Disgust in Early Modern English Literature

Natalie K. Eschenbaum, Barbara Correll

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781472440044
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317149613
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

What is the role of disgust or revulsion in early modern English literature? How did early modern English subjects experience revulsion and how did writers represent it in poetry, plays, and prose? What does it mean when literature instructs, delights, and disgusts? This collection of essays looks at the treatment of disgust in texts by Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Herrick, and others to demonstrate how disgust, perhaps more than other affects, gives us a more complex understanding of early modern culture. Dealing with descriptions of coagulated eye drainage, stinky leeks, and blood-filled fleas, among other sensational things, the essays focus on three kinds of disgusting encounters: sexual, cultural, and textual. Early modern English writers used disgust to explore sexual mores, describe encounters with foreign cultures, and manipulate their readers' responses. The essays in this collection show how writers deployed disgust to draw, and sometimes to upset, the boundaries that had previously defined acceptable and unacceptable behaviors, people, and literatures. Together they present the compelling argument that a critical understanding of early modern cultural perspectives requires careful attention to disgust.

Part I

Sexual encounters

1 Dirty jokes

Disgust, desire, and the pornographic narrative in Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller

Emily L. King

Disgust is a peculiar beast. It refuses to present itself as a reliable object of study. It cannot be observed from a safe distance. It will not be met on your own terms. Instead, disgust revolts you in an encounter that almost always feels like an attack. Sianne Ngai observes that this “ugly feeling par excellence” is no vague, amorphous affect, but rather one characterized by the “vehement rejection or exclusion of its object.”¹ In its emphasis on exclusion, Ngai’s discussion of disgust recalls Julia Kristeva’s abject. Disgust emerges as the affective response to an encounter with the abject. The connection between disgust and the abject does not end there. As with the abject, there is no universal object of disgust, for that affect depends on a host of variables that include cultural norms, ideological structures, and personal preferences.

That revulsion is not the sole constituent of disgust complicates matters further, for “the disgusting itself has the power to allure,” and social taboo only augments its strange appeal.² Desire keeps company with revulsion, creating an uncomfortable, even unthinkable blend. Building on the work of Kant and William Ian Miller, Ngai concludes of the amalgam, “What makes the object abhorrent is precisely its outrageous claim for desirability. The disgusting seems to say, ‘You want me,’ imposing itself on the subject as something to be mingled with and perhaps even enjoyed.”³ That which evokes disgust possesses a magnetism at once convincing and coercive. Excessive consumption of an otherwise utterly desirable object may generate disgust too.⁴ What was so attractive the night before can metamorphose into a strange and violent loathing the following morning.⁵

Thanks to the chameleon qualities of disgust, even its theorization offers ample difficulty, as the very attempt to make sense of this unwieldy monster is simultaneously an attempt to domesticate it. For instance, when I label something “disgusting,” I channel the overwhelming affects produced by an encounter – fear, loathing, revulsion, rage – into language. I am not left speechless and shaking, but rather am able to categorize that experience and its attendant affects. To name the disgusting is to know it, and it – whatever it is – cedes much of its power to overwhelm. Moreover, the term “disgusting” can encode and hold steady ideological frameworks and values. This, too, is domesticated disgust.

With these limitations in mind, I investigate critical reading practices produced in the engagement with disgusting texts in the following pages. What kinds of knowledge – or knowledge gaps – are generated by this affect? What might critical disgust forestall in academic discourse? To initiate a conversation in response to these questions, I examine the literary lineage that pegs Italian pornographer Pietro Aretino as the degenerate father of Elizabethan erotic writing and approach this lineage as a case study of critical disgust. For Elizabethans, Italian satirist and pornographer Pietro Aretino emerged as a “mythic figure of exotic transgression – known by rumor and innuendo, more talked about than read.”⁶ That mythos has endured for centuries, as Aretino has come to represent all that smacks of scandal within the early modern English imaginary.⁷ Identifying a vein of “violently sexualized discourse” in Elizabethan erotic writing – writing that includes the work of John Marston, Thomas Middleton, and Thomas Nashe – Lynda Boose pins the blame squarely on Aretino for this trend. Strikingly, though, Boose offers no evidence from Aretino’s writing to substantiate these claims.⁸ Despite this notable omission, her landmark work charting out a derivative relationship between Aretino and Elizabethan erotic writing continues to be echoed by recent critics, including Ian Moulton and Andrew S. Keener.⁹

To call into question the presumed influence of Aretino on English erotic writing, I look at two texts: Aretino’s Ragionamenti, published in London in 1584, and Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller, published there ten years later, an unwieldy picaresque novel that makes use of travel and romance genres, and in which Aretino himself makes a posthumous appearance.¹⁰ To distinguish the work of Aretino and that of the English Aretine, I attend to the comic modes underpinning analogous scenes of rape in each text.¹¹ Comedy emerges to me as a most unlikely, even unwelcome, lens through which to view rape in literature. But, as Rick Bowers reminds us, “laughter is not always pleasant … [and] comedy is not always safe.”¹² To pursue that perilous line of inquiry, I make use of Alenka Zupančič’s foundational work on comedy to demonstrate how Aretino’s text is aligned with conventional comedy, which is governed by substitutive logic, while the work of Nashe is aligned with radical comedy, which is governed by the logic of surplus.¹³ This comparison suggests how, if the violent turn in Elizabethan pornography derives from Aretino at all, it is a child turned changeling.

Disgust comes into play through my investigation of pornographic descriptions of rape. Beyond the gross violation and attendant trauma of sexual violence explicit or implicit in the depiction of these moments, what also seems disgusting is the possibility of deriving pleasure from another’s suffering and, perhaps more unthinkable, deriving amusement. Even as I make that assertion, though, I recognize that the classification is purely subjective. Treating representations of rape as static objects heralds the specter of the disgusting as well. Rather than focusing my efforts solely on the condemnation of rape or delegitimizing the literary works in which these moments are included, I take them seriously. I deem these episodes worthy of study. That, too, feels disgusting. Given the affective baggage such a project can bring with it, it is little wonder that this work has been largely avoided.

In troubling the assumed lineage of Elizabethan erotic writing, I will not supply an alternative history or origin story to account for its more violent, misogynistic turns. After all, the search for an origin is an attempt to locate and to quarantine disgusting material, to allocate blame to some while exonerating others. Such a move might well characterize most critical reading practices that engage with disgusting texts. Instead, my project illumines more broadly the problems that disgust poses to critical reading practices: namely, that this affect distorts interpretations of literary texts and that the blind spots that originate from such reading practices can persist for centuries. If we may deduce anything from these “disgusting” early modern texts, it is that their inclusion of seemingly disgusting sexuality suggests an early modern culture that was beginning to normalize the uncomfortable mingling of desire and disgust. Surely, then, we need critical reading practices that are adequate to the task of encountering disgust or, barring that, scholars who remain aware of the effect of critical disgust on interpretative practices.

Dirty books

To what does early modern pornography refer? Notable critics, among them David Frantz, Ian Moulton, Bette Talvacchia, and Sarah Toulalan, have wrestled with this question, and nearly all agree that pornography, early modern or otherwise, resists definitive boundaries.¹⁴ As for the historical specificity of early modern pornography, some scholars argue that the term is an anachronism; others point to its existence in early modern culture.¹⁵ For those who come to the latter conclusion, like Sarah Toulalan, early modern pornography emerges as distinct in several ways. Early modern pornography solicited laughter in its construction of narrative, for instance treating laughter not as an obstacle to orgasm but as an outburst that resembled and, perhaps, aided climax.¹⁶ The disgusting discharges of the body, rather than being fodder for fetish or other pornographic subcategories, were part and parcel of the early modern erotic. In humoral theory, insofar as bodily secretions are substitutive, blood could represent both semen and breast milk; these excretions are not dirty, but rather integral to the maintenance of good health.¹⁷ Yet, it is not simply the solicitation of laughter or a subscription to humoral theory that distinguishes early modern pornography from its twenty-first century analogues. In the later decades of the sixteenth century, a trend emerged in erotic writing that was characterized by the “hostile, malcontented potential aggressions of the violently sexualized discourse,” a trend in which eruptions of grisly violence are grafted onto erotic episodes.¹⁸ Boose first identifies the trend in Elizabethan writing and reads it as the implicit target of the 1599 Bishops’ Ban, which, she contends, was inspired by the “pornographic pleasures of Aretino.”¹⁹

Throughout sixteenth-century Europe, however, Aretino was regarded as more than a peddler of the salacious. He was one of the best-known writers in Europe.²⁰ As the notorious “scourge of princes,” Aretino was both satirist and pornographer, often deploying sexually explicit writing as the means by which he ridiculed those in power.²¹ But it was his reputation as pornographer that exceeded him posthumously. “In the word ‘Aretine,’ ” as Moulton observes, “Elizabethans coined an adjective that powerfully linked troubling notions of foreignness, erotic disorder, authorial power, and social mobility.”²² To complicate Aretino’s reputation further, a range of works that he did not author nevertheless became associated with him.²³ His early work included the composition of sixteen obscene sonnets (I Sonnetti Lussuriosi) to accompany Giulio Romano’s I Modi (1527), a collection of sexual pictures. Ragionamenti, of which The Secret Life of Wives is a part, features bawdy dialogues and tales exchanged between an experienced courtesan (Nanna), her confidante (Antonia), and her daughter (Pippa). Originally published in Venice in 1534, Ragionamenti arrived in London in 1584 through the efforts of John Wolfe, Gabriel Harvey’s publisher. But Ragionamenti’s notoriety preceded its London debut as the entirety of Aretino’s works – and not simply the salacious ones – had been placed on the Catholic Church’s Index of Prohibited Books decades prior in 1569, three years following his death. While this ban stemmed from political intrigue rather than moral fastidiousness, that act nevertheless stigmatized Aretino and his work in Italy and abroad, a stigma that, I would argue, continues today. On acco...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Sexual encounters
• Part II Cultural encounters
• Part III Textual encounters
• Afterword
• Index