Am'rous Causes

Reviews Am'rous Causes PATRICIA BRUCKMANN Jean H. Hagstrum. Sex and Sensibility: Ideal and Erotic Love from Milton to Mozart Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1980. xiv, 350, iIlus. $30.00 Robert Halsband. The Rape of the Lock and Its Illustrations, 1714-1896 Oxford: Clarendon Press 1980. xvi, 160, iIlus. $40.25 Most recent efforts to challenge conventional labels for the eighteenth century have been made by critics who, influenced by Michel Foucault, have triec! to make the Age of Reason into its very opposite. In place of presumed neoclassical order, these would establish images more suitable for a period in which (if Foucault is right) madness was invented: nightmares and hobby-horses, visits to Bedlam and other places ofconfinement where, in the phrase ofFoucault's later title, the forces ofirrationality mightbe disciplined and punished aswell as simply restrained. Itis not surprising that Foucault caught on, although the English-speaking scholarly community came late to his Histoire dela folie, for, pace George Rousseau (one ofits most enthusiastic reviewers), it was perhaps not so much that Foucault asked the right questions, but rather that his book came at a time of fashionable interest in aberration and, most critically, provided a ready and easy vocabulary for revaluation. Although readers will find no reference to Foucault (nor even to R.D. Laing) in the index ofJean Hagstrum's new book, they will discover revaluation, minus any labels at all. The brilliance of his Sex and Sensibility lies in the fact that, if there is a principal source for some of the central arguments, it is the greatest poem of the Restoration and eighteenth century, Paradise Lost. When [heard a version of the first part of Hagstrum's book in 1978, just after the publication of Lawrence Stone's The Family, Sexand Marriagein England, the title of the paper suggested the possible beginning of a new wave, with Stone and historical sociology replacing the structuralist wisdom of France. But Stone's theories, in that paper and hene, were and are only asmall partofHagstrum's scene, aparticularly rich setofannales for the period his title describes. The work of a scholar of great maturity, who commands the literature of not only his own tongue but at least two others and, as UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUM.E 51 , NUMBER 3 , SPRING 1982 0042"'02.4718210500-0298-0303$00.00/0 C UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS AM ROUS CAUSES 299 we already know, the sister arts, Sex and Sensibility is in a special way a very European book. The rather slow-moving opening chapter recovers various meanings for some important words, like 'pathetic,' 'sense,' 'sensible.I And 'various' is the operative word, for Hagstrum's aim is not to establish a 'creed, hut a pantheon,' so that 'sense,' for example, in addition to 'reasonableness,' can also mean passion, as it dearly does when Lovelace is described as a man of sense, and, less clearly to the modem reader, when Tetty uses the same phrase for young Samuel Johnson. Because we usually think of the first meaning, Hagstrum gently stresses the second, as he does the more active meanings of 'pathetic' and 'sensibility: Setting up the pantheon revises earlier creeds, so that the Age of Reason is literally fleshed out in the language of feeling and passion, without losing a certain underlying structure. These concerns are carried on into the Milton chapter, whose argument and language echo across the rest ofthe volume, as Hagstrum argues they did over the century. If one of the critical developments in that century was a turning of epic action from the usual heroic sources into the domestic scene, with Sir Charles Grandison as the most striking instance, then the beginning ofthis transformation occurs in Milton's epic, with the wars in heaven in the past and the new scene of conflicta marriage whose felicities are menacedbya figure Richardson remembers in Clarissa as well as in Grandison. While Hagstrum is not unaware of theological subtlety (although, as I shall suggest later, he might find more theology in this mentalitt), he reads Paradise Lost as a dramatic poem, with characters of flesh and blood (including angels who blush when asked how they love) whose...