Frankenstein Meets The Rime-man

Growing up in the Godwin household, Mary Shelley was exposed to parlor conversations between her father and some of the brightest intellectuals of the day. In 1806 she and her stepsister hid under the sofa while Coleridge recited "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." Ten years later Shelley began writing Frankenstein. Her book, as we know, deals with discovery, predominantly scientific discovery (through Victor) and to a lesser extent geographic discovery (through Walton). It also poses the same questions as Zezik about the ethical implications and possible real consequences of creating an artificially intelligent human being. In fact, Zezik uses Frankenstein as a model for what can happen when scientists lose control over their creations.

It’s less widely known that Coleridge was also concerned over the ramifications of science and discovery, particularly their historical development. According to Thomas Pfau, Coleridge considered modernity a “miscarriage.” In league with several German Romantics—Goethe, Schlegel, and Schopenhauer among them—modernity, which he traced back to the Cartesian method of rationality, ushered in an age of fractionalization and specialization. The result was the abandonment of the ancient notion of knowledge as the fortuitous fusion of theoria [contemplation] and eudaemnonia [human flourishing] in order to produce the vita contemplativa [the contemplative life]. Zizek says essentially the same thing when he refers to the “incessant activity” of scientists and technologists whose lives are run by the “objective constraint” of Progress.”

I’ve always had an underlying, unspoken belief that science and technology would save us. I guess that was my unknown known. There’s as much substance for believing in science as our savior as there is in believing in a talking snake as our nemesis. I agree with Zizek and Dupuy that the only way to confront the catastrophe is to first, accept that it’s unavoidable, and then govern our actions by what we would have done if we had known then what we know now. That’s the only way Zizek’s Four Points would have a chance of being implemented. But there’s another step that has to be taken: vote the tea party out of congress in ’14. 

It's the Economy, Stupid

The Cronon article makes an excellent companion piece to Jenny Price’s “Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in L.A.” The ideological framework that Cronon provides for Price’s observations helped me to more fully appreciate her article. The two pieces bracket the course nicely.

In the beginning Cronon makes Thoreau into a whipping boy for myth making, be it the myth of the mountain as cathedral or the myth of the wilderness. In the end, though, he seems to give Thoreau a reprieve. In distinguishing between wildness and wilderness, Cronon notes that Thoreau was right in attributing to the former the agency to preserve the world. Nevertheless, it requires a close reading to remove the impression of Thoreau as the mother of all tree huggers, particularly from someone already predisposed to such a view. I can imagine the reaction of those who arrange their reading schedules to suit their seatings on the throne: “Wildness, Wilderness, what’s the difference?” There’s no danger of these people ever reading Walden. So here’s my digest for them. It’s an ideal length.

The purpose of an economy is to maximum the benefit of a society’s material resources by creating a system of exchange. Thus if A grows wheat and B owns a forest, A, after putting aside all the wheat he needs to make bread, exchanges his surplus wheat with B for the surplus wood that he has after he has built his cabin. This way they can each have a life, so to speak, which would not have been likely if A lived in the elements and B went hungry. But what if someone can provide shelter and food by his own industry, and still have time for a life, in fact only has to work six weeks out of the year? He then has a very successful economy of one. He is Henry David Thoreau. Granted, it would be difficult if not impossible for someone to do in today’s advanced industrial, urbanized society what Thoreau did over 150 years ago. But, ironically,  (speaking of irony, I would have enjoyed reading Thoreau more if he occasionally displayed a little irony of his own. Reading a book without any irony in it is like driving cross country without a pit stop . . . alright, no more potty metaphors) technology is approaching the day—if we are not there already—when half the current work force can produce all the current goods and services. This creates the potential for people to work half the time they currently work and to have more leisure time to read and take nature walks that don’t add to carbon emissions. Now that’s a Thoreau thought.

This is not to suggest that Thoreau had no ecological impact on his environment. The white pine trees he cut down contributed to the erosion of soil, the crops he planted emitted carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, and his second-hand nails were produced by machines powered by fossil fuel. As Cronon suggests, in order to pass through this world without leaving your mark on nature would require reverting to a hunter-gatherer culture. But this would not necessarily be prosperous for Man. For instance, seventeenth century capture narratives show that the early Native Americans were often plagued by starvation, especially in the winter. So there is no danger of this blogger succumbing to the myth of the frontier. But I agree with Cronon that we should explore the middle ground—investigate ways to improve the world for “humans and nonhumans, rich people and poor, women and men, white folks and people of color. . .” . . . wait a minute, the rich people? I don’t think that the one-percenters need my help. But all people would do well to contemplate another Thoreau thought: “All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be.”

Maps from Cosgrove's Introduction

Jane's picture is the best illustration I've seen of the paradoxical perspective of the romantic poet/narrator (romantic irony?), who attempts to subsume nature until he realizes that he is subsumed by it, the same path as our gaze. This reminds me of two maps in Cosgrove's introduction, which I downloaded from the Internet, that show how ideology dramatically influences our view of the environment. The top sketch represents the world as it was visualized by the English during Medieval times, and the bottom one depicts the nineteenth century English visage. Notice that the mapa mundi is centered on the holy city of Jerusalem and shows Europe, Asia, and Africa as world islands enclosed by a ring of ocean. Note also hierarchical layout of heaven and the underworld. The map of the British imperial world, on the other hand, shows England in the center, flanked by its colonial possessions.

                                        Click on the map to enlarge it.

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Suburban Fields Forever

Before reading Cosgrove’s “Sublime Nature: Landscape and Industrial Capitalism,” I knew that the romantics’ extolment of natural and uncultivated places in many ways was a reaction to the social and economic ills of industrial capitalism, but I didn’t realize the extent to which the romantics themselves were implicated in these changes. As Cosgrove explains, with the transition from a patron-based to a market-based economy for the arts and literature, artists found themselves in the position that had been previously occupied by tradesmen, having to appeal to an anonymous customer base largely drawn from the ranks of the emerging middle class. So, to prevent the erosion of the privileged status of his work, Wordsworth claimed that he didn’t write for the public’s tastes  but for their “embodied spirit.” (Well, at least Wordsworth’s readers had the satisfaction of knowing that the tastes of their embodied spirits were satisfied even if their corporeal bodies were not.) Cosgrove goes on to say that the romantics’ conception of genius as organic  comported with their attitudes toward nature. Cosgrove stops short of saying that the romantics’ ideology was consciously self-serving, but his chapter did cause me to look in a new light at their penchant for writing extensively on aesthetics.

I also liked Hugh Blair’s concise and direct definition of the sublime (226). Leave it to a Scotsman to define a complex term like the sublime without befouling a single tree. Not that Cosgrove faults Wordsworth et al for the verbosity of their prose, but he does imply that “romantic expression” might have broadened its perspective. Cosgrove notes that for all the romantics’ celebration of the organic, they failed to accept that society is also organic. His criticism is even more pointed when he (sarcastically?) applauds the “success” of “romantic expression . . . in avoiding analysis of capitalist relations while criticising their consequences.” This seems to me like shorthand for saying that if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. Cosgrove doesn’t say just how the romantics could have gone about this analysis. Should Wordsworth have written a lyrical poem about a child pulling a coal tub in a mine galley? Well, maybe yes. Isn’t this essentially what Dickens later did?

But Cosgrove does provide some psychic relief to those of us who wondered whether we were lording over nature when we plant lilacs on our front lawns. Cosgrove depicts the home garden as a relatively recent innovation, an attempt by the new, urban middle class to bring take advantage of their new wealth to bring the sublime closer to home. In fact, these collections of exotic plants and dense shrubberies were not landscapes at all, since they did not direct the eye across the land but focused it on the vegetation. Thus, instead of exerting hegemony over the land, the home garden required attention to the “processes and forms of nature.” A welcome insight, just in time for spring.

The Sound of the Page

It’s been said that the fate of world history for generations turned on Dwight D. Eisenhower’s decision of where and when to launch the invasion of Europe in 1944, yet once he launched the 12,000 planes, 7,000 vessels, and 180,000 troops that comprised the largest amphibious assault in world history, he was powerless to affect the outcome. The female protagonists of Jane Austen’s novels could relate to  the general’s situation. While she is being courted by a suitor, her family waits on her decision with bated breath; but once she says I do, she can look forward to a life of doing very little. And so in one form or another Austen’s novels revolve around the courting game. Where else would a female writer during Austen’s time find the narrative grist to sustain a novel?

To say that Mansfield Park is about love and marriage, however, is like saying that Hamlet is about murder and revenge. Well, they are but they aren’t. Like Shakespeare, Austen gives her readers plenty of subtext to digest. She is perhaps a century ahead of her time in portraying the interiority of her heroes through modernist devices like indirect discourse: “She was at home. But alas! It was not such a home, she had not such a welcome as. . . (300).” At other times Austen allows her characters’ actions speak for themselves, such as when the Bertram daughters and Mrs. Norris concur on the innate deficiency of Fanny’s intelligence because she cannot name the rivers of Russia. Although Mrs. Norris, who is such a humorously horrible character that you just want to hug her, does not administer the girls’ formal education, she does set the moral tone in the Bertram household, enabled by the mental absence of Lady Bertram. To those of you who argue that the two sisters, Maria and Julia, prove the efficacy of nature over nurture, think about who it was that dispensed their moral education.

This is not to say that Mrs. Norris provides the only comic relief. Mr. Price is no slouch either. As the spiritual counterpart to Lady Bertram, he too is oblivious to what goes on in his noisy and unruly household; the irony is that he thinks he runs a tight ship. Thus he disses Sir Bertram when he learns about Maria’s scandalous behavior as if he (Bertram) is a gentleman fop who runs a permissive household that he (Mr. Price) would never countenance. Meanwhile, Price is lucky if he can remember the names of his nine children.

Although world history may not turn on the decisions made by Austen’s characters, the author ranks as one of the world’s great novelists by virtue of her ability to turn a phrase. Scott Ross referred me to a fascinating analysis of her style in an article on Mansfield Park by Vladimir Nabokov.* Nabakov uses the term knight’s move for Austen’s method of capturing the intricacy of Fanny’s emotions when she first hears of Sir Thomas’s departure for Antigua. The key is in the sudden shift of language. Quoting from the novel, Nabakov writes, “Fanny’s relief, and her consciousness of it, were quite equal to her cousins’, but a more tender nature suggested that her feelings were ungrateful, and [knight’s move:] she really grieved because she could not grieve” (Nabakov 57). Nabokov doesn’t mention this but Austen also uses more balanced dichotomies in her physical description of Fanny: “She was small of her age, with no glow of complexion, nor any other striking beauty, exceedingly timid and shy, and shrinking from notice; but her air, though awkward, was not vulgar, her voice was sweet, and when she spoke, her countenance was pretty” (Austen 10). Kind of reminds you of hedge-rows that are hardly hedge-rows. No? 

Nabokov also points out how Austen writes descriptive sentences of characters that in their rhythm and construction mirror their speech. This device works especially well with clumsy characters like Rushworth, who, in the discussion of Sotherton’s landscaping, “was eager to assure her ladyship [Lady Bertram] of his acquiescence [about planting shrubbery], and tried to make out something complimentary, but, between his submission to her taste, and his having always intended the same himself, with superadded objects. . .” and so on. Those of us who took ENGL 441 can recall Bakhtin’s description of this device as heteroglossia—when a speech of another is introduced in concealed form. Bakhtin showcases Dickens writing and cites several other English authors who also use it, but Austen's name is absent.

One final thought: It makes you stop and wonder when you realize that the rarefied society of Mansfield Park was predicated on the slave society of Antigua. My reaction is probably the same as those German WWII POWs being held in the U.S. South. They were eating in a roadside diner with the MPs who were supervising them on a roadwork detail. From where the prisoners sat they could see,, to their shock, black American soldiers walking around to the back door to pick up their food. 

*Lectures on Literature. Harcourt (1980). 

Ascent the Negativa

Like Jane (in her first post), I too found Hartman a difficult read. One of the reasons is that he sources the 1850 Prelude instead of the 1805 edition that's in LABL. Plus in its abridgement, LABL omits the Mount Blanc passage that Hartman obliquely refers to as the “unexpected revelation [that] comes almost immediately (ll. 624-40), while the whole is preceded by a parallel instance of disappointment with the natural world followed by a compensatory vision” (219A). I challenge you—not Professor Garrett, of course, and possibly not Dimitrios—to make sense out of this passage without having read those lines in the 1850 edition. Frankly, I had trouble explicating the passage even after downloading the 1850 version on the Internet. But what finally helped me is a March 11, 1965 review in The New York Review of Books of Hartman’s book by Christopher Ricks, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787-1814, in which his article occupies a prominent chapter, prominent because the reviewer spends most of the time discussing its ideas. (You can access the part about Mount Blanc from the Internet, but you have to pay an access fee of $5 to read the full review. If anyone wants to read it, let me know and I will email it to you.)

Returning to Jane’s post, I find her explanation of the mystical via negativa lucid and informative. I was also prompted by her discourse to give a closer reading to Hartman (and Wordsworth) than I ordinarily would have. My understanding is that for both the mystics and Wordsworth, the via negative foregrounds a way toward something. For the mystics it’s toward God, who can never be known directly, and for Wordsworth it’s toward the Imagination, a concept equally difficult to access (“the Power so called through sad incompetence of human speech”).  As Jane says, for the mystic the experience of the secular world must be eliminated—music, television, and technology, and even the abstract idea of experience itself. In Hartman’s analogue, Nature represents for Wordsworth what the secular represents for the mystic. But Jane argues that in Wordsworth “nothing really is being negated or eliminated . . . [e]verything coexists.” I’m not so sure. 

In Part VI, ll 599-608 of The Prelude (as quoted by Hartman), Wordsworth says that the “invisible world”— where “greatness makes[s] abode—is revealed when, with the “strength of usurpation” the senses are extinguished (“the light of sense goes out”). Therefore, the experience of the senses—Nature—holds the same relationship with the Imagination as the secular world does for the Devine. Granted, when Hartman says that “Wordsworth’s journey as a poet can only continue with eyes,” it suggests a symbiosis between the realms of Nature and the Imaginative. But Hartman qualifies this by saying that “the Imagination experienced as a power distinct from Nature opens his eyes by putting them out” (224B). Is not sightlessness the opposite of sight? And do not both the mystic and the poet have to experience these antipodal realms before they can negate them? 

As we know, Wordsworth poetry is rife with negative imagery—hedgerows that are hardly hedgerows, and a visionary dreariness that colors or words cannot describe. In The Prelude he anticipates post-structuralism by showing in the first of the “spots of time” how form collapses into content. Upon revisiting the sight of the Gibbet and the Beacon many years later with his sister and fiancé, he feels the “spirit of pleasure and youth’s golden gleam” . . . “from the power they [these remembrances] left behind.” This has a doubling effect on Wordsworth, conditioned on the reification of the original experience. (“So feeling comes in aid of feeling, and a diversity of strength attends us, if but once we have been strong.”) Now, as the poet in the midst of composition, he recollects this moment, despite his having been especially endowed with this spiritual vision (“it is from thyself it is that thou must give, else never [the poet] canst receive”), he sees only “glimpses now.” Soon, with age, he will “scarcely see at all.” But while he can he will express through his poetry “as far as words can give, a substance and a life to what [he] feels[s].” His purpose is to benefit posterity (“to enshrine the spirit of the past for future restoration”). 

McLuhan, McKusick, and McGann

In 1964 The Medium is the Massage burst onto the literary scene, catapulting its primary author, Marshall McLuhan, to rock star status (along with a $100,000 per year professorship at Fordham University and a cameo role in Woody A). The last word in the title was supposed to be  m-e-s-s-a-g-e, but the printer mistakenly inserted an a for an e. The error turned out to be a blessing because, among other things, the misspelled word punned mass and age. McLuhan rejoiced in being able to claim that his picture book was intended for the masses through the ages. (His publisher must have thought so too, because they omitted the year of publication.) The theme of the book is that the medium is the m-e-s-s-a-g-e. In other words, over time form is more transformative than content. Thus the invention of the Western phonetic alphabet privileged the linear continuum as the organizing principle of our perceptions, which had a greater long term impact than the content that it communicated. Although this idea is old hat to those of you who were reared on post-structuralism (not me), it was novel (and confusing) to us children of the Age of Aquarius. Today many of the literati trace the antecedent of post-structuralism to McLuhan’s book. But, as I learned this week, there are some who trace its roots 150 years further back, to Coleridge. In the James McKusick (assigned) article, he shows—or tries to show—how the “The Ancient Mariner’s” linguistic form enhances its content. The Jerome McGann (unassigned) article follows the McLuhan paradigm precisely in that he shows how the poem’s structure delivers a radically different message from its ecological theme.

McKusick, who prefers the 1798 version of the poem over its successors, believes that the original “enhances the poem’s ecological themes through its conservation of lexical diversity” ((7). The diversity is represented  by its melding of three linguistic forms: lexicon of traditional ballads, diction of Chaucer and Spenser, and seafaring terminology. Aside from the expressive poetic effects of this archaic language, McKusick sees value in the “discrete historical periods and social strata” (emphasis mine) from which this language is drawn. Supposedly these “polyglossic and diachronic features” give the Mariner an aura of geographic and historical transcendence. But I do not see how this quality “enhances” the poem’s ecological themes. Perhaps if McKusick had provided an example or two of which language belongs to which age, I would have had a clearer idea, but he does not do this. That’s the difficulty of dealing with discrete historical periods; they are hard to locate.

Professor Garrett suggested that I read  the McGann article, “The Meaning of the Ancient Mariner,” in conjunction with my class presentation on the poem. At first I was taken aback by its 37-page length; then, on reading in the first paragraph that McGann intends to explains the “meaning behind the meanings of the “Rime,” I hit the floor. But as it turned out McGann eases the reader into his argument, beginning with an informative critical history of the poem’s text. One of the things he shows is how the successive changes Coleridge made to the poem coincided with the evolvement of religious and philosophical thinking. By 1817, when he added the gloss, Coleridge was committed to a historical view of the Scriptures known as the Higher Critical approach, which viewed these ancient writings as a “living and processive” organism. So determining biblical truth meant not just consuming the written text but also god’s word expressed through commentary, gloss, and the interpretation of theologians at different points in history. Although this approach served to restore authority to the church, it also comported with Romantic aesthetics. Thus Coleridge applied this hermeneutical system not only to the bible but to ecology, history, and literature.

The significance of the 1817 version of the poem resides in its four layers of (fictive) development: the original, raw tale of a mariner; the subsequent ballad narrative; the editorial gloss supposedly added during publication; Coleridge’s hermeneutical theory imprinted on the finished product. Although Coleridge’s readers would have recognized the period difference in the language of the ballad and that of the gloss as spanning from before the Age of Discovery to the 17th or 18th centuries. What’s more, the discerning reader would notice that the factual differences between the gloss and the narrative, which testifies to the documents evolution of time. Of course, contemporary readers may not be privy to the significance of this multifaceted structure, but this only underscores the importance of having informed professors in the classroom. It seems to me that $100,000, in inflation adjusted dollars, is a fair salary.

Two Perplexing Poems: “Michael” and “Tintern Abbey”

Both “Michael” and “Tintern Abbey” testify to Wordsworth’s profound genius—especially the latter work—but at the same time I found them both perplexing, as I will explain. 

Most of “Michael” reads like an embedded narrative; the narrator devotes the first 40 lines to introducing his tale, and then the next 451 lines to recounting it. But what’s absent is the after-story wrap-up, so to speak, in which the narrator places what we read into perspective, like the omniscient narrator in Ancient Mariner who relates the wedding guest’s delayed-till-the-morrow-morn response to the mariner's story. During Michael's introduction the narrator leads us off the “public way” and “in bold ascent” of the “pastoral Mountains” until we reach the opening of the hidden Dell. But then he discloses that he’s only telling us about this secluded, uninhabited location in case we happen to go there someday and “see and notice not” the “heap of unhewn stones.” Come again, sir? If we don’t know about this secluded location, how are we ever going to encounter the stones in the first place? Continuing on, the narrator says there’s a story attached to the stones that he heard as a boy, when he was enamored of nature, pastoral farms, and shepherds. Although the tale is “ungarnish’d with events” and “homely and rude,” the narrator will relate it “for the delight (my emphasis) of a few natural hearts” and especially for the next generation of poets that succeed him. But I question the narrator's description of his purpose as to delight his readers—regardless of what Horace says. Michael’s story is dark. 

Critics have accused Michael of choosing the land over his son (relax Scott, there are no footnotes), but, if Michael were so land hungry, why would he pledge his property as surety for his brother’s son? Furthermore, although Michael’s plan to make Luke the financial rescuer of the farm fails (due to Luke being corrupted by the evil ways of the city), Luke stood in the not-so-distant future to inherit the land from his eighty-year-old father, so Luke would have been the plan's chief beneficiary. Michael himself acknowledges this when he says: “Our Luke shall leave us, Isabel; the land/Shall not go from us, and it shall be free,/He [Luke] shall possess it, free as is the wind/That passes over it.” This is not to suggest that Michael is altogether blameless. Despite admitting his mistake—“I have liv’d to be a fool at last/To my own family”—Michael makes a “covenant” with Luke that he never agrees to, or even ask him to agree to. What’s more, the covenant is made over a symbolic sheepfold that doesn't even exist. After Michael and Isabel die, and the farm is sold to a stranger, for some unknown reason the new owner tears down the Evening Star cottage and leaves the land deserted, except for “a few sheep, with rocks and stones, and kites that overhead are sailing in the sky.” Could this be why the narrator finds the story delightful?  

In “Tintern Abbey” the confusion is not over the narrator’s message but his audience. Although I've read the poem many times over the years, I never realized this until my current reading. For the first 112 lines, it seems that the narrator is addressing the reader, until the second section when he abruptly addresses his “dearest Friend,” whom has apparently been his audience all along (okay, I know it’s Wordsworth's sister Dorothy). Maybe I'm over-sensitive, but I feel slighted. This may explain why in the past I usually drifted away towards the end of the poem. I am also distracted by the feeling that, by the time Dorothy appears, I've already read two false endings—“We see into the life of things” on line 50 and “Of all my moral being” on line 112. To my untrained eye, the poem would not suffer any if it concluded with the statement that Nature is the anchor, nurse, guide, and guardian of all the narrator's moral being.

Moreover, it's unlikely that Dorothy is in a position to even benefit from her older brother’s exhortations. If she’s in the same mental state that Wordsworth was at her age, in which Nature “had no need of a remoter charm,” then his message falls on deaf ears, because she is ontologically incapable of understanding Nature in any other way than as a profusion of “dizzy raptures.” And when the time comes that she can respond to Nature with “lofty thoughts,” those “aching joys” will be “no more.” In other words, they're not coming back. So why “disturb” the poor child with the “presence . . . of elevated thoughts” until she is “mid the din of towns and cities” and ready to receive them? 

A Battle Over Language: Burke Versus Wollstonecraft

       What strikes me as especially artful about Wollstonecraft’s rejoinder to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France is how she uses his own words—one word in particular—to feminize his argument. Although Burke only says sensibility on five occasions in his book, each time he either commends its exercise or deplores its absence; therefore, he ascribes a positive, masculine meaning to the term. Yet the word had a distinctly feminine connotation to genteel eighteenth century Europeans. The “cult of sensibility” revolved around the idea that women have a delicate nervous system, which manifests itself in frequently “crying, blushing and fainting” and in the extreme by weakness, feebleness, and gullibility ((Earle NP).[1] As Wollstonecraft begins “A Vindication Reflections of the Rights of Men” (the unabridged version), she associates Burke’s ideas with feminine words like excitement, vanity, and beauty. She then digs her knife deeper in the fifth paragraph with a backhanded compliment: “Even the ladies, sir, may repeat your brightly sallies, and retail in theatrical attitudes many of your sentimental exclamations.” In the next sentence, she leverages Burke’s positive meaning of sensibility. “Sensibility is the “manie” of the day,” she declares, as if the nexus of each of Burke’s 407 paragraphs turns on the word. Completing her sentence, Wollstonecraft marries sensibility—by juxtaposition if not grammatically—to its darkest connotation: “. . . and compassion the virtue which is to cover a multitude of vices, whilst justice is left to mourn in sullen silence, and balance truth in vain” (123). This statement also lays the groundwork for her main argument, that Burke’s political philosophy sanctions injustice. But Wollstonecraft also continues to feminize Burke’s use of the term: his sensibility becomes pampered sensibility; his flights of metaphor become pretty flights; and his reflection inflames his imagination.

Modern liberals could take a cue from Wollstonecraft. Right-wingers already have, as evidenced by the adhesiveness of terms like panty-waist and bleeding-heart. Could Frank Luntz be the Mary Wollstonecraft of our age? Although the above epithets probably originated before the boy wonder of Fox News was born, he is credited with renaming the estate tax the death tax. But Burke and Wollstonecraft viewed the issue of inheritance in different terms: he favored continuation of prigmoniture, she the right to divide one’s estate “amongst all the children of a family” (126). The locus of the debate on inheritance is radically different today. Ironically, Warren Buffett’s argument in favor of the inheritance tax has Burkean overtones. Buffet says that the rich owe part of their wealth to the nation’s infrastructure—schools, roads, public safety. Is this not similar to the debt that Burke says we owe our forefathers for their “spirit of philosophical analogy” (115)? Of course, Burke could argue that the dead cannot collect taxes. (ha ha!)

Burke tries a linguistic tactic of his own with reason, by associating the word with power—“the empire of light and reason”—and primitivism—“our naked shivering nature” (119). In Burke’s revered pre-enlightenment society, however, power was “gentle” and obedience “liberal.” But Wollstonecraft appropriates this word too, capsizing it by using it as a verb: “Quitting now the flowers of rhetoric, let us, Sir, reason together” (125). How can Burke deny such a gracious invitation?

Work Cited (other than course texts)

Earles, Megan. “The Cult of Sensibility.”  

ww.unc.edu/courses/2006spring/engl/021/006/REFERENCES/CultofSensibility.html

Wollstonecraft, Mary. The Vindication of the Rights of Women. 1792. Project Guttenberg. www.guttenberg.org.

Burke, Edmund. The Sublime and the Beautiful. 1757. Bartleby.com. www.bartleby.com

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[1] Wollstonecraft articulates this view in her 1792 book, The Vindication of the Rights of Women: “Their [women’s] senses are inflamed, and their understandings neglected; consequently they become the prey of their senses, delicately termed sensibility (my emphasis), and are blown about by every momentary gust of feeling” (NP). Burke himself expresses the idealistic side of the paradigm in The Sublime and the Beautiful (1757). In the chapter on Delicacy, he writes: “The beauty of women is considerably owing to their weakness, or delicacy and is even enhanced by their timidity, a quality of mind analogous to it” (III.16).