Et in Arcadia Ego?: Thomas Amory, Mary Hamilton, and the (Re) Construction of Arcadia

Et in Arcadia Ego?: Thomas Amory, Mary Hamilton, and the (Re) Construction of Arcadia J. DAVID MACEY, JR. In the opening scene of Thomas Amory's idiosyncratic first novel, Memoirs: Containing the Lives of Several Ladies of Great Britain (1755), the anonymous narrator employs the esthetic vocabulary of the eighteenth-century landscape arts, including pastoral poetry, painting and landscape design, in order to describe the novel's heroine, Miss Marinda Bruce, and her rural estate, Hali-farm.1 The narrator assimilates Miss Bruce and her green retreat in his verbal portrait by representing the lovely heroine as a figure in—and for—the no less lovely landscape. In doing so, he repeats a characteristic gesture of eighteenth-century artists, whether novelists, poets, painters or landscape architects, by treating both women and the supposedly female "body" of nature as passive objects of esthetic pleasure and by evaluating them in terms of their ability "to titillate the imagination and satisfy the senses while at the same time remaining within carefully prescribed moral, aesthetic, and territorial limits."2 Amory (71691-1788) uses this scene to explore the power of culturally conditioned esthetic sensibilities to shape—and distort—our understanding of the relationship between human beings and their environment. The narrator's verbal portrait of Miss Bruce is, in fact, misleading; she is not the passive and inarticulate esthetic object that he imagines her to be but rather a landscape artist in her own right who is engaged in revising a well191 192 / MACEY known pastoral scene, Nicolas Poussin's Arcadian Shepherds II (c. 163840 ). Miss Bruce transforms Poussin's painting by depicting a Utopian community in which women, no longer ornamental figures in a landscape constructed by a male artist, act as teachers and spiritual guides to their male companions (22-25). Wer Arcadia corrects the narrator's verbal portrait of Hali-farm by demonstrating the full range of roles available to women as artists and as subjects of the landscape genre. Her revision of Poussin's painting, which requires her to work both within and against the conventions of an established genre, typifies the approach of eighteenth-century women writers to a literary tradition which provided them with a limited thematic and stylistic vocabulary in which to express their hopes, anxieties and lived experiences. Amory's fictional account of Miss Bruce and her painting offers a useful paradigm for interpreting the work of such writers as Eliza Fowler Haywood (71693-1756), Sarah Robinson Scott (1720-95) and Lady Mary (Walker) Hamilton (1739-1816) because it provides a richly symbolic (and exceptionally lucid) example of the way in which marginalized artists learn to speak in their own voices by entering into dialog with traditions that both shape and constrain their artistic development. Amory's Memoirs, now largely forgotten by critics and readers, may seem an unlikely point of departure for a discussion of intertextuality, artistic appropriation, and the social function of the landscape arts during the eighteenth century. Influenced by the oral narratives of Amory's native Ireland as well as by picaresque fiction and contemporary travel narratives, the digressive and episodic Memoirs resists generic classification.3 While Amory's Memoirs and his second, no less digressive novel, 77?e Life and Opinions of John Bunde, Esq. (1756-66) tend to puzzle (if not frustrate) twentieth-century readers, they delighted some of the most sophisticated readers of an earlier age, and these readers' assessments of Amory's work ought not to be taken lightly. Hazlitt, for example, enthusiastically proclaims Amory "the English Rabelais," while Charles Lamb finds in Amory's writing "an infinite fund of pleasantry."4 One recent critic has even suggested that Amory's diffuse and digressive narrative style, with its "blend of landscape description, tourism, and philosophical debate," may have served as one of Wordsworth's models for the design of The Excursion (1814).5 This diffuse and digressive style makes the Memoirs an ideal site at which to begin examining the role that artists played in shaping—and challenging— the social, political and sexual status quo in eighteenth-century England. Trained as a physician, Amory was also an amateur philosopher, theologian and antiquarian, a connoisseur of painting and an...