William W. E. Slights. The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare. The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare. By William W. E Slights. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Illus. Pp. xii + 205. $99.00 cloth. Robert A. Erickson Robert A. Erickson Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 60, Issue 2, Summer 2009, Pages 230–233, https://doi.org/10.1353/shq.0.0071 Published: 01 July 2009

The subject of "libertinism," like diose odier vexed subjects "homosexuality," "pornography," "venereal disease," and "antinomianism," to name a few, is important to eighteenth-century fiction in a variety ofways. This review essay will discuss the related critical fortunes of libertinism and pornography in two recent complementary books, with glances at odiers. The writings of James Grantham Turner have become, in die past two decades, a starting place for all discussions of "libertinism" in early modern Europe, but especially in English culture. In two articles that appeared in die late 1980s, Turner attempted to define, or at least characterize, libertinism in all its paradoxical significations. In "The Properties of Libertinism," Eighteenth Century Life 9:3 (1985), 75-87, he surveyed modern and seventeendiand eighteentii-century definitions of the topic and came to the conclusion diat questions about die nature and development of libertinism in the early modern period reflected

Fictions of the Heart: Sterne, Law, and the Long Eighteenth Century Robert A. Erickson The early modern anatomical representation ofthe human heart stressed the power of the heart as the source ofheat, and heat, along with pneuma, or breath, was thought to be the source oflife.1 This view of the heart was based on centuries of Galenic medical tradition. Another tradition, going back to the Hippocratic writings and Aristode, stressed that the heart was the source of intelligence, sensation, memory, and imagination, what I call "the cognitive heart." These two traditions originating in Greek antiquity emphasize the human heart as a source ofvitality and creativity.Joined with them in Western thought about the body is the biblical notion ofthe heart as the inner core or resources ofa person, especially die mind, will, and imagination. In scripture, die heart is a symbol ofthe ambivalence of human existence because it can represent both the source of all human wickedness (Genesis 6:5-6) and the source oftruth, rectitude, understanding, and sincerity, and the story of David's affair with Bathsheba is a complex exploration of the evil and ameliorative motions of the heart in one character (2 Samuel 11-12). In the Psalms, the heart is at once the source and instrument of language: "My heart is inditing a good matter ... my tongue is the pen ofa ready 1 See Nancy Siraisi, Medieval andEatly RenaissanceMedicine: An Introduction to Knoivledge and Practice (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1990), perhaps the best recent introduction to earlyWestern medicine; see also Everett Mendelson, Heat andLife: VieDevelopment oftlie Tliemy ofAnimal Heat (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964). EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 15, Number 3-4, April-July 2003 560 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURYFICTION writer" (Psalm 45:1). What I wish to highlight at the start is that both the classical and biblical notions of the heart place particular importance on the creative power of the heart. This emphasis was given even greater impetus with William Harvey's revolutionary discovery of blood circulation and the heart's propulsive power in creating and maintaining diat circulation. For Harvey, the heart itself was a creative organ or agent oflife, constandy in motion, constantly moving the blood through the body, constandy making and maintaining life in the body. He went so far as to characterize the heart as a "familiar house-hold god [who] doth his duty to the whole body, by nourishing, cherishing, and vegetating, being the foundation oflife, and the author ofall."2 The heart partakes of the God-like power of creation, ofauthorship, offiction-making. In this essay, I would like to explore the fiction-making powers ofseveral literary and religious authors (ranging from Boehme to Wordsworth but focusing on Sterne, Law, and the eighteenth century) who characterize and imagine the heart as an agent of creation. 1 first encountered the seventeenth-century German mystic Jakob Boehme in Norman O. Brown's Life against Death, which I read in 1961 in my impressionable early twenties. I was fascinated by Boehme's account of the divine "love play," and the androgynous Adam. I had always planned someday to study Boehme, and like many erstwhile projects, the plan was never fully realized. So it was that coming to the new British Library last summer for the first time, after a Fulbrightyear in the religious studies department at the University of Helsinki, I decided to go back to Boehme, and I ordered a fourvolume eighteenth-century edition of his complete works. I had not gone very far into the first volume, returning to Boehme's first work, 2 Robert A. Erickson, The Language of the Heart ¡600-1750 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), p. 82. I discuss the "cognitive heart" tradition further in "Ethnography and the Theater of the Body" in Ethnography Is a Heavy Rite: Studies in Compaiative Religion in Honor ofJulia Pentikäinen (Turku: Abo Academy Press, 2000), pp. 91-92. Other recent and relevant studies of the representation of the heart include Eric Jager, TheBook oftlielleait (Chicago and London: University ofChicago Press, 2000), which focuses primarily on the medieval period, and Scott Manning Stevens, "Sacred Heart and Secular Brain" in TheBody in Paits: Fantasies ofCmporealily in Early Modem Europe...

REVIEWS 225 Linda Merians, ed. The Secret Malady: Venereal Disease in EighteenthCentury Britain and France. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996. viii + 296pp. US$39.95 (cloth); US$19.95 (paper). ISBN 0-81310888 -8. Whatever one may think about the issue of "contagious" language (as evaluated carefully and vividly in Julie Candler Hayes's final essay on Sade and MacKinnon in this volume), anyone who pays close attention to the essays collected here will never be able to read Restoration and eighteenth-century literature in quite the same way again—one has been "infected." We still use the language of contagion in a variety of figurative ways, as Susan Sontag and others have reminded us. As early as 1653 William Harvey, searching for evidence of semen in the uterus of a fertilized doe without the aid of a microscope, concluded that the primary process of animal reproduction is analogous to contagion from disease: it "is agreed upon by universal consent; that all Animals whatsoever , which arise from Male and Female, are generated by the coition of both Sexes; and so begotten as it were per contagium aliquod, by a kind of contagion . In like manner as Physitians observe, that contagious disease (as the Leprosie, the Pox, the Plague, and Pthisick) do propagate their infection, and beget themselves in bodies yet sound and untoucht, meerly by an extrinsecal contact; nay sometimes onely by the breath ... and that at a distance" {Concerning the Generation ofLiving Creatures, p. 254). A few years later, Milton too uses the language of contagion and infection to recount how Satan, who is prohibited from doing physical violence to Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost, proceeds to impart his "venom" to Eve's mind and heart solely by the use of his tongue, at a distance, in order to engender "intoxication," pride, and disobedience . And to "pox" someone or something with a curse became almost as natural as breathing for the rake in Restoration comedy. I would guess that those of us who teach and write in the early modern period are frequently confronted by our ignorance about the nature of sexually transmitted diseases in that era and the effects of their representation in literature and art. How does this book help to remedy our ignorance? I suggest that after reading the editor's brief but informative introduction, one begin with the useful essay by Philip Wilson on the London physician Daniel Turner and his treatment of syphilis. Whatever the origins of the syphilis epidemic after 1495 (and various theories flourished, most attributing the disease to the "impure" and "promiscuous" women of "the new world" who contaminated the sailors returning with Columbus), the disease was spread throughout Europe by Charles vm's army marching through Italy in 1493-94. The eponymous shepherd of Fracastoro 's Latin poem Syphilis (1530) was struck down, with his entire nation, for its pride (p. 198), opening the door for Swift (and others) to play upon the mockpastoral name and theme in "Phyllis, or the Progress of Love." Not until the nineteenth century was syphilis distinguished from gonorrhea as a separate disease . Until that time most people believed the two were manifestations of the same affliction, and that one, gonorrhea—variously referred to as the dropper, the burning, la chaude pisse, gleets, or the clap (p. 70)—often led to the more serious syphilis—or le mal de Naples, the French disease, lues venerea, la grande 226 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 10:2 vérole, the Great Pox, or simply the pox (pp. 1, 70)—thus befitting eighteenthcentury notions of "progress" and hastening one's search for an immediate cure, which was rarely the case with more ordinary disorders such as ulcers or hernias (p. 71). In the Restoration and eighteenth century, the customarily fast and brutal act of sex led to a quick and brutal "cure," usually the external or internal administration of mercury in some form. (Significantly, Hogarth's famous progresses of the harlot, the rake, and marriage give the most accelerated and highly detailed representation of the effects of syphilis on children and adults in eighteenth-century graphic art, as N.F. Lowe and Rose Zimbardo perceptively trace in their...

294 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 6:3 Christopher Fox and Gloria Sybil Gross. Pointing out that the narrator in Swift's Gulliver 's Travels reveals, among other symptoms, those of lycanthropy (the "delusional belief of having been turned into an animal," p. Ill), Fox shows that Gulliver's way of thinking can perhaps be best understood if we read the story of Swift's fictional narrator as a case study of madness. Gross concentrates on the work of Jane Austen and argues that the. author's fictional representations of forms of hypochondria in various female characters, afflictions which these charachers often employ for the purpose of controlling and directing the lives of others, constitute "harsh indictments of devious personal aims, self-centred ambition and profoundly fallible social values" (p. 190). Marie Mulvey Roberts analyses ways in which the eighteenth-century preoccupation with mortality is reflected in the English novel of the period: she discusses literary instances in which longevity was promised to those who were able to lead a regulated and self-controlled way of life and she also shows that older women were, owing to their aging bodies, fictionally represented in a discriminatory manner. Lynn Salkin Sbiroli's essay on the regenerative role of women during the urne of the French Revolution concludes the volume. Like Mulvey Roberts, Sbiroli explores a form of social conditioning by means of imposing on women positive or negative body-related images. Both articles contribute to the continued illumination and clarification of woman's position in the eighteenth century. The articles in this collection are generally well edited and attractively presented. The introductory essay, presumably written by the editors, deserves, however, a special mention: not only does it give a good overview of the current research in the field of medicine and literature, but it also provides excellent bibliographical references. These will be helpful to scholars and students who come to this field for the first time and will, together with the wide range of topics addressed in this collection, indicate to them the size of the terrain which has been opened for exploration. Brigitte Glaser Universität Eichstätt Anne Jessie Van Sant. Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. xiv + 143pp. US$44.95. ISBN 0-52 1-40226-3. Anne Jessie Van Sant has written a useful and carefully researched book whose interest her title does not fully convey. She is concerned with several eighteenth-century discourses in her attempt to trace "the story of sensibility" (p. xi). These discourses are primarily the new languages of physiology, of philanthropy, of psychology, and of the novel, combined with philosophy and traditional rhetorics of pathos. Influenced but not overwhelmed by Foucault and "new historicism" (p. xiv) and developing her own subtle reader-response approach to these materials, Van Sant shows, in general convincingly and articulately, and with a good many vivid and memorable examples, how these discourses overlap and coincide in a variety of ways. The book is not without flaws, and the question as to any larger significance of her discoveries is more or less left to the reader to determine. "Mostly I am interested in discovering surprising coalescences—between psychology and physiology, between scientific and nonscientific texts and contexts" (p. xiv). She is not afraid to acknowledge that her method of discovery frequently depends on analogy . For me, the primary importance of her book lies in drawing attention, in a sustained REVIEWS 295 and fairly comprehensive way, to the linguistic coincidences among these discourses— particularly from physiology and psychology—and their meaning for the novel of sensibility , in so far as that term applies to Richardson's Clarissa, Sterne's A Sentimental Journey, and Mackenzie's The Man ofFeeling. This short book is neatly constructed in seven chapters, the first four focusing on the theme of sight, "on the creation and observation of distress" (p. xiii), the last three on the theme of touch, since "sensibility defines all sensory and emotional experience as forms of touch" (p. xiii). The introductory chapter gives a useful definition of sensibility as it operated in the three areas of physiology, epistemology, and psychology: "an organic sensitivity...

Mrs A. Behn and the Myth of OrOOnoko-ImoindaRobert A. Erickson How long wilt thou go about, O thou backsliding daughter? for the Lord hath created a new thing in the earth, A woman shall compass a man. Jeremiah 31:22 All I ask is the Privilege for my masculine Part the Poet in me ... to tread in those successful Paths my Predecessors have so long thrived in.1 Aphra Behn If the act of writing is always in some sense an abbreviated form of walking, travelling/travailing, and exploring, then Aphra Behn's unconventional "Female Pen" reiterates the adventures of a highly unconventional female explorer and literary pioneer. Amid a resurgence of recent interest in her work, especially her short narratives, we are still in the process of discovering just how richly innovative Behn is as a narrative artist. Oroonoko, published in the explosive political atmosphere of 1688 (and a year before her death) is a thickly woven and delicately allusive verbal artifact. Behn was forty-eight at the time, poor, sick, suffering from a variety of diseases, and actively and intently rereading Scripture.2 1 Aphra Behn, Epistle Dedicatory to TAe Lucky Chance (1686). 2 For Behn's biographical record I rely chiefly on Angeline Goreau's Reconstructing Aphra: A Social Biography ofAphra Behn (New York: Dial Press, 1980). For Behn's intellectual encounter EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 5, Number 3, April 1993 202 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION She was exactly double the age of her free-spirited and socially privileged and powerful "Eyewitness," the younger self-as-character who participates in the crucial historical events of the narrative.3 Oroonoko is a vital text in the multifaceted birth of the novel. Behn prefigures Defoe's invention of the retrospective Moll Flanders looking back over an active and unconventional life, but her purpose is to inscribe the experience and significance of her "Slave" within her own closing life's circle. The narrator's role in Oroonoko calls attention to the elegiac power of a narrative redolent of paradisal and gospel overtones in which Behn preserves for "Posterity" her godlike heroic pair—literally the first African-American protagonists in English fiction. While she may in part alleviate her own sense of guilt in their demise, at the same time she provides a cautionary literary and political fable for her dedicatee, the young nobleman Richard Maitland (nephew of the Lauderdale of Charles's Cabal ) and his lady (another potentially important heroic pair), and for an England—and an English Catholic king—in crisis. The title page of the first edition tells us that the author is "Mrs. A. Behn." Although Aphra Behn almost always signs her name "A. Behn" in the epistles dedicatory to her works, the "Mrs." [Mistress] here—whether her own addition or, as is more likely, the bookseller's—conceals a wealth of meaning present to a late-seventeenth-century audience.4 "Mistress " was one ofthe few female words of power in this era, but of sharply with Scripture and French biblical criticism in her translation and publication in early 1688 of Fontenelle's Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (accompanied by her "Essay on Translated Prose"), see Maureen Duffy, The Passionate Shepherdess: Aphra Behn 1640-89 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1977), pp. 270-74 and Robert Adams Day, "Aphra Behn and the Works of the Intellect ," in Fetter'dor Free: British Women Novelists, 1670-1815, ed. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1989), pp. 374-80. Of recent criticism (besides that cited elsewhere), I would like to note the following as the most pertinent to my concerns in this essay: Katharine M. Rogers, "Fact and Fiction in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko," Studies in the Novel 20 (1988), 1-15; Robert L. Chibka, '"Oh! Do Not Fear a Woman's Invention ': Truth, Falsehood, and Fiction in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 30 (1988), 510-37; Beverie Houston, "Usurpation and Dismemberment: Oedipal Tyranny in Oroonoko," Literature and Psychology 32 (1985), 30-36; Martine Watson Brownley , "The Narrator in Oroonoko," in Essays in Literature 4 (1977), 174-81; and Jacqueline Pearson, "Gender and Narrative in the Fiction of Aphra Behn," Review of...

266 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 2:3 the concept of masculine goodness an essentially female virtue. Two subsequent chapters focus on Tom Jones and Amelia. The first of these (chapter 8) explains the sense in which Fielding similarly offers a radical revaluation of traits conventionally associated with the female character—such as "Modesty," "Fearfulness," "Intellectual and Moral Capacity," and "Obedience." The second (chapter 9) opens by defining the ways in which Fielding succeeds not only in maintaining his reader's sympathy for Sophia, the unconventional heroine of his masterpiece, but in making her the moral centre of the novel. But it is in the concluding section of this chapter that Smallwood's considerable powers as a reader are displayed to advantage: she manages to redeem the insipid character of Amelia while revealing that one of Fielding's strategies in the novel is the continual undermining of conventional assumptions about the weakness of women. In the heroine of his final novel Fielding exalts the effeminate virtue of "tenderness"—a softer version, perhaps, of that hearty "good nature" he earlier had embodied in Parson Adams and Tom Jones—and makes it the essential attribute of goodness in a universal moral system. An example of feminist criticism at its best, Fielding and the Woman Question offers an entirely new perspective on its subject—a perspective from which Fielding appears decidedly more amiable and the works he wrote are seen to be deeper still than we had supposed. This book will be essential reading for anyone seriously interested in Fielding, Richardson, and their times. Finally, considering the disciplined manner in which Smallwood applies her method, this is also a book that will repay the attention of "New Historicists" everywhere. M.C. Battestin University of Virginia Margaret Anne Doody and Peter Sabor, eds. Samuel Richardson: Tercentenary Essays. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. xvi + 306pp. US$49.50. The tercentenary of Richardson's birth happens to coincide with a virtual eruption ofcritical interest in his fictions, especially Clarissa. As the last essay in this collection makes quite clear, Richardson criticism since the ground-breaking efforts of Alan Dugald McKillop (1956) and Ian Watt (1957) has been steady and voluminous, and is still growing, not unlike a Richardsonian fiction itself. Margaret Anne Doody and Peter Sabor have assembled in this opportune gathering of fifteen essays a rich and varied, if uneven, display of approaches and responses that reflects, despite a discernible Anglo-Eastern-American tendency, the present plurality of interest in Richardson's fictions. The best of the essays testify, in one way or another, to Richardson's gift for transforming his own REVIEWS 267 texts and a wide range of others into multivalent fictions which, with enduring power and immediacy, are able to illuminate his culture. No essay emerges as clearly superior to the others and even the most negligible points to something important; most of them are instructive or at least useful. Margaret Anne Doody, who with her previous comprehensive and spirited book on Richardson's fiction and several important recent articles has emerged as perhaps our principal active Richardsonian (her collaborators, with eighteen references to her work listed in the index, would seem to think so), provides a strong philosophical and linguistic basis for approaching his fiction through the theme of reading "character" in relation to personal identity in Sir Charles Grandison. The essay is particularly good on the meanings of "character" and "reserve" in the novel. Doody could go deeper with the "person as mask" motif , and she misses some of the wordplay in "cha-racf-er" (p. 1 17). But this essay and that by Carol Houlihan Flynn penetrate much further into the luminous mysteries of the novel than any but a few recent essays, perhaps in part because Doody and Flynn are returning resolutely to labyrinthine texts about which they have already written well. They know the terrain. For her part, Flynn explores one of the major, and probably intractable, problematics in Richardson's fiction: the "pains" (really the tragedy) of feminine accommodation and compliance— what the eighteenth century called "the arts of pleasing." She misses a chance to encompass in her argument the prettified and mannequinized post-marital Pamela (Pamela...