The Cell and the Garret: Fictions of Confinement in Swift's Satires and Personal Writings

The C ell and the G arret: Fictions of C onfinem ent in Sw ift’s Satires and Personal W ritings H O P E W E L L R . S E L B Y qponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Re ad ingSwift’s satire s is almost alway s to e xpe rie nceclaustro­ phob ia of a sort. Who d oe snot gasp for air as Gulliver, imprisoned in the Lilliputians’ temple, adds to its ancient pollutions new ordures of his own? Who does not gag as the Brobdingnagian monkey squeezes Gulliver with one paw and crams filthy food down his throat with the other? Or feel involuntary constrictions of the throat as he nearly drowns in Brobdingnagian cream? Or squirm as he wriggles in the marrow-bone? Few if any of us, I suspect, can read the Travels without feeling some if not all of these responses, which are almost involuntary reflexes. Similarly, few if any of us can experience the malodorous eructations in the Tale o f a Tub's cramped quarters without sharing, to some extent, the wish to rise above the crowd and breathe free. A common satiric procedure with Swift is to confine his reader within a narrow space—conventicle, dressing room, or crowd—and then let fly with a full-scale assault on the nose. 133 134 cbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA / H O P E W E LL R. SE L B Y Ty pically ,Swift y oke stoge the rhis re ad e r and satiric spe ake rin a fe arful e mb race which thre ate ns to strangle , suffocate , and choke . The irs is the kinship of fe llow prisone rs. My aim he re is to e xplore—selectively and doubtless in what Swift would term “M ignature”1 —the implications of this relationship as it appears in Swift’s protean prisons. This exploration can help to clarify the relation between Swift’s images of himself in the personal writings and their antitypes in the satires. The speakers of both kinds of writing have much in common beneath their apparent contrariety. Characteristically, Swift seeks to annihilate his satiric speakers— Gulliver, Partridge, the Tale’s mad scribbler—by imprisoning them and inflicting upon them the tortures of solitary confinement. But in the personal writings—including the Journal to Stella, the cor­ respondence, and “autobiographical” pieces such as the H olyhead Journal— Swift presents himself, in the guise of Presto and Punsibi, Dean and Drapier, as a similarly trapped victim, who is tortured as a prisoner by his keeper, by Patrick’s insolence, by his Dublin housekeeper’s tyranny, by the rudeness of an innkeeper’s wife. The two apparently different cases resemble each other in their common fictions of confinement, which are both psychological and epistemological in nature. Swift’s fictive prisons express his fears of the human mind’s tendency toward violent and anarchic disintegration, which results in its solipsistic alienation from the world of “outside” things.2 In this sense, Swift’s confinements are more than just another of the “special effects” which the satirist pulls from his proverbial bag of tricks. The claustrophobia generated by Swift’s satire has its nonsatiric counterpart in writings of the period as diverse as Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard, Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, and Richardson’s Clarissa, to name only three well-known examples. All of these works treat the problems created by individuals whose minds are isolated not only from the minds of others but also from what the empiricists were fond of calling “external objects.” All portray this isolation in the concrete image of the confined space: Eloisa’s cell, Clarissa’s closet, the small room through whose window H. F. observes the plague and his own ideas as well. It is Fictions of C onfinem ent in Sw ift IqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHG 135 not surprising that the se fictions of confine me ntshould prolife rate in the age of Locke and the e mpiricists,who portray the mind ,in the word s of Sir Isaiah Be rlin, as “a box containing mental equivalents of the Newtonian particles,” and for whom “threedimensional Newtonian space has its counterpart in the inner ‘space’ of the...