Harcourt) was followed by second and third parts (1715), as well as by John Oldmixon’s A Detection of the Sophistry and the Falsities of the Pamphlet, Entitl’ d, The Secret History of the White Staff (1714), William Atterbury’s The History of the Mitre and the Purse in Which the First and Second Parts of the Secret History of the White Staff Are Fully consider’ d (1714), William Pittis’ A Dialogue between the Mitre and the Purse (1715), and Defoe’s The Secret History of the Secret History of the White Staff (1715). Swift casts an ironic but knowing eye upon these competing truths: the narrator of the Tale has “a Quill worn to the Pith in the service of the State,

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in the Pro’s and Con’s upon Popish Plots, and Meal-Tubs, and Exclusion Bills” (P 1:42). Secret history offered “those sorts of Relations, which they fancy containing something more Secret and Particular, than is to be found in the Publick Newspapers” (Polish Manuscripts, or the Secret History of the Reign of Count Sobieski [1700, A2]). Such destabilizing “sorts of Relations” supplement and compete with “Publick” accounts. Claude Vanel’s The Royal Mistresses of France, or the Secret History of the French Kings (1695) defends and defines the form in its address “[t]o the reader . . . who may think these Stories Fabulous”: For certain it is, that in the Main, the short Stories agree exactly with what they call the Truth of History, and as for the Circumstances which are added, they may be justly thought rather to illustrate the Stories, and discover the Causes of those odd Events, which others only barely or obscurely relate. For example, ‘tis assuredly true, that a Prince committed such and such miscarriages, that such and such Persons of no Worth or Merit were advanced to high preferments, and that others greatly deserving of their Prince and Country, fell into Disgrace, while the True Historian (as they call them) is at a loss for the Reason of these Whimseys of Fortune. But here the Riddle is unfolded.

Truth “in the main” allows wide latitude for “Circumstances which are added.” Defoe’s The Secret History of the White Staff quotes one of Robert Harley’s speeches to the Queen, but prefaces it with the disclaimer “I have heard [it] was in Terms something like what follows” (54). “Something like,” “such and such,” “What they call the Truth of History,” what “others . . . relate,” what “they call them”—these phrases acknowledge the practice of replacing one story with another. The Secret History of the Secret History of the White Staff (1715), in keeping with its metacritical title, comments on the seduction of readers by party writers who easily shift “the Truth of what is here asserted . . . causing the deceiv’d people to dance in the Circle of their drawing” (8). Another author, John Phillips, justifies himself: “Tho we ought not rashly to rake into the Ashes of Princes, and expose either theor Personal Miscarriages, or their Failures, in the Management of Government; yet, no doubt, but the making of them Publick, may sometimes contribute, not a little, to the General Good” (The Secret History of K. James I and King Charles I 1690, A2). Secret history often focuses on abuses of power: on corrupt princes, competing parties, successful troublemakers, and worthy persons in disgrace. But it does not limit itself to the ruling class. A work like Ned Ward’s Secret History of Clubs (1709) interrogates a wide array of homosocial and homosexual social formations; shopkeepers, mathematicians, and ‘mollies’ are among them.


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A Genre of Broken Promises Aphra Behn called the last decades of the seventeenth century “the blessed age of swearing [i.e., promising], and the hopeful reign of evidences [i.e., secret informers].” Secret histories’ performative function anticipates Judith Butler’s notion of injurious ‘excitable’ language. Like gossip and slander, they would be inadmissible evidence in a strict court of law. Yet their seductions and promises have the effect of undermining the certainty of authority, and of constructing new identities. Secret historians promise truth to credulous readers, as Don Juan swears faithfulness to his believing lovers. The author of The Secret History of the October Club (1711) observes that his approach is well-suited to his readership: “The World in no Age having been used to a People of such Amphibious Politics as these . . . [N]o Parliament could frame Oaths of any kind, but they would take them. They submitted to Oaths of Allegiance, Recognition, Association, Abjuration, Assurance, and everything you pleased” (6). Although influenced by French examples, English secret histories acquire distinctive qualities in response to England’s distinctive political crises.5 The restored monarchy was disturbed by memories of lost authority and by anxieties about future stability. Its security was “sustained by . . . [a] wide network of spies . . . across Great Britain and abroad. The secretaries of state were sent a constant stream of intelligence from correspondents in every city and from ‘evidences’ or informers eager to prove their loyalty, lessen their own punishments or denigrate their personal enemies” (LL 5:n. 6). But eager informers (like Titus Oates) could also threaten national security with false testimonies, legal high jinks, and invented conspiracies. Promising forbidden pleasures, their aggressive language and strong opinions vie for the reader’s credulity and allegiance. In a time of uncertain leadership, these narratives perform the cycle of promise-making and breaking that constitutes the textual equivalent of (Don Juan’s) illocutionary speech acts. They do something with words. For example, they enroll readers/auditors in the community of gossips while they reenact the shifting and/or multiple alliances of the age. In The Secret History of Europe, Oldmixon describes the ways in which “[t]he mysterious construction of the oath of allegiance [to William and Mary] only whisper’d before, began now in the year 1691 to be made publick by which the Faction would have taken off all the binding Powers of that Oath” (2:308). In this case, “the notional distinctions of Kind de facto and de jure” are “invented” to allow the clergy a kind of political bigamy in which they swear loyalty to William and Mary without dissolving bonds with James II. The Secret History of . . . K. Charles II and K. James II (1690) is typical in

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the refrain on its pages: “oaths and promises” (28, 29, 45); “false vows and oaths” (26); “broke all faith and contract” (62); “breach of promise” (9), sworn “revenge” (3); “swears zeal to the Protestant faith at the same time he was . . . under promises and obligations to the Pope” (10–11). These speech acts perform the difference between doing and saying theorized by Felman. Oldmixon writes: “there was a great deal of difference in not doing a thing that was unlawful, and coming to the King with a petition highly reflecting upon the Government and with Scandalous Expressions, telling him, Sir, you act illegally” (247). The broken promise, oath, vow, or allegiance arouses anxiety in those who recognize it as the discursive practice of authority. Many late-seventeenth-century secret histories express outrage at the Triple Alliance (1668), in which Charles II officially joined Protestant Holland and Sweden, while he formed a private treaty with their common enemy, Catholic Louis XIV of France. Of this alliance, Sir John Reresby wrote in his memoirs: “I thought the thing had but an unlikely prospect, and particularly as I had seen the King, Duke, and the French ambassador so very often merry, and intimate together at the Duchess of Portsmouth’s lodging, laughing at those who believed it in earnest” (207). The secret version of the Alliance mingles affairs of state and of boudoir: “Was’t Carwell [Louise Keroualle, Charles II’s mistress], brother James, or Teague / That made thee break the Triple League?” (The History of Insipids, 100–101; POAS 1:248). Other secret histories focused on the Test Act, which required regular (but often insincere) oaths of loyalty to the Anglican Church. Some focused on the betrayal of marital or of lover’s vows. The Secret Treaty of Dover, “for a long time a thing of darkness . . . long concealed” (48) is inseparable from the Duchess of Orleans (Louise Keroualle) “Whose Charms and Dexterity, joyn’d with her other Advantages . . . quite supplanted all the King’s good Councils” (49). Later examples would target the Earl of Shaftesbury’s promises of power to the Duke of Monmouth, or the Whig Junto’s ‘betrayal’ of loyalty to Queen Anne, or Tory and Jacobite fealty to the Pretender, or on the queen’s shifting promises of toleration to dissenters or of power to her favorites.

The ‘Rise’ of Secret History Subversive energy animates English secret histories. An ancient precedent was provided by Procopius’s Anecdota (c. 550 CE), which was discovered and translated in the seventeenth century, first into French (1669) and then into English, as The Secret History of the Court of the Emperor Justinian


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(1674).6 Procopius was secretary to the general Belisarius during the reign of the Roman emperor Justinian (527–565 CE). Procopius wrote an official History of the Wars, comprised of seven volumes lauding Roman victories against the Persians, Vandals, and Goths. However, he felt compelled to compose an unofficial manuscript in order “to tell the whole unvarnished truth” (vii), which was full of “mischievous and hateful and sordid gossip” and was motivated by “a deliberate attempt to discredit.” The hidden manuscript, which was not discovered for eleven centuries, strikes its modern editors as puzzlingly contradictory and irreverent. Procopius, deferential in public, seems privately determined “to impugn the motives of Justinian and of the able Belisarius, and to cover with the vilest slander the Empress Theodora and Antonina, wife of Belisarius” (viii–ix). The narrative is bluntly about sex and power. Antonina, descended from a prostitute, raised by “cheap sorcerers” (6) and mother of many illegitimate children, is “insatiate in her passion” (11) for another man with whom she recklessly and ruthlessly couples. After reading Procopius’ account of Belisarius’ stupid victimization by “a sort of flaming hot love” (33) Edward Gibbon remarked that “the hero deserved an appellation which may not drop from the pen of the decent historian” (iv. 334). Justinian is “insincere, crafty, hypocritical, . . . a fickle friend, a truceless enemy, an ardent devotee of assassination and of robbery, . . . keen to conceive and execute base designs, . . . he . . . became the creator of poverty for all” (99, 101, 103). Theodora is even more depraved. Her youth is spent in brothels in “unnatural traffic of the body,” and her maturity in acts of lust and cruelty further exacerbated by abuse of imperial authority (125). The Loeb Edition calls the whole work “sadly miscoloured” (x). To seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century readers, however, the manuscript effectively struck a nerve. Here was a story with elements conveniently (if not exactly) parallel to current events: a victorious monarch (Charles II, William III, or in later years even Anne), a powerful royal mistress (such as Barbara Villiers or Louise de Kerouille), a brilliant but possibly mercenary military leader (such as John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough) with a beautiful, high-profile, ambitious wife (such as Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough), a privileged ruling class associated with sexual misconduct, and a setting rife with political faction and economic/imperial expansion. Procopius set down two competing accounts of the same famous events and people. Yet the author’s allegiance to his hidden disparagements, however fantastic or grotesque or exaggerated, take a certain precedence once it comes to light, even if it takes 1100 years to do so. Procopius’ reductive energy pithily condenses seven volumes into one.7 Here was a paradigm of heroic action transformed into a mock-heroic world of fools and knaves. Here also was a narrator whose ‘doubleness’ as

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both a respectable public agent and as an irreverent clandestine saboteur served as a paradigm for ironic narration. Other classical precedents include Suetonius (c. 69–140), secretary to the Emperor Hadrian. Lives of the Twelve Caesars (c. 110; an English translation by Robert L’Estrange appeared in 1688) follows a pattern of public biography followed by an account of secret life. Vivid episodes expose the agreement or the discrepancy between the exalted position of emperor and the character of each ruler. Thoroughly partisan, Suetonius celebrates his favorite emperor Augustus Caesar. But his lives of Vitellus, Caligula, Tiberius, and Nero aggressively attack their subjects. The life of Caligula is typical in its opening restraint. Yet by Chapter 22, Suetonius writes, “Thus far we have made recital of his Actions that lookt somewhat Princelike; what follows is the story of a monster.” No corruption is too egregious for the rulers of Rome. Swift owned a copy of Suetonius. The publication rate of English secret narratives escalates immediately following the decisive compromise to monarchy during the Glorious Revolution. Of the narration of John Macky’s secret services to the crown, “Mr. Baldwin the Printer sold Thirty Thousand, 1696” (vi). Royalty (Elizabeth I, James I and II, Charles I and II, William III, as well as the Duke of Monmouth, and many foreign rulers) fill the title pages. Steele writes of being “diverted with some Pieces of secret history. . . . They are the Memoirs of the private Life of Pharamond,” in which La Calprenède popularized the life of the king of the Franks (Spectator No. 76; 1:326–327). A few weeks later, he advertises the publication of “several secret transactions between the Courts of France and England” from the papers of Count D’Estrades, Ambassador from Louis XIV (Spectator No. 92; 1:391). Mr. Spectator receives a gift of secret history from the seductively named “Mary Heartfree.” And Thomas Tickell writes, referring to the printer John Barber, “I know some Authors, who would pick up a Secret History out of such Materials [letters sent to the Spectator], and make a Bookseller an Alderman by the Copy” (Spectator No. 252 [December 19, 1711] and No. 619 [November 12, 1714] 2:479–480 and 5:115). Perhaps most tellingly, Addison makes an inveterate reader of secret histories a member of the club: Will Honeycomb “knows the History of every Mode” including that of “the French King’s Wenches,” an apparent allusion to Claude Vanel’s popular The Royal Mistresses; or the Secret History of the Amours of All the French Kings (1695). The pervasiveness of secret history coincides with the growing taste for the intimacy of epistolary narrative. “And ’tis hoped no body will quarrel, that this Piece which is entitled by the Name of a Secret History, . . . should be written in an Epistolary way, . . . there is a very engaging part naturally couched under such a method of bringing State-Arcana to light, by way of


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Letters, which, in the very Notion of them carry something of secrecy” (Secret History of White-Hall, A6). A work like Behn’s Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister reflects both trends.8 It begins with letters between Philander and Sylvia, placing the reader in the position of eavesdropper on a secret correspondence. However, the narrator increasingly assumes the role of secret historian, and the text modulates into a gossipy third person narration of scandalous characters and sexual/political events.9 The particular conspiracy in which Philander and Cesario are involved had appeared in 1682 in Ford Lord Gray’s confessional The Secret History of the Rye House Plot. Some secret histories offer Anglicized renditions of European politics, such as Varillas’ Secret History of the House of the Medicis (1686), Polish manuscripts, or the Secret History of the Reign of John Sobieski (1700), or The Secret History of Lewis XI (1712). Other texts rewrite England’s past, such as The Secret History of the Reigns of K. Charles II and James II (1690), The Secret History of the Last Four Monarchs of Great Britain (1691), and Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots: Being the Secret History of Her Life (1725). Still others give accounts of contemporary events, such as Daniel Defoe’s The Secret History of White-Hall (1707), The Secret History of the October Club (1711), A Secret History of One Year (1714), and Secret History of State Intrigues (1715). The genre was able to accommodate an array of topics, including treaties and conspiracies, celebrated beauties and Catholic popes, rebels in Newgate and members of clubs.10 To avoid prosecution for libel, secret historians could camouflage one event with another, as in the case of numerous accounts of Polish politics. Conflicts involving Poland were in the news, but they serve also as indirect references to political faction and religious controversy in England. The Polish king was ‘elected,’ a timely concept to both Whigs and Tories struggling over conflicting claims of divine or hereditary right and parliamentary settlement of succession. Poland had witnessed the replacement of a Catholic king (Friedrich August) with a foreign Protestant one (‘Swedish’ Charles XII), offering parallels to English James II’s displacement by Dutch William III.11 In Manley’s Memoirs of Europe, the fictional country Samartia (35) is identified in the Key as Poland, but is in fact England. Polish Manuscripts depicts a faction-ridden world “uneasie to manage because of the different interests which justle there,” a world of “Cabals, Intrigues, &c.” in which monarchy is challenged and leadership is unstable: “There are also as many heads of Parties, as there are Senators and Ministers who . . . are always opposite to the Interest and Designs of the King” (3). In “The Last Will and Testament of Anthony, King of Poland” (1682) (as well as in Otway’s Venice Preserv’ d and Behn’s City Heiress), Tory propagandists insinuate that Shaftesbury wanted the throne of Poland (to

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which John Sobieski had been elected in 1674) and thus vented his frustrated lust for power at home. Oldmixon’s The Secret History of Europe (1712) establishes “parallels” (160) even more indirectly: he rehearses Parliament’s struggle with Charles II over the Test Act of 1675 in order to protest the Whig ministry’s defeat during Anne’s reign, signaled by the trial of Dr. Sacheverell in 1710. Oldmixon stops just short of legal culpability: “I wish the Reader would make the Comparison between the year 1675, and 1710 himself” (1:109).

Sex and the Body Politic Secret histories about sexual transgression—incest, rape, polygamy, promiscuity—also describe violations of power within the government. Like satire, they are characterized by partisanship, by techniques of exposure and linguistic injury, and by an interest in the ways that private peccadilloes destabilize public authority. The incestuous abduction of Henrietta Berkeley by Forde, Lord Grey of Werke, for example, becomes the vehicle for the story of the Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion against James II in Behn’s Love Letters. Characters simultaneously scheme for sex and power. The “secret origins” of the “foul and ignominious” Meal-Tub Conspiracy are traced to Charles II’s “counterplotting with his Popish Concubine and her close-stool Wench” (Secret History of the Reigns of K. Charles II, 105). The Secret History of Zarah (1705) offers a lurid version of Sarah Churchill’s sex life in order to attack Whig leaders. Even Swift, as the young secretary to Sir William Temple, had several years’ close exposure to his employer’s letters and memoirs, which may explain the origin of his affinity for the antipatriarchal tendencies of the anecdotal form.12 A Tale of a Tub (conceived while Swift was Temple’s amanuensis) narrates the course of European monarchy: The “[g]reat Prince [Henry IV of France who] . . . raised a mighty Army, filled his Coffers with infinite Treasure, [and] provided an invincible Fleet” (PW 1:103) is not motivated by any of the usual false mystifications for the exercise of power: “[s]ome believed he had laid a Scheme for Universal Monarchy: Others . . . determined the Matter to be a Project for pulling down the Pope. . . . Some . . . sent him into Asia to subdue the Turk, and recover Palestine” (103). But the “secret Wheel” and “hidden Spring” of his reign is his unsatisfied “Protuberancy” raised by “an absent Female” (103). This ‘analysis’ of politics as sex is precisely the kind of insider truth offered by scores of secret histories. The Secret History of . . . K. Charles II and K. James II, for example, observes that “the King [Charles II] . . . preferred the caresses of the expanded nakedness of a French Harlot before the preservation of three nations” (85). Swift’s version of Henry IV of France’s penile motivation


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for war also is asserted by Vanel’s The Royal Mistresses; or the Secret History of the Amours of All the French Kings: [W]hat is attributed to Policy, has no other Foundation than an erroneous Indulgence of Princes to their Mistresses, or their Favourites . . . at the same Time that they were believ’d to have in the Thoughts nothing more than the Welfare of their Dominions, ‘twas only a burning Desire to revenge the Quarrels wherein the amours had engag’d ‘em. (1–2)

A king becomes “so enthralled . . . for . . . ladies, that he neglects the Government of his Dominions and altogether slights [his queen].” His queen “was so far from being troubl’d at the infidelity of her inconstant Spouse, that she paid him in his own Coin” (19, 21–22). The Amours of Edward the Fourth (1700) narrates (from a woman’s point of view) the history of monarchy from Edward IV to Richard III by recounting Edward’s love affairs, but even more fully those of his wife Elizabeth: a “licentious manner of living” appears “free from all controul” (37). Punishments make justice seem as lurid as crime. Two adulterous men “were both sent to prison, and upon their being sufficiently prov’d, they were both condemn’d to be flea’d alive, to have their guilty members cut off, to be ty’d to the tails of two wild horses, and in that condition to be dragg’d through a new mow’d meadow.” Scandalous amours often focus on women’s role in secret sexual acts and ‘titled’ power, as in The Cabinet Open’ d, or the Secret History . . . of Madame Maintenon (1690) or Haywood’s The Secret History of . . . the Court of Caraminia (1727). In John Oldisworth’s State Tracts . . . with Some Secret Memoirs (1715), Madam M—s—m [Abigail Masham] must give precedence “occasionally” to official business: “State Intrigues more than Affairs of Love, have fill’d my Breast, not that I have been a Stranger to the little God but have been forc’d to banish him occasionally for more important business.” “Private and remarkable transactions, from the Restoration to the Revolution” in The Memoirs of the Honourable Sir John Reresby consistently mingle sexual and political matters: the Duchess of Portsmouth betrays the king; Buckingham is disgraced “for scandalously living with the Lady Shrewsbury, as man and wife, he being a married man, and for having killed my Lord Shrewsbury after he had debauched his wife” (178).13 One wonders that these people have time enough out of bed to conduct affairs of state. Other texts are less explicit, although they still “abound with Cabals, Intrigues, &c.” (Dalairac, A11) when describing politics, war, faction, and foreign relations. The Secret History of the White Staff is not literally about clandestine sex, although its metaphors and rhetoric imply it. Impassioned politicians burn with “secret Fire [that] they neglected at first, and

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impolitickly suffer’d too long to encrease, til it broke out into a Flame, which they could never quench” (9). They are “like hangers-on of the camp” (8). Powerful women (“That Female Buz which had . . . too much influence in Public Management”; “Men, and the Influence of their Female Agents”; “the Artifices of some Females”) inspire double entendre: “Men of State thought fit to plough with the Heifers of the Court” (44, 51, and 42). The Secret History of White-Hall draws attention to its collapsed metaphors: “in King Charles II’s reign . . . the Ministers everywhere were in Love with French politicks, whether like other unlawful Amours it was Venal and Mercenary, I leave others to judge” (106). Similar metaphors eroticize the king’s relationship to “parliament [which] doated upon his oaths and promises,” so that he resembles a faithless lover, guilty of “breach of promise” (Phillips, The Secret History of . . . K. Charles II and K. James II, 8, 28). England seems an innocent blooming youth, used and ruined by a lover/monarch willing “to reduce a plump, well-nourished Nation into a skeleton” (45). Charles’ ‘marriage’ to England lasts as long as “all things went trim and trixy,” but when a more attractive partner is offered (France, in the case of the Triple Alliance), divorce—“undoing the knot”—occurs. These and other examples of implicit sexualizing are common. The narrative stance of many secret histories is both aggressive and confidential; readers “sit down with the scandals and slanders of writers on any side without proof” (Defoe, 36). Chambers’ Cyclopedia (1728) acknowledges them warily as “speaking with too much freedom, or too much sincerity, of the manner and conduct of persons in authority, to allow of their being made public” (Patterson, 27).14

The Secret Life of Queens Secret histories about Queen Elizabeth’s amours (plentiful in the 1690s) also have hidden agendas. The political paranoia of the Stuart monarchy reaches back to the Elizabethan court “of secret spies, of accusers and informants, obsessed with seeing and knowing ‘privie secretes’” (Bronfen, 68).15 Elizabeth’s relations with the Earl of Leicester, the Duke of Alancon, and the Earl of Essex are told from various political perspectives.16 These narratives reveal contradictory threats: of Catholicism and French power, of female rule in a weakened patriarchy, of a Protestant matriarch who might no longer be able to protect the nation from tyrannical (papal or Stuart) father-kings. Although Pope-burning ceremonies occurred on the anniversary of Elizabeth’s accession (November 17) because “Queen Bess, / . . . sav’d your Souls from Popish thrall” (Luttrell 1:29, 77, 144, 237), they conveyed both


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overt and ‘secret’ meanings. Anxieties over the inadequacies of the royal womb (by the 1690s it was clear that two more queens, Mary and Anne, had failed to produce heirs) also are projected onto these narratives, in which a female monarch secures her subjects’ ‘love,’ promises political stability, but withholds the desired fruition of that relationship. Aptly, the song chanted on Queen Bess’ night exhorted the crowd to “set up Charles . . . That all true Commons, Lords, and Earls, / May wish him a fruitfull bride.” Secret histories of Elizabeth also explore the possibility of concealed acts of internal will; the queen is held accountable for the uses made of her sexuality, which she is suspected of manipulating. Clever and power loving, she “lured all the Princes of Europe with the Hopes of espousing them, although at the Bottom, she was resolved never to come to a conclusion of Marriage. . . . Because she took Delight in Courtship, which the knowledge of her Design had made her lose, she was careful to keep it very secret” (Secret History of the Duke of Alancon and Q. Elizabeth, 3). Elizabeth is driven by sexual jealousy to persecute the Princess Mariana and Mary Queen of Scots: “it seemed that Elizabeth had a mind to preserve the Liberties of all Men, by depriving the two fairest Princesses of the Age of theirs” (8). When Mary dies, the Duke of Norfolk tries to persuade Mariana to claim the throne. Perhaps this story interested readers in the 1690s because of its parallels to the plots of Monmouth and Shaftesbury. An ambitious courtier supports an attractive contender for the throne (in this case a Catholic) whose birth was secret and whose legitimacy was questioned. Like Monmouth, Norfolk is “condemned as a rebel to an infamous death” (99). In The Secret History of . . . Q. Elizabeth and the E. of Essex (1680), the queen narrates her own passion for the earl, her rivalry with the Countess of Rutland, and the determination of foreign policy and military strategy according to “the real secret cause,” namely her amorous feelings—“the entanglements of Love, Anger, and Jealousy” (11, 23). Things hidden assume exaggerated force. The Duke and the Countess of Rutland’s “Intrigue was mysterious; and the more secretly it was carry’d, the Engagement was the stronger, and the affection more tender” (28–29). The attack on Elizabeth is framed in terms of broken promises: “entreat her to remember the Promises she made,” says Essex before his execution, “I beg my life by this pledge, and she cannot deny it me without forgetting her Oaths” (52–53). The ‘Elizabeth’ secret histories were intended to reinforce the claims of the Stuarts by discrediting the Tudor family, and by venting anxieties about female rule and about the dependence of succession on women: “By the Death of Queen Elizabeth, the Crown of England passed into the Illustrious House of the Stuarts, whose right it was. King James [I], after a glorious reign, left it to his posterity, for the Repose of His Kingdoms” (61). As a sign of their continuing political volatility almost a century after the queen’s death, some of these narratives bear imprints of

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‘Cologne’ or ‘The Hague,’ to suggest that they were published abroad or by underground presses.18 A recurrent issue is Elizabeth’s ability to keep secrets. These include her decision never to marry, and even (in the most polemical pamphlets) her alleged pregnancies, childbirths, secret rearing of a child, and murders of several infants.17 The ‘historian’ looking back at her reign understands that the locus of her power was within, that, despite her many public occasions of self-display (or ‘self-fashioning’), she was able to conceal the most important truths about herself, and thus to retain power and to control her courtiers. Even Aphra Behn includes this aspect of Elizabeth’s personal secrecy in Love Letters, by comparing Cesario / Monmouth’s garnering of popular support to hers: “as the Maiden Queen I have read of in England, who made herself idoliz’d by that sole Piece of politick cunning” (397). We see a personal identity that is both constructed by circumstances and defined by (empowered by) self-knowledge that is never revealed. The ‘rise’ of secret history during the political tensions of the last decade of the seventeenth century coincides with several other issues that have come to seem typical of the period: the “problem of what satire should be understood to mean,” “the emergence of new issues dividing Whig and Tory,” and the “woman question.”19 As this chapter moves toward the intersection of these issues—secret history, gossip and scandal, gender, and satire—it will be important to acknowledge some differences of opinion. In investigations of the origins of early modern liberalism, secret history gives voice to Whig polemics during the Restoration in the work of male writers such as Sir William Temple, Andrew Marvell, and Gilbert Burnet (Patterson; Mayer). In feminist investigations of the eighteenth-century novel, amatory secret history by Tory women writers such as Aprah Behn, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood is the naughty ancestor to respectable fiction. In the first case, secret history seems ‘progressive,’ encouraging middle-class moral outrage at failures in the lives of kings and queens, and asserting ideals such as free speech and the citizen’s ‘right to know’ in England and America. In the second case, it seems ‘reactionary,’ encouraging aristocratic pleasure in voyeurism and libertinism, and tempting readers with forbidden sexual indulgence.

‘Feminine’ Secret Histories “Feminine” secret histories have been condemned for “embarrassing popularity” “awkward artificiality,” “debased conventionality,” and “execrable”


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structure.20 As ‘women’s texts’ they were dismissed for a time by critics as “deliberately aimed at a relatively naïve and impressionable mental norm” (Richetti, 120, 124). Secret history’s ability to release competing versions of events into the print marketplace was compared to unwelcome riffraff moving into a nice neighborhood: “The respectability of history as a branch of traditional letters (something the novel tried to turn to its own uses . . .) was in fact damaged, at least temporarily, as its border—traditionally heavily guarded against memoirs, personal anecdotes, journalistic gossip, and histoire scandaleuse—became difficult to maintain” (J. Hunter, 342–343). Steele’s Tatler No. 84 has been granted enough authority to “programmatically invalidat[e] the secret history and memoir” (McKeon, Origins, 60). Feminist theories of the novel challenge these ideas.21 Ballaster’s Seductive Forms (1992) argues that the work of Behn, Manley, and Haywood allows a “synchronic analysis of a particular historical moment in the making of the English novel” (29) revealing the “discursive power of sexuality in prose fiction by women of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century” (7).22 William Warner analyzes the backlash against this manifestation of feminine authority. All pleasure-giving narratives of amorous intrigue are by their detractors “characterized as essentially equivalent,” and equally “licentious, fantasy ridden and debased” (6). By discrediting women writers as inappropriately erotic, artificial, and European, male writers such as Richardson and Fielding could incorporate important elements of their work while claiming a new, masculine, realistic, elevated, and ‘pure’ English novel. Critics have been complicit in wishing to endow the novel with respectability and national stature. Thus ‘scandalous’ women are “pushed into the margins of literary histories . . . as an abject trace or degraded ‘other’ needed to secure the identity of the ‘real’ (i.e. legitimate) novel” (15).23 Toni Bowers also sees the story of the novel as one that has neglected the importance of “subversive and transgressive female creativity” (Bowers, 51) in “sensational tales of sexual intrigue published by and for English women in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century” (50). Bowers notes the centrality of the idea of promising: the reiteration of “false oaths, failed promises, and broken vows . . . goes to the heart of Augustan questions about the status of personal honor and the authority of words in a world where vows to god and king recently had been rendered negotiable and contingent” (63). Amatory fiction reflects the period’s confusion about its own culpability in the upheavals beginning with the death of Charles I and “places questions of agency in a sexual context, participating in feminized guise in the central political issues of its day until at least the 1740s’ when the last organized Jacobite uprising occurred” (67).24 Erica Harth links secret history and novel through the “embourgeoisement” of love. Narratives of sexual transgression that “grew up in an

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ambience of the clandestine” (181) evolved from “serv[ing] as an ideological prop to a collapsing nobility” (152) into the “potentially democratic” force of the novel. This transformation—“nowhere . . . more evident than in the especially successful genre of ‘secret history’” (196)—occurs because readers discover that their “leaders were just like everybody else, if not worse” (48). Through the move from narcissism to voyeurism, “secret historians subvert history and the modern novel appeared on the horizon as a subversive genre” (153). It seems fair to question a process in which democracy emerges from voyeuristic fascination with deceit, seduction, rape, incest, and other criminal conduct acted out on the bodies of suffering women. What if we consider the power dynamic of secret history as not toward equality but toward aggression, not as toward the novel but as toward satire? In claiming secret history for satire, we begin by observing that the secret loves of monarchs and ministers are not “just like everybody else.” Like Don Juan, these transgressors are exceptional, more obsessive, more entitled, and more indiscriminate.25 Their mistakes can have painful ramifications for many. Scenes of verbal and physical encounters, of seductions and betrayals, of loss of innocence and acquisition of desire follow patterns of repetition and substitution that are predicated on extreme inequality of power. The triumph of the strong over the weak is often integral to the kind of sexuality intended to arouse the reader, disturbingly represented by many scenes of rape, nearrape, and physical struggle. Crucial evidence of imbalances of power resides in the capacity of the secret historian for irony and excess. Ironic possibilities emerge, for example, in the English rendering of Madame D’Aulnoy’s crudely erotic The Secret History of Mack-Beth, King of Scotland (1708) (a ‘hybrid’ text, authored by a woman and translated by a man). Shakespeare’s Macbeth (warrior and husband, but not a father) is vulnerable to powerful women (the witches and his wife). His desire for royal power is always compromised by his lack of an heir, and his anguished violent ambition is shored up by self-delusion about his own immortality. Images of darkness, blood, and confusion permeate scenes of pain, loss, and murder. In contrast, the secret Mack-Beth shares none of the tragically compromised masculinity of Shakespeare’s hero. Although he too lacks innate “royalty of nature” (3:i. 49), he possesses an incorrigible, an almost comical, lust. This ‘secret’ laird, unlike Shakespeare’s faithful husband, seems to foreshadow John Gay’s libidinous Macheath in The Beggar’s Opera (1728). Mack-beth alludes to English politics after the civil wars and Restoration, including union with Scotland, Scottish Jacobitism, and the perils of disrupting the royal bloodline. Characters speak of the dangers of “faction” and the “distresses we have met with not only in the common calamity of our Country . . . and the foul play . . . found in [the court] of England since our good king’s restoration”


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(5). The Thane of Glamis alludes to Charles I and James II who were murdered, exiled, or supplanted by a child: “what unheard of rashness . . . to protect that guilty head, by which his own father was treacherously murdered, by whom his relations are robb’d of their estates, and those who could escape . . . forc’d to wander in foreign lands” (18). “Bickerings betwixt . . . Parties” (40) contribute to “the turbulent spirit of the times” (47) while “money [supplies] the nerves of the war” (45), and challenges to the monarchy are emphasized: “It was no new thing with us to remove one king, and put up another” (42). Stuart political problems—contested succession, illegitimacy, instability—are thus congenial to the discourse of seduction: “If every marriage is . . . a promise, every promise is to a certain extent a promise of marriage—to the extent that every promise promises constancy above all, that is, promises consistency, continuity in time” (Felman, 34). The seducer’s promiscuous “principle of infinite substitutability” is antihierarchical and devaluing. Gay describes Macheath in these terms when he is confronted with six ‘wives’ and four bastards at the end of The Beggar’s Opera: “From all sides their Glances his Passion confound; / For black, brown, and fair, his Inconstancy burns” (3:xvii). Unlike Shakespeare’s tormented hero, seduced by the promises of witches, the secret Mack-Beth is a Don Juan figure, a young rake complacently given to the “pleasures” of “breaking in”—to private chambers, concealed information, and women’s bodies. Macbeth was loyal to his lady, and determined to share his kingdom with no one. Supernatural forces conspire to dress him in borrowed robes. Mack-Beth promiscuously shares sexual partners; his natural instinct is not to borrow but to remove his clothes. He meets physical challenges willingly, yet they are not the challenges of military prowess but of sexual conquest: “Affairs of this secret Nature are never gone through without Hazards and Dangers, which whet the Appetite and heighten the Pleasure . . . which perhaps, on too easy possession had been dead before now” (18). In scenes verging on self-parody, he is both an eavesdropper and a voyeur. When interrupted in the act of cuckolding, for example, he “rise[s] from the Banquet of Love with [his] Stomach not half full” (18), then hides beneath the bed to listen while the returned husband asserts his marital rights (19). Mack-Beth then emerges with heightened ardor [“lose no more time, . . . therefore, to the bed” (21)]. His mistress Annabella’s wish for a bath creates an opportunity for him to peek through the doorway of her private chamber until “the sight of this Venus set [him] again on Fire, and speedily undressing, . . . rush’d into the Bath, and clasped her in [his] Arms” (22). Interruption and deferral of consummation are conventional techniques for prolonging desire in secret histories. These techniques can have other effects. Seductions break promises of loyalty, fulfillment, and responsibility, including the seduction of

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the reader whose desire also must wait. Mack-Beth’s narrator concludes with a reminder of the political meaning of the contract: “The prince therefore of any people should reflect, that he is chose . . . not to indulge his appetite, give loose to his Passions, and make everything subservient to his will, as if he were the Lord, not Ruler, of his people” (96). Secret histories can become ironic and self-reflexive; they serve as reading paradigms for ways to penetrate a text by means of voyeurism and eavesdropping. During a complicated tryst in The Amours of the French Kings, a would-be lover hides in the closet to a bedchamber. Like the reader of secret history, he is unable to participate himself in acts of sex, but he has gotten close to the action by entering the house disguised as a stationer carrying an armload of books (106–107).

‘Masculine’ Whig Secret Histories Robert Mayer’s History and the English Novel (1999) focuses on “the type of secret history that belonged to historical discourse” (94) written by men like Gilbert Burnet, Anthony Hamilton, and David Jones, the type that avoids the “sustained rhetorical blast[s]” and erotic excesses associated with feminine scandal chronicles. Mayer agrees that secret history’s distortions of ‘fact’ “asserted the power of fiction to do the work of history” (140). But in contrast to the contention of this book—that ‘secret’ versions destabilize official discourse and stimulate irony and satire—he concludes that scandal and transgression ultimately were self-defeating: “Histories couched in this kind of rhetoric were bound to be dismissed” (98), except insofar as they encouraged the production of novels. Annabel Patterson’s Early Modern Liberalism (1997) credits Whig secret history with popularizing liberal ideals of free speech and governmental disclosure, not through the novel but through the work of male writers including John Milton, Sir William Temple, Gilbert Burnet, Andrew Marvell, Algernon Sidney, John Locke, and John Adams. Patterson divides secret history into three categories: “erotic scandal in high places,” “scandalous political roman a clef . . . [which] attracted female authors” with its “pulpy intimacies,” and “political secret history proper” (183–185). “Political secret history proper,” like the ‘novel proper,’ requires differentiation from its licentious ancestors and from what Mayer calls its “shadowy” past (95): “a key aspect of English secret history as pioneered [by writers like Marvell and Burnet] was a combination of two liberal principles: that the government of any country ought to be practiced, and seen to be practiced, as the constitution requires; and that the concept of


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‘libel’ tends to be deployed as a weapon by those whose administrative conduct will not survive scrutiny” (189). Patterson dignifies “political secret history proper” as the most important “branch of the new genre” based on liberal ideals. A liberal republican or Whig lineage gives the genre a more respectable role in the evolution of democratic thinking. “[P]roper” secret history thus is seen to move “away from scandalmongering” and “towards an ideal of probity and integrity” (187). Patterson argues that the “recognizably Whig genre” can be compared to “investigative journalism” informed by an “ethics of reading” that could “lead not to useless cynicism but to well-informed and responsible activism” (185). These seeds of liberal thought, culled from a popular but degraded European invention, are transplanted to the New World for full flowering. In revolutionary America Burnet becomes “a secondary classic.”26 Andrew Marvell’s An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government (1677) is Patterson’s essential text for establishing the grounds of liberal secret history. Marvell accused the Stuart monarchs of “a grand international conspiracy” to subjugate the English: “There has now for divers years, a design been carried on to change the lawful government of England into an absolute Tyranny, and to convert the established Protestant Religion into downright Popery” (quoted in Patterson, 187). Government will conceal its motives by prosecuting for libel any one who uncovers them. “[T]he new English secret historian identifies part of his responsibility: to outsmart the government in its control of information” (188). Marvell and his colleagues, especially Burnet and Oldmixon, are credited with popularizing liberal values (197), while non-Whig secret histories narrate ‘scandal for scandal’s sake’ without any serious political purpose in revealing “government behind the scenes.” From this perspective, Tory writers merely appropriate the “genuine” invention of another party destined to dominate later-eighteenth-century history: “The Tory reaction might claim the name of ‘secret history’ for short tirades . . . but not its ethical rationale” (186).27 But the satirical impulse of feminine secret history also is driven, albeit aggressively, by an ethical rationale. Behn’s Love Letters , Manley’s New Atalantis, Haywood’s Love in Excess, among other texts, participate seriously in political and ethical discourse, and provide strategic models for narrative. Far from “useless cynicism,” Tory works suspect the ‘new men’ who profit from war, stocks, and paper money; they attack a world in which everything is for sale or available for colonization. They also want to “outsmart the government in its control of information” (188). Although their discursive practices are often ironic, although they appear to us tainted by allegiance to class hierarchy, and although they were less willing

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to endorse new ‘schemes’ and ‘projects,’ they attack the unjust exercise of power that obstructs peace. Unfortunately, ethical ideals, whether liberal or conservative, are vulnerable to compromise and hypocrisy in the face of power and pleasure. Secret history may have served the purposes of ‘party,’ but it did so for both parties. Whigs like Marvell and Sidney feared the accusation of libel (“Some will represent this discourse . . . as if it too were written against the Government . . . by being Criminal” [Marvell, Account of the Growth of Popery, 2:376; Patterson, 189]), but so did Tory Manley and Haywood (the former incarcerated, the latter silenced because of it). Defoe famously wrote for both political factions, and was both paid and pilloried for his efforts. He was in a unique position to remark on the traffic in secrets: “On the one Hand, they hire a Man or Men, to write a Secret History, pretending to vindicate and defend the Character of the Person . . . . On the Other Hand, the same Men hire another Man, perhaps the same Man, to mimmick the opposite Party . . . with Opprobrious Terms, and . . . Raillery” (Secret History of the Secret History, 32). Secret history is capable of punitive, aggressive discourse. Of Burnet, a contemporary observed: “no man living was more ready to foment [partison rancor] . . . [T]he first inquiry he made into any body’s character was, whether he were a whig or a tory: if the latter, he made it his business to rake all the spiteful stories he could collect together . . . which he was very free to publish, without any regard to decency or modesty” (Burnet 1897:1:73). Lurid, sensational details are not infrequent on his pages (death by poisoned snuff so that “small veins of the brain were burst”, a “revengeful Italian Lady”, “hot Italian Priests”, among many others), causing another contemporary to draw a parallel to Manley: “of all the English Historians, [Burnet] is the most notorious Slanderer . . . [I]n this respect he may shake Hands with the scandalous Author of the new Atalantis” (“Review of Bishop Burnet” 14).28 Destabilizing effects continue even when secret history serves a liberal cause. Once a reader discovers ‘another’ truth (the “politics of suspicion”), then yet another may be possible. Aptly, the Whig texts that support Patterson’s argument refer to the Test Act— that is, on a promise that proved impossible to keep. The Test Act demands an absolute constancy that is everywhere contradicted by human experience and institutions: “I do sweare that I will not at any time indeavour the alteration of Government either in Church or State.” The Exclusion Crisis raised questions reaching far beyond the succession or rejection of a particular monarch. The secret histories associated with it informally debate the consequences of assertions of freedom, especially in an environment where widespread cover-ups, disclosures, and conspiracies contribute to what Freud would later call paranoia.


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Men at Liberty The ‘man of liberty,’ the Don Juan type, is recurrent in secret histories. The ‘progressive’ Republican concept of liberty and the ‘reactionary’ aristocratic concept of libertinism were concurrent aspects of post-Restoration culture. Freedom was being redefined. Milton’s Republicanism pushes the concept of liberty to an extreme, making each individual an independent ‘church.’ Yet his contemporary Dryden expressed “loathing to the specious name of a republick: that mock appearance of a Liberty, where all who are not part of the Government, are Slaves” (D 8:6): “These Adam-wits, too fortunately free, / Began to dream they wanted libertie” (2:7, ll. 51–52). Oldmixon’s Secret History of Europe describes opposition to the Test Act: “Never was there shewn since the Restauration, such a spirit of Liberty” (195). Yet Swift, an ardent supporter of the Act, explains his own politics with the phrase, “Fair Liberty was all his cry” (P 2:566, l. 346). The ‘man at liberty’ appears frequently in Tory and Whig writing between 1660 and 1750. Political theorists contend that “[i]n the seventeenth century, the notion that men or ‘individuals’ are born free and equal to each other, or are naturally free and equal, began to gain wide currency” (Pateman 1988:4). Liberty and libertinism, despite their moral divergence, justify freedom (of various kinds) as ‘natural.’ Even Thomas Shadwell’s excessively vicious rendering of the Don Juan (Don John) legend in The Libertine contrasts “the dull slavery of Pupillage” with “the liberty of Nature” (B). The play’s shocking crimes of patricide, incest, rape, stabbing, and poisoning are rationalized by the ‘hero’: “My Appetites are all I’m sure I have from Heav’n, since they are Natural, and them I always will obey” (B2). Works as diverse as Behn’s fiction, Rochester’s obscene poems, Dryden’s ‘mock-heroic’ satire, and Marvell’s liberal political essays rely on this argument. The ambiguous figure of the free man—the attractive male possessed of political power, sexual prowess, geographic mobility, and discursive acumen—such an individual is comparable to the figure of Don Juan theorized by Felman. He has the ability to persuade and to promise. But he also could be corrupted, disguised, effeminized, and destroyed. Principal actor in shifting scenes of opportunities for power—economic, social, political— he serves as a locus for the controversies in Whig and Tory secret histories and satires. James Scott, Duke of Monmouth, was such a figure in stories of popular interest well into the eighteenth century, involving secret knowledge: rumors, gossip, plots, and scandal. In chapter 4, Monmouth will serve as a link between ‘Tory” and ‘Whig’ secret histories, and between the strategies of secret history and those of satire: the first section

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narrates the Rye-House Plot and Monmouth’s rebellion; the second describes the murder of Thomas Thynne, a member of Monmouth’s ‘cabal.’ The man of liberty combines sexual prowess and political power. Since politics was centered on succession, and succession was predicated on sex, problem ‘lovers’ (who are always also potential fathers) often are the ‘secret springs’ of history. Their “protuberances,” as Swift puts it, secretly govern the world. Monarchs need to produce viable, legitimate heirs, and political anxieties heighten in the face of irresponsible father/kings and barren mother/queens. The wives of Henry VIII, Mary I, Elizabeth I, Catherine de Braganza, Mary II, and Anne failed to procreate, while fertile mistresses and libidinous kings produced an abundance of illegitimate offspring. As the male subject, liberated or libertine, seeks his pleasure and exercises his power, his primary purpose is not the getting of children. However, that he will do so, though unintentionally, is one of the open secrets that everyone shares. Like the ‘man of wit’ in Rochester’s “Letter from Artemisia to Chloe,” who “[m]ade his ill-natured jest, and went away” (l. 200), he ignores the consequences of or shirks responsibility for his actions. Accidental paternity is one of the inherent contradictions of the patriarchal system that stakes its own stability on the very act it seems least able to regulate, the sex act. The behavior of the ‘man at liberty’ promoted him as the ideal of power, but also made him the speculative topic of gossip and slander about his secret life. His escapades act out the anxieties of a culture that does not know whether to value or to fear the physical requisites of its own perpetuation, and thus he has a crucial place in both secret histories and satires. The world cannot be mended without his reform. In Satiric Inheritance, Michael Seidel argues that “[i]nheritance is thus the most secure promise that time makes to creation’s progeny and the most secure victory . . . that civilization celebrates over regressive potential” (30). Seidel understands satire to be activated when this promise of succession is broken: “Breaches in lines of continuity generally provide much of the material for narrative conflict . . . the threat to authoritative first actions is a threat to the very nature of being” (31). Seidel looks to myths of origin in Biblical and classical texts and sees crises of legitimacy (Cain and Abel, Satan and Jesus, and so on) and he locates their satiric counterparts in Dryden’s Flecknoe and Shadwell, Swift’s three ‘sons,’ and Pope’s Theobald and Cibber, in Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, in Cevantes Don Quixote, all of which “manifest a kind of obsession with illegitimate beginnings” (61). This theoretical paradigm assumes ‘pure’ male lineage. The hero is born out of the dust of the earth, sans maternal womb: “In most systems of Western myth, original men are necessarily earth men. . . . Heroic narrative action records the struggle to dispense form in the proportional bodies and careers of kings, warriors, and fathers” (27). Women are


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invisible in this model. And yet what marks the development of satire, to the contrary, is its inclusion of sexuality, women, and women writers in the construction of ‘man.’ Threats to the ‘value of the first’ (Felman’s phrase for the consequences of the broken promise) instigated by rebellious progeny, illegitimate birth, and sibling rivalry had special currency during the Stuart era. The English had restored a king after their republican experiment, and that king had disappointed them. The ‘secret’ version of his assumption of the throne accuses him of violating fundamental codes of human relationship: The very first night his sacred Majesty was to live at White Hall, to have the Lady Castelmaine seduced from her Husband, and entic’d into the arms of the happily restored prince. Which was not only Adultery but Incest . . . she was his Sister by the Mother’s side, as being begotten by the E. of St. A upon the Queen’s Body after the Death of Ch. I. (Phillips, Secret History of the Reigns, 22)29

Thus the highest ranking ‘man at liberty’ begins a reign productive of famous illegitimacies, secret histories, and satires.


Chapter 4 Contracts and Promises: Speech Acts, Sex Acts, and Don Juan

The worst Mark you can receive is a Promise, especially when it is confirmed with an Oath; after which every Man retires, and gives over all Hopes. —Jonathan Swift

Monmouth and Don Juan: A Perspective from Byron In order to demonstrate some of the strategic relationships between gossip, slander, secret history, and satire, this chapter investigates two groups of texts relating to the rebellion of James Scott, Duke of Monmouth. Handsome, privileged, ambitious, and controversial, Monmouth was a topic of imaginative discourse in which liberty and libertinism overlap. In “Silvio’s Complaint,” Behn represents him as a seduced shepherd who “languisht to be King” (l. 48). But his reputation as a womanizer turns up even in the introductory pages of the Spectator: while meeting members of the club, the reader learns that Will Honeycomb knew “when the Duke of Monmouth danced at Court such a Woman was then smitten, another was taken with him at the Head of his Troop in the Park” (No. 2; March 2, 1711). Representations of his desire for love and power intertwine tales of seduction and betrayal, his own and other men’s, and support a comparison to that father-challenging paragon of male virility and speech act theory, Don Juan.

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When Byron looked back at the satirists of the Restoration and early eighteenth century, he found much to admire and emulate. He called, Pope in particular, “[t]he delight of my boyhood, the study of my manhood, perhaps . . . the consolation of my age.” Unlike Wordsworth, Byron heard “the real language of men [and women]” in the gossip and slander of satire.1 For his own satire on politics and religion, he aptly developed a new version of the legendary ‘man at liberty’ Don Juan, not to recall escapades of a former century but to narrate a secret history of contemporary sexual transgression. The “real motivation” for Don Juan’s dedicatory verses to Robert Southey (corroborated by correspondence and editorial commentary) was “Byron’s belief that Southey had spread the scandal that Byron, Shelley, Claire Claremont, and Mary Shelley had in Switzerland become allies in an outrageous league of incest” (Steffan, 1:12). The first canto developed from“[a] bit of Venetian gossip.” Byron’s satiric poem coincides with the writing of his scandalous Memoirs, and his editor notes, “Don Juan might be better compared to the lost Memoirs, which were anecdotal, digressive, and full of personal discursiveness” (McGann, 5:668). We know that the poem shocked readers because it mingled politics with intimate sexual revelations in ways that were “too free”: Canto I “is all about himself and Lady Byron, and raking up the whole transaction in a way the world would never bear” (Moore, Journal, 2:263, cited in McGann, 5:668). The poem is part scandalous secret history, part satire, and part reincarnation of the seducer figure. We turn back to the years of the Exclusion crisis, then, bearing in mind the longevity of this nexus of ideas. Monmouth appears in secret histories by men and women. Politics and sex commingle in narratives that question the roles of fathers, sons, and lovers (and implicitly mothers, daughters, and mistresses) in public and private spheres. Representations of Monmouth sometimes are androgynous. He is both the image of a king (his father) and an objectified image of physical desirability on which many gaze: “[T]he astonishing beauty of his outward form caused universal admiration” : “Every Bodies Eyes were . . . dazzled by his bright Form, which drown’d all the Men at Court, and made all the Beauties his Conquests. . . . [H]e was the Terror of Husbands and Lovers” (Hamilton, 323–324). At once a guilty adulterer and an innocent victim of seduction, at once the popularly acclaimed choice as monarch of a nation and the superstitious recluse governed by magical ciphers, he epitomized cultural confusion over the authority of the ‘man at liberty’ in civil society. In stories commingling politics and sex, the political contract and the seductive promise center on the idea of freely given consent; consent distinguishes government from tyranny and sexual intercourse from rape. In the stories about Monmouth’s associates Ford Lord Grey (later Earl of Tankerville) and Thomas Thynne, as well as about Thynne’s nemesis Count

Contracts and Promises

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Coningsmark, the empowered but inconstant male is a discursive marker for the limits of patriarchy, and therefore is a locus of anxiety and paranoia. Plots often follow the exercise, abuse, or loss of his freedom in conspiracies or escapes, rebellion, or other challenges to authority, and trials, incarceration or execution. As seducer, impregnator, and father, his fate affects the women in his life, whose roles are no less contradictory. As the embodiment of the promise of power, the virile entitled young man raises questions about the realization of that promise. His divided allegiance to fraternal and paternal authority expresses a crisis in the distribution of power because it opposes the political right of the father to the natural liberties of sons.2 Monmouth’s rebellion thus stands for the rebellious acts of several men (other ‘sons’ or ‘brothers’ motivated by liberty or libertinism), forming in the aggregate a “just . . . account of all our present Mischiefs . . ., for from them we may collect a just and secret History of the former times” (POAS).3 Different versions, all purporting to be true, advocate different political perspectives. Although these men may impregnate women, we tend to think of them not as fathers but as sons, or as brothers, comrades, or conspirators. Thus in each story that follows, the figure of the attractive young man is further refracted or displaced onto groups of men, historical and imaginary: Monmouth’s ‘cabal’; the Swedish adventurer Coningsmark4 (also the fictional Count Alarick) and his brother; Coningsmark’s avengers (Vratz, Stern, and Boroski); Satan and his fraternity of fallen angels; the biblical Absalom, or Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury (also the fictional Tomaso and Achitophel), the Whig radical Robert Ferguson (the fictional Fergusano), Grey’s servant-turned-lord William Turner (the fictional Briljard), the ‘merry monarch’ Charles II (recast by Dryden as the biblical King David), and the Rye-House conspirator Ford Lord Grey (the fictional Philander and his ‘foil’ character Octavio), and Monmouth himself (as Cesario and Absalom). This cast of characters vies for love and power in secret histories and satires in which “discourses about the body and state overlap” (Greenfield, 270).5 Episodes of conspiracy, elopement, violent death, and escape explore the effects of secret behaviors on public events.

Rebellion as seduction: The Secret History of the Rye-House Plot Illicit love affairs and strained relations between fathers and sons enliven accounts of the Rye-House plot and subsequent uprisings. Monmouth’s attempt to seize the throne is enmeshed in a network of seductions of which he is both the product (as the illegitimate son of Lucy

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Waters and Charles II) and the producer (his own mistresses and fellow conspirators). Ford Lord Grey of Werke was one of his cabal, and he functions as ‘brother’—rebel, narrator, and foil. While imprisoned in the Tower in 1685, Grey wrote The Secret History of the Rye-House Plot: and of Monmouth’s Rebellion that, according to its editor in 1754, “explains, at full length, all the most secret particulars” (A2).6 Grey had been deeply involved in the plans to promote Monmouth and to prevent Catholic James’ accession to the throne. He persisted in antimonarchical conspiracy despite several arrests for treason. However, his commitment to the cause evaporated during the heat of battle. At Bridport and Sedgemoor, when an army loyal to Monmouth finally invaded, Grey retreated, abandoning the troops of cavalry he was to lead. Addressing James II, the repentant Grey pleads for forgiveness: “I lie at your Majesty’s feet, where tho’ I cannot expect, yet it is a pleasure to beg for mercy” (vii). Once the fraternizer of regicides, Grey now courts the king: “I pray God bless your Majesty with a long and happy reign over your people; and may all those perish that ever lift up a thought against your Majesty’s life, or for disturbing the peace of your government” (vii). On one hand, Grey does tell all: names of other conspirators, their meeting places, their sources of money, their plans to amass and conceal an army, their coordination of an uprising in London with one in Scotland, even their clandestine practices of communication: “the Duke of Monmouth received a letter from Captain Mathews writ after the style of a merchant; but where the visible letter ended, there began another which appeared when wetted with a water for that purpose” (110). On the other hand, Grey conceals all personal culpability: “I do solemnly protest to your majesty, that if I thought the duke of Monmouth, or my Lord Russel, intended the destruction of the government, or the least prejudice to the King, I should have abhorred them; but believing the contrary, I loved them, and engaged with them to my own ruin and destruction” (46). Grey casts himself as the seduced victim who “loved” only to meet “ruin.” After his arrest for treason in 1683, he escaped from England to Cleve (Holland), where he portrays himself as forsaken and unappreciated: “I was at this time in as sad circumstances as can well be imagined: I had before me the prospect of being always a vagabond, and that a poor one, too . . . I had not a place to hide my head in, except a garret in Amsterdam” (84). Some memories seem just too painful or (perhaps conveniently) repressed for him: “there was another meeting; I was not at it, being prevented by some accident, which I have forgot” (59). Grey directs blame toward Shaftesbury by casting him as seducer and evil father. Grey and Monmouth, like Hal in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, are portrayed as wayward but loving sons; they only speculate about taking


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the crown during the king’s illness (4). But Shaftesbury relentlessly urges “a rising” (30). In his manipulative presence, they all are tempted, and yet “[a]fter my Lord Shaftesbury’s departure, all treasonable practices were thought on no more” (42). An irresponsible father figure, Shaftesbury is willing to “hazard” his ‘sons,’ his “boys,” on the basis of speculation, phantom hopes, and promises. “They had often heard of [Shaftesbury’s] ten thousand brisk boys, but did not know where to find them” (30). Grey’s strategic narrative saved his life: he paid a large sum to the Lord Treasurer, and testified for the prosecution at the trial of his co-conspirators Lord Delamere and Lord Brandon. When the political winds shifted again, he became a supporter of William of Orange, during whose reign he was elevated to Earl of Tankerville (1695), Lord Treasurer (1699), and Lord Privy Seal (1700). In his Secret History, words have completely replaced and rewritten rebellious deeds. Completely missing from Gray’s confessional are several events occurring simultaneously with the conspiracy, namely, his seduction of and elopement with his sister-in-law Henrietta Berkeley, her pregnancy and eventual abandonment. Thus the Dutch garret in which he portrays himself as a poor, languishing political refugee was also the scene of an incestuous love affair. Gray is a consummate anti-patriarchal figure, challenging the authority of his king, his prince, his party leader, his father-in-law, and the law of the Father itself. His eventual betrayal of the rebellious son Monmouth (who has rejected the protective authority of his father Charles II) accompanies his betrayal of the rebellious daughter Henrietta (who has rejected the protective authority of her father Lord Berkeley). Finally, his fate must be compared to that of Monmouth. Both privileged young rebels had engaged in scandalous adulteries (Monmouth’s include Grey’s wife; Grey’s include his wife’s sister.) But, unlike Grey, Monmouth lost his titles, his mistress, and his head.

Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister The parallels and intersections of these plots and personalities inspired the representation of the Rye-House plot and Monmouth’s rebellion, as well as the love affair between Grey and Henrietta Berkeley, in Aphra Behn’s Love Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister. Read in conjunction with Grey’s confession, Behn’s text underscores the destabilizing effect of searching for “secret springs,” and the ironic instability of ‘true versions.’ Grey’s selfserving writing in The Secret History of the Rye-House Plot could be

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embedded almost seamlessly in Behn’s ironic political fiction. His ingratiating and florid style won him pardon from the monarch he had offended. But this style sounds exactly like the charmingly devious Philander at one of his many insincere, seductive moments, when he masterfully rewrites ‘reality.’ Behn’s text encloses numerous ‘secret’ versions within versions. Sometimes characters retell the same events in different ways. Octavio narrates political events to Philander but omits his growing love for Silvia (133–135). Accounting for his time away from Cleve, Philander writes to Octavio of his amours with Calista, but he writes to Silvia of his involvement in plans for rebellion (306–312). Briljard variously describes his time alone with Silvia to Octavio, Philander, and Silvia herself, who has been fondled by him during her sleep (147–154). Often the reconstruction of the past is represented self-consciously as a purposeful speech act: Having writ this, he read it over; not to see whether it were witty or Eloquent, or writ up to the fence of so good a judge as Philander, but to see whether he had cast for his purpose; for there his Master-piece was to be shewn; and having read it, he doubted whether the relation of Silvia’s griefs were not too moving, and whether they might not serve to revive his fading love, which were intended only as a demonstration of his own pitty, and compassion. (155)

Almost anything is possible in a world in which language acts replace physical acts. Although this syncretic narrative technique would be used by Samuel Richardson in Clarissa to serve the purposes of sentimentalism, here it is not emotive, but aggressive, ironic, and satirical. Yet it shares with Clarissa the idea that characters are constituted less by actions than by what they tell or do not tell about themselves, by the secrets they manipulate. Behn’s character Briljard (based on the shadowy ‘Mr. Turner,’ for whom Grey arranged a marriage of convenience with Henrietta) becomes a subject with (and by means of) secrets of his own. In Part 1, Philander’s letters to Silvia seduce many readers, who ‘side’ with the lovers and anticipate their union. But by the time we read later versions of Philander’s seductions in Parts 2 and 3 (“Cant and stuff . . . which Lovers serve themselves with” [236]), their political meaning takes precedence, even over the reader’s voyeuristic pleasure in scenes of sex. The world evoked by the text is permeated by desire for sex and power mediated strategically through secrets. As Philander, Grey embodies the very traits he abjures in his own narrative. He is a seducer par excellence; he is a master of detailed memories, unlikely to wave aside “some accident, which I have forgot.” He is supremely disrespectful of patriarchal authority. No explicit representations of his plots against the monarchy are given.


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But several problem father figures allow him to demonstrate his gift for conspiracy. Two memorable scenes displace these plots onto his comic trickery of and successful sexual rivalry with older men. Both involve seductions and gardens: the ‘phallic handshake’ scene in Part 1 (60–61) and the cistern scene (240–241) in Part 2. The challenge to paternal authority in the first garden scene has been admirably discussed by Ellen Pollak.7 Philander leaves Silvia’s room disguised as her maid, with whom her father Count Beralti expects an assignation. In the darkness of the garden, Beralti mistakenly attempts to seduce his son-in-law, by placing in his hands two materializations of patriarchal power—his phallus and his money. The episode becomes Philander’s and Silvia’s little secret, and thus empowers them. Beralti is unknowingly humiliated: denied sexual gratification, outsmarted by his son-in-law, and indirectly exposed, half-naked and undignified, to the laughter of his daughter. The incident is strategically positioned. Silvia recently has sent a letter to Philander (37–43) urging the divine right of kings (Charles “holds his Crown by right of Nature, by right of Law, by right of Heav’n itself” [41]). She also urges Philander to abandon the cabal’s plots (the “afflict[ing] . . . secret” of the Rye House conspiracy) that will be “ridicul’d to all posterity” (41). Philander’s response is to render a patriarch (Beralti) ridiculous to his posterity (his daughter and ‘son’), and to promise success to rebels (himself and Silvia). Not surprisingly, the letter immediately following the garden encounter announces the arrival of Cesario/Monmouth (63) and more rebel ‘brothers’: “We have two new Advancers come in of youth and money; teach’em not negligence; be careful and let nothing hinder you from taking horse immediately” (63). The second scene functions symbolically as well. In Part 2, Philander is surprised by Count Clerinau, whom he is in the process of cuckolding, and must escape into a garden through the window of Calista’s room: “I was naked, unarm’d and no defense against his jealous rage” (240). Philander finds an apt place to hide: he inserts his naked body into the wet cistern in the middle of the garden, while “with the Torch they search’d round about it, and beat the fringing flowers that grew pretty high about the bottom of it” (241).8 The irony, of course, is that even when Philander seems most vulnerable and unmanned (dressed up like a maid or naked and unarmed), he manages to escape discovery. Moreover, he manages to lodge himself pleasurably (literally and metaphorically) in those sexual feminine spaces desired by other men. In this scene he arguably ‘becomes’ the naked phallus placed triumphantly in the wet enclosure within the garden.9 Far from languishing alone in a Dutch garret, Philander always finds his way into bed with a woman. It would be difficult to find a text more thoroughly suffused with sex, secrets, and politics than Behn’s (except Manley’s), or one more conducive

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to analysis through the critical paradigm of Don Juan: “[Philander] may as well love a third time as he has a Second; for in Love those that once break the rules and Laws of that Deity, set no Bounds to their Treason and disobedience” (165). In Love Letters, inadequate fathers and rebellious children strain the concept of a functional nuclear family (generally considered of rising importance at this historical era). England’s concern with royal succession— underlying all these political crises—establishes the paradigm. The royal family was a small, exclusive, well-organized and inbred world in which everyone was born with a title. But its men carelessly violated this world from without and within. The closeness and intimacy within households and between bloodties produce secrets of rivalry and incest. Philander’s amours involve three sisters (Mertilla, Silvia, and Octavio’s sister Calista). During the course of the narrative, he fathers two illegitimate children with two different wives of two different men. His bonds with other men (Cesario, Octavio, Briljard, Beralti, Clerinau) are both forged and confused by the women’s bodies that they share, control, or mutually desire. (Although Silvia is not the focus of this argument, female promiscuity also threatens the clarity of succession and family.) Behn’s text lays out a web of cause and effect that knits together sex and politics with troubling implications: what happens to a world that has staked its political order to the idea of legitimate succession but that produces little or no legitimate offspring? At first, Silvia thinks erroneously that sex and politics can be separated, telling Philander: “you cannot intend love and ambition, Silvia and Cesario at once: No, perswade me not, the Title to one or t’other must be laid down. Silvia or Cesario must be abandon’d; this is my fix’d resolve” (43). The secrets bred of desire bind the characters together in interdependencies of stealth and revelation, and sustain a constant level of anxiety, relieved occasionally by consummation or ironic insight. All of the characters breathe the intoxicating ether of sexuality and power, all whisper words of treason and love. They need only approach each other for the hormones and pheromones to activate. An anxious intimacy results not only from the restriction of our vision to bedrooms, closets, and enclosed gardens or coaches, not only from the specific incest between Silvia and Philander, or from recurrent scenes of sex. A narrative predicated on political controversies over succession recognizes that danger lurks in close relationships, that threats are embedded within family. Love Letters’s complex version of political events as incest makes it a strategic secret history. From the revelation of Silvia’s incestuous desire for Philander in the first letter (“sighs she wou’d in vain conceal”), to the cipher-covered toothpick case produced at Monmouth’s execution on the final pages, the narrative is steeped in secrets. Even the letters themselves


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were stealthily encoded. To one epistle, Philander adds the subscript: “burn this, for writing in haste, I have not counterfeited my hand” (47). The word ‘secret’ is repeated so often that it becomes itself a cipher with many different meanings. Secrets are “unfolded” and “unravel’d” (197) like garments that must be removed from lovers’ bodies. The word refers to the Rye-House plot (39, 44), Silvia’s sexual initiation (39, 44), anticipated erotic pleasure (86), homosexual attraction (123), scandal (180–181) and knowledge of scandal (151), forgeries (204), spying (259), deceit (289), desire (323), granted sexual favors (373), confidences (378), the body in disguise (385), and occult visions and magical philters (404). These and other examples punctuate the text and bind together not only Silvia and Philander but also Octavio, Calista, Briljard, Cesario, Hermione, Don Alonzo, and Fergusano with “that secret that so concern’d my life” (44), “Loves-secrets” (86), “the mighty secret” (89), “secret joy,” (123), or “every secret of her Soul” (373). Vows and promises rival secrets in frequency on the pages of Behn’s text. They are uttered by every character at various times: “I swear by every power that made me love” (47, Philander to Silvia); “I urged your Vows as you prest on . . . break all the feebler vows I make against thee” (68, 93, Silvia to Philander); “he fancied himself a very Machiavel already, and almost promis’d himself the Charming Silvia” (Briljard of Silvia, 155); “swear by all that was sacred” “Have a care, my Charming Fair, how you play with Vows” (Octavio, who has taken holy vows, to Silvia, 250); “she wept with Love . . . to ev’ry Vow I made” “I told her I would marry her, and swore it with a thousand Oaths; she believed” (Philander of Calista, 237, 391); “this new Lover, to whom she had promis’d all things” (Cesario and Hermione, 423–424); “I have but one Game to play . . . ‘tis to promise to marry Sebastian . . . my Vow to become his wife” (Silvio of Don Alonzo to Briljard, 297); “give me your Vows of revenge on Philander” (Silvia to Octavio), and so on. Scene after scene of “swearing violently” (412) or in which “new lovers have new vows” (311) contribute paradoxically to the sense of inconstancy and lack of faith: “all past loves, past Vows, and obligations have power to bind no more” (171). Every time a character “breakst an Oath, a vow, a word” (89), another “must be undone, perjur’d, forsworn” (93). Speech acts dominate Behn’s narrative, which privileges words over physical deeds. This emphasis on language over action is suggested not only by incessant swearing, but also by Behn’s original conception of Love Letters as an epistolary fiction, in which readers would encounter plot only indirectly, through characters’ writing about plot events. Philander is a great talker and promise-maker, like his ‘real life’ original Grey, whose tongue drips with honey in The Secret History of the Rye-House Plot.

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Philander can “perswade” Silvia (and others) in “the Garden Grove” with “powerful Arguments [that] convince . . . in spight of reason” and with “the Tongue of an Angel, and the Eloquence of a God” (43). The language suggests Satanic rhetoric in Paradise Lost. But in the ‘manly action’ of physical battle, Grey/Philander runs away. This failure is foreshadowed by his sexual impotence the first time he tries to become Silvia’s lover; after physical disappointment, his words, not his body, arouse and maintain her desire. Love Letters’ replacement of deeds with words transforms scandal into a sophisticated attack on English politics in which contracts (acts of Parliament) are replacing bloodlines (the Stuart kings). The new politics depends on speech acts: on words that make things so, that give titles, set terms of relationships, and determine rights. In circumstances where viable legitimate bodies are missing, words take their place. Thus oaths, vows, and promises are mentioned constantly, as are threats, arguments, and accusations. A key example of the dangers of such a world is the birth of Silvia and Philander’s illegitimate child (364–367). While it might seem that a culture preoccupied with succession, or that an author interested in women’s experience, or that a narrative instigated by the claims of an illegitimate son, might acknowledge the physical reality of the baby, the opposite occurs. One week before Silvia’s delivery, Octavio is still “that all ravish’d Lover [who] lay panting in expectation of the blessed sight” of her body (364), and his unsatisfied desire results not from Silvia’s incapacity sexually (at nine months of pregnancy) but from Philander’s removal of her to “a little Town in Luke-land . . . without giving her time to write.” Her pregnancy and its product are invisible: “she fell in Labour, and was brought to Bed, tho’ she show’d very little of her Condition all the time she went” (365). The baby—dead or alive we never know—disappears: “This great Affair being well over, she considers herself a new Woman, and began, or rather continued to consider the Advantage she had lost in Octavio.” With this kind of maternal feeling, it is not surprising that parenthood does nothing to reconcile her with Philander. Their relationship becomes a torment of language: “not a Day passed wherein they did not break into open and violent quarrels . . . her disagreeable Life . . . was now reduced, not only to scurrilous Quarrels, and hard Words . . ., that render Life insupportable” (365).10 The horrors of this world of words are interrupted only when politics intervenes: “the News arrived that Cesario [Monmouth] was in Bruxells” (367). Cesario appears at crucial moments, encouraging a comparison to Philander that intensifies by the end of the narrative (dedicated primarily to Cesario’s history, 396–439), when Cesario’s ignoble death contrasts with Philander’s rejuvenated perpetuity. An irrepressible Don Juan,


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Philander keeps reinventing himself. At the nadir of his relations with Silvia, he has been “making a hundred little Gallantries with all the pretty Women, and those of any Quality in the Town, or neighbouring Villa’s” (365). Despite such sexual excesses, open rebellion against the king, and a brief imprisonment, he “was at last pardoned, kiss’d the King’s hand, and came to Court in as much Splendour as ever, being very well understood by all good Men” (439). Cesario begins as a Don Juan figure, having made love with Philander’s wife and other mistresses, but in contrast to Philander, his ultimate loyalty to Hermione ‘unmans’ him, a process Behn explores in a series of gender reversals. “[T]he wit and masculine Spirit of Hermione, her Courage, the manliness of her Mind” (399) allows her to keep Cesario “perfectly her slave” (397). Physical beauty becomes a more important feature for the man than for the woman: although “her Charms of youth were ended, being turned of thirty,” he is “without exception the most lovely person upon earth” (397, emphasis added). Hermione pulls all the crucial strings: “all the World made their Court to Hermione, that if any Body had any Petitions, or Addresses to make to the Prince, ‘twas by her sole interest; she sate in their closest Councils, and heard their gravest Debates; and she was the Oracle of the Board” (396–397). She has asserted the masculine liberty of a ‘son’ by gaining Cesario’s assent to “her Contract” with which she secures her “rights” (399). But far from celebrating such liberty, the text draws a parallel between the “Contract . . . of her right to Cesario” (399) and a pact with the devil. She holds secret “midnight Conferences with Fergusano” (the Radical Republican Robert Ferguson) in order to obtain a magical philter “to attach the Prince to her by all the force of the black Art” (399). Most important, the effects of the “black Art” are precisely to destroy Cesario’s Don Juan–like qualities. Fergusano creates a Tooth-pick case of Gold of rare infernal Workmanship, wrought with a thousand Charms, of that force, that every time the prince should touch it, and while he wore it about him, his Fondness should not only continue, but increase, and he should hate all Womankind besides, at least in the way of Love; and have no power to possess another Woman. (400)

Deprived of both liberty and libertinism, Cesario is a domestic “slave” who “sought no other Glory than to have retired to a Corner of the World with [Hermione], and changed all his Crowns of Laurel for those of Roses” (400–401). Fergusano (variously referred to as “The Wizard” and “the subtle old Fiend”) seduces Cesario away from Hermione and into rebellion by promising him a mystical/Satanic vision “where all the Destinies of Princes are

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Hieroglyphick’d” (404). During this scene, he conceals Cesario’s body in a cave of “hollowness and ruins” (405), which prepares the reader for the prince’s demise. In “a large garden . . . [was] a Grotto; which pass’d a good way under the ground. It had some rareties of Water-work formerly belonging to it . . . [R]owling a great stone that lay in one corner of the Cave, [Fergusano] desired the Prince to place himself in it” (405). The description contrasts with the earlier torchlit, midnight garden scene involving Philander’s concealment in an underground cistern. Philander’s successful Don-Juanism asserted itself in a secret tryst during which he lay naked in a wet cavern, symbolically acting out the sexual prowess with which he will cuckold Calista’s old husband Clerinau. Fergusano, in contrast, enforces Cesario’s celibacy on the night of his secret vision, an arousing vision that dissipates before consummating the “pretty Powers” of the wizard’s “mystick Wand” (408). Philander and Cesario become alter egos. Philander’s speech acts are successful. He swears and vows effectively, promising love and faithfulness to men and women, all of whom he betrays but all of whom believe and obey him. Even when his cowardice makes others wish “to shoot Philander in the Head” (430), he ends up “in as much Splendour as ever” (439). Cesario’s speech acts fail; he allows his voice to be impersonated by others. Instead of claiming the throne himself, he allows Ferguson to articulate the “Declaration, or rather a most scandalous, pernicious, and treasonable Libel” (409). Although he acts “with much courage and bravery, . . . [y]et all this avail’d him nothing, he saw himself abandon’d on all sides” (432). I have dwelt on these matters because they demonstrate scenarios from secret histories that serve also as satiric fictions: the influence of a seductive agent, the mixture of sex and politics, the body and the body of the state, the rivalries and fraternities among and between men, the specious reasons and magical visions that tempt and delude. In both secret history and satire, power can be managed through secrecy and promises. Anger, which is abundant in Behn’s narrative of “love,” is managed through a facility with language and a capacity for irony. The Don Juan paradigm serves as a measure for the success or failure of characters. Silvia becomes a female Don Juan. Both Octavio and Don Alonzo, along with scores of women, fall in love with her when she is disguised as a man. Octavio becomes an anti–Don Juan; he loves only Silvia and eventually gives up worldly power and sexuality by entering a monastery; Don Alonzo also is loyal (to Silvia) and weak. Philander and Silvia act out two contrasting consequences of excessive or misused liberty; both are morally bankrupt but vital. Their survival contrasts with the fate of Monmouth. And of course they contrast with one another. Philander is at the center of power while Silvia becomes a


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marginalized predator. Although Silvia has been treated only tangentially thus far, the next section of this chapter will broach the question of women, motherhood, and power raised in Love Letters in conjunction with the discussion of Dryden’s satire on Monmouth’s rebellion in Absalom and Achitophel.

Absalom and Achitophel Dryden satirizes Monmouth’s rebellion in the context of the strategies and assumptions of secret history, and this context must be added to Absalom and Achitophel’s synthesis of sources. The editors of the California edition write that “Dryden was fascinated by heroic poetry, and it is against a background of epic poetry that Absalom and Achitophel should be viewed” (D 2:234). Yet the editors of Poems on Affairs of State recognize that the poem is “certainly more than a satire in the classical sense” (4:294). Michael McKeon, acknowledging its affiliation with “the epic or heroic tradition” rooted “in Homer and Virgil” and Milton (24) nevertheless points out “the eccentricity of Dryden’s contribution to the heroic line,” and the instability of the poem’s relationship to these forms. Stephen Zwicker calls the poem’s genre a “‘confusion’ of epic, satire, prophecy, and history” (Weinbrot, 374), a list to which we add ‘secret history.’ Howard Weinbrot refers to “the poem’s decidedly mixed genre” despite its “dominant satiric mode” and suggests that Dryden sought inspiration for reconciling a political dilemma in private issues relating to family and marriage, in “domestic or national family structures” (375). Weinbrot’s view of Dryden’s “healing satire” is that its revelation of sexual scandal can mend the king’s vices in a “friendly” way—a view not uncongenial to the idea of satire as related to gossip, that discourse within a community that abets cohesion, holding institutions (nation, monarchy) together. Finally, the poem has been seen as typological: the Old Testament account of King David (Samuel, ii), his illicit love for Bathsheba and his rebellious son Absalom. Dryden’s Achitophel tempts Absalom, as Satan tempts Eve, and as Shaftesbury tempts Monmouth.11 The slyness and insinuation with which the poem depicts both Charles II/ David and Shaftesbury/Achitophel, and the innocence or vulnerability it attributes to Monmouth/Absalom immediately suggest commonalities with ‘secret’ representations of politics as sex. Dryden’s allusive style camouflages the poem’s array of bodily transgressions. David’s promiscuous use of bride and concubine merely begins a narrative that includes sexual slavery, rape, monstrous birth, fraternal murder in response to incest, homoeroticism, bestiality, and venereal disease. Implicitly or explicitly, sexuality sets the

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terms for the exploration of the succession crisis. As a secondary effect of couching his ‘secret history’ of the rebellion in biblical terms, Dryden recalls the libertine appropriation of scripture in order to sanction transgressions such as incest, adultery, and polygamy. The opening lines (1–6) use the same justification for polygamy and concubines used in Rochester’s and other libertine poems, by Manley in The New Atalantis and Memoirs of Europe, and by numerous other works of the period: When man, on many, multiply’d his kind, E’re one to one was, cursedly, confin’d: When Nature prompted, and no law deny’d Promiscuous use of Concubine and Bride. (11.3–6; D2:2)

Similarly, Philander rationalizes incest and adultery in the first epistle of Behn’s Love Letters: [L]et us love like the first race of men, nearest allied to God, promiscuously they lov’d, and possess’t, Father and Daughter, Brother and Sister met, and reap’d the joys of Love without controul, and counted it religious coupling. (12)

Biblical typology not only “establish[es] a broad biblical framework” but may also “undermine the authority of Dryden’s central text, 2 Samuel, as an integral and coherent history” (Weinbrot, 26). Rather than substantiating Dryden’s views, the use of biblical allegory triggers ironic comparisons; it tends to emphasize the moral uncertainty of authority. Dryden’s version vies not only with biblical types and antitypes but with other accounts of Monmouth involving the intimacies of temptation, problem fathers and mothers, transgressive sex, speech acts in the form of broken oaths and promises, and tests of liberty. The poem’s allusiveness activates the reader’s recollection of other versions of the story. For example, Philander’s seduction of Sylvia (38–43), like Achitophel’s of Absalom, echoes Satan’s temptation of Eve in Paradise Lost (Bk. 9). The seducer can convince “in spight of Reason” with “the tongue of an Angel, and the Eloquence of a God (LL 43), or with “smooth pretence/ Of specious love” (D 2:27, ll. 745–746). Each scene represents the arousal of desire through language, the reward of power and pleasure, specious reasoning, fatal circumstances, glittering light, elaborate rhetoric, and a false sense of soaring to new heights while irreversibly transgressing. Absalom first responds to this seduction by asserting his royalist views, that David is a good king who rules by right—just the sequence that Sylvia follows in her royalist letter to Philander. The following discussion shows how fully


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Dryden participates in the pervasive treatment of failures of monarchy, in one secret history after another, as the consequence of promiscuous sex. Absalom and Achitophel ’s version of the exclusion crisis not only represents politics as seduction; it clearly portrays the exercise of power as a speech act. The multilayered narrative maintains parallels between secrets of generation and secrets of state. The climax of the ‘action’ of this performative text is a promise and a contract: David (Charles II) vows to assert the rights of “Lawfull Pow’rs” (D 2:35, l. 1024), and “Th’Almighty, nodding, gave Consent” (l. 1026). Samuel Johnson was disturbed by this privileging of word over deed. “When expectation is at the height,” he protested, “the king makes a speech” (Lives of the English Poets, 2:101). But in the terms of secret history, the emphasis on language is appropriate: while Charles II was siring bastards, gossip and slander about him were circulating as well, ‘planting’ disaffection. Johnson also complained that the ending made him think about tales of enchantment and of “the destin’d knight” of romance. He seems to have responded to the poem’s hints at other stories of illicit love, sexual danger, and betrayal—like the magic tricks forecasting the fate of “the destin’d knight” Monmouth/Cesario at the end of Love Letters.12 Like the romance knight who perpetually defers desire, David/ Charles gives up sex acts for speech acts. Just as in secret history, slander, and gossip, words replace deeds, a childless king must assert his power through language: “He said. . . . Henceforth a Series of new time began . . . Once more the Godlike David was Restor’d/And willing Nations knew their lawful lord” (D 2:36, ll. 1029–1030). By focusing on the king and not the son, Dryden emphasizes the change from seducer to good father. Since Charles II had asserted his royal prerogative in the arms of many mistresses, he embodied the problematic relationship between familial and political power, between libertinism and liberty. The importance of the poem’s father-son theme has attracted the attention of numerous critics.13 Weinbrot, in particular, moves the discussion of paternity forward by elucidating the subtlety and complexity of Dryden’s support for monarchy. No simple conservative, Dryden acknowledges that Charles’ libertinism has contributed to England’s succession problems: “David makes his own rebellion by propagating his own lawlessness in his lawless son and lawless nation” (Weinbrot, 379). The king must be shown to change from a promiscuous lover to a responsible authority. Thus the reckless Charles who from “his bed” (15) “scatter’d his Maker’s image through the land” (10), must by the end of the poem pull himself together in order to utter God’s words “from his Royal Throne” (936).14 The “gradual education” of the father/king enacts a kind of marriage plot, in which holy bands of matrimony are the model for “nature’s holy bands” and the “bands between king and country and king and God” (392).

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Susan Greenfield furthers this line of thinking by raising the questions of mothers and misogyny. In order to exonerate the promiscuous king for the rebellion of his illegitimate son, she argues, the poem affixes blame on the mother: “David is ultimately acquitted of his role in this generative act when maternal creative power . . . emerges as the primary and most dangerous source of any challenge to the status quo” (271). Various references to women, she argues, bring into the poem allusions to adultery, slavery, incest, rape, and murder, as well as frigidity, barrenness, ruptured pregnancy, and death in childbirth. The “several mothers” in the opening lines, the women on whom David is culpable for fathering illegitimate offspring, are reconfigured near the poem’s end as the “mother plot,” the viper breeding “bloody incubator of revolt” to whom David is vulnerable (283). In light of Weinbrot and Greenfield’s perceptive readings, I want to focus on two issues that allow the concept of secret history to contribute to a reading of the poem: gender instability and the idea of the ‘pleasing rape.’ Experimentation with gender construction is one of Behn’s effective strategies in Love Letters. Silvia begins as a shy young thing, but eventually adopts male roles: she dresses, seduces, and desires actively. Philander and Cesario have feminine qualities. Dryden’s poem also works in this mode. Giving Monmouth the role of Eve does far more than exonerate him as a victim of evil, for he has been an object of love that proves unworthy. He, like Eve, is weak, secondary, blamable and punishable. Patriarchy’s debates about the role of the father inevitably dovetail with debates about the role of the mother. Greenfield points out that “patriarchal political theory . . . was fundamentally structured around the erasure of the mother” (267). It expressed ambivalence toward pregnancy as the badge of sexual experience and male potency: how much power might women wield as mothers? David must transcend the need for women, and the needs of women, in order to overcome the ramifications of promiscuous desire. Monmouth’s androgyny is interesting in this regard. Because he is feminized by his natural beauty and desirability, he is doomed as a patriarch. Achitophel’s seduction of Absalom does not occur as a physical act. And yet, Achitophel incites Absalom to take the throne by force, a violent act called not ‘rebellion,’ ‘battle,’ or ‘invasion,’ but “rape.” Why a “pleasing rape”?—because pleasing rape is a staple of secret history, signifying complicity and exposing disturbing cultural constructions of power relations. In Greenfield’s analysis, Achitophel deludes androgynous, “[m]ild,” ineffectual Absalom with the prospect of rape as a chance to gain some of his father’s reckless virility and power: But Absalom’s fantasy of masculine grandeur proves simply ironic, first because the rape he and Achitophel imagine performing is pointedly


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homoerotic, and second, because throughout the scene Absalom is actually the one who, like Eve and the whorish Lucy Walter, is being seduced. When he thinks he will become most virile, the son is really the reverse. (279)

While I can have no quarrel with this reading, it offers further support for the importance of ‘secret’ experience to the poem. Rape and near-rape in secret history usually portray the victim “Half loath, and half consenting to the Ill.” Seduction arouses new desires, and disables judgment. Numerous pairs of lovers and politicians succumb to temptation in this fundamental trope for the exercise of power. In Dryden’s struggles to exonerate the king from his generative failures, he must suppress the secret truth of Charles II’s reign, the secret that every one already knew and therefore tolerated in the poem. Succession again entangles a nation in the private sex lives of monarchs, since Michal/Catherine is a queen unable to produce children, and David/Charles, a king who produces too many outside the marriage bed. The King’s “Lust” (19), the “secret Joy” (91) with which he views the products of his “scatter’d” seed, make him a problem patriarch. A very different version of these events occurs in Manley’s Memoirs of Europe. Purporting to “relate some matters of fact which have hitherto been conceal’d,” it reveals the “journal of ciphers found in the Duke of Monmouth’s Pocket” (177) as evidence that Monmouth “was a man of mean parts, everybody allows” (190), that his plot was “look’d upon as the frolick of a madman” (188), and that “the Catastrophe was as absurd as all the rest of it.” A kindlier eye is cast on Grey’s perfidy: “I should remember here the extraordinary Mercy of King James to the Lord Grey, afterwards Earl of Tankerville” (194) whose actions seem destined to allow a display of royal magnanimity. Sexual desire and jealousy (Monmouth’s affair with Grey’s wife; Grey’s seduction of his wife’s sister) are dismissed: some go so far back as their mutual amours, and pretend the Lord Grey betray’d him to Revenge a former Jealousy, all of which I take to be imaginary guesses. . . . For who is there who will believe that the Lords Spiritual and temporal, and the Gentlemen of England who invited over the Prince of Orange, were drawn in by those that had form’d the RyeHouse Plot? Was ever Slander so Wicked, so Impudent, and yet so Absurd? . . . Could he dare to assert that their Royal Highnesses . . . were influenced by the same Conspirators that had Shaftesbury for their Head? Was ever Malice and Insolence like this? . . . I cannot account for Men’s Weaknesses, Fears, Hopes, Vanity, Stubbornness or Humour. (ME 2:202–205)

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Monmouth and the Murder of Tom Thynne In 1681, the year Absalom and Achitophel was published, Thomas Thynne was murdered in the street outside his home. By 1734, at least a dozen versions of the event had been published, some of which remained in print throughout the eighteenth century.15 Who was the now-obscure Thynne to have generated such interest on the pages of history, secret history, and satire? Apparently a dull man, his bland personality allowed him to become a cipher for conflicting political interpretations of his death. In the circle of Whigs around Monmouth, his income of nine or ten thousand a year made him a ‘deep pocket’ but never a leader of any of the actions of the Exclusion Crisis. However, his story involves elements dear to the secret historian: unusual sex, promises, power, money, and conspiracy. Thynne married, through the intercession of her grandmother, a beautiful fifteen-year-old heiress, Lady Ogle, with a strange story of her own. Born Elizabeth Seymour, daughter of the Earl of Northumberland, she was wed at the age of twelve to Henry Cavendish, Earl of Ogle, and soon widowed. Thynne arranged to be her second husband, but agreed to wait one year before consummating the relationship. In the meantime, Elizabeth was seduced by a dashing Swedish adventurer, Count John Karl (or Charles) Coningsmark (or Koningsmarck), who arranged to have Thynne killed by paid assassins. The assassins eventually were executed on the spot of the murder, but Coningsmark was acquitted. As a consequence of Thynne’s death, Elizabeth lost a husband, and Monmouth, a financial resource. Soon after, Elizabeth, still vastly rich, made her third and final marriage to Charles Somerset, thus becoming the “damned duchess of Somerset” of whose influence over Queen Anne Swift complains in the Journal to Stella, an opinion that Manley shared. Thus, through the gossipy disclosures of secret history, the connubial ephemera of a young girl and her suitors are shown to be inseparable from the weighty cares of monarchy. Parallels to the Rye-House stories also begin to emerge: before Thynne’s murder, Elizabeth had fled from one of Monmouth’s followers to Holland with her adulterous lover Coningsmark, thus recalling Henrietta Berkeley’s flight to Holland with one of Monmouth’s followers, her incestuous lover Ford Lord Grey. Monmouth himself sought refuge in Holland with his mistress, Henrietta. From the Whig perspective, Thynne’s murder was a botched attempt on the life of Monmouth, for the men supposedly had been together earlier that evening. The assassins had pointed a musket in the coach window and fired, possibly believing that both men were inside. From the Tory


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perspective, the Count had avenged his honor on a calculating man who cared only for money and who had insulted him and ensnared—legally and sexually—an unwilling female victim. In order to demonstrate how the strategies of secret histories affect the retellings of this event, and achieve broader significance, I contrast three narratives: John Reresby’s moderate Whig and Laurence Echard’s Tory versions, and Manley’s reworking of it in her complex satire, Memoirs of Europe. Reresby laments “the most barbarous and audacious murder that almost ever had been heard of in England” (256). Thynne is an “unhappy gentleman, much engaged in the Duke of Monmouth’s cause.” Downplaying Thynne’s financial motives, Reresby merely says that “repenting herself of the match, [Lady Ogle] fled from him into Holland before they were bedded.” Reresby is at court when news of Thynne’s death reaches the King who fears the incident may stir up the anticourt party. Reresby, a proponent of English law and parliamentary ‘balance’ of power, wishes to minimize the volatile possibilities of the crime: “I was extremely glad that in this whole business there was no English person directly or indirectly concerned. [The hit men were German, Swedish, and Polish.] The fanatics had buzzed it about that the design was chiefly against the Duke of Monmouth” (256). Reresby downplays Coningsmark’s aristocratic attractiveness and even makes him look a little foolish. His ‘powers’ are subordinate to the power of English law (and to Reresby himself, its steward); his loyal followers are mere “ruffians,” his sexual prowess is compromised by a rumored case of gonorrhea. He is apprehended in disguise as he skulks aboard a ship and, looking foppish (he has the “longest hair” Reresby has ever seen), he informs the king with great assurance that he was hiding while being treated for “a small venereal disaster.” Reresby congratulates himself on rejecting the bribe offered to exonerate Coningsmark: “I told him, that if the Count was really innocent, the law would naturally acquit him, as much though a foreigner as if he was native, but that he ought to be cautious how he made any offers to pervert justice . . . This was one of the first bribes of value ever offered to me, which I might have accepted without any danger of discovery, and without doing much for it” (261). Having cleared his reputation, Reresby reveals that Coningsmark, a ladies’ man like the king, does in fact go free because of royal intercession. A series of broken pledges—marital and monetary—are left in the aristocrat’s wake. Echard’s version of the “public assassination, strange and unusual in the street of an English city” goes much further to exonerate Coningsmark, to sympathize with the “young lady,” and to blame Thynne for his own sorry end. The order of events is slightly adjusted. The adventurous count becomes a proper suitor who, “sojourning in England was honourably

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countenanc’d by the king himself,” was among “many [who] aspired to the happiness and advantage of a second match with this fine lady” (652). But the young lady, chiefly by means of her grandmother . . . was secretly married the last summer to Thomas Thynne . . . . The marriage it seems was not made so well to the satisfaction of all parties, but the young lady was prevail’d with, . . . to convey her self privately into Holland, and this was done before her husband had ever bedded with her. Hereupon the town was alarm’d with the approach of a mighty suit at law, concerning the validity of the match, and the best civilians of Doctors-commons were ingag’d and retained on one side or other. And not only so, but Count Coningsmark, who had left England . . . , began afresh to concern himself, and again came over to London in disguise. He had already sent two challenges to Mr. Thynne, by a dependent of his call’d Captain Vratz; but instead of answering himself, he sent six men after him into France, to kill both the count and the captain, but they both escap’d in the conflict. . . . However it was, on Sunday night the 12th of February, Mr. Thynne, . . . was encounter’d by three men on horse-back, one of which discharg’d a musquetoon into the coach, and with two brace of bullet mortally wounded him. (652)

Echard emphasizes the homosocial “friendship and obligation” between the Count and his followers (Captain Vratz, Lieutenant John Stern, George Boroski) who claim to be avenging affronts by Thynne. He also excuses the technically adulterous elopement of Lady Ogle, who becomes the “innocent and unfortunate occasion of the disaster” and who “soon shew’d to the world that her worth and reputation was above all Blemish.” Indeed, Thynne is blamed both politically (for “being so deeply ingaged with those now call’d the Whigs”) and sexually: “some look’d upon it as a just judgment upon him for his treacherous practices to another lady, noted for her modesty and virtue” (653). Echard, maintaining the parallels between sexual desire and political power, finally turns the scandal into an attack on Monmouth, his ultimate if concealed target. Thynne becomes a mere pander to the Duke’s lawless lust for a woman “who had bravely resisted the temptation of . . . the courtship of the Duke of Monmouth, as being a marry’d man”: “The duke inrag’d at the disappointment, it seems apply’d himself for revenge to an unmarry’d man, his friend Mr. Thynne, who by the help of his great estate . . . found means and opportunity at length basely to betray her virtue, and then shamefully abandon’d her.” Coningsmark again inspires love and escapes punishment. By the time Manley reworks the scandal in the Tory satire Memoirs of Europe (1:134–168), most of the principal actors were dead, and the political crises, resolved. Manley retells an old secret history in order to conceal new one—and probably in order to avoid a second arrest for seditious libel.


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She shrouds the identities of her characters with multiple layers of code names in the text and in its key. Coningsmark becomes “Alarick.” Both he and the events surrounding the murder of Thynne are represented obliquely. This indirection signals a shift from the discourse of succession (what the Thynne/Monmouth story had signified formerly) to that of class and party, from monarchy to “our Endeavours not to be enslaved” by “Tryrannick pre-Possession” (ME 2:141), and even to the function of women as tokens in men’s struggle for wealth and power. The indirectness of Manley’s narrative technique suggests that the story of Thynne, certainly stale news by 1710, may be serving as a code for something else beyond the Exclusion Crisis. The murder is narrated by a French adventurer, Count St. Gironne, who addresses Horatio (Charles Mordaunt, Lord Peterborough) and Merovius, Prior of Orleans (Melchior de Polignac, French ambassador to Poland). (The narrative is actually referred to as “St. Gironne’s Memoirs” [168], an enclosure of memoirs within memoirs [of Europe].) The men are encamped on a battlefield during war, but they do nothing but gossip. Horatio and the Prior eagerly solicit news of “the Affair” because (in a world of competing narratives) “[o]ne cannot depend upon what one hears” (ME 2:135). Indeed, their eagerness for gossip is striking because we learn that Alarick/Coningsmark is nearby—“now wretched and under [St. Gironne’s] Guard, in a Tent pitch’d not far [away]” (134)—and so might speak directly for himself if anyone really wished to suspend the discursive practice of telling contradictory versions of truth. Alarick/Coningsmark’s guilt or innocence remains an open question; he simply awaits judgment. His character remains open, too, since Manley gradually conflates his identity with that of his brother (Philip Cristoph Coningsmark [1662–1694]), of whom more will be said shortly. Gironne, Horatio, and Merovius evaluate Alarick principally as a successful lover who like Don Juan will suffer for killing another man: “his Exploits have been perform’d and renown’d under the Queen of Love than the God of War . . . His Person is . . . young, handsom, gay” (135–136). At first St. Gironne’s account seems to follow the conventions of amatory intrigue. Lady Ogle becomes Lady Isabella, and Thynne, a nameless “Gentleman.” Some ‘facts’ vary, but the condition of a year’s celibacy after their marriage is retained. Manley’s dull Thynne, an anti–Don Juan who keeps his promises and does not have sex, ineptly handles the two patriarchal symbols of power (the “Application” of his phallus and his money): he “had neglected to make those necessary Applications by which a Lover insinuates himself into the tender Inclinations of the Fair” (138); and he “was guilty of another oversight, and that was forgetting to secure [with a bribe] Lady Isabella’s Woman, who had been before tampered with by . . . his rival.” This maid, “an industrious

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Incendiary” (139) is then able to conspire against the legal contract (their ‘Settlement’ of the [es]State) and to kill the marriage with gossipy “poison[ous]’ speech: Her Power over the old Lady was not so great as with the Young, and consequently she could not prevent the Marriage: But when she saw the Consummation was deferr’d, and that the Bridegroom was departed without bribing her, she poison’d Lady Isabella’s unwary Innocence against her Husband: The first thing she did, was to bring her a Looking-Glass, and asking her . . . Who but an unsensible, or diseas’d abject Wretch, or perhaps with affections pre-engag’d, could leave so vast a share of Youth and Beauty un-enjoy’d? (ME 2:137)

Once persuaded and inflamed by her words, Isabella flees to Batavia (Holland) where (like Monmouth, Grey, and Philander) “Count Alarick with his Charms, Generosity, and Address, met her . . . and had the Glory to touch [her] Heart” (140). Thynne’s murder follows shortly: Alarick “dispatch’d a Gentleman of his Chamber, too faithful a Domestick, who hired Ruffians, and assassinated the unfortunate Gentleman in his Coach” (140). Because the murder was familiar to her readers, Manley emphasizes instead the power of interpretation and distortion in the process of telling. St. Gironne proves himself an unreliable narrator by gradually exposing his prejudices. He condemns Thynne’s death as a “reproach [to] all Gallantry, Humanity, and Honesty” not because he supports Monmouth or Charles II, but because the attackers “were Masters of a Sword, [and] ought by that way and no other, to have pretended to Isabella.” That is, Gironne objects not to murder (were it an old-fashioned proper duel) but to the “musquetoon” with which it is committed. Manley exposes the irony of constructing Thynne’s murder with a trope common to all of the secret histories about the scandal, regardless of political orientation: as the outcome of the greed and lust of men who delude themselves with empty notions of “Gallantry, Humanity, and Honesty” while competing for the money and body of an adolescent girl. Thus St. Gironne reveals his latent misogyny when he rails against women, until stopped by his listeners: “Monsieur Le Count, interrupted Horatio, with a Smile, has sure been very ill us’d by what he calls that undistinguishing Sex, . . . or he would hardly have digressed so much to their Prejudice, and given us cause to desire him to return to his subject” (146). Through this unreliable narrator, Manley can safely attack the Somerset family into which ‘Isabella’ ultimately marries. Her husband is not a man of language but a “snarling” beast, “lewd in his Nature, low and promiscuous in his Amours, void of all Delicacy, rigid, penurious, and snarling to his Attendants, often chastising’em for imaginary Faults with real Blows from his own Hand;


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whimsical, offensive, never to be pleas’d but with Novelty” (146–147). St. Gironne’s sense of justice is satisfied by Isabella’s fate because it strips her of the power that might have accrued from her youth and wealth: “something sure of mortification is due to her, for the Catastrophe that befell her other unhappy husband.” And what of Alarick/Coningsmark? His story continues, as the adventures of John Charles merge with those of brother Philip Christoph. By conflating the love intrigues of two philandering brothers, Manley merges two political situations in order to let them comment on each other: the Stuart court of Charles II and the Hanoverian court of (soon to be) George I. Ever the Don Juan figure, Alarick makes a “Tour of Gallantry through several nations” (147): “He had once like to have been surprised by a man of Quality in his Bed Chamber, and escaped so narrowly, that he was forc’d, at the hazzard [sic] of his Neck, to save his Person by a Leap from a high Window.” Such escapades, savored by St. Gironne, end badly for the women: “but it did not happen so well with the poor Lady, for her angry Lord, . . . inhumanly cut her to pieces on the Spot; neither her prayer, Repentance, Youth, or Beauty, cou’d protect her” (148). The second phase of Alarick’s amours becomes a secret history of George I’s unhappy wife Sophia Dorothea of Hanover (Annagilda Princess of Dacia) and of his powerful mistress Catherine Marie Bussche (Rodegund).16 Annagilda succumbs to Alarick’s charms while he takes refuge in her father’s court.17 But Rodegund, whose spies are everywhere, contrives for them to be caught. At the very least, the episode drives home the perils of arbitrary power exemplified by the sexual double standard. The Prince punishes his innocent wife and has sex with his mistress: “The prince . . . caus’d his Rival to be taken . . . to the Dungeon of the Castle, and a Guard to be set upon Annagilda, . . . then gave his Hand to the wicked triumphant Rodegund, and led her to his own Apartment, from whence he immediately . . . took her with him to a House of Pleasure” (165). While plots and counterplots by multiple sexual miscreants grow convoluted, they all circle back to Thynne, an emblem of (sexual) restraint and (settlement) legality, whose ineffectuality cannot control the reckless energy of other power seekers. Alarick, ever the resilient escape artist, “thinks this extraordinary Expedition is only to set him at Liberty” (171). Memoirs of Europe narrates the performance of speech acts such as gossiping and promising, but also of what Austin and Felman call failed speech acts. The wedding vow exchanged between Thynne and Lady Ogle does not do anything since they remain celibate. Successful speech acts can be dangerous (the maid’s seduction of Isabella made “her resolve never to live with a Man that held her in such despicable Estimation” [138]) because words perform in a world where soldiers and diplomats talk rather than

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fight. Like the stories associated with Ford Lord Grey of Werke, the accounts of Thynne turn on the dangers and attractions of the law-breaking male aristocrat. Grey and Coningsmark literally get away with murder (unlike Don Juan), but their fascinating sexual attractiveness, moral corruption, ability to survive and escape, contrasts to the awful execution of Monmouth and his fidelity to Henrietta Wentworth (to whom he swore a kind of marriage), and to the violent death of dull Thynne and his fidelity to money (for which he swore celibacy). Anxiety over the reconciliation of freedom with contract, or of liberty with binding promises resonates in these secret histories and satires. The limits of freedom are tested repeatedly by the ‘man at liberty’ whose desiring body and efficacious speech acts seduce and betray others and himself. Even Shadwell’s Libertine makes Don Juan the nexus for pressing cultural issues. His Don John is both parallel and ideologically antithetical to Dryden’s David in Absalom and Achitophel. Don John has many wives. The play fixates on “Vows and Oaths . . . [and] Sacred Contracts” (4); on succession (“I am the last of my Stock . . . I am of an ancient Family; will you cut off all Hopes of a Son and Heir?” 46), on authority (Don John commits double patricide), and on class issues (valiant shepherds apprehend the villain/hero). But Don John is a “Tyrant,” an unironic, unrepentant, one-dimensional monster of immorality who incessantly fornicates and kills. The pace of his seductions, rapes, and murders is too rapid for extensive, efficacious speech acts. In contrast to the fine stroke of Dryden’s metaphorical sword of wit, Don John’s wields the weapons of a slovenly butcher: “Ravish, Rascal, or by my Sword, I’ll cut thee into so many pieces, it shall pose an Arithmetician to sum up the fractions of thy Body” (46). Shadwell’s character invites parody, but he participates in a larger discourse of which he marks one extreme.

Chapter 5 Satire and Secrecy: Rereading The New Atalantis, Gulliver’s Travels, The Rape of the Lock, and The Dunciad

But oo must not know zees sings, zey are Secrets, & we must keep them from naughty dollars. —JS 2:503 I shall now . . . desire the Reader to compare this Key with those upon any other Pieces, which are supposed to be secret Satyrs upon the State . . . . —Alexander Pope, The Key to the Lock, 88

Is Satire a Manly Genre? Gossip, slander, and secret history challenge “the limitations of traditional theory [of satire]” (Bogel, vii) with strategies of aggression made possible through covert rather than overt attacks. Manley, Swift, and Pope share a conspiratorial imaginary that shapes their ironic fictions and engages the reader in strategies of concealment and discovery. Manley makes a good starting point because her production of secret histories was explicit. Her secret-revealing gossips forge a relationship between literary speech acts and the “scandalous speaking body.” Her fusion of politics with sex, while often derogating women, shows how women writers could appropriate the

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very terms in which they have been abused (as secondary, changeable, irrational; subject to seductive promises, secrets, and broken vows) and redeploy them in authoritative acts. In this way, language directed against ‘the feminine’ also interpellates and constitutes the female satirist and empowers her to “wound with words.” Understanding a text like The New Atalantis as a paradigm for the relationship between secrecy and satire changes the way we read Swift and Pope. Traditional theories of satire rely on authoritative figures of masculine aggression: blasts from Saturn, Roman god of winter; thrusts of libidinous satyrs; cannibals and warriors; slashes, stabs, barbs, and stings from battling soldiers, swordsmen, wits, and moral scourges. “All satire kills, symbolically at any rate,” argues Robert Elliott (4). Since the Greek Archilochus (seventh century BCE) first “dipt a bitter Muse in snake venom,” Ben Jonson claims, verse satirists have hoped to “rime ‘hem [their adversaries] to death” (Poetaster, “To the Reader,” 163). The spelling ‘satyr’ conjures up a lustful brute that menaces nymphs, dryads, and mortal women. Responding to the crisis of authority accompanying the civil wars, some early modern commentators favor a heroic paradigm. John Milton asserts that the weapon of satire “ought . . . to strike high and adventure dangerously” (Apology for Smectymnuus 1642). John Oldham writes, “Strait to Thrusts, / And pointed Satyr runs him thro’ and thro’” (“Satire upon a Painter,” Works 1:250). And Samuel Butler observes in “Wit and folly”: “Among all Sports and shews that are usd [by the satirist] none are so delightful as the Military; that do but imitate and Counterfet Fights” (S. Butler, 60). His manuscripts contain this definition: A Satyr is a kinde of Knight Errant that goe’s upon Adventures, to Relieve the Distressed Damsel Virtue, and Redeeme Honor out of Inchanted Castles, and opprest Truth, and Reason out of the Captivity of Gyants, and Magitians . . . (215)

Jonson distinguishes masculine satire from more feminine speech acts like gossip and slander: “Each slanderer bears a whip . . . Which to pursue, were but a feminine honour, / And farre beneath the dignitie of a man” (Poetaster, 176–179). In the Earl of Mulgrave’s Essay on Poetry (2nd edition, 1691), war-like aggression “Distinguishes [male] Satire from a [female] Scold” (Spingarn 2:296). Joseph Warton praises the potency of Pope’s satire because it made English “depravity and corruption” seem in contrast “emasculated and debased” (An Essay on the Genius and Writing of Pope 2:357). Dryden is an often-cited figure for understanding satiric theory at the beginning of its ‘rise’ in England. The editors of Discourse

Satire and Secrecy: Manley, Swift, Pope

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concerning . . . Satire (1693) assert that “from the perspective of the 1690’s both the word and the idea of satire were fraught with ambiguity and confusion”: The problem of what satire should be understood to mean began (and was not resolved) in antiquity; it was intensified, especially in England, when the word and the genre revived just a century before Dryden’s Discourse. Four sorts of confusion can be distinguished. One was generic. Is satire verse or drama? A second was etymological: Is the word actually “satire” or “satyr”? A third was ethical: what is the appropriate character for the imagined speaker of a satire? And a fourth was literary: In what style should a satire be written? (D 4:515)

Dryden’s answers to these questions peremptorily brush women aside. He criticizes Donne for “perplexing the Minds of the Fair Sex with nice speculations of Philosophy, when he should engage the Hearts, and entertain them with the softness of Love” (7). After a long digression on heroic tragedy’s representation of “the whole Beauty . . . [of] a Hero and Prince,” Dryden transfers qualities of the hero’s masculinity to the satirist. Potency, pleasure, and control are idealized in his well-known remark about the fine stroke of the sword of irony. The frontispiece of the second edition of The Satires (1697) depicts Juvenal simultaneously receiving the satyr’s mask and the hero’s crown of laurels. Feminist critics have reevaluated Dryden’s views. Proposing that the need to protect male autonomy is central to the purposes of conventional satire, Domna Stanton argues that an “incorruptible masculine self” is neurotically affirmed “through the creation and debunking of an image of phallic female power” (Stanton, 118–119; Ballaster, 219). Ros Ballaster analyzes Dryden’s eroticization of satiric ‘thrusts’ as homosocial/sexual gratification (“Manl(e)y Forms,” 221–222). He values Juvenal over Horace because “the delight Horace gives . . . is but languishing. . . . He may Ravish other men; but . . . the reader is uneasie, and unsatisfi’d” (D 4:63, 65). In contrast, Juvenal’s “impetuosity” and “lively Agitation . . . create . . . an Appetite [for] more vigorous and Masculine Wit, . . . [that] gives [Dryden] as much Pleasure as [he] can bear” (64–65). Satirists compete, like epic hero athletes. In “To the Memory of Mr. John Oldham,” Dryden and Oldham become Virgilian rivals Nisus and Euryalus (2:175); in the Discourse, the race is between Horace, Juvenal, and Persius. Juvenal “ride[s] first in Triumph,” receiving “the quiver of an Amazonian Dame” (an image of usurped phallic female power, following Stanton’s critical analysis) to “gird his manly side.” Other important images of satire derive from the root word satura: the farrago, medley, miscellany, or ‘mixed, filled dish.’ Like ‘satyr,’ satura is a ‘mixed being.’ Many commentators associate this Latin etymology with satire’s origins in ritual (a filled sacrificial vessel). The word also refers to satire’s formal

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inconsistency: verse, prose, high and low styles, and various subject matters may be combined in a single work. Satire is thus distinguished by its own inconstancy to a single form and by reference to the need to appease appetite. Further, ‘satura’ sets a useful precedent for satiric license because it traces its genealogy back to missing ‘ancestral’ texts and therefore to permissive forefathers. Lucillius, whose work survives in fragments only, says that his predecessor Varro wrote ‘mixed’ satura in the manner of his predecessor Menippus (the Saturae Menippae). However, neither of these texts survives, leaving later ‘Varronian’ or ‘Menippean’ satirists to fill the ‘dish’ as they desired. The lexicographical array associated with satyr/satura/satire allows for other metaphors and demurrals from Dryden’s views on male potency and autonomy as central to this problematic genre. In uncertainty lies possibility. Swift chose images of disunity: the “Ball bandied to and fro” and the trick mirror that reflects “every body’s Face but [one’s] own” (215). Like the implement of wit for “scumming” a bowl of cream and for whipping froth, these are images of dispersal, randomness, refraction, and deflection. Manley cites Dryden’s Discourse in order to reject both Horace and Juvenal. She claims that The New Atalantis was “written like a Varronian Satyr, on different subjects, Tales, Stories and Characters of invention, after the Manner of Lucian, who copy’d from Varro.” Manley’s choice suggests further implications for the relationship between genre and gender. Although her model is masculine, it condones the aspects of satire criticized by Dryden: mixing prose with verse and refusing to keep “underplots . . . subservient to the main fable” (D 4:79–81). The choice of Varro affiliates her with a paradigm of indirectness and absence. By allying herself with a missing satirist, known through a copy of a lost copy of a missing original, she loosens the strictures of a masculine ideal.1 A woman’s alliance with satirists who are not there ironically reflects cultural constructions of presence as masculine, and absence as feminine. The missing source of authority, the ultimate reference point that is difficult to fix pertains also to gossip. Other constructions of women—as secondary, mutable, and emotional—invite further parallels to satire, which “is essentially imitative” (Knight 1992:27). Its secondary status has been crucial to critics including Guilhamet, Stopp, Knight, Snyder, Bogel, Nichols, Gill, and Griffin. Satiric parody, mock-forms, and formal imitation are always ‘other’ to an antecedent, always the ‘Eve’ to a textual ‘Adam’: “satire proffers no essence at all, no in-itself” (Snyder, 11). Satire is often described as ‘protean.’ Critics agree that satire is “transformative” (Guilhanmet, 17), and “a borrower of forms” (Knight 1992:22). ‘Protean’ satire shares qualities associated with constructions of women: mutability, and (especially given its ironic language) unreliability. Satire’s intimacy has interested scholars like Thorne and Seidel in studies that emphasize the importance of recognizing “the intertwinement of satirist and reader with


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satiric object, and the compromising intimacies of irony and parody or satiric mimicry, as essential features of the structure of satire rather than occasional aberrations” (Seidel 1979:6). Satire’s rhetorical purpose, its verbal gamesmanship (like Swift’s bandied ball), might be construed as orienting it away from unified action in the traditionally masculine sense and toward what Carole Fabricant has called “the feminization” of Tory discourse (172). Despite feminist possibilities, the modern canon of criticism and theory about satire has almost always failed to question its own gendered assumptions, and thereby has perpetuated notions of a masculine genre. For Northrup Frye, “[s]atire is militant irony” (223), a genre associated with Saturn: “The first phase of satire is dominated by the figure of the giantkiller, but in this rending of the stable universe a giant power rears up on satire itself” (236). Elliott locates the origin of satire in magic, ritual murder of enemies, and primitive phallic songs. Maynard Mack’s satiric ‘personae’ are variations on male physiognomy (vir bonus, etc.). Kernan’s cankered muse is “a man [who] has learned to control aggression and manage it to useful ends” (21): “Every satirist is something of a Jekyll and Hyde” (1959:16). David Worcester celebrates the ‘heroes’ of ‘tragic’ satire. Claude Rawson identifies the satiric speaker with the machismo of Norman Mailer. Brian Connery equates the idea of persona with literal masks: “satirists utilize exactly the same device . . . suitable to savages, robbers, . . . and con men” (22). Ronald Paulson sees an Oedipal pattern in “the distinction between Horatian and Juvenalian satire”: “Horace focuses on the fathers who are hated, while Juvenal focuses on the sons who kill their fathers.” The terms of discourse remain centered on classical precedent: Old Comedy, Aristotle’s De Poetica, Plato’s Dialogues remain touchstones. The history of antipathy toward the female satirist must be mentioned as well. Manley, for example, was held in custody for her work, while Swift was protected by a conspiracy of silence when the Privy Council demanded the author of the Drapier’s Letters (PW 10:ix–xxxi). Attitudes do not improve. Frances Burney’s Mrs. Selwyn, Evelina’s “satirical friend,” is condemned as a transgressor of gender: “her understanding, indeed, may be called masculine . . . unfortunately, her manners deserve the same epithet.” Even kindly Mr. Villars is “disgusted at her unmerciful propensity to satire.” Jane Austen’s Lady Middleton condemns the Dashwood sisters because “she fancied them satirical: perhaps without knowing what it was to be satirical; but that did not signify. It was censure in common use, and easily given” (Sense and Sensibility, 215). Most critical studies of satire and women (Nussbaum 1984; Pollak 1985) portray them as objects, not perpetrators of attack. But these protests would not occur if women satirists were not exerting pressure on old stereotypes, if they had not learned to probe and

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disclose damaging secrets, or if the feminine possibilities for satire were not threatening a formerly male bastion of aggressive wit.

Manley’s Secret Memoirs of . . . the New Atalantis In The Woman as Good as the Man (1677) Francois Poullain de La Barré asks: “Is it a thing so difficult, that a woman could not perform it, to instruct her-self of the strength and weakness of a State . . . to entertain amongst strangers, secret Intelligence for the discover[y] of their Designes . . . ?” (NA 123). Intelligence, the principle narrator of Manley’s New Atalantis (1709–1710) might be said to embody an answer to that question. She abjures the rhetoric of war for sotto voce conversations about desire. “[T]his soft passion,” however, harbors the potential for violence: few can resist “the force of love . . . be the dangers never so imminent and many, the obloquy so notorious, the miserable consequences so inseparable” (133). Although she is a gossip, Intelligence is not trivial. As the agent through which “time and chance reveals all secrets” she gathers hundreds of peccadilloes into a relentless force that helped to topple a ministry. In Seductive Forms, Ballaster recognizes Manley’s “satirical powers” (115) but understands them as constructing “a specifically female amatory form”: “Manley sets femininity and masculinity at odds, privileging the former over the latter in a move that has become conventional in twentieth-century romantic fiction” (142–143). In Nobody’s Story, Gallagher places Manley at the crossroads of “politics and ‘fiction’ in the discourse of libel” (104). “[S]atire on a woman in a woman’s voice,” she argues, must “vacillate” between a series of self-effacing opposites: “alibi and crime” (104), “exculpation and incrimination” (120), “fiction” and “allegory” (104), “civic” and “civil” humanism (107). Gallagher believes that it is “difficult to place Manley squarely inside the Scriblerian milieu we associate with Swift, Pope, and Arbuthnot” (108). The discourses of secrecy offer a way to overcome that difficulty. To Manley, gossip is as inevitable as birth and death (its frequent topics). Eventually, someone discovers and tells about “underground” misdeeds: “Time will disclose to us,” she promises of a Whig minister (Lord Halifax), “what the long, underground, never-ceasing workings of this busy mole can intend” (NA 263). As a satiric strategy, racy gossip can challenge the process of constructing a public sphere on a foundation of willfully ignored and suppressed secrets. Eve Sedgwick observes: “Ignorance can be harnessed, licensed, and regulated on a mass scale for striking


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reinforcements—especially around sexuality, in Western culture, the most meaning intensive of human activities” (5). A culture under duress may need to conceal things from itself, in order to avoid articulating problems it does not know how to solve. Manley’s satire targets official silences that are “as potent and as multiple” as official proclamations: “ignorance and opacity collude or compete with knowledge in mobilizing the flows of energy, desire, goods, meanings, and persons” (Sedgwick 1990, 4). Women, Manley implies, know things that can channel this “flow.” The destabilizing effect of gossip’s multiple ‘versions’ of events weakens authority with ‘secret’ inversions and subversions. In Manley’s sensational page-turner, monarchs, government ministers, lords of the realm, and ladies-in-waiting act the parts of clandestine lovers, mistresses, adulterers, and seducers. Parliament, court, council, exchange, and battlefield are settings for rape, incest, bigamy, greed, various illicit amours, and murder. The Exclusion Crisis is never far from mind; people and events that had interested Behn, Dryden, and others continue to resonate. Through them, Manley critiques the conflicts of Queen Anne’s reign (1702–1714): persistent succession problems (dissatisfaction with the impending Hanoverian reign) and war (of Spanish Succession). The framing fiction, a visit by a ‘foreigner’ to an island, begins with the death of William III (1702), and recurrent themes—seductive promises, desire for sex and power, legitimacy, authority—connect the ‘secret’ scandals that fill the narrative. Characters rarely act directly for the reader; rather the reader joins Astrea and Virtue in listening to Intelligence telling on others. The speech act of gossip, then, is the primary ‘event’ of the narrative. Intelligence’s “garments are all hieroglyphics”; as “groom of the stole to the omnipotent Princess Fame,” she is privy to the most private. A compulsive talker, she admits, “a secret sits heavy upon me ‘till I have disburthened my self” (13). She enjoys a gossip’s intimacy with her companions Justice (Astrea) and Virtue (and the reader) whom she conducts on a tour of the island. Desire for power is her constant theme: “To be short, between friends, the King of this island is just dead; ‘tis yet a mighty secret, but I must take what haste I can to divulge it” (13). Astrea makes Intelligence invisible, the better to snoop into her “beloved diversion, scandal” (99). In contrast to the official masculine talk of Parliament (OF parlement, speaking), the little band of gossiping women tell the secrets of the nation. Both in the narrative frame and in individual episodes of moral transgression, speech acts constitute an ongoing political “contestation and reformation” of the subject (Butler, 160). Intelligence understands that language is power. She resents other characters who narrate stories of “scandal, revenge, cruelty, pride . . . for usurping

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her province and forcing her to a long and painful silence” (87). She reprimands the tattling midwife Mrs. Nightwork: “I am afraid you are taking my province from me, and engrossing all the scandal to yourself . . . I thought you had been sworn to secrecy” (138). Mrs. Nightwork is one of a very few speakers who are able to silence Intelligence, albeit briefly. We recall that the God-sib “appeared as a validating witness at infant baptisms . . . absolutely necessary when, as was often the case, the real father was absent” (Gordon 1988:14). As a midwife to illegitimate children, Mrs. Nightwork fulfills this role. Another ‘rival’ narrator, Delia, is merely overheard; ironically, she is the autobiographical alter ego for Manley herself (222–228). Yet while Intelligence chatters and digresses from one scandal to another, her reliability and motives become “excitable” and fall under ironic scrutiny. Virtue observes, “You are uneasy till you have divulged our secret,” to which Intelligence admits that gossip “sits heavy” until she is “disburthened” (NA 13). Like the “freshest modern” who cannot resist a digression in Swift’s Tale, Intelligence cannot resist a scandal. When Virtue and Astrea try to assist a lonely woman in the throes of labor, Intelligence restrains them while she tattles the woman’s story, over “cries and groans [that] pierce the heart.” Her companions marvel: “Is scandal so bewitching a thing in your court that you cannot delay divulging what you know”? (138). Both Intelligence and the narrator of the Tale are spokespersons for problems of which they are a part: unrestrained modern fancy and malicious modern gossip. Both allude to alchemy and occult sciences, while dark arts and dark secrets instigate their digressive styles. Intelligence is clothed in mystical symbols, and the Tale’s narrator ushers the reader into “the sublime mysteries that ensue” (PW 1:32). Both justify their narratives with the dubious claim that they wish to contribute to the education of a prince: Prince Posterity (18–23) and “the young Prince” for whom Astrea will serve as tutor (NA 7–8).2 The narrator of the Tale celebrates madness and is himself mad; Intelligence glorifies scandal and is herself scandalous. In this way, both serve as self-conscious devices for the satirist. The connection between the gossip and the god-sib who witnesses birth is implicit in The New Atalantis’ formulation of problems of succession and authority. Fathers are missing from seven scenes of lying-in. Many births, painful, illegitimate, and/or fatal, punctuate the narrative, and children often die or disappear. Pregnancy and birth are important organizing motifs. Bringing life into the world seems to multiply the world’s secrets. Although myriad scandals are reported in the course of the narrative, episodes involving the production of children clearly illustrate the connections between scenes of love and of politics.


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“You are a politician I find, Madam, as well as a midwife” (NA 140), says Intelligence to Mrs. Nightwork. The birth motif nervously connects sex and politics: hidden, often violent acts breed new forms that must vie for a place, for power, for legitimacy, even for existence. Seemingly random pregnancies, resulting from clandestine trysts, tap into political anxiety accumulating over almost a century of problems hinged to royal births. Promiscuity, infidelity, and illegitimacy wreck havoc on both female bodies and on the ‘body’ of the state. Scenes of erotic pleasure, like the Duchess and Germanicus being “happy” on their bugle-bed (20–21), alternate with, in fact are overwhelmed by, scenes of childbed horror: “Pain after pain, tear after tear, cry after cry . . . she is delivered all alone by her self of a brave boy. Lest he should cry, she tore out his bowels in the birth” (83); she “fell in labour when she was at court and was forced to appear the next day at dinner . . . ‘I’m racked! I die in agonies!” (136); “her cries and groans pierce the heart” (137); “the Count of —— had had two children by his sister, of the latter of which she died in childbed” (146); “from one anguish to another, she wore out the bitter night . . . she fell into strong convulsions, in which she was so happy as to lose her understanding” (150); “a helpless, useless load of grief and melancholy! With child!” (226). Although couples never speak of it en route to the boudoir, secret acts are productive of unpredictable consequences. Manley never forgets this unspoken reality; women characters regularly acquire big bellies, just as male politicians are later burdened with the results of their misbehavior. Thus broken lovers’ promises are also broken paternal promises (and broken women’s bodies). The ‘disconnect’ between masculine desire to gratify physical pleasure and maintain social/political control is reiterated in episode after episode: “in their discourse and debauch they confound distinctions” (11). Unrelenting seduction has several important effects insofar as it deconstructs the value of the ‘first’ and challenges patriarchy by showing the father’s failure in his role as constative, cognitive authority (Felman, 38). Unlike amatory fiction in which sexual titillation and pleasure are prolonged, Manley treats these matters in a more perfunctory ironic way. The pace at which we witness episodes of “promiscuous adoration” by numerous ‘Don Juans’ is rapid. Plots and subplots accumulate; one clandestine event may be enclosed within others, “incognito within incognito,” Intelligence says (140). A narrative of constant inconstancy—“Another land, or another lover, or a train of lovers” (140)—fits the paradigm of infinite substitutability at the center of gossip’s subversive power. In The New Atalantis, paternal promises are never kept. Starting at the top of the hierarchy, Charles II’s amours parallel his state policy: “he was irresolute and changeable in his councils as in his counselors, steadfast in nothing during the whole course of his reign” (NA 140). His disorder

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spreads to other noblemen: “there is no excess in vicious love that [John Sheffield, Duke of Buckinghamshire] has not been guilty of, and those in number” (46). A count pursues a widow while he “keeps two women for his debauch. He visits’em in turns” (81). The Duke of Ormond “has corrupted more women than a Grand Segnior. His pleasure consists in variety” (90). A Naval commander “more inconstant than the element on which he presides [is always] gratifying a fresh inclination” (11). The infection of Charles’ disorder is literalized as venereal disease. More than one man contracts “the secret malady” at a “debauch” and shares this “present” with wives, mistresses, and cuckolds. Yet such a man is “all the while protesting his never-dying passion” (10) or swearing “that he’ll marry her . . . [although] he already has two wives, and does not know that but he may as well . . . increase them to two hundred” (11); or, “He took his leave . . . with a promise to return home” (78). “I mean to marry you . . . upon my faith and honour” (120) is reiterated in many “vows of love” (165). Mosco disabuses Zara: “You will object the promises I made you . . . No wise woman reckons upon the performance of those extravagant things that are said to gain her. . . . I promised to make a marriage after your fashion by cohabitation, I do not think fit to perform it. What of that?” (128–129). What of that? Because no promise goes unbroken, the overall effect of “promiscuous adoration” (241) is the confusion of personal ties, of family structures, and ultimately of the nation. Like the narrative’s many fickle lovers, “The Utopians . . . change parties, they change monarchs, with the same ease that they shift their linen . . . No obligations, no interest can fix them” (190). In Felman’s analogy, “[l]anguage is as faithless as men.” The consequence in Manley’s text is that female cadavers hang on gallows, float down rivers, and stiffen in childbed. If secrets are a way of knowing in New Atalantis, they by no means constitute a simple epistemology. Their revelation can be “laudable and blameable [so] that we don’t know how to determine” (161). Multiple episodes of incest and bigamy complicate the subversion of the value of ‘the first.’ One of the more lurid sequences focuses on the incestuous love between a brother and sister, Polydore and Urania.3 While Intelligence calls their love “impious” and “criminal” (143), she also represents them sympathetically: They were ever together and too often alone. Then kisses and endearments were their continual employ . . . How young! How artless! How unpracticed in the manners of the world were these unhappy orphans! Without other pleasure to divert them from what they tasted in each other . . . They, to whom sincerity was natural. (144)


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They attempt concealment in “some little cottage” where “the ardent brother would learn to dig and plough for his adorable sister, and the too loving sister milk or spin for her beloved brother” (144). The narrative applies terms like “pilgrimage,” “ecstasy,” and “happiness” to their secret incest until discovered by their cousin Harriat. They entreat her silence “with dying eyes and heart-breaking sighs to have pity on their youth,” but Harriat rushes to report their “monstrous and unpardonable . . . abomination, . . . telling her with eager exaggeration the wickedness of the guilty pair” (147). Harriat’s speech acts are powerful interpellations, however morally justified, that through language transform the lovers into criminals. Eventually, the pregnant Urania “drank her tears, suppressed her cries” (149) and dies miserably with her newborn. Polydore, feverish and driven mad by Harriat’s maliciously vivid report of his sister’s death, purposely exposes himself to a “volley of shot” in a naval battle. But more interesting than their crimes (The New Atalantis is rife with sexual crimes) is Harriat’s role as discoverer, “with eager exaggeration,” of their secret. She becomes unpleasantly self-righteous, smugly punishing her cousins. Intelligence uses the phrase “good nature” ironically; her description of the injurious gossip equally describes the satirist “censuring and exposing the frailties of others”: [P]leased and triumphant at the fate of these unhappy lovers, [Harriat] pursued her principles of good nature, in censuring and exposing the frailties of others. Nor did she wait for convincing proofs; the very shadow of a crime was sufficient for her to proclaim it confirmed. Her eyes were perpetually where they should not, broad open upon the faults of every one but her own. (151)

Secrets have complex effects as they circulate through society. Yet another seduced female character is abandoned by her soldier/lover. Pregnant, of course, and alone she manages self-concealment through labor, delivery, and murder of the baby. Exhausted, she begs the help of her maid Alice to hide the stillborn corpse on the roof until she has strength enough to bury it. The maid swears secrecy but Some two or three days passed on. Alice . . . longed to tell all she knew, and so she reveals it to Doll the dairymaid, that was her bedfellow. . . . Doll had a sweetheart, one Crispin, a shoemaker in our town, as honest a fellow as ever lived; him she opened her mind to. The fellow smelt a rat presently and was resolved to discover it to the next cadet or judge. Away he goes, makes oath of what Doll had told him. This magistrate mortally hated the young lady’s father. A warrant was granted, the house searched, and the child found. She was tried for her life and condemned for a willful murther. (84)

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Intelligence, Astrea, and Virtue find her “nailed to a gibbet.” The network of voluntary spies detects a crime, but its punishment is really the consequence of enmity between men: the magistrate hates the young lady’s father for unknown reasons having nothing to do with the seduced daughter. A brief respite from “the insatiable hydra” (i.e., scandal, NA 154) accompanies the representation of a female secret society, the New Cabal (153–161), consisting mostly of women of the court of Queen Anne and women writers (292–294). The “happiness” of this group has several sources: “they meet, they caress, they swear inviolable secrecy and amity” (155); their relationships are not based on property because “[i]n this little commonwealth is no property; what ever a lady possesses is, sans ceremone, at the service and for the use of her fair friend” (161); they exclude “that rapacious sex who, mak[es] prey of the honour of ladies” (154); they engage in pleasurable and implicitly lesbian “mysteries of the Cabal.” They can avoid pregnancy by resisting “that . . . unforgiving sex who arbitrarily decide that woman was only created . . . to adorn the husband’s reign . . . and propagate the kind” (161). The scandalous pregnancy/birth/death cycle informs the secret history of English monarchy that concludes Volume Two. Earlier examples of pregnant women sensitize the reader to the endemic weakening of patriarchy by promiscuous conceptions, to the devalued world in which any one plus any one will make two. But individual mothers, identified in the ‘keys’ but sometimes veiled and ‘faceless’ in the narrative, are not repositories of power. Their corpses are cleared away like so much litter. Manley’s ironic retelling of Stuart history tests pregnancy as a satiric metaphor. In her version of the Glorious Revolution, James II becomes a woman, Princess Ormia, the narrative’s only example of a truly loving mother of a legitimate child. During the civil wars, both Stuart brothers, Charles and James, had at various times disguised themselves as women in order to escape to safety. Mary of Modena had fled with the infant James Frances Edward Stuart in the eve of the Glorious Revolution. The New Atalantis, from these historical hints, develops a fiction about a ‘female’ James who is martyred in the process of protecting a beloved child (James Frances Edward Stuart), the throne’s rightful heir: “[Princess Ormia] wept incessantly, holding her helpless babe in her arms” (202) as their open boat tosses on a stormy sea. When the Princess saw the approaching ruin, she repined not for her self, but her dear child and those unhappy wretches that were likely to be involved in her destiny . . . Ah, wretched thirst of arbitrary power! To what have you exposed me . . . Ah, wretched infant! Why art thou also devoted to destruction? . . . [T]hey could no longer stem the force of the waves which, with very little opposition, overturned their small bark, and sunk them irremediably down for ever, into that fatal abyss. (NA 203)


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The Stuart family problems have even more potential for melodrama. Anne also was “Princess Ormia’s [James II’s]” child. The parent who was “sunk . . . irremediably down” in Manley’s fantasy actually was living in exile in Catholic France, casting a shadow of guilty complicity over his Protestant child. Anne had chosen the text “Thy kings shall be nursing mothers” for her coronation speech. Its ironic implications are not lost on Manley who represents Anne’s dilemma both as (conflicted) royal child and (unsuccessful) royal mother. Queen Anne appears as the pregnant Princess Olympia. This portrayal alone would not be surprising, since Anne had tried so often to produce an heir. However, in the midst of arbitrating the political conflicts between Whigs and Tories, Princess Olympia goes into labor and dies in childbirth:4 ‘Tis hard to say which of the two factions would have prevailed. The Princess took time to weigh the merits of both but, before she could determine, the hour of her delivery was come (for she was big with child), which was so severe, that even the divine Olympia could not escape the torture of it with life. (NA 208)

The death of a queen in childbirth feminizes the terms of politics by insisting on the physicality of succession, in a culture that does not know whether to respect or to fear the role of the woman’s body. Eve Keller observes that “throughout most cultural traditions, the secrets of women, like the secrets of nature, are and have traditionally been seen by men as potentially either threatening—or alluring—simply by virtue of the fact that they articulate a boundary that excludes them” (40). Manley’s fictions insist on the centrality of this equivocation. Ambiguous constructions of motherhood are endemic to patriarchy. Births that are too easy or too prolific arouse fear, suspicion, and even loathing; yet failure to reproduce at all is demeaning and devaluing.5 Manley reorients the common satiric motif of succession, then, away from classical precedents like Virgil’s Aeneid and toward the more immediate context of modern sex. The Queen’s ‘death’ is not about the frailties of female leadership. It pushes the sex-as-politics metaphor of pregnancy and birth to a limit that exceeds the parameters of party interest. As a Tory, Manley is presumed to have royalist ideals. Yet her representations of monarchy include Charles II as libertine, William III as a homosexual, and both James II and Anne as dead mothers. She brings the satirical possibilities of gossip (about clandestine love affairs and desire for power) beyond the narrow concerns of party. The careers of Manley and Swift intersect between 1710 and 1714 when both were in London writing on behalf of the Tory ministry. Carol

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Fabricant observes, “[I]f Tory ideology was broad enough to accommodate Swift’s anarchic tendencies and his anticolonialist sentiments, it was also sufficiently inclusive (or contradictory) to accommodate Manley’s feminist perspective” (176). I have demonstrated elsewhere Manley’s contribution to political pamphleteering in which she effectively adapts the practices of secret history to events like Guiscard’s attempted assassination of Harley.6 Her satiric practices bear directly on some of Swift’s work.

Secret Memoirs of Lemuel Gulliver What is the relationship between satire, secrecy, and secret history? Swift suggests a partial answer to this question in one of the most famous scenes in Gulliver’s Travels, although its similarity to seductions on secret histories has not been sufficiently noted. Readers of Manley, Behn, and Haywood will recognize the amatory conventions: the weather is excessively hot; a young woman goes to a river bank or garden and removes her clothes, unaware of the gaze of a desiring male who, inflamed by lust, catches her in a surprised embrace from which she struggles to escape. In Manley’s New Atalantis, [t]he beautiful Diana . . . passed her down into the gardens. She had nothing on but a petticoat . . . . It was the evening of an excessive hot day . . . A canal run by which made that retreat delightful. . . . the dazzling lustre of her bosom stood revealed, her polished limbs all careless and extended . . . . Rodriguez . . . stole close to the unthinking fair . . . throwing himself at his length beside her . . . Her surprise caused her to shriek aloud. (245–246)

Gulliver, in a reversal of gender roles, reports his near-rape by a “libidinous and mischievous” would-be lover: [T]he Weather exceeding hot, I entreated him to let me bathe in the River . . . I immediately stripped myself stark naked, and went down softly into the Stream; It happened that a young Female Yahoo . . . saw the whole Proceeding; and inflamed by Desire, . . . embraced me after a most fulsome Manner; I roared as loud as I could . . . whereupon she quitted her Grasp, with the utmost reluctancy, and . . . stood gazing. (PW 11:266–267)

Manley already had set a precedent for reversing gender roles for the purpose of satire in the seduction scene between the Duchess (Barbara Palmer) and Germanicus (Henry Jermyn) (NA 20–21). Should we make something or nothing of this coincidence?


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Gullible Gulliver, often a wide-eyed and frank reporter, at first seems an unlikely figure to associate with stealth and mystery. But Swift’s ironic protagonist charts a journey into a world of dangerous secrets. Secrecy determines politics in each of the countries of Gulliver’s Travels. Gulliver leaves England in 1699 and, except for brief intervals when he seems primarily engaged with his family, does not return until 1715. That is, he is away from England during the Partition Treaties (1699), the War of Spanish Succession (1701–1713), and the entirety of Queen Anne’s reign. Unlike the Tale’s narrator, who has written “Fourscore and eleven pamphlets . . . under three Reigns and for the service of six and thirty factions” (P 1:42), Gulliver misses the most virulent Whig-Tory controversies, and returns after the demise of Harley, Bolingbroke, and the Tory ministry. However, English politics has been transplanted. Gulliver travels not to desert islands or primitive societies, but to sophisticated foreign courts in the manner of the “secret” travels. On the first voyage, Lilliputian authorities operate by stealth. Redresal is “Principal Secretary . . . of private Affairs” (PW 11:39). Gulliver is thoroughly searched and with difficulty manages to conceal one “secret pocket” (37). “Court-Scandal” and “the Malice of evil tongues” run rampant, and Gulliver is victimized several times by “private Intrigue” (67). The worst plot is revealed to him by a “considerable person at court” who comes “very privately at night in a close chair, and without sending his Name” (71). After locking the door, pretending to sleep, and hiding in Gulliver’s pocket, he confides, “It was strictly enjoined that the project of starving [Gulliver] by degrees should be kept a Secret” (71). On the second voyage, in contrast, the king of Brobdingnag proves his worth by “profess[ing] both to abominate and despise all Mystery, Refinement, and Intrigue . . . He could not tell what I meant by Secrets of State” (135). When Gulliver attempts to win his esteem by revealing the formula for gunpowder, the king rejects it: “he would rather lose half his Kingdom than be privy to such a Secret, which he commanded me, as I valued my life, never to mention any more” (135). On the third voyage, the issue of secrecy is more complex. Balnibarbi is full of caves, a topography conducive to hiding things, but it is inhabited by a population distinguished by its incapacity for keeping confidences. In Langden “the Bulk of People consisted wholly of Discoverers, Witnesses, Informers, Accusers, Prosecutors, Evidences, Swearers” (191). When persons are accused of a plot, “effectual care is taken to secure all their Letters and Papers . . . These Papers are delivered to a set of Artists very dextrous in finding out the mysterious Meanings of Words, Syllables, and Letters.” They may use acrostics, anagrams, or other alphabetical codes to “lay open the deepest Designs of a discontented Party” (191).

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From this place of espionage and concealment, Gulliver enters the dark magic of Glubdubdrib. The fourth voyage is equally, if not more profoundly, concerned with the human penchant for keeping, breaking, and sharing secrets. In Houyhnhnmland, Gulliver himself is urgently caught up in the concealment of his Yahoo identity. “I had hitherto concealed the Secret of my Dress, in order to distinguish my self as much as possible from that cursed race of Yahoos; . . . I considered that my Cloaths and Shoes would soon wear out, which already were in a declining condition . . . whereby the whole Secret would be known” (204). His dilemma leads to a crucial question about the essentiality of secrecy in human behavior. Gulliver ‘explains’ clothing to his Master: “I did not expose those Parts that Nature taught us to conceal” (205). But the Houyhnhnm finds such “discourse . . . very strange”: “he could not understand why Nature should teach us to conceal what Nature had given” (205). Why indeed? Here the distinctive, “natural” human characteristic is not the capacity for speech (horses talk) or the capacity for handcraft (horses sew), but for concealment or secrecy. Swift complicates the fundamental JudeoChristian association of nakedness and shame: people have fallen not simply into mortality but into a tangle of pleasure and anxiety, scandal and desire that constitute the competing stories of the human race. The parallel seduction scenes quoted above, as well as other famous examples of nudity in Swift’s work (the flayed woman and the dissected beau, the beautiful nymph going to bed, Yahoos, etc.), affirm the innately furtive human being. Every Yahoo will hide a shiny stone, and every Yahoo would look better clothed. Swift’s views on secrets of generation and of state inform his views on satiric narration. No history of the human condition can proceed without taking into account this defining feature. The four versions of English history in Gulliver’s Travels are informed by Swift’s “continued preoccupation with the study of history” (PW 12:x), as well as an abiding interest in writing history. Does history preoccupy him because it offers a reliable means of understanding the use and abuse of various forms of power? History is rather as mercurial and vexing as any other human endeavor; Swift represents it as a ‘dark art’ in Glubdubdrib (PW 11:194). The past is not fixed and dead but restless and malleable, so that ‘history’ and ‘secret history’ constantly interact. Versions, “from severall great Men, or from one great Man at severall times,” destabilize one another. Interestingly, Swift wanted the post of Royal Historiographer.7 In retrospect one wonders how he could have hoped that the Queen he had offended with one history (of Christianity in A Tale of a Tub) would enlist him to produce another. Nevertheless, he submitted a sample “Memoriall,”


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and John Arbuthnot tried to joke about consigning it to flames with a burning glass because it reveals secrets: Apollo speaks that since he had inspired you to reveal those things which were hidden ev’n from his own light, such as the feeble springs of some Great Events, and perceiving that a faction wh. could not bear their deed to be brought to light had condemned it to an ignominious flame, that it might not perish so, he was resolv’d to consume it with his own celestial one. (C 2:70).

The record of Swift’s disappointment confirms the web of subterfuge, gossip, and secrecy around his experience of official events. While Bolingbroke was promising Swift to solicit the post of Royal Historiographer from the Queen, he was busy in secret political negotiations with the Pretender. And while Arbuthnot was attempting to gain favor for Swift by intervening with Lady Masham, Thomas Madox, unbeknownst to them, had already been sworn into office. Several letters and fragments record Swift’s unrealized plans to write a history of England from William Rufus to the end of Elizabeth I’s reign.8 With the History of the Four Last Years of the Queen, although not published until thirteen years after his death (1758), he had hoped to vindicate Tory responsibility for the Treaty of Utrecht. He promises to “strictly follow truth” and not to “mingle Panegyrick or Satire with . . . History” (PW 7:1). But the equable pose of the Preface turns partisan and accusatory. His odd phrase for Hanoverian succession, “the German Family’s succeeding to the Crown” (xxxiii), is rudely circumspect. Moreover, he writes, everybody knew that George I would slander Queen Anne and would encourage “the most ignorant and malicious of mankind” to perform injurious speech acts that “load their predecessors with as much infamy as the most inveterate malice and envy could suggest, or the most stupid ignorance and credulity in the underlings could swallow” (xxxiv). Anne’s reign, in contrast, rises in dignity. Compared to the Journal to Stella and to the correspondence from the same four years, Last Four Years of the Queen conceals the bedroom/backstairs power-brokering by women. The Duchess of Marlborough is mentioned just twice in the 200-page text, the Duchess of Somerset is mentioned only once, and Abigail Masham is not mentioned at all. As in Procopius, history coexists with a destabilizing secret “other.” Swift had considerable knowledge of other historians. The sale catalogue of his library lists over 100 histories, including some secret histories like Suetonius’s Lives of the Twelve Caesars and Gilbert Burnet’s History of His Own Times. Several volumes are annotated and reread (PW 5:xxxvii–xxxviii). He criticizes minutiae of style, word choice, and

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argument, as well as fundamental interpretations of the past. “A good opinion weakly defended . . . that is a mistake,” he notes of Parsons’ Conference about the Next Succession (1681; 241). In the margins of Herbert’s Life and Raigne of Henry VIII (1649) Swift vents his hatred of the “Bloody inhuman Hell-hound of a King”: “I wish he had been Flead, his skin stuffed and hanged on a Gibbet, His bulky guts and Flesh left to be devoured by Birds and Beasts” (PW 5:247–251).9 Swift despises Henry’s sexual faithlessness, his Don Juanism. Whenever Herbert rationalizes Henry’s uxorious failings, Swift insists on another version in which Henry’s unbridled desires and “private Pleasures” motivate a bogus political agenda “to have Posterity to inherit the Crown”: “Does the Author question this monster’s cruelty? . . . What a softener is the Historian! . . . as men go to Stool so he was damnably laxative [in concupiscence] . . . This palliating Author hath increased my Detestation of his Hellish Hero in every Article” (250). When Joseph Addison writes circumspectly of George I in The Freeholder (1715–1716), “I might here take Notice of His Majesty’s more private Virtues, but have rather chosen to remind my Countrymen of the public Parts of his Character,” Swift dryly remarks, “This is prudent” (251). When Addison explains the history of the succession as a neatly legal issue, Swift writes, “Are you serious?” He calls Burnet’s History of His Own Times “[a]ll coffee-house chat . . . a most foolish story, hardly worthy of a coffee-house” (287). Objections to Burnet’s content and style continue in the margins for over 700 pages. Swift’s impatience is almost comical and often sarcastic, but taken in the aggregate his fragmented remarks do provide an alternative version of Burnet’s “own times,” and they reconstruct Burnet himself as bumbling and inept. When Burnet betrays writer’s weaknesses—mistaken tenses, repeated words, grammatical errors—Swift repeats and redeploys them, and even draws little hands to point out the most embarrassing places: “much, much, much,” “was, was, was, was,” “think, thought, thought, think, thought,” “I never read so ill a style” (273, 275, 269, 266). Since Burnet’s Whig history of his own times extends “from the Restoration of Charles II to the Treaty of Peace, at Utrecht in the Reign of Queen Anne,” we may consider Swift’s defense of the Tory ministry’s negotiation of the same treaty (in his Four Last Years) as a competing version. Further, Burnet’s work has been cited in recent studies (Patterson; Mayers) as an important secret history with transatlantic ramifications in revolutionary America, where it was extremely popular. Mayer notes that “Burnet first conceived of the History of His Own Times as a secret history or memoir” (100), and Patterson observes that he “might very well have called [the text] The Secret History of the Stuarts” (198). I will return to his work’s relevance to Swift’s satire.


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Swift’s annotations to John Macky’s Secret Services also shed light on the further significance of secret history in Gulliver’s Travels. The foreign Electress of Hanover had requested information about members of court and Parliament. Macky introduces her to important people in England. Swift’s pugilistic marginalia challenge Macky’s authority. The Earl of Romney is called “the great Wheel on which the Revolution turned” (PW 5:258), to which Swift responds, “He had not a wheel to turn a mouse.” If Macky intends to preserve a record of the powerful men who make history, Swift’s running commentary renames them: “an endless talker,” “a great Booby,” “a profligate Rogue, without religion or morals,” “An arrant Knave in common dealing and very prostitute,” “a Dunce,” “a Fop,” “the vainest Old Fool,” “a Puppy,” “a good plain hum-dum,” “a most arrogant conceited Pedant,” “a blundering rattled pated drunken Sot” (257–262). Swift supplies the secrets to the Secret Services, challenging Macky’s inside information with the force of his own. History must not be allowed to ‘fix’ the characters of men as heroic or noble, but must be unhinged by an undercurrent of slander. Further, Mackey and the other historians share, almost obsessively, the recurrent topic of political succession. Gulliver’s Travels mentions “Anecdotes, or secret History” in a chapter set in Balnibarbi called “Antient and Modern History Corrected” (PW 11:197). We know that the third voyage was written last and positioned in the narrative as preparation for the devastating effects of the final voyage to Houyhnhnmland. Why must Gulliver first “correct” history? Gulliver encounters “Counts, Marquesses, Dukes, Earls, and the like,” only to discover “Cruelty, Falshood, and Cowardice” and the “Interruption of Lineages by Pages, Lacqueys, Valets, Coachman, Gamesters, Fidlers, Players, Captains, and Pickpockets” (198). There is some resemblance between the terms of Swift’s marginal comments in Macky and Gulliver’s comments on a modern Senate full of “Pedlars, Pick-pockets, Highwaymen and Bullies” (180). But there is more. The concept of history is probed within a pattern of irony that dominates the third voyage. Critics have noted the distinctive way in which the reader is set up to anticipate a certain judgment or interpretation, only to find that Swift’s irony has shifted terms or changed the rules of his satiric game.10 In the School of Projectors, in the visit to Lord Munodi, in the conversation about Struldbruggs, for example, a sequence of episodes encourages the reader to form a set of opinions (projectors do stupid experiments; misanthropes are bad; immortality is good), only to prove those opinions inadequate or wrong (projectors can have good ideas; misanthropes can be wise; immortality can be miserable). But even this summary oversimplifies the destabilizing effects of the satiric process.

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History in Glubdubdrib is the counterpart to, or the antithesis of, immortality, the voyage’s ultimate hope. One reaches endlessly into the imaginable past, the “Beginning of the World” (PW 11:195), while the other endures into the endless future. Both are populated by the living dead: ghosts and Struldbruggs. Thus time stretches away in two opposing directions, with Gulliver teetering at the present moment, a dizzying prospect. In the case of the Struldbruggs, as Michael Deporte argues, Gulliver first reacts with idealism and hope: he imagines immortality as the attainment of wisdom and magnanimity, and we cannot help but admire the altruism with which he tries to write his own future history of wealth, learning, and good deeds. But soon the terrifying prospect of ceaseless aging disabuses him of his visionary schemes, raising fundamental questions about human possibility that will be tested in a republic of horses.11 History on the third voyage is a kind of virtual reality in which Gulliver can summon and interact with “whatever Number among all the Dead from the Beginning of the world to the present Time” (PW 11:179). He begins in idealism about the Ancients: “vast Numbers of Illustrious Persons were called up, . . . I chiefly fed my Eyes with beholding the Destroyers of Tyrants and Usurpers, and the Restorers of Liberty to oppressed and injured Nations” (180). But the longer Gulliver pursues history, the more he is disillusioned, especially in the past century, that is, in the period that produced many secret histories and fostered the rise of English satire. In particular, he raises the perpetual issue: the principle of succession. “[H]aving been always a great Admirer of old illustrious Families,” Gulliver to the contrary finds history to be the story of innumerable seductions, infidelities, illegitimacies, and diseases “lineally descended in scrophulous Tumours to their Posterity” (182). Gulliver grows “disgusted with modern History” (199) that glorifies the past. When he is “truly informed of the Springs and Motives of great Enterprizes and Revolutions in the World,” he rewrites them in terms common to secret memoirs: the escapades of “Cowards, . . . Fools, . . . Sodomites, . . . Informers, . . . Bawds, Whores, Pimps, Parasites, and Buffoons” determine the “Motions and Events of Courts, Councils, and Senates” (183). Although the sordid origins of “great Enterprizes” dismay him, his animus falls harder on the illegitimate authority accorded to falsely glowing representations of the past. Gulliver cites those “who pretend to write Anecdotes, or secret History” (183). The operative word is “pretend.” Because Gulliver rightly rejects eulogizing historians in the preceding paragraph, we might anticipate a rejection of secret historians. But we would be mistaken: his quarrel is not with the substance of secret history—sex, politics, and things like the innards of a beau or flayed woman that had more flatteringly remained


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concealed—but with its methodology. What is wrong with writers “who send so many Kings to their Graves with a Cup of Poison; will repeat the Discourse between a Prince and chief Minister, where no Witness was by; unlock the Thoughts and Cabinets of Embassadors and Secretaries of State”? (199) They lack documentation; they surmise, while Gulliver, summoning up scores of ghosts, literally witnesses “the true Causes of many great Events”: “I had a whisper from a Ghost, who shall be nameless” (199). But then, who is Gulliver’s ‘witness’ to corroborate his strange stories of corruption in foreign courts? Can the historian’s credibility depend on necromancy? What he witnesses, however, is precisely congruent with the findings of secret history, including its insistence on corrupt politics as sexual transgression (and even affirming the cup of poison that sends monarchs to their graves): How a Whore can govern the Back-stairs, the Back-stairs a Council, and the Council a Senate . . . a scene of Infamy . . . Perjury, Oppression, Subordination, Fraud, Pandarism, and the like . . . some confessed they owed their greatness and Wealth to Sodomy or Incest; others to the prostituting of their own Wives and Daughters; others to the betraying their Country or their Prince; some to poisoning, more to the perverting of Justice in order to destroy the Innocent. (PW 11:199)

Gulliver’s pride in the “faithful history of [his] travels” (274) frames the narrative, beginning in the “Letter to Cousin Sympson” and continuing to the final page. By setting an impossible standard of veracity, which requires talking to ghosts and visiting nonexistent places, he alone can affirm the existence of pygmies, giants, flying islands, and talking horses. The discussion of secret history in the third voyage takes a further ironic turn when Gulliver suddenly resumes his obtuse deference to rank and asserts his “inferior[ity]: I hope I may be pardoned if these Discoveries inclined me a little to abate of that profound Veneration which I am naturally apt to pay to Persons of high Rank, who ought to be treated with the utmost Respect due to their sublime Dignity, by us their Inferiors” (200). Given the improbability of replicating Gulliver’s methodology of truth, he has made a case for the substantive accuracy of secret history, especially in its recurrent theme of promiscuous generation. The last ‘Case’ Gulliver narrates before leaving Glubdubdrib, a tale of legitimate succession subverted by sexual license in high places, would fit comfortably into The New Atalantis. A naval commander, although victorious in battle, loses his only son in the fighting and thus ends the family line. Worse, two false ‘sons’ destroy his remaining hopes for the future. His preferment is handed over to “a Boy who had never been to Sea, the Son of a

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Libertina, who waited on one of the Emperor’s Mistresses.” (201) His ship is “given to a favourite Page of Publicola the Vice-Admiral” (PW 11:201). Gulliver next visits Luggnagg where he encounters the Struldbruggs. At this point, fantasies about experiencing the beginning of time give way to imaginings about the end of time. The naval commander’s story of blighted hopes tweaks the desire for futurity the Struldbruggs will so painfully disappoint. The very concepts that seem to determine history—succession and posterity—are inherently impossible for Struldbruggs: perpetuity of life obliterates affection beyond grandchildren and memory of even the nearest relations; the everlasting patriarch feels only “impotent Desires” (212). Secrets of history on the third voyage are pivotal because they negotiate between two versions of English history narrated by Gulliver in Brobdingnag, and two more told later in Houyhnhnmland. In Brobdingnag, Gulliver’s first account merely amuses the giant king: “taking me up in his right Hand, and stroaking me gently with the other; after a hearty fit of laughing, asked me whether I were a Whig or a Tory” (107). From the king’s broader perspective, Gulliver’s exposition on “Manners, Religion, Laws, Government, and Learning” boils down to a story of seduction and disloyalty: “they love, they fight, they dispute, they cheat, they betray” (91). In the second version Gulliver pumps things up into panegyric on his “own dear native Country” (127). As every reader of Gulliver’s Travels knows, Gulliver’s inflated history is punctured by the king’s extensive questioning. Especially “the historical Account . . . during the last Century” is dismissed as “only a Heap of Conspiracies, Rebellions, Murders, Massacres, Revolutions, Banishments; the very worst effects that Avarice, Faction, Hypocrisy, Perfidiousness, Cruelty, Rage, Madness, Hatred, Envy, Lust, Malice, and Ambition could produce.” Readers rarely forget the king’s carefully justified and sweeping condemnation of “the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin” (132). If we recall Swift’s animus toward Gilbert Burnet, it is tempting to perceive parts of the second voyage as a parody of the private conversations between a common member of the household and the reigning monarch in A History of His Own Times, which, in Burnet’s own words, was intended “to look into the secret conduct of affairs among us” (1:4). Swift was not alone in finding the History to be “trifling, insignificant, and defective” and “full of the vain Solemnity of Self-Praise” (Review of Bishop Burnet, 2, 3). In Brobdingnag, a king and queen jointly rule, one governing the nation and the other supervising court activities, in the manner of William and Mary, during whose reign Burnet was kept at court. Gulliver’s pride becomes a central satiric issue, as he struts and preens and brags of his intimacy with the reigning sovereigns: “I have lived in such intimacy with all who have had the chief conduct of affairs, and have been so much


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trusted, and on so many important occasions employed by them, that I have been able to penetrate far into the true secrets of counsels and designs” (1, 2). Burnet, like Gulliver, seems to spend a lot of time in the monarch’s closet. Presumption is precisely the aspect of Burnet that Swift most despises: “The day before [the king] set out he called me into his closet, . . . These were the King’s secret motives; for I had most of them from his own mouth” (Burnet 1838:661). Or he presents himself as the king’s crucial informer: “[the Duke of Hamilton] wrote to me very fully on that head, and I took the Liberty to speak sometimes to the King on those Subjects” (539). Burnet opines that William understood a campaign “better than how to govern England” and he patronizingly praises Mary for “employ[ing] her time and thoughts in any thing, rather than matters of state” (552). Burnet, like Gulliver recommending the ‘improvement’ of gunpowder, believes that he knows better than the monarch, although his advice and recommendations are rejected: I could not help thinking he might have carried matters further than he did . . . I had tried, but with little success, to use all due freedom with him; he did not love to be found fault with; and though he bore everything that I said very gently, yet he either discouraged me with silence, or answer’d with such general expressions that they signified nothing. (643)

Protesting his commitment to truth, Burnet “unwillingly” reveals embarrassing information about the queen (her mistreatment of her sister) with the kind of gesture of deference that Swift would transform into irony. Burnet writes, “An incident happened . . . that had very ill effects; which I unwillingly mention, because it cannot be told without some reflections on the memory of the queen, whom I always honoured beyond all persons I had ever known” (577). Although Swift did not admire monarchs, he had even less patience with those who sought status through proximity to them. Conflicting versions of truth undermine patriarchal authority, and these effects are tested on Gulliver who has fathered children between voyages. Brobdingnag threatens Gulliver’s manhood; he is at various times a child, insect, toy, and little animal. When he finishes his several versions of English history, the king considers him briefly as a sexual being, but only to imagine him as a completely disempowered patriarch: “He was strongly bent to get me a Woman of my own size, by whom I might propagate the Breed: But I think I should rather have died than undergone the Disgrace of leaving a Posterity to be kept in Cages like tame Canary Birds” (PW 11:139). The fourth voyage also includes two versions of history: Gulliver’s third version of his own time, from the Glorious Revolution to Anne’s reign; and the Houyhnhnm’s comparative history of the Yahoos. Gulliver now condemns all aspects of England, indicting government, law, religion,

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medicine, commerce, education, class, and war with vivid details: the legal dispute over ownership of the cow; exploded body parts as a diversion of war; medicines made from frogs, spiders, and putrid flesh; the struggles over subtlety of translation from English into Houyhnhnm, and so on (246–250). But this version is no more reliable. Gulliver confesses his “secret springs,” that his distortions are a ploy to stay in Houyhnhnmland: “there was yet a much stronger Motive [than love of truth] for the Freedom I took in my Representation of Things. . . . Let me deal so candidly with the Reader, as to confess, that . . . in what I said of my Countryman, I extenuated their Faults as much as I durst” (258). As a performative speech act, Gulliver’s history is, then, not to represent truth but to ‘wed’ himself to, and secure a relationship with, his Houyhnhnm Master. But exaggeration only weakens his authority. If, after listening to ‘versions’ of England, the king of Brobdingnag considered using Gulliver’s manhood to breed a new species of pets, the Houyhnhnm Master has an even more stunningly antipatriarchal idea: the castration of Yahoo males. The Houyhnhnm Master has the final word on human history. Houyhnhnms themselves have “no Letters” and thus no written chronicles: “the historical Part is easily preserved” (273). They also have no libidos to confuse “the regulation of children” (254), thus obviating fundamental patriarchal issues hinged to succession and procreation, to restless pleasure-seeking between male and female, or to the allegiance of father to son, that is, to the mainstay of the plots of secret histories. In light of the cautionary lessons of Balnibarbi and Luggnagg about past and future longings, living in the present might seem a plausible alternative. “Here [Gulliver] did not feel the . . . Inconstancy of a Friend, nor the Injuries of a secret or open Enemy” (276). But of course Swift offers an impossible alternative. “Inconstancy” is human history. Houyhuhnms have no desire for power and almost no experience that might constitute historical change, “there happening few Events of any Moment” (279). They are “brute” enough to live in the self-enclosed moment but smart enough to recognize in Gulliver’s humanity the possibility for seduction: “That because [he] had some Rudiments of Reason, added to the natural Pravity” of humankind, he might try “to seduce them” into revolution. Gulliver’s conversations lead to this dangerous possibility. As Swift noted in the margins of Burnet’s ‘secret’ History, “all plots begin with talk” (PW 5:280). Gulliver might “do things with words”: secretly promise, seduce, conspire, and tell histories. Significantly, Gulliver has secrets but no privacy on his travels. Secrets need no space even on the longest voyage. He cannot hide in Lilliput where his legs protrude from even the largest building. In Brobdingnag his box may be opened at any time. He has no fixed abode on the third voyage, no


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human dwelling on the fourth, and even back in England, sleeps in an open horse stall in the stable. He madly tries to tell anecdotes that, once published, merely compete with other secret memoirs. Gulliver in this sense has become the character so central to these histories: the proud, displaced, frustrated patriarch unable to perpetuate a true version of his self.

Pope’s Key to the Lock and Dunciad Variorum: Belinda, The Barrier Treaty, Dulness, and Gossip Although famous as a mock-heroic, The Rape of the Lock’s ‘key’ resembles the textual apparatus that accompanied secret memoirs more than it does the conventions of heroic epic. In Key to the Lock (1715), Pope purported to reveal the poem’s “secret Designs” (88). As “Esdras Barnivelt,” he parodies but also acknowledges a relationship between his satire and other “am’rous” and political works, including Manley’s New Atalantis, to which he refers in the poem (TE 2:178, l. 165). At the conclusion of the Key, he may again have Manley or other scandal writers in mind. She had been taken into custody and examined, along with her publisher and printer, because the timing of her anti-Whig satire was said to influence an imminent change of ministry. ‘Barnivelt’ writes similarly of Pope and Bernard Lintott: Nor has the Royal Dignity it self been omitted in the Progress of his Satyr; and all this he has done just at the Meeting of a new Parliament. I hope a proper Authority may be made use of to bring him to condign Punishment: In the mean while I doubt not if the Persons most concern’d would but order Mr. Bernard Lintott, the Printer and Publisher of this dangerous Piece, to be taken into Custody, and examin’d; many further Discoveries might be made both of this Poet’s and his Abettor’s secret Designs. (Hammond, 88)

The Rape of the Lock blends aspects of secrecy, gossip, and secret history with mock-heroics and Ovidian allusion. The ‘machinery,’ more mystical than classical, places the poem “on a very new and odd Foundation, the Rosicrucian Doctrine of Spirits” (TE 2:142).12 The occasion of the poem is social gossip: John Caryll’s report to Pope about a family feud over a “dire offense” by Robert, Lord Petre against Arabella Fermor. Like many secret histories, its “am’rous” offense refers not to love but to sexual transgression, a rape among the rich and noble. Belinda is like other beautiful young

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virgins who lie on beds or attract the desiring male gaze with “white breast” or tempting “hairs.” Other details, such as the Cave of Spleen’s images of sexual frustration and tension, sustain the poem’s general eroticism and voyeurism. Further, the poem is a locus of speech acts: “Sighs, Sobs, and Passions, and the War of Tongues” (TE 2:186, l. 84). The result of the ‘rape’ is not to impregnate Belinda but to render her the topic of secret slander: “Already hear the horrid things they say, / Already see you a degraded Toast, / And all your Honour in a Whisper lost!” (189, l. 108–110). Speech acts include promises and curses. “let Earth, Air, Sea, to Chaos fall, / Men, Monkies, Lap-Dogs, Parrots all! / She said” (190, ll. 119–121): “By this Lock, this sacred Lock I swear, / . . . That while my Nostrils draw the vital Air, / This Hand, which won it, shall for ever wear.” (191, ll. 134, 137–138). Danger lurks in “broken vows” and “[t]he Courtier’s Promises” (204, ll. 117, 119). Epic heroes fight battles and perish. In The Rape, language performs deeds; metaphor and song are lethal weapons: “At ev’ry word, a reputation dies” (168, l. 16). The court setting, the game metaphor, the conspiracy of woman against woman are staples of secret histories (and of the Baron’s vast French romances), as is the rhetoric of “Trembling hands,” “ardent eyes” (160, l. 43), “am’rous sighs” (42), “Melt[ing] . . . tears,” “rich Brocade” (174, l. 116),” “the close recesses of a Virgin’s Thought” (176, l. 140), and warnings “believ’d too late.” Dangerous passions make “the Blood the Virgin’s cheek fors[ake]” (172, l. 89). Like the cynical wisdom of secret memoirs, the poem accepts the violence of sex in which “neither . . . prayers, tears, nor strugglings could prevent him, but in her arms he made himself a full amends for all those pains he had suffered for her” (NA 39): Resolv’d to win, he meditates the way, By Force to ravish, or by Fraud betray; For when Success a Lover’s Toil attends, Few ask, if Fraud or Force attain’d his Ends. (TE 2:159, ll. 29–34)

Even the sylphs when “Loose to the wind their airy Garments flew,” recall many erotic moments when we regard the “thin silk night gown . . . flying open as he caught her in his arms” (Haywood, 58). Belinda, too, makes an amatory fashion statement similar to heroines like Haywood’s Melliora whose hair “fell . . . on her neck in careless ringlets . . . fastened here and there with bodkins . . . and as she moved, glittered with a quivering blaze, like stars” (207). The metaphorical mingling or confusion of genders during the actual “rape” (Pollak 1985:100–102) suggests those scenes in amatory writing in which the virgin both resists and yields, denies and desires,


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her lover, scenes often signifying unavoidable collusion within systems of political power. Clarissa’s speech reminds Belinda of her procreative function (“she who scorns a Man, must die a Maid” [TE 2:197, l. 28]). The careful survey of Belinda’s dressing table lingers over her body, or the ornaments to her body, with that worshipful/prurient interest familiar in amatory texts. Such details gesture at a world beyond, a world of commerce and war that enables fantasies of desirability and pleasure. Pope ironically exaggerates this possibility in A Key to the Lock. Or, a Treatise Proving . . . the Dangerous Tendency of a Late Poem, Entituled, The Rape of the Lock, To Government and Religion, which claims that the poem is a satire on the Barrier Treaty.13 The second edition of the Key expands the number of political secrets by adding four ironic anti-Jacobite mockdedicatory verses. They praise “Great Barnivelt” whose canny reading will “save this Land from dangerous Mystery,” whose “deep Knowledge dark Designs reveals”: “How safe must be the King upon his Throne, When Barnivelt no Faction lets alone. / Of secret Jesuits swift shall be the Doom” (PW 179–181). One of the mock-tributes to Barnivelt reflects the penchant of “secret” writers for anagram, acrostick, and other linguistic mysteries. It ludicrously discovers the hidden meaning of Barnivelt’s name—“UN BAREL IT”—and possibly hints with equal absurdity at parallels between Esdras’ barrel and Swift’s tub. Like Swift’s tub, Barnivelt’s barrel will draw off dangers the poem might provoke. The characters identified in the key are familiar from the New Atalantis and other secret histories, although Pope piles on double and triple layers of secret meaning, some of it contradictory. Belinda represents England, Queen Anne, and the Whore of Babylon. The baron signifies the Barrier Treaty or the Earl of Oxford. Clarissa and Thalestris represent Abigail Masham and Sarah Duchess of Marlborough. Sir Plume is identified as Prince Eugene, leader of the forces of the Holy Roman Empire. Pam is the Duke of Marlborough. Shock the dog is Dr. Sacheverell who in his sermon ‘wakes England’ with ‘his tongue’ (shades of amatory sex as politics). Sylphs and gnomes are various Tory and Whig ministers of state. The sylph cut in twain represents Lord Townsend, who negotiated the treaty. Belinda’s bodkin is construed as the British scepter in “[a]n open satyr on hereditary right.” If Belinda can represent both England and the Whore of Babylon, we encounter again, in selfconscious exaggeration, the destabilization of authority peculiar to ‘secrets’ and gossip in satire. The entertaining absurdities of the Key are not dismissive of the idea that sex conveys political meaning. To the contrary, the same political issues of succession remain volatile in 1714–1715, when the poem and ‘key’ were published. George I had ascended the throne, imperiling Pope’s Tory

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friends: Bolingbroke was dismissed from office and joined the Pretender in France; Harley too was arrested during these same years: A Key to the Lock was probably a pre-emptive strike by Pope, aimed at warding off hostile reaction to The Rape of the Lock. . . . [T]here had already been adverse comments on his Roman Catholicism, and accusations that he was a Jacobite . . . It was not unlikely that Pope’s enemies would attempt to compromise him politically by publishing a distorted reading of the poem, so Pope anticipated such a move by issuing his own absurd political interpretation . . . However, this does not mean that The Rape has no political connotations. (73, emphasis added).

The outrageous political readings performed by Barnivelt make one cautious about offering alternative ones. But we can at least observe the threat of lost political power for English Catholic families, already a beleaguered minority, if daughters like Belinda reject marriage and do not continue ‘lines’ like the Carylls, Petres, and Fermors. Seduction and violation thus bring a more sober meaning to the poem’s light and bright and sparkling wit. The failed speech act, “Restore the lock” reverberates (perhaps to ‘reStuart the Lock’? or to portray the lock as the Stuart line ‘ravished’ by the Elector of Hanover?) reverberates with not entirely comic political meaning: reversing the fates of severed hairs, severed maidenheads, severed royal lines—is no more possible than restoring Stuart kings. Pope added even more elaborate commentary to The Dunciad Variorum (1728).14 Like the Key to the Lock, the “Notes Variorum” bring a new dimension to the poem and confirm the observation of Pope’s editor that “Pope’s primary concern is not to write mock-epic” (TE 5:xliv). Episodic anecdotes supercede epic form, and the poem in certain ways assumes an intimate community in which everybody knows everybody. The notes look scholarly, but many read like gossip. As Pope summarized his rumorspreading purpose in An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, the Dunciad “[l]et the Secret pass“ into a world populated by “Fool[s]” and “Ass[es]” (TE 4:101, ll. 79–80). The notes are full of juicy tidbits. Ward had to stand in the pillory and took bribes from “a great Lady” (TE 5:152). Roome is the son of an undertaker in Fleet Street (162), and Cooke of the keeper of a rural public house (112). Henley’s career is stymied because, though unprincipled enough to have “offer’d the service of his pen, in one morning, to two great Men of opinions and interests directly opposite,” he “was not qualify’d to be a compleat Spaniel” (173–174). Ralph writes panegyrical puffs to accompany his own work “and once in particular prais’d himself highly above Mr. Addison,” but ends up in the “common sink” of newspaper work for a “small pittance” (165). Concanon is “an anonymous slanderer” (113). Of Oldmixon (author of the Secret History of Europe), we learn that


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“the top of his character was a Pervertor of history, in that Scandalous one of the Stuarts in Folio” (125). And so the “secret[s] pass.” If the poem is the official narration of Dulness’ reign, the notes provide the anecdota of secret narration, and the two versions are in continual dialogue. Similarly, if “Pope’s primary concern is . . . to satirize his enemies,” the entire satire is an attack on reputations in the form of a ‘conversation’ between the history of anti-Pope satires and Pope’s counterrevelations of their flaws. The “Advertisement” prepares readers for anecdote and secrecy: “The Commentary which attends this Poem . . . is not made upon Conjectures . . . and the reader cannot but take one pleasure from the very obscurity of the persons it treats of, that it partakes of the nature of a Secret, which most people love to be let into, tho’ the Man or the Things be ever so . . . trivial” (8). What is “the nature of the secret”? Brooks Davies argues that it is emotional Jacobitism expressed through the secret mystery cult figure of Isis, Dulness’ original. Isis is a fertility goddess (sorely needed by the nation’s royals) and an alchemical symbol, capable of turning an age of lead into gold, that is, reversing the effects of Dulness—who turns creativity to sterility, and brightness to darkness, who epitomizes the failed speech act with an “uncreating word” (192, l. 340). Pope wrote to Swift in 1725, “I mean no more translations, but something domestic, fit for my own country and [shades of Burnet] for my own time” (ix). Although Swift complained about the poem’s urban provincialism, Pope’s comment suggests other kinds of secrets. If the characters are truly local, then they really will only be remembered as he construes them. Further, the smallness of their world and fame reinforces the sense of intimacy of the gossip’s community. Dulness’ “secret might” (193, l. 345) resides in the cumulative effect of hundreds of trivial details. Readers do not witness the revelation of a fallen angel in Hell or of the “first” father and mother in Paradise; they glimpse the peccadilloes of trivial mortals who will end the world not with a bang but a whimper. James Sutherland claims that “the Dunciad was more than a Poem, it was an event” (xxiii).15 More precisely, it was a linguistic one, a speech act, or rather a series of injurious speech acts, attacking reputations and countering earlier slander against Pope. Otherwise, not much happens. Sunderland observes, “Pope is parodying epic action by having almost no action at all” (xli). Episodic satirical anecdotes supercede epic form in “a poem almost wholly given up to denigration [by sustaining] ridicule and abuse for almost two thousand lines” (xliv). The Dunciad Variorum responds to name-calling with its own acts of interpellation. At the same time, it is a poem about a monarch’s reign and succession: “She saw with joy the line immortal run / Each sire imprest and glaring in his son” (71, ll. 97–98). Despite its universals—chaos, night, art, the mighty mother,

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the uncreating word—the satire’s gossipy pettiness is its “elasticity and fire.” These satirists wound with words while creating a community of readers. Secrecy and secret history claim a significant place in their work when they attack others, and, as the next chapter shows, when they write about themselves.

Chapter 6 ‘A Life by Stealth’: Autobiographical Satire in Manley, Swift, and Pope

Much health, a little wealth, and a life by stealth, that is all we want. —JS 2:203

Birth Injuries From the sidelines of the attacks and counterattacks on Alexander Pope during the eighteenth century, friend and collaborator William Broome astutely observed, “A person of real merit will build himself a monument with the very stones that are thrown at him by the hands of the malicious” (Corr 2:163). What has an attack on or by others to do with the constitution of a self? Discussions of satire rarely challenge Alvin Kernan’s belief: “we never find characters in satire, only caricature . . . in no art form is the complexity of human existence so obviously scanted as in satire” (1965:23). Yet readers must be struck by the degree of authorial self-involvement practiced by writers like Manley, Swift, and Pope. Each imagined himself or herself as a satiric fiction. The idea of injurious language and its role in the process of interpellation—speech acts of naming, renaming, and namecalling “by which a subject is constituted in language”—pertains readily autobiographical satire: “by being called a name, one is also, paradoxically, given a certain possibility of social existence” (Butler, 2).1

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Satiric words can wound and embody. Pope ‘fixes’ Hervey on a verbal pin by calling him a ‘gilded bug’ but in so doing casts himself as the waspish curmudgeon whom others attempt to “catch” or to whom they “[a]ll fly to Twit’nam” like so many drones to a queen bee (TE 4:97, ll. 14, 21). Swift lashed faults in others: a flayed woman and a dissected beau are among his most memorable images. How fitting that, in a revision of his will to accommodate a final self-assessment, he chose to be remembered as a body cut open: ‘Here lies the body of Jonathan Swift . . . where savage indignation can no more lacerate his heart.”2 Indeed, images of cut hearts are common to all three writers. Manley begins her most complex satire, Memoirs of Europe, with a scene in which the narrator removes this vital organ from her chest. Expressing ardor for Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Pope too offers a cardiac transplant: “I love you as well as King Herod could Herodias . . . and would as freely give you my heart in a Dish, as he did another’s head” (Corr 1:353). Swift mused to Pope about a possible haven for satirists, “an Hospital built for [the world’s] despisers . . . it need not be a large Building” (2:342). Pope responded by developing the image: “I wish as warmly as you for the Hospital to lodge the Despisers of the World in, only I fear it would be fill’d wholly . . . with maim’d Soldiers, and such as had been dis-abled” (2:349). Satirists, like the maimed soldiers, cannot attack without sustaining wounds. But these wounds leave the scars that define and distinguish each from the other, that give each ‘character.’ Difficile est saturam non scribere: Juvenal’s claim of compulsion takes on new meaning as the satirist’s rationale. The satirist “cling[s] to the terms that pain [him/her] because . . . they offer . . . some form of social and discursive existence” (I adapt Butler, 25). Satire must have a hostile ‘other’ to instigate what are depicted as irresistible counterattacks. Integral to this process is an autobiographical possibility: like “excitable” speech, the satirist’s words must be uttered and thus compel the exercise of voice or agency. Pope bound four volumes of published attacks on himself, “the libeled Person and the pictur’d Shape,” as if by binding them he could somehow contain and own them. Pat Rogers observes that these attacks were a source of self-definition: he “fed on the assaults of others: his artistic constitution took its rudest health in a climate of opposition”(1993:4). To recall Broome’s terms, he used the stones thrown at him to build a monument to himself. The satirist aspires to a subject position aligned with a (political/social) minority—the small group of friends laughing or whispering in a corner. Thus Pope imagines confiding in Arbuthnot about how others think of the Scriblerians: “I found him close with Swift”—“Indeed? No doubt” / (Cries prating Balbus) “something will come out” (TE 4:115, ll. 275–276). This group, although disenfranchised in certain ways, nevertheless has access to

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a certain kind of power against the banal majority because “words that mean in equivocal ways are . . . a threat to the ideal of consensus” (86).3 Is it possible for a reader, an outsider, to understand the satirist’s life and to comprehend the satirist’s full meaning and intentions? Certainly, promises Swift, if we can put ourselves into all of the exact “Circumstances and Postures of Life that the Writer was in, upon every important Passage as it flowed from his Pen” (PW 1:27). Otherwise, we seem to depend on gossip and hearsay: Manley’s self-representation as the topic of scandalous stories about her surrogates Delia and Rivella; Swift’s life as the idle chitchat of drawing room and tavern in the verses on his death; distortions and scandal reviewed by the poet and adversarius in Pope’s prologue and epilogues to the Imitations of Horace. The telling or withholding of secrets establishes crucial conditions for selfhood. D. A. Miller argues that secrecy and willful self-censorship are essential delineators of the subject who ultimately is circumscribed by what others do not know about him or her. ‘Open secrets’ require the complicity of a group, but personal secrets radically individuate. While psychoanalytic theory allows for unplumbed secrets in the unconscious, Miller focuses on the possibility of conscious manipulation of material known but not shown.4 Censorship—from without or from within—can be productive of subjects, and always with that edge of the “excitable” with which repudiated, silenced, or hidden material produces unexpected consequences. Pope would have been aware, as a Catholic living in anti-Papist England, of the ways in which power could be brokered through the codification and selective distortion of national memory. Swift and Manley, too, test and probe information officially swept into dark corners of backstair, bedroom, or privy chamber. How might such a process work for the individual? Where is the point of conjunction between Miller’s views of the construction of a particular subjectivity through willful suppression and obfuscation, and Butler’s views of the construction of identity according to imposed censorship and categorical disenfranchisement? How are we defined by the secrets we keep if no one ever knows what they are? Among the intimacies of satire is what Maurice Johnson calls “the biographical presence,” a kind of sfumato of personal details that can filter aggression toward an ‘other’ (Vieth, 67). Manley, Swift, and Pope could be quite specific in making their own lives the occasions for satire: they represent both the ways they look to themselves and the ways they imagine they appear (or would like to appear) in other eyes (70). And yet each remains shrouded in secrets. Did Manley willingly remain for several years in the bigamous marriage to her cousin John? What was her relationship to the printer Barber and how did she meet her “good friend the Dean of St. Patrick’s”? Who was her source for court scandal? Why did Swift’s

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mother not come to claim him when his nurse carried him off as a child? Did he marry Stella and was he Vanessa’s lover? What were his real beliefs with respect to religion and to his duties as clergyman? Did the physically disfigured Pope sincerely imagine himself the lover of the Blount sisters and Lady Mary Montagu? Was he a Jacobite? What exactly did he know about Bolingbroke’s French negotiations? What really motivated him to collect and bind four volumes of published attacks on himself? Resistance to being completely known to the penetrating consciousness of others demarcates crucial boundaries of self: “the subject is allowed to conceive of himself as a resistance: a friction in the smooth functioning of the social order, a margin to which its far-reaching discourse does not reach” (Miller, 206). Resistance and friction against the “smooth functioning of the social order” also are the satirist’s methodology. Again, I recall Miller on secret subjects and open secrets in the paradox of autobiography: “the self is most itself at the moments when its defining inwardness is most secret, most withheld from writing” (200). It is not enough to enumerate the unsolved life secrets of Manley, Swift, and Pope; such autobiographical evidence as exists suggests their deliberate obfuscation and confusion, as well as their pleasure and empowerment in the process of hiding. Manley, Swift, and Pope make secrecy, gossip, and resistance pivotal concepts in their autobiographical writing. The name of Manley’s fictive self, Rivella, puns on revelation in her “secret memoirs.” In Swift’s “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift” gossiping women act out La Rochefoucauld’s maxim about the secret egotism governing human relationships. In Pope’s Arbuthnot, the compulsion to write satire is compared to the irresistible blabbing of those who discover the donkey ears hidden beneath King Midas’ turban: neither barber (in Ovid) nor wife (in Chaucer and Dryden) can restrain the urge to be “[o]ut with it” (79). All three satirists acknowledge the destabilizing effects of gossip or slander as competing versions of ‘truth’ and explore its effects on self-knowledge and on construction (or deconstruction) of the subject. All three delight in the possibilities of irony and allusion to conceal other texts or meanings implicitly necessary for the reader’s full comprehension. Fictitious manuscripts are reported as lost, incomplete, or poorly edited and translated (Memoirs of Europe, Gulliver’s Travels). Bogus explanatory ‘keys’ (New Atalantis, Tale of a Tub, Key to the Lock) and editorial footnotes (Tale of a Tub, The Dunciad) lead to dead ends: “I cannot guess the Author’s meaning here, which I would be very glad to know because it seems to be of Importance,” opines the Tale’s baffled editor. ‘Secret texts’ are frequent sources for allusion: occultist techniques for enhancing sexual orgasm are cited without explication (New Atalantis), as is “the Gemara of the Jeruselem Misna” (Tale), and the doctrine of invisible Rosicrucians (Rape of Lock). Hints may tantalize readers with promised

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information about the “Disappointment, (to discover a Secret) [that] . . . gave [the narrator] the first hint of setting up for an Author” (PW 1:210), but promises of disclosure are rarely kept. The speech acts that can destabilize authority in politics also challenge self-representation. ‘Manley,’ ‘Swift,’ and ‘Pope’ exist in many competing versions of themselves. They explore the inherent contradictions of the satirist’s role. Manley’s alter egos are a study in contrast: Delia is a young innocent victim needing protection, but Rivella, an older experienced mistress and petty criminal. Swift identifies with the broom that cleans up hidden corners of corruption but is befouled in the process (“Meditation on a Broomstick”); he is the topic of both idle gossip and eulogy (“Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift”). Pope is the irrepressible warrior of words who, by being dipped in ink at birth, is simultaneously baptized and stained, protected and defiled by writing (Arbuthnot). He is the earnest correspondent producing epistolary “window[s] in the bosom,” as well as the manipulative editor of his own letters. We also have seen that gossip and slander’s reckless procreation of versions of truth is connected to the reckless procreation of the Don Juan figure. The admired and reviled male aristocrat, whose scandalous possibilities challenge authority, recurs in the life-writing of Manley, Swift, and especially Pope.

Manley’s Adventures of Rivella Like her narrators, Manley “knew . . . the hidden springs and defects of humankind” (NA 105) and engaged in practices of secrecy. As a Tory pamphleteer, she played the role of Mr. Examiner with relish. After anonymously publishing the first volume of The New Atalantis, she offered to meet secretly with Harley to let him have a private look at the continuation. She concealed her sources, yet seems to have been privy to every form of sexual deviance. We know little about her mother or the fate of her son or the whereabouts of the manuscripts of two plays mentioned in her will. Manley’s characters spend a lot of time talking scandal, and in many ways “being” is “being talked about.” She visualizes self-knowledge in images of mirrors, reflective surfaces with ironic implications for both women and satirists. In The New Atalantis, images of sound and sight coincide in the story of the Berintha, a hypocrite who gazes in a mirror and laughs aloud (65–70). She has seduced a Baron, pretended innocence, duped her hosts M. and Mme. D’Amant, and feigned escape. The image she sees in the mirror has signified differently to every character. Why? She has confided to each a different secret. The Baron

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believes her to be a brazen coquette consumed by passion for him; Monsieur St. Amant thinks she is the innocent victim of attempted rape; Madame St. Amant believes her to be a sincere friend and advisor. She is none of these things, but she exults in the secrets about herself that no one knows and in the success of her various speech acts. What she sees in the mirror reflects the incoherent conditions and ludicrous discrepancies of her womanhood, and she shatters the silent visual moment with a raucous laugh. A reading of Berintha’s laugh as a paradigm of difference, responds to feminist theories of autobiography that problematize the “mirroring capacity of the autobiographer”: The (masculine) tradition of autobiography beginning with Augustine had taken as its first premise the mirroring capacity of the autobiographer: his universality, his representativeness, his role as spokesman for the community. But only a critical ideology that reifies a unified, transcendent self can expect to see in the mirror of autobiography a self whose depths can be plumbed, whose heart can be discovered, whose essence can be definitively known. No mirror of her era, the female autobiographer takes as a given that selfhood is mediated; her invisibility results from her lack of a tradition, her marginality in male-dominated culture, her fragmentation—social and political as well as psychic. (Schenck and Brodski, 1, Schenck and Brodski, 1)

This mediated self offers an apt model for the self-representing satirist. If male autobiographers like Augustine, Rousseau, Adams, and Whitman imagine themselves as cultural foci (Whitman sees “the far off depth and height [of the world] reflecting [his] own face” in Song of Myself l. 380), the satirist holds up a “glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own” (PW 1:140). The feminine and the satiric glasses connote instead distortion, absence, and invisibility. When postmodern texts like Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes or A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments reject the autonomous or representative self in favor of a “radical aesthetics” capable of “the proliferation of polygamous meanings” (6), critics Miller and Schenck dryly note that women “never having achieved the self-possession of post-Cartesian subjects, do not have the luxury of ‘flirting with the escape from identity’ which the deconstructed subject may enjoy.”5 What kind of looking-glass, then, belongs to the autobiographical female satirist? Manley is self-conscious about the double indemnity of being both the ‘absent’ sex and the unrepresentative (and unrepresented) writing subject, of being doubly marginal as both woman (of questionable social standing) and satirist. Thus she seems to split every static image into at least two competing versions. Textual revelations of other people’s

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secrets, told several times and in contradictory ways, become complicit in the revelation of her own. Few women from this period left so complex yet confusing a record of self-appraisal, or so ironic an evaluation of the problems besetting the telling of their own stories. Examples begin early in her career. In The Lost Lover, Belira is, as her name suggests, an angry beauty and an author figure who curses a faithless lover with the rage of a satirist. Manley used an anagram of her own name for the heroine of Almyna, who tells stories to stay alive, like Scheherazade.6 Other self-referencing fictions include the “airy wife” in The New Atalantis, Letters 20 and 23 of The Lady’s Pacquet, Violenta in the revision of William Painter’s “Didaco and Violenta” in The Power of Love, Delia in The New Atalantis, and, of course, The Adventures of Rivella. In the New Atalantis, Manley’s account of her early life is embedded in narratives about other people. The three gossiping narrators, Astrea, Intelligence, and Virtue, are watching the Grand Druid and at first barely notice a “lady with him in tears.” Only after giving his biography—his is an exemplary life—does Intelligence notice Delia as an object who “may not be unworthy [of their] curiosity.” Casually eavesdropping on Delia’a tearful story, Astrea impatiently shrugs her off: “I am weary of being entertained with the fopperies of the fair” (NA 228). Thus Manley ironically dismisses the value of women’s lives.7 Delia’s narrative parodies the conventions of (Augustinian) confession.8 Delia pleads with the Grand Druid to help her “atone” for transgressions committed in “extreme youth and innocence,” and to intercede on her behalf with the Beaumonds (Henry, Duke of Beaufort, to whom the New Atalantis is dedicated). She does not imagine that she could have an analogous relation to God or to the Grand Druid or to any other male authority figure, such as her father or her husband. She does not envision her body and soul as sites on which good and evil clash. She abjures patterns—like symbolic death and rebirth—that might shape the meaning of her revelations. Instead she describes a series of unredeemed disappointments and predicaments. Several times she “dies” without the benefit of rejuvenation. Books “poison” her; when first taken to London, she “fell ill of a violent fever where [her] life was despaired of” (NA 224). Marriage to Don Marcus is a moribund state in which he keeps her “imprisoned.” After release, she finds that her reputation has been murdered in the world of the living. Again, she is “killed” by Don Marcus’ revelation of bigamy: he “stabb’d [her] with the wounding” news and “carried [her] to the bed all motionless” (226). Motherhood is equally self-negating. The sight of her illegitimate son deals her “a mortal wound . . . whenever I cast my eyes upon him.” Family life degenerates into daily immolations: “the killing anguish of every day having before me the object of my undoing.” When “released

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from the killing anguish” of repeated “inner deaths,” she re-enters society to find it equally life-denying: “I found the reputation I had lost (by living in such a clandestine manner with Don Marcus) had destroyed all the esteem that my truth and conversation might have procured me” (227).9 The delineation of identity by alterity is what Mary Mason calls “the most pervasive characteristic of female autobiography” (8).10 Delia is what others think of her and say about her. “I had married him only because I thought he loved me; . . . I was not in love with him” (224), she says. No apotheosis redeems her tale of passive suffering. If the Grand Druid prescribes penance and absolution, we never know. The Adventures of Rivella, or, the History of the Author of the Atalantis with Secret Memoirs and Characters (1714) is Manley’s attempt to build a monument to herself with stones about to be cast by others, since she took over a plan by Charles Gildon and Edmund Curll to publish a scandalous secret history of her life. Protesting to Curll that she is “plagued to death for want of time” (AR 117), she urges caution: “for God’s sake let us try if this affair can be kept secret. . . . I dread the noise ‘twill make when it comes out; it concerns us all to keep the secret” (116). “[T]hough the world may like what I write of others,” she wrote in defense of anonymity, “they despise what an author is thought to say of themselves” (117). Her “monument” reconstructs the female subject within two traditionally masculine genres: satire and life-writing. While Rivella has been read as a sourcebook for information about Manley’s life (Anderson and Morgan), it also attacks masculine appropriation of her life (Ballaster and Zelinsky). Under the camouflage of conflicting rumors about her, the text encloses secret intrigues within secret intrigues. As “translation” and “transcription,” the narrative’s fictional provenance surrounds Rivella with layers of time, language, and distance. Neither author nor scribe has ever met the woman their text claims to ‘know.’ Rivella is not even a central participant in many of the narrated events. More than a third of the book retells the complicated legal battle between the Duke of Albermarle and the Earl of Bath, an embedded “secret history of that tedious law suit” in which she was marginally involved (AR 74–102). Extensive narrative splitting (two Double families, and pairs of lawyers, lovers, narrators, sets of heirs and legal wills, languages—English transcribed into French and then translated back into English) suggests the dispersive strategy of the narrative. The very existence of the work is owing to the plans of two men (Gildon and Curll) to expose her. Sir Charles Lovemore and the Chevalier D’Aumont are two literal-minded characters who misunderstand her published double entendres. They talk about her, but never are her actual whereabouts disclosed: proper femininity is disclosed to be nothing more than a patriarchal fiction within which the woman herself is absent. What Lovemore pimps to his

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male reader is his own fantasy of the absent author. However, the absent author is in reality his author. It is, after all, Lovemore who is the fictional creation. Manley’s consummate irony is evident here. While the man appears to have author’ the perfect female object she is, in reality, elsewhere authoring him. (Ballaster, 150)

They reonstruct her missing body, disjoining her into eyes, hair, skin, lips, teeth, hands, arms, neck, breasts, and feet. Although she is “inclined to fat,” and marked by smallpox, the men produce an erotic object with no libido spoilers such as “Red hair, Out-Mouth, thin and livid Lips, black Broken Teeth, [or] splay Feet” (AR 48). This imagined body is searched for outward signs of amorous propensities and talents, although Lovemore admits that he “never saw any of Rivella’s hidden Charms.” Because her intellect and authorial powers make him uneasy, Lovemore commends the fact that “she rarely speaks of her own Writing” (49). He can praise her mind only for its dependent feminine qualities of loyalty and gratefulness. D’Aumont conflates her body with the body of an amatory text: “I find myself resolved to be in love with Rivella. I easily forgive want of beauty in her face, to the charms you tell me are in her person” (49). Apparently, neither recalls The New Atalantis’ indictment of men who, while they engage in sexual intercourse, veil the ugly face of “the most beautiful woman in Atalantis from the neck down.” Both men misinterpret politically charged sex scenes of The New Atalantis as “high ideas of the dignity of human kind” (44). D’Aumont considers the text an aphrodisiac: “After perusing her inchanting descriptions, which of us have not gone in search of raptures which she everywhere tells us, as happy mortals, we are capable of tasting.” Of course, the promiscuous villains and suffering mistresses of Atalantis hardly qualify as “happy Mortals” nor does the attack on Whig corruption have anything to do with a panegyric on love. Indeed, the word ‘happy’ becomes laden with the bitterest irony in the course of its many repetitions in The New Atalantis.11 Lovemore is inept at uncovering secrets. Hopelessly literal-minded (“but what else could she mean?”) and misogynistic (“what is not a crime in men is scandalous and unpardonable in woman”), he never values her beyond her sexuality: “I believe [sexual raptures] are to be met no where else but in her embraces.” He has no taste for satire’s “folly” and “notorious indiscretion.” He cannot understand Rivella’s involvement in national politics: “I began with railing at her books; the barbarous design of exposing people that never had done her any injury” (107). His favorite examples of her writing are ephemeral notes she has written to himself: he “ever will maintain, that all her other productions however successful they have been, come short of her talent in writing letters: [he] has numbers of them” (53). Is it any wonder that Rivella returns his

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correspondence unopened? His many attempts at “caution and advice” only expose his obtuseness. He even has the temerity to wish that Rivella had “died with honour” rather than be “ruin’d” by bigamy (60). Rivella subtly baits Lovemore with the promise “to be ashamed of her writings” as soon as “the world would have the goodness to forget those she had already committed” to print (112). Manley’s examination for seditious libel forms one of the crucial memories of Rivella: “several times exposing her in person to walk across the court before the Bench of Judges” (115). Under the objectifying gaze of her prosecutors, she conceals the secret of her political motives with the ruse of romantic “inspiration” indulged merely “for her own diversion and amusement” (110–111). The law-suit digression, with its complicated exposition of the back-biting and greed of “that worthless brood of Doubles” deflects attention away from the amatory Rivella.12 Her adultery with John Tilly, magistrate and warden of Newgate prison, becomes a mere footnote in the Albemarle trial. Tilly (Cleander) represented Ralph Montagu, Duke of Albemarle (Lord Crafty), while Manley’s former husband John Manley (Don Marcus) represented John Granville, Earl of Bath (Baron Meanwell), in a battle over the Albemarle fortune. Transforming “this eighteenth-century Jarndyce v. Jarndyce” (Morgan, 102) into a farce of madness, disguise, drunkenness, and stupidity, the digression serves as an effective smokescreen over Manley’s possible culpability. Although Rivella intrigues with two men who were her lovers, money, not love or sex, motivates them. A moronic “booby” replaces Rivella in Cleander’s bed. Crazy schemes backfire, and the men’s comical mishaps make their moral compromises seem bumbling but not vicious. They victimize themselves so thoroughly that further punishment seems unnecessary. The reader, distracted by the men’s performance, almost forgets about Rivella who remains out of sight during much of the bustle. Surely Manley could have tried to justify her legal entanglements and her love affair with Tilly in fewer pages. The long account of the trial relegates Manley to a minor role in her own life; it conceals a sexual passion that biographers agree was her most intense. No amatory rhetoric describes the lovers. They never touch or kiss. The reader learns of their attraction from Lovemore, a thwarted suitor, who reports only that they look at each other often and take pleasure in the same book. Dramatic events occur in their ‘love nest,’ but often those events have nothing to do with Rivella. Furthermore, the plot takes another seemingly gratuitous twist by bringing in a minor character: the seventeen-year-old aspiring actress Bella,13 a curious travesty or antiself of the younger dramatist Manley: That wench was perfectly Mercurial, and had the greatest propensity to Intrigue, and bringing people together; tho’ her Lady was not acquainted

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with her talent, no more than her other qualifications of dissimulation: for she was perfectly demure before her Mistress: Bell was greatly in her favour, because she used at spare times to entertain her with scraps of Plays and amorous speeches in heroicks . . . and when she was abroad, the wench was always repeating in a theatrical tone and manner. (AR 95)

‘Booby’ Tim falls in love with Bella, and their tawdry “amour” is more fully described than the love between Rivella and Cleander. In a sense, Bella eventually replaces or supplants Rivella’s authority for a significant stretch of the narrative: “To conclude, Bella was become the head of the company, neither durst Rivella contradict her” (98). Rivella is further displaced by other women: Don Marcus’ first wife and Cleander’s rich widow. The crucial events surrounding Manley’s bigamous marriage are sidelined: Lovemore simply tells D’Aumont to go and read the five pages on Delia in The New Atalantis. Moments of intense feeling are distanced and mediated through an unreliable narrator. When Cleander’s wife dies, Rivella anticipates his pursuit of another rich woman to wed. But she is deprived even of a private conversation with him by Lovemore’s intrusion into their rooms. She withdraws into a kind of selfnegation or dispersal, leaving Cleander and Lovemore to settle matters: “I am undone from this moment,” she says. The text maintains an ironic insistence on Rivella as a secondary effect. Passages that “quote” her remain technically speech acts by Lovemore, such as her defense of satire: “she was proud of having more courage than had any of our sex, and of throwing the first stone, which might give a hint for other persons of more capacity to examine the defects, and vices of some men who took a delight to impose upon the world, by the pretence of publick good, whilst their true design was only to gratify and advance themselves” (108): She told me that her self was Author of the Atalantis, for which three innocent persons were taken up and would be ruined with their families; that she was resolved to surrender herself into the messenger’s hands, whom she heard had the Secretary of State’s warrant against her, so to discharge those honest people from their imprisonment. (107)

Obtuse Lovemore only “stared upon her and thought her directly mad.” This defense of satire contrasts with the defense she offers in court, where her writings become “stark naught,” “a few amorous trifles purely for her own amusement,” written not by design but by “inspiration.” Who is authorized to tell and judge the truth of Rivella’s adventures? The male interlocutors Lovemore and D’Aumont would like to reveal Rivella, right down to those “hidden charms” neither will ever see. But she is dispersed among several subject positions (mistress, daughter, gamester, author) and

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several discourses (heroic, comic, erotic) without resolving the contradictions. Ultimately the narrators return her to the status of sexual object in a homosocial exchange. The disintegrated parts of Rivella (the pock marks coexisting with the fair complexion) can achieve coherence or autonomy only with a secret adhesive that we have not been given. Like the ephemeral, fragmentary remains of Varro and Mennipus, the absent satirists she emulates, her autobiography leaves gaps, spaces, and open “faults” where a woman can stash a few secrets. Resisting full disclosure, withholding intimacy, managing the effects of gossip on reputation— she narrates her life as being radically conditional, as the experience of being misconstrued and disenfranchised. Like Berintha, she has a few laughs at the expense of those who long for but cannot possess her secrets: “she said she did no more by others, than others had done by her (i.e.) tattle of frailties” (AR 108). Manley’s ironic rendering of homosocial gossip is especially insistent at the beginning and the end of the history. Lovemore begins his discourse on Rivella while he and D’Aumont enjoy a garden on a hot summer day, a sultry setting reminiscent of Manley’s fictional erotic encounters. Both are so caught up in their fantasies about her that neither man needs her actual presence. Lovemore will “give her” to D’Aumont for his pleasure: “I should have brought you to her table . . . shown you her sparkling with and easy gaiety, . . . From thence carried you . . . to a Bed nicely sheeted and strow’d with Roses, Jessamins or Orange-Flowers . . . given you leave to fancy yourself the happy man, with whom she chose to repose herself” (113). She keeps the truth about herself secret by deflecting attention onto various misperceptions and distortions of her. Ironically (although the irony escapes Lovemore), Rivella keeps in her pocket a copy of La Rochefoucauld’s cynical maxims, which she “admired and remembered” (84). These maxims appear again in the autobiographical satire of Jonathan Swift.

The Secret Life of Swift From the early “sublime mysteries” of A Tale of a Tub (PW 1:32) to the late scatological “Secrets of the hoary Deep” in “The Ladies Dressing-Room,” from ephemeral riddles for his friends to interpretive enigmas in Gulliver’s Travels, Swift’s work exhibits a fascination with secrecy and abjures the Houyhnhnm ideal, that we most value things of apparent meaning “that strike [us] with immediate conviction” (PW 11:267). The autobiographical fragment, “The Family of Swift” (5:187–195), suggests that he inherited a tendency toward stealth, or at least that he identified most strongly with

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those of his ancestors who were adept at it. An anecdote about Thomas Swift’s devotion to Charles I centers on an act of subterfuge. Swift takes obvious pride in the cleverness of this patriarch who, although plundered at least thirty-six times by the Roundheads, managed to conceal a large sum of money by quilting it into a waistcoat. He escaped to “a town held for the King” where: being asked . . . what he could do for his Majesty . . . take my wastcoat, he bid . . . [The Governor] ordering it to be unripp’d found it lin’d with three hundred broad pieces of gold, which as it proved a seasonable relief, must be allowed an extraordinary supply from a private Clergyman with ten children of a small Estate. (5:189)

The size of the sum, “three hundred broad pieces of gold,” implies that he had been engaged in this secret tailoring for some time. Swift also savors the dramatic moment of revelation, in which Thomas merely hands over his vest and surprises the governor with its generous surprise. Equally vivid is Thomas’ spontaneous plot to sabotage Cromwell’s soldiers. After discovering their intended route to battle, he contrived a number of iron spikes and “plac’d them at night in the field where . . . the Rebels would pass early the next morning, which they accordingly did, and lost two hundred of their men” (5:189). Swift’s pleasure in his progenitor’s successful secrecy overcomes any commiseration he (as clergyman) might be expected to feel at the violent fate of the soldiers “who were drowned or trod to death by the falling of their horses, or torn by the spikes” (189). He seems also to have inherited a penchant for mystery from his mother, who never revealed the reasons why she waited in Ireland for three years to reclaim a son known to be in Whitehaven with his nurse (5:192). (Or perhaps she did reveal reasons that her son suppressed.) Swift’s advertisement for a future work called “The Author’s Critical History of His Own Times” proposes extensive exposure of secrets: “corruptions, Frauds, Oppressions, Knaveries, and Perjuries; wherein the Names of all the Persons concerned shall be inserted at full length, with some account of their Families and Stations” (5:345)—a work he never realized. Part of Swift’s attraction to Stella was a shared propensity toward keeping things to themselves. Swift admits that her move at age nineteen to be near him in Ireland “looked . . . as if there were a secret history” (“On the Death of Stella,” PW 5:228). He savors the anecdote of how she circumvented an armed robbery by strategic concealment of her person (and by learning to shoot a gun): “She stole softly to her dining-room window, put on a black hood, to prevent being seen, primed the pistol fresh, gently lifted up the sash; and, taking aim with the utmost presence of mind,

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discharged the pistol . . . into the body of one villain” (P 5:230). Swift teases her about trying to conceal a passionate outburst “which Manners, Decency, and Pride, / Have taught you from the World to hide” (“To Stella Who Collected and Transcrib’d His Poems”). Their correspondence is filled with examples of secret understanding, beginning with “our little language” (coded as “ourichar gangridge”), including the “md’s” “lele’s,”and “pdfr’s” well known to Swift’s scholars.14 Sometimes he writes to her in code about sensitive matters: “He gave me al bsadnuk lboinlpl dfaonr ufainfbtoy dpoinufnad” (JS 1:208) and “I would hoenlbp ihainm italoi dsroanws ubpl tohne sroeqporaen siepnot last oiqobn.”15 Or he sends elaborate instructions about delivering a letter to Dean Stearn that “he must not have but under Conditions of burning it immediately after reading, & that before your Eyes” (2:655). Even the Journals’s “erasures and blottings,” it has been argued, “are to be read as a secret code”: “The spirals and strokes of his pen . . . guard a secret enclosure of thoughts and meaning” (1:liii–liv). Like Manley, he enjoyed the experience of seeing his work published while his authorship was unknown, and he confides in Stella on numerous occasions that “nobody suspects me for it” (59) or “No-body knows who it is, but those few in the secret” (185) or that not even “the Bishop of Clogher smoaks it yet” (here referring to Sid Hamet’s Rod, The New Journey to Paris and The Examiner (see JS 1:59, 1:185, 1:358). Although the sense of sharing clandestine knowledge figures significantly as an expression of love for Stella [“Keep It a Secret” (1:50); “that is a secret only to you” (1:60)], Swift had other secrets from which she was excluded, such as his relations with Vanessa (Esther Vanhomrigh) and Manley.16 The extent of his attachment to Vanessa, Swift wrote, “[i]s to the World a Secret yet . . . Must never to Mankind be told, / Nor shall the conscious Muse unfold” (P 2:712, ll. 819, 826–827). Their relationship also, Swift admits, “looked . . . as if there were a secret history” (PW 5:228), according to amatory conventions in which a beautiful young heiress with “Five thousand Guineas in her Purse” (ll. 654) grows enamored of her “paternal” tutor: “The World . . . / Wou’d say, He made a treach’rous Use / Of Wit, to flatter and seduce . . . That when Platonick Flights were over, / The Tutor turn’s a mortal Lover” (P 1:712, ll. 643–651), the typical seduction plot. Swift’s letters to Vanessa reinforce this notion with the promise of a secluded lovenest: he “will take a little Grubstreet lodging . . . and will tell you a thousand secrets provided you will have no quarrels with me” (C 1:305). He instructs her to write in cipher, “I wish your letters were as difficult as mine; for then they would be of no consequence if they were dropped by careless messengers. A stroke thus——signifies everything that may be sent to Cad——” (C 2:354). And she demonstrates her skill in code by writing a rebus on Swift’s name, with the answer “Joseph Nathan Swift.” Cadenus

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teaches Vanessa that “Virtue . . . knows nothing which it dare not own; / Can make us without fear disclose / Our inmost secrets to our Foes” (ll. 608–611). But bonds of affection between men and women, it seems, are forged by clandestine desire. Vanessa soon acts the transgressive part of the young ward, seduced by her older guardian’s “dang’rous” and attractive “Wit” and emboldened by love to disclose her forbidden passion: “I can vulgar Forms despise, / And have no Secrets to disguise” (ll. 616–617). The poem maintains a shroud over their relations: But what success Vanessa met, Is to the World a Secret yet: Whether the Nymph, to please her Swain, Talks in a high Romantick train; Or whether he at last descends To like with less Seraphick Ends; Or, to compound the Business, whether They temper Love and Books together. (818–825)

That Swift spoke of his relationships to both of the important women in his life with reference to secret history indicates the aptness of this paradigm. In other circumstances, secrets can be a means of self-preservation. “His watchful Friends preserve him by a Sleight” (“The Author upon Himself,” Poems 1:196, l. 62) when they conceal his identity as author of “The Publick Spirit of the Whigs,” for which Harley had “secretly sent him 100 pounds to reimburse the printer and the publisher.” So, too, the Irish had hidden his identity as the Drapier, a remarkable circumstance considering Swift’s description of Ireland as a place of rumor “where every thing is known in a Week, and magnified a hundred Degrees” (C 2:123). Or a capacity for stealth can enable some access to power. In “The Author upon Himself” Swift imagines his enemy Daniel Finch jealous of his friendship with Harley: “he hears for certain, / This dang’rous Priest is got behind the Curtain: / . . . that Swift oils many a spring which Harley moves” (ll. 38–40). Walpole and Ayslaby, similarly piqued at Harley’s choice of confidante, inform the House of Commons “that the Secret’s out” (l. 42). Although there was a great deal that Harley concealed from Swift, including top-level negotiations with the Pretender in France, Swift pledges “faithful Silence”: “Within our Breast be ev’ry Secret barr’d” (“To the Earl of Oxford,” Poems 1:210, ll. 15–16). Or he promotes himself as a repository of secrets to other ministers: “At Windsor Swift no sooner can appear, / But, St John comes and whispers in his Ear; . . . Delaware again familiar grows; / And, in Swift’s Ear thrusts half his powder’d Nose” (“The Author upon Himself,” ll. 33–34, 67–68). Or he protests that his close association

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with the ‘great’ makes people unfairly probe him: “And, though I solemnly declare / I know no more than my Lord Mayor, / They stand amaz’d, and think me grown / The closest Mortal ever known” (Imitation of Horace, Lib. 2. Sat. 6,” 101–104). A love of stealth is documented repeatedly by puzzles, enigmas, and jokes. The clue, “From me no secret he can hide; / I see his vanity and pride” (23–24), leads to the answer, “the writer’s pen” (Poems 3:915–916). Thomas Sheridan reports that Swift “dexterously inserted” his parody, “A Meditation on a Broomstick,” into Lady Berkeley’s copy of Boyle in order later to read it “with an inflexible gravity of countenance” (Greenberg 600–602). Maurice Johnson points out that autographs of Swift’s poems “show three different styles of writing”: a very formal script, a more relaxed script, and “the so-called disguised hand” (Vieth, 69). “A bad scrawl is so snug,” he writes to Stella ( JS 1:79), or he indulges in self-dramatization: [B]urn this Lettr immediately without telling the Contents of it to any Person alive (C 3:141). Swift wrote several autobiographical poems in which he “creates a character for himself and plays the leading role (M. Johnson in Vieth, 75).17 Johnson compares Swift to Montaigne who sought himself in the trick mirror of others’ opinions (76). Montaigne bemusedly admits that selfawareness fluctuates with changing discourses about reputation: “this breathie confusion of bruits, and frothy chaos of reports and vulgar opinions” (Essays 2:347). The character Hearsay in Rabelais (Swift’s favorite author) embodies restless, aggressive language acts; he has seven tongues split seven ways and a body covered with ears (Gargantua and Pantagruel 4:33). Aptly, Swift’s “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift,” which constructs his life as hearsay and gossip, is filled with diverse speakers and listeners. The poem has aroused lively critical debate, especially as regards the final lines (307–484). After three hundred lines of relatively mean-spirited gossip, a eulogy by an unnamed speaker at the Rose tavern pumps Swift up to heroic proportions. Brian Slepian argues for an ironic reading of the second half of the poem in order to prove its initial thesis that all humans suffer from pride (Vieth, 295–305). Marshall Waingrow objects that such a reading “lays Swift open to a charge more serious than vanity, and that is a pointless humility” (307–313). James Woolley attempts to mitigate various discordant elements by demonstrating that the poem’s seemingly ironic and distorted statements have correspondences to biographical facts (Mell, 112–122). A. B. Englund sees the “grandiloquent dramatization” at the end of the poem as a noble contest in which Swift is the hero of a mythic struggle between good and evil (175–187). Louise K. Barnett argues that “Swift’s depictions of self lack the dichotomized presentation of good opposing bad that is essential to the satiric speaker” (101–111). Barnett

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responds most explicitly to the characteristic style of Swift that Claude Rawson describes as “undermin[ing] certainties, including the certainties it consciously proclaims” (Rawson 1973:30). She sees Swift’s “profusion of perspectives on self” as evidence of his “awareness of and interest in the complexity of the self” (104). According to Barnett, “fictive self-portraiture reveals a vulnerability to forces that the poet cannot control in the world outside his poem” (109). But such a reading leads us away from satire toward sentiment; Swift becomes ultimately a victim, “prey to time, death, the distortions of malicious tongues, and his own weaknesses” (110). Barnett’s interest in multiple portraits also assumes that “dichotomized presentation of good opposing bad . . . is essential to the satiric speaker.” To the contrary, autobiographical satire, like women’s autobiography, does not necessarily conceive of the self as a battleground for good and evil, but rather as split and fractured by the violence of aggressive language that constitutes its linguistic being. Swift’s Verses privileges obfuscation more than disclosure; deliberate feints at contradictory knowledge distract us from what we would really like to know. Swift told Gay that he wrote not confessional but gossip: “near five hundred lines . . . onely to tell what my friends will say of me after I am dead” (C 4:273). If none of the poem’s speakers has the correct view of Swift, the publication history of the poem confirms Swift’s anticipation of discordant versions of himself among his actual acquaintances: “Yet thus methinks I hear’em speak” (P 2:556, l. 79). Pope and William King expunged lines they thought made Swift look too vain in the London edition. Faulkner included more lines and edited them differently for publication in Dublin. Until the twentieth century, “[t]he text and notes of the ‘Verses’ have never been fully or accurately printed” (2:552). If Pope, King, and Faulkner disagree over the ‘truth’ of the friend they share, Swift had staged a similar competition between versions of himself within the poem, as friends gossip about his advancing senility, garrulousness, foolish attempts to fraternize with young people, stubborn continuation of writing, and deteriorating appetite and body. Such contentious discourse is aggressive: each friend would “rather chuse that I should dye, / Than his prediction prove a Lye” (2:557, ll. 131–132). Death merely escalates the amount and the speed of gossip: “Before the Passing-Bell begun, / The News thro half the Town has run (151–152). Unnamed friends debate his estate and will: “What’s he left? And who’s his Heir” (155). Grubstreet wits write elegies, all printing differing versions of Swift: “Some Paragraph in ev’ry Paper, / To curse the Dean, or bless the Drapier” (168, italics in original).18 His doctors say that he was a bad patient who did not follow advice (171–176). At court in London, Lady Suffolk and Queen Caroline, Chartres and Walpole rationalize their ill treatment of him by reinventing

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him as unworthy (178–196). Tibbald, Moore, and Cibber each produce different ‘Swifts’ by erroneously editing his works, while Curll completely fictionalizes him in spurious texts (197–205). People who are a year younger try to think of him as much older (219–224). Card-playing friends do not bother to stop their game while they blur memories of him with “what is trumps” (225–242). After a year, the bookseller Lintot struggles to recollect the ‘Swift’ who has been overwritten by second-rate hacks (ll. 253–298). The club at the Rose continues to spawn contending versions of Swift: “they toss my name about, / Some with favour, and some without” (ll. 303–304). Only two lines are devoted to his three closest (and presumably most reliable) friends, Pope, Arbuthnot, and Gay, who remain silent (ll. 207–208). The last part of the poem, the much-debated eulogy by the “impartial speaker” (ll. 307–484), seems to sustain one point of view and to stabilize the jostle of preceding accounts, but “numberless” versions of Swift’s life continue in the footnotes.19 The poem does not mention his love of secrecy; the final irony is that all of his describers miss this essential quality.

Pope: “So Shall Each Hostile Name Become Our Own” Pope wrote no less enigmatic autobiographical satires, including An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, To Fortescue (Sat. 2:1), the Epilogue to the Satires, Dialogues 1 and 2, and The Dunciad with its ‘variorum’ apparatus. As Dustin Griffin points out, self-representation accompanies the climactic moments of the early poems and becomes a more pervasive practice over time (1978:165). Pat Rogers concurs that Pope “devoted much of his career to a process of deliberate self-fashioning as an artist” (2002: 236). But while Griffin finds Pope “[s]tudying his own character” in order to explore predicaments that “confront all those who . . . must live in a world at once exhilarating, gratifying, and offensive” (165), I believe that autobiographical satire in the later poems resists such a reading. Rather than delineating qualities shared with “all,” the poems proffer a unique (because uniquely unknowable) consciousness. The Dunciad ’s expanding forms suggests, in contrast to the promise of saying merely “something” of himself in the advertisement to Arbuthnot that he is compelled to say more and more. Numerous self-referential footnotes and appendices fail to ensure greater sense of clarity and intimacy with the poet. We have information yet are

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missing important kinds of knowledge. Griffin, aware of Pope’s inconsistencies, believes that the poet represented himself “with wry amusement” (66) according to “two competing principles” of identity (67): part-Achilles (vengeful and aggressive) and part-Hector (virtuous and friendly). These discordant versions, Griffin argues, occasionally achieve harmony. We can begin to reconsider this insight by recalling that Pope, like Manley, engaged in intrigues with Edmund Curll over the threatened publication of unauthorized biographical material. In Manley’s case, the resulting Adventures of Rivella seems to fulfill feminist theories of women’s autobiography. Two men narrate/gossip about her life, but she has invented the two men. How does the parallel circumstance of pirating one’s own life play out in Pope’s case? Does his self-representation “stan[d] at the base of his poetic world” in order to “encompass a wider world” (Griffin 1978:164) in which a coherent moral system depends on a coherent integrated self? Or, when offering “to say something of [him]self,” does he offer the reader inconsistent autobiographical fragments in order to make himself “radically inaccessible” to the world that would know him? Does he follow his own command to Arbuthnot to “shut the door” on certain closeted areas of his life? In 1722 Pope wrote to Robert Digby about a favorite garden: “I look upon myself as the Magician appropriated to the place without whom no mortal can penetrate into the recesses of those sacred Shades” (Corr 2:115). He claims to feel empowered by concealment in this verdant arbor, and the scene can serve as a metaphor for the shadier strategies of concealment that inform his poetic career. He habitually professed sincerity and transparency—“pour[ing] himself out plain,” “throwing [him]self upon paper” (1:111), exposing “thoughts just warm from the brain without polishing or dress” (1:160). But his editors, critics, and contemporaries concur that he “love[d] mystification and devious ways” (Guerinot, xxxiii). “Mr. Pope desires that the business of Homer may be carried on with all imaginable secrecy,” wrote Fenton to Broome about their collaboration on translating the Greek text (Corr 2:106). And indeed, Pope often reiterated this need: “I must once more put you in mind, that the whole success of this affair will depend upon your secrecy”; “Pray keep the utmost secrecy in this matter”; “I think I need not recommend to you further the necessity of keeping this whole matter to yourself” (103, 164, 271). Years later his correspondence with Atterbury was conveyed to Harley by stealth (“I depend upon your Lordships not showing it to any one: You’l [sic] lock it up” [Corr 3:187]), as was The Dunciad (“I desire you to keep locked up & send not one of the Dunciads to any body” [3:25]). Pope stops hiding things only at the end of his life when he is too sick to write poetry. It has taken several centuries to unearth some of what he buried.

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The autobiographical poems contain the crucial figures for this book’s reconsideration of satire: the gossip, the Don Juan figure, the problem mother, the illegitimate child, the promise-breaker, the secret sharer. Two mutually reinforcing processes are at work during the course of Pope’s career, especially after 1729. He became increasingly a satirist, but as he did so he became increasingly autobiographical. Like Edmund Spenser’s Blatant Beast (evoked in a pamphlet attack on Pope), “the capacity of language to run abroad, to carry a defiling aggression outward into the world, also depends on the way that the language of slander takes hold of, or finds an anchor in, the space of private thought and fantasy” (Gross, 108). Pope, who fulfills Broome’s injunction to build “with the very stones that are thrown at him by the hands of the malicious,” shows how injurious language creates possibilities for agency and constitutes a self. The autobiographical poems allude to and appropriate language from the attacks on Pope. The Dunciad Variorum not only references such “stones” in the poem and its footnotes, but adds complete lists of titles (over sixty in Appendix II) and direct quotations (Appendices V and VI). Like Swift and Manley, Pope feigned innocence while readers responded to a work he had not signed: “I cant imagine when it comes to pass that the few Guardians I have written are so generally known for mine: that in particular which you mention I never discovered to any man but the publisher till very lately, yet almost every body I met with told me of it” (Corr 1:193).20 Pretending that the Essay on Man is not his own, he wrote to Caryll: “The town is now very full of a new poem . . . attributed, I think with reason, to a divine. It has merit in my opinion, but not so much as they give it” (3:354). After the publication of The Dunciad Variorum, he told Caryll that “friends who took so much pains to comment on it, must come off with the public as they can” (3:36), although he had written most of the notes himself. He teases Swift about being less adept at tricks of hiding authorship: “one [publication] I am sure is yours . . . your method of concealing your self puts me in mind of the bird I have read of in India, who hides his head in a hole, while all his feathers and tail stick out” (3:401). “Pope surely, was the ultimate master of such games,” observes Rogers (2002:243). Control over the revelation of names is fundamental to Pope’s notion of satiric artistry. Despite entreaties from his adverserius, he depicts himself in the Epilogue to the Satires Dia. 2 as a deft secret keeper in a world ever eager for scandal. F. Scandal! Name them, Who? P. Why that’s the thing you bid me not to do. Who starv’d a sister, who foreswore a Debt,

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I never nam’d—the Town’s enquiring yet. The pois’ning Dame—Fr. You mean—P. I don’t. –F. You do. P. See! Now I keep the Secret, and not you. (TE 4:314, ll. 18–23)

More importantly, Pope had his own problems to conceal, especially his physical ones. Neither as concerned with sexual/political intrigue as Manley nor as playfully secretive as Swift, he constructs an identity of which the ‘inside’ must always be valued over the ‘outside.’ The visible or manifest Pope who could be shown, whose existence was demonstrable, was truly ‘monstrous’ (monstrare [L. and Fr. to show, to prove, OED 631]).21 The grotesque body of a satyr seemed eerily mimicked by the grotesque body of the satirist. The hidden, inner Pope (L. secretum, OED 356) could imagine his life as a secluded journey or secretum iter (Mack 1969:113) and himself as the handsome hero of his own contrived friendships, amours, and adventures. The personal attribute that caused him the most physical and emotional pain—his deformity—was the most frequent topic of verbal/emotional abuse of him. Legal issues of slander and libel only partially explain Pope’s games of concealment. Anonymity serves him as a mechanism of perceptual control, as if his frustrated desire to hide his body were acted out through the bodies of his texts. Pope delighted in ingenious subterfuge with booksellers (Corr 1:xvii): “The title page of the 1728 Dunciad claimed that it was a London reprint of an earlier Dublin edition: this was quite fictitious, and gave the deliberate impression that the work had been published in a clandestine way” (Rogers 2002:237).22 His “carefully engineered” publication of the Essay on Man involves the anonymous release of separate moral essays (“To Burlington,” “To Bathurst,” 1731, 1733), then the issuance of the first Imitations of Horace with his name—all under Gilliver’s imprint. Then the first three epistles of Essay on Man appeared anonymously with a publisher called John Wilford who had never been associated with Pope. This ruse confused his enemies, who praised the poem. Mack describes some consequences of the deliberate confusion: “[Those] not in the secret reported . . . that the Town was currently reading, along with the poem to Bathurst, ‘An Essay on Man by a New Author’ . . . several of the dunces went on record at this time with tributes they could not afterward decently retract” (Mack 1985:522; Rogers 2002:238). Pope’s career-long machinations over anonymity can be conceptualized as a practice of secrecy that allows a sense of self. To choose to remain unknown, to resist scrutiny, to withhold information—these behaviors paradoxically give Pope a greater sense of completeness and integrity. Furthermore, Pope’s contrivances often create the illusion of excitability; they imply that his words have been wrested from him. He did not choose to be “dip’t in ink” or to be “born for nothing but to write”

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(TE 4:104, 115, ll. 126, 272). To some extent, of course, this compulsion for selective anonymity also masks a desire for fame. To this end, Pope hoped the correspondence would vindicate his reputation for honesty and virtue, but it, too, has a history of seemingly needless intrigue. He had smarted over Curll’s publication of his early letters to Henry Cromwell, and over his loss of the rights to William Wycherley’s letters. Determined to have more success with his correspondence with Swift, after wheedling back the originals, he pursued a labyrinthine course of publication. He secretly printed an octavo edition; in order to get a copy to Swift he used an unsuspecting intermediary, Samuel Gerrard. An unsigned letter in an unknown hand accompanied the delivered volume, while Pope covered his tracks by writing to Gerrard that he had nothing to send to Swift (Corr 1:xiv–xviii). But anonymity also allows reckless aftereffects. Pope told Caryll that his unnamed enemies were a special target of his satire because they “slander and belie my character in private, to those who know me not.” There is no way of controlling the dispersal of these randomly circulating versions of his self. Like Manley, Pope discovered that Curll, who advertised in 1733 for relevant information and documents, intended to produce his unauthorized biography, doubtless unexpurgated of embarrassing details.23 Like Manley, Pope sought means of circumventing these plans. Over the course of several months, he wrote to Curll in the guise of the mysterious “P. T.” who claimed to have a substantial cache of Pope’s letters. When Curll attempted to force Pope into cooperation by indicating that he had a secret source of documents, “Pope loudly scorned the overture . . . and after long, sly, and even melodramatic intrigues, on 12 May 1735 mysterious agents began delivering at the shop of Curll octavo volumes of Pope’s printed letters, in various stages of completeness” (Corr 1:xiii). Pope’s secret machinations seem almost comical: “By a series of intrigues and intermediaries, including at one point a London actor dressed to look like a clergyman [Pope] had duped Curll into buying the unbound sheets and thus becoming their apparent publisher and unmistakably their first distributor” (Mack 1985:653).24 By pirating his own work to sensationalize its first appearance and then publishing an authorized version (in which he blotted many a line) to renew public attention, Pope, according to Sherburn, Rogers, and others, managed to produce “a more perfect image of himself” (Corr 1:xiv). More perfect? It seems more accurate to argue that he produces more imperfect, discrepant versions of himself, because each version is in discursive competition with others. Perhaps, as Dennis Todd argues with respect to images of Pope’s deformity, “the proliferation of roles atomizes as well as articulates the self, . . . in all of his sliding from role to role, his self may be

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undergoing a kind of dispersion” (Todd, 258).25 When the act of naming is detached from clear authorship and authority, “Cook shall be Prior, and Concanen, Swift: / So shall each hostile name become our own” (Dunciad 2:138–139). Pope described the dispersive effects of gossip as a bloodlust sacrifice involving dismemberment: “so now they pull some harmless little creature into pieces, and worry his character together very comfortably.” (Corr 1:171). Although he sometimes may be able to identify the source of gossip, he cannot contain the effects: “Mrs. Nelson and Mrs. Englefield have served me just thus” (171). Men gossip too, disseminating slander from the coffeehouse: “Mr. Philips did express himself with much indignation against me one evening at Button’s Coffee-house (as I was told) . . . [He] did all he could, secretly to continue the report with the Hanover Club” (1:229). Guerinot observes that “his enemies published and popularized wildly inaccurate and misleading versions of what ever they could find against him” (xxxiii). Although we can identify some of the authors of the 158 pamphlet attacks on Pope published between 1711 and 1748, they must “be seen as only a part of a much larger phenomenon.”26 The majority (more than 130) were anonymous (Guerinot, xxvi), giving the cumulative effect of an ubiquitous invisible enemy: “It is much as though a quarterly magazine devoted entirely to attacks on one author should run for thirty years . . . The pamphlet attacks deeply influenced both Pope and his writing. . . . The Dunciad and The Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot are sure evidence that Pope had read, and read with care, most of the attacks” (xxiii, xlvi, li). As nameless Grubstreet writers multiply in the Dunciad Variorum (1729), so they responded with more unsigned Popiads and Female Dunciads (xxiii). Their “imputed Trash” and “abuse” are reformulated by Pope in imitations of Horace (“the libel’d person and the pictur’d shape” [TE 4:121, l. 353]). The more they waged war, the more Pope became a warrior; the cruder the images of him, the more ingeniously grotesque became the imagery of his poetry. He tells about himself by referencing the libels against him by others, but only in bits and pieces, a fragmented series of acts of interpellation. He cultivates the persona of vir bonus who “stooped to Truth and moraliz’d his song” (Arbuthnot, 341). This persona heroically declares, “arm’d for Virtue . . . I point the Pen . . . to Virtue only . . . a Friend” (TE 4:17, l. 121) and “the last Pen for Freedom let me draw / When Truth stands trembling on the edge of Law” (5:327, ll. 248–249).27 Griffin speaks for the critical majority in his belief that Pope’s self-representation is personal without being private, a “carefully calculated performance, acted out in a public arena and designed to persuade an audience” of his integrity (12).28 But control over public opinion is not easy. Pope affects

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nonchalance—“can I chuse but smile / When ev’ry Coxcomb knows me by my Style?” (5:116, ll. 281–282)—but sounds a little strained. Both anonymity and self-identification involve different kinds of concealment, a difficulty that drives Pope into anxious missives and awkward bawdy jests.29 He may be responding to the extent with which the Popiana associates him with secrecy. The theme of secrecy occurs frequently in the attacks. “Why How Now Gossip Pope?” was John Henley’s title for a pamphlet attack that accused Pope of “us[ing] the Old Woman’s Weapon of malicious Gossiping, venomous Scandal, and lying Chit-chat” (Guerinot, 4). Pope is quoted as saying of his collaboration with Swift, “Who better knows than I his Dirt to throw? / To wound in Secret either Friend or Foe?” (Tales, Epistles, Odes, Fables, Guerinot, 120). His detractors dismiss his poses of equanimity as instances “[w]hen soft expressions covert-Malice hide, / And pitying Satire cloaks o’er-weening Pride” (Cythereia Guerinot, 86). John Dennis’ Reflections Critical and Satirical, Upon a Late Rhapsody, Call’ d an Essay on Criticism accuses Pope of behaving “in a clandestine manner with the utmost falsehood” (A3r; Guerinot, 2). In A True Character of Mr. Pope, and His Writings, Dennis and Charles Gildon (who had planned to write The History of Rivella) dismiss Pope as “the Secret Author of so much stupid Calumny . . . he openly extoll’d Sir Richard Steele [but] secretly publish’d the infamous Libel of Sir Andrew Tripe upon him” (3, 6–7). Thomas Burnet writes of Pope’s Key to the Lock, “I have a Master-Key now under File, with which I shall be able to unlock all their Secrets from the Beginning” (Grumbler v; Guerinot, 33); of the Scriblerian play What D’ye Call It, he writes that Pope has “found out a new and happy Secret, which makes Burlesque for ever after an easy Task, which is, writing infinitely worse than those you intend to ridicule” (Grumbler v). The Flying Post and Achilles Dissected assert that he has “been many Years a Spy of State” (28) whose “Eyes pry ev’ry where.” Or he is accused of hiring Richard Savage as a spy (“One that seem’d and was a Spy,” Tales, Epistles, Odes, Guerinot, 162). After acquiring nasty secrets to use as “clandestine Weapons,” he “[s]kulking, the scandal privately disperse[s]”. Richard Morley, Eliza Haywood, and Colly Cibber joined anonymous authors to produce “intrigues and amours” that cast Pope as a secret lover of the Duchess of Buckingham, of Martha Blount, and of nameless prostitutes (“The Life of the Celebrated Elizabeth Wisebourn” [Guerinot, 80]; Memoirs of a Certain Island [Guerinot, 90]; “A Second Letter from Mr. Cibber to Mr. Pope”; The Female Dunciad [Guerinot, 142]). Ned Ward, in “Apollo’s Maggot in his Cups,” involves Pope in secret history by claiming that “Mr. Pope keeps a House of intrigue at Twickenham . . . and that’s the Reason why so many Gentlemen and Ladies are his constant Subscribers.” Memoirs of the Court of Lilliput includes him along with Gulliver/Swift in

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the closet intrigues of the Brobdingnagian Maids of Honour (16–17, Guerinot, 99). Frequently his detractors attempt to expose, strip, uncover, and undress his concealed deformities: “to pull the Lyon’s Skin from this little Ass” (“Remarks upon Mr. Pope’s Translation of Homer,” A2r). The Progress of Dulness ridicules his use of Rosicrucian mysteries in The Rape of the Lock: “From Gabalis, his Mushroom Fictions rise” (Guerinot, 122–124). He is four times deciphered in Gulliver Decyphered (Guerinot, 100–102). Hervey’s “A Letter to Mr. C[ib]b[e]r, On his Letter to Mr. P[ope]” reacts to secrecy and obscurity in The Dunciad: “there is no one Article you can name, in which it is not so obscure, that, according to Milton’s phrase, it is a Darkness to be felt in ev’ry Line by ev’ry Reader” (Guerinot, 296, italics in original). Hiding within the cultivated figure of the gentleman-poet, the pamphlet writers discover a “snarling elf” (Monthly Chronicle; Guerinot, 117). No wonder Pope urged Caryll to return letters secretly that reveal his naked “thoughts . . . without polishing or dress, the very dishabille of the understanding” (Corr 1:160). He also told Caryll that “[m]ore men’s reputations . . . are whispered away, than any other ways destroyed” (1:168). There can be no confidence in someone “[w]ho has the Vanity to call you Friend . . . [w]ho tells whate’er you think, whate’er you say” (TE 5:117, ll. 295, 297). Todd argues that Pope’s self-representations reveal a profound “anxiety about his monstrosity [which] prompted him to cultivate new modes of poetry in which he simultaneously addressed the ethical dimension of ‘human life and manners’ and laid open his heart to the readers” (238– 239). But metaphors of opening the heart, we have seen, have counterparts in acts of linguistic aggression, so a different process is also at work. Todd grounds his argument about “the complex interplay of Pope’s notions of identity, monstrosity, and the imagination” (219) in Pope’s worry over the possible correspondence between inner and outer selves, in light of “the way many people in the eighteenth century conceived of the relationship between the mind and the body” (267). Deformed bodies were understood to harbor minds adept at spying and whispering: Bacon remarks that they [the deformed] are “good spials [i.e. spies] and good whisperers.” . . . [t]hey advance themselves by spreading scandal, gossip, and lies . . . But all of this is conducted under a mask of friendship, virtue, and sanctity.” (Todd, 227)

Such mischievous espionage also undermines the manliness of ‘monsters,’ casting doubt on their authority and their progeny. ‘Real’ men are not afraid to stand up, show their faces and fight, according to gendered constructions of bravery and cowardice. In contrast, spies lurk in corners; they are functionally marginalized while others openly wield power. Capable of

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breeding only more distorted shapes of truth, monsters lack (re)productive viability. In light of these associations, the intersection of satire and secrecy in Pope’s work must be reconciled with his problematic masculinity. Pope’s masculinity becomes a point of contention in assessments of his moral authority. Aggressive masculinity is central to traditional ideas about satire, autobiographical and otherwise. The aggressive male was epitomized in the figure of the virile aristocrat, who fascinated (and sometimes shocked) the eighteenth century with his power through body and text. Pope, invoking this model of authority, sometimes plays the amorous rake, boasting to Congreve about his attraction to the Blount sisters: “How gladly wou’d I give all I am worth, that is to say, my Pastorals for one of their Maidenheads, & my Essay for the other” (Corr 1:137, italics in original). Or he writes to Martha about Teresa’s plan to cross-dress and with him “go a Rakeing” (274). He emulates (before 1720) witty poets like Rochester, Cowley, Dorset, Waller, and Congreve. But Pope was considered a ludicrous lover by his contemporaries, and often he confesses his own insecurities.30 Swift might identify with the spider’s masculine bluster and disputatious aggression in The Battel of the Books. But Pope’s poet-figure Dick Distick (“a lively little Creature, with long Arms and legs: A Spider is no ill Emblem of him” [Guardian 92]) seems ineffectual. Pope might facetiously defend the “dignity of littleness” by pointing at “those Hyperbolical Monsters of the Species, the tall Fellows” (Guardian 91). More often the “little Poet,” “little Lover,” and “little politician” seem empty bravado: “’Tis certain the greatest magnifying glasses in the world are a man’s own eyes, when they look upon his own person; yet even in those, I appear not the great Alexander Mr Caryll is so civil to, but that little Alexander the women laugh at” (Corr 1:114). How then does “Gossip Pope” justify the claim, “I must be proud to see / Men not afraid of God, afraid of me”? Pope reimagines, in the later poems, the beautiful warrior and lover whose dangerous urges toward power, reckless generation, and illegitimate succession, and whose inconstancy and self-dispersal challenge the construction of a masculine subject. To the examples of Don Juan and the Duke of Monmouth (who exemplify the destabilization of self as a consequence of gossip, as explained in chapter 5), we now add another figure of authority whose hunchback inspired comparisons by Pope’s enemies. Shakespeare’s Richard III infamously sought women and the throne and became, as Todd points out, a “memorable literary depiction of the deformed.” Richard’s combination of bestiality and seductiveness is echoed in the pamphlet attacks on Pope. Likened to spiders, dogs, and toads, Richard nonetheless wields rhetorical power. He is proud to be “subtle, false, and treacherous,” and finds pleasure in manipulating “Deceits,” “Plots,”

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“libels,” and “secret mischiefs” (Todd, 227). His opening soliloquy expresses frustrated sexuality, as he broods over visions of a lover “caper[ing] nimbly in a lady’s chamber / To the lascivious pleasing of a lute,” or gazing in “an amorous looking-glass,” or “strut[ting] before a wanton ambling nymph” (1:i.12–13, 15, 17). First claiming that his “own deformity” means that he “cannot prove a lover” (i. 27, 28), Richard in the next scene demonstrates his seductive powers over the widowed Anne. She calls him a “Lump of foul deformity” (57), “hedgehog” (102), and “toad” (147), but eventually his speech acts overpower her, and she yields to the allure of images “figured in [his] tongue” (193). But Richard’s sexuality never escapes the shadow of impotency. Anne “never yet one hour in his bed / Did . . . enjoy the golden dew of sleep” (4:i. 82–83). Like Don Juan, he considers all women to be replaceable. When Anne no longer serves his purpose [“Rumor it abroad / That Anne my queen is very grievous sick; . . . I must be married to my brother’s daughter” (ii. 49–50, 60)], he seduces the Duchess of York into forming an alliance between him and her daughter (iv) by promising to sire grandchildren. Richard, of course, is the destroyer, not the procreator, of children: “Shall I be plain? I wish the bastards dead” (ii.18). His vows mean nothing. When Buckingham reminds him “of what you promis’d me,” Richard replies, “Well, but what’s a’ clock?” (ii.111– 112). His crookedness embodies several sources of anxiety about masculine authority and its inability to secure a stable future or succession. Todd cites Bacon’s essay “Of Deformity” (which Curll had published with the subtitle “A Looking-Glass for Mr. Pope” [228]) to show that men like Richard III find pleasure in aggressive language that can hurt others: “Look when he fawns, he bites; and when he bites / His venom tooth will rankle to the death” (I.iii.290–291). The speech act (of fawning) ultimately inflicts pain, and such injurious language seems to link deformity and satire. However, the accusation of fawning also introduces the possibility of effeminacy. The world is spared his monstrous generation because of his questionable manliness. Monstrosity and procreation are recurrent issues in the autobiographical satires in which constructions of masculinity (and femininity) reveal failures of authority (and authorship). Arbuthnot, the Epilogue to the Satires, and The Dunciad illustrate the important tension between ideas of paternity and maternity in Pope’s self-appraisal. Todd privileges paternity by focusing on Pope’s concern over the transmission of the father’s image to his children: “[t]he monstrous births in the Dunciad point to Pope’s own conviction that a poet’s identity was incarnated in his art, that his character was mirrored in it just as a father’s image is mirrored in his child ” (Todd, 222–223, emphasis added). Would a deformed man produce deformed offspring? In Arbuthnot (especially in the earliest manuscript draft),

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attention has been drawn to Pope’s celebration of his father. Pope’s own succession, inheritance, and legitimacy are emphasized and defended— and explicitly compared to those “who sprung from Kings” (405). In comparison to the political paradigm of the potent male aristocrat (both the beautiful Monmouth and the ugly Richard III), Pope asserts his birthright to the ‘throne’ (of poetry): “No Pow’r the Muse’s Friendship can command” (Epilogue to the Satires Dia. 2:118). But like the other royal contenders, he has mixed motives: he defends a just cause, but he involves himself in secret plots; he is endowed with a problematic mix of creative and destructive powers. The poet’s self-portrait, then, shows traces of the rake-warrior-lover— that is, the ‘problem’ male aristocrat who is a repository of power, yet who is fragmented by inconstancy and by the slanderous discourse he seems to provoke. The Epilogue to the Satires Dia. 2 raises the issue of ‘great’ men and their reputations in its roll call of worthies: Scarbrow, Kent, Pelham, Sommers, Halifax, Shrewsbury, Carleton, Stanhope, Atterbury, Pulteney, Chesterfield, Argyle, Wyndham, Kyrle (the Man of Ross), Lord Mayor Barbard, Cobham, Polwarth, Bolingbroke, Hough, and Digby (65–132, 240–241). “[T]he proud list” (92) reflects on the “proud” poet, who applies the word to himself four times. But the virtuous “Fathers shine” briefly, only to give way to “their degen’rate Line” (252–253) of bestial, insect-like sons. These effeminized descendants, mere “tinsel” and “cobweb” (220, 222), ineffectually aspire to be lords and bishops, yet (unlike the masculine poet) are incapable of self-support and must be ‘kept’ like mistresses at court. In another version of debased masculinity, the hogs of Westphaly perform a travesty of male bonding: “If one, thro’ Nature’s Bounty or his Lord’s, / Has what the frugal, dirty soil affords, / From him the next receives it thick or thin . . . / From Tail to Mouth, they feed, and they carouse” (TE 5:323, ll. 173–179). This grotesque homosociality enacts a further failure of in-bred generation; the “hogs” fertilize one another with their own manure until they produce an ‘offspring’: “The last, full fairly gives it to the House” (180). Elsewhere, in a kind of science fiction fantasy of male drones hopelessly coupling with a female printing machine, Pope imagines writing insects engendering spontaneous abortions that “dro[p] dead-born from the Press” (5:325, l. 226). Such constructions of masculinity—a ‘club’ of scatological swine and a ‘family’ of moribund larvae—are filled with anxiety. The codes of masculinity require their ‘other,’ and Pope’s autobiographical satires also are concerned with feminine qualities in men, as well as with men’s relations to feminine forms of creativity and authority. Although Pope’s unflattering views on women are not exonerated by the fact that he sometimes spoke of himself as a woman, such moments do support the

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view of autobiographical satire as fragmented, performative, and circumstantial in its construction of self. Pope figures himself as a repository of dark incommunicable knowledge “[l]ike a witch, whose Carcase lies motionless on the floor, while she keeps her airy Sabbaths, & enjoys a thousand Imaginary Entertainments abroad” (Corr 1:163). Carol Fabricant has discussed some of the feminized positions Pope assumes. To Jervas he plays a wife; to Bathurst, an old mistress: “I dream of you still, you are the object of my Dotings; like an old woman that loves the man that had her Maidenhead: You animated by Youth, my Lord, Comfort my age!” (Corr 3:500; Frabricant 1997:509). In Arbuthnot, Pope appears “in various feminized postures and roles—as a figure in need of protection because vulnerable to penetration . . . as a sickly, fragile creature falling far short of the physical standards of masculinity . . . and as a maternal caretaker nursing a mother-turned-infant” (513). Pope can “celebrate the manly virtues of his father . . . [or] his own place in the familial lineage as a follower in paternal footsteps” (513), while also performing feminine roles. The soldier armed for virtue and wielding his “sacred Weapon” coexists with the domestic gossip who is intimate with women: “To virtue only and her friends a friend” (Dia. 2). Pope’s most famous satire on an effeminate man is the portrait of Sporus, described by Griffin as dramatizing the conflict between Pope’s public and private roles (defender of virtue versus recluse). He calls the portrait “a passage to rival anything Pope wrote in its violence and aggressiveness, in the focused intensity of its fury” (200). The gender issues raised in this portrait bear directly on the process through which injurious language constructs a self. The intensity of the attack betrays a degree of identification on the part of the poet with his ‘antiself.’ Griffin notes that Pope may have seen in Sporus “a grotesque version of himself,” that he may have “sensed a secret affinity between himself and the loathed John Hervey”: Sporus is an effeminate, androgynous figure; Hervey was notoriously “pretty” and . . . publicly bisexual. . . . We have no unequivocal evidence that Pope was, or imagined himself, sexually ambivalent. But there are grounds for speculation. A “little man,” never physically manly, possessed of an unusually delicate sensibility (a “feminine” sensibility?), Pope humorously called himself “abominably epicoene.” Once, after a visit to view a hermaphrodite, he remarked that “few proficients have a greater genius for Monsters than my self.” (Corr 1:277; Griffin 1978:182)

Griffin enumerates the details that “in fact seem more appropriate for Pope than for Hervey,” such as the charge of impotence to a man who had a wife, mistresses, and numerous children. Hervey has replaced Pope as an intimate of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and is now joined to her by

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the coauthored attack, Verses Address’s to the Imitator of Horace.31 Pope’s friend William Pulteney had satirized Hervey in A Proper Reply to a Late Scurrilous Libel; Intitled, Sedition and Defamation Display’ d (1731). This attack harps on three qualities befitting an ‘antiself’ of Pope: doubtful masculinity; danger resulting from physical appearance; a tendency to gossip and tell secrets that makes him inconstant, womanish, and willing to prostitute himself: “[a] circulator of Tittle-Tattle, a Bearer of tales, . . . a Station’d Spy . . . another Blab” (7, 20). People must have “more Discretion than to trust [him] with any Secrets” because of his “clandestine Trade” and “unwelcome Secrets” (23, 19). Pope’s conflation of monstrosity and effeminacy yields fantasies of uncontrolled proliferation, such as the spread of darkness, madness, and dunces (and self-referential, ‘excitable’ footnotes) in The Dunciad. Unlike Dryden’s flawed but potent King David/Charles II who “scattered” his image “wide as his command,” Pope’s aristocratic men lack force. Sporus merely “spits himself abroad.” The Baron and Sir Plume in The Rape of the Lock, or young Englishmen on the Grand Tour in The Dunciad, are inarticulate and inept. Crucial source of the seed of legitimate succession, the hitherto virile male has been compromised by sterility, impotency, “selfpleasing,” and birth defects. Yet women are capable of reckless proliferation. The fertile mother gives birth to innumerable sons. Her womb seems inexhaustible in quantity, if questionable in the quality of its productivity. Fathering and mothering in Pope fulfill fantasies about the consequences of secret sex acts, as well as anxieties about the consequences of language acts. In Arbuthnot, Pope vindicates his father’s reputation and his moral legacy in order to legitimate his own ‘succession.’ In a world of irresponsible, wandering, or anonymous men, he knows who his father is. But even when fathers are unknown or absent, every newborn child is joined to a maternal body. In this capacity, the Goddess Dulness (like Spenser’s Error and Milton’s Sin) is a crucial emblem in Pope’s autobiographical satire. Dulness, Sin, and Error are productive of offspring that simultaneously injure and affirm their creator. Their power, their existence depends upon the very things that give them pain. Monsters feed on the lower bodies of Sin and Error; so the dunces hungrily search for wit in Dulness’ nether realms. In Pope’s antiselves, birth and sustenance cannot be separated from destruction and consumption. These females are grotesque emblems of the satirist literally being ‘bit’ (slang for being duped by irony or wit) by his own aggressive productions. He is the monster whose literary progeny guarantee lasting fame with lasting pain. In her maternal attributes, Dulness illustrates the concept that ‘offspring’ (physical, textual, imaginary) give back the image of the mind that created them. The dunces give back the image of clouded reason and

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immorality of their mother. But do they not also give back the image of the mind that authored them? In their leaden opacity, they grotesquely exaggerate but do not contradict a quality of personal mystery, opacity, or ultimate inexplicability shared by the poet: “But each man’s secret Standard in his mind, / . . . This, who can gratify? For who can guess?” (176, 178). For Pope, as well as for Manley and Swift, a life retains a degree of radical inaccessibility, even while it is mediated by anecdote, gossip, and rumor. In the end, personal integrity does not seem capable of resisting forces of personal dispersal. Despite graven epitaphs and lasting memorials (enigmatic in Swift’s case, bulldozed under in Manley’s, highly edited in Pope’s), crucial information is withheld. Ultimately satirists are subjects of gossip that never can resolve their mysteries. Secret knowledge would seem to resist the forces of Enlightenment secularism that endorse humanistic ethics and rational epistemology as the means to comprehend and to manage everything including the self.32 Bishop Lowth observes of self-reflection: “Since the human intellect is naturally delighted with every species of imitation, that species in particular, which exhibits its own image, which displays and depicts those impulses, inflexions, perturbations, and secret emotions, which it perceives and knows in itself, can scarcely fail to astonish and to delight above every other” (Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Ancients [1753]). Those “perturbations, and secret emotions, which (the conscious subject) perceives and knows in itself” constitute the most profound affirmation of selfhood, yet they need never be shared. The satirist’s public face, when contemplated in the mirror of satire, bears the marks of the injuries that gave it ‘character,’ but the reflection also hides the interior subject engaging, in various ways, in acts of language, irony, aggression, and stealth.


Conclusion Postmodernizing Satire: Irony, Conspiracy, and Paranoia

M. O. A. I. . . . If I could make that resemble something in me! —Shakespeare, Twelfth Night They fell once more to the scrutiny, and soon picked out S, H, O, U, L, D, E, R —Swift, A Tale of a Tub It’s W. A. S. T. E., lady, . . . an acronym, not ‘waste,’ and we had best not go into it any further. —Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

From Attack to Paranoia From Lucilius to DeLillo, from the biblical Book of Revelations to the blotted FBI documents in Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11, satiric writing has a long-standing association with the concept of secrecy. This association helps to bridge the gap dividing postmodern subjects from millennia of now remote, linguistically inaccessible, or little-studied satirists. How many admirers of The Onion, The Daily Show, or Borat have read Horace, Persius, or Juvenal? Bogel notes “the surprisingly small step from seventeenth-century characterizations of wit and satire as shapeless and

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inchoate to late twentieth-century designations of satire as ‘that most protean literary something’” (4). In the 1690s, Dryden’s Discourse concerning Satire articulated an ideal for ironic aggression as “the fineness of the Stroak that separates the Head from the body, and leaves it standing in place” (D 4:71). In the 1990s, Nelson Algren had similar praise for Don DeLillo’s quintessentially postmodern satiric narratives in which “wit is so surgical you don’t even know an artery has been severed.” Both periods struggle with the ‘disconnect’ between abundant information and lack of truth. In MacFlecknoe “trash” pollutes the Thames and clogs the streets with worthless sheets from booksellers’ stalls. Throngs of dunces crowd London only to sink into intellectual and moral anarchy in Pope’s Dunciad. In Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, an underground network coded W. A. S. T. E. conflates the possibility and the denial of meaning with the hint of scatology (“waste”) and the ironic suggestion that information systems function not openly but through secrecy. In DeLillo’s Underworld, technology’s by-product is actual waste: pollutants sink into the ooze of oblivion where excrement mixes with plutonium “from Pluto . . . ruler of the underworld” (106). Postmodernizing, however, is not merely a drawing of parallels or a recording of echoes between centuries, but rather a process of coming to terms with our own critical and satirical practices. Having prefaced this book with claims about the mutually illuminating relationship between post–civil war England and postmodern America, I conclude by returning to the possibilities of this relationship for rethinking secrecy and satire. The satirist discovers secrets “beyond the surface and rind of things” (P 1:40) and then exhibits them for ridicule. Such charismatic pugilism is founded on professed belief in an explanatory system that may be applied to a world worthy of relentless suspicion. The satiric text engages the reader in the quest for hidden meanings that are revealed or concealed through mechanisms of irony, and through the appeal of sharing in scandalous disclosures. A compulsion to find hidden meanings everywhere, to perceive secret plots and conspiracies, to merge feelings of narcissism and persecution, and to regard patriarchal masculinity (and sexual identity) with anxiety has a technical name, paranoia: “[the] term did not come into existence until the mid-nineteenth century, but the attitude toward thinking that it implies was fundamental to the discourse of modernity from the seventeenth century onward” (Farrell, 35).1 Today, we think of paranoia as both a condition and a methodology, as both a disabling abnormality and an enabling interpretive strategy, as a way of knowing that “ranges across the multi-discursivity of contemporary existence” (O’Donnell, 181) including literary studies such as this one. Satire can be a paranoid fantasy, but at the same time, paranoia can be a satiric condition.

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Everyone seems to agree that postmodernism views the world as “a web of hints to hidden meaning” (Bywater, 80). The landmark systems of modern thought articulated by Nietzche, Marx, and Freud are informed by a “hermeneutics of suspicion”. After the Kennedy assassination of 1964, writes DeLillo, “paranoia is the only intelligent response” (Mao II 24). American culture in general reflects the “rise of conspiracy and paranoia as major themes” in response to “changing social and technological conditions, . . . new conceptions of human subjectivity, . . . [and] anxiety about an apparent loss of autonomy or self-control” (Melley, 44–45, 12). As “one of the most important issues taken up by contemporary North American novelists since 1960” (O’Donnell, 181), paranoia shapes postmodern fictions. Repeatedly, the new information age articulates the same judgment: Jacques Lacan declares “all knowledge is paranoid.” Leo Bersani says the paranoiac “taunt[s] us with the secrets of his own hidden . . . orders” (107). Eve Sedgwick observes: “[T]he methodological centrality of suspicion to current critical practice has involved a concomitant privileging of the concept of paranoia” (2003:125). Although “conspiracy theory” first appears in the OED in 1997, Swift had created visions of vast secret conspiracies on a global scale. In “The Day of Judgment,” millennia of beliefs cherished by “Human Kind” (P 2:579, l. 11) prove false once the deity reveals his cruel “Design” (l. 18) against human “Blockheads” (l. 21), a design always there but never perceived. The hidden violence of struggles over succession and authority during the formative years of “the modern liberal subject” has been the substance of satires discussed in this book. John Farrell positions Freud at a culminating point of “the great current of suspicion that energized the anti-traditional, satiric culture of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries” (68), a culture characterized by “mistrust, political conspiracy, and bloodshed over a century and a half [1600–1740].” Suspicion that secret versions and hidden realities lie concealed beneath manifest signs becomes a way of reading the world. If, to paraphrase Lacan and Foucault, the subject is structured like a language, so too is human perception of the world. To read signs is to perform the creation of meaning, not merely to receive it. Shakespeare’s Malvolio (the narcissistic victim of a conspiracy) seems to inaugurate the seventeenth century with a paranoid search for meaning in texts: “[W]hat should that alphabetical position portend? If I could make that resemble something in me! Softly! M. O. A. I” (2:5). Manley’s Delia reads romances that “made [her] fancy every stranger that [she] saw, in what habit soever, some disguised person or lover” (NA 224). The premise of The New Atalantis– that invisible observers are able to penetrate the most carefully buried secrets—is a paranoid fantasy. In Swift’s Tale, the

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three brothers Martin, Peter, and Jack ingeniously mystify the language of their father’s will in order to gratify their desires: hoping to defy an obvious injunction against shoulder-knots on coats, “they fell once more to the Scrutiny and soon picked out S, H, O, U, L, D, E, R” (PW 1:50). Pope offered his readers a hint about conspiracy to commit rape (the Baron cannot do it alone) in the name BARNIVELT (unbarrel it). In Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, the heroine Oedipa Maas struggles between (and sometimes during) seductions to decipher codes and symbols: a puzzling clue from a seventeenth-century text leads first to the acronym W. A. S. T. E. and ultimately to the enigmatic phrase “We Await Silent Tristero’s Empire” (139). Conspiracies involve groups like “Inamorati Anonymous” or “The Paranoids”; sunken bones and mysterious symbols hide truths; and a clandestine group of Westcoast neo-Jacobites wait for coded news of a latter-day Pretender named Tristero. Unlike a mystery novel in which clues lead to the solution of a crime, here the unknown proliferates, and we are not even sure what crime has occurred. Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 lingers on behindthe-scenes shots of government officials being prepared for the camera by make-up artists and hair stylists, in order to expose the artificiality of public image and to undermine the dignity and veracity of men who vainly request self-concealment by “cosmetic powers” (like the transformation of Belinda in The Rape of the Lock). “Make me look young,” they confide. Another meaning or plot always lies concealed behind the obvious and apparent—not God’s one redemptive plan but ever-proliferating, doomed human plans.

Conspiracy: The Plots of Satire Alvin Kernan has argued that “the most striking quality of satire is the absence of plot” (1965:31), in favor of forms like the anatomy and the digression. Yet there is irony in Kernan’s failure to recognize that certain kinds of “plot”—conspiratorial fantasies—often govern satire, and enable the “compromising intimacies” that permit the satirist and the reader to conspire together in the attack on an ‘other.’ Conspiracy narratives assume that “all external manifestations must be fallacious, a cover for secret motives” (Bronfen, 71). Satires are full of such plots: Achitophel’s seduction of Absalom, Philander’s regicide conspiracy, Thynne’s murder, Dulness’ apocalyptic plans, the betrayal of Macheath, the plot to destroy Modern works as soon as they appear in a bookseller’s stall. The “sole


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Design” of Swift’s Tale is a grandiose scheme of saving the Commonwealth “’til the perfecting of that great work, into the secret of which it is reasonable the Courteous Reader should have some little Light” (25). And of course Gulliver believes himself the frequent victim of conspiracies by Lilliputians, Blefescuans, Brobdingnagians, pirates, Houyhnhnms, and English Yahoos including his own editor. Why is he dismissed from Houyhnmland? Because he is suspected of eventually conspiring with other Yahoos. Swift even represents himself “[p]ursued by base envenomed pens, / Far to the land of Slaves and Fens” (“Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift,” ll. 395–396). Postmodern examples include the hidden schemes for oil and money that determine American foreign policy according to Fahrenheit 9/11, and clandestine threats involving pollution and assassination in Underworld and Mao II. The list could include many other works by many other satirists, Jonson’s Volpone, Marvell’s Last Instructions to a Painter, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Byron’s Don Juan, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, and Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 among them. We have seen that the popularity of secret histories runs concurrently with the rise of satire. Aptly, the sixth chapter of Pynchon’s novel consists of a secret history of Europe from 1577 to 1789. The opening scenes of Fahrenheit 9/11 precisely enact the contending versions of the past that are essential to conspiratorial secret history. Election night 2000 is represented as several contradictory stories. What, the film insinuates, really happened? Historical ‘facts’ are invoked to support an obviously partisan, inflammatory view, and damaging secrets underlying the crucial Florida vote are put forward. Moore’s narrator instills doubt by suggesting that a different history is hidden behind the public version of the election victory, the events of September 11, and the subsequent war on terror. He repeatedly tweaks this possibility: “If the public knew this . . .,” perhaps the war in Afghanistan was really about something else, . . . “somebody [permitted security infractions] or was something else going on?” Underworld more complexly demonstrates the legacy of a (paranoid and ironic) relationship between history and the plots of satire. Historical facts and figures (a missing baseball from the game in which the New York Giants won the pennant in 1951, conflict in Vietnam, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, the Cuban missile crisis, the comedians Lennie Bruce and Jackie Gleason, the nuclear arms race) are transformed into “family secrets and unbreathable personal tales” that disclose a secret history of the cold war. Mood-swinging between “the unseen something that haunts the day” (11) and “the excitement of a revealed thing” (14), the country’s chief of espionage realizes that “fame and secrecy are the high and low ends of the same fascination” (17).

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Irony and Charisma: The Characters of Satire Bran Nicol claims a “dominance of the ironic mode in postmodernism,” in which the “reader becomes aware of his/her own interpretive endeavors” (45). Swift also claims a special relationship to “Irony . . . [w]hich [he] was born to introduce, / Refin’d it first, and shew’d its Use” (P 2: ll. 56–58). Like secret history, irony is a mode of competing meanings. But irony also draws together the circle of friends laughing in a corner: “the intertwinement of satirist and reader with satiric object, and the compromising intimacies of irony and parody or satiric mimicry” (Seidel, 1979 6). The paranoid way of reading the world has ironic potential: “the clues in a text give rise to a variety of readings none of which is definitive” (Bywater, 91). Satire maintains a reactive, secondary, and parodic relationship to ‘facts’ or ‘reality.’ Both parody and paranoia (sharing the Greek prefix for ‘beside’ or ‘alongside of’) “denote a level of existence beside or above the literal and observable; both assume that no statement . . . contains its own meaning . . . [Statements] conceal from the uninitiated as much as they conceal” (Davis, 369). Paranoia is literally “a form of ‘overknowing,’ of surplus knowledge that leads, paradoxically, not to discovery but to undecidability” (Charnes, 5). Thinking of satire as paranoid gives new meaning to the recurrent satiric theme of madness, because characters are ‘beside’ or literally ‘out of’ their minds. An “abundance in mental activity that is in excess of its mark” (Bronfen, 68) may be compared to the definition of satire as lanx satura.; “overknowing” is symbolized in the image of the overflowing dish. Satire’s plenitude—its sense of endless examples, lists of ‘wrongs’ or crowds of objects to expose or exemplify or attack—reflects the paranoid ability to see enmity everywhere. The minds of satiric madmen are not so much disordered as overloaded and overactive: “[P]aranoia feeds off an abundance of narrative energy (too much meaning)” (Bronfen, 78). Its restless and fantastic tendencies resist closure. The charismatic seeker of elusive but self-aggrandizing knowledge is a recurrent figure. With paranoid efficiency, the Tale’s narrator (a former inmate of Bedlam) perceives the interconnectedness of all things and urges on us the secrets of his own hidden schemes of coherence. Segments of tale and digressions equally contribute, for example, to his self-absorbed system in which air explains and unites everything from Christian zeal to a fart. The more he feels persecuted and misunderstood, the more intently he whispers in the reader’s ear. Like charismatic paranoiacs, satirists (and their personae) can direct aggression against the enemies who persecute them by insisting earnestly on the special knowledge they possess. Unwelcome


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revelations make people uncomfortable. Pope took satisfaction in the thought that his enemies feared him, that they would “Hear this, and tremble” (TE 5:17, l. 118), that “Men not afraid of God” would be “afraid of [him]” (5:324, l. 209). Certainly Pope, a disenfranchised, four-and-a-half-foot Catholic hunchback, could claim neither physical prowess nor political power. Yet he could, in verse, choose to “strip the Gilding off a Knave” (115). This strategy—to peel away and expose unpleasant truths—is taken up by postmodern satirists. In Moore’s film, for example, we witness the removal of ink from condemnatory and embarrassing words and phrases on official documents that have been blotted. Here too the probing satirist, who lacks both physical intimidation and official authority, nevertheless has the power to arouse fear and uneasiness. Moore depicts himself as an overweight, slightly clumsy ingénue who nevertheless can make senators nervously rush away and can arouse the Secret Service police. It is “typical of paranoid logic that the multiplication of obstacles and intensification of suspicion should bring . . . heightening of heroic exhilaration” (Farrell, 74). Satire is thus congenial to the redefinition of heroism in the postmodern “culture of irony”: “paranoia is the only available form of heroism—all others having been skeptically disallowed—the heroism of irony becomes the last resource of ambition and the last object to admire” (216). Another explanation of satire’s paranoid “life of stealth” is to reconsider the frequent target of self-love or ego. Examples span centuries, like the parody of the Narcissus myth in Gulliver’s Travels, or of the town of San Narcisso in The Crying of Lot 49. According to Freud, paranoid minds “attach the greatest significance to trivial details in the behavior of others. Details . . . they interpret and utilize as the basis for far-reaching conclusions . . . project[ing] into the mental life of others what exists in [their] own unconscious activity” (Brill, 162–163). Satire’s many examples of self-absorption and self-destruction take forms of aberration like mental illness and addiction: dullness and madness in Pope and Swift; promiscuity and infidelity in Manley and Byron; or DT’s and LSD in DeLillo and in Pynchon who, in the tradition of The Dunciad ’s apocalyptic psychomachia, predicts the “trembling unfolding of the mind’s plowshares.”

Patriarchy and Noir from Freud to Žižek Patriarchy and its attendant themes—fathers, sons, genealogy, succession, authority, liberty, and control of women—are central to satires of the Restoration and early eighteenth century, as are the Don Juan figures that

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represent the ‘man at liberty.’ Freud’s “family romance” contains similar themes: the primal father is empowered with freedom and sexuality; father/ son relations are key; issues of succession (acquiring the authority of the father) preoccupy sons; mothers, wives, and daughters circulate as objects of exchange between men. Not surprisingly, Freud thinks of Don Juan in his earliest writing about paranoia (his 1895 Letter to Wilhelm Fliess. Draft H) in order to explain the psychoanalytical principle of substitution as analogous to Don Juan’s seductions/substitutions of women. Thus, “things are erotic equivalents” (112). Every collector is a Don Juan, and every paranoiac performs acts of substitution: “In every case the delusional idea is clung to with the same energy with which some other intolerable distressing idea is fended off from the ego. Thus these people love their delusion as they love themselves. Herein lies the secret” (Letters, 113). Like the pleasure-seeking Don Juan of speech act theory who promises and swears without conviction, any woman will do, although none can satisfy enduringly because meaningful bonds exist only between men. The vexed role of the father in the Don Juan legend provides insights into the relationship between satire, paranoia, and the concept of noir, which “offers a paranoiac ethos, in which the fact of a particular crime is insufficient to explain what’s really gone wrong” (Charnes, 3).2 Don Juan slays the father of a lover, but that father returns in ghostly form to exact revenge and to send his murderer to Hell. (In Shadwell’s version, Don John slays both his own father and his lover’s.) Freud’s primal father “was free. His intellectual acts were strong and independent . . . he loved no one but himself, or other people only insofar as they served his needs. . . . [he was] of a masterful nature, absolutely narcissistic, self-confident and independent” (Totem and Taboo, 1995:15). Here is the forebear of the idealized libertine or entitled male aristocrat with “no checks to his desire”: “narcissism coinciding with . . . power. . . . was the only true state of freedom Freud ever imagined” (Farrell, 15). Reaction to the powerful father leads to the psychology of sons, who are caught between resentment of the father’s enslavement of them, his prohibitions of libido (laws of incest, murder, marriage) and love. Thus Freud explains the origins of heroic myth (disguised desire in stories of a hero who slays the father) leading to the narcissistic impulse to reincarnate the primal father in the family romance (18)—and resembling in many ways the patriarchal antiromances of secret history and satire. If we can demonstrate the prevalence, the centrality of paranoia in satiric fictions and in postmodernism, what are we to do with Freud’s belief that paranoia results from repression of same-sex desire? The insistent masculinity of traditional ideas about satire—the knight errant, the primitive


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warrior, the god Saturn, the deft swordsman, the vir bonus, even the circle of friends laughing in a corner—resonates with Freud’s belief that paranoia results from anxiety over love between men.3 Perhaps the manliness of satire needs further recontextualization within postmodern studies of the history of gender and sexuality: “As scholars in these fields of literary studies and the history of sexuality and gender have demonstrated over the past twenty-five or so years, a certain degree of anxiety about masculinity and . . . male authority, runs just under the surface of many late seventeenthand eighteenth-century texts” (Gladfelder, 22–23). Crises of masculinity in this period have been ascribed to various causes. The beheading of Charles I triggered civil war and unhinged the disposition of religious authority, and the restored Charles II spectacularly failed to stabilize the nation. Scholars of the novel recently have argued that “changes in male and female gender roles [between 1650 and 1750] . . . threatened to destroy the structures upon which patriarchy rested” (Webster 2005:430). A “major demographic crisis among English landed elite” occurred in which “about half of all landowners failed to produce” legitimate sons, and more than half of the productive fathers did not survive to see their sons reach adulthood (McCrea, citing Laurence Stone and Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone, 76, 101). The emergence of a homosexual or “molly” culture further signaled changing constructions of manhood increasingly defined by specific sexual acts, rather than by specific qualities such as honor and discipline: “Before the eighteenth century, men did not define themselves in terms of their sexual behavior . . . Rather they constructed their identity from a variety of behaviors amongst which sexual practice was only one” (Hitchcock and Cohen, 3). These new insights need to be applied to Restoration and eighteenth-century satiric writing not only because of its purported “manliness” but also because of its concern with father-son relations and succession. The case of Daniel Paul Schreber has set the terms for the association between paranoia and homosexual desire, and Freud specifically notes that Schreber’s case is about “the Father complex” (444). Postmodern theorists argue that paranoia responds to “the collapse of traditional white middleclass hegemony” (Knight 1999:817). Slavoj Žižek writes, “[t]his is what is ultimately at stake in the noir universe: the failure of the paternal metaphor” (159). Uncertainty about masculine authority and its ability to secure the future may occur because the real bonds of attachment are between men, but love between men does not produce children. Freud implies the nonproductivity of paranoia when he reports that Schreber cannot become a father because one of his symptoms is nausea toward his wife (shades of Gulliver). In terms of noir, “[t]he failure of the paternal metaphor . . . renders impossible a viable, temperate relation with a woman; as a result, woman finds

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herself occupying the impossible place of the trauma tic Thing” (Žižek, 159–160).4 Freud interpreted Schreber’s fantasies of megalomania, persecution, emasculation, and redemption as a defense against feelings of love for another man. Schreber’s delusion includes his own seduction and transformation into a woman by the ultimate father God. Schreber claims not only erotic pleasure as “God’s wife,” but also a feminine responsibility for sexual procreation/succession and moral reformation: “further consequence of [his] emasculation could, of course, only be [his] impregnation by divine rays to the end that a new race of men might be created” (400). Schreber imagines “that he has a mission to redeem the world” and to establish a “theologico-psychological system” of his own design. (Swift promises a “histori-theo-physi-logically considered” discourse in a Tale “written for the Universal Improvement of Mankind.”) Bodily functions and “creatureliness” also are part of Schreber’s aggressively scatological fantasy: “Any one who has been in such a relation as I have with divine rays is to some extent entitled to sh—upon the whole world” (407).5 Žižek, Lacanian rather than Freudian, redirects the analysis of paranoia away from “the usual babble about ‘latent homosexuality’” (160) and argues that there are always two fathers to consider: a good (but absent) father and an obscene (and present) father; the Big Other and the Paranoiac Other. “In patriarchal culture the place of the Big Other may be occupied by God, King, Pope, Lord, Father—placeholders who quilt a paternal allegory over a fundamentally antagonistic social formation” (Charnes, 2). This father stays hidden in the background but gives things in the foreground their place in the order of things, rather like the Father who leaves behind his Will at the start of Swift’s Tale, leaving behind as placeholder Peter the corrupt Pope (his name and title doubly reinforced by their classical roots—pater [father] and papas [father]) who replaces de jure divino with de jure paterno. The Big Other need not display power openly, although he represents the threat of potential power, such as the king who dies at the start of The New Atalantis, the ancestors who precede Pope’s father in Arbuthnot, or the pre-priestcraft biblical God of Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel. Or like Sir Robert Walpole, depicted as the master-puppeteer in “The Screen” (1741) (the broadside that illustrates this book), Žižek’s Big Other “appears as a hidden agency ‘pulling the strings,’ running the show behind the scenes” (Žižek, 39). In contrast, the second or problem father obtrudes in the present: he emerges “as the obscene, uncanny, shadowy double of the Name of the Father” (Žižek, 158; Charnes, 2). Swift’s Peter or Gulliver, Manley’s seductive Duke, Behn’s Beralti and Philander, Dryden’s David and Shaftesbury, Gay’s Peachum and Lockit, Sterne’s Walter Shandy embody “‘the humiliated father,’ . . . who can no longer function as the guarantor of the symbolic and, consequently, of all the juridical, ethical, filial, and sexual


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organizations that derive from it” (Charnes, 2; Žižek, 149). This father has “sustained irreparable damage to his integrity.” There is a certain “obscene enjoyment” in the degradation of this father—he is “a father who knows, and whose knowledge specifically is of the libidinal enjoyment that Law must disavow in order to maintain its unquestionable shape” (159). We might say that there are always (at least) two versions of the father competing for dominance. The struggles of sons reiterate stories of succession and lineage: “all of them encounter opposition from their very births . . . a process that invariably makes them the center of hostility and resentment” (Farrell, 117). There are also always (at least) two versions of knowledge, public and secret: “‘the facts’ are always less relevant than the sinister effects of a reality that acquires paranoid dimensions precisely the more one learns about ‘the facts’” (Charnes, 5). But we have seen that the world of secrecy is also a feminine world, in which speech acts prevail over physical acts. Not only the ghosts of fathers but also the gossip of women come back to haunt wrongdoers. Any one, Oedipus or Oedipa, can be paranoid. The feminization of satire (through gossipy secret sharing) is thus compatible with Žižek’s revision of Freud’s theory of paranoia as a homosexual crisis within the history of masculinity. But perhaps more important for postmodernizing satire is the extent to which conspiracy, paranoia, and the hermeneutics of suspicion inflect critical practice. New Historicism, for example, has been called an “interpretive project of unveiling hidden violence . . . in the genealogy of the modern liberal subject. . . . [T]he force of unveiling hidden violence would seem to depend on a cultural context . . . in which violence would be deprecated and hence hidden in the first place . . . as a scandalous secret” (Sedgwick 2003: 139–140). But even broader implications pertain. As critics we participate in a “highly compelling tracing-and-exposure project” that raises questions not only about what knowledge is but also about what knowledge does: “What is at stake in reading from the position of posteriority; of looking backwards in history to uncover an inaugural historical narrative of conspiracy that will confirm our own suspicions about a contemporary surfeit of narratives culturally exchanged to assure the protection of a meaningful world?” (Bronfen, citing Maus, 71). Sedgwick wisely observes that “what is illuminated by an understanding of paranoia is not how homosexuality works, but how, if one understands oppressions to be systematic in patriarchal culture, how the world works” (Sedgwick 2003:126, italics added). I have attempted to sketch these relationships between satire, postmodernism, and paranoia because they support my contention that secrecy is a pivotal concept in the study of satire in the age of the so-called public sphere. If the postmodern writer claims “to privilege hidden latent meaning

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over manifest surfaces,” the satirist claims “whatever word or sentence is printed in a different character shall be judged to contain something extraordinary whether of wit or sublime” (P 1:28). While postmodernism “cultivate[s] epistemological uncertainty and doubt,” satire’s puzzled critic admits that he “cannot conjecture what the author means here, or how this chasm could be filled, though it is capable of more than one interpretation” (113). Satire itself is capable of more than one interpretation, and so I am mindful of my original disclaimer that not every satire responds equally to the same critical tools. But often we become complicit in discovering secrets we wish we did not have to know.

Abbreviations

LL

Aphra Behn, Love Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister, vol. 1, The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd, 7 vols. (London: Pickering, 1992–1996). D The Works of John Dryden, ed. E. N. Hooker, H. T. Swedenborg, Vinton Dearing, Alan Roper. 20 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956–1989). Guerinot J. V. Guerinot, Pamphlet Attacks on Alexander Pope, 1711–1744 (London: Methuen, 1969). SJ The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. Gen. ed. John H. Middendorf. 18 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958. Lives Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets. Ed. George Birkbeck Hill. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905. AR Delarivier Manley, The Adventure of Rivella, ed. Katherine Zelinsky (Ontario: Broadview Press, 1999; 2003). NA Delarivier Manley, New Atalantis, ed. Ros Ballaster (New York: New York University Press, 1992). ME Memoirs of Europe in The Novels of Mary Delariviere Manley, vol. 2., ed. Patricia Koster. 2 vols. (Gainesville, FL: Scholar’s Facsimiles and Reprints, 1971). EP Essays and Poems and Simplicity, a Comedy, eds. Robert Halsband and Isobel Grundy. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977. CL The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Robert Halsband. 3 Vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965-67). TE The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, Gen. ed. John Butt, 11 vols. (London: Methuen; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939–1969).

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Abbreviations

Corr

Alexander Pope, Correspondence, ed. George Sherburn. 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956). C The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963). JS Jonathan Swift, Journal to Stella, ed. Harold Williams, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1948). P ———, Poems, ed. Harold Williams, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958). PW ———, Prose Works, ed. Herbert Davis, 14 vols. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1939–1968). Tatler The Tatler, ed. Donald F. Bond, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987). Spectator The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965). POAS Poems on Affairs of State, 1660–1714, ed. George de F. Lord, 7 vols. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963–1975).

Journals ECS ELH PMLA PQ

Eighteenth-Century Studies Journal of English Literary History Publications of the Modern Language Association Philological Quarterly

Notes

Introduction: Public versus Secret, Not Public versus Private 1. Harold Love’s English Clandestine Satires 1660–1702 (published in 2004 when this project was near completion) corroborates extensive covert circulation of manuscript, oral, and illegally printed satires from the accession of Charles II to that of Queen Anne. 2. See also Lodwick, Wilkins (1641), and Bridges. 3. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas argues that from the middle of the seventeenth century, men gathered in London coffeehouses where “critical debate ignited by works of literature and art was soon extended to include economic and political disputes.” Habermas imagines that satires by members of the Scriblerus Club were a “critical organ of a public engaged in critical political debate” (60), forging alliances across traditional barriers of class and birth. My argument takes a contrarian position. 4. In light of Downie (2004), I refrain from attributing Queen Zarah to Manley. 5. Love describes the circulation of manuscript satire as “the principal medium of free comment” for Restoration poets. 6. The claim that by the 1670s “coffee houses were considered seedbeds of political unrest” (59) is supported by Habermas with a secondary quote from Emden (1959:323)that “establishes the connection between the coffee houses and the beginnings of ‘public opinion’” (262). 7. Warner writes specifically of print in early American republicanism, not of secrecy. 8. “Is not every Body freely allowed to believe whatever he pleaseth; and to publish his Belief to the World whenever he thinks fit; especially if it serve to strengthen the Party which is in the Right? . . . Does any Man either believe, or say he believes, or desire to have it thought that he says he believes one syllable of the Matter? And is any Man worse received upon that Score; or does he find his Want of Nominal Faith a Disadvantage to him, in the Pursuit of any Civil, or Military Employment?” (P II. 29–30). 9. Sedgwick, in The Epistemology of the Closet (67–68), cites Miller’s “aegis-creating” passage on secrecy as “the subjective practice in which the oppositions of private/public, inside/outside, subject/object are established, and the sanctity

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10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

Notes of their first term kept inviolate. And the phenomenon of the ‘open secret’ does not, as one might think, bring about the collapse of those binarisms and their ideological effects, but rather attests to their fantasmatic recovery” (207). Their interest in the novel does not extend to satire. Sex as a metaphor for political corruption is not exclusive to women writers. POAS contains many, often crude, examples lacking in irony and in self-consciousness about gender. If Burney and Austen are reliable indicators, antipathy between satire and the feminine increases during the eighteenth century. In Evelina, Mrs. Selwyn’s “masculine” satirical tendencies arouse resentment, and the Dashwood sisters in Austen’s Sense and Sensibility are sneeringly “rumored to be satirical.” Habermas would seem to corroborate the impossibility of women participants in satire by asserting inaccurately that “only men were admitted to coffee-house society” (33). My understanding of irony as a linguistic practice is modeled on the theory of metaphor. Both signify nonliterally and require a body of information that adjusts (and destabilizes) meaning. See Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies in the Creation of Meaning in Language (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978). See Watkins, DePorte, Max Byrd, and Ingram. Foucault’s Madness and Civilization (1965) has done much to reinforce this theme in eighteenth-century studies generally. Even Samuel Johnson’s satire manqué, Rasselas, participates in the madness trope. Imlac says, “If we speak with rigorous exactness, no human mind is in its right state.” See Hekman. The debate over performance and performativity is ongoing in Parker and Sedgwick’s collection of essays. I was intrigued to read their ruminations on Austin’s word choice “etiolation” because the word also implies processes that go on in secret (3; Austin, 22).The sickly plant that grows out of the light, out of the knowledge of anyone, has an ominous possibility—like the dark secret love of Blake’s invisible worm or the tubers sprouting in Roethke’s “Root Cellar.” Their investigation, of course, takes issue with Austin’s rejection of performative utterance as “hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage.” Themes of succession, legitimacy, desire, and libertinism may be said to extend into a work like Tom Jones. Fielding represented himself as a second generation satirist, H. Scriblerus Secondus. And he set his novel in the second generation of Catholic—Protestant conflict, rebellion, and invasion associated with the Stuart line—the Jacobite rebellion.

1


1. For perspectives on theater history and its relationship to politics, see Owen, Braverman, Backscheider, Canfield and Payne, Maclean, and Macguire. 2. See Ranum, as well as Fumerton and Stewart, for important discussions of the early modern closet and the experience of privacy.

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3. See Foucault 1977. 4. Rambuss refers to the “Envois” to Jacques Derrida’s The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (3:45). Derrida discusses the implied inversion of power in Matthew Paris’ thirteenth-century engraving of Plato and Socrates. 5. Manley was a companion to Lady Castlemaine (mistress to Charles II) and presumably used information learned during this period of dependency. Swift spent ten years intermittently at Moor Park as secretary to Sir William Temple who “grew increasingly to recognize and rely upon his talents” (Nokes, 20). Eventually Swift was able to play an ironic Plato to Temple’s Socrates in The Battel of the Books. Pope’s relationship with William Wycherley follows a similar pattern, although Pope did not live with and was never officially employed during the two years he worked on Wycherley’s writing (“you have prun’d my fading laurels” wrote Wycherley). 6. See Markman Ellis, “Coffee-woman, ‘The Spectator,’ and the Public Sphere” in Women, Writing, and the Public Sphere 1700–1830 (2002): 27–52. 7. Habermas’ theories have been criticized for overreliance on secondary texts, neglect of women, and neglect of the antisocial aspects of coffeehouses. See Ellis in Eger, 43–45. 8. Swift’s critics have long debated the erotic references to drinking coffee in Swift’s correspondence with Esther Vanhomrigh. In the context of Ellis’s research, the sexual meaning of these references seems less idiosyncratic. 9. Coffee was more popular than tea until around 1720. “All the major European colonial powers introduced coffee into their tropical settlements” (Walvin 1997:44) where production reached multiple millions of pounds. 10. Examples of the good merchant as icon of pragmatism and morality appear in Edward Young’s The Merchant, (1729) Edward Glover’s London, or the Progress of Commerce (1741), and George Lillo’s The London Merchant (1731). Joseph Addison (who was commissioner of trade and plantations) wrote cheerfully in Spectator No. 69 that London was the “Emporium” of the world. Defoe, and Pope in “Windsor Forest,” are other voices on this theme. 11. The OED defines ‘intelligencer’ as “one employed to obtain secret information, an informer, a spy, a secret agent,” as in “Central Intelligence Agency.” 12. The transition from the Invisible College to the Royal Society, is discussed by Yates, 171–306. See also Webster, de Castells, and Shumaker. 13. See Roberts, 97–113. 14. See also Pinkus and Andreasen. 15. Sprat edited The History of the Royal Society to downplay the presence of ‘secret arts’ among its members and to recommend ‘objective’ scientific writing. 16. Pucci discusses Western fascination with the harem, not scientific knowledge, per se. 17. Yates presses this argument: “Bacon himself seemed aware of such connection, that parts of the myth of New Atlantis are actually modeled on the myth of the invisible R.C. Brothers . . . their great college unknown to the rest of the world. . . . Bacon was certainly aware of the Rosicrucian myth when he wrote New Atlantis” (179–180).

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Notes

18. Recent discussions about the function of surveillance and display in early modern culture are indebted to Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1977). These debates are complicated by the fact that Bacon, Swift, and Manley make invisibility a key feature of their utopias/dystopias. ‘Display’ as power is displaced by the power of the secretive, and by the possibility of putting power into many unseen hands. (See Archer, 6). 19. Rochester, for example, is not ‘a homosexual’ despite his references to the performance of same-sex acts. Similarly, the relationship between William III and William Bentinck is recorded without rendering William III a ‘gay king.’ 20. Manley’s father published narratives about the Ottoman Empire, Siam, and Japan. In his section of Rycaut’s history, peeking into the seraglio is typically provocative. Murder, rape, and polygamy are among its dark secrets, as is homosexuality: “this love of theirs is nothing but libidinous flames. . . . This passion likewise reigns in the society of women; they die of amorous affections one to the other” (16–17). 21. Manley’s Almyna (an anagram on the author’s name) appeared within a year of the English translation of Arabian Nights (1707). The play liberates women from a Sultan’s sexual oppression. 22. The earliest usage cited in the OED is dated 1737 “The Prodigious Increase of Secret Service Money in the Late Reign.” Gentleman’s Magazine 1737 7:531:3). 23. See Gregg, 363–395 and Brooks-Davis, 3.

2

Toward a Theory of Satire I: Gossip and Slander

1. Meredith, 292. Also quoted in Spacks, 52. 2. I paraphrase Edward Rosenheim’s definition of satire (31): an “attack by means of a manifest fiction upon discernible historical particulars.” 3. For a summary of views of satire as an imitator or borrower of forms, see Knight 1992, 22–41. 4. Austin proposes two general views of language. First, language that transmits truth, that assumes congruence between utterance and referent is constative. Second, language that performs, rather than informs, that cannot be judged true or false, but rather successful or unsuccessful utterance, is performative. 5. ‘Performative’ “indicates that the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action” (Austin, 6). Felman elaborates on performatives: “expressions whose function is not to inform or describe, but to carry out a ‘performance,’ to accomplish an act through the very process of their enunciation” (15). Gossip, slander, seduction, and satire share a disinterest in the absolute ‘truth’ of statements in order to privilege the effect of statements.

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6. Austin’s first example is the wedding vow (“I do”) in order to show the high stakes, if not the danger, of the promise. 7. Derrida might object that all ‘acts’ are textual or linguistic, and that the focus on speech acts reflects Western logocentrism. However, Austin’s theory, as here applied, meets these objections in its precise and situational applications, that is, in its particular examples of language enabling certain further acts such as sexual consummation, legal exchange of property, obligation to progeny, and so on. The reverse process is not possible: sexual consummation, joint property, children, and so on do not traditionally constitute the words “I do.” 8. The year 1811 documents the earliest usage of gossip as a verb cited in the OED. 9. According to Robin Dunbar, as primate social groups grew in size and complexity, nonverbal behaviors such a grooming were replaced by vocal exchanges. “‘Vocal grooming’ became increasingly informative, the outcome being speech as ‘gossip’ or social information exchange” (Hurford, 11). 10. On the debataes between linguistics and anthropology, see Hurford, StuddertKennedy, and Knight. 11. Spacks’ Gossip, to which I am indebted, focuses primarily in gossip as “a model . . . for the dialogic aspect of realistic fiction,” that is, in the relation between gossip and the novel, not satire. Alluding in passing to Robert Elliot’s work on satire’s origins in magical rites, she notes: “the idea of talking in secret . . . recalls old conceptions of words as dangerous weapons” (11). 12. I have made Austen’s work a touchstone for literary representations of gossip because (1) her novels are familiar, satirical, and woman-authored; (2) a considerable body of critical discussion on gossip refers to her work. 13. The word gossip—like the words spinster and coquette—becomes feminized and acquires antisocial connotations during the eighteenth century; both social roles threaten patriarchal order and the nuclear family. 14. Anthropologists such as Donald Brenneis who study gossip in non-Western cultures, have described situations in which adult males are the sole practitioners, and in which the “co-narration” of “troubling stories” or the surreptitious circulation of private stories, actually strengthens patriarchy. See Briggs, 41–52. 15. Multiple narrators occur in Manley’s New Atalantis, and in poems by Rochester, Swift, and Pope. Digressive, episodic practices also fracture authority and privilege opinion or partial views over facts: Swift in Tale; Sterne in Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey; Gay in The Beggar’s Opera; Manley in Memoirs of Europe. 16. In 1559, by act of Parliament, it became seditious to “maliciously, advisedly, and directly say . . . that the Queen’s Majesty that now is, during her life, is not or ought not to be Queen of this realm.” See Carole Levin, “Gender, Monarchy, and the Power of Words” in Dissing Elizabeth, 87. 17. See Deborah Willis, Barbara Rosen, and Laura Gowing in Kermode and Walker.

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Notes

18. Other motives include the possibility of offering legal redress to persons harmed by libel, and thereby diminishing private resort to violent redress. I am indebted to Susan Staves for this point. 19. Carl R. Kropf and Michael Seidel write about the same sets of terms, but their definitions do not align. Kropf cites these distinctions: “Defamation is a general term which subsumes the other three. Libel, which is written defamation, could be treated either as a crime or as a tort. Slander, which is spoken defamation, is a tort only. Scandal can be used only to refer to Scandalum Magnatum” (155). Seidel arranges categories differently: “[Lampoon is] a lesser form . . . distinguished by the particularity of its reflections. Libel is an actionable defamation, but the term was often used synonymously with lampoon. Slander is libel with a casual or callous disregard for the truth” (33). 20. In addition to ‘excitable speech,’ twentieth-century American law has debated the concept of injurious language in the “Fighting Words Doctrine,” first formulated in 1942 with reference to Chaplinsky V. New Hampshire, 315 U. S. 568. “Fighting words” are speech acts (obscenity, libel, lewd or profane insult) incurring direct and immediate violent consequences (a disturbance of the peace). Cases invoking the Fighting Words Doctrine are First Amendment cases because they test the limit of Constitutionally protected free speech which must be preserved unless such words “produce a clear and present danger of a serious intolerable evil that rises above mere inconvenience or annoyance” (Terminiello v. Chicago, 337 U. S. 1 [1949]). “Fighting words” cannot be measured and judged by content but only by provable effect. 21. The statute against the slander of magnates states that “one who publishes false news or scandal tending to produce discord between the King and his people or the magnates shall be kept in prison until he produces in court the originator of the tale” [Westminster I (1275); c. 34].

3

Toward a Theory of Satire II: Secret History

1. “[T]he end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries was undoubtedly the ‘golden age’ of secret history in English letters” (Mayer, 95). 2. In The English Short Title Catalogue, approximately 450 editions titled ‘secret history’ were published in England between 1660 and 1800; most (approximately 375) appeared by 1750. Another fifty editions published between 1700 and 1800 use the term ‘secret memoirs’ in the title, forty-one by 1750. 3. Further support for the association of secret history with political upheaval may be found in Karl Marx’s account of Lord Palmerston and the eighteenth century, Secret Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century. Marx. The dearth of eponymous secret histories in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries makes Marx’s title and topic notable.

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4. ‘Secret history’ will serve as the ‘umbrella’ term for ‘scandal chronicle,’ amatory fiction, and roman à clef. This choice highlights the essential component of secrecy in all variant terms. 5. On Madame D’Aulnoy, see Ballaster, Seductive Forms, 123–132. D’Aulnoy does not share Manley’s political concerns with civil war and succession. 6. The 1682 reissue of the 1674 translation of Procopius coincided with the Exclusion Crisis and Popish Plot, and reflects the politically volatile moment by a change in title: The Debaucht Court. Or, the Lives of the Emperor Justinian, and His Empress Theodora the Comedian (Patterson, 183). 7. This reductive quality is a recurrent, although not a constant, feature of secret history and is one of its qualities most readily related to satire. The Secret History of Europe summarizes European politics: “Sweden and Denmark had just commenc’d Slaves . . . The Empire was harrass’d by Infidels, and under the Dominion of a Prince who would rather have done his Business by Prayers than Arms. Spain was govern’d by a Child, Portugal by a Madman, Holland by a Faction, England by the Ladies, and France by a King instructed in all the Arts and Enamour’d of the Charms of Power” (107). 8. Susan Owen asserts that the “Exclusion Crisis is a particularly appropriate period to observe the intersection of party politics and sexual politics” (37). In the Restoration theater, rape was sometimes a metaphor for rebellion; for whigs, it could serve as a metaphor for popery. 9. English taste for epistolary fiction usually is traced to translations of French works such as Roger de Bussy-Rabutin’s Histoire amoureuse des Gaules (1667), translated as Love’s Empire (1682); Cesar Vichard de St.-Real’s Memoires de Mme. La Duchesse de Mazarin (1675 [1676]); Letters Portugaises (1669), translated by Robert L’Estrange (1678). Behn’s Love Letters was written over three years. Part I (1685) is strictly epistolary; Part II (1686) is partly epistolary; Part III (1687) is almost entirely third person narration. Seven more editions appear between 1693 and 1765. 10. The Secret History of the Lives of the Most Celebrated Beauties . . . or, Cupid Restored to Sight (1716); The Secret History of the Rebels in Newgate (1717); The Secret History of the Loose and Incestuous Loves of Pope Gregory VII (1722); The Secret History of Clubs (1709). 11. Parallels shifted, depending on the writer’s point of view. Daniel Defoe, in The Dyet of Poland (1705), used Charles XII to represent Louis XIV, Stanislaus Leszczynski (the Polish ‘Prince of Wales’) to represent James Francis Edward (the Pretender), and Friedrich August to represent Queen Anne, in order to stir fears that a Catholic monarch might invade (as France considered invading England), remove the ‘elected’ ruler, and establish his own choice on the throne. 12. Temple’s relevant works include Letters . . . Wherein Are Discovered Many Secrets Hitherto Conceal’ d (1699), Introduction to the History of England (1695), and Memoirs of What Passed in Christendom (1692). Abel Boyer’s edition of Temple’s memoirs adds the phrase “secret springs”: Memoirs of the Life and Negotiations of Sir William Temple . . . Containing . . . the Most Secret Springs of Affairs of Christendom 1665–1681 (1714).

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Notes

13. Reresby often laments “the prodigious influence of the Duchess of Portsmouth . . . over the king . . . she betrayed him not in his councils only, but his bed also, and that she certainly lay with the grand prior of France, who often came over, under the mask of love, the better and more efficiently to transmit intelligence and information to his master the French king” (274). The Duchess also torments the Queen: “Her majesty was thereby thrown into such a disorder, that the tears stood in her eyes, while the other laughed at it, and turned it into a jest” (290). 14. Patterson’s argument for secret history as a Whig genre with a significant relationship to early American liberalism adds an important transatlantic dimension. 15. For discussions of paranoia and spying in the Elizabethan court, see especially Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context and Bronfen, 66–80. 16. Patterson dismisses these works from her argument about the rise of liberalism because she does not consider them “political secret history, the . . . most important branch of the new genre.” Of the secret histories of Queen Elizabeth, Patterson remarks: “It is difficult to determine what was the motive behind the revivals of old Roman Catholic propaganda, in The Secret History of the Duke of Alancon and Q. Elizabeth (London: Will of the Whisp, 1691) and The Secret History of . . . Q. Elizabeth and the E. of Essex . . . 1680, 1681, 1689, and 1695)” (183–184). Elizabeth I represented England’s independence from the Catholic powers of Europe. Pope-burning processions held on the anniversary of her ascension were generally anti-Catholic, but different “versions” of her reign were given various political and religious meanings. 17. These accusations occur as early as 1584, in Leicester’s Commonwealth, a text that claims that Robert Dudley had secret plans to claim the throne for his illegitimate child after Elizabeth’s death. See North in Walker (185–208). 18. The publication year 1680 saw the appearance of numerous transgressive works, including the unexpurgated “Antwerp edition” of poems by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. The delay in Parliament of the renewal of the Licensing Act allowed the printing of these scandalous works. 19. “[F]rom the perspective of the 1690’s [sic] both the word and the idea of satire were fraught with ambiguity and confusion,” note the editors of Dryden’s “Discourse of Satire” [D 4:515]. Geoffrey Holmes calls increased Whig/Tory differences “[a] most important feature of politics in the 1690’s [sic],” especially with respect to Britain’s foreign policy and greater involvement with the Continent (64). 20. John Richetti’s Popular Fiction before Richardson (1969) denigrated secret history, approvingly citing Bonamy Dobree (English Literature in the Early Eighteenth Century, 1959) who “disposes of Mrs. Manley and Mrs. Haywood in a sentence” because “they deserve no more than this . . . to us they are absolutely irrelevant in either a moral or an aesthetic sense” (119). Richetti’s recent work reflects a complete reversal of these attitudes. 21. Not all feminist theories of the novel include secret history. Nancy Armstrong’s ‘rise of the novel’ in Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987) effectively begins in 1740, with Pamela, and locates ‘female forms of power’ in the respectable domestic ‘sexual contract’ that is modeled on Rousseau’s ‘social contract’ and

Notes

22.

23.

24.

25.

26. 27.

28.

29.

199

on conduct literature for women, rather than in scandalous and secret writing (in which contracts repeatedly are broken). The modern term ‘amatory fiction’ reinforces the association between women and love; ‘Secret history,’ ‘memoir,’ and ‘anecdote’ are seventeenth- and eighteenth-century terms that have the advantage of embracing a wide array of texts by both men and women that explore the association gossip, scandal, and authority. Warner cites John Colin Dunlop’s History of Fiction (1814). Dunlop feels obliged to account for popular women secret historians (an acknowledgment that sets the tone for the next 150 years) by condemning their “faults in point of morals” and “impassioned” characters (13). Helen Hackett acknowledges a connection between politics and romance that had “been increasingly used through the Civil War as political roman à clef ” (187). But she sees the evolution of romance traditions in the work of Behn and Manley as increasingly autobiographical, not satirical: “the correlative of putting themselves into their fictions is a tendency to turn their lives into romance” (189). The specificity and privilege of many characters in secret history make them ‘somebodies,’ in contrast to the ‘nobodies’ posited by Catherine Gallagher as linking amatory secret history to the novel. The particularity of these characters contributes to their effectiveness as satiric fictions. Two-thirds of American public and private libraries listed by Colbourn owned a copy of Burnet History of His Own Times (Patterson, 205). Marvell’s verse satire Last Instructions to a Painter (1667) participates fully in the corrupt sex/corrupt politics scandals of secret history and state poems in its attack on the excesses of Charles II’s court. Begun in 1683, the first draft of “the ‘Secret History’ (as Burnet himself terms it) had its own clandestine past. Burnet confided his memoirs to Lord William Paulet who, “desirous of retaining a copy, . . .hired, before the return of the manuscript, a number of clerks; and dividing among them, with every possible precaution of secrecy, the papers in question, he managed to secure . . . a complete transcript” (xi). The secret copy leaked enough to prompt an announcement in 1703 of “the Discovery of a certain Secret History not yet published” that was both “virulent” and “voluminous” (xiii). A full account of the Fragments in the Harleian Manuscripts may be found in H. C. Foxcroft, A Supplement from the Unpublished MSS. To Burnet’s History of My Own Time. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1902, v–xxx. Further accusations of incest are made, asserting that the king married one of his illegitimate sons to one of his illegitimate daughters (22–23).

4 Contracts and Promises: Speech Acts, Sex Acts, and Don Juan 1. Romantic taste typically abjured the ironic couplets of eighteenth-century satire. Wordsworth and Coleridge’s preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1798)

200

2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

Notes contains the most famous statement of this rejection. Byron is, of course, an exception. See Pateman 1988, 35–36, on the “momentous transition from the traditional to a new specifically modern (or fraternal) form: patriarchal civil society” and “the political right of fathers and the natural liberties of sons.” The preface to State Poems Continued reiterates this claim: “the said State-Poems, and this Continuation, are the best secret history of our late Reigns . . .” (195). I have found four spellings: Coningsmark, Coningsmarck, Koningsmark, and Koningsmarck. I use the spelling in the Key to Manley’s Memoirs of Europe. Texts that are not self-nominated secret histories can use the same strategies and vocabulary. Patterson’s discussion of secret history, for example, draws on works by Andrew Marvell, who never uses the term. Certain Whigs, opposed to the ascension of Catholic James II, saw an alternative in Charles II’s illegitimate Protestant son James Scot, Duke of Monmouth. The most famous supporter was the Earl of Shaftesbury, who generally is portrayed as older, manipulative, and self-serving. Other Whigs, including Ford Grey, conspired on Monmouth’s behalf. A rebellion (summer of 1685), failed miserably, and Monmouth was executed. See Jones J. R. I am indebted to Pollak’s insightful essay, “Beyond Incest: Gender and the Politics of Transgression in Aphra Behn’s Love Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister,” in Hutner, 151–186. ‘Cistern’ is defined as ‘an underground tank for storing liquids’ but also as “a fluid-containing sac or cavity in an organism.” Philander often is described as “beautiful.” The specific physical trait Behn mentions is that he has the longest hair anyone has ever seen. It is tempting to attribute a Slawkenburgius-like suggestion to this detail, given Behn’s sense of humor. “Indecencies” here refers to indecent language, rather than indecent physical acts, since nothing in the portrayal of Philander justifies the accusation of brutal or obscene offenses against the body. Further, nothing else in Love Letters warrants the repellent idea of inflicting such acts on a postpartum woman. Dryden’s ‘secret’ version of Shaftesbury as seducer has prevailed over historical evidence of his reluctance to ‘use’ Monmouth, whom he did not believe to be intelligent or reliable enough to carry out the rebellion. Steven N. Zwicker states, “Associating political radicalism with sexual libertinism had been standard in the civil war years” (1993:142). Zwicker substantiates this point with two poems from 1682: “The Saint Turn’d Courtezan” and “The Lecherous Anabaptist.” He does not cite texts from the civil war period, and thus his point seems a bit misleading, since libertinism was associated clearly with conservative aristocratic figures such as the king and courtiers such as Rochester. See Donnelly, McKeon, Carver, and Weinbrot. The poem is structured around a series of father-son relationships: David (Charles II) and Absalom (Monmouth); Achitophel (Shaftesbury) and his disappointing “two leg’d

Notes

14. 15.

16.

17.

201

thing” (Anthony Ashley); Barzillai (James Butler, Duke of Ormond) and the son who was “his eldest hope” (the Earl of Ossory). See Weinbrot, 373. An Account of the Proceedings at the Sessions-House in the Old Bayly . . . against . . . the Principle Murtherers of Tho. Thin (London: Roger Evans, 1682); An Account of the Tryal and Examination of Count Coningsmark . . . in the Death of T. Thynn (London: H. Jones, 1681; 1682); A True Account of the Apprehending and Taking of Count Coningsmark (London: Langley Curtiss, 1682); A True Account of the Discovering and Apprehending of Count Coningsmark (London: R. Baldwin, 1682); The trials of the persons who committed the barbarous and inhumane murther upon the body of Thomas Thynn (London, 1682); Count Coningsmark’s letter to the Lady Ogle (London, 1682); Capt. Vratz’s ghost to Count Coningsmark (London, 1682); “A Hue and Cry after Blood and Murder” (H3271 [1682]; POAS 5:18–23); Elkanah Settle, “Prologue to ‘The Heir of Morocco’” (S2689; POAS 5:24–27); Robert L’Estrange, Observator 101 (February 20, 1682/1682); John Evelyn, Diary, from 1641 to 1705 (London, 1895); Narcissus Luttrell, Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs 1678–1714 (Oxford, 1857); Delarivier Manley, Memoirs of Europe (London, 1710); Laurence Echard, History of England (London, 1718); Memoirs of the Honourable Sir John Reresby (London, 1734); Eveline Godley, The Trial of Count Coningsmark. Manley subordinates historical accuracy to the needs of her satiric fictions. She confuses or conflates the two Coningsmark brothers as well as the two sisters, Catherine Marie Bussche and Clara Elizabeth von Platen, mistress to Ernst Augustus, Elector of Hanover (Koster 2:867). Sophia Dorothea, Electress of Hanover, married George I who divorced her in 1694. She died in prison in 1726. Many, including Manley, viewed her sympathetically.

5 Satire and Secrecy: Rereading The New Atalantis, Gulliver’s Travels, The Rape of the Lock, and The Dunciad 1. Manley would have been aware of Varro and Menippus’ absences through Dryden: “We have nothing remaining of those Varronian Satires, excepting some considerable Fragments: and those for the most part much corrupted. . . . [Varro] Entitled his own Satires Menippean: Not that Menippus had written any Satires, (for his were either Dialogues or Epistles) but that Varro had imitated his Style, his Manner, and his Facetiousness. All that we know farther of Menippus, and his Writings, which are wholly lost; is, that by some he is esteem’e . . . by Varro” (4:6–47). 2. The identity of the “young prince” is probably George Augustus, son of George I of England. George Augustus’ mother, Sophia Dorothea, had been

202

3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

Notes divorced by the king, thus depriving the child of a noble female guide, the role Astrea plans to fill (See Ballaster; NA 270). Ballaster (NA 291–292) questions the Key’s identification of this pair as the children of Sir John Thompson, first Baron Haversham (1647–1710). Manley takes imaginative license in this episode by merging incest with the secret art of alchemy. The occult concept of chemical union contributes to her sympathetic portrayal of the ‘irresistible’ love between the siblings. Queen Anne was often pregnant, but she was very much alive when The New Atalantis was published. See Francus on the cultural significance of issue surrounding motherhood and infanticide. See CaroleFabricant, “The Shared Worlds of Manley and Swift” and Melinda Rabb, “Swift and Manl(e)y Style” in Mell, 154–178 and 125–153. See Levine, 89–90. Abstract of the History of England, “Of Public Absurdities in England,” “Of Mean and Great Figures” (Brooks-Davis 5:ix–xl). See Deporte 1990, 419–433. See Sams 36–44 and Kropf, Reader Entrapment in Eighteenth-Century Literature. See Deporte, “Teaching the Third Voyage,” in Reilly, Approaches to Teaching Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, 57–62. In Abbe de Montfaucon de Villars’s Le Comte de Gabalis (1670; 1700; translations by Philip Ayres and A. Lovell were published in 1680) Rosicrucian philosophy (based on an occult and invisible brotherhood of the Rosy Cross) had “been used for the purposes of erudite and erotic amusement” (Tillotson; TE 2:356). References to it occur in many English writers, including Fludd, Burton, Dryden, Warton, Temple, Bayle, Lady Chudleigh, Gildon, Steele, Swift, and Manley. Manley and Swift contributed pamphlets to the Barrier Treaty controversy in 1709–1711. The treaty gave the Dutch control of territories that were to provide a ‘barrier’ against France. Prolonged hostility between England and France lessened the chances of bringing back a Stuart monarch. Two unauthorized keys were published before Pope supplied his own “Notes Variorum” (Sutherland; TE 5:xl). Sutherland has in mind the public anticipation that proceeded and the furor that followed the publication of the poem (5:xxiii). Pope’s identity was suspected but immediately confirmed.

6

‘A Life by Stealth’: Autobiographical Satire in Manley, Swift, and Pope

1. The double action of such language in satire is, in J. L. Austin’s terms, both illocutionary and perlocutionary, having both an immediate performative

Notes

2.

3.

4.

5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

203

effect and aftereffects that exceed in unexpected ways the initiating linguistic situation. At first Austin’s notion of an illocutionary utterance seems incompatible with an Althusser’s notion of interpellation. For Austin, the subject who speaks precedes the speech in question. For Althusser, the speech act that brings the subject into linguistic existence precedes the subject in question. Indeed, the interpellation that precedes and forms the subject in Althusser appears to constitute the prior condition of those subject-centered speech acts that populate Austin’s domain of analysis. Austin, however, makes it clear that he does not think the workings of the performative always depend on the intentions of the speaker. He refutes forms of psychologism that would require that “fictitious inward acts” (10) accompany the promise, one of the first speech acts he considers, in order to validate that act. Although a good intention may well make a promise felicitous, an intention not to perform the act does not deprive the speech act of its status as a promise; the promise is still performed” (J. Butler, 24). Swift’s final will (May 3, 1740) left detailed instructions about a Latin epitaph that should be “‘deeply cut and strongly gilded’: . . . Hic depositum est corpus Jonathan Swift, S. T. D. Hujus ecclesiae Cathedralis Decani, ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit, abiviator, et imitare, si poteris, strenuum pro virili libertatis vindicatorem” (Nokes, 412). While Habermas, in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, insists that “language games only work because they presuppose idealizations that transcend any particular language game” (199), Austin argues that irony consists of perlocutionary acts with consequences that can be unintentional and ongoing. These consequences help to account for the satirist’s (and for the reader’s) struggles over power, personal and political. Pope notes sardonically that secrets individuate dunces as well as geniuses: “But each man’s secret standard in his mind, / That Casting-weight Pride adds to Emptiness, / This, who can gratify? For who can guess?” (Arbuthnot, 176–178). See Miller, 274 and Bella and Schenck, 288. See Rabb, “Angry Beauties,” in Gill, 127–158. Ballaster reads Delia’s story differently, as “an unabashed attempt at whitewashing Manley’s complicity in her bigamous marriage” (Seductive Forms, 151). But she agrees about the contrast with Rivella “whose very knowingness in the arts of love is what makes her so attractive.” Foucault defines confession in masculine terms as “a ritual in which the expression alone, independently of its external consequences produces intrinsic modification in the person who articulates it: exonerates, redeems, and purifies him; it unburdens him of his wrongs, liberates him, and promises salvation” (1978:1: 61). Jane Spencer sees Delia as representing a “type” for womanhood that was gaining ground in eighteenth-century fiction: the innocent, passionless dupe of men (Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen [Oxford: Blackwell, 1986]). The idea of parodic confessional as an experiment in ironic feminine self-representation differs but is not incompatible with either Spencer’s or Ballaster’s views.

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Notes

10. My understanding of the formation of the subject through alterity is influenced by feminist revisions of Habermas. See Joan Landes in Meehan, Feminists Read Habermas, 91–116. 11. Manley’s satire on happiness is further analyzed and compared to Swift’s treatment of happiness in A Tale of a Tub in Rabb, “Swift and the SpiderWoman,” in Douglas 1998. 12. See Zelinsky, 27–33. 13. Identified as Katherine Baker, an actress in the King’s Company who was actively performing from 1699 (Zelinsky, 94). 14. The abbreviation “md” signifies ‘my dear(s)’; “pdfr” stands for ‘poor dear foolish rogue,’; “ourichar gangridge” signifies ‘our little language’. 15. Swift refers to the sensitive matter of an offer of money from Harley and their disagreement over it. Translation: He offered me a bank bill for fifty pounds. 16. For a discussion of Swift’s omissions about some personal matters in the Journal to Stella, see Rabb, “Swift and the Manl(e)y Style,” in Mell, 131–132. 17. See “The Author upon Himself,” “The Author’s Manner of Living,” “In Sickness,” “The Dean’s Reasons,” “The Dean to Himself on St. Cecilia’s Day,” “Written by Dr. Swift on His Own Deafness,” “The Life and Genuine Character of Dr. Swift,” “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift,” “The Dean of St. Patrick’s to Thomas Sheridan,” “Dr. Swift to Mr. Pope While He Was Writing the Dunciad,” “My Lady’s Lamentation against the Dean,” “Lady Acheson Weary of the Dean,” “A Panegyrick upon the Dean in the Person of a Lady in the North.” 18. Swift emphasizes the notion of contradictory texts proliferating after his death in a note to line 168: “The Author imagines, that the Scriblers of the prevailing Party, which he always opposed, will libel him after his Death; but that others will remember him with Gratitude, who consider the Service he had done to Ireland under the name of M. B. Drapier, by utterly defeating the destructive Project of Wood’s Half-pence . . .” (558). 19. Swift added, “Upon the Queen’s death, the Dean returned to live in Dublin . . . Numberless libels were writ against him in England, as a Jacobite” (568). 20. Rogers argues that anonymity “is in some measure textualized: that is, the author uses the absence of an acknowledged identity to produce meaning in the ongoing discourse” (2002:235). Rogers considers secrecy as a response to government censorship. 21. Manley’s ironic use of her own body as an erotic object and Swift’s references to his deafness, vertigo, and idiosyncratic habits, never, in my opinion, express the anxiety that accompanies Pope’s references to his disabilities. All three nevertheless contrast their public with their hidden selves. 22. Rogers claims that “in Britain there was less need for secrecy [than in France] . . . consequently the choice to write anonymously was a more positive authorial action” (235).

Notes

205

23. Pope shares Manley’s distaste for being the victim of Charles Gildon’s pen because Gildon was thought to be the secret coauthor of John Dennis’s scurrilous A True Character of Mr. Pope and His Writings. See Guerinot, 42. 24. Fuller descriptions are given by Mack, Sherburn, Winn, and Rogers. 25. I am indebted to Todd’s illuminating chapter “What the Body Says,” in Imagining Monsters. 26. John Dennis initiated the pamphlet attacks by ridiculing the Essay on Criticism in 1711. Colly Cibber, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Lord Hervey are the most famous of Pope’s known detractors, but, as Guerinot shows, their publications constitute only a small percentage of the total assault on Pope. The attacks target not only his poetry but also his physical deformity, his Catholicism and alleged Jacobitism, his masculinity, his profit from the subscription to Homer, and his disingenuousness. 27. “[I]n the face of this image [of AP-E, the deformed Catholic] he gradually constructed for himself another, that of the Poet of the Imitations of Horace. . . . The pamphlet attacks . . . played their part in the construction of this persona. . . . It also seems certain that they played a part in changing the application of Pope’s genius toward the satiric mode. . . . The Dunciad and ‘The Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot’ are sure evidence that Pope had read, and read with care, most of the attacks” (Guerinot, xlvi–li). 28. Richard H. Douglas sees Pope’s self-representation in Arbuthnot as “internal harmony” and “a balance in the persona” (“More on the Rhetoric,” 488). Thomas Maresca describes Pope’s autobiographical references in the Horatian poems as a “regenerative, concordant individual in contrast to the depravity and disorder that mark the dunces and their works” and as a “reconciliation of opposite concepts” (Pope’s Horatian Poems, 110). 29. Pope crudely joked with Martha Blount about the ineffectual management of information: “They conceald it as well as a Barber does his utensils when he goes to trim upon a Sunday and his Towels hand out all the way: Or as well as a Fryer concealed a little Wench, whom he was carrying under his Habit to Mr. Collingwood’s Convent; Pray, Father (sayd one in the Street to him) what’s that under your Arm. A saddle for one of the Brothers to ride with, quoth the Fryer. Then Father (cryd he) take care and shorten the Stirrups— For the Girls Legs hung out” (Corr 1:269). 30. The rift between Pope and Montagu supposedly followed her laughter when he offered physical love. Colly Cibber also ridiculed Pope’s sexuality by supposedly rescuing Pope from a whore “with a finger and a thumb, picked off thy small round Body, by thy long Legs, like a Spider” (Another Occasional Letter from Mr. Cibber to Mr. Pope, Guerinot, 52). 31. Pope’s identification with/hatred of Hervey because of a sense of rivalry over Lady Mary may explain why “Pope, surprisingly enough, omitted this pamphlet from his list of attacks in the Appendix to the Dunciad” (Guerinot, 115). 32. Peter Brooks describes Enlightenment rationality as creating the need for a different, more secular and psychological, understanding of irrationality and faith (“Virtue and Terror: The Monk,” 262).

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Notes

Conclusion: Postmodernizing Satire: Irony, Conspiracy, and Paranoia 1. John Farrell makes the case for Freudian theory as an elaboration of seventeenthand eighteenth-century satire, that is, he treats Freud’s writing as more literary than scientific. He further assumes that Freudian theory is itself predicated on paranoid ideas. 2. Noir has come to connote the difficult search for clues and meaning—the detecting of ‘detective stories,’ for example—in which a degree of radical inaccessibility is maintained and full disclosure or resolution is denied. Linda Charnes calls Hamlet the first noir text. 3. One assumes a degree of homophobia in Freud’s writing, so that his belief that paranoia is always a response to latent homosexuality in tinged with his own anxiety. He did not have the term/concept “homosocial” with which to temper his theory. 4. It is tempting to draw parallels between liquor-and-sex world of the reckless libertine or problematic male aristocrat of the Stuart era and the participants in the drugs-and-sex world of the 1960’s invoked in Pynchon’s novels and Žižek’s essays. 5. Freud associates paranoia as repressed same-sex desire with aggressive feelings of anger and fear, “whereby the libidinous energy directed towards the loveobject is reenvisaged as coming back at the subject in the form of aggression” (1959:445).

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Atterbury, Francis. The History of the Mitre and the Purse; in Which the First and Second Parts of the Secrecy History of the White Staff Are Fully Considered. 1714. Aulnoy, Madame d’ (Marie-Catherine). Hypolitus, Earl of Douglas, Containing Some Memoirs of the Court of Scotland; with the Secret History of Mack-Beth King of Scotland. 1708. Boyer, Abel. The History of the Reign of Queen Anne Digested into Annals. Year the First (through Fifth). 1703–1707. Bridges, Noah. Stenography and Cryptography, or the Arts of Short and Secret Writing. 1659. The Cabinet Open’ d, or, the Secret History of the Amours of Madam de Maintenon, with the French King. 1690. Chambers, Ephraim. Cyclopaedia, or, an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences. 4th ed. 1741. Croll, Oswald. Basilica Chymica. Three Parts in One Volume, translated by Richard Russell. London, 1670. Crouch, Nathaniel [?]. The Secret History of the Four Last Monarchs of Great Britain, viz. James I, Charles I, Charles II, and James II. 1691. Dalairac, M. Francois-Paulin. Polish Manuscripts: Or the Secret History of the Reign of John Sobieski the III of That Name, K. of Poland. 1700. Day, Angel. The English Secretary. London. 1592. De Britaine. Humane Prudence, or the Art by Which a Man May Raise Himself and His Fortune to Grandeur. 5th ed. London. 1689. Defoe, Daniel. A Detection of the Sophistry and Falsities of the Pamphlet, Entitul’ d the Secret History of the White Staff. 1714. ———. A Dialogue between the Staff, the Mitre, and the Purse, with a Conclusion by Lord John Bull. 1715. ———. A Secret History of One Year. 1714. ———. The Secret History of the Secret History of the White Staff. 1715. ———. The Secret History of State Intrigues in the Management of the Scepter. 1715. Dunton, John. Athenae Rediviae, or the Athenian Spy. 1704. ———. Athenian Mercury. 1690. E. P. A Bridle for the Tongue: Or, the Trial and Condemnation of a WhisperingBackbiter. London. Echard, Laurence. The History of England. From the First Entrance of Julius Caesar and the Romans, to the End of the Reign of King James the First. 1707. Estienne, Henri. Uniform ti Art de faire des devises, translated by Thomas Blount. London: W. E. and J. G., 1646. A Full and Impartial Account of All the Secret Consults, Negotiations, Stratagems, and Intriegues of the Romish Party in Ireland, from 1660, to This Present Year 1689. 1690. Gildon, Charles [?]. The Secret History of Queen Zarah and the Zarazians. 1705. Grey, Ford Lord. The Secret History of the Rye House Plot: And of Monmouth’s Rebellion. London. 1754.

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Stoughton, William. The Secret History of the Late Ministry; from Their Admission, to the Death of the Queen. 1715. Temple, William Sir. An Introduction to the History of England. 3rd ed. 1708. Themis Aurea, The Laws of the Fraternity of the Rosie Crosse, Written in Latin by Count Michael Maieris. London. 1656. Vanel, M. (Claude). The Royal Mistresses of France, or the Secret History of the Amours of All the French Kings. 1695. Varillas, Monsieur Antoine. Anekdota heterouiaka. Or, the Secret History of the House of Medicis. 1686. Ward, Edward. The Athenian Spy: Discovering the Secret Letters Which Were Sent to the Athenian Society. 1704. ———. The Secret History of the Calves-Head Club: Or, the Republican Unmask’ d. 6th ed. 1707. ———. The Secret History of Clubs: Particularly the Kit-Cat, Beef-Stake, Vertuosos, Quacks, Knights of the Golden-Fleece, Florists, Beaus, & c. 1709. Wilkins, John. Mercury: Or the Secret and Swift Messenger. 3rd ed. 1708.

Index

Adams, John, 84, 150 Addison, Joseph, 5, 8–9, 22, 74, 132, 142, 193n10 Adorno, Theodor, 63 aggressive speech, 47–48, 58, 64–65 Akenside, Mark, 35 Algren, Nelson, 178 amatory fiction, 80–81, 199n22 anecdotes, see secret memoirs Aquinas, Thomas, 58 architecture, 17, 22–24, 26 Armstrong, Nancy, 198n21 Ashmole, Elias, 33 Assiento, 29 Atterbury, Francis, 69 Atterbury, William, 69, 172 Aubin, Penelope, 8 Augustine, 150 Austen, Jane, 21, 52–53, 119, 192n11, 195n12 Austin, J. L., 2, 15–17, 49, 51, 56, 62–63, 113, 192n16, 194n4, 195n6, 195n7, 202–203n1, 203n3 autobiographical satire, 18, 147–49 Manley and, 149–56 Pope and, 162–75 Swift and, 156–62 Bacon, Sir Francis, 36, 51, 169, 171, 193n17, 194n18 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 4 Ballaster, Ros, 12, 81, 117, 120, 152–53, 197n5, 202n3, 203n7, 203n9

“bandied ball” image of Swift, 10, 118, 119 Barker, Frances, 39 Barnett, Louise K., 160–61 Barrier Treaty controversy, 141, 202n13 Barthes, Roland, 53, 150 Bataille, Robert, 37 behabitives, 15–16 Behn, Aphra, 2, 11–12, 40, 80, 81, 121, 128 fathers and, 186 gender construction and, 106 politics and, 44 promises and, 95–103 secret history and, 95–103 on the seventeenth century, 71 Behn, Aphra, works of City Heiress, 75 Love Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister, 13, 18, 75, 76, 80, 85, 87, 95–106 The Rover, 16, 58 “Silvio’s Complaint,” 91 Bentham, Jeremy, 13 Bentinck, William, 194n19 Benveniste, Emile, 15 Berkeley, Henrietta, 76, 95, 108 Bersani, Leo, 179 Bogel, Fredric V., 10, 118, 177 Bok, Sissela, 6 Bonham, Thomas, 24 Bourdieu, Pierre, 37–38

226

Index

Bowers, Toni, 12, 81 Boyle, Robert, 33, 160 Bray, Alan, 14, 37 Brenneis, Donald, 195n14 Bridges, Noah, 191n2 Briggs, Charles, 51, 195n14 Brooks, Peter, 205n32 Brooks, Thomas, 24–25 Brooks-Davies, Douglas, 143, 194n23 Broome, William, 145, 145, 163–64 Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross, 32, 202n12. See also Invisible College Burkitt, Williams, 24 Burnet, Gilbert, 42, 80, 84–86, 131–32, 136–38, 143 Burnet, Thomas, 168 Burney, Frances, 119, 192n11 Butler, Judith, 2, 11, 14–16, 49–50, 60, 63, 71, 146–47 Butler, Samuel, 1, 116 Byron, Lord, 92, 181, 183, 200n1 camaraderie of satire, 7–9 Caryll, John, 139, 164, 166, 169, 170 Castiglione, Baldassare, 59 Catholics and Catholicism, 42–43, 72, 76, 79, 94, 127, 142, 147, 183, 192n17, 197n11, 198n16, 200n6, 205n26, 205n27 censorship, 58–65, 147 Chambers, Ephraim, 78 Charlton, Walter, 34–35 Chartier, Roger, 8 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 50–51, 148 Churchill, John, 37, 73 Churchill, Sarah, 36, 37, 73, 76, 141 Cibber, Colly, 35, 88, 162, 168, 205n26, 205n30 Claremont, Claire, 92 closets, 7–8, 23–27, 29, 32, 37, 39, 44, 59, 84, 137, 163, 168–69 Coates, Jennifer, 51–52 coffeehouses, 8, 10, 12, 22, 27–31, 33, 167, 191n3, 193n7

Cohen, Michelle, 14 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 199n1 colonialism, 17, 28–29, 40, 128, 193n9 commerce and finance, 6, 9, 17, 27–31, 45, 108–109, 138, 141 competing truths and narratives, 2, 49, 52, 67, 69–70, 73, 81, 111, 130, 132, 148–51 Congreve, William, 3, 22, 170 Coningsmark, Count, 93, 108–11, 113–14, 200n4, 201n15, 201n16 Connery, Brian, 119 conspiracy, 3, 4, 17, 41–43, 71, 75–76, 85–86, 93–97, 119, 178–81, 187 constative language, 15, 194n4 contract, political, 17, 92 Cooper, Anthony Ashley. See Shaftesbury, Earl of Cowley, Abraham, 170 Curll, Edmund, 152, 162, 163, 166, 171 D’Aulnoy, Madame, 82, 197n5 The Secret History of Mack-Beth, 82–84 D’Aumont, Chevalier, 152–56 Dabydeen, David, 28, 29 Dante, 58 Dawes, Samuel, 24–25 Dawes, William, 24 Day, Angel, 25 de Lafayette, Madame, 39 de Medici, Catherine, 69 de Villars, Abbe de Montfaucon, 35, 202n12 defamation law, 61–64 Defoe, Daniel, 8, 22, 28, 40, 69–70, 75, 86, 193n10, 197n11 DeLillo, Don, 177–79, 183 Dennis, John, 168, 205n23, 205n26 Deporte, Michael, 134, 202n9, 202n11 Derrida, Jacques, 15, 193n4, 195n7

Index Diderot, Denis, 35, 41 Digby, Kenelm, 33, 36 Digby, Robert, 163 domesticity, manuals of, 24 domesticity, private, 23–24 Don Juan figure, 3, 17–18, 55–58, 71, 82–83, 87, 91–93, 98, 100–102, 111–14, 123, 132, 149, 164, 170–71, 183–84 Donne, John, 25 Dorset, Earl of, 170 Downie, J. A., 191n4 Dryden, John, 2, 4, 16, 44, 93, 121, 148, 174 promises and, 103–107 on Republicanism, 87 satiric theory and, 116–18 Dryden, John, works of Absalom and Achitophel, 18, 58, 103–108, 114, 174, 186 Discourse concerning . . . Satire, 116–18, 178 Mac Flecknoe, 88, 178 Dunbar, Robin, 51, 195n9 Dunlop, John Colin, 199n23 Dunton, John, 37 dystopian narratives, 36, 194n18 Eagleton, Terry, 2 Echard, Laurence, 109–10, 201n15 education, 31–33, 36, 138 effeminacy, 171–74 Elliott, Robert C., 11, 49, 65, 116, 119 Emden, C. S., 191n6 Englund, A. B., 160 Enlightenment, 8, 13, 31, 35, 63, 175, 205n32 eroticism, 13, 17–18, 22, 24–27, 35–40, 78, 81–82, 84, 99, 103, 117, 123, 140, 153, 156, 184, 186 excitable speech, 15–16, 63, 66, 71, 122, 146–47, 196n20

227

Exclusion Crisis, 17, 43–45, 86, 92, 105, 108, 111, 121, 197n6, 197n8 Fabricant, Carol, 119, 127–28, 173, 202n6 Farrell, John, 3, 179, 206n1 father figures, 12, 19, 49, 68, 82–83, 92–98, 104–106, 143 absent, 47, 119, 122–23, 173–74, 186 authority and, 55–57, 151 God and, 186 “good,” 105 hatred of, 119, 125–26 illegitimate children and, 55, 88, 98, 106, 137 lovers as, 88, 105 primal, 184 problem, 97, 104, 186 sons and, 92–96, 105, 119, 138, 183–85 virtuous, 171–72 See also patriarchy father-kings, 78, 88, 92, 105 Faulkner, William, 161 Felman, Shoshana, 2, 3, 15, 16, 49, 56–57, 63, 72, 87, 89, 113, 124 female satirists, 10–11, 116–19, 150–51 Ferguson, Robert, 93, 101, 102 Fielding, Henry, 31, 81, 192n17 “fighting words,” 196n20 Finch, Daniel, 42, 159 Foucault, Michel, 3, 13–14, 25, 36–37, 53, 61, 63, 179, 192n13, 193n3, 194n18, 203n8 founding of the “subject,” 17 Fox, Christopher, 39 freedom, 5, 29, 86, 87, 93, 114, 184 Freud, Sigmund, 3, 86, 179, 183–87, 206n1, 206n3, 206n5 Frye, Northrup, 119 Gallagher, Catherine, 120, 199n25 Gay, John, 3, 9, 161–62

228

Index

Gay, John: The Beggar’s Opera, 3, 58, 82–83, 186, 195n15 gender theory, 3, 14 gendered, speech acts, 16 Gerrard, Samuel, 166 Gibbon, Edward, 41, 73 Gildon, Charles, 152, 168, 202n12, 205n23 Gill, James, 118, 203n6 Glorious Revolution, 17, 44, 74, 126, 137 Glover, Edward, 193n10 Godfrey, Sir Edmund Bury, 44 gossip, 5, 108, 111–13, 139 aggressive language and, 10, 47–50 autobiographical writing and, 148–49, 151, 156, 160–61, 163–64 Byron on, 92 derivation of, 47–48 gendered discourse and, 16–17, 115–16, 118, 120–27, 168, 187 homosocial, 156 hypothesis of, 50–55 intimacy of, 143 journalistic, 81 magical powers and, 11 Manley on, 120 Pope accused of using, 168–70 Pope on, 167 promises and, 55–58 satire and, 103, 141–44, 173–75 slander and, 58, 65–66 Swift on, 161 Greenfield, Susan, 106 Grey, Ford Lord, 76, 92–96, 99, 100, 107–108, 112, 114, 200n6 Griffin, Dustin, 118, 162–63, 167, 173 Guerinot, J. V., 167, 205n23, 205n26 Guilhamet, Leon, 118 Habermas, Jürgen, 2–3, 8–10, 13, 22, 27–28, 63, 191n3, 191n6, 192n11, 193n7, 203n3, 204n10

“hack” or “hacker,” 4 Hackett, Helen, 199n24 Hamilton, Anthony, 84 Hanoverian Succession, 17, 131 Harley, Robert, 44, 69, 70, 128, 129, 142, 149, 159, 163, 204n15 Harth, Erica, 81 Hay, Douglas, 21, 23 Haywood, Eliza, 11, 22, 48, 69, 77, 80, 81, 85, 86, 128, 140, 168, 198n20 Heller, Joseph, 181 Henley, John, 168 Hervey, John, 4, 146, 173–74, 205n26, 205n31 Heywood, Oliver, 24 Hobbes, Thomas, 4 Holmes, Geoffrey, 198n19 homosexuality, 14, 37–39, 70, 99, 127, 185–87, 194n19, 194n20, 206n3 Hooke, Robert, 34 Hooker, Thomas, 67 Horace, 2, 3, 117–19, 167, 177 Horkheimer, Max, 63 Howell, William, 24 illocutionary speech act, 15, 62, 71, 202–203n1 inaccessibility, radical, 163, 175 information age, 4–5 Internet, 4–5 intimacy and satire, 2, 6–11, 14, 118–19, 147, 180, 182 Invisible College, 32, 193n12. See also Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross irony, 7, 16, 17, 102, 117, 137, 148, 153, 174, 178, 192n12 charisma and, 182–83 as “ex-citable,” 65 female satirists and, 13 Frye on, 119 history and, 133 madness and, 12 paranoia and, 182–183 sciences and, 34

Index Johnson, Maurice, 147, 160 Johnson, Samuel, 4, 5, 32, 51, 60, 105, 192n14 Jones, David, 84 Jones, J. R., 200n6 Jonson, Ben, 116, 181 Jordanova, Ludmilla, 39 Juvenal, 2, 48, 117–19, 146, 177 Kaplan, M. L., 58–61 Keller, Evelyn Fox, 5, 6, 34, 127 Kemp, Anthony, 67 Kernan, Alvin, 119, 145, 180 King, William, 161 King Charles I, 26, 42, 44, 64, 74, 81, 83, 157, 185 King Charles II, 3, 30, 42–44, 68, 72–73, 76–78, 93–95, 103, 105, 107, 112–13, 123, 127, 132, 174, 185, 191n1, 193n5, 199n27, 200n6, 200n13 King Edward I, 59–60 King Edward IV, 77 King George I, 113, 131–32, 141, 201n17, 201n2 King James II, 3, 42, 44, 71, 75–76, 83, 94, 126–27, 200n6 King Louis XIV, 29, 43, 44, 72, 74, 197n11 King William III, 42, 44, 71, 73–75, 95, 121, 127, 136–37, 161, 194n19 Knight, Chris, 51, 118, 194n3, 195n10 Kropf, Carl R., 196n19 L’Estrange, Robert, 74, 197n9, 201n15 Lacan, Jacques, 3, 179, 186 Landes, Joan, 10, 204n10 landscape, 17, 22 language, evolution of human, 51 Laqueur, Thomas, 37, 39 learning, abuses of, 18, 31, 32–36 Lee, Nathaniel, 39–40

229

libel, 17, 47, 49, 55, 61–66, 75, 85–86, 110, 120, 146, 154, 165, 167–68, 171. See also slander libertinism, 104–105 Licensing Act of 1662, 7 Lillo, George, 193n10 Lintott, Bernard, 139, 162 Liset, Abraham, 24 Locke, John, 31, 36, 50, 84 locutionary speech acts, 15 Lodwick, Frances, 191n2 Love, Harold, 191n1, 191n5 Lovemore, Sir Charles, 152–56 Lucilius, 177 Mack, Maynard, 119, 165, 205n24 Macky, John, 44, 74, 133 madness, 7, 12–14, 122, 174, 182–83 “man at liberty,” 87–89, 92, 114, 184 Mandeville, Bernard, 31–32 Manley, Delarivier, 109, 175, 179 abuses of learning and, 31, 35–36 autobiographical writing and, 18–19, 147–49, 149–56, 163 body imagery and, 146 closet images and, 23 homosocial gossip and, 156 libel and, 55, 61 promiscuity as metaphor in, 12–13, 55, 183 scandalum magnatum and, 44, 61, 65, 119 secret histories of, 12, 110–15 secret memoirs of, 120–28 secret societies and, 35–36 secretary function and, 25 Swift on, 16 Manley, Delarivier, works of The Adventures of Rivella, 18, 147–56, 163 Memoirs of Europe, 11, 18, 36, 75, 104, 107, 109, 110, 113–14, 146, 148

230

Index

Manley, Delarivier —continued New Atalantis, 5, 11, 12, 18, 31, 36, 61, 85–86, 104, 116, 118, 120–28, 135, 139, 141, 148–49, 151, 153, 155, 179, 186 Markham, Gervase, 24 Markley, Robert, 23, 200n13 Markman Ellis, 27–28, 193n6, 193n7, 193n8 Marshall, Alan, 23, 26 Marten, John, 38 Marvell, Andrew, 43, 80, 84–87, 181, 199n27, 200n5 Marx Karl, 179, 196n3 masculinity, 2–3, 14, 17, 69, 84–86, 101, 116–21, 152, 170–74, 178, 184–85, 187, 192n11, 203n8, 205n26 Masham, Abigail, 37, 77, 131, 141 Mayer, Robert, 84, 132 McKeon, Michael, 68, 103 McRae, Andrew, 61 Meal-Tub Plot, 43, 76 Meehan, Johanna, 10, 204n10 Menippus, 2, 118 Meredith, George, 48, 194n1 Miller, D. A., 1, 3, 8–9, 27, 147–48, 150, 191n9 Miller, James, 28 Milton, John, 32, 84, 87, 103–104, 116, 169, 174 misogyny, 106, 112 modernity, 9, 13, 56, 178 Monmouth, Duke of, 3, 18, 44, 72, 74, 79–80, 87–88, 91–95, 97–114, 170, 172, 201n13 Monmouth’s Rebellion, 76, 88, 91, 93, 95, 103, 200n6, 200n11 Montagu, Earl of, 44 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 3–4, 41, 146, 148, 173, 205n26, 205n30 Montagu, Ralph, 154 Moore, Michael, 177, 180–83

Morley, Richard, 168 mother figures, 32, 126–27, 143–44, 174–75, 184 barren or productive, 88, 174 illegitimate children and, 73, 126 misogyny and, 106 nursing, 127, 173–74 problem, 104, 164 motherhood, 103, 127, 151 Mulgrave, Earl of, 65, 116 multiple narrators, 57, 195n15 New Historicism, 187 Newton, Sir Isaac, 33–35 Nichols, James, 118 Nicol, Bran, 182 Nietzche, Friedrich, 56, 179 Oates, Titus, 43, 71 occultists, 32–34, 36, 99, 122, 148 Ogle, Lady 108–11, 113, 201n15 Oldham, John, 3, 116, 117 Oldisworth, John, 77 Oldmixon, John, 6, 71, 72, 76, 85, 87, 142 open secrets, 8, 147, 148 Ormsby-Lennon, Hugh, 32 Osborne, Thomas, 43 Owen, Susan, 197n8 Palmer, Colin, 29–30 Palmerston, Lord, 196n3 Panopticon, 13 paranoia, 3, 19, 50, 52, 57, 78, 86, 93, 177–87, 198n15, 206n3, 306n5 Parker, Patricia, 192n16, 198n15, Partridge, John, 24 Pateman, Carole, 11, 200n2 paternal promises, 57, 123 patriarchy, 14, 18, 68, 78, 97, 111, 136, 157, 183–88 accidental paternity and, 88 challenges to, 19, 123, 126, 137–39 crisis of, 44

Index gossip and, 50–58 limits of, 93 role of the father and, 106 fictions of, 152 motherhood and, 127 paranoia and, 178 See also anti-patriarchy, 58, 76, 95–96, 138 Patterson, Annabel, 84–86, 132, 198n14, 198n16, 200n5 Paulson, Ronald, 119 Pepys, Samuel, 7, 28, 39 performative language, 15–16, 50, 60, 68, 105, 138, 173, 192n16, 194n4, 194n5, 202–203n1 Phillips, John, 70 Phillips, Trevor, 29 Pittis, William, 69 Plucknett, Theodore, 62, 64 politics of the performative, 15 Pollak, Ellen, 97, 200n7 Pope, Alexander, 4, 33, 88, 115–16, 161, 180 autobiographical writing and, 18, 145–49, 162–75 Byron on, 92 camaraderie of satire and, 7, 12 closet imagery and, 23 on enemies, 183 eroticism and, 35 politics and, 44 on satire, 48 on secrecy, 2, 3 secretary function and, 25 on slander, 58, 60 Pope, Alexander, works of Correspondence, 145, 146, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 169, 170, 173 The Dunciad, 5, 11, 12, 18–19, 31, 35, 48, 60–61, 142–43, 148, 162–69, 171, 174, 178, 183 Epistle to Cobham, 31

231

An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 16, 18, 142, 148–49, 162, 167, 171, 173–74, 186 Essay on Man, 45, 164–65 To Fortescue, 61, 162 Key to the Lock, 115, 139–44, 148, 168 The Rape of the Lock, 22, 18, 32, 34–35, 52, 139–42, 148, 169, 174, 180 “Windsor Forest,” 29 Popish Plot, 43–44, 197n6 Porter, Roy, 37–38, 41 postmodernism, 2–4, 14, 19, 50, 150, 177–79, 182–88 Potter, Lois, 26 Power, Camilla, 51 pregnancy, 13, 42, 100, 106, 122, 126–27 prelocutionary speech acts, 15, 62, 202–203n1, 203n3 print culture, 4, 9, 14, 22, 31, 62, 68 promises in Absalom and Achitophel, 105 broken, 17, 71–72, 78–79, 81, 83, 86, 88–89, 104, 123 gossip and, 55–58 inheritance and, 88 in Love Letters, 99, 101 marriage and, 83, 124 paternal, 57, 123 power and, 93 secret history and, 68, 71–72 seductive, 17, 92, 116, 121 significance of, 49 speech act theory and, 49–50, 140, 184 prostitution, 22, 27–28, 38, 73, 135, 168 public assemblage, places of, 8, 22, 191n3. See also coffeehouses public sphere, 8–11, 18, 22, 28, 41, 48, 63, 120, 187 Pucci, Susan, 35, 41, 193n16

232

Index

Pulteney, William, 174 Pulton, Ferdinando, 47, 59 Pynchon, Thomas, 177, 178, 180–81, 183, 206n4 Queen Anne, 37, 42, 44–45, 72, 73, 76, 79, 88, 108, 121, 126–27, 129, 131–32, 137, 141, 171, 191n1, 197n11, 202n4 Queen Elizabeth I, 60, 69, 74, 78–80, 88, 131, 198n16, 198n17 Queen Mary I, 42, 60, 71, 79, 88, 136–37 Queen Mary II, 60, 69, 75, 79, 88 Queen Victoria, 37 queens, secret life of, 78–80 Rabb, Melinda, 202n6, 204n11, 204n16 Rabelais, François, 88, 160 Rambuss, Richard, 24–25, 193n4 rape, 17, 39, 53, 59, 76, 82, 87, 92, 103, 106–107, 114, 121, 128, 139–40, 150, 180 Rawson, Claude, 119, 161 readers of satire, 10, 63, 65, 69, 116–18, 121–22, 133, 143–44, 147–48, 178, 180–82 Reresby, Sir John, 72, 77, 109, 198n13 restoration of monarchy, 17, 41, 80, 82–83, 132 Richardson, Samuel, 45, 81, 96 Richetti, John, 198n20 Ricoeur, Paul, 192n12 Roberts, Mary Mulvey, 21, 33, 193n13 Rochester, John Wilmot, Earl of, 39, 52, 57, 87–88, 104, 170, 194n19, 195n15 Rochford, Anne, 28 Rogers, Nicholas, 21 Rogers, Pat, 13, 146, 162, 164–66, 204n20, 204n22, 205n24 Rosenheim, Edward, 194n2

Rosicrucian, see Invisible College; also Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross Roulston, Christine, 52, 55 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 150, 198n21 Royal Historiographer, 130–31 Royal Society, 32–36, 193n12, 203n15 Rycaut, 40, 194n20 Rye-House Plot, 88, 93–95, 99, 107, 108 Sacheverell, Dr. Henry, 76, 141 satire, definitions of, 3, 16 as masculine, 10–11, 115–17 as ‘noir’, 183–88 theories of, 48–50, 65–66, 82, 115–20 women and, 10–11, 118–20 Savage, Richard, 168 scandalum magnatum, 59–61, 65, 196n20 Schenck, Celeste, 150, 203n5 Schreber, Daniel Paul, 185–86 Scott, James. See Monmouth, Duke of Scriblerians, 120, 146, 191n3 Searle, John R., 15 secrecy closets and, 23–27 “good” and “bad,” 5 modern ideas of, 24 public vs. 21 secret history, 8, 17–18, 39, 57, 152, 159, 181 Absalom and Achitophel and, 103–107 competing stories and, 67–70 feminine, 80–84 Gulliver’s Travels and, 128–39 Love Letters and, 95–102 man of liberty and, 87–89 masculine, 84–87 Memoirs of Europe and, 110–14 New Atalantis and, 12, 120–28 promise-making and, 50, 71–72, 114

Index queens and, 78–80 Rape of the Lock and, 139–44 rise of, 72–76 Rye-House plot and, 93–95 sexual transgression and, 76–78, 92, 107 secret learning, 34–35. See also secret societies secret loves, 36–41 secret memoirs, 11, 26, 67–70, 77, 120–39, 148 secret politics, 41–45 secret societies, 17, 32–36, 126 Secret Treaty of Dover, 43, 72 secretary function, 25 Sedgwick, Eve, 2–3, 14, 37, 120–21, 179, 187, 191n9, 192n16, Seidel, Michael, 88, 118–19, 196n20 sexual secrets, 35–40, 76 Seymour, Elizabeth, See Ogle, Lady Shadwell, Thomas, 87, 88, 114, 184 Shaftesbury, Earl of, 43, 75, 79, 93–95, 103, 107, 200n6, 200n11, 200n13 Shakespeare, William, 49, 51, 58–59, 82–83, 94–95, 170, 177, 179 Sharpe, J. A., 60, 62 Shelley, Mary, 92 Shelley, P. B., 92 Sheridan, Thomas, 5, 160, 204n17 Shirley, John, 24 Sidney, Algernon, 84, 86 Simmel, Georg, 6, 41, 53 slander, 10, 17, 28, 47–49, 54, 58–66, 68, 73, 86, 88, 92, 107, 116, 131, 133, 143, 148–49, 164–67. See also libel slave trade, 29–30 slavery, 17, 22, 27–31, 40, 87, 101, 106, 197n7 Slepian, Brian, 160 Snyder, John, 118 Sobieski, John, 75–76 South Sea Company, 29–30

233

Southey, Robert, 92 Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 51–54, 195n11 speech act theory, 2–3, 15–18, 49, 62, 91, 184 Spence, Fernand, 68 Spencer, Jane, 203n9 Spencer, Robert, 44 Spenser, Edmund, 25, 58, 164, 174 Sprat, Thomas, 34, 193n15 Stallybrass, Peter, 38 Stanton, Domna, 14, 117 Steele, Sir Richard, 5, 33, 74, 81, 168, 202n12 Stengers, J., 39 Sterne, Laurence, 53–54, 181, 186, 195n15 Stone, Lawrence, 23, 62, 185 Stopp, 118 Stovel, Brian, 53–54, 55 Stuart era courts in, 23 as information age, 4 informers in, 60 inside information in, 68 male aristocrats in, 206n4 political paranoia in, 78 political problems of, 83 secret histories and, 79, 85 succession and legitimacy in, 126–27, 194 “value of the first” in, 89 Suetonius, 74, 131 Sutherland, James, 143, 202n15 Swift, Jonathan, 18–19, 49, 115–16, 193n5, 193n8, 194n18, 195n15, 202n13, 203n2, 204n11, 204n15, 204n18, 204n19, 204n21 on abuses of learning, 31, 35 autobiographical writing and, 147–49, 156–62 “bandied ball” of, 118, 119 body imagery and, 146 Burnet and, 136–38, 143 camaraderie of satire and, 7–9

234

Index

Swift, Jonathan—continued censorship and, 60 closet images and, 23 competing truths and, 69–70 conspiracy theory and, 179 on English depravity, 48–49 eroticism and, 35 father figures and, 186 female satirists and, 119 gossip and, 55 Gulliver’s secret memoirs and, 128–39 history and, 130–39 inaccessibility of life and, 175 on irony, 182 on libel and slander, 61 madness and, 183 “man at liberty” and, 87–88 Manley and, 127–28 metaphors for satire used by, 10 on occult scientists, 32 the “other” and, 40–41 paternal promises and, 57 politics and, 87–88 Pope and, 164, 166, 168 on promise, 91 on readers of satire, 147 Royal Historiographer and, 130–31 on secrecy, 1–2 secret politics and, 42, 44 secretary function of, 25 sexual secrets and, 76 Stella and, 148, 157–58 Suetonius and, 74 on slave trade, 30 Vanessa and, 158–159 verbal intricacies of, 12 Swift, Jonathan, works of An Argument against Abolishing Christianity, 8 The Battel of the Books, 4, 31, 170 “The Day of Judgment,” 179 Discourse concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, 3

Gulliver’s Travels, 5, 7, 11–12, 16–18, 23, 32, 34, 36, 40, 45, 48–49, 55, 128–39, 148, 156, 168–69, 181, 183, 185, 186 The History of the Last Four Years of the Queen, 29, 131 Journal to Stella, 108, 131 “Meditation on a Broomstick,” 60, 149, 160 A Tale of a Tub, 12, 19, 23, 31, 34, 55, 57, 61, 69–70, 76, 122, 129, 130, 141, 148, 177, 179–82, 186 Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, 18, 148–49, 160–61, 181 technology, 4, 22–23, 45, 65, 178–79 Temple, Sir William, 32, 49, 76, 80, 84, 193n5, 197n12, 202n12 Templeman, Daniel, 30 Test Act of 1675, 72, 76, 86–87 theater as public space, 22 Thorne, Christian, 8, 9, 118–19 Thynne, Thomas, 18, 88, 92, 108–14, 180 Tibbald, 35, 162 Todd, Dennis, 166–67, 169–71, 205n25 Tolstoy, Leo, 47 Tories, 9, 27, 29, 43–44, 69, 72, 75, 80, 85–87, 108–10, 119, 127, 132, 136, 141–42, 198n19 travel books, 40–41 Treason Act of 1660, 14 Triple Alliance, 72, 78 Trumbach, Randolph, 37 Turner, William, 93 Twain, Mark, 181 Ulbaek, Ib, 51 Vanel, Claude, 70, 74, 77 Varillas, Antoine, 68, 75 Venette, Nicholas, 38

Index violence, 39, 41, 53, 120, 140, 161, 173, 179, 187–88 Waingrow, Marshall, 160 Waller, Edmund, 170 Warburton, William, 33 Ward, Edward, 5, 27, 70, 168 Warner, Michael, 8, 191n7 Warner, William, 12, 81, 199n23 Waugh, Evelyn, 181 Webster, Charles, 33, 193n12 Weinbrot, Howard, 103–106, 200n13, 201n14 Wettenhall, Edward, 24 Whigs, 27, 29, 43–44, 61, 69, 75–76, 84–87, 93, 108–10, 127, 129, 132, 136, 139, 141, 153, 159, 197n8, 198n14, 198n19, 200n6

235

White, Allon, 38 Whitman, Walt, 150 Wilkins, Charles, 33 Wilkins, John, 5–6, 42–43, 191n2 Williams, Raymond, 21 Woolley, Hannah, 24 Woolley, James, 160 Worcester, David, 119 Wordsworth, William, 92, 199n1 Wren, Sir Christopher, 22, 33 Wycherley, William, 166, 193n5 Yates, Frances, 33, 193n12, 193n17 Young, Edward, 193n10 Žižek, Slovaj, 3, 19, 185–87 Zwicker, Steven, 103, 200n12

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