The Power of the Passive Self in English Literature, 1640–1770 by Scott Paul Gordon (review)

111 varying degrees of development of a political public sphere in each, which in turn affected the dominant literary forms in each. Censorship is the mother of satire. Where public political discussion is prohibited, writers must resort to irony, paradox, allegory, fantasy, and other modes of indirect expression to avoid prosecution. In the politically oppressive German states, and in France, with the brief exception of the 1789–1793 period between the beginning of the Revolution and the rise of the Terror,narrativesatireremainedadominantliteraryformthroughoutthelongeighteenth century, even after forms associated with the literary sphere had appeared. In Britain, on the other hand, satire quickly lost its earlier preeminence as the development of a political public sphere enabled the more open, direct discussion of political subjects, alongside the development of the literary sphere. British writers, for example, were freer than their Continental counterparts to write philosophical history, which could assess the possible motives for actual political behavior. French and German authors, on the other hand, were more likely to treat conjectural history, which afforded them the safer opportunity to comment indirectly on recent and contemporary eventsthrough satiric or utopian representations of the past or future. In Britain, narrative satire remained the dominant literary form only for writers who had been denied access to the public political sphere, such as women throughout the period and radicals during the 1790s. Mr. Palmeri’s complex and persuasive achievement in Satire, History, Novel is a major contribution to Swift studies and to intellectual history. Vincent Carretta University of Maryland SCOTT PAUL GORDON. The Power of the Passive Self in English Literature,1640–1770. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2002. Pp. 279. $65. Tristram Shandy introduces the theory behind his revolutionary method of moral biography (the drawing of Uncle Toby’scharacterthroughhishobbyhorse)byreflecting on the great advantages enjoyed by those of his biographical colleagues fortunate enough to live on the planet Mercury. The ambient heat of that planet has, he deduces, quite vitrified the outer bodies of its inhabitants, leaving their inmost souls plainly visible. ‘‘But this,’’ laments Tristram, ‘‘is not the case of the inhabitants of this earth; —our minds shine not through the body, but are wrapt up here in a dark covering of uncrystalized flesh and blood.’’ Sterne’s satirical friskings around this problem owe much, of course, to the ridicule of moral anatomy practiced by the Scriblerians. The narrator of Swift’s Tale of a Tub flays away the skin of a woman and is amazed to find that she is faulty (not to say dead) underneath. All the fear and hatred of Pope were engaged by the evil emptiness of Sporus, an apparently unmotivated character: ‘‘. . . in florid Impotence he speaks, / And as the Prompter breathes, the Puppet squeaks.’’ Mr. Gordon’s ingenious and timely The Power of the Passive Self investigates a less familiar eighteenth-century discourse concerned with the impossibility of predicting how private motives will create public actions. He traces a long line of writers who searched for a sphere of perceptibly disinterested moral behavior, and tried to isolate 112 a category of human activity that is entirely free of Pharisaic ethics. Dismayed by the Hobbesian or Mandevilleian genealogy of moral virtue (‘‘the Political Offspring which flattery begot upon Pride’’), these writers depicted characters whose motivation is located beyond the individual will. They find it variously in a direct and prevenient providence , in nature, in the reverberating passions of another human being, but always (for the subject) in bodily, brute passivity. Mr. Gordon classifies these depictions as a ‘‘discourse of passivity’’ or ‘‘the passivity trope.’’ The trope is set spinning by a generation of seventeenth-century Protestant divines (covering the full range of latitude, orthodoxy and rigor) who encouraged their flocks to search within themselves for the preventing grace of a God who requires not autonomy , but supplication and patience. Mr. Gordon finds that the passivity trope is so powerful and consoling that it ‘‘enables actions that would otherwise be difficult to conceive’’—from regicide to ‘‘public speaking by women.’’ Some readers will feel a yawning, Milton-sized hole in this part of the book. Samson Agonistes is mentioned briefly, but one remembers that the ‘‘rousing motions’’of providence detected by Samson as he is led...