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Addison
Ms. Lubey begins to explore Addison's deployment of eros in pursuit of aesthetics with parallel accounts of the imagination. First, she notes the Spectator's familiar emphasis (No. 411) on sight's effect in the viewer's imagination; second, and less commonly, she considers Haywood's heroine from Love in Excess dreaming what she would probably not allow herself to imagine while awake. The slight disparity in parallelism (surely the dream falls into a different category of imagining?) is a minor wobble in an otherwise lively and persuasive discussion of the erotic in training the reader's imagination to respond to the aesthetic. By mid-century, Fielding could expect his readers to enjoy the explicit appeals to their self-awareness in the reading process, both in his own fiction and in the delight he takes in recasting Richardson's graphic representations of vice within the tendentiously virtuous. In the opening decade of the century, however, the embodied imagination posed an obstacle for the polite reader taking form in the pages of the Spectator. Ms. Lubey incisively unpacks the discussions of the hoop-petticoat in the Tatler and the Spectator to demonstrate how the erotic imagination destabilizes the satiric stance and then continues with a more detailed exploration of Addison's reliance on the erotic to frame and theorize the aesthetic. The mediation of the imagination reroutes an entirely bodily response; nevertheless, the body is central to the experience. Ms. Lubey maps the same dynamic of desire and response onto Addison's account of the act of reading, where the excitement of the senses must be schooled in the aesthetic, rather than the erotic.
Behn
That Elizabeth Bishop quotes from Behn's "Love Armed" in her odd little poem "From the Country to the City" (from North and South, 1946) is curious, but this short essay tells us little about Bishop's interest in Behn and strains to relate [End Page 1] the quotation to the plot of Abdelazer. The contribution of this article is to compare the effect of the poem-as-song in the play, where it highlights Abdelazer's inability to respond to beauty or love, and its repositioning in Behn's collected poems, where it is part of a larger amatory oeuvre, preparing for the volume's culmination in A Voyage to the Island of Love.
Ms. Goulding looks at Oroonoko through Behn's "stories of nuns." The access point is the narrator's entertainment of Imoinda with such tales, ostensibly to divert her attention from her slavery and the impending slavery of her unborn child. The slippage here is the conviction that the stories the narrator tells to Imoinda are identical to those published by Behn, which could be the case, but there is no support for this inside or outside the text. Ms. Goulding concentrates on The Fair Jilt and The History of the Nun, Or, the Fair Vow-Breaker, ignoring references to convents and religious women in several other Behn works. Heavily indebted to the work of Jacqueline Pearson, the article repetitively focuses on Miranda's escape from punishment because she never really broke a vow and Isabella's execution because she did. The account of Henrick and Miranda is seen as a reprise of Ovid's story of Apollo and Daphne rather than the more closely related story of Potiphar's wife. There is also some confusion about the variety of religious communities for women, about the variety of religious vows, and about vows in general, as opposed to oaths and promises. What the article does illustrate, not intentionally, is the need for a focused study of Behn's attitude toward religious orders and religious practice. The solid work of Claire Walker on seventeenth-century religious orders needs to be studied in relation to...
