Recent Articles

5 RECENT ARTICLES* ASTELL TAYLOR, DEREK E. ‘‘MaryAstell’sIronic Assault on John Locke’s Theory of Thinking Matter,’’ JHI, 62 (July 200l), 505–522. Although Letters concerning the Love of God (1695) has been long understood as a bridge Astell constructed to mediate between the divergent philosophies of John Norris and Locke, Mr. Taylor suggests it actually deferred resolution of her conflict. Then, from his careful graphing of her intellectual and personalhistory,he posits the revisionary notion that in Christian Religion, As Professed by a Daughter of the Church of England (1705), Astell finally rejected Locke’s sense-based epistemology and his dangerous political views. This choice confirmed her return to Norris’s fold and her embrace of the notion of ‘‘efficient causality’’ (God’s uniting of a corruptible body to an immortal mind) that she had discounted in Letters. In a compelling and persuasive reading, Mr. Taylor presents a cogent construction of Astell’s complex, female negotiation with the philosophical and religious thought of her day. Susan B. Iwanisziw Independent Scholar BEHN GAUTIER, GARY. ‘‘Slavery and the Fashioning of Race in Oroonoko, Robinson Crusoe, and Equiano’s Life,’’ ECent, 42 (2001), 161–179. Presenting a basicbut sound mapofthe shifting relations between the categories *Unsigned reviews are by the editors. of race and class in Behn’s, Defoe’s, and Equiano’s representations of slavery, Mr. Gautier notes Oroonoko portrays slavery as ‘‘quite natural even as it mocks the racist idea of white superiority,’’because the novel treats it ‘‘as a natural link’’ in a ‘‘hierarchical class structure’’ that ‘‘has little or nothing to do with race.’’ However , once Oroonoko is enslaved, he is incorporated into a commercialorderthat ignores his natural superiority. ‘‘The implication is that in a heroic or landed culture deeply invested in the ideology of blood and rank,’’ Mr. Gautier notes, ‘‘slavery cannot be culturally intelligible if it ignores that ideology. And the commercial form of slavery does just that.’’ InRobinsonCrusoe,‘‘bloodideology’’ is under stress from a commercial culture thatvalorizesindividualmerit,sothatDefoe turns to race, rather than class, as the central category for naturalizing slavery, appealing to ‘‘a kind of racial essentialism that works diachronically rather than synchronically. . . . [D]espite our equal capacities, whites, due to the improvements afforded by the dual lamps of knowledgeand revelation,haveadvanced much further from the initial stateofpostlapsarian degeneracy than have nonwhites .’’ Equiano ‘‘duplicat[es] Behn’s model of heroic versus commercial forms of slavery’’ to explain indigenous African slavery, but ‘‘continually forc[es] the reader to view Africans through the lens of humanness,’’ drawing ‘‘heavily on the mechanisms of sensibility’’ in ways that support abolition (in the West) by presenting race as a category of cultural difference rather than of natural inequality . 6 While the map Mr. Gautier draws is valuable for undergraduate classes, his infatuation with computer jargon (using ‘‘networking’’when ‘‘comparing’’would do) overdresses sensible readings. The texts are treated as objects to be described , rather than interlocutors to beengaged . Mr. Gautier views each work as representative of an ideology. Donald Wehrs Auburn University MORGAN, PETER E. ‘‘A Subject to Redress : Ideology and the Cross-Dressed Heroine in Aphra Behn’s The Widow Ranter,’’ Eighteenth-Century Women: Studies in their Lives, Work, and Culture, 2 (2002), 23–41. For audiences in the Restoration, the Widow Ranter represented a ‘‘crisis of category in which the performative nature . . . of gendered roles is emphasized.’’ Though disregarding the objectifying erotics of the breeches part on the Restoration stage, Mr. Morgan arguesthatthe The Widow Ranter’s conclusion in marriage breaks cultural stereotypes because the Widow literally and figuratively carries the sword as she and Dareing leave the stage at the end of Act IV. By linking the play’s setting, a rebellion in 1676 Virginia , to the politics of 1688, and theWidow to representations of deviant, warrior women in lower-class ballads and broadsides , Mr. Morgan conjectures the play would have unsettled Behn’s upper-class theater audiences. In describing warrior women as predominantly ‘‘lower-class cultural products ,’’ Mr. Morgan ignores the influence of figures from high literature, such as Spenser’s Britomart. Though noting the Widow’s cross-dressing is the enactment of her excessively masculine behavior throughout the play, Mr. Morgan does not...