Romantic Hospitality and the Resistance to Accommodation

introduction

i Of Mice and Women: A Preliminary Case Study for a Theory of Romantic Hospitality Anna Letitia Barbauld wrote several of her poems as a guest in Dr. Joseph Priestley’s family home in Leeds. Late one night, during a visit in the summer of 1769, Barbauld steals her way into Priestley’s laboratory only to discover another of Priestley’s guests, a terrified mouse who has“been confined all night” in a cage by the master of the household “for the sake of making experiments with different kinds of air”(McCarthy and Kraft 36).1 As William Turner explains,“it happened that [the] captive was brought in after supper, too late for any experiment to be made that night, and the servant was desired to set it by till next morning” (184). Witnessing what she determines to be the abusive imprisonment of her fellow lodger, and knowing all too well his unhappy destiny, Barbauld immediately fashions “The Mouse’s Petition to Doctor Priestley”(1772), a work that attempts to capture the thoughts and the voice of an animal pleading for his liberty and his life at the hands of human cruelty. The next morning, the mouse is brought to Dr. Priestley after breakfast with a note “twisted among the wires of its cage,” containing the following verses: Oh! hear a pensive captive’s prayer, For liberty that sighs; And never let thine heart be shut Against the prisoner’s cries. 1 introduction Reading the Foreign Romantic Hospitality and the Resistance to Accommodation J 00_intro 3/1/07 12:04 Page 1 For here forlorn and sad I sit, Within the wiry grate; And tremble at th’ approaching morn, Which brings impending fate. If e’er thy breast with freedom glow’d, And spurn’d a tyrant’s chain, Let not thy strong oppressive force A free-born mouse detain. Oh! do not stain with guiltless blood Thy hospitable hearth; Nor triumph that thy wiles betray’d A prize so little worth. The scatter’d gleanings of a feast My frugal meals supply; But if thine unrelenting heart That slender boon deny, The cheerful light, the vital air, Are blessings widely given; Let nature’s commoners enjoy The common gifts of heaven. The well taught philosophic mind To all compassion gives; Casts round the world an equal eye, And feels for all that lives. If mind, as ancient sages taught, A never dying flame, Still shifts thro’ matter’s varying forms, In every form the same, Beware, lest in the worm you crush A brother’s soul you find; And tremble lest thy luckless hand Dislodge a kindred mind. Or, if this transient gleam of day Be all of life we share, Let pity plead within thy breast, That little all to spare. 2 reading the foreign 00_intro 3/1/07 12:04 Page 2 So may thy hospitable board With health and peace be crown’d; And every charm of heartfelt ease Beneath thy roof be found. So when unseen destruction lurks, Which men, like mice, may share, May some kind angel clear thy path, And break the hidden snare. (1–48) A kind of prisoner itself, Barbauld’s poem has, until recently, been unjustly confined to what Christine Kenyon-Jones calls a “very popular genre” of poetry and fiction in the late eighteenth century that sought to dissuade children from torturing animals by deploying stories recounted by the animals themselves (54). Dr. Priestley, the apparent addressee of the text, is certainly not a child; but, as McCarthy and Kraft remind us, Barbauld’s poem did “become a set piece for children to memorize”in the late eighteenth century (245).2 Julia Saunders reads “The Mouse’s Petition” against the history of its reception as a poem for children, championing it instead as a serious “feminine ” critique of the “‘masculine’ domain of science” (501–2). According to Saunders, Barbauld was not“inimical”to scientific practices such as vivisection (which she saw as “just” in her terms), but she did wish “to inject a breath of ethical fresh air into the sealed bell-jar of the laboratory, reminding the scientist of his Christian responsibility to temper justice with mercy” (502). Mounted as an implicit critique of science, the mouse’s petition no longer speaks on behalf of the particular suffering of a single mouse, but miraculously on behalf of all living creatures rendered as objects of scientific interest...