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  • Political Magic: British Fictions of Savagery and Sovereignty, 1650–1750 by Christopher F. Loar
  • Elizabeth Kraft (bio)
Political Magic: British Fictions of Savagery and Sovereignty, 1650–1750 by Christopher F. Loar New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. xiv+ 326pp. US$65. ISBN 978-0-8232-5691-4.

Christopher F. Loar’s Political Magic investigates a central trope in fictions of colonial contact: violence as magic. The trope has significance not only in terms of the treatment of “savage” populations, but also with regards to the re-visioning of domestic sovereignty after the English Civil War. While Loar notes that “after 1660 … Britain seeks to cultivate a political community that does not need strong applications of violence [End Page 108] to keep it ordered” (4), he also demonstrates through his careful readings of central texts that internalized response to the potential of violence replaced (or was recommended to replace) “application.” Fictional representations of communities of civil contract from the Restoration through the mid-eighteenth century focus on this question: “How can a prepolitical, uncivil person become sufficiently civil to enter into an agreement about government?” (8) And the answer is, not without the threat of violence or the mystification of power—alternatives that, in the end, amount to the same thing.

Loar begins where such a discussion should begin: with the facts of regicide, civil war, commonwealth, and restored monarchy. These are the conditions of Restoration and early eighteenth-century literature (and, though not as viscerally, certainly residually, of all literature of the long eighteenth century). The writers of the time were struggling to come to terms with new realities and reacting to unprecedented events. Thomas Hobbes, William Davenant, William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, and especially Margaret Cavendish were astute observers and eloquent writers about the world they were living in and the one they hoped to create. As preamble to his analysis of Cavendish’s The Blazing World, Loar discusses Hobbes’s belief in “terror as a tool of government” (39), Davenant’s concern that “mere physical force is an unsteady foundation for authority” (51) without the added political use of the aesthetics of spectacle and ceremony, and Newcastle’s advice (in a letter to Charles ii) that “a sovereign must sustain his authority with a violence that paves the way for more ceremonial modes of power” inasmuch as “force and display can change human nature, creating a polity that will obey of its own will” (49–50). Cavendish’s work, which draws on that of Hobbes, Davenant, and Newcastle, also addresses the question of “how a sovereign can civilize the people and make authority visible” (58). Her answer, though, is a troubled vision of the role of violence—especially violence enhanced by technology—in the process of civilization. While effective in the short term, such magical displays can have apocalyptic consequences if the sovereign governs above and outside the law. Masculine sovereignty, in particular, is dangerous, according to The Blazing World. Feminine sovereignty, with its emphasis on “disinterested virtue,” is safer, “though even here … violence may yield a terrifying excess” (65).

In the following chapters, Loar turns to post-Restoration writers, beginning with Aphra Behn. Focusing on Oroonoko, The Roundheads, and The Widow Ranter, Loar investigates Behn’s presentation of the fetishizing of political symbols of wonder, for example the burning glass in Oroonoko or the crown jewels in The Roundheads. Behn’s writings reveal “the implicit conflation of the savage and in rabble,” the latter [End Page 109] of which is “a central concern in … [her] work” (69), and make the point that the sovereign needs to maintain an ironic distance from manipulation of the people through fetish and display; otherwise, he will be prone (as were James ii and Oroonoko) to buy into his own romance and, therefore, to over-emphasize violence to his own destruction and the country’s ruin.

Daniel Defoe’s Crusoe narratives do not emphasize ironic distance, but they—especially Robinson Crusoe—develop the notion of “political magic” as a positive tool for empire. Defoe’s fictions confront “new forms of social and political organization” as the author “struggles to understand how the undisciplined body and chaotic politic spaces might be...

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