Print, Visuality, and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Satire

"The Scope in Ev'ry Page"

Katherine Mannheimer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136728563
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This study interprets eighteenth-century satire's famous typographical obsession as a fraught response to the Enlightenment's "ocularcentric" epistemological paradigms, as well as to a print-cultural moment identified by book-historians as increasingly "visual" — a moment at which widespread attention was being paid, for the first time, to format, layout, and eye-catching advertising strategies. On the one hand, the Augustans were convinced of the ability of their elaborately printed texts to function as a kind of optical machinery rivaling that of the New Science, enhancing readers' physical but also moral vision. On the other hand, they feared that an overly scrutinizing gaze might undermine the viewer's natural faculty for candor and sympathy, delight and desire. In readings of Pope, Swift, and Montagu, Mannheimer shows how this distrust of the empirical gaze led to a reconsideration of the ethics, and most specifically the gender politics, of ocularcentrism. Whereas Montagu effected this reconsideration by directly satirizing both the era's faith in the visual and its attendant publishing strategies, Pope and Swift pursued their critique via print itself: thus whether via facing-page translations, fictional editors, or disingenuous footnotes, these writers sought to ensure that typography never became either a mere tool of (or target for) the objectifying gaze, but rather that it remained a dynamic and interactive medium by which readers could learn both to see and to see themselves seeing.

1

From Speech-Act to Print Spectacle

Changing Modes of Satire at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century

From Ear to Eye

Eighteenth-century Britain witnessed the transformation of literature into an experience that was increasingly visual. As many historians have shown, the early part of the century constituted a watershed-era for English print culture.¹ Scholars point to the Interregnum as a pivotal moment for publishing, when the pamphlet wars demonstrated the capacity of print to facilitate public discourse in a new way. But only with the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695 and the institution of the Copyright Act in 1710 did book publishing suddenly become at once much less constrained and much more profitable.² An unprecedentedly rapid growth in literacy rates and a newly emergent public sphere further expanded the production and cultural influence of print materials.

While the technology of writing itself renders linguistic expression into an ever-more visual form, scholars have argued that it was specifically the innovation of print that caused the shift in literature from a phenomenon of sound to a phenomenon of sight: Harold Love has described the manuscript or “chirographic” culture that existed between orality and print, which, while not literally “spoken,” nonetheless carries with it “the values of orality—and the fact of presence … [by promoting] a vocal or sub-vocal experience of the text, and a sense of validation through voice.”³ He concludes, “A manuscript-based culture preserves a feeling for the book as a kind of utterance, an occurrence in the course of conversation.” Margaret Ezell elaborates on the interactive or reactive nature of literature produced within a manuscript culture: “Manuscript verse,” she explains, would often be “transmitted through [a] letter,” whose “recipient … then frequently contributed a verse reply to the originating text.”⁴ Correspondingly, “a reader in a manuscript culture … is responsible for participating in literary production as well as consumption,” and “the role of the reader … becomes conflated with the roles of editing [or] correcting” the text.⁵

Indeed, recent histories of reading have shown that even the print culture of earlier periods partook of the participatory or “active” ethos of the chirographic: as Stephen Dobranski explains, “active” reading characterized both Elizabethan and seventeenth-century reading-practices.⁶ Emphasizing the various social sites in which reading took place, from the coffee-house to the common spaces of a household to the collegiate library (whose inclusion of long tables, bench-seating, and revolving desks seem to bespeak a more collaborative style of study), Dobranski argues that “readers were conditioned to participate in their books,”⁷ a practice that carried over into printed texts as well.⁸ Indeed, William H. Sherman shows that, through the seventeenth century, pedagogical theory and practice encouraged extensive marginal annotation, and even the insertion of extra leaves for pages of notes.⁹

So too, several studies have shown the extent to which early participants in print culture not only retained chirographic “attitudes”—“active” approaches to texts, collaborative methods of interpretation and study—but also continued to utilize manuscript per se as an alternative to print. Indeed, the three central figures of this book continued to use manuscript strategically even as they cannily navigated careers in print: I will show in my second chapter how one of these figures, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, published her writing only selectively, and argue that even when she did decide to print, she subversively used that technology to insist on manuscript-culture values, resisting print’s ocularcentric paradigms in a form of proto-feminist critique.

But in the case of the two other figures—Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift—the use of manuscript is more striking, if only because these authors’ commitment to print seems so clear. As Ezell has shown, throughout his life Pope was engaged in epistolary exchanges with friends and fellow-writers, sending copies of his latest poems, and sending back others’ texts with suggestions or corrections: during his early career in particular, years-long gaps between composition and publication suggests a process of vetting among a coterie. And of course, Pope was also one of the print-world’s most outspoken critics, as his Dunciad attests. But the vast majority of Pope’s work did eventually appear in print during his lifetime (with a few exceptions), and under his own personal micromanagement: as David Foxon, James McLaverty, and Helen Deutsch have shown, Pope painstakingly crafted a public persona for himself (a persona distinct from his own stunted physical presence), and print constituted the foundation on which this process was built.¹⁰ Thus while Pope did maintain a foothold in chirographic practices, when it came to presenting himself to the larger world, and in choreographing how his readership would respond to that self-presentation, he staked nearly everything on print.

Swift’s career may represent a more complex set of contradictions. As Stephen Karian has shown, although Swift is known to have collaborated heavily with his printers at some points in his life, at other points he found himself far from London, and relied on others to convey his manuscripts, and his instructions, to his booksellers. By the end of his life his work was often so incendiary that he never sought to print it at all. Indeed, by the time Swift died, some of the poems best known today had only ever appeared in manuscript or in incomplete printed editions. Yet Swift obviously enjoyed print’s potential for visual jokes, public pranks, and misinformation: though he often uses print in such a way as to make the reader question its authority, countless works of Swift’s would operate quite differently if they were not as embedded as they are in print and its productions. The fictional annotations in The Battle of the Books, for instance, or the whole series of publications in which Isaac Bickerstaff predicts (and then “reports” on, and finally waxes elegiac over) the demise of John Partridge (who, as a publisher of almanacs, was himself a famous figure of the print-world at the time)— are texts that rely fully on print for their effects, even as they warn readers not to rely on it for facts.

Both Pope’s and Swift’s careers thus illustrate the impossibility of locating any one turning-point after which writers broke with chirographic practices altogether. One would have to look far beyond the eighteenth century (and seemingly beyond the twenty-first as well) to identify the moment at which coterie-culture dies out once and for all and authors cease pre-circulating their work prior to publication. Nonetheless, I contend that, even within those texts that never did appear in print during the poets’ lifetime, one can detect a specifically visual orientation toward the world, and that this visuality is wrought in part by an increasingly print-mediated experience of literature. Unlike earlier periods’ literary output, the Augustans’ work is infused by a print-consciousness. Discussing seventeenth-century satire, Love remarks on the importance of the coterie to the origin, scope, and purpose of those texts, which “[were usually] written about current happenings and for immediate consumption.”¹¹ “Satire of this kind,” he asserts, “is really a branch of what Johnson in his life of Rochester calls ‘colloquial’, that is, ‘conversational’.”¹² Augustan satire exhibits a very different conception of itself, aiming (often) at monumentality, at timeliness but also at a certain iconic permanence. So too, even as Pope’s and Swift’s practices often depend on visual techniques and visual impact, they also rely on the strategic use of invisibility that is harder to pull off in a moremanuscript-mediated literary scene: Swift’s anonymous publications (e.g., A Modest Proposal) are a good example of this; another is Pope’s “leaking” of his own correspondence to Edmund Curll in order to publish his own “correct” versions without seeming indecorous. Thus even though both Pope and Swift remained partial participants in a manuscript culture, and certainly expressed ambivalence about the cultural impact of print, it seems that they and their contemporaries do represent a period in which print became unprecedentedly central to the way literature was thought about, and that the visual preoccupation of their work is in part a reflection of this change.

Even though the Renaissance and late seventeenth century also participated in a thriving print culture, then, I want to argue that that culture retained many of the stylistic tendencies underlying orality, but also its epistemological paradigms, in which knowledge of ourselves and our world comes from tradition, from memory, and from the ability to play synergistically upon those sources.¹³ In contrast, eighteenth-century print culture participates in an epistemology of empiricism, in which our senses, primarily our eyes, provide us with our most relevant kinds of information: imagination and creative force are expressed not by accretative and amalgamatory improvisations on traditional construals of our world, but by discrete acts of discernment vis-à-vis an external reality.

This chapter has four main sections. In the first, I delineate eighteenth-century satire’s commitment to an empirical epistemology, a commitment exhibited by Pope and Swift, and shared by Hogarth, Fielding, and early periodicals editors, who also turned a scientifically analytical eye on the social world. The next three sections constitute a series of close readings. First, I establish the modes of visual penetration and presentation embraced by the Augustans, even in texts that would seem to resist such an interpretation: as my central texts, I have chosen to examine poems by Swift that would otherwise appear to operate within the distinctly non-visual frameworks of teleological narrative (his “Progress” poems) and orally-inflected invective (the Legion Club). In the third and fourth sections of the chapter, I move on to a set of comparative analyses, looking at selected poems by John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester (“My Lord All-Pride,” “On Poet Ninny,” and “On the Supposed Author of a Late Poem in Defense of Satyr”) and John Dryden (MacFlecknoe), and reading them side by side with passages from Pope (his portrait of “Sporus” in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot; and Book I of the Dunciad). The texts being compared, in each section, share a similar starting-point or central topic (the first set of selections represent “personal” satire; the second set—MacFlecknoe and the Dunciad— are more ambitious works, and take on public issues in a mock-epic style). So too, just as, in my readings of Swift, I elucidate the intense visuality of poems that would initially seem to work as exceptions to my argument, in these final sections I have chosen my Restoration texts for their apparent (and apparently paradoxical, according to my thesis) emphasis on the visual. However, Pope is convinced that by tapping into the unique powers of his satirist’s gaze, he can peel back the surfaces of social nicety and expose the truth, rendering his victims—along with their fatuous, affected uses of language—into silent spectacles. In contrast, despite their seeming dependence on visual description, the Restoration satirists seem to regard themselves as participating in a form of literature that is still very much rooted in social and speaking bodies. The divergences that emerge between the two periods’ respective modes of satire, I hope to suggest, can be at least partially explained by a shift in epistemology, natural philosophy, and aesthetic theory, as well as by an increasingly print-mediated literary industry: indeed, my final paired-reading, of MacFlecknoe with the Dunciad, addresses this last development head-on.

Visual Satire Theorized: from Pope to Hogarth

Eighteenth-century satirists defined their own task as one of visual arrest and analysis, making repeated analogies between the satiric project and gestures of exposing and revealing to the eye. Throughout their oeuvres, satire is portrayed as an act of “exposing,” “stripping,” “baring,” “flaying,” “opening men’s eyes,” and “peeping.” The satiric text itself is compared to a looking-glass, a widely-posted “bill of complaint,” a public courtroom, or an urban monument. Thus Pope wrote to Gay after the publication of the Dunciad,

I can tell you of no one thing worth reading, or seeing. … The whole age seems resolv’d to justify the Dunciad, and it may stand for a publick Epitaph or monumental Inscription, like that at Thermopylae, on a whole people perish’d!”¹⁴

Pope’s most formal “defense” of satire, the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated, bespeaks just such a conception of satire; of course, the poem invites comparisons with Horace’s original, and its relationship to the Latin text proves telling. Pope’s self-depiction in the poem (“Mr. Pope”) describes himself as “bar[ing] the mean Heart that lurks beneath a Star [of the knighthood]”(line 108), and as “strip[ping] the Gilding off a Knave”(115)—removing flashy, glinting surfaces to reveal the lurking despicability at the courtier’s core.¹⁵ In Horace’s version, the poet speaks of satire as a way of “stripp[ing] off the skin, in which each went sleekly groomed in public, while inwardly foul” [“componere carmina morem detrahere et pellem, nitidus qua quisque per ora cederet, introrsum turpis … ”].¹⁶ But Pope has amplified and extended the metaphor: his enemies are not just “sleekly groomed,” they are active artificers, men who have encrusted themselves with a layer of precious metals and medals. The act of stripping thus becomes a full-out battle not just on deceptive men, but on the institutional and societal practices that enable the deception.

Correspondingly, each poet describes satire with slightly different metaphors: whereas Horace suggests that his poetry functions to display his “whole life … open to view as if sketched on a votive tablet” [“fit ut omnis votiva pateat veluti descripta tabella vita … ”](32–33), Pope portrays his satire as an “impartial Glass,” a “clear … Medium” in which he vows “[f]air to expose myself, my Foes, my Friends”(56–59). By transforming Horace’s tablet into a mirror, Pope shifts the metaphor from one of representation to one of revelation: his satire functions not as a crafted rendering, but as “pure,” “unmediated” display. It is in this way that he intends to “[p]ublish the present Age …,” he explains. The act of “publishing” for this satirist, then, is literalized as a gesture of “making-public,” of displaying to general scrutiny, keeping nothing hidden, leaving self and society equally “expose[d].”

Pope’s writings on satire continually convey the sense—already implicit here—of a double-layered universe, in which “truth” is that which lies beneath and behind...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. From Speech-Act to Print Spectacle: Changing Modes of Satire at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century
• 2. Swift’s Tableaux, Montagu’s Table-Turning: Verse, Visuality, and Gender
• 3. Augustan Satire’s Textual Bodies: The Quest for an Ethics of the Eye
• 4. Pedagogies of Paranoia, Spaces of Adjudication: Swift’s and Pope’s Typographical Training-Grounds of the Gaze
• 5. “That Spirit He Pretends to Imitate”: Pope, Montagu, and the Letter and the Spirit of the Law
• 6. Crossing Stage and Page: Pope’s Four-Book Dunciad and the Critique of “Absorptive” Textuality
• Coda: Theatricalized Print and the Reciprocal Gaze: Gender Politics in Pope’s Printed Playhouse
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index