Recent Articles

ASTELL

Newton, Geoff. “Divine and Human Love: Letters between John Norris and Mary Astell, Laurence Sterne and Eliza Draper,” Theology and Literature in the Age of Johnson, ed. Melvyn New and Gerard Reedy, S. J. Newark: Delaware, 2010. Pp. 183–201.

Emphasizing mystical and Neoplatonic elements in the 1767 correspondence between Sterne and Eliza Draper and the 1693–1694 correspondence between John Norris and Mary Astell, Mr. Newton examines divergences of divine and human love. At one end of the spectrum is Norris, for whom the love of God “ought to be intire and exclusive of all other Loves,” a principle Mr. Newton locates in the Jewish Shema, as spelled out in Deuteronomy 6:5 (“thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart . . .”). Norris, according to Mr. Newton, “displaced whatever human sexual feelings he may have had” onto a “mystically conceived image of God,” which he characteristically described in “the erotic language of sexual love.” (A secondary and largely speculative argument of Mr. Newton’s essay is that Norris may have had such feelings for the young Astell.) While sharing Norris’s suspicions of human sexuality and his aim of “displacing it onto a safer spiritual realm,” Astell had reservations about Norris’s rejection of all but divine love: For her, “the love of human friendship is vital and real, and cannot be excluded from her love of God, however much she says she agrees with Norris that it should be. . . .” Some seventy-three years later, Sterne continues Astell’s trajectory away from Norris, embracing not only the love of friendship, but sexual desire itself. For Sterne, as Mr. Newton aptly writes, “The love of God was not exclusive of all other loves, but was to be found, and indeed fulfilled, in expressions of care toward one’s neighbor, and if one’s neighbor was an attractive woman, he refused to be moralized out of his desire.”

Sterne’s reversal of Norris here is so complete that some readers may wonder if it is necessary to go through Norris to arrive at this unobjectionable conclusion. Mr. Newton, however, asks us to consider this as a rigorously theological position on the nature and obligations of love. So while Sterne rejects Norris’s specific view of the relation between divine and human love, he does so, Mr. Newton insists, within the conceptual framework of Norris’s Christian Neoplatonism. Ultimately, Sterne’s desire for Eliza is neither a distraction from God, as Norris would have it, nor a romantic or sentimental indulgence, as secular readings may assume: more complexly, more mystically, it “intertwines the real woman with the holy presence.” In particular, Mr. Newton persuasively clarifies Sterne’s theological debts to Norris.

Brian Michael
Norton California State University, Fullerton

BEHN

Gonthier, Ursula Haskins. “ ‘La différence de couleur n’en fait point dans l’âme’: Behn’s Oroonoko and the French Anti-Slavery Debate,” BJECS, 31 (2008), 209–222.

Behn’s role as an abolitionist writer has been bandied about for well over a century, probably as a cover to allow the reading of an “immoral” woman’s writing. In 1899, Wilbur Cross saw Oroonoko as a “humanitarian novel” intended “to awaken Christendom to the horrors of slavery.” Critics such as Edward Seeber and Wylie Sypher worked to correct this concept, which derived from the later eighteenth-century plays based on Thomas Southerne’s 1696 adaptation and from the French tradition established by Pierre Antoine de La Place’s translation, which provides the happy ending of the two royal slaves’ repatriation to Coramantien.

La Place’s translations (there were several editions with expanded material) effect a paradigm shift in French thinking about Africans and slavery, epitomized by Montesquieu’s L’Esprit des lois in 1748 and the encyclopédistes. This study traces the impact of La Place’s translation and the influential review of it by Elie-Catherine Freron, to the bio-bibliographical notices by Pierre Bayle and Jacques Georges de Chaufepié. The essay significantly contributes to...