Jonathan Swift and the Vested Word (review)

REVIEWS 165 Thrale and Samuel Johnson. This group, together with Sheridan and Sir Joshua Reynolds, prompted her to write the play The Witlings, which Doody praises for its realistic setting and its creation of a contemporary atmosphere of frustration , incompleteness, clutter, and anticlimax. Everything in it is retarded and deflected (p. 86). Doody's reading of this and the other plays (chap. 5) is emblematic of her entire thesis. They are treated primarily as private allegories; they deal with civil war and inner divisions, becoming pleas for personal liberty (p. 179). In the tragedies (written during her experience at court), Bumey transfers her own sufferings under the imposition of authority onto her hero and heroine; Doody concludes that the plays are "coded" (p. 182), enabling Bumey to reformulate this unhappy and constricted period of her life. Doody's analysis of Camilla (chap. 6) is also noteworthy; she rescues the novel from both its contemporary and current disfavour. It comes, she tells us, during a decade fraught with concern for female education; "it is a sceptical novel about the difficulty not only of making choices but of seeing the truth" (p. 214). And the truth about Camilla is that it is about mothers and mothering (p. 216), and about the construction of a new language befitting the feminine (p. 217). Because it was written after Burney's return from the court experience, it is, Doody concludes, a festive work: Camilla is the novel of her fecundity (p. 217). This fruitfulness is further illustrated in her last novel, The Wanderer, a piece about the self and society. "For the first time in Burney's works, society itself is presented as an historical phenomenon" (p. 319). But the process of "livingin -history" can create dread and mystery; and the novel is peculiarly opaque. Reflecting Burney's reading of the feminists of the 1790s, The Wanderer remains a difficult work. Burney's increasing feminist tone, coupled with the "coding" of the novels, ultimately leads Doody to the conclusion that "Frances Burney's novels were all messages that Charles Bumey could not accept, however pleased he might be at the praise and publicity" (p. 370). Doody, however, does understand the messages and eloquently relays them to us. Scholars of the eighteenth-century novel are the better for her work. Mary Anne Schofield Saint Bonaventure University Deborah Baker Wyrick. Jonathan Swift and the Vested Word. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. xvii + 248pp. US$26.50. Jonathan Swift and the Vested Word argues that the figure in Swift's carpet is the weaver of carpets. Deborah Baker Wyrick traces that figure through an impressive range of Swift's writing, weaving into a single fabric his puns and 166 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION explicit comments on language, a variety of his poems familiar and unfamiliar , his political tracts, and his narrative satires. She finds her metaphoric centre, the image of weaving that gives us the word text, in Swift's persistent interest in clothes and texts—from the clothes philosophy of A Tale of a Tub to his presentation of himself as the Drapier. She is very alert to the metaphor's literal recurrence in Swift's writing; she also plays wittily, though not always lucidly , with "investiture" and "transvestiture" to describe Swift's situation of the self in language. To some extent her material is familiar. Swift sought authoritative textual expression while presenting himself defensively through a variety of elusive personae; he delighted in a free verbal play while exploiting it so as to limit interpretive play: in Wyrick's terminology, these are, respectively, liberal and conservative textocentric strategies. But she resituates enough of this material to offer a fresh and stimulating entry into Swift's works. Readers of Eighteenth-Century Fiction will be most interested in the narrative satires, the subjects of some of Wyrick's strongest criticism. Wyrick instructively reads The Battel ofthe BooL· in terms of Swift's divided allegiance to both the weaving spider and the wandering bee (pp. 58-62). Her fourth chapter ("Vested Interests: Swift and the Textual Self") examines Swift's pseudonyms and textual identities, a topic also central to other eighteenth-century fiction. Wyrick suggestively applies the...