Commonplacing the Long 18th Century

Week 2 Post 1 - Candide   #satire #optimism #heroism #syphilis #voltaire #candide #pangloss

Week 2 Post 2 - Candide  #conflict #pessimism #sheep #karma #realistic #voltaire #candide #martin

Week 3 Post 1 - Candide   #coincidence #reiteration #unethical #character flaw #comedic effect #candide #voltaire #ugly

Week 3 Post 2 - “The Mouse’s Petition”  #barbauld #the mouse's petition #pathos #enlightenment #personification #mercy #justice #humor

Week 4 Post 1 -  “An Inventory of the Furniture in Dr. Priestley’s Study”  #women in science #religion and science #god's creation #man's creation #barbauld

Week 4 Post 2 - Cook Journal   #cultural awareness #westernization #cleanliness #captain cook journals #April to June of 1769

Week 5 Post 1 -  Lady Montagu’s Letters  #logos #pathos #small pox inoculation #persuade #lady montagu #trusting foreign science

Week 5 Post 2 - Don Juan   #irony #blasphemy #biblical allusion #scandalous #epic poem #lord byron #don juan

Week 6 Post 1 - Equiano’s Narrative   #savage #black vs. white #connotations #olaudah equiano #slave narrative

Week 6 Post 2 - “On the Slave Trade   #empathy #pathos #persuasion #samuel taylor coleridge #on the slave trade

Week 7 Post 1 - “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”   #allusion #changing perception #milton #paradise lost #blake #the marriage of heaven and hell #distort meanings

Week 7 Post 2 -  “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”  #romanticism #intimacy #discovery of nature #nature is perfect #coleridge #the lime-tree bower my prison

Week 8 Post 1 - “Mont Blanc”   #Sublime #Overwhelming #inability to think #imagining the sublime #shelley #mont blanc

Week 8 Post 2 -The Sorrows of Young Werther  #unaware #similarities #parallelism #geothe #werther #overwhelming love v. irrational love

Week 9 Post 1 -The Sorrows of Young Werther   #geothe #werther #trial #example #parallelism

Week 9 Post 2 - “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”   #Sublime #anti-sublime #thoughts v feelings #the powerful mind #wordsworth

Week 10 Post 1 - “Ode to a Nightingale.”  #sympathy #escape #poetry vs alcohol as an escape #keats

Week 10 Post 2 -  “Ozymandias”  #fall of power #kingdom in ruins #irony #shelley #ozymandias

Week 11 Post 1 - “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror; with Sir Bertrand, a Fragment”   #terror #sympathy #gratification #relief #horrified #Barbauld #Aikin

Week 11 Post 2 - The Spectator  #sensibility of men #misogyny #the women respond #the spectator #steele #defense of women

Week 12 Post 1 -  A Vindication of the Rights of Woman  #modesty #sexualization of girls #misogyny #feminism #mary wollstonecraft

Week 12 Post 2 -  The Rights of a Woman #confused #unfitting #sarcastic #response #barbauld

Week 13 Post 1 - “The Rape of the Lock”  #seer #fault #fate #rape of the lock #alexander pope

Week 13 Post 2 -  “The Rape of the Lock”  #fault #protectors #responsibility #rape of the lock #alexander pope

Week 14 - Fall Break

Week 15 Post 1 - Persuasion  #favoritism #set up #skewed viewpoints #jane austen #persuasion

Week 15 Post 2 - Persuasion  #Believability #Goodness #Foils #Persuasion #Jane Austen

Week 16 Post 1 - Persuasion  #Sensibility #control #reliability #the spectator #persuasion #jane austen

The final chapter of Persuasion by Jane Austen acts as a rounding out of all the issues presented within the book. It shows how all the family and friends love Captain Wentworth as Anne’s husband, it shows how Mr. Elliot and Mrs. Clay left the family after the marriage of the couple, and it shows how better off Mrs. Smith is from the relationship. However, Mary Elliot’s feelings towards the relationship are the iffiest. Austen writes,

“It was creditable to have a sister married, and she might flatter herself with having been greatly instrumental to the connexion, by keeping Anne with her in the autumn; and as her own sister must be better than her husband's sisters, it was very agreeable that Captain Wentworth should be a richer man than either Captain Benwick or Charles Hayter. She had something to suffer, perhaps, when they came into contact again, in seeing Anne restored to the rights of seniority, and the mistress of a very pretty landaulette; but she had a future to look forward to, of powerful consolation. Anne had no Uppercross Hall before her, no landed estate, no headship of a family; and if they could but keep Captain Wentworth from being made a baronet, she would not change situations with Anne” (Ch. 24).

Mary is happy that Anne being married to a prominent man elevates Mary’s own status. However, the realization that Anne has now become of a higher status than her causes her to feel slightly unhappy about her sister being married off. She consoles herself by reminding herself that she gets to have Uppercross someday, and Anne has no great manor to inherit from her husband’s family. She also has to remind herself that she wouldn’t ever trade places with Anne, but only if Anne’s husband never becomes a baronet. This one paragraph does a good job at showing Mary’s personality and obsession with having a good name and fortune. She wants her sister to be happy and well-off, but not happier or better off than Mary is. She still wants to be of higher status than Anne even though she is the youngest child.

Chapter 23 of Persuasion by Jane Austen includes the following conversation starting with Captain Harville and finishing with Anne Elliot’s response,

"‘As I was saying we shall never agree, I suppose, upon this point. No man and woman, would, probably. But let me observe that all histories are against you--all stories, prose and verse. If I had such a memory as Benwick, I could bring you fifty quotations in a moment on my side the argument, and I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men.’

‘Perhaps I shall. Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything’" (Ch. 23).

This passage about how men have always had control of literature and history and how this causes Anne to distrust truths found in books reminds me of the story printed in The Spectator by Sir Richard Steele that I wrote about in week eleven post two. In it a character named Arietta said, “You men are writers and can represent us women as unbecoming as you please in your works, while we are unable to return the injury” (469). Anne agrees with Arietta here. She understands that men have had control of literature and writing, and if women had more control then there would be more stories about the faults of men. Captain Harville seems to understand this too even though he’s disagreeing with Anne. He included that she would probably write off books and histories because they were written by men. Even though he knows that history and books have been skewed by male authors, he sticks to his idea that books validate his opinion about men and women’s emotions.

Austen, Jane. “Persuasion” The Complete Novels, Kindle ed., Centaur Editions, 2015.

In chapter ten of Persuasion by Jane Austen, Anne Elliot overhears a conversation between Louisa Musgrove and Captain Wentworth about her, her sister Mary Musgrove, and Mary’s husband Charles Musgrove. During this conversation, Louisa said,

“‘Mary is good-natured enough in many respects,’ said she; ‘but she does sometimes provoke me excessively, by her nonsense and pride--the Elliot pride. She has a great deal too much of the Elliot pride. We do so wish that Charles had married Anne instead…I wish she had accepted him. We should all have liked her a great deal better’” (Ch. 10).

In class we discussed whether Anne is too good of a character and if her goodness makes her unrealistic or an unbelievable character. Even Jane Austen wrote that Anne is almost too good of a character for her. However, I don’t believe that it’s Anne’s goodness that makes her unbelievable (because she has many other qualities and depths) but it’s her sisters’ lack of goodness that makes all of them unbelievable characters. In this passage, Louisa is explaining how superior Anne is. Mary is far too obsessed with her family pride to be fun to be around, and the same could be said for Elizabeth. Mary also puts having a fun time and being around the correct people above anything else including taking care of her own children. She would much rather have Anne care for her kids so she can spend weeks on vacation than care for them herself. Elizabeth meanwhile seems cold, bad with money, obsessed with the family name, and essentially an extension of their father. Having one child who doesn’t care about the family name, doesn’t care if she’s seen with the wrong people (like Mrs. Smith), and who is easily pushed around by others to do what they want makes her seem unrealistic because she is her sisters’ exact opposite.

Early in chapter one of Persuasion, Jane Austen writes,

“A few years before, Anne Elliot had been a very pretty girl, but her bloom had vanished early; and as even in its height, her father had found little to admire in her, (so totally different were her delicate features and mild dark eyes from his own), there could be nothing in them, now that she was faded and thin, to excite his esteem. He had never indulged much hope, he had now none, of ever reading her name in any other page of his favourite work. All equality of alliance must rest with Elizabeth, for Mary had merely connected herself with an old country family of respectability and large fortune, and had therefore given all the honour and received none: Elizabeth would, one day or other, marry suitably” (Ch. 1).

I had never read Persuasion before, and from the beginning of the book, I expected this story to be mostly about Elizabeth’s finding of love. Especially when the reader sees the three daughter’s from Sir Elliot’s eyes in this passage. He expects Elizabeth to marry eventually, and this line caused me to think that this would be where the story would go. He paints the image of Anne being past her prime, utterly dull, and unlikely to ever be courted. He casts Mary aside more than Anne, so I assumed Elizabeth would naturally be the primary focus for this story. Anne was just faded, thin, delicate. This description of her makes it shocking to me that she has multiple men attracted to her and courting her. Even Mr. Elliot has to do a double take when he sees her. Looking back on this description proves how skewed her father’s perspective of her is and how poorly he views her.

Canto 3 of Pope’s The Rape of the Lock states,

“The Peer now spreads the glittering forfex wide,

To enclose the Lock; now joins it, to divide.

Even then, before the fatal engine closed,

A wretched Sylph too fondly interposed;

Fate urged the shears, and cut the Sylph in twain,

(But airy substance soon unites again)

The meeting points the sacred hair dissever

From the fair head, forever, and forever!” (518).

This passage continues the ideas from the previous post. In that post, I wanted to call the sylphs Belinda’s protectors, but they are not good at protecting. This one sylph tried to save her hair from being cut, but it got cut as well as the hair. Thus, I called them her pets. They spend time with her, they love her, they can sense when something bad is about to happen, but they ultimately cannot do anything to help her or stop the bad things from happening. This passage further takes the blame off of the baron. It states that fate urged the scissors to cut the hair. It’s as if the baron didn’t have any choice in preventing the scissors from staying open or cutting her hair. Pope is wanting the reader to blame Clarissa for giving him the scissors or Fate for closing the scissors, but not to blame the Baron. This makes sense because this piece is based on a real event and Pope hoped to restore the relationship between the real-life Baron and Belinda’s families. He wanted them to be able to read this and realize that it wasn’t truly his fault. However, the modern reader (and probably the original readers) understand that a man should be held responsible for his own actions.

The second canto of Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock states,

“He spoke; the spirits from the sails descend;

Some, orb in orb, around the nymph extend;

Some thread the mazy ringlets of her hair;

Some hang upon the pendants of her ear:

With beating hearts the dire event they wait,

Anxious, and trembling for the birth of Fate” (514).

This passage is interesting because it paints this image of Belinda being covered in spirit-like sylphs. They fill her hair, hang off her earrings, and act as a sort of pet of hers. It’s almost as if these little spirits are seers who can foresee the events that are to come. This is shown in the “anxious, and trembling for the birth of Fate” line. The birth of fate could be Belinda beating the Baron at chess, but this is more likely relating to the moment when the Baron cuts her hair. The cutting of the hair being called the “birth of Fate” also encourages the idea that it was not the baron’s fault that he cut her hair. It was Fate’s fault, and thus it was inevitable that he should cut her hair. This causes me to wonder if the sylphs are capable of seeing the future, or if they are only able to foresee Fate’s actions. As if this story’s (proper noun) Fate is also a member of the spirit world like these sylphs.

The final stanza of Anna Letitia Barbauld’s “The Rights of a Woman” says, “Then, then, abandon each ambitious thought. / Conquest or rule thy heart shall feebly move, / In Nature’s school, by her soft maxims taught, / That separate rights are lost in mutual love” (49).

This passage confuses me. The rest of Barbauld’s poem feels like it is a rally cry preparing women for the battle of obtaining their rights. Her third stanza even includes references to artilleries, canons, and war. Then she ends her poem with a surrender saying men and women’s rights aren’t important when you’re in love. This seems as if Barbauld doesn’t feel the pressing need for women’s rights because her husband may treat her well and she doesn’t see the need for anything else. She wrote this battle cry to make fun of the women who are saying they need these rights. She’s saying that they’re turning their request for equality into a war-like battle that is entirely unnecessary. The footnote for this poem says that she wrote this in response to Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in which Wollstonecraft critiques how Barbauld follows the established gender codes in her writings. It could be that she felt called out, so she felt the need to respond in (what I hope is) a sarcastic manner.

In Chapter two of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote,

“Dr. Gregory…advises an innocent girl to give the lie to her feelings, and not dance with spirit, when gaiety of heart would make her feel eloquent without making her gestures immodest. In the name of truth and common sense, why should not one woman acknowledge that she can take more exercise than another? Or in other words, that she has a sound constitution and why, to damp innocent vivacity, is she darkly to be told that men will draw conclusions which she little thinks of?” (235)

I love this passage for many reasons. First, I love that she calls her argument “truth and common sense” as if men must be blind of the world around them if they really believe that girls shouldn’t be allowed to dance for fear of men seeing them sexually. Secondly, this passage (especially the part about men drawing conclusions about things little girls do not think about) reminds me of the modern trend against modesty culture. Modesty culture is where women and girls are told to not wear revealing clothes so that men won’t over sexualize them. Wollstonecraft is saying that girls should be allowed to dance and live just as freely as boys without men viewing them as immodest or seeing them as sexual creatures because the girls are not thinking about immodesty or sexual conduct in any way. Wollstonecraft is appalled that Dr. Gregory sexualizes girls in this way just like the modern feminist is appalled by dress codes in school that cater towards sexualizing and essentially incriminating young girls for doing things like showing their shoulders or wearing leggings without doing the same to boys.

In The Spectator, Sir Richard Steele wrote of a woman named Arietta who said, “You men are writers and can represent us women as unbecoming as you please in your works, while we are unable to return the injury” (469).

I do not find it interesting that Arietta said this because I’m sure that’s how many women felt during this time. However, I do find it interesting that Steele chose to write this. He shared a moment of a woman proving women’s worth, and it caused him to cry. He shared how she stood up to him and defended her gender to him. Earlier in this piece he was writing about how women tend to be much more prone to be emotional about generalizations made about their gender. He said that they are more “sensibly touched with those general aspersions which are cast upon their sex than men are by what is said of theirs” (468). Then by the end of this piece, the speaker (or Steele) ends up having to walk away from Arietta because her story made him cry. She did not cry during the story, so the man is more prone to sensibility in this circumstance. It’s also interesting that the woman in this story said that women are not able to write about men like men do of women. About twenty years after this was written, women like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Anne Ingram start writing responses to the misogynistic writings of men. They did what Arietta wishes she could have done.

The beginning paragraph of “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror; with Sir Bertrand, a Fragment” by Anna Letitia Aikin (later Barbauld) and John Aikin states:

That the exercise of our benevolent feelings, as called forth by the view of human afflictions, should be a source of pleasure, cannot appear wonderful to one who considers that relation between the moral and natural system of man, which has connected a degree of satisfaction with every action or emotion productive of the general welfare. The painful sensation immediately arising from a scene of misery, is so much softened and alleviated by the reflex sense of self-approbation on attending virtuous sympathy, that we find, on the whole, a very exquisite and refined pleasure remaining, which makes us desirous of again being witnesses to such scenes, instead of flying from them with disgust and horror (519-520).

This piece interested me because I have never thought deeply about why people enjoy horror or scary books, movies, and experiences. I’ve gone to haunted houses, read spooky stories, and watched scary movies, but I do not understand why some people love horror as much as they do. It seems like it should be a paradox that someone would want to be terrified. It’s interesting to me that this passage argues that the feeling of sympathy is why someone may enjoy horror. The gratification of pity could lead someone to feel better about themselves for partaking in horror. They also mentioned the relief one feels after feeling the pain of misery or the tenseness one experiences when they’re on the edge of their seat could be the reason why someone likes horror, and I think that is closer to the truth than the pity. At least in modern day horror, there are not many characters to pity. Usually the main characters do something that wasn’t smart, and they make plenty of bad decisions. The relief after a scare, when you heart is still beating but your breathing is slowing down, seems to be the more likely cause of the love of horror.

The sonnet of Ozymandias says,

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away (791).

This sonnet is so ironic. There’s a statue of a once mighty king who believes future generations will look onto his statue with fear because of how mighty and strong this king is. Instead he and his old kingdom are in ruins and look pathetically destroyed. What Shelley wrote could apply to any kingdom or country. It especially reminds me of the United States. We act like we are a big power-horse of a country that is never defeated and is the king of democracy. We believe we are the most powerful nation in the world. Yet, someday we could become destroyed like Ozymandias, and our old mantras of how powerful we are will look ironic compared to our destruction.

The fourth stanza of “Ode to a Nightingale” by John Keats begins with “Away! away! for I will fly to thee, / Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, / But on the viewless wings of Poesy, / Though the dull brain perplexes and retards / Already with thee! tender is the night” (978).

           In this poem, the speaker is wanting to escape from his current reality. There’s a bird chirping nearby, and it is causing him some envy. The bird sings without any of the effects of tuberculosis inhibiting her (many members of Keats’ family and Keats himself died from TB), and she lives a more blissful life. The speaker wants to escape. First, he wants to escape through alcohol, but doesn’t seem to have any nearby. In this stanza, the speaker then decides to turn to poetry and his imagination to escape. He tells the bird to fly away and he will join her. The god of wine, Bacchus, won’t help him escape. He’ll escape with poetry, but his mind is feeling too dull to write well. Then this segment ends with him referencing the F. Scott Fitzgerald book called Tender Is the Night. Perhaps he includes this reference so the reader understands the beauty in the blissful and tuberculosis free world he longs to escape to with this little nightingale.

The first stanza of “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” by William Wordsworth says, “There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, / The earth, and every common sight, / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light, / The glory and the freshness of a dream. / It is not now as it hath been of yore; – / Turn wheresoe’er I may, / By night or day, / The things which I have seen I now can see no more” (348). Then the final lines of the poem say, “To me the meanest flower the blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears” (352).

This poem and these passages feel as if they are the anti-sublime. In the first stanza, the speaker sounds woeful. Nature used to provoke sublime feelings in him when he was a child. It was provoking and beautiful when he was young. Now, however, he cannot see the beauty anymore. The reader doesn’t know if he’s trapped inside and literally cannot go see the beauty or if the beauty is now lost no him. I believe that he sees the nature, but he doesn’t see its beauty. He is growing older, his childhood is fleeting, and the world doesn’t seem as wonderful as it once did. The sublime has faded, and now he is left with sadness. Throughout the poem he recalls these memories of his childhood. Then by the ninth stanza, he realizes the power of his memories. Through them he can access his childhood again, he can see the beauty again, he can experience the sublime again. Which then provokes this anti-sublime idea brought out in the final lines of the poem. His mind and his thoughts are powerful. They can take him back into the places he thought he had lost. He can then experience the sublime through these thoughts. This feels anti-sublime because the sublime is supposed to be this overwhelming feeling where your brain shuts off, you enter a trance, and you cannot think. Wordsworth is hypothesizing that his memories and thoughts could be what takes him into the sublime, and his thoughts power the sublime. Coleridge hinted to the mind being capable of creating the sublime when he imagined seeing Mont Blanc, but here Wordsworth is proclaiming that his thoughts are stronger than this sublime. His “thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.” He’s saying that his thoughts are stronger than the tear provoking and emotional experience of the sublime.

In book two of The Sorrows of Young Werther, Geothe continues the story of the peasant who took actions against his mistress’ new suitor, “The murdered man had been in the service of a widow, and the person who had previously filled the situation had been dismissed from her employment.” Then when Werther found the peasant he said, “The prisoner was no other than the servant, who had been formerly so attached to the widow and whom he had met prowling about, with that suppressed anger and ill-concealed despair, which we have before described” (95-96).

           Werther believes that someone has to die in his little love triangle. It could be himself, Albert, or Charlotte. No matter what, someone has to die. He knew that Charlotte couldn’t die since she had the kids to care for, so Werther uses the peasant’s actions as a sort of trial to see if he or Albert should die. The peasant killed the other man in his love triangle, and the peasant now faces jail time and/or execution. This leaves the woman without any suitor or anyone to keep her company, and that’s what the peasant wanted. If he couldn’t have her, then no one can. However, Werther probably saw an issue with that for his own case. Werther cares about Charlotte. He wants her to have someone to help her care for her children, and he really liked Albert when he first met him. Werther wants to be with Charlotte, but after seeing the peasant’s demise (and seeing how it tarnished his good name), Werther decides that the best method for all of those involved is to kill himself so Charlotte can still have someone to care for the children.

In book one of The Sorrows of Young Werther, Geothe wrote about Werther’s peasant friend by saying that “His passion for his mistress increased daily, until at last he neither knew what he did nor what he said, nor what was to become of him. He could neither eat nor drink nor sleep: he felt a sense of suffocation; he disobeyed all orders, and forgot all commands involuntarily; he seemed as if pursued by an evil spirit.” Later, his desire for his mistress turned into him being fired, “He was dismissed at length; and the whole affair occasioned so much scandal, that the mistress dared not take him back, even if she had wished it. She has since hired another servant” (75-76).

           Werther writes this letter to Wilhelm because he cares about the peasant and wants Wilhelm to see the similarities between the himself and the peasant. At the end of the letter he includes “Wilhelm: it is the history of your friend! My fortune has been and will be similar; and I am neither half so brave nor half so determined as the poor wretch with whom I hesitate to compare myself” (77). When I hear about a man who become incapable of doing work, forgets everything, and is completely taken over by the love for a woman, I don’t quickly view him as being brave or heroic for his love. I view his as being irrational. However, Werther thinks this man is amazing. He loves beyond what most men can fathom and is viewed as being below most men since he is a peasant. Werther’s amazement and appreciation for the Peasant’s irrational love decisions shows how unaware Werther is of his own actions. He is pursuing a woman who is engaged. He sees nothing wrong with his love for Charlotte, and this passage about the peasant shows that he wishes he was more brave, outspoken, and willing to commit more of his love and his life to Charlotte like the peasant did for his mistress.