Independent Study
How we should teach literature in our college classrooms continues to be a hotly debated issue involving not only considerations of the canon, but also debates about the relationship between student and teacher established by a variety of pedagogical positionings. If we analyze the history of criticism of a particular canonical text, we can begin to understand that what is really being argued is who will have the right to determine what knowledge is valued, a struggle which is always already occurring in the institutions throughout our culture. The texts found in the canon are crucial to an understanding of this struggle because they are the objects at which a variety of theoretical arrows are being fired. I will analyze the critical history of John Donne's "Elegy XIX: To His Mistress On Going To Bed" because the criticism written about Donne,s poem effectively reflects this struggle. My bibliographic analysis will begin with Herbert J. C. Grierson's 1912 article .Donne' s Love-Poetry," travel through New Critic Clay Hunt' s reading of Donne's "Elegy XIX" and end with a re-consideration of poststructuralist Thomas Docherty's book John Donne Undone. Throughout this essay, I will illustrate the manner in which these theorists are exemplars of the criticism of their time and how their themes get played out again and again in the postmodern criticism that attempts to critique those themes.
The struggle is chiefly between old and new theorists, New Critics and poststructuralist theorists; surprisingly enough, the two groups are not as divergent as they would like to argue because, in actuality, many of the theorists who are using poststruturalist theories are doing so to achieve New Critical aims that focus on unity through the resolution of paradoxes and conflicts. Thus, in analyzing the ways in which the two groups are similar, we can see where we need to work now in order to go beyond the limitations of New Critical analysis into an arena in which texts, both canonical and non-canonical, are valued not for their sense of unity, but for the ways in which they construct meaning and encourage readers to become active participants in that process.
A brief overview of the poem is necessary at this point in order to ground this discussion in the specifics of the poem. In "Elegy XIX," Donne characteristically combines secular and heavenly aspects of love in an attempt to seduce his mistress: "Now off with those shoes, and then safely tread/In love's hallowed temple, this soft bed" (17-8). In these lines, Donne is conparing the couple's bed to a temple and by association, the acts that he wants to perform there will be sacred, even though they are expressions of secular lust and desire. In order to seduce his mistress, he catalogs her clothing, comparing her clothes to stars--"0ff with that girdle, like heaven's zone glistering,/But a far fairer world encompassing" (5-6)--and to angel ' s clothing - - "In such white robes, heaven ' s angels used to be/Received by men; thou, angel, bring' st with thee/A heaven like Mahomet's paradise" (19-21). Her clothing is so beautiful because it contains a beauty that is even greater than the articles of clothing themselves, and, thus, by praising her clothing he is lauding her beauty. In addition to this cataloging of clothing, he also analyzes her body and uses comparison to praise her physical form that is slowly revealed as the clothing comes off. "Your gown going off, such beauteous state reveals/As when from flowery meads th' hill's shadow steals,' (13-4).
After he praises her clothing and her body, he asks her to give his roving hands the right to touch her. At thie point, he continues his comparison, linking her to a new-found kingdom, a "mine of precious stones" (29) and "books' gay coverings" (39). He stresses that she is like a kingdom that is -safeliest when one man manned" (28), insinuating that this woman should allow him and only him into her bed because she is more worthy if she is monogamous. He carries this theme through by comparing women to "mystic books, which only we/(Whom their imputed grace will dignify)/Must see revealed" (41-2), stressing that a woman such as his mistress is a gem that should be reserved for men like himself who know how to appropriately appreciate L~ey,~va~ue ~;~ Other men can "read" her covering but only the speaker has the ability to "read" her nakedness, just like a layman can appreciate a pretty book cover but does not know how to read the pages of the book. And to prove to his mistress that he has her best interests in mind, he takes off his own clothing to set an example for her.
The above described metaphors are the predominant ones of the poem and have been interpreted and re-interpreted by many theorists. Depending on their theoretical affiliation, however, what becomes important about those metaphors differs greatly. Reflecting the ever changing nature of theoretical interpretation, the frontispiece to a 1962 collection of essays about John Donne states that the aim of the book, which is part of a series entitled Twentieth Century Views, "is to present the best in conten~orary critical opinion on major authors, providing a twentieth century perspective on their changing status in an era of profound revaluations" (Gardner). When he wrote this, Maynard Mack, the series editor, could not have known how true those words would become as structuralism and poststructuralist, with all their revisionary impulses, swept through universities across the world. The effects that these theories have on our readings of canonical "Great" works such as Donne's "Elegy XIX" are still being re-evaluated. To understand what peststructuralist theories are supposedly working against, we must start our analysis in a space before the New Critics to see how current theories attempt to interrogate the tensions between that which came directly before New Criticism and that which is coming after it in an effort to multiply the theoretical possibilities. In turn, this multiplication will affect how literature is viewed and what knowledge will be valued enough to be taught in university classrooms.
In an essay which was originally published in 1912, Herbert J. C. Grierson stresses the necessity for analyzing Donne's relationship to other poets throughout history in order to determine what iS unique in Donne's work. Grierson argues that since Donne's poetry illustratee two strains of thought--"the strain of dialectic, subtle play of argument and wit, erudite and fantastic; and the strain of vivid realism, the record of a passion which is not ideal nor conventional . . . but love as an actual, immediate experience in all its moods" (23)--it presents love as that which is constantly in flux and changing. The tension between these two strains of thought produce a concept of love, therefore, that is immediately present and real and is, thus, necessarily different from his contemporaries and his forefathers' writings on love. Grierson traces the foundations of these two strains by explaining the traditions that Donne's poetry both embraces and questions as he sketches a new view of love. As a result of this combining of a variety of traditions, Donne's courtly love poems "become a literary artifice, a refining upon outworn and extravagant conceits" (Grierson 25).
According to Grierson, Donne extracts the expression of sensual passion from classical love poetry, emphasizes a dialectical evolution which is preeminent in medieval poetry, and furthers the argumentative evolution of Renaissance writing. Donne rejects idealism and focuses instead upon the realities of love as he sees them. Consequently, Grierson asserts that "the finest note in Donne's love-poetry is the note of joy, the joy of mutual and contented passion" (29). Donne's poems emphasize the simplicity of "the sheer joy of loving and being loved" (Grierson 29). Grierson contends that this simpicity is achieved only because Donne is so skillful in his unification of two strains of thought, claiming that
it was only the force of Donne's personality that could achieve even an approximate harmony of elements so divergent as are united in his love-verses, that could master the lover natured--steed that drew the chariot of his troubled and passionate soul and make it subservient to his yoke-fellow of purer strain who is a lover of honor, and modesty, and temperance, and the follower of true glory. (34) Thus, Grierson argues that even though Donne is not as great a poet as Milton, "he sounded some notes which touch the soul and quicken the intellect in a way that Milton's magnificent and intense but somewhat hard and objective art fails to achieve" (35).
In order to explain the traditions from which Donne draws, Grierson finds it necessary to illustrate the ways in which Donne's work is different from authors such as Dante, Milton, and Ovid. His enphasis is thus on a cataloging of characteristics and demonstrating in what ways Donne's writing is unique and different from other writers of his time and of other time periods. This sort of cataloguing attempts to elucidate what Harold Bloom calls the "anxiety of influence," a condition which he defines as a male writer' s fear that what he writes will not be empirically different from his predecessors and will therefore not be worthy of reading. This fear ties into a conception of the writer as individual which was established during the Renaissance, a concept that stresses that "we each have our own 'proper' place in the social system" (Docherty 124). Grierson's self-defined project is to explain the beauty and worth of Donne's poetry. That worth is directly linked to how individualistic Donne's poetry is.
Thus, it becomes crucial to show how Donne creates a new kind of poem using pieces from old traditions and to illustrate how Donne's poetry affected his descendants. Grierson's critical contemporaries emphasized the greatness of individual talent by explaining both how the author in question was a part of the tradition from which he came and was different from the tradition from which he came. They also emphasized events of the poet's life that had shaped their ExMMS. For example, Grierson comments that
the truth is . . .that owing to the fullness of Donne's experience as a lover, the accident that made of the earlier libertine a devoted lover and husband, and from the play of his restless and subtle mind on the phenomenon of love conceived and realized in this less ideal fashion, there emerged in his poetry the suggestion of a new philosophy of love which . . . rests on a juster, because a less dualistic and ascetic, conception of the nature of the love of man and woman. (24)
Clearly, Grierson reads the poem through the frame of the poetts experiences with other literary traditions as well as the poet's experiences in his personal life. Thus, in Grierson's criticism, there remains an emphasis on the poet's part in the history of poetry and how that history affects what gets written. This emphasis on the history of the poet will be questionedby the New Critics.
For Grierson, the worth and beauty of Donne's poetry is also directly linked to the degree to which Donne's poetry reflects reality. And in this concern, Grierson is also representative of his critical generation. Literature's worth was determinedby its relationship to reality. The experiences in the piece needed to affect real and true emotion in its readers in order to be considered a fine piece of writing. The theme of the poems likewise had to embody universal morals in order to be considered great. This enphasis on humanist realism privileged linearity because that method of telling a story appeared to be most real. The speaker in "Great" literature occupied a stable, unified position and spoke from a space of authority and knowledge. Grierson and his conteporaries' templates, however, did not take into account that what they considered tobe the one and only way to express reality was, in fact, a series of constructs that privileged certainpositions over others and allowed certain perceptions of reality to be privileged while other perceptions were discounted. The New CritiCs who were to follow Grierson would not emphasize this sense of reality as much as Grierson and his contemporaries; instead, the New Critics. would judge a peem's worth by the unity of its presentation.
Unity, yet another characteristic of Grierson's reading of Donne's poetry, is carried through to New Critics' readings of the Metaphysical poets. Grierson argues that passion in Donne's poetry "is purified and enriched by being brought into harmony with his whole nature, spiritual as well as physical. It has lost the exclusive consciousness of itself which is lust, and become merged in an entire affection, as a turbid and discolored stream is lost in the sea" (33). This passage reflects Grierson's privileging of closure and unity. He praises Donne' s work for its ability to resolve the conflict between love and lust which results in a unified vision of love. He acknowledges Donne's playfulness, but praises how adept he is at moving between this playfulness and a skillful use of words to convey a serious message that has real import. This gaiety, in fact, lessens the negative impact of his sometimes bawdy words, and thus balances the pull between secular passion and transcendental love. Grierson contends that
there is . . . a gaiety in the poems elaborating the thesis that love is a perpetual flux, fickleness the law of its being, which warns us against taking them too seriously; and even those Elegies which seem to our taste most reprehensible are aerated by a wit which makes us almost forget their indecency. (28).
Thus, once again he emphasizes the underlying theme of Donne's Elegies--the love between man and woman--and illustrates the ways in which Donne's bawdiness, in conjunction with a praising of love, does not contradict this honorable thence. Thus, all the elements of Donne's elegies contribute to a sense of unity.
Although Grierson's successors, the New Critics, will repeat this emphasis upon the value of unity, they differ from Grierson's humanist realism in that they critique an examination of the historical events surrounding the writing of a poem. In his response to Douglas Bush's critique of his own article, Cleanth Brooks explains why Bush's assertion for considering the history of the poem and the poet is limiting and misguided, stating that "historical evidence does not solve critical problems . . . it is often inadequate or problematical . . . the objective facts that can be pegged down and verified do not in themselves yield a Judgment" (132). Instead of focusing on an historical analysis of the poem, the New Critics argue that great literature is inherently great and does not need the help of history to make it appear great. the very language that the poet uses expresses the posm's worth, and anyone who has any knowledge of poetry will be able to understand a great poem without the aid of any outside interpretation. This view of literature establishes, therefore, a tenuous relationship between the act of reading and teaching. .~"~ to~~Criti~j (the' teaching of great literature is not necessary and, in fact, actually convalutes the reading of a poem.
Other basic tenets of New Criticism include an almost exclusive focus on close readings of individual texts to illustrate the skillful ways in which authors use parodox, ambiguity, and irony to convey their message. Metaphysical poets such as Donne are exemplars of these literary techniques, and it is therefore not surprising that many New Critics focused on this category of poets. In his essay on Donne's Elegy XIX, Clay Hunt analyzes Donne's balancing between two divergent views of love-love as transcendant and love as a bodily experience. He argues that Elegy XIX is not a very skillful poem because
the artistic paradox of the Elegy--its mixture of bumptious, perverse wit with excited philosophic speculation and strong emotion--is never fully resolved in the poem. Probably the poem as a whole was never brought to complete definition in Donne's mind; it grew on him as he wrote. And I think that, for all its brilliance, the poem never quite assumes shape as an artistic whole. (Hunt 31) Griefson also emphasized the contradiction between love as spiritual entity and love as secular entity, but he praised Donne for his representation of love as a constant moveneat between the two ends of the spectrum whereas Hunt 's focus upon the formal structural techniques that Donne uses to create a paradox in which love can be both bodily and heavenly points to the ways in which Donne's poem fails to achieve an artistic whole. Unlike Grierson's reading of the poet's life in relation to the poem, Hunt's argument reflects a turning inward to understand the poem and therefore stresses an isolated of the text from historical and social contexts, a New Critical characteristic which poststructuralist theorists will question. Even though Hunt attempts to justify what the author's intentions were, his reading of the poem attempts to separate the text from both the author and the reader, a tendency poststructuralists will also question.
Even though Hunt does not think that Donne effectively resolves the conflict between the two views of love, he nonetheless appreciates Donne' s use of extended metaphor throughout the Elegy. Donne's comparison of love to war "freshens this stale conceit by exploiting its latent dramatic possibilities. He makes the beginning of the poem a call to battle, a vigorous challenge delivered in a tone of swagger and arrogance" (Hunt 19). Donne compares his mistress to the riches of a colonized land, a comparison which allows the speaker to address "the mistress in the specific role of an explorer who is requesting a royal patent ('license') which will permit him to discover a new land, explore its unknown riches, conquer it, and having established himself as its autocratic monarch, bring it under the firm mastery of his civil authority" (Hunt 20). Thus, the sexual conquest of the mistress becomes a praising of colonialiem and when juxtaposed with this colonialism, the act of seduction assumes grand proportions and importance. Hunt praises Donne's metaphors because they intellectualize and philosophize the sexual experience, a New Critic characteristic which poststructuralist theorists will interrogate.
In his analysis of Donne's Elegy XIX, Wilbur Sanders also praises Donne,s use of metaphors even as he critiques the poem for its mixture of bawdy colloquial language and religious language. He claims that Donne's language is so confusing that, as readers, we are not certain whether this is a poem of sexual emancipation or sexual perversion. Sanders claims that ,'it's still unclear whether we' re in the bedroom, or the brothel . . the emancipation in which the poem deals has not quite won its way through to freedom" (Sanders 106). Sanders argues that it is Donne's guilt about profaning the religious codes that prohibits the poem from succeeding in reconciling the differences between earthly and sacred love. As is typical of New Critics, Sanders emphasizes unity and judges Donne's poem as unsuccessful in achieving unity, but his analysis of Donne's feelings of guilt can be traced back to the humanist's need for poetry to embody moral behaviors and the acknowledgment that a poet's life necessarily affects the poem. So, in Sanders we see a combination of New Critical tendencies along with a strict belief in the strength and glory of the individual author, which are traces left from humanism. Thus, New Critics borrowed from the traditions they were critiquing in order to justify their own projects. Even though New Criticism attempts to distance the text from the author, the author's presence is still clearly relied upon in their critiques of texts because the New Critics were very committed to the Renaissance notion of individuality. Perhaps this commitment to the individual explains the New Critics' reliance upon Renaissance texts to practice their theoretical critiques. Poststructuralism will question this overreliance on the Renaissance notion of individual, but will still cling to traces of that view.
One of the most striking differences between the three schools of criticism being discussed here is Their beliefs about language. Grierson and his contemporaries had very little to say about the use of language to convey the images in the poems. They were more interested in studying the images, not how they were constructed. New Critics, on the other hand, became very interested in how language shaped what got produced. In "The Language of Paradox," Cleanth Brooks emphasizes how the language of poetry is different from that of the sciences, claiming that he is interested in our seeing that the paradoxes spring from the very nature of the poet's language: it is a language in which the connotations play as great a part as the denotations. And I do not mean that the connotations are important as supplying some sort of frill or trimming, something external to the real matter in hand. I mean that the poet does not use a notation at all--as a scientist may properly be said to do so. The poet, within limits, has to make up his language as he goes. (9)
In this passage, Brooks stresses that poetic language is inherently different from scientific language because the poet constructs his language as he goes and defines his own rules. The poet, then, has control over language, and must take an active role in the shaping of what literature means. The poet, then, is not limited to the denotations of words, but, instead, natst revel in the possible connotations of words. The individual poet is given a great deal of power, then, in the process of knowledge making and the reader is isolated from the production of meaning.
In his essay "John Donne: A Reconsideration," J. E. V. Crofts also emphasizes the differences between poetic language and scientific language and the supremacy of the poet over language. Crofts argues that as a poet, Donne was "pestered with the apparatus by which contemporary Science endeavored to extend man's tactual apprehension of the universe, and reduce the inrmeasurable or mysterious to something which he could hold in the palm of his hand" (85). The poet is then the actor who can appreciate the greatness of mysterious entities without attempting to reduce them to understandable bites. The poet relies upon paradoxical presentations of these mysterious entities so that the fullness and greatness of them can be experienced without reducing it to clinical smallness. Thus, the poet's task is to provide an exquisite balance between unlike entities in order to further a comtemplative indeciveness that illustrates both the poet's skillfulness and the theme's greatness.
Poststructuralist theorists argue for a questioning of the core principles of New Criticism, including notions of the individual, unity, language, history, and locus of textual authority. Many theorists who argue for this interrogation, however, utilize poststructuralist theories in order to further the aims of New Criticism. We need to analyze the ways in which these theorists contribute to the current re-evaluation of the canon even as they cling to New Critical notions before we can point toward a critical questioning which challenges the limitations of this retro-thinking.
In "Donne ' s Atomies and Anatomies: Deconstructed Bodies and the Resurrection of Atomic Theory," David A. Hedrich Hirsch challenges the Renaissance individual by illustrating that the notion of individual is a construct that relies upon contradictory elements for its existence. Hirsch argues that Donne is attempting to deconstruct the physical form through the use of his cataloguing in order to be able to reconstruct a new form that is vastly different from the original form. Attendring to ward off his fear of nothingness and destruction through death, Donne tries to immortalize the body by breaking it into parts. His deconstruction, however, points to the body's materiality and reemphasizes the impending destruction of it. "Far from securing an unalterable presence defined by immutable atom, Donne' s metaphorical evasion of deconstruction deconstructs on the very hasis of its prioritization of the material" (Hirsch 87). Thus, Donne's unified individual is dismantled to preserve the whole but invariably ends up being destroyed by the very materiality that allows Donne to dismantle the whole in the first place. Hirsch critiques Donne's poetry on his failure to reconcile that paradox since the unresolvability of the paradox threatens "to leave Donne stranded in the nothingness of aleconstructed aporia. There seems no simple way to resolve Donne's contradictory impulses" (88). Thus, even though Hirsch emphasizes the need to dismantle the Renaissance notion of the individual, he uses deconstruction to argue that Donne does not resolve the paradoxical issue and is, as a result, left at the center of nothingness, a place with which Hirsch himself is not comfortable.
Thomas Docherty also emphasizes this need to question the Renaissance individual because it relies upon legitimacy and ownership in order to exist. Docherty points to Donne's obsession with his mistress's monogamy in Elegy XIX as an example of men's need for their wives to be faithful in order for the wives truly to be their property. It was crucial that wives be their husbands' property because it was through the owning of property that men defined themselves. Thus, a "woman's proposed adultery threatens the identity, property and familial name or integrity of her husband; in short, she threatens to rupture the walls of the house, which equate with the walls of his individual sense" (Docherty 127). Donne's poens cannot, then, create this individual sense because his poens have been made public and, as such,they are no longer his property. Since he cannot control how readers will read the poems, he cannot control the connotations of the poems, even though the New Critics argued that he could. Thus, "as the reader 'animates' them, breathes through them, the texts fundamentally change . . .there is, simply, no pure identity of Donne which is accessible to us through writing. His much vaunted 'individuality' is based upon an evasion of the theoretical problems which the texts themselves raise" (Hirsch 127 ) .
Docherty, therefore, avoids falling into the New Critical emphasis on unity by insisting that the only way that Donne's text continue to make sense is if they are read through the historical contexts of the reader and the author. Thus, he challenges the New Critical privileging of the author over the reader. Docherty argues that the reader shapes the reading of the poem as much, if not more, as the author shapes the reading. Donne's poeus, then, are not, as the humanists and New Critics would like to suggest, examples of an individualistic talent, but are, instead, a reflection of the interaction between the text and the reader. Docherty argues that
in refusing to treat the poems of Donne as the expressions of a unique individual, validated by the specificity of that individual, I am following the critical and theoretical precepts regarding the possibilities of interpretations of representations and the production of historical knowledge which organize the texts thenselves. (131)
Thus, in order to understand the texts, we need to situate them in historical and social contexts, instead of praising them as great works written in isolation.
Situating these texts in historical and social contexts means more than simply analyzing the contexts in which Donne wrote; it means analyzing the ways in which the theoretical readings of the texts also need to be historicized because both humanist and New Critical readings of the Donne's text privilege an elitist, patriarchal reading position. Ted-Larry Pebworth and Richard Wollman analyze the ways in which Donne's culture's interpretation of manuscript and print influenced Donne' s view of himself as a poet, but they do not acknowledge that the postmodern reader's view of the position of the poet will affect how Donne's poems get interpreted. In critiquing Donne's poetry, we need to historically situate Donne, the readers of his poetry, and the criticism written about the poetry. we have to be careful not to read Donne' s poetry, or any canonical,, poetry only through our own political agendas because the mee__ning(s) of the poetry can be made by an interaction between the text, history, language and representation. Gregory Dime analyzes the difficulties that we face in order to accomplish this in his critique of counterculture theorists who are labeling themselves poststructuralist but who are actually reading texts through the Roeantic tradition which privileges individuality and the supremacy of the author. Dime claims that "the Romanticism of the countercultural critics often induces them to mistake Donne,s experimentation with, or attack upon, poetic conventions as a sign of a revolt against society in general or prevailing political authority" (14). Thus, Dime accuses them of using the Romantic lens to examine the Metaphysical poets which "tends merely to act as a mirror of their own sociopolitical aspirations and concerns" (14).
In her article "Donne's 'Elegy 19': The Busk Between a Pair of Bodies," Sandy Feinstein negotiates this movement between text, history, reader, and criticism byanalyzing the meaning of the busk in Donne's poem. She explains the importance that was placed on fashion in Donne's time and illustrates the struggles that surrounded the busk which was a metal object that "was placed in the lining of the Basquine (tight fitting bodice), in the busk pocket" (64) and was "one of the primary means to create the stiff, erect, masculine visual effect that was achieved by flattening the chest and stomach and elongating the waist" (64). Some men did not want women wearing busks because they allowed women to control their bodies, but other men favored them because they served to control the woman's body. The busk therefore both threatens and sustains the hierarchical order which devalued and deprivileged women. She analyzes the struggles over the busk through twentieth century feminist eyes because modern readers of the poem will need to be made aware of the history of the busk as well as its significance to women today. This balancing act can only be achievedby historicizing the past and the present in terms of a struggle for the future.
Unlike Barbara Estrin's analysis of Donne,s language, which relies upon New Critical close reading techniques and does not situate the poem in a social context, Achsah Guibbory analyzes Donne's language of love by historicizing both the Renaissance and the postmodern conception of love. She writes that "for modern reader, accustomed to distinct separations between private and public, love and politics may seem strange bedfellows" (811). She argues that love itself is political because it always already involves power relationships between men and women. To claim that Donne was merely being playful when he objectified and seduced women in his poems is, according to Guibbory, a repression of the underlying political struggles for power that occurred _and are still occuring between men and women. Guibbory claims that Donne,s misogyny is a response to a female monarch and to the possible threat to male superiority that she posed. Thus, even as Donne is supposedly glorifying the female body, he in fact is expressing a revulsion of the very form that threatens patriarchy. In Elegy XIX, then, "Donne transfers power from the woman, desired and praised, to the man who hopes to possess her" (Guibbory 821). Thus, Donne's poetry serves as an arena in which he can contest a female monarch, but in order to understand the in~lications of that contestation, we need to read the text through postmodern feminist lenses, as Achsah Guibbory does. She neither privileges the past nor scorns the future; instead, she achieves a balance between the two so that she can question and interrogate the previous interpretations of Donne's poetry. Guibbory's balance, however, does not in any way suggest a universal understanding of Donne, but rather serves as an opening up of the text to broader interpretations. In order to accomplish this opening, however, we need to take into consideration the past, the present, and the future historical and social contexts of the poem.
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