Hogarth’s Harlot: Sacred Parody in Enlightenment England by Ronald Paulson (review)

106 RONALD PAULSON. Hogarth’s Harlot: Sacred Parody in Enlightenment England. Baltimore : John Hopkins, 2003. Pp. 418. $49.95. Basing his discussion of Hogarth’s paintings on the medieval idea of ‘‘parodiasacra,’’ that is ‘‘the medieval and carnival and holiday practice of inventing parodic equivalents of liturgies, prayers and hymns—of the Paternoster, the Credo and the Ave Maria,’’ Mr. Paulson sees prints as a parody of redemption and parody as a form of redemption. There was a change in emphasis in the Church of England between the eighteenth and nineteenth century from the Atonement to the Incarnation, from the emphasis of the Calvinists, Evangelicals, and Methodists on the cross to a less harsh concentration on the redemptive act of the Incarnation. With the rise of sentimentalism, feeling replaces grace; and goodness and pleasure are not future rewards, but pursued in this life. For Mr. Paulson, the dissenters are the true revolutionaries, resisting both church and state, the laws of God and Man as inscribed by the establishment. This definition only works, however, if he treats the Methodists in a very narrow sense, perhaps restricted to the group called the Countess of Huntington’s connection, which included George Whitefield , and separated from Wesley and his group over the issue of predestination. The Wesleyan Methodists, strictly speaking, were not dissenters at all until after the death of John Wesley in 1791, when they officially broke with the Church of England. Wesley himself was hardly a radical; he was opposed to Catholic emancipation, for example. The book includes, among others, sections on Pope, Milton, Swift, Smart, and Blake (in the last two, the whole idea of parodia sacra comes into focus). Thus, the Jubilate Agno becomes an ‘‘Englishing’’of the canticles, ‘‘retaining the biblical cadences while inserting demotic language and national, personal, and local references.’’ The connection between Blake and the ranters is illuminating, and the comparison between Blake’s and Hogarth’s religious beliefs, their similarities and differences, demonstrates the contrasts in their artistic achievement. Mr. Paulson’s central argument, however, is not persuasive. Far too much hangs on Moll Hackabout, who is forced to represent both Mary and Christ. It is problematic to see the last plate as a parody of the Last Supper, which requires a leap from the living Christ breaking bread to a corpse in a casket. It is also difficult to link the dying Moll of the second to last plate with the swooning Virgin at the foot of the Cross. Conjectural ideas become firm evidence for new conjecture. For example, a very tenuous link between Smart’sMaryMidnightandHogarth’sHarlot(thatMaryMidnight ‘‘recreates Hogarth’s Harlot—or rather offers her interpretation of the Harlot’s progress ’’) is adjusted in the accompanying endnote to suggest that she may instead be interpreting Hogarth’s source, one of Steele’s Spectator papers. We are directed to a previous page, where Steele’s verbal image of a woman walking in Covent Garden (here described as ‘‘one source’’) is supposed to have produced the graphic image of the Harlot, holding a stolen watch and sitting on her bed as she is about to be arrested. The footnote to this passage leads to support of a third picture’s being the one that led to the production and popularity of the print, but does not appear to say anything in support of Steele’s influence. The weary reader justifiably concludes that the best preparation for reading this book is a familiarity with Pale Fire. 107 There are far too many ‘‘might’s,’’ and ‘‘may’s,’’ which, however reasonable, do not rest on evidence. The section that posits a relationship between the portrayal of David and Michal in the painting of the restoration of the Ark of the Covenant in plate 2 and Jane Hogarth’s disapproval of her husband’s work is overargued and much qualified (‘‘presumably,’’ ‘‘may also,’’ ‘‘perhaps,’’ ‘‘possibly,’’ ‘‘could allude,’’ and references ‘‘addressed to an esoteric audience of three or four only,’’ all in one paragraph). Since in the notes Mr. Paulson points out that we know almost nothing about Jane Hogarth, presumably we do not know what her attitude towards The Harlot’s Progress was. The book contains no Bibliography...