Seeing Satire in the Eighteenth Century ed. by Elizabeth C. Mansfield, Kelly Malone (review)

Two main themes run through this interesting volume, which examines Enlightenment-era satire both visual and verbal: first, ‘satire reveals the ambitions and incongruities of the Age of Reason like no other comic form’ (p. 1); second, ‘modern viewers cannot rely on vision alone if they wish to perceive the full range of eighteenth-century visual humour’ (p. 11). The Introduction, written by both editors, is useful, scholarly, and engaging. An impressive first chapter by Emmanuel Schwartz explores how a number of literary sources, beginning with Homer, inspired Goya and other artists to adopt a satirical stance towards the Age of Reason. The same chapter also shows how satirical writers of the long eighteenth century were inspired by artists. Julie-Anne Plax offers a subtle and sophisticated analysis of satirical in-jokes in Watteau’s paintings; her reading is informed by a theory of humour that permits the perception of an historical shift in which ‘superiority’ is increasingly displaced by ‘incongruity’. Focusing on print satirists, Trevor Burnard offers a fascinating analysis of images by James Gillray, George Cruikshank and others, all of which are related to slavery in the British West Indies. Burnard demonstrates that, besides conveying pro- or anti-abolitionist ‘messages’, such images were capable of showing planters and abolitionists as being in equally decadent thrall to the erotic allure of slave women. Burnard infers that miscegenation was seen by some print satirists and their consumers as a particularly insidious threat to British interests at home and abroad. Chapters offering a more literary emphasis include Steven Minuk’s reading of Gulliver’s Travels as a response to early modern theories of seeing. Minuk finds satiric traces in the Travels of the euphoria surrounding vision as a privileged tool of natural philosophy, and argues that Swift’s mockery was fed by an openness to Malebranche, Descartes, and Berkeley. Also literary in emphasis is Katherine Mannheimer’s chapter, which revisits Swift’s Battle of the Books and Pope’s Dunciad in order to examine the analogies that each writer draws between books and (female) bodies. Mannheimer argues that the Augustans reacted ambivalently to developments in print culture. On the one hand, as they compared books to female bodies they celebrated a new capacity on the part of authors and readers to penetrate women’s wiles; on the other, they worried that male- as well as female-authored books, including their own, may become somewhat ‘feminized’ in the process. One quibble with this volume would be the small scale and the darkness of several of the illustrations, but all in all it is to be highly recommended.