Making Waste: Leftovers and the Eighteenth-Century Imagination (review)

Sophie Gee’s Making Waste: Leftovers and the Eighteenth-Century Imagination treats waste as a material phenomenon, philosophical problem, and literary construction: as a complex cultural site, in other words, where value is determined and meaning is made. In the wake of the Great Fire and the resurgence of the plague, waste proliferated in seventeenth-century London. Gee claims that not only did the debris, corpses, and excrement that littered the streets demand new forms of urban planning, the lasting effects of the Reformation and Restoration also demanded new definitions of “leftovers.” Taken together, the increased presence of waste in urban landscapes and the problem of materiality in philosophical and religious discourses made representations of glorious and degraded surpluses in literary works especially significant. On the one hand, writers like Dryden, Milton, Swift, Pope, and Defoe—the central figures in Gee’s analysis—reflected the historical conditions they experienced and the metaphysical questions they inherited. On the other hand, eighteenth-century authors intervened in these debates, Gee argues, by negotiating and preserving waste’s value.

Gee begins with an introduction that clearly establishes her argument. Eighteenth-century writings on waste anticipate “twentieth-century theorists of abjection” (3) in the fields of psychology, philosophy, and anthropology by revealing that waste is a peculiarly compelling thing because it is easily “confused or conflated” with “valuable abundance” (8). In fact, much of the book is as concerned with value as it is with waste. Gee begins, for example, with a reading of Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis (1667). Dryden’s poem, responding as it does to the new urban wasteland of London after the fire, transforms waste from a conventional feature of biblical apocalypses into an ironically profitable secular reality. Dryden recasts “waste and loss” as the “ineradicable residues of economic modernity” and “unstable politics” (35). Yet Dryden’s waste is made valuable because it functions as a means of fashioning a new, more modern “literary selfhood” that finds itself at home, however uncomfortably, in the fullness of urban wastelands (41).

Where Gee’s first chapter examines Dryden’s poetic use of London’s urban wasteland, her second moves purposefully to examine its counterpart: the rural wasteland of Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). Gee reads Milton within the context of his contemporaries’ debates about enclosure. These debates characterized England’s rural landscapes paradoxically: as empty wildernesses and as abundant, untapped resources. Paradise Lost exemplifies the conceptual comingling of waste and value. For Milton, matter in itself was neither refuse nor treasure but became configured as such only by virtue of its obedience to divine will. Consequently, Gee unearths uncanny similarities between the disparate settings of paradises and wastelands in Milton’s work. She goes on to show that Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad (1728) provides an unexpected example of the eighteenth century’s inheritance of Milton’s representations of matter. Despite Pope’s and Milton’s competing politics, Gee finds that Pope nevertheless uses Milton’s “material philosophy” (69) to ponder what exactly constitutes waste and value. If for Milton the problem was theological and political, for Pope it is literary and economic. The literary marketplace made waste valuable and in the process rendered texts into interchangeable elemental substances. The Dunciad is a more nuanced commentary on Grub Street than critics have assumed because its interest in the materiality of texts belies its attempt to make “qualitative distinctions between seemingly identical material entities” (73) that have been made susceptible to the “magical conversions of the competitive marketplace” (86).

The problem of confusing waste and value also preoccupied Jonathan Swift, the central figure in Gee’s next chapter. Like Pope, Swift “play[s] endlessly” (91) with the interchangeability of waste and value in order to draw readers’ attention to the hypocrisy of British culture. Swift uses images of waste to satirize not only Britain’s imperial policies but also topics as diverse as religion and coinage schemas. Gee suggests that A Modest Proposal (1729), for example, transforms infants from...