Exclusion and Desecration: Aphra Behn, Liberalism, and the Politics of the Pindaric Ode

Sometime after William of Orange’s landing in Britain, the Tory writer Aphra Behn seems to have been solicited by Gilbert Burnet—counselor and propagandist for William and Mary—to write a coronation ode on behalf of the new sovereign. In response, Behn crafted an ode of refusal, addressed not to the king or to the public but directly to Burnet himself. In this poem, “A Pindaric Poem to the Reverend Dr. Burnet” (1689), Behn strikes a tone quite different from that found in her earlier political verse: the characteristic amplification and hyperbole of the conventional panegyric is replaced with sarcasm and understated wit. Her refusal is consistent with her steadfast support for the House of Stuart and with her hostility to parliamentary and popular power. But in its emphasis on private political feeling, it is also surprisingly consistent with certain tenets of liberal thought. Rather than speaking in the odd mixture of the vatic and the abject called for by ceremonial verse, it bases its claims on an elegiac voice of dissidence, a right of refusal, and a rhetoric of isolation and individual exceptionality that is closely aligned with our understanding of liberalism as a practice based on the sacred natural rights of the individual, and with acts of conscience. The poem is thus not only an expression of a conscience-driven refusal of the revolution’s outcome: it is, more precisely, an assertion of a sacred individual right to that dissent, as well as an affective and elegiac embrace of the virtual exile and loneliness that results. The sacral qualities of divine-right kingship are in this poem transferred to the individual conscience.

Though Aphra Behn was a devoted supporter of the Stuart monarchy, seeing her merely as a Tory writer obstructs us from seeing other implications of her thinking, particularly the way her proto-Jacobitism is genealogically linked to liberalism. In this essay, I call attention to a less-visible facet of her politics by reading her ode to Burnet not simply as a refusal of political modernity but also, more specifically, as a desecration of the coronation panegyric ode. I choose the term desecration because the panegyric is, in a sense, sacred; used during the Restoration to manifest the divine and heroic virtues of the monarch, its desecration has surprisingly potent effects. The poem effects a transfer of the sacral qualities of the monarch to the ostensibly secular right of political dissidence, which, in Behn’s rendering, becomes sacred in a new way. In this poem we thus see a version of the relationship between the public and the private, and between official language and the individual conscience, that also lies at the heart of liberalism.

To make this argument, I draw on anthropologist Michael Taussig’s suggestive work on defacement and public secrets. Examining contemporary acts of desecration such as flag burning, Taussig draws two conclusions: that when sacred objects are defaced, they become paradoxically more powerful and more sacred; and that the source of this added power may be the revelation of a “public secret,” something generally sensed or known but unable to be spoken publicly. Arguing that “when the human body, a nation’s flag, money, or a public statue is defaced, a strange surplus of negative energy is likely to be aroused from within the defaced thing itself,” Taussig concludes that the desecrated object is “the closest many of us are going to get to the sacred in this modern world” (1). This essay uses Taussig’s suggestive if somewhat gnomic claims to ask questions about early liberalism, literature, and the sacred. I suggest that his identification of the sacred with acts of defacement might help us better to understand the relationship between coronation verse and the emergence of literary and political subjects. Behn’s “Pindaric Ode” borrows the form and conventions of the coronation ode but mars them. While this defacement might not precisely “release energy,” it does effect a transfer of a certain sacredness from the person of the monarch to the political dissident/author. In doing so, the poem unites...