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THE ALIMENTARY STRUCTURES OF INCEST: EATING AND INCEST
IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH NARRATIVE

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Minaz Jooma

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THE ALIMENTARY STRUCTURES OF INCEST: EATING AND INCEST
IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH NARRATIVE

BY

Minaz Jooma

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1995

ABSTRACT

THE ALIMENTARY STRUCTURES OF INCEST: EATING AND INCEST
IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH NARRATIVE

BY

Minaz Jooma

Eating and incest appear frequently in major works by
Milton, Defoe, Richardson and Fielding that are widely
accepted as important to the development of modern
narrative. These themes are linked to concerns about social
and narrative authority, and they articulate anxieties about
several forms of inheritance in the eighteenth century.
Paternal authority in these works is validated by historical
commensal patterns that facilitate the retention and
consumption of certain family members by others. By
elaborating complex power relations within the family,
metaphors of eating and incest clarify how paternal
authority is conceived and how it fosters a particular myth
of male individuation in eighteenth-century narrative that
retains its currency in modern thought.

Tensions at the heart of socially-sanctioned forms of
sexuality and eating in Paradise Lost, Robinson Crusoe,
glarissa and Tom Jones, may be considered through feminist,
anthropological and psychoanalytical theories which explain

the interrelatedness of the codes that govern sexual and

eating practices. Transgressive eating and filial
disobedience, represented though father-daughter seduction
in Paradise Lgst, help to perpetuate a discursive tradition
that normalizes a pattern of paternal indulgence and filial
indebtedness. As this pattern enables alimentary, libidinous
and capitalist consumerism, it anticipates the operative
discursive and transactional relations of eighteenth-century
narrative.

Transactional relations are elaborated in Robinson
Crusoe when underlying homosocial structures tie father-son
relations to cannibalism, and when eroticized father-son
bonds endorse Crusoe's project of colonization. As the
exploitation of colonial and female bodies provides a basis
for a materialist economy, Defoe's novel represents the
consumption of minions as necessary to modern economic
structures. Power differentials embedded in these structures
are taken up and transformed as eighteenth-century narrative
evolves.

The codification of domestic consumption that occurs in
narratives of the 1740s may be considered through conditions
governing commensality in Clarissa, and through patterns of
kinship, property ownership, sexual access and food
distribution in Tom Jones. The figures of incest and eating
trace the accumulation of that cultural capital in
eighteenth-century narrative which supports patterns of

commensality and incestuous abuse in modern Western culture.

Copyright by

MINAZ JOOMA

1995

To Russell

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the Department of English at
Michigan State University for providing me with both a
stipend and an opportunity to continue teaching; these
initially made it possible for me to undertake a Ph.D. in
the United States. Fellowships from the Graduate School and
the College of Arts and Letters at Michigan State University
subsequently gave me the chance to concentrate on the later
stages of writing the dissertation and to take my work into
the wider scholarly community. Travel awards from the
Northeast American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
and the Graduate School at Michigan State University also
helped me to remain active at professional conferences, and
these meetings in turn provided ideal environments for
questioning and refining my ideas.

I wish to distinguish a number of individuals who have
<enabled my work and to say--in what seems an oddly small
tvay--how much I appreciate having had their support during
Imy graduate career. My sincere thanks first go to the
members of my doctoral guidance committee: to Ellen Pollak,
the director of my dissertation, to Howard Anderson, to

Victor Paananen and to Sheila Teahan. The linearity of

vi

written language does not allow me to convey the dynamic
intellectual milieu that was created by each member's
willingness to comment on the work-in-progress in a
distinctive and incisive way. And it is impossible to give
both thorough and succinct expression to the many levels--
personal as well as professional--on which I have been able
to seek guidance and support. Suffice it to say that the
members of my guidance committee have invited me into their
homes and their families with the same warmth and
colleagiality as that with which they have welcomed me into
their professional lives.

A sonorous thank you must next go to my dear friend,
Jenifer Banks, who has listened with unending patience to
untold variations on the tunes of incest and eating, and
whose wisdom and sound judgement has steered me through many
a crisis. During the course of many long and lively
conversations Marilyn Brouwer has, likewise, proved a source
of friendship and encouragement. Special thanks must also go
to Steve Bamlett of the Roehampton Institute in London whose
own rigorous scholarship first spurred a hopeful
undergraduate to consider graduate work, and to Sue
carpenter of Michigan State University Libraries who
graciously procured materials for me when I was compelled to
work on the dissertation from a distance and whose efforts
<3ften prevented my work from coming to a standstill.

Although they live in England, my parents, Merziya

Sachedina Jooma and Yusuf Jooma, have kept pace with my

vii

project. It was they, after all, who brought me up on a
glorious mixture of the foods and the folklores of three
continents and who early schooled me in the nuances of
language. Lillian Spagnola Angrisani and the late Frank
James Angrisani have always derived immense satisfaction
from my progress; they have often given me space in which to
ruminate and have fostered in me an irrepressible love of
the fete and the festive. I thank each of them for what they
have taught me about food-related practices and for
unwittingly moving me to ask leading questions about the
ontological significance of food rituals and their
intertwinedness with sexual taboos.

Finally, I am deeply grateful to Russell Angrisani who
has, without a murmur, made very considerable sacrifices in
his own career to support me in mine. The tenor of his
friendship, the quality of his mind and the sheer generosity
of his spirit have sometimes rendered me speechless--though,

fortunately, never silent.

viii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction
Chapter 1: The Apple of Her Father's I
Chapter 2: Robinson Crusoe Inc(orporates)

Chapter 3: Bringing Up a Chicken for the
Father's Table

Chapter 4: Bre(a)d, Bed, and Bawd
Conclusion

Bibliography

ix

46

98

157

221

277

284

INTRODUCTION

Coming into the house, apply yourself immediately
to your Parents; and having saluted them according
to your duty, acquaint them with what proficiency
you have made in your learning that day; be not
absent when Dinner is on the Table, but present
when Grace is said; and sit not down before you
have done your obedience to your Parents, and the
company then present. Keep your Clothes from
greasing... and receive what is given to you,
thankfully. Be not talkative at Table, nay nor do
not speak, unless you are askt question. Eat not

your meat greedily, nor fill your mouth too
full....

--Hannah Wolley, "Advice to the Female younger
Sort," in The Gentlewoman's Companion
Eating and incest are themes that reccur frequently in

eighteenth-century literature yet they have only recently
begun to receive sustained critical attention for their
significance in the study of gender relations in eighteenth-
century narrative. Even in recent work in gender and
narrative, the themes have been dealt with as discrete
entities. For example, Raymond F. Hilliard has published
articles on oral violence toward women in Frances Burney's
Evelina and in Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, and Paula
Marantz Cohen has used systems theory to describe Clarissa
as an anorectic daughter.1 Each critic argues that eating is
frequently linked to relations of power as they arise within

the emerging bourgeois family which is characteristically
1

nuclear or elementary in form. They have recognized eating,
and sometimes the act of not eating, as a powerful way of
representing collective tension and perpetrating collective
violence toward a member of the group who contravenes
accepted codes of behavior and structures of paternal
authority.

While studies of incest in Renaissance drama have been
in evidence for some time,2 incest, like eating, has only
fairly recently begun to receive significant attention as a
recurrent theme in eighteenth-century narrative. Of
particular interest among the recent work on the subject are
three articles, John Allen Stevenson's "Clarissa and the
Harlowes Once More," T. G. A. Nelson's "Incest in the Early
Novel and Related Genres," and Ellen Pollak's "Beyond
Incest: Gender and the Politics of Transgression in Aphra
Behn's LgygrLettersibetween a Nobleman and His Sister."
These articles have linked incest and its thematic
recurrence in a variety of ways to issues of power and
legitimation, identity and agency from the eighteenth
century to modern times. Lynda Zwinger's Daughters and
Fathers: The Sentimental Romance of Heterosexuality, and a
collection of essays titled Re-fiqurinq the Father also
examine features of parent-child relations in narrative in a
thought-provoking manner, as does a chapter on Tom Jones

that touches on incest in Christine van Boheemen's The Novel

 

§§ Family Romance. These studies of incest have collectively

suggested that incest functions as a figure for authority at

the level of the family in a manner akin to the way kingship
implies authority at the level of the state and that this is
why incest repeatedly gets written into attempts to imagine
authority within and beyond the family in the eighteenth
century.3

I believe that because the themes of incest and eating
are each deeply concerned with the question of paternal
authority, it is not by accident that they appear so
frequently in tandem in English narrative of the eighteenth
century which is a period that both historians of the family
and historians of the novel have in different ways
identified with the codification of the structure we now
customarily refer to as the affective elementary or nuclear
family and with the new conceptualization of bourgeois
subjectivity.4 This is not to say that incest and eating do
not occur together before the eighteenth century. For
example in Ovid's Metamor hoses, Tereus' incestuous rape and
mutilation of his wife's sister, Philomela, is avenged by
the women killing Tereus' son, Itys, and serving him to his
father as food. In the Tereus and Philomela tale, the
marriage to Procne is contracted to bring about an alliance
between Athens and Thrace (Tereus' place of origin). As
Tereus wants to control Athens and his progeny represents
the possible continuation of that control, the killing and
eating of Itys causes the demise of Tereus' political
power.5 Another example is to be found in King Lear. In this

:flay, incest occurs as a submerged theme in Lear's

insistence that his daughters pledge to love him all--that
is, to love him unreservedly over all other claims to their
love. Lear eventually represents Goneril and Regan as sharp-
toothed, devouring vipers for failing to live up to their
pledge to love their father completely and unconditionally.
Against the background of the Fool's likening of ungrateful
children to the parasitic cuckoo that bites off the head of
the host sparrow that has nurtured it (1.4.211-12), the play
shows how Lear's attempt to retain control of his daughters
through a coerced declaration of an affective tie leads
first to the delapidation of the King's body and then to the
demise of his kingship.6

In these examples from Ovid and Shakespeare, violent
images of eating and powerful narratives of explicit or
submerged incest converge to articulate concerns about
generational tensions and the breakdown of a political order
that may result from those tensions. The configuration of
eating and incest that emerges in the eighteenth-century
narratives that I consider in this study, however, is more
markedly domestic. By this I mean that incest occurs with
distinct patterns of eating in a coherent family structure,
usually nuclear in form and affective in character, that is
under internal stress, rather than the stress that results
from a crisis at the level of the state. Taking my cue from
Zwinger, who identifies novelistic familial ties as
simultaneously affective and erotic, I argue that in

eighteenth-century narrative the power differential between

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familial head and family members is bound to the
hierarchical structure of the family dominated actually and
emotionally by the father.7 I suggest that incestuous and
commensal relations, each of which operate along lines of
power and authority, emerge forcefully in representations of
the nuclear family while each also supports that family
structure by deferring or averting its fragmentation through
the formation of other affective ties.

Because sexual and food-related behavior in eighteenth-
century narrative frequently have a great deal more to do
with power than with reproduction or hunger per se, I
maintain that both erotic behavior and the provision or
witholding of food function as a display of domination. In a
display of erotic behavior between father and daughter for
example--especially if one partner is unwilling--the display
may articulate, and in some ways validate, the father's
claim to supreme power.8 In narratives of the period,
conflicts over power are frequently characterized and
measured in terms of quotidian family life. At the same
time, the wider social and political implications of the way
in which power operates are relegated to a less prominent--
but ultimately not less important-—position.

Milton's poem, Paradise Lost, for example, is a
narrative moment that dramatizes the new emphasis on the
familial and the domestic. As Satan is traditionally seen as
a figure for Charles I's absolutism, his incest with Sin

dogs at one level emerge as part of an attempt to wrest

6

political power. Yet when Milton makes Satan an incestuous
rapist, he couches the bid for political power in the
language of a domestic struggle between a father and his
usurpatory son. Represented in this way, Satan upsets a
well-regulated domestic paradigm in the poem within which
father and sons have hitherto existed in a clearly
delineated social/power structure. As Paradise Lost tells
its story of domestic crisis, the poem links that crisis
with, and prepares the ground for, the larger concern with
transgressive eating in the poem. Satan's libidinous
consumption of his own daughter early in the narrative
sequence establishes both the conditions for her to be
devoured by her offspring, and the prehistory to Eve's later
eating of the forbidden fruit. The central episode of
transgressive eating in Paradise Lost therefore emerges
through incest, and both eating and incest are utilized as
ways of talking about a type of domestic generational
conflict. This configuration of the subjects of incest and
eating is strongly in evidence in eighteenth-century
narrative, the subject of which is so frequently
intrafamilial relationships and the tensions that arise from
them. I place these relationships and tensions at the center
of my study.

Before I proceed to the theoretical bases of my
project, I wish to explain my particular uses of the term
incest, and to show how I arrive at the definitions of

family that are used in this study. My aim is not to

7

interrogate incest in eighteenth-century narrative in terms
of changes in laws regulating marriage and debates about the
degrees within which marriage has been permitted by the
Church or by civil law at different historical moments. This
decision is based primarily on the fact that, in the works
under consideration, the incest theme does not arise most
forcefully out of a question about whether a man and a woman
may be licitly joined in matrimony in the sense of marriage
as a religious sacrament (as it had been viewed by the
Church since the twelfth century), or as a civil contract
(as it became defined in 1653 during the Puritan
Commonwealth when the civil marriage service became required
by law).9 Indeed, in these works, marriage pg; §g is often a
less direct concern than sexual relations and gendered
behavior. Incest more often surfaces as a cause for concern
in sexually-fraught and erotically-charged situations within
several of the considerable number of elementary families in
the works under consideration. Hence, for the purpose of
this study, I define incest more narrowly than it was
defined prior to the Reformation (when marriage or sexual
relations within the seventh degree of kinship according to
the German system of computation were considered
incestuous), and more narrowly than the definition of incest
in the Christian West based upon the Levitical prohibitions
that became codified in England in the Table of Kindred and
Affinity in 1560 and 1563.10 I use the term incest first to

describe sexual relations between members of an elementary

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family linked-~or believed to be linked--by consanguinity or
by surrogacy. Although this may seem a rather modern
definition for a project dealing with eighteenth-century
texts (it was not, after all, until the twentieth century
that the definition of incest in England was legally
narrowed to sexual relations with a close blood relative),11
I use this definition because I am concerned with a series
of relationships in the narratives that do not rely on legal
or ecclesiastical clarification to be considered incestuous.
The relationships to which I give my attention operate at
the level of sexual relations between, or sexual desire for,
a near relative--usually a child or sibling--that belongs to
the natal or surrogate family.

I also use the term incest more widely as a metaphor
for a particular relationship of power between parent and
child generated by the emotional obligation that the child
incurs of his or her parent because the parent gives him or
her nurture in the form of food and shelter. My thinking on
this point has been shaped by two scholars working on incest
in historical and modern family relations. Florence Rush's
study of ancient Judaeo-Christian cultures and psychiatrist
Judith Lewis Herman's study based upon case studies in
contemporary North America have identified the key
structures that have obscured, and the cultural codes and
biblical apparati that have enabled, erotic, power, and
sometimes sexual relations between family members--and

fathers and daughters in particular--to go uncommented

9

upon.12 Rush and Herman have analyzed the kinds of
obligations that are generated when an inferior in terms of
power, social status, and the capability to provide for
himself or herself accepts nurture and shelter from his or
her superior. Herman expresses this most succinctly when she
argues that children are a "captive population" entirely
dependent upon their parents or other adults for their basic
needs, and that they are for this reason compelled to do
whatever they perceive to be necessary to preserve a
relationship with their caretakers (Herman, 27). Herman's
point is very pertinent to the present study when one
considers that the kind of domestic arrangement and
household she describes gradually evolved during the
sixteenth and seventeeth centuries from significantly
different forms in feudal times. By the eighteenth century,
the household consisting of the parents and children of the
natal family living under one roof to the virtual exclusion
of the extended family had largely displaced earlier feudal
household arrangements. The gradual movement toward the
nuclear style of household is discernible in changing
patterns of commensality between the Middle ages and the
eighteenth century.

Food historians and students of English eating habits
and dietary practices before the eighteenth century agree
that the celebratory banquets of the Middle Ages and
Renaissance known to us from literary and other sources were

the privilege of the few. Even though the peasant orders did

10

participate in lavish banquets, such events usually
punctuated their more everyday experience of scarcity and
enforced frugality.13 These scholars further suggest that
the internal structure of the medieval banquet gives an
insight into the respective roles of powerful nobles and the
peasant orders. They cite evidence of exacting attention to
seating arrangements and to who was served first and from
which dishes, to argue convincingly that the medieval
banquet was not primarily a gastronomic event, but that it
served ritual, aesthetic and religious needs, and that the
banquet was extensively guided by social imperatives. For
example, although banquets took place in a common hall,
clear distinctions were made between upper and lower tables.
Providing lavish food and beverages in significant
quantities was a way of emphasizing the power of a regional
'king' and of attracting supporters with a display of
resources. Those who partook of the food confirmed their
allegiance to the provider and their willingness to go to
battle to protect his interests so that the banquet served
as a form of patronage;14 selling one's services, oneself,
or one's children into slavery in return for a guarantee of
food was an established practice in England from the early
fifth century to the end of the first feudal age (circa
1100).15 The sending down of dishes from upper to lower
tables during feudal times might therefore be better
understood as a demonstration of the provider's resources

and his prerogative to supervise lower orders than a

A.
E:.

in

11

generous and disinterested attempt to combat hunger or to
fullfil an ideal of Christian charity.

At the beginning of the second feudal age, everyday
eating observed similar distinctions within the common arena
of the great hall. However, with the successive phases of
the granting of feifs during the first feudal age (initially
to enable knights to accomplish certain defensive
functions), the gradual enrichment of some nobles by gaining
ascendency over lesser nobles, the growth of towns and
trading centers, improvements in agricultural methods making
lands more profitable and so worth retaining, and the
related shift to a system of rents, the internal order of
the medieval hall gradually began to alter.16 At the same
time that the rent system began to reshape feudal ties
between nobles and vassals, enfoeffed nobility that had
enlarged their wealth were able to develop relative self-
sufficiency so that a noble household might easily live off
the products of its estates. As this phase of increased
self-sufficiency continued, and certainly by the middle of
the fourteenth century, it became increasingly common for
noblemen to eat in a separate chamber and to delegate to
their stewards the supervision of the high table in the
hall.

Food historians Stephen Mennell and Bridget Ann Henisch
both observe that the shift toward eating in a private
chamber with one's immediate family marks a sharp

distinction in an otherwise relatively organic household

12

with several intermediate ranks of gentlemen, yeoman and
menial servants. The removal of the proprietor and his
family to a separate chamber, Mennell further suggests, not
only alters the social functions of the commensal table by
generating a greater privacy for the noble and a greater
social distance between a noble and his minions, but it also
creates changes in the kinds of dishes served--as evidenced
by the development of a haute cuisine at this time in
England.17 In the same way that fine distinctions within
seating arrangements and in who was served first and with
which dishes offered codes for creating and cementing
differences in rank and status in the earlier feudal period,
so the segregation of those of the highest order provided
such a code for the later feudal period. Because the act of
secluding oneself during mealtimes is predicated on a notion
of exclusivity, whom one includes in the exclusive group
attains great significance; any invitation to dine at the
more private table would have been deemed a mark of
privilege.

Such changes in eating arrangements during the later
Middle Ages and in the sixteenth century are clearly
discernible in a number of the cookbooks that were beginning
to appear in Europe at this time. Cookbooks of the late-
fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries do not simply
presume that a more private chamber is to be used for the
noble and his family to eat in, and that a more exclusive

group is to be fed: their recipes also contain information

13

about the higher quality and smaller quantity of individual
dishes to be served. In Italian and French cookbooks, for
example, the attention to delicacy, the choice and novelty
of ingredients, the specialized skills required to prepare
those ingredients and the elegance with which food was
served suggests that a nobleman was no longer
distinguishable by his ability to provide and consume a
large amount of food, but by the sophistication and subtley
of his table.18 A similar conclusion might be drawn about
English nobility based upon the earliest known example of a
printed cookery book in England. In this English cookbook,
entitled This Is The Boke of Cokery (1500), food is treated
as though it were to be enjoyed as much with the eye and for
the technical virtuosity involved in its preparation as with
the palate or for its properties of dispelling hunger. Like
a large number of the early cookbooks that follow it in the
sixteenth century, This Is The Boke Of Cokerv is male
authored and it is of a medieval and courtly character in
that it gives receipts for elaborate dishes which take time
to prepare. This Is the Boke of Cokerv is clearly addressed,
like the better known Boke of Kervvnqe (1508), to the
knowledgeable professional male cook (women were not
employed as cooks in noble households) engaged in the
preparation of lavish dishes with many costly ingredients
for the noble household: elaborate details as to which of
these dishes might be served together and how they might be

rmesented are also given. Although the commensal group

14

sharing food is less extensive in the sixteenth century than
formerly, it still consists of a noble household with
courtiers. The omission of details about the procuring of
food and the processing and preserving of ingredients in
cookbooks of this period suggests that these tasks were
performed by menials rather than the specialist male cook
who dressed dishes for the table.

In the last two decades of the sixteenth century and by
the beginning of the seventeenth century, however, a rather
different type of cookbook is in evidence in England. Thomas
Dawson's Thgggood Huswife's Jewell of 1585, and Gervase
Markham's Thngnqlish Houerife of 1615, signal a departure
from the courtly style of cookbook. Written, as their titles
suggest, for the 'hous-wife', Dawson's and Markham's books
include instructions on the practical details of running a
household--baking, brewing, dairy work, preserving--as well
as receipts for 'Physicke.‘ The change in emphasis
discernible in the cookbooks when they identify gentlewomen
as the overseers and managers of smaller households rather
than having these functions performed by hired servants or
vassals, concurs with the widespread belief among family
historians about the kinds of radical changes that had taken
place in the conceptualization and organization of the
domestic unit by this time. The cookbooks--particularly
Markham's--make assumptions about the ready availability of
certain ingredients and about the housewife's access to a

large garden or country estate from which these ingredients

15

might be freshly gathered--once she has carefully garnered

and germinated the seeds that enable their growth.19 Of
particular interest from the point of view of the present

study is these cookbooks' elaboration of a discourse of

housewifery that links a woman's success in the management

of food to her success in managing herself, her body, and
her immediate environment. Before giving instructions on

brewing, baking, weaving, physic and cookery, Markham

describes these skills in the subtitle to his book as "The

inward and outward Vertues which ought to be in a compleat

Woman...". In his first chapter he further associates what

is wholesome with what the household can provide for itself

and he enjoins the housewife to

Let her dvet be wholeeome and cleanly. prepared at due
hours, and cookt with care and diligence: let it be
rather to satisfie nature, than our affections, and
apter to kill hunger than to revive new appetites; let
it proceed more from the provision of her own yard,
than the furniture of the Markets; and let it be rather
esteemed for the familiar acquaintance she hath with
it, than for the strangeness and rarity it bringeth
from other Countries.

To conclude, our English Houswife must be of chaste
thought, stout courage, patient, untyred, watchful,
diligent, witty, pleasant, constant in friendship, full
of good Neighbour-hood, wise in Discourse, but not
frequent therein... secret in her affairs. (emphases

added)2°

 

Markham's placement of women at the center of his

discourse of domestic management and self management heralds

a new era in the cookbook genre. This is not to suggest that

the courtly style of cookbook written by men to be used by

16

professional male chefs in noble kitchens disappeared
altogether in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries, for there were a number of cookbooks of this kind
printed between 1660 and 1730.21 However, books of the
courtly kind were clearly eclipsed in the latter half of the
seventeenth century and in the eighteenth century by a vast
array of books written by women explicitly for gentlewomen
readers and for female cooks preparing food for much smaller
households.

During the latter half of the seventeenth century, two
cookbook writers, Shirley John and Hannah Wolley, were very
popular. Wolleys's The Gentlewoman'e Companion (1673) is
particularly interesting in the way that it moves from
general advice on conduct and demeanor, to etiquette, and
only then to cookery; before Wolley brings her gentlewoman
reader to the table to eat the food that the gentlewoman
herself has prepared, Wolley presents a series of codes by
which women are to govern their bodies and temper their
desire for food. Her advice on serving food not only
reflects a wider trend of the separation of each diner's
personal dish and utensils from his or her neighbor's, but
it couples this with ways in which the gentlewoman might
graciously preside at table.22 Hence advice about not
appearing greedy by overfilling the mouth is juxtaposed with
a caution to the gentlewoman to exert herself in a way that
will not make her sweat profusely while carving.23 Efficient

and thrifty household management through the processes of

17

preserving, distilling and curing is everywhere stressed,
leading one analyst of the the period's cookbooks to
describe the female-authored books as characterized by "a
pleasant ingenuity of adaptation and economy".24

Later cookbooks by women, such as Eliza Smith's The
Qohpieat Housewife (1727), Hannah Glasse's The Art of
Qeekegy Mede Plain and Easy (1747), and Elizabeth Raffald's
The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769)--all of which
went through multiple editions--underline the considerable
changes that had taken place in household arrangements to
create the gentlewomen who oversaw provisions and who
extensively supervised the preparation of food for a smaller
household.25 Among these changes, as Mennell points out, is
a distinct departure from medieval ideals of "lavish charity
and keeping open house" (118). Following in the footsteps of
Markham, the instructions that eighteenth—century cookbooks
offer to the gentlewoman whose skill at housewifery is to
transform the produce of landed estate and trade into
domestically-consumable goods is everywhere permeated with a
spirit of thrift: her mission is defined not in terms of the
resources she will expend, but in terms of the resources she
will conserve and create for the benefit of the household.
And because that household is organized along markedly
different lines from the extended household consisting of
lords and vassals, the domestic table, with its more private
mealtimes, implies a very different kind of domestic economy

than that of the great ha11.26 First of all, the domestic

18

table situates the gentlewoman manager of food at its center
and makes her accountable in a new way for the preparation
of food and beverages. Because this type of commensality
marks a domestic economy in which food consumption can be
monitored, measured and controlled with ease, the cookbook's
monitoring of table manners and recommendation of female
gustatory self-restraint creates an analogical link between
the privately-consumable food and the woman who regulates
its consumption in conjunction with the regulation of her
own body. Finally, the domestic table contracts the concept
of household to a kernel consisting primarily of family
members and dependents as a commensal group.

As a result of these changes in household composition
and the contraction in household size, and the coincidence
of these with developments within the nuclear family toward
a more recognizably modern form, I modify my use of the term
family in this study to include not only those linked by
consanguinity or by virtue of surrogacy, but also those
dependents--particularly domestic servants--who had long
been regarded as the 'children' of the male householder in
family obedience literature.27 Information available in the
cookbooks about who was responsible for food preparation,
how food was served and by whom, the size and structure of
household that recipes were geared to, suggests that
domestic arrangements and patterns of commensality from the
early eighteenth century anticipate the arrangement Herman

describes in her analysis of caretaker and dependant. These

19

commensal arrangements are very much in evidence in the
eighteenth-century narratives that I consider, where they
are vitally important in understanding the various
configurations of obligation and debt, and of women's
household management and self-management, that produce the
conditions for sexually-predatory and incestuous behaviors.
In the chapters that follow, then, I do not place my primary
emphasis on the physical consumption of food and actual
occurrences of incest defined as relations between members
of a single kinship group within prohibited degrees of
consanguinity as designated by law in a given historical
moment. Instead, I consider incest and eating as both
metaphors and symbolic systems--as ways of framing and
talking about familial economies and transactional
relationships therein.

I turn now to the theoretical underpinnings of my work
which derive from several disciplines--psychoanalysis,
structuralist anthropology, and feminist cultural and
literary theories--and begin with the account of incest
offered by Sigmund Freud. In Totem and Taboo (1913), Freud
claims that the incest prohibition came into being as a
result of rivalries between men-—the father and his sons--in
the patriarchal horde. According to Freud, the sons wanted
to be like their father, and yet they were ambivalent about
the father because of their desire to possess their mother.
Because the sons were prevented from having access to the

umternal object of desire, they killed their father and the

20

incest prohibition came into being at this founding moment
of culture to prevent the future reinauguration of
hostilities within the kin group over competition for
women.28
Although I believe that rivalries between men have an

important part to play in the analysis of incest and eating
as interrelated concerns, I feel that two elements of
Freud's theory require some modification if they are to be
useful to such an endeavor. Firstly, if attention is to be
given to the proposition that sons seek to be like their
fathers through the heterosexual appropriation of a woman
that belongs to the father, then the daughter is as suitable
a candidate for the sons' attention as the mother--indeed
sometimes a hehe suitable one-~because the daughter can be
understood as 'belonging' most unequivocally to the father
by virtue of his paternity. Secondly, Freud's assumption of
a heterosexual matrix of desire--of son desiring mother--
needs examination. In Totem and Taboo, the moment in which
incest comes into being implicitly follows an earlier
understanding that sexual desire is heterosexual desire. Yet
when in his essay of 1927, "The Ego and the Super-Ego (Ego
Ideal)", Freud introduces the Oedipus complex to elaborate
on the way in which 'ego formation' occurs, he suggests that
gendered identity emerges through the effective operation of
the incest taboo. In this discussion 'male' and 'masculine'
are not coupled in a pre-given way. Because the male child

irritfially identifies with the parent of the same sex, his

21

father, Freud remarks that that each individual has a
"constitutional bisexuality": it is when the mother is
chosen as a love-object over the father that the Oedipal
situation arises, and only from this point on does the son's
identification with his father "tak[e] on a hostile
colouring and chang[e] to a wish to get rid of the father in
order to take his place with his mother".29
Freud's argument in "The Ego and the Super-Ego (Ego
Ideal)" works from the premise that two choices,
identification with the mother or identification with the
father, are available, and he describes the former as "more
normal". But in following this line of reasoning, as Judith
Butler has observed, Freud resolves the Oedipus complex by
presuming that a taboo against homosexuality is operative
prior to the heterosexual incest taboo.3O Thus the child
entering the Oedipal situation is already 'predisposed' to a
heterosexualily that is created by the taboo that forbids
erotic attachments between people of the same sex. This
suggests that desire in the Freudian realm of culture is
effected through a series of displacements and, if this is
'tulia case, then further displacements ought to be possible.
If the father is the more direct object of his son's desire
as Freud's notion of a "constitutional bisexuality" would
Seem to imply, then it is important that any study of incest
that makes use of Freud does not wholly put aside same-sex

ea .
ttraction by assuming that a heterosexual matrix predates

Q - . .
as.21.]:‘e. Indeed, what IS explained by Freud as a heterosexual

22

competition between men over women might be readily viewed
as a feature of an ambivalent--part homosocial, part
homoerotic--bond between men that may be subsequently
displaced onto other objects of desire.31
I elaborate on the subjects of the father's charge or
ownership of the daughter and the ways in which ties between
men operate by drawing on Lévi-Strauss' well-known argument
in The Elementary Structures of Kinship that women are the
'gifts' that are given through the institution of marriage
by one patrilineal clan to another. A woman who is exchanged
serves the social function of facilitating commerce (by
which is meant interaction as well as trade) between the
separate clans. The exchange of women gives rise to exogamy.
The exchanged woman also performs an important symbolic
function of differentiation and identification. She
signifies and underlines the separate collective identities
of the two groups and yet highlights their commonality as
complete patrilineal systems which expel some women and
Iiaceive others. In this sense, as Gayle Rubin has pointed
out, exchanged women are relational terms, or conduits,
between groups of men.32 Le‘vi-Strauss' argument is valuable
15(31? its identification of the bonds that exchange generates
between men and for suggesting that there may be a greater
iiEIDUEDGetus for groups of men to be aligned rather than for them
t:<:, lae in conflict. But while Levi-Strauss' theory
es":ablishes exchange as important to the consolidation of

gb‘bup identity and the group's differentiation of itself

L

ha-
“‘0

v Q
be.

0'. I

(v

1‘...

23

from its exchange partner, it assumes that exchange occurs
relatively unproblematically. Because of this assumption,
the theory of exchange does not explore the tensions that
are inherent in the giving away of a valuable item to a
group with whom one's own group is in most respects in
competition, or the psychic effects of the breach in group
integrity that is signaled by the loss of one of its
members.

Through her study of pollution and taboo,
anthropologist Mary Douglas examines precisely such tensions
as they arise around the practice of exchanging women in
marriage. In Purity and Danger, Douglas establishes the base
for her commentary on bride exchange by arguing that the
body is initially identifiable through culturally-coherent
codes that enable humans to comprehend its boundaries.
Humans understand what ie the body by deciding what is not
the body. In this process, body orifi--the sites at which
sexual acts and food ingestion and expulsion take place--are
experienced as sources of anxiety because they mark breaches
in the wholeness of the body. Although ideas about what
constitutes the body operate at the physical level, they
gain their meaning through psychic distinctions that operate
in many cultures through the concepts of pollution and

taboo. And these concepts in turn gain their force through a
culture's expectations of the danger that will be unleashed
‘bfi’ tihe transgression of cultural codes regulating bodily

acts . 33 Douglas therefore sees the body as a model for other

24

forms of regulation-~especially dietary regulation and
regulation through exogamy. She argues that dietary
regulation and restrictions concerning with whom one may
have sexual relations each constitutes a coherent system of
social interaction, or a sign system, that operates through
the observation of accepted cultural codes of behavior.

When she analyzes exogamy pep ee, Douglas considers it
in terms of the psychic effects of adherence to, or a breach
of, such cultural codes. She suggests that because the
exogamous arrangement is both a way of codifying a power
structure and defining specific clans' positions within it,
and a way of articulating the identity of individual clans,
the woman who moves from one clan group to another is both
the system's most perfect representative, ehg most
surrounded by disorder because she will break the closure of
her own group to join another. Douglas further argues that
where a wife comes from a group with which her husband's
group ordinarily competes for resources, the marital
arrangement is often a source of conflict over material
interests. Firstly, a married daughter is a human resource
that her own community is not allowed to utilize, even while
she is the means by which her husband's group increases its
human resources. Secondly, if and when the married daughter
bears children, her progeny, already a cause for concern

because they swell the number of the rival group,
IsinHUthaneously and alarmingly bring together the crossing of

community and blood lines.“ The daughter's anomalous

25

position as a part of two groups yet on the margins of each,
makes her an object of fear: she becomes--as do other
marriageable women—-the focus of attention in family
relations and in a variety of questions about the kinds of
authority and coerced loyalty that arise from paternity and
from the sibling bond. It is through Douglas's understanding
of the body as a signifying system--and the critical role of
the daughter's body in making meaning--that I approach my
subjects of eating and incest in eighteenth-century
narrative.

While I have already indicated that my concern in this
study is more with the deployment of eating and incest as
metaphors than with actual acts of incest and eating, the
physical body--because it is the corporeal entity from which
such metaphors derive their force--inevitably surfaces in my
discussion. In looking at representations of the female body
in individual works in the chapters that follow, I have
drawn on a wide range of feminist scholars, two of whom,
Florence Rush and Judith Lewis Herman, I have already
mentioned in connection with the indebtedness of children to
their parents. Rush's examination of biblical laws and
Herman's analysis of the incest prohibitions in Leviticus
that make the daughter a focus of desire have also been

extraordinarily useful to me in thinking through the

corporeal dimensions of the father-daughter erotic. Nancy
Armstrong's 'political history' of the novel, Desire and

game. stic Fiction, which early identified the performative

26

functions of early modern narrative and its contribution to
the construction of gendered identity has had a pervasive
influence on my work as has Judith Butler's Gender Trouble.
Armstrong's insights on the preoccupation with the female
body and its regulation in seventeenth-century conduct
books, on master and domestic servant relationships, and the
increasingly private sphere of the bourgois household in
eighteenth-century narrative dovetail with the way I frame
incest and eating as metaphors that gain particular meanings
in that sphere. Butler's questioning of heterosexual and
homosexual as exclusive categories has provided me with a
way of thinking through a spectrum of desire orientations,
and of examining various representations of male and female
bodies, particularly in the second of the chapters that
follow.35
My readings have been considerably enriched by thinking
of gender as a construct in line with Armstrong's and
Butler's use of Foucauldian theory in their analyses of
gender.36 However,my attention to hierarchical structures
within the nuclear family and my use of particular
anthropological models to examine these structures has led
me to place greater emphasis than Armstrong and Butler on
the symbolic weight of paternal authority wielded by a
.Datriarch. By the eighteenth century this concept of
authority had already had currency in the Western mind for
at least two centuries. Contemporary ideas about authority--

including John Locke's widely-read and highly-influential

27

IKQ Tzeetises of Government (1690)--were shaped by the
revival and extension in the seventeenth century of the
sixteenth-century debate about the nature of patriarchal
authority which had in turn repeatedly used the analogue of
the father's position as family head as a way of framing
arguments for and against absolutism.37
From the point of view of the present essay and its use
of Milton's epic poem to mark a shift in emphasis in
narrative toward domestic matters, Paradise Lost offers
itself as an illustration of the central importance of the
father figure. When Milton wrote Paradise Lost he did so
both out of and against a tradition of conceptualizing
political power in terms of a father and his children.
Although Milton uses Satan to cast Charles I as a tyrant and
misuser of power in Paradise Lost, the germ of this
representation can be found much earlier in his
Eikonoklastes (1649), written explicitly to refute a
royalist work, Eikon Basilike that was apparently in
circulation on the day of the king's death but that was not
published until February 1649. Written as though by the king
himself, and characterizing Charles as a Christ-like martyr
through a series of reflections and meditations, Eihph
Bdgiiihe unabashedly attempts to link fatherhood and
kingship to generate an emotive argument about the kinds of
duty that ought to arise from filial-paternal affection.38
These are precisely the concerns that repeatedly come up in

W and the three prose narratives that I consider

28

in this essay, as indeed they do in wide range of
eighteenth-century narrative, from Aphra Behn's epistolary
Leye-hethegs between a Nobleman and Hie Sister (1684-87),
John Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel (1681) and Jonathan
Swift's Tale of a Tub (1704), to later century works such as
Tobias Smollett's Humphry Clinker (1771), Frances Burney's
Evelina (1778), Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple Story (1791),
and Matthew Lewis' The Monk (1796).

The figure of the father has traditionally had an
important influence on ways of thinking about power
relations within the family and beyond, and in the way that
power is deployed. This figure also looms large in works of
the period that raise questions about the proper use of
power and the ownership of narrative authority. For these
reasons I suggest that, within the narrative representation
of the nuclear family, the figure of the father helps to
generate a discourse of eroticized affective desire and that
it offers a way of comprehending that discourse. Although I
do draw on insights from Armstrong's and Butler's uses of
Foucauldian theory to demonstrate that female figures in the
narratives I consider are at least partially gendered
through contemporary ideas about female sexuality, about
women's bodies, their reproductive functions and the kinds
Of work for which they are deemed suitable as a result of

these ideas, I also argue that these figures are
simultaneously constructed through, and often

.ilaczcanmmehensible (as in Milton's myth) without explicit

29

reference to, the father as a primary-—though not exclusive-
-source of authority.

I have attempted to treat each of the four narratives
in this study as discrete works while simultaneously
extending my argument about the deep-seated importance of
food and sex as systems of signification in the eighteenth-
century literary imagination, in the emerging bourgeois
novel with its strong emphasis on family life and domestic
relations, and in the period's ideas about gendered
identity. To this end, each successive chapter either teases
out the arguments of earlier chapters or builds upon them by
returning to recurring patterns of family organization and
commensality and by examining similarities and differences
in the way these are treated. The canonical stature of each
of the works, the wealth of critical materials that each has
generated, and the need to give due attention to situating
my work in relation to the criticism that has preceded it,
have also contributed to my decision to have each reading
stand in its own right. This approach has raised an array of
questions about how incest and eating have been treated as
separate concerns in the four works, and it has yielded some
‘tentative suggestions as to why substantial discussions of
‘the recurrent concerns of incest and eating in eighteenth-
Icentury narrative have not been undertaken.

In the first chapter, I lay out the groundwork of my
argflnment by isolating thematic patterns and metaphors in

mar dise Lost that reappear in the later prose narratives

30

and by considering how psychoanalytical and anthropological
theories can provide ways of making sense of these. I then
consider Milton's attempt to imagine an authoritative
subject through a genealogically-based model which deploys
incest to represent Satan as a tyrannical father and a
rebellious son. situating myself in relation to the widely-
accepted reading of the Satan-Sin union as a parody of right
relations between Adam and Eve, I show that the Satan-Sin
union loses some of its force as such a parody when it is
retraced first in the Sin-Death coupling, then in their
Hell-hound progeny's rape of Sin, and finally in the union
of Adam and Eve. By showing that the coupling of Sin and
Satan and the rape of Sin by her son, Death, and then by
their hell—hound progeny is predatory in both libidinous and
alimentary senses, I demonstrate that the primary assertion
of male appetitive impulses in Paradiee Loeh simultaneously
disallows female appetite, female sexual desire and female
agency. As a result of Eve's inability to have being
separate from her author, Adam, the main episode of
transgressive eating in the poem cannot originate with the
daughter, and this problematizes Milton's concept of
‘volition. Because desire is shown to originate with Eve's
(areator, moreover, I suggest that Eve's quest for god-like
lknowledge actually stands in for the son's desire for his
father's knowledge. As a result, when elements of the
incestuous father reappear in Adam's union with Eve, and

'Evea's' search for knowledge takes the form of imbibing

31

knowledge of a forbidden variety, the twinned themes of
incest and eating provide a clearer understanding of how
deeply filial indebtedness is embedded in the concept of
paternity in Milton's narrative. Finally, I argue that a
complicated relation exists between the early injunction
against eating, a filial rebellion that is heralded by an
act of father-daughter incest, and an act of transgressive
eating for which the daughter is held responsible.

In the second chapter, I identify a particular culture
of indebtedness--a politics of consumption, or a politics of
food--that emerges in the interstices between homeroticism
and homosociality in Robinson Crusoe. Drawing on recent
scholarship that shows that sexual identity did not function
discretely and unproblematically along axes of masculine and
feminine in eighteenth-century culture, I demonstrate the
power of cannibalism as a metaphor for articulating
sexually-predatory relations between fathers and sons, and
masters and minions. Through the deployment of the politics
of consumption, I show how a particular variety of
exploitation, modeled extensively on domestic arrangements
in Crusoe's native England, facilitates the growth of a
(consumption-oriented new world economy on Crusoe's island in
*which the son moves beyond rivalry with the father to become
llike his father. This occurs in two phases, first by means
txf predatory father-son relations, and then through a

displacement of the son's subject position onto the maternal

32

body resulting in the incestuous cannibalization of that
body.

In the third chapter, I turn my attention to the
ramifications that the culture of indebtedness has for the
eponymous daughter when it reappears in the mid-century
English country house of Clarissa. I explore the tensions
between the socio-cultural need for giving the daughter in
exogamous marriage and the paternal, fraternal and avuncular
imperatives to retain Clarissa as at once the symbol and the
embodiment of family unity and wealth. Contextualizing my
discussion of Clarissa's value in these respects against
biblical commentary in the novel about licit and illicit
uses of the daughter in the father's house and explicit
codes governing commensality, I suggest that the daughter's
tremendous value as a forbidden object of desire ruptures
the myth of the nuclear bourgeois family as the locus of
affective ties and as a safe haven for nurture. By
identifying the daughter as the family member who must yield
to familial demands or be denied community and commensality,
I trace similarites between the uncles, the brother, and the
father who would hoard Clarissa for intrafamilial enjoyment
irather than give her in marriage, and a rapist, would-be
Jhusband that forces her to accept commensal terms that
culminate in her starvation.

Whereas the son's oral aggressiveness has been
associated with the process of individuation from the mother

1n ' son Crusoe, the daughter's emaciation emerges in

33

giexieee as a feature of her father's capacity to effect her
diminution. I emphasize the rejection of food by a woman,
rather than its assimilation by a man as in the previous
chapter, to argue that Clarissa's food refusal presents
itself as the assymetrical counterpart to the voracious male
that Western culture dominated by the heterosexual matrix
offers to the female. Although the Harlowe house, with its
private, modest and closely-monitorable eating arrangements,
contrasts strongly with the distributive and more public
eating arrangements of an ealier period, it nevertheless
relies upon an assumed power differential between food
providers and receivers of food for its survival as an
integral body.

In the last chapter I examine the implications for the
nuclear family unit of retaining woman as erotic object and
valuable property within the enclosed natal family. I
demonstrate that although incest is only explictly named in
one of three important bed episodes in Tom Jones, a
philOSOphy of retaining game animals exclusively for the use
of landowners underwrites the latent irregularities of the
other two bed episodes. In this discussion, the issues of
rightful access to landed property and rightful access to
women become conflated in Fielding's extended use of a
hunting analogy that casts marriageable women as prized
game, and masculine heterosexual prowess as coextensive with
the capacity to eat large quantities of animal flesh. In

contrast to Clarissa, in which marriage ultimately remains a

34

source of tension between the natal family and the potential
marital family, the final bed episode in Tom Jones
celebrates a marriage in which the fragmentation of landed
estates is averted, a complete transfer of property along
blood lines is achieved, and domestic harmony is
restablished. When the resulting household subsequently
yields issue in the form of a single boy and a single girl,
it not only reproduces itself, but it duplicates the
brother-sister household of Paradise Hall whence the
illegitimate Tom Jones sprang. My closing chapter therefore
traces in Tom Jones a return to a mythical self-contained
paradise very like that first encountered in Paradise Lose:
it shows that Fielding's country-house version of paradise
relies as profoundly as the model that it follows upon the
assumption that certain intrafamilial relations and certain
conditions governing food distribution and consumption are
tacitly endorsed.

Rather than explaining incest solely in terms of a
need to contain father-son conflict as does Freud, or
exclusively in terms of a need for harmonious bonds between
men, in Lévi-Straussian fashion, Douglas' theory of food and
‘the body as signifying systems, as it dovetails with certain

StIrands of feminist scholarship, enables me to argue that
the culture of indebtedness I have identified has a
Significant role to play in the reproduction of a particular
familial power structure along lines of gender in

eighteenth-century narrative. Through my focus on incest and

35

eating, which have not hitherto been given sustained
attention as interrelated concerns in eighteenth-century
studies, I seek to foster a discussion of the kinds of
filial obligation which arise from parental nurture to
support incestuous erotic and sexual behaviors within the
family. At the same time I hope to suggest through the
currency of many of the gender configurations I examine in
this essay that the permutations of masculine and feminine
gender identity I have observed in eighteenth-century
narrative have some bearing on the way gender is conceived

in our own age through food practices and sexual relations.

Notes

1. Raymond F. Hilliard, "Clarissa and Ritual
Cannibalism," EULA 105, no. 5 (1990): 1083-97: Raymond F.
Hilliard, "Laughter Echoing From Mouth to Mouth: Symbolic
Cannibalism and Gender in Evelina," Eighteenth-Century Life
17 (1993): 46-61: Paula Marantz Cohen, The Daughterie
Dilemma: Familv Process and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic
hegei (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), chap.
2.

2. Discussions of incest in literary studies of the
Renaissance include Lois Beuler's "The Structural Uses of
Incest in English Renaissance Drama," Renaissance Drama 15
(1984): 115-45; Lynda E. Boose's "The Father's House and the
Daughter in It: The Structures of Western Culture's
Daughter-Father Relationship," in Daughters and Fathere, ed.
Ihynda E. Boose and Betty S. Flowers (Baltimore and London:

fifile Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 19-74; Bruce
Thomas Boehrer's Monarchv and Incest in Renaissance England:

Literature, Kinship and Kingship (Philadelphia: University

Of IPennsylvania Press, 1992); and Richard MaCabe's, IncestI

Dramha and Nature's Law 1550-1700 (Cambridge, Massachusetts:

Camh>xidge University Press, 1993).

36

37

3. John Allen Stevenson, "The Courtship of the Family:
Clarissa and the Harlowes Once More," Engiish Litepagy
hispegy 48 (1981): 57-77; T. G. A. Nelson, "Incest in the
Early Novel and Related Genres," Eighteenth-Century Life 16,
no. 1 (1992): 127-62; Ellen Pollak, "Beyond Incest: Gender
and the Politics of Transgression in Aphra Behn's heye;
Lehheps beEween a Nobleman and His Sister," in Rereading
hphze Behh: Histopy, Theory, and Criticism, ed. Heidi Hutner

(Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia,
1993), 151-186; Lynda Zwinger, Daughters. Fathers. and the
Nevei: The Sentimental Romance of Heterosexuality (Madison,
Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991); Beth
Kowaleski-Wallace and Patricia Yaeger ed., Re-figuring the
Eehheng hey Feminist Readings of Patriarchy (Carbondale and
Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989):
Christine van Boheemen, The Novel as Family Romance:
Lehguage, Gender. and Authority From Fielding to Jovce
(Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1987), chap.
2.

4. For histories of the family that deal with the
enmergence of the nuclear family structure and the growth of
individualism in this period, see Lawrence Stone, The
IEuLiiy, SexI and Marriage in Englandl 1500-1800 (New York:
HarIDer and Row, 1977), chap. 6; Edward Shorter, The Making

2£_1;he_hegeph_fiemiiy (New York: Basic Books, 1975), chap. 6:

and .Jack Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage

 

Mame (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 1,

38

129, 152. Although Goody challenges Stone and Shorter by
suggesting that the family characterized by 'companionate'
marriage and bound by affective ties was already in evidence
as early as the twelfth century in some parts of Europe, his
claim that the family emerged in its modern form largely
through the gradual secularization of marriage is important
for the way he codifies the nuclear family. As Goody's
argument links the development of the nuclear affective
family directly with the increasing secularization of
marriage, he would seem to indicate that this form of family
became fully fledged sometime in the latter half of the
seventeenth century--that is--e£pe; the civil marriage
service was first required by law in 1653. For treatments of
the family in histories of the novel, see Ian Watt, The Rise

ef the Novel: Studies in Defoel Richardson and Fieiding

(Berkley: University of California Press, 1957), 138-50; W.
Austin Flanders, Structures of Experience: History, Society,
and Personal Life in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1984), chap.
3: Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political
Histopy of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press,
1987), chaps. 1 and 2; Michael McKeon, The Origins of the
'sh Novel 1600-1740 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1987), 180-81, 221-25, 228.
5. On the Tereus and Philomela story, see Patricia
Klindienst Joplin, "The Voice of the Shuttle is Ours,"
Emigrd Literature Review 1 (1984): 25-53.

39

6. On the conflict between giving up a daughter and
retaining her in Shakespeare's plays, see Lynda E. Boose,
"The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare," Phhh 97, no. 3
(1982): 325-47.

7. Zwinger, 9, 11, 13.

8. On this point, see W. Arens, The Original Sin:
incest and its Meanings (New York: Oxford University Press,
1986), 147-48, 140

9. Goody, 151-2.

10. Goody, 135-37, 172-73, 175-76. The shift from the
Roman to the Germanic system of computing degrees of kinship
occurred in the eleventh century. Goody is especially clear
in his explanation of the differences between the two
systems.

11. Sybil Wolfram, In-Laws and Out-Laws: Kinship and
harpiege in England (London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1987),
143, 157 n. 30; McCabe, 11.

12. Florence Rush, The Best-Kept Secret: Sexual Abuse
pf Childpen (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1980), chaps. 3 and
10: Judith Lewis Herman, Father-Daughter Incest (London and
Massachusetts, 1981), chap. 1.

13. Massimo Montanari, The Culture of Food (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1994), 57; Philippa Pullar, Consuming Passions: A
Histopy of English Food and Appetite (London: Hamish
Hamilton, 1970), 87, Ann Hagan, A Handbook of Anglo-Saxon

Food Processing and Consumption (Middlesex: Anglo-Saxon
Books, 1992), 76.

40

14. Hagen, 76: Bridget Ann Henisch, Fast and Feast:
Food in Medieval Society (University Park and London: The
Pennsylvania University Press, 1976), 56-57.

15. Hagen, 103.

16. Stephen Mennell All Manners of Food: Eating and
Teste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the
Ppesent (Oxford and New York: Basil Backwell, 1985), 54-55,
58-9.

17. Henisch, 204: Mennell, 57.

18. Piero Camporesi, Exotic Brew: The Art of Living in
hhe Age 0; Enlightenment, trans. Christopher Woodall
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 92.

19. Thomas Dawson, The Good Huswife's Jewell. Wherein
is to be found most excellend [sic] and rare Deuises for
Qonceits in Cookery, found out by the practice of Thomas
Qayson. Wherevnto is adiovned sundrviapproved receits for
meny souvegeine ovles. and the wav to distill manv precious

wate; . and diuers approued medicines for many diseases.

 

Aiso gerhain approued points of husbandry (London, 1585).
Gervase Markham, The English Hons-Wife. containing The
Ipye;g_ehg_pppyerd Vertues which ought to be in a cohpieeh
KQEQE (London, 1664), 3. Markham was well known for a number
of books on husbandry. In 1623, a number of his more popular
works on planting, enriching barren soil, and animal
husbandry and medicine, were gathered together and published
.fil London under the title, A Way to Get Wealth. Containihg

fig: Principall Vocations, or Callings, in which every good

41

Hgsband or Hons-wife. may lawfully implov themselves. Here,
as in The English Hons-Wife, Markham makes the housewife,
and not her husband, responsible for seed collection and
germination.

20. Markham, The English Hons-Wife, 3-4.

21. Among the courtly style of cookbook are Robert
May's, The Accomplish't Cook, or the Art and Mystery of
geehepy (1660), William Rabisha's, The Whole Body of Cookepy
pisseeheg (1661), Patrick Lamb, Royal Cookery; o; the
erplete Court Cook (1710), Robert Smith's, Court Cookerv
(1723), and Charles Carter's, The Complete Practical Cook
(1730).

22. Stone, 256-57.

23. Hannah Wolley, The Gentleypman's Companiohz or, a
Geide to the Female Sex: containing Directions of [sic]
Behevieug, in all Places. Companies. Relations. and
Qohditions, from their Childhood down to Old Age... With
Letheps & Discourses upon all Occasions. Whereunto is added,
A Guide for Cook-maids, Chamber-maids, Dairy-maids and all
ephers that go to Service. The whole being an exact Rule_;e;
the Eehale Sex in General (London, 1673), 71, 65.

24. Pullar, 139, 161.

25. On the changing nature of women's work, and the
gradual exclusion of women from many commercial occupations
including brewing and baking, see Alice Clark, The Working

Mn in the Seventeenth Century (1919, reprint, New

York: A. M. Kelley, 1968), 286, 39.

42

26. Stone notes the frequent use of the 'dumb waiter'
as a way of increasing family privacy at mealtimes. He also
notes that house plans of the eighteenth century begin to
allocate space to corridors in order more rigorously to
separate public rooms for mass entertaining from family
rooms, servants quarters and entrances, and nursery areas
for children. While the trend toward architectural privacy
mainly affected the wealthy, similar practices of division
were discernible in the houses of yeomen and tradesmen (253-
55).

27. On this point, see Gordon J. Schochet,
Papriapchalism and Political Thought: The Authoritarian
Eamily and Political Speculation and Attitudes Especially in

v e -Centur En land (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975),
64-83. The family obedience genre, representing servants
and dependants and other members of the household as the
children of the householder, has a long tradition. See, for
example, Robert Cleaver, A Godlv Form of Household
Govegnment, for the Ordering of Private Families (London,
1598): Thomas Cobbet, A Fruitful and Usefull Discourse
Teuching the Honour Due from Children to Parehps (London,
1656; William Fleetwood, The Relative Duties of Parentsl
Hushehgs, haspegs (London, 1705); and Daniel Defoe, The
Remiiy instructor (London, 1715).

28. Sigmund Freud, Toteh,and Taboo: Some Points of

Agreement Between the Mental Lives of Savage_s and ILeurotics,

II

In

43

trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton and Co.,
1950), 13-16.

29. Sigmund Freud, "The Ego and the Super-Ego (Ego
Ideal)," in The Ego and the Id, trans. Joan Riviere, ed.
James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1974), 21, 22.

30. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the
§phye1sioh of Identity (New York and London: Routledge,
1990), 63-65.

31. On the continuities between heterosexual bonds that
underwrite men's concern for the interests of other men, and
homoerotic impulses that give rise to homosocial bonds
between men, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English
Liperature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1985), chap. 1.

32. Claude Levi-Strauss, The Elementarv Structures of
Kinship, ed. Rodney Needham, trans. James Harle Bell and
John von Sturmer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 480, 491,
496: Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the
'Political Economy' of Sex," in Toward an Anthropology of
Epheh, ed. Rayna Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1975), 159.

33. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analvsis of
Qeneepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York and Washington:
Frederick A. Praeger, 1966), 4, 113-14.

34. Douglas, 146-47.

35. Armstrong, 5, 20, 23, 95; Butler, chap. 2.

44

36. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality.
yeiphe 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York:
Vintage Books, 1990), chaps. 1 and 2.

37. Arguments in suppport of absolutism include a
tract, God and the King, that James I had published in 1615
and that was presumed to be written by Richard Mocket, John
Swan's Redde Debitum: or. A Discourse in Defense of the
Three Chief Fatherhoods (paternity, magistry and
priesthood), which was published in 1640, and of course
Robert Filmer's Patriarchia, written in 1640, and published
some forty years later. Arguments in support of populism
include Henry Parker's response to Charles I's "'Answers' to
Parliament's 'Nineteen Propositions'" entitled Observations
ppoh Some of His Majesties Late Answers and Expresses (1642)
and his later Jus Populi (1645), Samuel Rutherford's heyy
Rex. the Law and the Prince (1644) and John Locke's
sustained criticism of Filmer's Patriarchia, Two Treatises
g: Gpvernment (1690). Schochet is very useful for
identifying major currents in the seventeenth-century
revival of the debate that prepared the way for what is
often dubbed the Filmer/Locke debate later in the century.

38. Milton's criticism of Charles I being represented
as a fatherlike king is particularly fierce in part twenty-
seven of Eikonohlastes which responds to passages in chapter
twenty-seven of Eikon Basilike that are styled as Charles
writing to his son, the future Charles II, in the persons of

father and king. John Gauden, later made Bishop of Exeter by

45

Charles II, is widely believed to have been mainly
responsible for Eikon Basilike. On the authorship and
reception of Eikon Basilike, see Philip A. Knachel's
introduction to Eikon Basilike, The Portraicture [sic] of
his Sacred Majestie in His Solitudes and Sufferings, Folger

Documents of Tudor and Stuart Civilization Series (Ithaca,
New York: Cornell University Press, 1966), xi-xxxii. On
Milton's use of Satan as a figure for Charles I's
absolutism, see Joan S. Bennett, "God, Satan, and King
Charles: Milton's Royal Portraits," EMLA vol. 92, no. 3

(1977): 441-57.

Chapter 1: The Apple of Her Father's I.

Shalt thou give Law to God, shalt thou dispute
With him the points of liberty, who made
Thee what thou art...?

--John Milton, Paradise Lose.
My Author and Disposer, what thou bidds't
Unargu'd I obey; so God ordains,
God is thy Law, thou mine: to know no more
Is woman's happiest knowledge and her praise.

--John Milton, Paradise Lost.

Milton scholarship of the last fifteen years has shown
a persistent attention to the question of sexuality in
Pagegise Lost. Even among scholars who hold self-consciously
opposed positions such as those of the so-called feminist
and opposition camps of Milton criticism, there is a general
consensus that sees Adam and Eve's marital relations as
temperate, licit sexuality. Within this consensus there are
critics who are primarily concerned with what they identify
as 'licit' marital sex, and those that focus on 'illicit'
sex. The latter is usually defined as sexual expression that

lies beyond the prelapsarian edenic marriage, and criticism

46

47

of this kind has tended to concentrate on the pointedly
incestuous union of Satan and his daughter, Sin.1

The Satan-Sin incest is commonly seen as a deliberately
shocking parody of other socio-familial relations in the
poem that serve, by their propriety, to define right
relations between man and woman within the poem's broader
framework of right relations established by God. Edward Le
Comte who associates the incest with Death's kingdom of
Hell, for example, argues that "[t]he love of the angels,
the unfallen marriage of Adam and Eve... have their
distorted reflection, their perversion in hell," so that the
Satan-Sin union is explained as one of the author's
'contraries.' In a similar vein, Jean Hagstrum's study of
love identifies Satan and Sin with eroticism, and Adam and
Eve with an ideal heterosexual marital state. Hagstrum
suggests that eroticism throws the ideal into relief to
establish reciprocity as a model for appropriate human
socio-familial, and particularly marital, relations.2 In
conceiving of one set of relations as a distortion or parody
of another, Le Comte and Hagstrum imply that the converse of
these relations is already in place in the ideal of Adam and
Eve's marriage and reciprocal marital sexuality. However,
neither Le Comte nor Hagstrum accounts for the fact that the
Satan-Sin incest, recounted by Sin in Book 2, actually
QQQQIS before Satan is ejected from heaven, and before the

creation and physical union of Adam and Eve.

48

This chronological sequence of events is, according to
Noam Flinker, by no means incidental to the purposes of
Eezadise Lost. Noting that Satan's incest with his daughter
precedes most of the action of the poem, Flinker argues that
this incest is introduced early in Paradise Lost to help the
reader later to understand his or her misguided sympathy
with a number of Satan's attractive and seemingly heroic
followers.3 Even though the reader responds with horror to
the Satan-Sin incest, s/he is liable to admire Thammuz-
Adonis who appears in the catalog in Book 1; it is only the
hidden incest theme as it relates to Thammuz-Adonis (in
Ovid, the product of father-daughter incest) that enables
the thinking reader to recognize the dangers of attractive
exteriors that conceal baseness. When Flinker argues that
Paradise Lost first warns of the nature of evil and then
represents evil in a way which seems to ignore the warning,
he suggests that incest exists to support a teleological
method of Christian historiography in which later events are
;prefigured and their significance clarified by earlier
events (119-20).

William Kerrigan, who also notes that the Satan-Sin
.incest occurs prior to the union of Adam and Eve, claims the
Lincest and its resultant births establish a model of death
for posterity and that Death's "unappeasable hungers. . .
become our dark heritage."4 Whereas Flinker and Kerrigan
differ in the importance they allocate to the chronological

positioning of the Satan-Sin incest within Paradise Log,

49

they nevertheless agree with Le Comte and Hagstrum in seeing
incest as an inappropriate intrafamilial relationship.
Because the Satan-Sin incest is seen as a negative exemplum
against the positive exemplum of Adam and Eve's prelapsarian
marital union, critics generally continue to treat incest as
subsidiary to the epic theme of generational rebellion of
son against father.5 As a result, none has fully or
satisfactorily explored the significance of the fact that
the Satan-Sin union occurs in Heaven at the time of Satan's
rebellion, and that it takes place chronologically and
narratively before the physical union of Adam and Eve.

Although Kerrigan and Flinker acknowledge when and
where the incest takes place, they do not address some of
the questions that their observations raise. As the
narratively central figure of Satan exemplifies the falsity
of attractive exteriors, why should it be important to
establish a secondary ploy to teach the lesson of concealed
baseness? If we accept that a secondary ploy is operative,
‘then yhy is the incestuous desire of a father an apt prelude
'to an ingrate's rebellion against his creator? As the poem
:nowhere suggests that Satan's incest is explicitly punished,
how does incest become a reiterative device to underscore
appropriate socio-familial relations? If we assume that the
Adam-Eve and Satan-Sin unions represent respectively
apprOpriate and inappropriate forms of sexual appetite, is
it eXpedient to underscore the latter and to situate its

consummation in Heaven (the realm of right) prior to that

50

which it supposedly parodies? These questions raise others
about the significance of incest to the poem's broader theme
of forbidden appetite: how does the form of sexual appetite
figured as incest inform our understanding of the carnal
hunger which precipitates the fall? And is it possible to
see the link between eating and incest in the poem as purely
incidental as critics seem to have tacitly assumed?

More than one theorist of incest has observed that
sexual and alimentary appetites are subject to analogous
prohibitions in many cultures. In Totem and Taboo, Sigmund
Freud rejects eugenic and horror explanations of the incest
taboo on the grounds that the application of the prohibition
varies from culture to culture.6 For Freud, incest
prohibition came into being as a form of social control and
it is central to exogamy and to totemic kinship systems. He
claims that because the totem (an animal or artifact, or a
food item whose consumption is prohibited) is revered and
identified with a group's origins, it is deemed by the group
to be akin to the father. Freud explains incest prohibition
through an originary narrative: a group of sons in the
patriarchal horde are united in their wish to kill the
father who prevents access to the maternal object of desire.
The sons express kin solidarity through symbolic parricide
and the ritual consumption of the totem object that
represents the father: the incest prohibition that follows
prevents a recurrence of conflict between kin over their

desire for the same woman.

51

In his Elementar Structures of Kinshi , Claude Levi-
Strauss, like Freud, rejects eugenic and horror explanations
of incest. But Levi-Strauss also rejects the idea of a totem
whose consumption is unequivocally prohibited.7 Because a
totem may be eaten in certain ritualized circumstances,
Levi-Strauss argues that there is no prohibition against the
actual eating of a particular item, only against its use
based upon its symbolic value. Influenced by Marcel Mauss'
theory that gift-giving is the basis for social exchange in
simple societies, Levi-Strauss marks women as the most
valuable gifts to be given, and marriage as therefore the
most basic exchange between different social groups. The
incest prohibition ensures that social interaction between
different kinship groups or clans continues, and exogamy
results from an ongoing exchange that presupposes that each
group will not consume what it can offer to another to forge
a social or political alliance.

Underpinning both Freud's and Lévi-Strauss' views of
incest and, I would argue, providing the basis for incest
prohibition as a whole, is the psychological propensity to
distinguish the self or social/kinship group from all
others: logic dictates that a taboo prohibiting the use of
one part of a group works on the assumption that a boundary
already exists to distinguish groups from one another. Such
boundaries are crucial to anthropologist Mary Douglas'
theory that at the heart of incest taboo lies the human

drive for systemization. In Purity and Danger, Douglas

52

argues that within the larger framework of rituals concerned
with the purity of cultural signifiers, eating and incest
each occupy a highly ambiguous space: as each occurs at a
site--a body orifice--where inside/outside divisions may
blur, the symbolism of body boundaries articulates what a
group construes as dangerous to its definition.8 Body
orifices symbolize particular vulnerability because they are
points at which the boundary between the self-contained and
the uncontained becomes indistinct. Because group and body
margins are encircled by rituals which seek at once to
maintain integrity and to negotiate the breach, moreover,
situations of entry and departure--where the psychic
conception of autoplasticism and alloplasticism is usually
subject to revision--are fraught with tension. Hence for
Douglas, it is never solely the act of incest that is at
stake, but the cultural significance of the act; incest
prohibition both comprises and is ensconced within a
symbolic system that continues to inform culture.

Returning via Douglas to the sexual acts cast as
alternately licit and illicit in the dichotomy established
by both 'feminist' and 'opposition' critics of Paradise
Lpsp, it is pertinent to think of specific acts in terms of
their symbolic value: only in this way can their import in
relation to the larger structure--the dual narratives of
rebellion and prohibited eating--be purposefully examined.
As features of a symbolic system, similarities between

different types of sexual act or forms of eating are of

53

greater interest than supposed dissimilarities. Furthermore,
as there are certain sexual acts and forms of eating that
are the same in physical terms but that bear decidedly
different meanings, I would like to reconsider the
relatedness of these sexual and alimentary acts in Paradise
hpsh. Viewing consumption in Paradise Lost--especially the
eating of the forbidden fruit--as a metaphorical counterpart
to the poem's representations of sexuality, I shall suggest,
unsettles the ease with which Eve's disobedience may be read
as simply a transgressive act.

Let us first assume that the union of Satan and Sin in
Pepedise Lost is problematic because the dominant Western
cultural tradition prohibits consanguineous sexual unions.
Seen in terms of Douglas' elucidation of incest and
definitional kinship boundaries, the Satan-Sin incest is
aptly related by Sin at that moment in Book 2 when
established father-son relations in Heaven are under acute
stress (indeed, when they are on the point of rupture) and
when Satan is bent on corrupting Man in revenge for being
ejected from Heaven by the father-God. The disclosure of
incest occurs at a symbolic division between realms, the
Gates of Hell, where Satan, on his way to destroy the
Garden, encounters Sin and Death. As the disclosure
constitutes Sin's attempt to prevent Satan and Death's
threatened mutual destruction, its circumstances
suggestively juxtapose the theme of incest with that of

emnity between fathers and sons. Interestingly, however,

54

while Sin promotes harmony between Satan and Death here, she
performs a rather different office elsewhere in Paradise

mo

 

Sin's tale of her birth, for example, reveals that she
is born at the very moment that Satan articulates his
rebellion against God-the Father: "In Heav'n... in sight /
Of all the Seraphim with thee combin'd / In bold conspiracy
against Heav'n's King, / .... / Out of thy head I
sprung...."9 Sin's role in these two father-son
relationships (God and Satan, Satan and Death) points up the
ambiguous role and the unstable position of daughters in the
poem: Sin is alternately cast as bringing father and son
together she as a divisive force in father-son
relationships. The latter role is stressed when Satan
simultaneously conceives rebellion and gives birth to become
a self-authorizing father on the brink of his ejection from
the domain of his own father/creator.

In this moment of triple inception, each of Satan's
creations is associated with the others and rebellion is
inseparable from hermaphroditic self-perpetuation. Satan's
hermaphroditism in conceiving and giving birth to Sin is
paradoxically compounded in the incest because the sexual
union brings together two distinct bodies even as it
collapses distinctions between bodies from the same source.
Sin appeals to Satan, moreover, because she is the fleshly
counterpart of that self which conceives the conspiracy to

usurp the Father/Creator. The story of Satan's sexual desire

55

in Eezadise Lost is therefore interspersed with that other
narrative of a desire for power, so that even as Satan is
impregnating Sin, Heaven is at war:

I pleas'd, and with attractive graces won

The most averse, thee chiefly, who full oft

Thyself in me thy perfect image viewing

Becam'st enamor'd, and such joy thou took'st

With me in secret, that my womb conceiv'd
A growing burden. Meanwhile War arose....

(emphasis added, 2.762-67)

As it is expressed here, the father's desire for his
daughter displays self-interest of a corporeal kind in that
sexual attraction becomes a form of self-gratification; if
Satan's sexual attraction to Sin is attributable to her
appearance, that appearance pleases by its likeness to his
own. The incest is therefore both an articulation of self,
and a consolidation of self to self through a form of
familial cannibalism whence the father libidinously consumes
his own creation.

The association of explicitly incestuous desire with
the propensity to usurp one's creator is amplified when it
is placed within the context of building Pandemonium in Book
1. In Pandemonium, a symbolic act of incestuous rape is
necessary to defying God-the-Father when the fervor to
establish an alternate kingdom to God's links male sexual
desire with violence perpetrated on a form identified as
female. The alternate kingdom, it should be noted, is oddly

like the Heavenly kingdom for it seeks to replicate Heaven's

56

splendor. The search led by Mammon for materials with which
to reconstruct the magnificence of Heaven in Pandemonium,
adopts the language of mother rape:
Men also, and by [Mammon's] suggestion taught,
Ransack'd the Center, and with impious hands
Rifl'd the bowels of thir mother Earth
For Treasures better hid. Soon had his crew

Op'n'd into the Hill a spacious wound
And digg'd out ribs of Gold. (1.685-90)

A lust for political power rendered as the gouging of a
mother's entrails, conflates the desire to possess a
valuable commodity with male sexual appetite. Mammon's
example figures rebellion against the father specifically in
terms of 'rifling' that female who, as Freud would have it,
most properly belongs to the father. The rape of 'mother'
earth, her enforced yielding of consumables and her bodily
disfigurement are predicated upon the assumption that they
will provide the means to generate an alternate kingdom in
Pandemonium. Each of these actions is graphically replicated
in Book 2 of Paradise Lost when Satan encounters Sin and
Death guarding the Gates of Hell.

In the figure of Death, in his rape of his mother, and
in the hell-hound progeny born of that union, male sexual
and oral appetite are closely associated with a lust for
power. When Death scorns Satan's treason against his father
he does so primarily to protect his own 'kingdom' (2.688-99)
as becomes clear when father and son prepare to do battle at

Hell's portal (2.711-24). Viewed from the scene at the

57

portal, Death's incest with Sin becomes a figurative
counterpart to his challenge of his father for, in raping
his mother, Death perpetrates an act of rebellion against
his father analogous to that which his father, Satan, has in
turn committed against God. The result--perpetual rape and
the devouring of the mother's innards by the incest-bred
hell hounds--is a circular system that reproduces nothing
beyond itself:

... of that rape begot

These yelling Monsters that with ceaseless cry

Surround me, as thou saw'st hourly conceiv'd

And hourly born, with sorrow infinite

To me, for when they list, into the womb

That bred them they return, and howl and gnaw

My Bowels, thir repast; then bursting forth
Afresh with conscious terrors vex me round

(2.794-801)

This representation clearly establishes incest as a
form of familial cannibalism;10 the hell hounds eat that
forbidden flesh, the body of the mother, that is properly
reserved for the father. Interestingly, however, the role of
their father, Death, is to encourage the hounds, to "se[t]
them on," in lieu of consuming the mother himself (Death
"his Parent would full soon devour / ...but that he knows /
His end with mine involv'd. I / Should prove a bitter
Morsel..." [2.806-81). The hell hounds' eating thus reenacts
Death's rape of his mother. As displaced eating, the hell-
hounds' incest marks Death's competition with his father as

a competition that is meaningful only in the body of the

58

mother through a rapacity at once alimentary and libidinous.
The complex system of signification that emerges from the
Satan-Sin and Death-Sin unions shows that when the poem's
metaphors of sexual and and alimentary consumption are seen
in terms of the figure of incest, they establish incest as
not simply a means of disclosing false exteriors, nor a
wrongheaded rebellion, not indeed a parody or hellish
perversion as some ctitics have suggested. Viewing the
Satan-Sin and Death-Sin incests in terms of successive acts
of prohibited consumption gives access to a particular
generative economy which in turn gives meaning to the nature
of of familial relations between fathers and sons, and
fathers and daughters, in Paradise Lost.11

Within this economy, Sin's consumption by the hell

hounds derives its force from what Satan's and Death's sated

 

appetites have established as a donné of male power
expressed in sexual and alimentary violence toward mothers
and daughters. The unquestioned acceptance of these male
appetites, however, belies popular contemporary beliefs
about female appetite. It is important to acknowledge that
the trepidation inspired by female appetites-~for food, for
power and for sex--were not confined to this period and that
women exhibiting such appetites had for centuries been
considered monstrous.12 But the way that these fears are
taken up by Milton from the contemporary milieu
significantly affects how we read the Satan-Sin incest and

the conditions surrounding the more prominent trangressive

59

acts of his narrative of origin.13 For example, Sara Van den
Berg has convincingly argued that Milton constructs Sin
according to a conception of witchcraft peculiar to the
seventeenth century. She places Milton's depiction of Eve
against the background of a 1604 statute that made
witchcraft a capital crime; comparing descriptions of Sin in
Regedise Lost to contemporary witchcraft fantasies, Van den
Berg argues that witchcraft fantasies attribute evil to
insatiable female appetites. According to Van den Berg, the
charge of insatiable female appetite derives from what, in
psychological terms, "was most feared about the mother--that
she would devour rather than nurture her child" (353).14
This last point is particularly interesting in light of

the different representations of Sin as daughter and as
mother in Paradise Lost. Although daughter Sin reportedly
wins notice because of her "attractive graces" in Heaven,
mother Sin and her progeny are linked with a mélange of
popular and learned misogynistic ideas about perverse female
sexuality, women's infanticidal tendencies, bestiality and
quintessentially female ugliness when she is encountered by
Satan at the Gates of Hell:

Far less abhorr'd than these [hell hounds]

Vex'd Scylla bathing in the Sea that parts

Calabria from the hoarse Trinacrian shore:

Nor uglier follow the Night-Hag, when call'd

In secret, riding through the Air she comes

Lur'd with the smell of infant blood, to dance
With Lapland Witches.... (2.660-65)

6O

Powerful though these images are, Sin's likeness to
predatory figures is undercut by the fact that it is Sin who
is acted upon. The hell hounds that constitute Sin's nether
regions might be deformities that emblematize her depravity:
"Woman to the waist and fair, / But ended foul in many a
scaly fold / Voluminous and vast, a Serpent arm'd / With
mortal sting..." (2.650-53). But they also create depravity:

... about her middle round

A cry of Hell Hounds never ceasing bark'd

With wide Cerberean mouths full loud, and rung

A hideous Peal: yet, when they list, would creep,

If aught disturb'd thir noise, into her womb,
And kennel there.... (2.653-58)

Thus before Sin's voluminous genitalia can be dismissed as a
version of the horrifyingly predatory vagina dentata which
appears in the Christian West and cross-culturally, it must
be noted that it is Sin who is perpetually devoured by her
children, preyed upon by her father, and consumed by Death
who is at once brother, child and father (2.803-6).15

Sin's grotesque mutilation as the child begotten by
Satan rips through her belly to be born ("Thine own
begotten, breaking violent way / Tore through my entrails,
that with fear and pain / Distorted, all my nether shape
thus grew / Transformed... " [2.782-851), underscores the
potential for violent bodily control which lurks in the
father's command over his daughter. Associated in this
period with both gustation and gestation, the entrails are

emphasized here, not for their role in Sin's self

61

nourishment, but with her potential to nourish others--
principally the father and son. Incest makes the daughter
into figurative and literal flesh of Satan's flesh: she is
libidinously consumed by Satan and is food for Satan and
Death's progeny. Ordinarily reliant upon the parent for
nurture and for sustenance, the daughter is transfigured by
incest and cannibalized into a nourishing mother.16
Corporeal and consumable, her bowels torn usunder, Sin
recalls the "Rifl'd bowels" of the nurturing mother, earth,
and so draws attention to the fact that, in Milton's version
of the creation myth, the mother who is biologically central
to the reproductive process, is conspicuously absent at
crucial moments of origin.17 What is yet more notable about
mother earth vis-a-vis the dearth of mothers and the
preponderance of fathers in Paradise Lost (God, Satan,
Death, Adam) is that in Milton's creation myth, mother
earth, authored by God-the-Father (7.232), is also
unavoidably a daughter: 'she' is the sibling of the
rebellious "third part of Heav'n's sons" (2.692) who, led by
Mammon, divest her of her treasures with impious hands.
Figured as a means to satisfy a specifically male lust
for political power, the rifling of the
mother/daughter/sister earth for her "ribs of Gold"
represents the reproductive female body as a valuable,
exploitable resource in a manner consistent with
contemporary writings on pregnancy and motherhood. As Ruth

Perry has argued, women became constructed increasingly as

62

nurturers of the nation in the early modern period; at the
same time there was a growing attention to what they ate and
especially to what was eaten during pregnancy. Perry
convincingly links the sentimentalization of motherhood with
an increased need for human resources in the project and
processes of colonialist expansion. Although her emphasis is
on the growing constraints upon mothers and upon women's
bodies, bodily functions and diet toward the middle of the
eighteenth century, Perry indicates that, as early as
Nicholas Culpeper's well-known manual on midwifery, h
hipectorv for Midwives or. A Guide for Women in Thei;
ggheephion, Bearing and Suckling Their Children (London,
1651), what women ate and their capacity as nourishers were
deemed to be intimately connected. That a mother's appetite
might negatively affect her offspring is clearly an
important notion in the case of Sin, just as it is later in
Eeradise Lost in which the satiation of the "Mother of all
Mankind" curtails the immortality of her offspring, making
them fit fodder for Death.18

That procreation itself may yield valuable resources is
signalled in the mother's ribs of gold, and these ribs
anticipate the use of a parental rib in another act of
creation in Paradise Lost. As the mother's ribs of gold are
later recalled in Adam's rib, they highlight the very
different positions occupied by the life-giving mother and
life-giving father in Milton's poem. Whereas the rape of

mother earth for the treasure within her bowels is replete

63

with the language of enforced submission, the removal of the
father's rib--which occurs ih response to his request for
meet companionship--has a considerably less violent tone:
"[Hee] stooping op'n'd my left side, and took / From thence
a Rib, with cordial spirits warm, / And Life-blood streaming
fresh: wide was the wound, / But suddenly with flesh fill'd
up and heal'd" (8.465-68). Adam's fleshly rib is returned to
him in a highly acceptable--even desirable--form when it is
made to gather flesh to form Eve.

The contrast in the ways that these ribs are figured
and the manner in which they are taken focuses attention on
the curious location of Eve, the archetypal mother, within
the particular set of relationships between begettors and
begotten in the poem. The nature and significance the poem's
familial relationships becomes clearer if one recalls that,
even though she has not been widely identified as such in
Christian myths of origin, Eve the archetypal mother is also
(and unavoidably given the single male original in Paradise
Lesh) a 'begotten': Eve is the daughter both of the man from
whom she sprang and a creation of the father-God.19 As such,
Eve too is pointedly a resource: as the mother is to be
retained by the father, the woman who is most clearly the
father's to bestow upon others is the daughter whom he has
begotten and who consequently owes to him her very being.

The relationship between Adam and Eve in the poem must
be rethought in light of this debt of the daughter to her

creator. I have said that the Satan-Sin father-daughter

64

pairing has been problematic for readers of Paradise Lost
primarily because it is a consanguineous sexual
relationship. But, as Adam and Eve stand in precisely the
same relation to one another (father-begettor to daughter-
begot) as Satan and Sin, doesn't the union of Adam and Eve
becomes as problematic as that of Satan and Sin? Isn't Adam,
like Satan, a father who hermaphroditically conceives a
daughter and engages in sexual relations with his daughter
to make of her a mother? And doesn't the union in each case
ultimately result in the birth of a predatory deathliness?
Even in this simple mapping of parallels, there are too many
similarities between the two pairs to dismiss easily. The
points of contact between the two pairs create a disturbing
resonance which suggests that the Satan-Sin union is not
diametrically opposed to the Adam-Eve union but coterminious
with relations between Adam and Eve. And if the prelapsarian
union of Adam and Eve reproduces a heavenly union, it has a
model in the relationship between father and daughter as
these are established in Heaven prior to Satan's fall.20

I am by no means arguing here that because the Adam and
Eve union is incestuous, the Satan-Sin incest is
instinctual, natural, or appropriate. I am suggesting,
however, that the myth of origin offered by Paradise Lgsh
presumes certain power relations--between men, and between
men and women--which suggest that this originary myth is
bound up with the structures of power within the family as

they are emerging during a period of intensifying

65

materialist values. Christine Froula's work on how woman is
represented through figures of the procreative family in
Eepegise Lost crystalizes this paradigm of familial
indebtedness within a paternally-autocratic structure; she
shows that relations between males and females in the poem
are dependent on this paradigm. Within a larger discussion
of canon formation and the role of women readers of Paradise
peep, Froula notes that Satan, Sin and Death are frequently
aligned with the Holy Trinity and that this alignment has
often been used to claim that the former trio parodically
recreates the latter. Given the dearth of females in
Milton's cosmos, the translation of the mother into the Holy
Ghost is noteworthy for Froula because it supports the
exclusion of women from structures of power.21 Whereas in
Heaven it occupies a position akin to the mother, the Holy
Ghost does not re-translate into the mother in the Satan-
Sin-Death trio. In this 'family,' the position that a parody
of the Holy Ghost might occupy becomes a form of the mother
which collapses the daughter into the mother: father and son
are left as the principal, because most clearly
identifiable, members of the family while daughter and
mother occupy positions which are ambiguous because they are
peripheral.

Because the Adam-Eve, Satan-Sin, and even the Sin-Death
'families' eeeh replicate this collapsed model, the
supposedly non-incestuous nature of the first cannot be held

up as its distiguishing feature. Of greater consequence in

66

making distinctions between the unions is whether a given
pairing is sanctioned within the structure of an originary
myth which establishes generation as explicitly male by
rendering it in terms of the transmission of political power
from father to son.22 This concept of generation implies, if
not the invisiblity, then at least the exchangeability of
daughters as 'gifts' to render them facilitators in a
narrative of male succession rather than beneficiaries of
lineal and political succession.

For an elaboration of this notion, I turn briefly to
anthropologist Gayle Rubin's well-known essay, "The Traffic
in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex." Rubin
explores what she names the "sex/gender" system, which is
"the set of arrangements by which a society transforms
biological sexuality into products of human activity," and
the way these transformed sexual needs are satisfied.23
Drawing on Levi-Strauss, Rubin claims that in return for the
son abiding by the incest prohibition that denies him his
mother, he is rewarded by the father with a woman of his own
(192). Rubin's essay is important because it places
exogamous marriage within a kinship economy and refines the
theory of women as the gifts exchanged between men. She goes
some way toward explaining how men come to be principal
members of the family by suggesting that the reciprocal
giving of women forges alliances between men while it
confers no comparable benefit to the 'gifts' themselves: "If

it is women who are being transacted, then it is the men who

67

give and take them who are linked, the woman being a conduit
of a relationship rather than a partner to it.... it is the
partners, not the presents, upon whom reciprocal exchange
confers its quasi-mystical power of social linkage.... women
are in no position to realize the benefits of their own
circulation" (174).

Yet while Rubin's discussion of the system of gift
exchange between kinship groups and the resulting system of
exogamy is persuasive, the notion of an equivalent
indebtedness between giver and receiver is, as she
acknowledges, less plausible if taken outside a very
specific context.24 When Rubin refers to the son's
abstinence from his mother and the woman with whom his
father rewards his abstinence, for example, it is implied
that the giver and receiver are differentially empowered:
the woman is not given as a gift pep se, for the
father/giver cannot expect a like return. As a result the
given woman is not ascribed a value es yepeh but a point at
which shared cultural values inhere and gain meaning. For
this reason, I see Rubin's alternative to the system she
describes--her valorizing of a liberatory androgyny--as
misleading. Liberatory androgyny both assumes a certain
fixity of the cultural meanings of gender and intimates that
incestuous desire is in some sense natural and
precultural.25

Whereas Rubin's understanding of desire through

androgyny presumes that desiring parties can be equally

68

empowered, Mary Nyquist explores the limits of such an
assumption in the context of God's ambiguously framed giving
of Eve to Adam in Paradise Lost to show that Eve's erotic
value is embedded in her value as a conduit. Nyquist rejects
what she terms the appeal of "originary androgyny" to argue
that the milieu into which Eve is born is already gendered,
not least of all by the relation of Adam to God. Referring
to certain ceremonial utterances of Genesis, she considers
the implications of the fact that Milton's use of Genesis
attributes key utterances to an Adam whose "legitimate
desires pre-exist the creation of the object that will
satisfy them":
In Milton's exegesis, the significance of the
gift--woman--passed from maker to man is
determined by two speeches... constructed as a
verbal exchange that is basically contractual. In
Genesis 2:18 Adam's maker promises him that he
will assuage his loneliness and provide him with a
meet help: in 2:23 and 24, Adam accepts this gift

by acknowledging it was exactly what was promised
him, and then promises to honour it on these very

grounds.26

The Genesis dialogue highlights the contractual nature of
the marriage of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost which, Nyquist
claims, is produced by "a Protestantism pressed into the
service of an historically specific form of individualism...
paradigmatically masculine, autonomous, articulate, and
preternaturally awake to the implications of entering into

relations with others" (115). Turning to the dialogue

69

between Adam and God just prior to Eve's creation, Nyquist
also notes that the corresponding dialogue in Paradise Lost,
as it is told by Adam to Raphael in Book 8, has structural
parallels to the contract passages in Genesis. In response
to Adam's need to "beget / Like of his like, his Image
multipli'd" (8.423-24), God first responds with a promise:
"What next I bring shall please thee, be assur'd, / Thy
likeness, thy fit help, thy other self, / Thy wish, exactly
to thy heart's desire" (8.449-51) and rapidly follows with
the creation of Eve from Adam's rib. It is to God's
fulfillment of the promise that Adam responds with uplifted
voice and in the language of obligation:

This turn hath made amends: thou hast fulfill'd

Thy words, Creator bounteous and benign,

Giver of all things fair, but fairest this

Of all thy gifts, nor enviest. I now see

Bone of my Bone, Flesh of my Flesh, my Self

Before me; Woman is her Name, of Man

Extracted; for this cause he shall forego
Father and Mother, and to his Wife adhere...

(8.491-98)

The above dialogue between God and Adam is clearly
based on paternal indulgence and filial indebtedness. The
depth of understanding between God and Adam is underscored
when one recalls the manner in which Adam and Eve's nuptial
has been framed earlier, for, if "wedded Love" is to be
hailed as the true source of human reproductivity and
productivity, it is also the means by which "all the

Charities / Of Father, Son, and Brother first were known"

7O

(4.756-57). Where Adam's speech in Book 8 expresses a
commitment to honor the gift giver, his honoring of that
giver within the established contractual matrix of male
relationships associated with 'wedded love,‘ implicitly
depends upon three things. First, that the woman given is
given in good faith; she must have value to render the
receiver indebted. Second, that the transaction of a
daughter enables her transfiguration; when the daughter
functions as the mother's replacement, she must be
interchangeable with the mother, and be, like the mother, a
means of generating the father's bloodline. Finally, the
daughter must not resist being given, she must comply with
the terms on which she is given.

Because the divine voice responds to Adam's desire by
making him a gift of Eve, the voice must also construct
Eve's desire as responsive to Adam's desire. Consequently,
when Eve seems to enact desire she is actually precluded
from doing so by the system of indebtedness into which she
is born. Flesh of Adam's flesh, 'creation' to his 'creator,'
and expressly designed to sate Adam's desire, Eve cannot but
respond. Thus Adam's contract with his creator propels Eye
into a situation of indebtedness to her creator.27 Eve's
birth is represented in material terms in the well-known
passage of the rib taken from Adam's left side (8.465-67).
But Eve more properly comes into being at the point at which
her earthly father imagines his desire and precipitates

God's fashioning of his daughter: "Mine eyes [the Almighty]

71

clos'd, but op'n left the Cell / Of Fancy my internal sight,
by which / Abstract as in a trance methought I saw [a
manlike creature]" (8.460-62). While she is displaced from
Adam by God's intervention in her fashioning, Eve is
conceiveable phiy as a figment of Adam's dormant desire;
echoing Sin's relation to Satan, Eve owes her being to Adam.
The implications of such a debt emerge more clearly in

'Eve's' narrative of her creation. In Eve's account she is
first warned against herself (4.468) and then prescribed by
the voice that names her desire, states her indebtedness to
her original, and thereby identifies her future functions:

... hee

Whose image thou art, him thou shalt enjoy

Inseparably thine, to him shalt bear

Multitudes like thyself, and thence be call'd
Mother of human Race: what could I do,

But follow straight, invisibly thus led?28
(4.469-76)

Eve's question at the end of this passage suggests that the
representation of Eve as archetypal mother should not place
aside what the originary myth commonly fails to address--
that mother Eve is also a child. It is abundantly clear
later in her account that Eve is daughter as well as mother,
for when Eve turns away from the sight of Adam, his voice
commands her to return and claims her on the basis of his
authorship, his blood relation, and her indebtedness to him

on both counts:

72

Return fair Eye,

Whom fli'st thou? whom thou fli'st, of him thou
art,

His flesh, his bone; to give thee being I lent

Out of my side to thee, nearest my heart

Substantial Life, to have thee by my side

Part of my Soul I seek thee, and Thee claim

My other half: with that thy gentle hand

Seiz'd mine, I yielded, and from that time see

How beauty is excell'd by manly grace

And wisdom.... (4.481-91)

Because Eve initially turns away from Adam, who seems
less attractive than the image of herself that she sees
reflected in a pool (4.478-80), her return and yielding in
response to the voices that direct her motions suggest that
her desire for Adam is constructed by those voices. Thus if
the union of Adam and Eve is to be cast in terms of the
mutuality or reciprocity of a 'right' marital sexuality, it
can only be so in a context in which consent is not a real
possibility; and consent is not a real possibility in a
context girt about by the relations of indebtedness in which
the daughter, Eve, is engendered. As a result of these
relations between Adam and Eve as begettor to begotten, it
is implausible for the daughter to be seductress or
initiator because each of these roles presupposes volition.
Eve's position as daughter within the scheme of the father-
son family on the other hand disallows volition when it
invalidates all grounds for refusal.29

Eve yields to one voice, and then succumbs to a second,
each of which suggestively prefigures a third authoritative

voice that speaks her desire for the forbidden fruit. The

73

cumulative effect of the first two voices problematizes both
the third voice which encodes Eve as an obedient daughter
and the concept of volition in Milton's larger argument. The
voice that draws Eve toward the forbidden fruit in the dream
that she relates to Adam unmistakeably echoes the
disembodied voice of one Father who has led her to another
soon after her birth: "Close at mine ear one call'd me forth
to walk / With gentle voice, I thought it thine; it said, /
Why sleep'st thou Eye...?/ .... / I rose as at thy call, but
found thee not" (5.36-8, 48). As Eve's actions in the
ambiguously named seduction are prescribed by the third
fatherly voice, this draws attention to how Eve's so-called
choice is also encoded by the biblical source that, by
writing her as already and inevitably the transgressor, has
religious authority underwrite paternal autocracy.30

Echoing the persuasive mode of the previous two voices,
Satan's voice also echoes the second mythical account of
origin in Genesis--the 'word' which consigns Eve to a
doubly-binding debt as daughter/wife and constructs her as a
voracious woman who tempts the father of mankind.31 Milton
takes up the terms of this account in his description of
Eve's eating of forbidden fruit that emphasizes Eve's
appetite for godhead. But the description of Eve's voracity
contrasts strongly with her early ministry to others'
appetites. In Book 5, for example, when Eve gathers fruit to
provide a bountiful feast for Adam and Raphael, she does not

partake of the fruit herself, just as she does not partake

74

of the knowledge transmitted from God through Raphael to
Adam that the feast serves to celebrate (5.33-36).32
Eve's abstinence from eating in one context in which
eating is linked to the successful transference of God's
higher wisdom must affect our reading of her subsequent,
'transgressive' eating, particularly as the proscription
against eating builds on the belief that there are some
forms of knowledge to which humans should not have access.
The contrast between the two scenes of feasting is
heightened by Eve's nice attention to others' tastes in
garnering the feast in Book 5 versus her gorging on the
forbidden fruit in greedy self-absorption:
[Eve] Intent now wholly on her taste, naught else
Regarded, such delight till then as seem'd
In Fruit she never tasted, whether true
Or fancied so, through expectation high
Of knowledge, nor was God-head from her thought,
Greedily she ingorg'd without restraint,
And knew not eating Death: Satiate at length
(9.786-92)
This representation of Eve's eating implies that
satisfaction of her appetite inevitably results in a failure
to minister to others' appetites; Eve regards naught but her
own desire, fails to succour others, and so brings about the
deathliness and destruction for which Satan hungers.
The grief of the earth--that other archetypal mother
and source of succour--in response to the plucking of the

fruit is entirely appropriate: "Earth felt the wound, and

Nature from her seat / Sighing through all her Works, gave

75

out signs of woe / That all was lost" (9.782-84). Taken
together with the tenor of God's injunction not to eat of
the knowledge-giving, but deathly, fruit (8.321-30), the
manner of Eve's eating, understood within the frame provided
by incest, is crucial to a myth which constructs male and
female appetite and knowledge differentially. Eve's self-
absorbed gorging identifies woman's hungry access to
knowledge as that which creates dearth and depletes
generative potential. Eating the Father's fruit signals
Eve's possible absence as a bountiful mother and her
presence as a hungering daughter, and so presages the
deathliness of the eating-related blights which Michael
foresees will afflict the human race:

Some by violent stroke shall die,

...by Intemperence more

In Meats and Drinks, which on the Earth shall

bring

Diseases dire...

What misery th' inabstinence of Eve

Shall bring on men...

...ghastly Spasm...

Convulsions, Epilepsies, fierce Catarrhs,

Intestine Stone and Ulcer, Colic pangs....
(11.471-84)

The daughter's inability to curb her appetite is thus
identified as the root of human misery expressed in terms of
the intestinal corruption accompanying alimentary excess.
The unchecked appetite of the daughter portends that she
will become a mother who endangers, rather than nurtures,

the race created in the Father's likeness. Eve's appetite is

76

therefore held responsible for the mortality of future
generations who consequently become fit food for the maw of
Death (10.597-609).

The encoding of the daughter by the voices which speak
and sanction a particular form of desire and the creation of
her body to satisfy others' appetites, draw together two
injunctions against orality in Paradise Lost. Together these
show that 'pre-speaking' the daughter's desire actually
refuses her the power of speech. Speechlessness both denies
the articulation of desire and underlines the more explicit
injunction against orality implied in the forbidding of the
fruit which yields the father's knowledge.33 As each of the
injunctions is aimed at the willingness of children to hear
and to obey the Father's word, the oral/aural method of
Satan's seduction of Eve, (first entering the serpent
through the mouth to give it voice, and then crouching at
Eve's ear), becomes powerfully charged. If it is the
father's higher discourse that has by-passed Eve in the
confabulation between God and Adam prior to her creation,
and between Raphael and Adam in Book 5, it is access to
orality that Satan's "persuasive words" at first seem to
promise Eve as she reiterates his words:

Great are thy Virtues, doubtless, best of Fruits,
Though kept from Man, and worthy to be admir'd,
Whose taste, too long forborne, at first assay
Gave elocution to the mute, and taught

The Tongue not made for Speech to speak thy
praise. (9.745-49)

77

On one level Satan gees give Eve the elocution that her
position as daughter has hitherto denied and Eve briefly
becomes instructor to her author, Adam. However, reading
Satan as a liberator who gives Eve access to knowledge and
speech ignores the incestuous underpinnings of Satan's
relation to his own daughter to whom he has offered similar
promises of exaltation through alimentation (2.871-41). To
cast Satan as a liberating rebel is to locate him entirely
outside the dominant structure of power and to identify him
as inciting others to uprise from this position of weakness:
thus rendered, Satan is entirely an heroic victim of an
oppressive power structure. It is important to acknowlege
that Satan's relation to hhis daughter duplicates both his
relation to his daughter she Heaven's demand of an indebted
obedience.34 Because Satan's relation to Eve duplicates both
his relation to his own daughter, Sin, and Heaven's demand
of an indebted odedience, his seduction of Eve should be
seen as another use of the daughter to depose the father. As
Satan draws on the father's exclusive privilege with regard
to the daughter, his use of Eve to the end of usurpation
discloses that the prohibition against eating itself occurs
in a context in which the 'seduction' of the daughter is
bound to succeed.35

Eve's seduction also, if indirectly, initiates a
hitherto obedient son into disobedience. Eyels offer of the
fruit to Adam, "This Tree is not as we are told, a Tree / Of

danger tasted... / ... but of Divine effect / To open Eyes,

78

and make them Gods who taste" (9.863-66), reiterates Satan's
words to her: "Ye Eat thereof, your Eyes... / ...shall
perfectly be then / Op'n'd and clear'd, and ye shall be as
Gods (9.706-8). Just as the orally-penetrated serpent
becomes a vehicle for Satan's voice, the orally- and
aurally-penetrated Eve becomes a vehicle for conveying the
promise of godhead through disobedience. Because the
daughter's appetite is already contained by her father's
appetite for her, Eve's eating can be a threat only if her
voracity is a form of displaced consumption: phiy if Eve's
eating is usurpatory, ehiy if it threatens the demise of the
father, does it become a cause for concern. As such a threat
cannot come from the daughter, though she is traditionally
represented as seeking godhead, and it can only come yie the
daughter, the first woman's voracity is actually a mechanism
which covertly force feeds her a definition of herself as
voracious.

Moreover, as Satan's powerlust is enacted through Eve,
her transgressive eating emblematizes cannibalization of the
father; it discloses that at the heart of the myth of the
daughter's appetite for the Father's forbidden fruit, lurks
a power-hungry, ungrateful and quinessentially incestous
son. The rebellious son, Satan, exercises a father's
privilege when he compels Eve to an experience beyond that
into which the God-Adam transaction has given her. Eve's
seduction threatens to disrupt the very foundation of the

God-Adam transaction, namely, the Father's sole authority to

79

confer privilege. Clearly it is this authority that Satan
challenges when he rebels in response to God's preference of
the Son of God ("My only Son" [5.604]) and his appointment
of the favored son over all others. Satan's ingratitude is
further characterized by his marked ambivalence about being
indebted to the father:

The debt immense of endless gratitude,

So burdensome, still paying, still to owe;

Forgetful what from him I still receiv'd,

And understood not that a grateful mind

By owing owes not, but still pays, at once

Indebted and discharg'd; what burden then?
(4.52-57)

Satan's ingratitude in this passage is diametrically
opposed both to the Son of God's obedience to paternal
authority (3.266-71) and to Adam's humble indebtedness.
Against the backdrop of Adam's willingness to honor the
Father and the importance of such willingness to harmonious
generational relations, Satan's reluctance to acknowledge
his debt to God establishes a point of rupture in father-son
relations. Repeatedly associated with direct and displaced
consumption of prohibited women (the libidinously consumed
daughter, the mother 'mined' for gold, the mother raped by
Death and devoured by his hell-hound offspring), Satan's
enticement of the daughter to eat the Father's fruit both
underlines the gravity of such a rupture and maps the
trajectory of the son's insubordination. Due to the

cumulative effect of the metaphor of incest as it is

80

associated with alimentation and filial rebellion, eating is
unquestionably an act of usurpation.

Paradise Lost thus tells a story of insubordination
that begins with a son's failure to honor his father's
authority by leading a third of his sons to rebellion, and
culminates in the consumption of fruit that traditionally
symbolizes generative capability and continued potency.36
The son, who at one level attests to the potential
immortality of the father by perpetuating his name and his
bloodline, at another level precipitates the father's demise
by questioning paternal omnipotence and seeking political
power beyond what is allowed. The paradoxical location of
the son is strikingly figured in the images of bodily
diminution and encroachment that abound in those moments of
the narrative most directly concerned with father-son
conflict, and nowhere more so than at the Gates of Hell
during Satan's encounter with his son, Death.37

Satan is first consigned to a vacuous realm which
threatens to engulf him: "Which way I fly is Hell; myself am
Hell; / And in the lowest deep a lower deep / Still
threat'ning to devour me opens wide" (4.75-77). But as the
danger from which the rebellious Satan shrinks is bodily
annihilation through being devoured, his power to withstand
annihilation is fittingly expressed in his conversion of
himself into the vacuous space ("myself am Hell") that
engulfs all else. In a similar vein in book 2, when Satan

solicits Sin's and Death's aid to gain passage to the Garden

81

in which the forbidden fruit grows, he secures their
cooperation with a promise to liberate them from the realm
of their confinement. He promises to release Sin and Death
to unrestrained oral indulgence once his own mission in Eden
has been accomplished:

[I shall] bring ye to the place where Thou and

Death
Shall dwell at ease...

...there ye shall be fed and fill'd
Immeasurably, all things shall be your prey.
He ceas'd, for both seem'd highly pleas'd, and
Death
Grinn'd horrible a ghastly smile to hear
His famine should be fill'd, and blest his maw
Destin'd to that good hour: no less rejoic'd

His mother bad.... (2.840-49)38

Satan here aligns himself with Sin and Death on the
grounds that he is constrained like them. In so doing Satan
establishes the forbidding Father as the one who threatens
starvation through the restrictions He poses upon
consumption. The tale of the Father's withholding of
sustenance simultaneously sows the seeds of the argument
Satan will use to seduce Eve. Because Eve's seduction
recalls the rationale for earlier acts of disobedience,
incestuous desire and consumption become irrevocably
intertwined with the son's ambition for power of a domestic
character. The oral/aural seduction of Eve and her
'transgressive' eating therefore emphasize the points of

contact between those fatherly voices that frame a

82

daughter's desire, the satiation of a father's libidinous
appetite through consuming a daughter, and the implicit,
deferred promise of alimentary gratification made to a
power-hungry, and therefore potentially incestuous, son.
Each of these becomes crucial to a familial economy which is
founded upon the daughter's compliance, upon her
consumability, and upon her inability to articulate the word

that constructs her desire in relation to her father's.

Notes

1. For details of these strands of criticism, see
William Schullenberger, "Wrestling with the Angel: Paradise
Lee; and Feminist Criticism," Milton Quarterly, 20, no. 3
(1986): 69-85; Joseph Wittreich, "‘John, John, I Blush for
Thee!‘: Mapping Gender Discourses in Paradise Lost," in pg;
of Bounds: Male Writers and Gender(ed) Criticism, ed. Laura
Claridge and Elizabeth Langland (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1990), 22-54. Each side holds to an
individualized view of the author so that the discussion
becomes bounded by notions of Milton as a forbidding
patriarchal literary father, or an embryonic womanist and
champion of companionate marriage. Mary Nyquist ("Fallen
Differences, Phallocentric Discourses: Losing Paradise Lost
to History," in Post Structuralism and the Question of
flishpzy, ed. Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington and Robert
Young, [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987], 212-
43) consciously avoids the limitations of the
feminist/opposition divide. See also Janet E. Halley,
"Female Autonomy in Milton's Sexual Poetics," in Milton and
ehe Ides of Woman, ed. Julia M. Walker (Urbana and Chicago:

University of Illinois Press, 1988), 230-53; Stephanie

83

84

Demetrakopoulos, "Eve as a Circean and Courtly Fatal Woman,"
hiiheh Quarterly 9, no. 4 (1975): 99-107.

2. Edward Le Comte, Milton and Sex (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1978), 68; Jean Hagstrum, Sex and
Sepsibilitv: Ideal and Erotic Love from Milton to Mozart
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), chap. 2. See
also Diane K. McColley, Milton's Eve (Urbana: University of
Illinois, 1983), chap. 3.

3. Noam Flinker, "Father-Daughter Incest in Paradise
Lpsh," Milton Quarterly, 14, no. 4 (1980): 116-22.

4. William Kerrigan, The Sacred Complex: On the
Esyehegenesis of "Paradise Lost". (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press, 1983), 123.

5. Bruce Thomas Boehrer, (Monarchy and Incest ih
Beheissance England: Literature, Culture, Kinship, and
Kingship [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1992], 132-37) is a notable exception. He treats incest as
a central issue in his brief discussion of Paradise Lost.

6. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of
Agzeement between the Mental Lives of Savages,and Neurotics,
trans. James Strachey (New York and London: W. W. Norton and
Company, 1989), 6-13. Eugenic theories of incest are often
discredited because incest prohibitions do not focus in all
cultures solely upon preventing consanguinity; in many
cultures prohibitions include affinal relations to whom
there is no direct blood tie. On this point see Emile

Durkheim (Incest: The Nature and Origin of the Taboo, trans.

85

Edward Sagarin [New York: Lyle and Stuart Inc., 1963], 68-9,
82-96) who first suggested that incest prohibition is part
of a larger avoidance of contact with bodily emissions,
including blood; Edmund Leach, Culture and Communication:

'c B Which S bols Are Connected (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1976), 65-68.

7. Claude Levi-Strauss, The Elementarv Structuresypf
Kinship, trans. James Harle Bell and John Richard von
Sturmer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), chap. 2.

8. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of
Qencepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York and Washington:
Frederick A. Praeger, 1966), 121. Roy Wagner ("Incest and
Identity: A Critique and Theory on the Subject of Exogamy
and Incest Prohibition," Man: ThesJournal of the Royal
Ahphpopoiogical institute 7, no. 4 [1972]: 601-13) usefully
elaborates Douglas' point when he demonstrates that a false
problem is created by separating relationship from
genealogical denotation and then inquiring about the
relationship between the two. He argues that the artificial
distinction between action and meaning can be overcome if
incest laws can be shown to "exist as a function of the
meaning system of a culture and to derive their force from
meaning" (606).

9. John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed.
Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 2.749-51,
2.758. All subsequent references will appear parenthetically

in my text.

86

10. Peggy Reeves Sanday (Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as
e epipural System [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1986]) argues that in an exogamic society in which trade and
marriage each emphasize the forging of 'outward facing' ties
to create an expanding network, "cannibalism stands for an
unacceptable 'turning back,'and is thus sybolically equated
with incest" (24). I shall return to a fuller discussion of
cannibalism, domestic and material economies, and modes of
production, in subsequent chapters.

11. Sin's reference to herself as a bitter morsel may
be an allusion to a belief (common in the folk wisdom of
many cultures) that a nursing woman ought to abstain from
sexual activity. Although Sin cannot be said to be nursing
in the conventional sense, she is certainly a source of
nourishment for the hell-hound offspring. Consistent with
the belief that a sexually-active nursing woman cannot
sustain her progeny because her milk is rendered
unnourishing or even curdled by her sexual activity, the
hell hounds remain unsated and so perpetuate the rapacious
cycle of the forced re-entry of the mother. For a discussion
of contemporary views of the sexuality of nursing mothers,
see Linda Pollock, A Lasting Relationship: Parents and
thigzen Over Three Centuries (Hanover: University Press of
New England, 1987), 53-55, cited in Ruth Perry, "Colonizing

the Breast: Sexuality and Maternity in Eighteenth-Century

England," in Forbidden History: The State, Society, and the
Reghiapion o: Sexuality in Modern Europe, ed. John C. Fout

87

(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992),
120-21, n. 71. See also Franciose Heritier, "The Symbols of
Incest and its Prohibitions," in Structuralist Essavs_ih
Beiigion, Histopy and Myth, ed. Michel Izard and Pierre
Smith (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
1982), 171-76. An interesting variation on this theme, the
'milk-tie,' is briefly discussed by Peter Farb and G.
Armelagos (Consuming Passion : The Anthropology of Food
[Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980], 78-79). The term milk-tie
refers to a sex prohibition imposed upon male and female
children unrelated by blood but nursed by the same woman. In
some societies such children are forbidden to marry as
though they were linked consanguineously.

12. That a woman's tongue, like her body, must be
governed is certainly not a new idea in this period, as
evidenced by the loquacity of Chaucer's Wife of Bath and the
mysogynist authors cited by her last husband in his attempts
to silence her. For a useful recent discussion of
Renaissance responses to legendary women who displayed a
"mannish independence and sexual depravity" and the climate
that these established for the early modern period, see Ann
Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, "Fetishizing Gender:
Constructing the Hermaphrodite in Renaissance Europe," in
hpdy guard : The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambi it , ed.
Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (New York and London:

Routledge, 1991), 80-111.

88

13. G. R. Quaiffe (Wanton Wenches and Wavward Wives:
Peasants and Illicit Sex in Seventeenth Centurv England
[London: Croom Helm, 1979], 31-37) cites evidence given in
an examination of witchcraft conducted by Glastonbury
justice Robert Morgan in 1653. Much of the so-called
evidence supporting accusations of witchcraft focused on the
power of witches to cause monstrous birth or untoward
behavior in those who crossed them.

14. For Sara Van den Berg ("Eve, Sin and Witchcraft in
Earedise Lost,"-Milton Quarterly 47, no. 4 [1986]: 347-65),
Sin and Eve are represented as diametrical opposites and Eve
is ultimately redeemed as a 'good' woman. While I agree that
Eepagise Lost does establish Sin and Eve as figures of
contrast, I believe that because the appetite of eeeh figure
makes her appear culpable, it does not allow the two figures
to be read as opposites. Similarly, the Adam-Eve and Satan-
Sin opposition is disallowed by acknowledging the incestuous
underpinnings of each union. For a fuller debunking of the
stereotype of the daughter's culpability in incestuous
relations with her father, see Judith Lewis Herman, Father-
Daughter Incest (London and Massachussetts: Harvard
University Press, 1981), chaps. 2 and 3.

15. In considering the persistence of the vagina
dehhehe figure over several centuries, Margaret R. Miles
(Qaphal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in
phe thistian West [London: Beacon Press, 1989], 159, 223,

n. 49) argues that while female reproductive functions were

89

"the quintessential terror" during the Middle Ages and were
seen as needing restraint, they nevertheless provided a
macabre form of voyeuristic pleasure. This point is
evidenced by the frequent appearance of female genitalia and
the simultaneously frightening and titilating manner of
their depiction in the art of the period. Anna K. Juhnke
("Remnants of Misogyny in Paradise Lost," Milton Quarterly
22, no. 2 [1988]: 50-58) carefully traces the sources,
including Spenser's Errour, that were available to Milton
for his depiction of Eve and monstrous rendering of Sin.

16. This sense of Satan as a predator is heightened by
his likeness to the vulture of Mont Imaus who gorges upon
"the flesh of Lambs or yeanling Kids" (3.434). It is
interesting to note that as Satan paces, awaiting his prey,
he overlooks the realm that is to be peopled by the progeny
of the "ill-join'd Sons and Daughters" made vain by Sin. For
an elaboration of the role of actual and symbolic food in
rituals marking changes in state and status, see Leach, 60-
62. For a more detailed discussion of how women's erotic and
maternal functions become constituted as mutually exclusive,
and the connection of these functions to diet, see Perry,
120-21.

17. On the subject of absent and present women,
especially mothers in Paradise Lost, cf. Richard Corum, "In
White Ink: Paradise Lost and Milton's Ideas of Women," in

Milton and the Idea of Woman, ed. Julia M. Walker (Urbana

and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 120-47.

90

Viewing woman in terms of the earth as a colonial territory,
Corum sees heaven as a mother and an "ideal home country"
from which God's progeny is born. Asserting that "this home
country, as maternal matrix, has no sexual or genetic
relationship to the father's generation of sons" (122),
Corum argues that Milton's God is "not sexual." He does
concede, however, that while heaven's gate "Pour[s] out by
the million her victorious bands" (2.996-97), there are no
daughters, only "Spirits masculine" among them; Lynda E.
Boose, "The Father's House and the Daughter in It: The
Structures of Western Culture's Daughter-Father
Relationship," in Daughters and Fathers, ed. Lynda E. Boose
and Betty S. Flowers (Baltimore and London: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1989), 19-74. Noting the dearth of
female figures in Western originary myth, Boose reads the
absence women as explicitly an absence of daughters (44-48);
Marcia Landry, "Kinship and the Role of Women in Paradise
LESL" Milton Studies 4 (1972): 3-18. Landry, though she errs
in locating the Satan-Sin incest in Hell, partly explains
the difficulty of identifying who is a mother by showing the
complexity of blood ties in the poem: "In Hell, both son and
father rape the mother who is also daughter and sister,
confusing the roles of father, son, brother, and husband as
Sin confuses her roles of mother, sister, daughter, and
wife" (10).

18. Perry, 124, n.53. That Culpeper's manual was

modified and republished in 1684, 1716, 1737, 1777, and

91

again as recently as 1985, attests to the dissemination--and
perhaps the popular appeal--of the idea that fetuses are
tempermentally affected by the diet of the woman bearing
them. Farb and Armelagous consider the role of the sacred
cow in India in a way that is broadly analogous to the way
that Perry believes mothers were perceived in England in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They claim that the
cow holds a revered position among certain groups in India
mainly because it is "the factory" from which key elements
of agricultural production (oxen for tilling and transport,
dung for fuel and fertilization) are derived. Farb and
Armelagous further suggest that prohibitions regarding
consumption that become woven into the pyschic and cultural
fabric often have their raison d'étre in economic forces
(120).

19. Boose, 49.

20. Boehrer makes a similar point when he argues that
in creating a distinction between the holy trinity
("heavenly rectitude") and the Satanic trio ("infernal
depravity") Milton "create[s] a distinction without concrete
difference" (135).

21. Christine Froula, "Pechter's Spectre: Milton's
Bogey Writ Small; or Why is He Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"
inhical Ingpipy 11, no. 1 (1984): 171-78; cf. Boehrer, 132-
37.

22. On the transmission of power, see Froula's earlier

and better-known article, "When Eve Reads Milton: Undoing

92

the Canonical Economy" Critical Ingpiry 10, no. 2 (1983):
321-48. In it Froula argues that Milton "'transexualize[s]'"
the female Muse "not just into a Creator figure but into
that powerful, self-sufficient heie Creator so central to
Adam in his relations with Eve" (338). I agree with Froula
that the very "invisibility" of cultural authority
underwrites silencing and exclusion of woman and that the
poem creates an explicitly male originary myth. I differ
from Froula where she frames female identity as though it
were a pre-existing entity that is only subsequently
repressed by the effects of a patriarchal structure. Halley,
who uses Froula, likewise assumes a certain fixity of male
and female essence. She argues that in the invocation to
Book 1, "[e]xactly when maternal brooding becomes paternal
impregnation, the female figure of the 'heav'ly Muse' is
displaced by a male spirit" (249).

23. Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the
'Political Economy' of Sex," in Toward an Anthropology of
EQEQB. ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1975), 159: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English
Liteyature and Male Homgsocial Desipe (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1985), chap. 1.

24. Rubin is clearly conscious of the need to
contextualize the exchange system as she conceives of it
when she asks: "Is the woman traded for a woman, or is there
an equivalent? Is this equivalent only for women, or can it

be turned into something else.... is it turned into

93

political power or wealth?" (207). She further observes the
importance of the evolution of commodity forms in women,
systems of land tenure, political arrangements and
technological developments to any full-bodied analysis of
women in a given society, culture and time.

25. For a thoroughgoing critique of Rubin which tackles
Rubin's implicit acceptance of a 'natural' sexuality into
which women can be liberated, see Judith Butler, Gender
Tgouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identihy (New York
and London: Routledge, 1990), 72-75.

26. Mary Nyquist, "The Genesis of Gendered Subjectivity
in the Divorce Tracts and in Paradise Lost," in Re-membering
Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions, ed. Mary Nyquist
and Margaret W. Ferguson (New York and London: Methuen,
1987), 111, 114.

27. Referring to the biblical myth, Boose argues that
as Eve is given to Adam, the brother-sister union is
implicitly authorized (49). While this may also be said of
Eepegise_hpsh, the sibling relationship and fraternal
authority resulting from receiving Eve is made subordinate
to paternal authority by Milton's luxuriant description of
Eve's birth which establishes the importance of the father-
daughter relationship. 0n the question of sibling incest and
mutuality, see Diana E. H. Russell, Incest in the Lives of
Gigis ehd Women (New York: Basic Books, 1986), chap. 18. The

power differential in sibling relationships is an issue I

94

shall take up again in my chapters on Clarissa and Tph
Jones-

28. More than one critic has noted that Eve's account
echoes Sin's words to Satan at the Gates of Hell: "Thou art
my Father, thou my author, thou / My being gav'st me; whom
should I obey / But thee, whom follow?" (2.864-66).

29. When Kerrigan suggests that the Death-Sin incest
warns against the appetites of the usurpatory son, he also
claims the son's appetites are made possible by the
"incestuous mother." In blaming the incestuous mother,
Kerrigan overlooks the important fact that Sin is first the

incestuous daughter. Even as a mother, moreover, her son's

 

pepe p; he; makes §lfli§ appetite less the point than Qeehhis
appetite, and both of these secondary to the conditions
which enable the rape; Philip J. Gallagher (Milton, the
Bihie, and Misogyny, ed. Eugene R. Cunnar and Gail L.
Mortimer [Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press,
1990]) also views Sin as culpable for winning attention with
her graces; he claims that Sin gives way to "consensual
perversion" with Satan and his followers (93).

30. Froula suggests that Milton uses the Genesis myth
in a way that "preenact[s] the silencing of Eve" and that
this is integral to Milton's authority in a patriarchal
culture ("When Eve Reads Milton," 338): Boehrer makes the
important point that language is necessary to prohibition
when he argues, with Derrida, that incest presupposes and

comprises the extension of popular language between kinship

95

groups: "without popular language there is no practical
apparatus for prohibition... before the prohibition, it is
not incest: forbidden, it cannot become incest except
through the recognition of the prohibition" (136-37).

31. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar treat the theme
of Satan's rebellion in their landmark study The Madypman in
phesAttic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Centupy
Liperapy imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1985). They suggest that Satan provides implicitly
feminist women readers with a hero, a model for rebellion,
or a revolutionary figure with whom they might identify. But
this argument presumes that Satan functions on the edge of,
or outside, an established order. In casting Satan as a
victim of sorts, they inadvertently imply that his
incestuous use of his daughter ought to be overlooked
because his rebellion is a bid for freedom from the larger
power structure (188-212). I believe that Satan's exercise
of power over Sin presumes her fulfillment of a duty to him
in a manner analogous to the filial obedience that God
demands of his sons, and, more specifically, analogous to
that obedience to which Adam's voice commands his daughter,
Eve. This makes Satan an inappropriate, or at least
unsatisfactory, model for 'feminist rebellion' or literary
women's subversiveness.

32. Cf. Louise Schleiner ("Pastoral Male Friendship and

Miltonic Marriage: Textual Systems Transposed" Literaturey

inherpgetahion, Theogy 2 [1990]: 41-58) who argues that

96

Milton creates space for the emergence of a new and
distinctly Protestant bourgeois form of marriage in which
the wife is a fit helpmeet. She suggests that Adam asks for
a companion in the spirit of the pastoral tradition of male
friendship, but that, as Eve does not fulfill this role,
Adam continues to need homosocial male friendship which he
then finds in Raphael. That Eve continues to minister to the
garden during Raphael's visit, Schleiner argues, signals a
marital ideal in which woman can affiliately join in with
male intimacy and "clai[m] her own education and biblical
spirituality... largely through ...[her] insistence on
working alone" (154).

33. Raphael tells Adam that when he was given the gift
of life, he was also given the gift of speech: "Nor are thy
lips ungraceful, Sire of men, / Nor tongue ineloquent..."
(8.218-19). Adam thus possesses the capacity to name and so
to construct meaning: "to speak I tri'd, and forthwith spake
/ My Tongue obey'd and readily could name / Whate'er I saw"
(8.271-73). Eve does not have this access to articulation:
she is, as I have argued, articulated.

34. Herman, 4.

35. Boose, 56.

36. Eli Sagan (At The Dawn of Tryranny: The Origins of
individualism. Political Oppression and the State [New York:
Knopf, 1985], 296) believes that when a son is born, an
extreme emotional conflict is engendered in the father, for

the birth presages the political, if not the physical,

97

decline of the father. See also Otto Rank (Doubles: A
Esyeheanalytic Study, trans., ed. and intro. Harry Tucker
Jr., [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1971], 153) who suggests that the father's ambivalence is
associated with the rebirth of the father in the son. He
claims that in some cultures it is believed that a child
with a strong resemblance to the father has appropriated a
part of the father's personality and so the father must soon
die.

37. Many critics have also interpreted Satan's
Leviathian proportions following the failed 'coup' (1.192-
241) as an indicator of filial strength that is to be
overcome by the greater paternal might.

38. While Sin responds as warmly as Death to Satan's
promise of sustenance (2.848-49), the fact that her appetite
is conditioned by her father's aligns Death's appetite more

closely with Satan's lust for power.

Chapter 2: Robinson Crusoe Inc(orporates).

"Come boldly, every one of you, and assemble
together to dine off me, for you shall at the same
time eat your fathers and grandfathers, whose
flesh has served to feed and nourish this body.
These muscles, this flesh and these veins are
yours, poor fools that you are! can you not see
that they still contain the substance of your
ancestors' limbs? Relish them well, you will find
that they have the flavour of your own flesh." A
fiction that by no means savours of barbarity.

--Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, "Of Cannibals."

Whence comes all the indecent lawful Things we
have been talking of, but from this Sin of Sodom,
(viz.) Fulness of Bread? while the Stomach is
gorged with animal Food, of which no Nation in the
World feeds like us; while the Blood is filled
with these pungent Particles, and the Veins
swelled with animal Spirits, no wonder the seminal
Vessels are over full, and summon the Man to a
Dismission or Evacuation, even at the Price of his
Virtue, of his Conscience, and of his Reason.

--Daniel Defoe, Conjugal Lewdness.

By Modesty in Discourse I think it must of
Necessity be understood, a Decency of Expression;
particularly as our Discourse relates to Actions
or Things (whether necessary or accidental) that
are and ought to be Matters of Secresy [sic],
Things which are to be spoken of with reserve, and
in Terms that may give no offence to the chaste
Ears and Minds of others, and yet perhaps are of
Necessity to be spoken to. Indeed such Things,
with respect to Decency, ought never to be spoken
of at all, but when Necessity urges; and it were

98

99

to be wished, that in a Christian and Modest
Nation, where the Laws of Decency are expressly
admitted as Rules of Life, all immodest Discourses
were decry'd by universal Custom; and especially
that Printing and Publishing such Things as are
not to be read with the like Decency, were
effectually suppress'd. But as I have made that

Subject a Part of this Work, I say no more of it
here.

--Daniel Defoe, Conjugal Lewdness.

As my discussion of Paradise Lost has shown,
consumption must be understood as far more than merely a
means of supporting life because eating has cultural
significance beyond simple gustatory functions. When
examining consumption in Robinson Crusoe, which for many
readers is made particularly memorable by the incidence of
cannibalism, it is crucial to dispel the materialist myth
that Crusoe superficially subscribes to--that anthropophagy
serves primarily to create a supply of food in a 'savage'
culture.

The myth is not one that is to be dispensed with solely
in the light of modern thinking or since the rise of the
discipline of anthropology. As E. Pearlman has pointed out
in his excellent discussion of cannibalism in Robinson
Cnnsoe, several writers available to Defoe were fully aware
that the consumption of human flesh by other humans was more
than simply a food preference aberrant by European standards
in a given period of history. Montaigne, whose Essais was
first translated into English in 1603 by John Florio, is

probably the writer on cannibalism best known to modern

100

readers. He was clearly sensible of the symbolic and

ceremonial functions of anthropophagy in his essay, "Of

Cannibals":
[the] captor convokes a great gathering of his
acquaintance.... [He and] his best friend... in
presence of the whole assembly, dispatch [the
prisoner] with their swords. This done, they roast
and eat him in common, and send bits of him to
their absent friends. Not, as one might suppose,

for nourishment... but to signify an extreme
revenge.

And when he used cannibalism to attack the cruelties that
his own culture perpetrated in the name of the Church,
Montaigne, though himself a Catholic, certainly understood
and exploited the symbolic potential of cannibalism to refer
to religious extremism: "there is more barbarity in eating a
live than a dead man, in tearing on the rack and torturing
the body of a man still full of feeling, in roasting him
piecemeal and giving him to be bitten and mangled by dogs
and swine... under the cloak of piety and religion... than
in roasting him and eating him after he is dead."1

Modern anthropologists have, likewise, gone some way
toward exploring the figurative possibilities and the
symbolic functions of cannibalism. Anthropologist Peggy
Reeves Sanday, whose data demonstrate that more than fifty-
six percent of simple societies do nee practice cannibalism,
claims that for a society to sustain itself primarily
through cannibalism would require that its production of

offspring far exceed what is practicable. The idea that

101

cannibalism merely supplies a community with a source of
protein and provides food for common, everyday consumption
is as untenable for Sanday as it is for Pearlman--who
considers the notion an ecological absurdity.2 While Sanday
acknowledges that cannibalism can sometimes be a reaction to
external conditions such as famine which give rise to food
stress, she also observes that in societies where there is
hunger, cannibalism is frequently not practised.

Instead of seeing cannibalism in terms of food supply,
Sanday conceives cannibalism, as Mary Douglas conceives
incest, within a larger framework of the rituals and
prohibitions which function as cultural signifiers. For
Sanday, the ritual nature of cannibalism suggests that, like
sacrifice and indeed incest, cannibalism is a primordial
metaphor for relations of domination and submission and for
formulating self- and social-consciousness. Concerned with
the foundation, maintenance and regeneration of the cultural
order, cannibalism is an ontological system consisting of
"the myths, symbols and rituals by which people explore
their relationship to the world, to other beings, and to
being itself."3

The importance of Sanday's formulation to my discussion
of Behinson Qrusoe can be clarified through a brief return
to Mary Douglas' view of the psychic importance of
maintaining symbolic distinctions and boundaries. Douglas
asserts that religious and other rituals constitute an

effort to create unity in, and to impose system on,

102

experience which is otherwise inherently untidy: "It is only
by exaggerating the difference between within and without,
above and below, male and female, with and against, that a
semblance of order is created."4 All that cannot be clearly
identified as belonging to a distinct category becomes a
locus of tension. Because of the body's central role in
fundamental experiences, Douglas sees body symbolism as a
highly emotive part of the common stock of symbols. Both
matter which straddles the inside/outside bodily
distinction, and the sites at which the inside/outside
division is breached, especially bodily orifi, have a
tremendous power to pollute and therefore to generate fear.
Although Douglas refers explicitly to substances which
traverse the inside/outside divide by emanating IIQE the
body at especially vulnerable points (she names spittle,
blood, milk, urine, faeces, tears), a parallel argument can
be made with regard to matter which enters and becomes part
of the body. As such substances--especially foods--also blur
lines of demarcation, they ought to represent a similar
threat to order. Precisely because ritual cannibalism is
centrally concerned with the orderly crossing of bodily
boundaries, Sanday argues, it constitutes a conceptual
framework that provides "models of and for behavior....
[and] a system of processing culturally encoded information"
(31).

While my analysis of Robinson Crusee will occasionally

touch upon actual anthropophagy, Sanday's understanding of

103

cannibalism as an ontological system is valuable for
enlarging our understanding of the use that Defoe make of
figures of eating in this work. Making use of Sanday's
insight, I argue that, as cannibalism is used to figure
relations of power, it serves to disclose several highly
eroticized domestic economies in Robinson Crusoe. There is
in my discussion one small but important departure from
Sanday. Sanday identifies the reproductive female body as
the key ontological symbol in cannibalistic cultures which
are typically dominated by competitive male individualism
and stresses that cannibalism is a form of social aggression
associated with the oral phase of psychosexual development
and directed at the mother.5 She argues that cannibalism
plays a primary role in the social construction of gender
identity because in the psychological basis of patriarchal
social structures there is an on-going and violent
repudiation of oral dependency on the mother. Although I do
return to the important issue of oral violence toward
females and especially toward mother figures, the first part
of my discussion tries to show the larger structure wherein
men exhibit a predatory and, I contend, fundamentally
incestuous, violence toward other men. Because I believe
that oral aggression against females arises out of the
context established by relations between men, I place
greater emphasis in this chapter on the nature of the
intense competition between men. Such competition is

repeatedly expressed through references to bodily control,

104

orality and consumption, all of which are linked by the
trope of cannibalism in Robinson Crusoe.

My discussion of Robinson Crusee begins with a close
look at the strained relations between eater and eaten in
the work. Even though instances of actual cannibalism on
'Crusoe's' island late in the narrative are memorable
because of Crusoe's alarm and his fear of being destroyed,
literal anthropophagy does not establish eater and eaten as
as metaphors for human relations. Instead, anthropophagy
makes visible and clarifies mechanisms of power discernible
in several domestic economies in Robinson Cruspe including
those that undergird extant domestic relations, and
especially those between fathers and sons, in Robinson
ansoe. An important aspect of such relations as I have
identified them previously is the fact that father and
child--frequently represented as respectively predator and
prey--are differentially empowered. An examination of the
predatory qualitity of father-son relations in Robinson
ansoe shows how these enable and support the consumerism
that emerges with colonialism in the period of mercantile
expansion in which the work is set. Familial power dynamics
emerge with what I refer to as the novel's 'politics of
food' or its 'politics of consumption,' and this is first
seen in Crusoe's father's house.

The father, Kreutznaer, recommends the "middle state"
as one that will allow Crusoe to be appropriately nourished

without exposure to "vicious living, luxury, and

105

extravagancies on one hand, or by hard labour, want of
necessaries, and mean diet on the other."6 According to
Kreutznaer, those who live the extremes suffer distemper and
discomfort. It follows that Crusoe's acceptance of
Kreutznaer's middle state would mean that he would not have
to be "sold to the life of slavery for daily bread... but
[live] in easy circumstances... sensibly tasting the sweets
of living without the bitter" (28-9). But just as
Kreutznaer's gout-riddled condition undercuts his sermon on
the virtues of temperance, so the ease with which Kreutznaer
may withhold sustenance undercuts his apparent willingness
to sustain Crusoe.7 Kreutznaer's offer to place Crusoe under
"no necessity to seek [his] bread" (29) is subject to
certain conditions, for Kreutznaer, who has the means to
maintain Crusoe, also claims the power to withhold that
other paternal blessing which would allow Crusoe to maintain
himself outside his father's house:
having thus discharged his duty in warning me
against measures which he knew would be to my
hurt... he would do very kind things for me if I
would stay and settle at home as he directed... he

would not have so much hand in my misfortunes as
to give me any encouragement to go away [and]...

if I did take this foolish step, God would not
hiess me, and I would have leisure hereafter to

reflect upon having neglected his counsel when
there might be none to assist in my recovery.
(emphasis added, 29)

Given the fact that a retraction of paternal support

and sustenance is threatened, the early exchanges between

106

Crusoe and Kreutznaer strike at the very core of what it
means to remain in the father's condition-bound house. If
the son should disobey, as his errant brothers have before
him, he will be doomed to a languishing state from which,
starved of paternal approval in both senses, he might never
recover. The significance of the father's withdrawal of
approval is encapsulated in two biblical sons whose fates
are mapped out, like Crusoe's, through the metaphor of
consumption. The sea captain on Crusoe's first nautical
venture observes Crusoe's likeness to Jonah whose filial
disobedience results in his being swallowed by a whale, and
Crusoe fantasizes his own ultimate obedience to Kreutznaer
and its reward of being feted and feasted like the returned
Prodigal. The parables of the Prodigal and Jonah would seem
to offer the choices of obedience or disobedience, of reward
or punishment, of being fed or food. And clearly Jonah's
fate of being entombed in the belly of the whale, though
temporarily, fits this model.

But the Prodigal's father's slaughter of the fatted
calf conceals a sinister twist which lies embedded in this
form of paternal power. Having wasted his substance--having
figuratively consumed himself--the starving Prodigal is
placed more thoroughly at his father's mercy. In receiving
the Prodigal son and feeding him, the parabolic father (of
whom Crusoe believes his own father to be an emblem [37])
would effectively renew the capacity to dictate terms: he

would renew the power to prey upon his charge's dependence

107

upon him. While departure from the father's house at one
level suggests a movement beyond the realm of paternal
power, Kreutznaer's evocation of the omnipresent heavenly
father suggests that such a removal creates at best an
illusion of escape. The inevitability of the Prodigal's
return and his ensuing obedience gives his father license to
extact what price he might in the face of the child's
involuntary dependency. By becoming his son's host--that is,
in receiving him--Kreutznaer in a sense offers himself to
the son for communion. Yet while the concept of communion
contains the promise of the reciprocity of host and guest,
reciprocity is not offered here. In the son's communion with
his father, as in the ritualized communion with the Ur-
father host of the religious ritual, the son accepts the
kind of food that promises eventually to convert the feeder
into the form of 'host' upon which the father might live.8
The son's return therefore enables a more thorough
incorporation into the father's domestic economy and signals
the father's authority over those who are of his house; the
Prodigal's parabolically-prescribed return and the father's
role as one who is disposed to receive the son each
underscore the father's power. Defoe's use of the Prodigal
parable highlights the obligation which accompanies the
son's acceptance of paternal sustenance: it shows that
although filial obedience offers the promise of being fed,
it also necessarily writes the child as potential food--as a

body available for the father's use. The kind of paternalism

108

that characterizes Kreutznaer's house clearly relies upon a
debt nexus between the male parent who makes provision for
the members of his household and those members. This aspect
of the father-son relationship forces a recognition of the
invasive quality of paternal demands and obligations.9
Because domestic relations in Robinson Crusoe are
repeatedly concerned with the violation of bodily and
psychic boundaries, the text's use of eating, purging and
being eaten become highly charged. Common to all three
activities is the mouth, the site at which substances in the
external world become incorporated into, or, if
necessary,ejected from, the corporeal being. As Paul Rozin
explains in his study of food preferences, the mouth is "the
last site at which reversible decisions about acceptance or
rejection can be made. Once swallowing has occurred, the
ingested substance is difficult to reject voluntarily."
Given the importance of the mouth and the functions
associated with this portal between the inside and outside,
the mouth plays a key role in both accepting the matter of
one's being into the body and in rejecting or regurgitating
what is deemed noxious. The father's peculiarly oral
violence toward the son (in the form of the blessing given
or withheld and the injunction to live in the middle state)
is thus oddly similar to the father's bread; it must be
expelled before it is assimilated and before it possibly
contaminates. At the most literal, as well as the highly

figurative level, Kreutznaer's invasiveness must be purged

109

before the son can begin to become his own master. It is
entirely fitting, therefore, that Crusoe's disobedience in
going to sea awakens alternating fears of being "swallowed,"
and so losing being, and that it is accompanied by perpetual
vomiting, swooning and calentures which likewise signal a
loss of self.10 Because the father-son relationship here is
one in which the father seeks to assimilate the son, it is
cannibalistic; as this relation exists between two immediate
members of a household that functions as a domestic familial
unit, as well as a family in the sense of close blood
relatives, it is also profoundly incestuous.

The power dynamic in Kreutznaer's house and the
implications of its operation are taken up in Crusoe's
enslavement by the captain of the Turkish rover. When Crusoe
is captured, persistent images of bodily invasion and
penetration indicate that the basic fear that attends living
in the new master's house arises from the threat of being
physically possessed. The Turkish captain's wholesale
claiming of Crusoe and the latter's enforced servility
amplify this threat. Crusoe is on a slave ship for the
purpose of increasing his own material possessions when the
Turkish ship attacks. He is alarmed by his transformation
"from a merchant to a miserable slave" (41), from purchaser
to purchase, and from master to minion. And Crusoe has,
perhaps, good reason to be alarmed by the transformation,
when one considers the assumptions that he himself brings to

the role of the master.

110

Crusoe the plantation owner sees slave ownership as a
means to future prosperity: he understands proprietorship
explicitly in terms of stock increase. Later in the
narrative, when Crusoe laments the decisions that have led
to his island sojourn, he discloses in a rhetorical question
that it was specifically to expedite such "encrease" that he
first undertook the slaving mission:

What business had I to leave a settled fortune, a
well stocked plantation, improving and encreasing,
to turn supra-cargo to Guinea, to fetch negroes,
when patience and time would have so encreased our
stock at home, that we could have bought them at

our own door, from those whose business it was to
fetch them? (199)

Although it is the plantation, identified as stock,
that is destined to increase, the notion of fetching human
cargo which might at some future date be 'purchased' at
one's own door through patience and time expended at home is
rather suggestive given Crusoe's understanding of mastery
elsewhere. For example, when Crusoe describes mastery on the
island as a state of having everything that he desires ("I
had nothing to covet: for I had all that I was capable of
enjoying: I was lord of the whole mannor" [139]), he
attaches the perquisite of pleasure to the power and
privileges of ownership. This draws attention to another
benefit that may be reaped by he who plants and invites a
rather different reading of Crusoe's role as a 'planter.' In

the light of Crusoe's definition of mastery, the plantation

111

first identified as stock in the above passage gives way to
the human stock--African slaves--which might be also
propitiously "encreased" with time and patience expended at
home. Precisely because the plantation passage fails to
identify the most certain and direct method of of increasing
one's stock of slaves--sexual contact with slaves--it
gestures toward, without having to name, the tacitly-
accepted sexual privileges of mastery.11 Against the
backdrop of Crusoe's definition of mastery, his recollection
of the invasive Kreutznaer's "prophetick discourse" en route
to the house of his captor and new master, the Turk,
establishes a point of contact between the Turk's and
Kreutznaer's houses.

The similarity between Kreutznaer's domestic
arrangements and those of the Turkish captain is heightened
when one considers the popular view of Turks in early
eighteenth-century England. Turks were commonly associated
with contemporary beliefs-~and growing fears in the wake of
a number of well-publicized prosecutions--about sodomitical
practices.12 Looking at homosexual behaviors and the
evolution of sodomitical subcultures in Western culture
during the early modern period, Randolph Trumbach
distinguishes between continental European and English, and
Islamic and Christian attitudes toward sodomy. He notes that
the Societies for the Reformation of Manners, influenced by
the religious revival of the late seventeenth- and early

eighteenth-centuries, were particularly active between 1690

112

and 1730. Trumbach suggests that the 'reforms' that these
societies supported (and sometimes facilitated through the
persecution of 'mollies,') contributed to the stigmatization
of sodomy and sodomites in Europe.13 Because he finds that
in some Islamic cultures sodomy was not stigmatized if the
'passive' role was taken by an adolescent, while in Europe
both passive and active sodomitical roles were stigmatized,
Trumbach helps to partially explain why Islamic Turkey was
strongly identified with 'exotic' sexuality and why it came
to be seen as one of the "home[s] of sodomy." G. S.
Rousseau's slightly more recent examination of late
seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century sexual mores also
indicates that there were certain popular myths about
Turkish sexual behaviors in the period. He suggests that
these myths gave rise to tales of Ottoman homosexuality.
While Rousseau concedes that it is difficult to assess to
what degree such tales fed into pre-existing British myths
about Turkish sodomy, he nevertheless demonstrates that
Turkey was clearly identified by the English as one of three
supposed origins of sodomy.14

The popular conception of Turks and the sodomitical
practices with which Turks were synonymous in this period
unmistakeably, if subtley, sexualizes Crusoe's situation as
the slave to a Turk. The pointed separation of Crusoe from
the other members of the crew who are taken to the emperor's
court, and the Turkish captain's deliberate selection of

Crusoe for his domestic and personal uses are described in

113

terms which connote their invasiveness. Because he is
"perfectly overwhelmed" by the change of circumstances,
Crusoe is "obliged to yield" as the crew of the slaver has
previously had to yield to the greater might of the
attacking rover.

Crusoe's sudden shift in circumstance from merchant to
chattel is indicated most strongly in the functions he must
perform: he is "kept by the captain of the rover as his
proper prize, and made his slave, being young and nimble and
fit for his business" (41). Retained as the Turk's property,
Crusoe is both a domestic menial "left on shoar to look
after his little garden, and to do the common drudgery of
slaves about his house" (41) and a sort of 'cabin boy.‘
Lying first in the cabin of the master's larger vessel while
it is docked, Crusoe subsequently composes a third of the
crew that staffs the pinnace that serves as the Turk's
vessel of pleasure. The pinnace--which in contemporary usage
was another name for a prostitute or a mistress--is equipped
with the accoutrements of fishing and merry-making. The
pleasure vessel also has within it a "cabbin, which l[ies]
very snug and low, and ha[s] in it room for [the Turk] to
lye, with a slave or two, and... some small lockers to put
in some bottles of such liquor as he thought fit to
drink...." (42-3); it is in this cabin that Crusoe is
"ordered... to lye" (41).

It is not Crusoe's availability for domestic

consumption which is the only significant point here.

114

Equally important is the text's rejection of males as items
for consumption and its reluctance to represent--to name--
the availability of men as objects of male sexual pleasure
except in the most oblique fashion.15 Such obliquity has
created a lacuna around certain aspects of male sexuality in
Robinson Crusoe and has caused more than one critic to speak
of the text as being devoid of sexual desire.

The alleged absence of desire in Robinson Crusge
becomes conspicuous precisely because so much of Defoe's
writing--prose, poetry and prose fiction--is concerned, at
some level, with the theme of sexual desire. Certainly, it
might be argued that Defoe does not deal with the theme in
Rebinson Crusoe in the same way as he does in Moll Flanders
or Roxana in which female sexual desire is located centrally
and situated largely in relation to heterosexual marital
arrangements. Indispensable to the claim that sexual desire
is absent in Robinson Crusoe is the assumption that by
sexual desire one means heterosexual desire. And indeed
where this claim is made the dearth of women in the work is
often used as supporting evidence while the proliferation of
men and groups of cohabiting men goes largely uncommented
upon in terms of the sexual theme.16

Closing down all erotic possibilities other than
heterosexual requires the virtual divorce of Robinson Crusoe
from the contemporary climate of sodomy trials, the
activities of the Societies for the Reformation of Manners,

criticism of homosexuality in courtly circles, raids on

115

mollie houses, and documented concerns about sodomy in the
Navy. Furthermore, as much of Defoe's own work both before
and after Robinson Crusoe--including his gleeful satire of
the conquests, rapes and resulting miscegenation that had
made the Englishman trueborn--demonstrates, Defoe was at
least mindful of the quiet concealment of vices that social
mores render unmentionable.17
In his later treatise Conjugal Lewdness (1727),

furthermore, Defoe makes much of the association between
Turks and sodomy. In order to do so he relies upon a tacit
understanding among his readers of mythical Turkish sexual
practices. Defoe then uses this understanding to criticize
the 'unspeakable' practice of conjugal sodomy. Making it
quite clear that he disapproves of this practice and others
that he makes an elaborate feint of not naming ("God forbid
we should by Silence seem to approve that Wickedness"),
Defoe asserts "that silence is occasioned only because the
Wickedness is too gross to be reproved." Defoe "compliments"
the Turks for their resourcefulness and for their

fruitful Inventions... some Signals, some Figures,

to serve instead of Speech...[.] I have observed

the Tnnhs... turning up the Slipper by which

Signals or Figures the filthy Part might be
expressed, without fouling the Mouth, or

affronting the Ears of others.18

Although the context of this passage is heterosexual marital

practice, the point that it makes relies upon what is

116

strenuously rejected; and what is rejected is the practice
of sodomy which is associated, via the reference to Turks,
with male homosexuality. The "compliment" to the Turks, if
it can be so called, is therefore undoubtedly backhanded. As
the compliment assumes that the reader shares the writer's
understanding of the nature of the absence to which such
figures allude, it also presumes the reader's concurrence
that what is made absent by the Turkish custom is
unspeakable because it is abhorrent.

Michel Foucault construes such lacunae around the
subject of male homosexual desire as a form of denial. He
suggests that because male power as it is constituted
through heterosexual relations is always constructed in
terms of polarities such as active command and passive
compliance, dominator and dominated, penetrator and
penetrated, one role is understood as intrinsically
honorable and the other its converse. If this model is
transferred to a situation of same-sex male partners, a
conflict develops between an ethos which associates men with
the active pole and the conception of all sexual intercourse
in terms of penetration and male domination. To be an object
of pleasure without giving up forever the high status
accorded to men in the heterosexual matrix, the passive
partner or 'boy' must represent himself as capable of
prevailing over others. He must also either deny the passive
role itself or deny the possibility that the passive role

might afford pleasure. Denial affirms that such pleasure

117

could not exist, and prescribes that it ought not to be
experienced. Where such is the case, desire becomes
enshrouded by a tacit code of silence--an absence of what is
socially and culturally awkward to name--and therefore
surrounded by taboo.19

In Robinson Crusoe the silence that envelopes master-
slave sexual relations is particularly sonorous when one
acknowledges the common understanding, contemporary and
modern, of the sexual offices demanded of slaves. Orlando
Patterson's extraordinarily detailed study, Slaverv and
Social Death, indicates that in many parts of the Islamic
world, and notably among Ottoman Turks in this period,
European slaves were especially prized. Pointing out that
homosexuality was common in the Jebala area of Morocco where
'boy-markets' were to be found, Patterson also claims that
the homosexual use of slaves both remained an important
aspect of Islamic slavery into the twentieth century, and
that it was "almost the norm" among the mamluks. Paul
Rycaut's The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (1688)
confirms that the homosexual use of servants and slaves was,
if not he rigeur, at least common enough to draw commentary
from travelers who wrote about Turkish customs. Rycaut's
prominence as secretary to Heneage Finch, the second Earl of
Winchilsea, who was Ambassador to Turkey between 1661 and
1669, as well as his own five-year residence in
Constantinople that Rycaut deemed his "qualification" to

write on Turkish customs, lent his treatise a certain

118

legitimacy. The impressive publication history of Rycaut's
work and the attention that it continued to receive into the
early-eighteenth century suggest that Defoe's mention of
Turks in the context of slavery would have been a subtle cue
that contemporary readers would have been unlikely to have
missed.20

Although I am not claiming that sodomitical acts
actually take place either in the Turkish captain's house or
aboard his pleasure vessel, I am suggesting two things.
First, that the sexual consumption of domestic minions is
established as considerably more than a possibility in the
text. More importantly, the pattern of male power relations
in Robinson Crusoe (and especially the relation of the
master-proprietor to the slave-property which parallels the
father-son relationship of Kreutznaer and Crusoe), creates a
predatory environment which requires that domestics at ei_
levels and of both sexes are cast in terms of their
obedience to the master. This situation generates a domestic
milieu that is at least partially homoerotic and intensely
homosocial. Just as Crusoe exists as potential prey in his
father's house, so he occupies a similar space within the
Turk's domestic realm. The latter household replicates the
conditions of the former in that its boundaries include all
that the master unequivocally possesses and what he might
consume by virtue of ownership. It is therefore apt that, as
Crusoe makes his escape, he robs the Turkish master of his

pinnace and that he only does so after he has first thrown

119

the Turk's "manservant" overboard by "supriz[ing] him with
my arm under his twist" (44). When he steals the pinnace
Crusoe also appropriates the Turk's "boy" as "[his] boy
Xury"--his, that is, to consume or dispense with (54).

Because Crusoe reproduces similar relations in the way
that he orders his own domestic estates and dictates the
relations of consumption on the island, the relationship of
consumers to consumables from the point of his arrival on
the island underlines the interrelations between eating,
power, and incestuous desire. Yet as it does so, it signals
an important shift in the relations of eater and eaten that
I have hitherto identified in Robinson Crusee. Crusoe at
first experiences the island and its waters as invasive, as
evidenced by the proliferation of metaphors of ingestion, of
being overwhelmed, engulfed, incorporated and swallowed by
the sea or by wild beasts noted by many readers (64, 66, 74-
6). However, if Crusoe quails at the thought of bodily
annihilation through incorporation, then his power to resist
annihilation is aptly expressed in his impulse to devour
rather than be devoured.

Such an impulse is amply displayed during Crusoe's
lengthy island sojourn, and it is significant that the
impulse is first enabled by oral violence toward consumable
objects which are clearly identified as female. The shift
from Crusoe as potential prey to Crusoe as predator is first

discernible in Crusoe's laborious process of removing goods

and foodstuffs from the stranded ship. Crusoe's use of the

 

 

120

ship establishes the tone and the significance of
consumption on the island, and as the salvaging process
elaborates and extends the metaphor of anthropophagy, it
establishes Crusoe's role as a consumer rather than a
consumable in the newly-established domestic economy of the
island.

When Crusoe is washed ashore with neither clothes nor
food in a birth-like "dreadful deliverance," the ship
provides him with the means to assuage his immediate bodily
needs. Because the ship holds food "she" becomes, as Robert
Erickson has astutely observed, rather like a nurturing
mother to Crusoe, who, "very well disposed to eat," fills
his pockets with biscuit from her untouched and copious
supply (57). Although the ship, with her bulbous upper
foreward deck providing sustenance, is like a nursing mother
in one sense, her hold is also laden with consumables.
Because of this, as Erickson also points out, the ship
simultaneously resembles a pregnant woman:

I found that the ship was bulged, and had a great
deal of water in her hold... that she lay so on
the side of a bank... that her stern lay lifted
upon the bank... all her quarter was free and all
that part was dry... you may be sure my first work

was to search and to see what was spoiled and what
was free. (68)

But while Erickson notes that the laden ship resembles

a pregnant woman, he stops short of the implications of

Crusoe feeding on her. If the ship is like a pregnant woman,

 

121

then does it not follow that feeding on the contents of her
hold constitutes cannibalism? Indeed Crusoe's repeated
entries into the bowels of the ship conjure an image of
mother violation which recall nothing so strongly as the
three episodes of cannibalistic mother ravishment in
Raradise Los ; namely, Death's rape of his mother, the
Hellhounds' multiple forced re-entries of their mother to
gnaw her innards and the womb that bred them, and Mammon's
voracious plundering of the earth to establish the kingdom
of Pandemonium.21 In Robinsen Crusoe, as in Milton's epic, a
son's libidinous violence toward a body which is clearly
identified as maternal heralds his attempt at founding a
domestic economy beyond the reach of his father's power but
based, nevertheless, upon the relations of consumption
established in the father's realm. Not only does Crusoe
effect his labored 'boarding' of the ship in a naked state
and with acknowledged physical difficulty (67), but his
subsequent mutilation of the vessel repeats the language of
an earlier boarding of a similarly laden vessel by the
Turkish captain. Just as the Turkish rover's crew falls to
"cutting and hacking the decks and rigging" (41) to
overwhelm the trader and to force it to yield up its load,
so Crusoe forces the stranded vessel to yield her load.
‘Whereas Crusoe is the plunder in the case of the Turkish

:rover, in the case of the stranded vessel he becomes the

piunderer .

 

9!

II

fa

122

Crusoe first rummages the ship for supplies to
establish himself in his new realm ("everything I could get
from her would be some use or other to me" [100]) and then
he tears the very body of the ship limb from limb to provide
himself with the building materials for his 'kingdom.'
Crusoe's violence as a plunderer is most graphically shown,
however, in his later journal account of a disconcertingly
obstetric operation in which he hacks at the ship's 'ribs'
to gain access to what lies within: "the beams being cut...
the in-side of the hold lay so open that I could see into
it... " (100). Crusoe's faintly erotic and decidedly violent
domination of the laden body of the ship underlines the
sense of the ship as a female nurturer in an echo of those
other "digg'd out ribs of Gold" encountered in Paradise Lost
(1.689-90).22 Even as the ship is cast as a nurturer,
Crusoe's violence enacts a brutal repudiation of dependence
upon the sustenance offered by the ship and replaces it with
a physical command of "her" body. And it is the
disembowelment of this body that helps to ensure the
survival of Crusoe's corporeal frame during his long life on
the island.

The violence of the assault upon the "bulged" body to
extract valuables for use in his future kingdom underlines
the fact that Crusoe can pniy found his kingdom and estates
‘upon the dismembered and cannibalized body of the 'mother'
‘whereof he feeds. So if the politics governing eating in his

father's house render Crusoe prey to his father's voracity

123

it is through a displacement of those relations that
Crusoe's domestic realm is established on the island. Crusoe
shifts his own subject position as prey onto those he
consumes and so builds what will become his colony on the
basis of either the ready or the enforced consumability of
others. The methodical, almost ritualistic, cannibalization
of the mother ship signals, just as the consumability and
saleability of lesser species and 'savages' elsewhere
signals, one aspect of Crusoe's gustatory pipe ge passage
into the ranks of those who eat rather than those who are
eaten, of those who take possession, rather than wait to
receive.

Another aspect of this transition is Crusoe's relation
to the island, and more properly, the land itself. Crusoe's
series of encounters with the land offers strong parallels
to the episode of the ship and underlines the symbolic
weight of his particular use of each of these as resources.
The idea of land as a female would have been a familiar one
in the early eighteenth century because of its currency in
the burgeoning writings about settlement in the New World
since the 15005. The centuries-old linguistic habit of
referring to land as a woman, a habit which had fallen into
disuse by the sixteenth century was, according to Annette
Kolodny, vigorously revived by the 'discovery' of America
‘which gave the idea of land as mother an everyday reality
and immediacy. Because so many of the writings about

discovery and settlement emphasized the new lands' bounty

and

0!

th'

tr

124

and the ease with which such lands might be profitably mined
or worked, they would have offered a particular appeal to
the mood of overseas investment in plantations and foreign
trading ventures in the first two decades of the eighteenth
century.23 Defoe has Crusoe, who is, after all, stranded on
the island during a period of intensive emigration and
overseas settlement during the years of the Stuart monarchy
(1659-1688), follow in one part of this tradition when he
figures the island as a mother who nurtures in the immediate
sense of providing a new haven from the tempestuous element
after his vessel founders.

Like the wrecked ship, however, the island is rapidly
translated into a nurturer of a slightly different order,
that is, into its capacity to provide Crusoe with food.
While the roles of nurturer and nourisher are not discordant
in the cultural discourse of motherhood, what is interesting
is the way that these functions join to enable the emergence
of an elaborate pattern of womb-like enclosures which both
feed and protect Crusoe.24 Very soon after his arrival on
this island, Crusoe builds an enclosure of a double row of
stakes suggestive of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
Obstetrical and anatomical notions of the womb being
surrounded by protective bones. Crusoe further excavates a
large hollow with means of egress and regress into which he
introduces the goods and foodstuffs that will enable his

Survival .

125

But the fact that the land nourishes from its own store
also allows it to develop rapidly into something beyond this
kind of mother figure. The land acquires erotic appeal
through a fecundity which invites intemperate and
connotatively incestuous indulgence of the appetites: "I
found mellons upon the ground in great abundance, and grapes
upon the trees; the vines had spread indeed over the trees,
and the clusters of grapes were... very ripe and rich"
(113). Faintly dangerous because indulgence in her fruits
can bring on flux and fevers, the land nevertheless affords
"a secret kind of pleasure" and as Crusoe contemplates
possession of her, he constructs himself as licensed to
proceed by an age-old privilege: "to think that this was all
my own, that I was king and lord of all this country
indefeasibly, and had a right of possession; and if I could
convey it, I might have it in inheritance as compleatly as
any lord of a mannor in England" (114). In addition to this
claiming of privilege, the 'fruits' that Crusoe elsewhere
‘wrests from the land as mother-mistress through his
plantation-style seeding of tracts for maximum yield (118),
(enable the leisure which is necessary for the enjoyment of
Iris country-house and sea-coast estates.

Because the estates, each supported by its own
jplantation and cattle enclosures, rely upon the deliberate
and purposeful exploitation of the mother-mistress island,
another womb-like enclosure that Crusoe appropriates--the

cave that he finds concealed in the interior of the island--

126

becomes laden with meaning. Erickson alludes to the
sexually-suggestive nature of this cave when he remarks that
Crusoe's discovery of the "virginal cave made by no hands
'but those of meer Nature' marks Crusoe's farthest
penetration into, or 'possession' of his kingdom" (68).
Erickson's suggestion that the cave is virgin land is,
however, belied by the fact that the entrance to the cave is
blocked by its ppevious occupant. With his "broad shining
eyes," and his "very loud sigh like that of an old man in
pain," the "monstrous frightful old he-goat, just making his
will... and gasping for life, and dying indeed of meer old
age" (183), resembles no-one more closely than Crusoe's
gouty, chamber-ridden father. The death of the goat releases
to Crusoe, not a barren or unseeded tract, but a cave
pregnant with treasure. Nearly two-hundred feet high and
studded with what Crusoe believes to be diamonds, precious
stones or gold (184), the womb-like enclosure left to Crusoe
by the goat becomes the "vault" to which Crusoe will take
his valuables--his munitions, his ammunition, his money, and
Friday--for safekeeping as he elsewhere entrusts his
valuables to that other isolated and vacated goldmine, the
frugal "good ancient widdow."

Crusoe's occasional, but financially strategic,
recourses to the widow initially mark her value as just
another female item available for his consumption, for the
self-sacrificing woman invests wisely for him despite her

own wasted substance and straitened circumstances. However,

127

closer examination discloses that the widow is the enabling
force in Crusoe's success because it is she who initiates
the profitable triangulated commerce--the trading of
purchased 'servants,' tobacco, and English goods sold at
four times their value--which yields stock valued in excess
of the original capital investment. The widow thus becomes a
shadow of Crusoe's biological mother in the sense that the
money first given to the widow is the money that Crusoe
makes on what he describes as "the only voyage which I may
say was successful in all my adventures" (40). Although
Crusoe attributes his success on this voyage to the ship's
captain who teaches him the principles of navigation, the
success that Crusoe seeks--success as a trader--is only
possible because of the initial forty pounds that his mother
raises on his behalf. Crusoe's use of his mother is
therefore analagous to his commandeering of the ship and the
island. The mother's summoning of material resources enables
his success in terms of the world beyond the island just as
the island and the ship provide Crusoe with the means to
establish a polity after the fashion of his father, and each
enables Crusoe to establish ascendency over other men. Like
the mother-mistress island, the mother-as-resource
acknowledges what Swift's Spanish name for another island,
'Le Rhee, would make abundantly clear: that 'she' is the
whore (as well as the trade) on which one doats.25

It might still be argued that Crusoe's cannibalization

of the ship and his plundering of the island's bounty are

1e

60

128

justifiable necessities. Indeed one might ask whether, given
the dismal prospects that the island at first seems to offer
for Crusoe's survival, Crusoe has any choice but to use the
ship, and contend that there is no good reason for him to
shun the wealth that the land affords. However, because
Crusoe elsewhere demonstrates a thorough understanding of
what--besides basic subsistence--is at stake in the politics
of consumption, it is not possible to dismiss Crusoe's
particular use of the stranded vessel nor his luxuriation in
the riches of the earth quite so easily. The stakes become
more clearly defined in Crusoe's deliberate pursuit of
female flesh on the island to satisfy his carnal desires.
Not only does Crusoe mine another female 'treasure' in the
form of a turtle filled with eggs (101) immediately after
his plunder of the wrecked ship, but he also comes to see
that she-goats and their young, despite their resistance and
Crusoe's own momentary pangs of remorse, may be had with
relative ease:

I killed a she-goat which had a little kid by her

which she gave suck to, which grieved me

heartily... I laid down the dam, and took the kid

up in my arms... in hopes to have it bred up tame,
but it would not eat, so I was forced to kill it

and eat it myself. (79)26

More interesting still--indeed a fascinating object
lesson in the politics of eating--is Crusoe's mode of

acquiring and taming goats for purposes of domestic use.

129

Having tethered a beast and left it without any means of

feeding for several days, Crusoe makes the fullest use of

his advantage:
I began to think of the poor kid, which I had
penned within my little circle, and resolved to go
and fetch it home, or give it some food;
accordingly I went, and found it where I left it,
for indeed it could not get out, but almost
starved for want of food.... having fed it, I ty'd
it as I did before, to lead it away; but it was so
tame with being hungry, that I had no need to have
ty'd it, for it followed me like a dog; as I
continually fed it, the creature became so loving,
so gentle, and so fond, that it became from that

time one of my domesticks also, and would never
leave me afterwards. (124)

Able, simply by virtue of greater might, to incorporate kids
in the fleshly sense of eating them, Crusoe first effects a
figurative incorporation which is here painted as a
benevolent attempt at domestication. Crusoe's feeding of the
goat to make it tractable in this passage, as he elsewhere
selectively feeds the cats he retains for companionship and
(destroys all others, serves a function: it brings the beasts
into the enclosure which marks off Crusoe's domestic sphere
from all that lies beyond his pales. In feeding the goats,
(:rusoe makes the desired objects an integral part of his
«domestic "little circle." As the flock from which Crusoe
selects the animals that he is going to devour is ultimately
spoken of as his "little family," the feeding pi one's
'Niomesticks" becomes collapsed into feeding en one's

'Ndomesticks" which is, as a modest proposer has elsewhere

130

established, the age-old privilege of the "lord of the whole
mannor." Here, the majestic, paternalistic privilege of
absolute command ("I could hang, draw, give liberty, and
take it away, and no rebels among all my subjects" [157])
becomes the privilege of the butcher. It is therefore only
with the driest humor or the most gruesome irony that one
can enjoy Crusoe's idyll and "smile to [see him] and [his]
little family sit down to dinner" (157).

As his methods of husbandry show, Crusoe, like
Kreutznaer before him, maximizes his capacity to give or to
withhold food in order to maintain about him a "family" upon
which he can feed.27 Furthermore, although Crusoe supposedly
shudders at the mere thought of exocannibalism as it is
practiced by the Amerindians, he himself institutes a form
of endocannibalism when he gathers goats for his household's
deferred consumption. Just as the cannibals use
anthropophagy ritually as a means of dealing with
competitively invasive enemies and to differentiate between
the prowess of competing groups, so Crusoe's cannibalistic
husbandry proclaims who is licensed to eat whom; Crusoe's
domestic husbandry institutes a system which allows its head
'unrestricted access to the members.28 This system is both
(conducive to capitalism in that it enables the accumulation
tof a deliberately-amassed surplus enabling selective and
strategic future consumption, and emblematic of the system

'that underwrites Crusoe's project of colonizing the island.

131

When Friday is brought within the circle prescribed by
Crusoe's pales he is claimed in much the same way as the
goats have been claimed--and he is husbanded in more than
one sense of the word. In a repetition of Crusoe's taming of
the goat, Crusoe initially makes Friday tractable by
withholding the type of food that Friday is wont to consume
and replacing that food with matter of Crusoe's own
creation. As Pearlman has osberved, Defoe's representation
of Crusoe's elaborate weaning of Friday from a "cannibal
diet" with bread and milk is rather absurd in view of
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century travellers' reports that
the the Caribs did not live solely on human flesh and that
anthropophagy was a religious and ceremonial practice for
them. Pearlman further asserts that the weaning episode
works to create a dutiful son bound to glorify Crusoe and to
do his bidding:

It should come as no surprise when he tells us of
Friday, that "his very affections were tied to me,
like those of a child to a father".... Friday is
dealt with not as a child, but as an infant.

Crusoe strips him of all personality; he is a
zero, a cipher, and the characteristics attributed

to him merely projections of Crusoe's own needs.29

Pearlman is right to underscore the egocentricism that
.is implied this treatment of Friday and the way that Crusoe
'thereby diminishes Friday. But in one crucial respect
IPearlman does not go far enough. More disturbing than the

aactual fact of Crusoe's egocentricity is the total obedience

 

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132

required of Friday at the most fundamental level at which
Crusoe's egocentricism is effective. In what must be seen as
a rather bizarre repetition of Adam's conjuring of Eve prior

to her actually coming into being in Paradise Lost, Crusoe

 

first conceives Friday in a dream immediately after he is
violently agitated by his desire for a meet companion who
will let him learn about his own condition on, and means of
deliverance from, his paradisal island:
When this had agitated my thoughts for two hours
or more with such violence, that it set my blood
into a ferment, and my pulse beat as high as if I
had been in a feaver, meerly with the
extraordinary fervour of my mind about it; nature,
as if I had been fatigued and exhausted with the

very thought of it, threw me into a sound sleep...
[and] I dreamed.... (202)

Even though Crusoe describes the dream as being
unrelated to his mental activity prior to sleep, the fact
that he conjures a companion for himself and that he does so
when he is in an unmistakeably excited, even frenzied,
state, heightens the erotic suggestiveness of Friday's
conception.3o Moreover, when Friday is encountered in the
flesh in a meeting which virtually reenacts the dream
sequence, he is described in terms that set him apart from
the other Amerindians, the cannibals who seek to devour.
Enticing and desirable when given through Crusoe's waking
eyes, Friday is

a comely handsome fellow, perfectly well made;
with straight strong limbs, not too large; tall

133

and well shaped... a very good countenance...
something very manly in his face... yet he had all
the sweetness and softness of an European in his
countenance too, especially when he smiled. His
hair was long and black, not curled like wool; his
forehead very high and large, and a great vivacity
and sparkling sharpness in his eyes.... His face
was round and plump; his nose small, not flat like
the negroes, a very good mouth, thin lips, and his
fine teeth well set, and white as ivory. (208)

Because the description of Friday is given with all the
cloying detail of a Romantic love object, it acquires a
homoerotic quality which points up Friday's fitness for
consumption. Not only is sweet, plump Friday appealingly
sensual, but the fact that he is rendered as an assemblage
of body parts underscores the similarity of the cannibals'
and the father-like Crusoe's potential uses for him.31 The
cannibals intend to use Friday both for ceremonial purposes
and to assuage certain appetites, or, as Friday explains and
Crusoe translates, "'They no eat mans but when makes the war
fight'; that is to say, they never eat any men but such as
come to fight with them, and are taken in battle" (224).
While Crusoe's consumption of Friday is not literal, it is
nevertheless a figurative incorporation designed to sate a
form of power lust.

Following the successful defeat of the cannibals at the
time of Friday's so-called rescue,32 Crusoe also enacts the
ritual of a victory feast and it is fitting that his ritual
differs from that of the cannibals only in so far as Crusoe
substitutes the flesh of young goats for that of Friday

(213). Just as the reprieve from the cannibals causes Friday

to 1
his
eve
cre

COll

11‘;

th

of

ar

134

to kneel down, kiss the ground, and lay Crusoe's foot upon
his head "in token of swearing to be [Crusoe's] slave for
ever" (207), so the killing of a kid to celebrate victory
creates in Friday an abject submission similar to the
complete bodily possession celebrated in the cannibal feast:
"[Friday] came and kneeled down to me, and embraceing [sic]
my knees, said a great many things... I could easily see
that the meaning was to pray me not to kill him" (213). The
rules governing conquest, capture and the consumption or use
of prisoners of war, as they are explained by Friday (and
are here tacitly adhered to by both the cannibals and
Crusoe), dictate that he who spares life, in essence
possesses the power to take life. By an extension of this
formulation, he who spares life has, figuratively, the means
to give life.

Yet if the fact of Crusoe's ritual places physical
control of the body at the center of the master-servant and
father-son relationship, it also strongly suggests that
:mastery is intimately bound up with the designation of
functions and the names given to certain functionaries. For
example, the fact that Crusoe's sovereignty of the island is
lbased first and foremost upon his verbal claim to the
island--upon his naming of the island and everything in it
as his own and himself as its "lord" and master--suggests
‘that.the act of naming is, at bottom, an act of creation.
IIndeed as a skillful propagandist, pamphleteer and

especially as a promoter of colonization and trade in the

135

colonies, Defoe's awareness of the power of discursive
practices, his 'linguistic colonialism' in laying claim to
human and other resources, ought not to be overlooked.
Examining Defoe's copious writings promoting
colonization against the backdrop of his many money-making
schemes in the New World, Fakrul Alam observes that both in
Defoe's narratives and in his essays, particularly those in
Sezieus Refiections, linguistic conversion follows rapidly
on the heels of physical domination and religious
(Christian) invasion. Writing in a similar vein about more
recent colonialist literature, Abdul R. JanMohamed holds
that the most powerful means by which colonization is
effected is he; through materalist practices, the efficacy
of which ultimately depends upon the technological
superiority of the colonizing force. Control is most
effectively exercized through the acceptance by colonized
peoples of the colonizers' system of values, attitudes,
discursive practices and mode of production. JanMohamed
distinguishes between material and discursive practices to
expose the contradictions between the stated purposes of
colonization, to 'civilize' and 'Christianize,‘ and its
covert aim, to exploit the colony's resources thoroughly and
:ruthlessly. JanMohamed shows that, at the same time as the
Inaterialist and discursive practices seem contradictory,
“there is a profoundly symbiotic relationship between them
Ibecause "the discursive practices do to the symbolic

jpresence of the native what the material practices do to his

136

physical presence: the writer commodifies him so that he can
be exploited more efficiently by the administrator."33

The considerable material benefits which accrue from
Crusoe's naming of the island as his realm attest to the
efficacy of linguistic practices and to the power of naming
in particular, for, as Patterson has observed, one's name is
the "verbal signal" of one's identity and the use of a
different name is universally recognized as a sign of
altered status. Patterson notes that a name change is often
associated with the stripping of a former identity, an
increase or denudation of privileges, or a change in social
or legal standing, as Daniel Foe, son of a tallow chandler,
was undoubtedly aware. In master-slave relations, Patterson
identifies re-naming as a feature of enslavement secondary
only to the usually ritualized consumption of a slave's
first meal in the master's house. Such a meal, consisting of
the type of food that the master customarily eats,
symbolizes the cutting of ties with the slave's kinsmen: the
ingestion of the master's food and renaming together signal
the creation of a future kin tie or allegiance to the
master.34

Nowhere is the significance of a change in name and the
power implicitly vested in the name-giver more strikingly
exhibited than in what transpires during the naming of
Friday. Crusoe presumes that the Carib has no name and no
comprehensible language but dumb show in the same way that

he presumes that the island is previously 'undiscovered'

137

land. In giving the young man who escapes from the cannibal
feast a name, Crusoe both claims the power to designate
functions and underscores the fact that proprietorship
commonly attends naming. In a ritual which carries the
symbolic weight of a communion, Crusoe actually brings
Friday, the reforming cannibal and his soon-to-be
Christianized servant, into being, for none such exists
prior to the naming.35 In the act of linguistic creation
which is virtually simultaneous with Crusoe's first 'gift'
of food to the Carib, Crusoe speaks Friday's servitude and
the ease with which he will be assimilated to his master's

ways:

[Friday] made all the signs to me of subjection,
servitude, and submission imaginable.... I began
to speak to him, and teach him to speak to me; and
first, I made him know his name should be
Friday... taught him to say Master, and then let
him know, that was to be my name; I likewise
taught him to say yes and no, and to know the
meaning of them: I gave him some milk in an
earthen pot... [and] a cake of bread... [and he]
made signs that it was very good for him. (209)

A condition which in slave-master relations Patterson
calls "human parasitism" reinforces Crusoe's first human
subject's obedience and his supposed dependence on Crusoe as
sovereign master. Referring to an aspect of European
Americans' relationships with their African slaves,
Patterson describes human parasitism as a phenomenon in

'which "one party produces nothing and consumes part of the

other's product." Patterson sees this as an initially

 

 

138

unstable situation which can be stabilized only through the
slave's alienation from all other attachments. With
Patterson's example of African slaves in North America, as
with other situations of enslavement, alienation takes the
form of the genealogical isolation and detachment of the
slave. Such casting adrift of the slave from all points of
reference to social and cultural systems other than those of
the master causes the social death of the slave who, as a
result of his/her alienation, has no existence or social
legitimacy except through the parasitic master:36
[o]n this intersubjective level the slaveholder
fe[e]d[s] on the slave to gain the very direct
satisfaction of power over another, honor,
enhancement, and authority. The slave, losing in
the process all claim to autonomous power, [is]

degraded and reduced to a state of liminality.
(337)

The situation that Patterson describes is one in which
the master's parasitic dependence on the minion, subject or
slave is transformed by paradoxically defining the minion as
dependent. At the same time that the condition of parasitism
obscures the master's satisfaction with the position of
authority, it renders the minion as a pitiful creature who
cannot survive without the master. That the term human
parasitism accurately depicts the relationship between
Crusoe and a number of those whom he subjects is amply
demonstrated when Crusoe later requires the marooned ship's

captain and the men put ashore by mutineers to live by his

 

SI

139

rules: "'you will not pretend to any authority here; and if
I put any arms into your hands, you will upon all occasions
give them up to me, and do no prejudice to me or mine upon
this island, and in the mean time be governed by my orders'"
(254). In the sublimation of Europeans, as with the Carib,
Crusoe justifies his actions by casting them as parasitic
dependents who can only survive under the superior
governance of a master who directs their labor and who
creates stringent laws to enable their survival and
happiness: although it is Crusoe who actually seeks to be
delivered from isolation by his subjects, he credits himself
with their deliverance.37

The declarative act of naming others as subjects and
servants is therefore by no means removed from other more
overt forms of oral violence in Robinson Crusoe. In the case
of Friday, Crusoe both authors a persona for later narrative
consumption and creates a being whose existence as servant,
reformed 'savage' and as "my man, Friday" (like "[his] boy
Xury") is entirely incorporated into the existence of the
'civilized' master. Crusoe's linguistic assimilation of
Friday is therefore every bit as powerful as any material
incorporation that anthropophagy can achieve. In
constructing Friday verbally as a minion in relation to
.himself as master, and by additionally showing his capacity
‘to follow this through with physical force, Crusoe precludes

‘the possibility of Friday's resistance.

140

In the light of Crusoe's propensity to assimilate
others as a means of appropriating their value, Crusoe's own
fear of being literally consumed on the island can be viewed
in two distinct ways, each associated with being penetrated,
invaded or colonized. At one level the possibility of the
existence of another person constitutes a threat to the
self: the very sight of the footprint destroys security and
signals destruction rather than deliverance. The cannibals
do not, however, threaten mere destruction; they threaten
"the worst kind of destruction" (200). Not only do signs of
the cannibals' presence herald complete annihilation in the
literal act of incorporation, but the sheer physicality of
the act of cannibalism makes undeniable the fact that the
most extreme form of subjection to another's will and system
of values has taken place. In fact Crusoe's explanation for
the killing of cannibals on the occasion of the Spaniard's
rescue shows that the murders have very little to do with
the immediate physical threat that the cannibals pose either
to the Spaniard or to Crusoe himself. Crusoe's attack is
triggered, despite his sometime resolution not to "meddle"
or presume himself the executioner of God's justice, by the
sight of the Spanish captive who is "an European, and ha[s]
<1loaths on" and whose first word upon rescue, though it is
the Latin form, is nevertheless, "'Christianus'" (233-5). It
it: entirely fitting that once Crusoe vomits the "disorder"
occasioned by his first sight of a cannibal feast, he thanks

GOd--not for not being the cannibals' next meal--but for his

141

ontological separateness from the cannibals: "[I] gave God
thanks that had cast my first lot in a part of the world
where I was distinguished from such dreadful creatures as
these" (172).38

In this sequence, as Crusoe later observes, cannibalism
represents the complete loss of ontological being: "what
would become of me, if i fell into the hands of the savages;
or how should i escape from them, if they attempted he..."
(emphases added, 201). Cannibalism is here the
quintessential expression of what it is to be 'mastered'--to
be assimilated into an alien body without trace. And this
form of violent assimilation, as the text amply demonstrates
through its choice of would-be cannibal victims, comes
closest to being realized through the incorporation of
certain forms of otherness; of youth that has suffered
itself to be conquered (Friday and Xury), of the aged and
infirm (Friday's father), and of those, like the Catholic
Spaniard, who in their alienness are too weak to defend
themselves. Masterful like the cannibals in that he gains
custody of the same would-be cannibal victims--as well as
his own addition of the 'savages' themselves and of those
female bodies which might be easily laid waste--Crusoe is
more cannibalistic than the cannibals themselves. Through
his acts of sublimation, Crusoe does not have to actually
anusume those he captures, he merely incorporates them and

so compels them to do as he desires.

Notes

Maggie Kilgour (From Communion to Cannibalism: An
Rnetomy of Metaphors of Incorporation [Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1990], 250, n.11) points out that
'incorporation' in its rarer forms can mean both to furnish
with a body and to copulate. More usual significances are:
to unite into one body or uniform substance; to put
something else into or include it in the body or substance;
to put one thing into another so as to form a body or
integral whole; to take in or include as part of something;
to join or form into a society or organization; to
constitute as a legal constitution. The three basic forms
that Kilgour draws from these definitions are
'incarceration' (to give something formless a body),
'consubstantiation' (the joining of two bodies), and
'sublimation' or 'cannibalism' (the subsumption of one body

b)’ another). It is the interplay between these significances
tllért I wish to evoke in my title and so to highlight in this
Chapter.

1. E. Pearlman, "Robinson Crusoe and the Cannibals,"

=2152§§$1ie 10 (1976): 50. Contemporary writers on cannibalism

Jvr‘<=llude Peter Martyr, he nouo Orbe. or The History of the

Mes (1612); Richard Hakluyt, Hakluvt's Voyages

142

143

(1600); Charles de Rochefort, history of the Caribby-
isiengs, (1665). Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, "Of Cannibals,"
in The Essays of Montaigne, trans. E. J. Trenchmann, vol. 1
(London: Oxford University Press, 1927), 209.

2. Peggy Reeves Sanday, Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as a
Qnihnral System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986), 11; Pearlman, 51.

3. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of
Qoneepps of Pollution (New York: Frederick A. Praeger,
1966), 21, xii, 31.

4. Douglas, 4.

5. Sanday, 13, 37.

6. Daniel Defoe, The Life and Adventures of Robinson
Cnnsge, ed. Angus Ross (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin,
1965), 28. All subsequent references will be to this edition
and page numbers will be given parenthetically in my text.

7. Ian Bell (Defoe's Fiction [Totowa, New Jersey:
Barnes and Noble, 1985], 83) notes that Kreutznaer's
affliction, gout, is traditionally (if inaccurately)

associated with gluttony and venery. He links Kreutznaer's
Danna with Defoe's identification of drunkenness as a trait
of the Germans in TheTrueBorn Englishman and so with
intlemperance .
8. Kilgour, 15.
9. Florence Rush's study of the sexual abuse of

children in the Judeo-Christian West (The Best Ke t Secret:

Sigiésiigi_nhnseyof Children [New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1980])

 

144

explores the culture of indebtedness between parents and
children. While Rush stresses the way that deeply-embedded
notions of duty to parents enables the abuse of girls--
including the incestuous abuse of daughters by fathers--she
also suggests that societies which normalize such abuse of
girls thereby enable the sexual abuse of boys. Rush's
discussion of emotional coercion and the physical access of
fathers to their children is particularly valuable for the
insights it gives as to why and how such abuse is
experienced and silenced. On the abuse of boys in
particular, see pp. 176-82.

10. Paul Rozin, "Psychobiological Perspectives on Food
Preferences and Avoidances," in Food and Evolution: Toward a
Theory of Human Food Habits, ed. Marvin Harris and Eric B.
Ross (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), 182-83;
Kilgour describes verbal communication in the frame of
cannibalism and communion as, an "oral activity that is
similar to eating but [which] offers a less physical model
for exchange.... Food is the matter that goes into the
nmnrth, words the more refined substance that afterward comes

Ont1= the two are differentiated, and yet somehow analogous,
media exchanged among men" (8) .

11. Defoe's verse satire, The True Born Englishman,
first published in 1700, emphasizes miscegenation in a way
that makes it clear that Defoe is no stranger to the
frament, though unspoken and usually undocumented, sexual

abuses that attend mastery:

 

 

145

 

That Het'rogeneous Thing, en Englishman:
In eager Rapes, and furious Lust begot,

Betwixt a Painted Britain and a Scot:

Whose gend'ring Offspring quickly learn'd to Bow,

And yoke their Heifers to the Roman plough:

From whence a Mongrel half-Bred Race there came,

With neither Name, nor Nation, Speech or Fame.

In whose hot Veins new Mixtures quickly ran....
(1.280-87)

12. On this point see Dennis Rubini, "Sexuality and

Politics, Elite Circles,
1-2 (1988): 355-

Augustan England: Sodomy, and

Society," Journal of Homosexuality l6, nos.
60. For a discussion of charges of sodomy and navy

prosecutions extending into the latter part of the century,

see Arthur N. Gilbert "Buggery and the British Navy,"

Journal of Social History 10, no. 1 (1976): 72-98.

13. To imply that the Societies for the Reformation of
Manners singlemindedly pursued sodomites is perhaps
misleading, for the Societies were almost certainly summoned
to partisan and personal political uses. On the ways in
which the Societies were used in the pursuit of individual
:hTterests of members of the Country party such as the
Reverend Thomas Bray, see Rubini, 352—358. Rubini's
discussion is also useful for the distinctions that it makes
witT-l'lin Christianity and its consideration of the political
Value of linking a Catholic monarch, via the association of
catholicism and Rome, with sodomy. On Defoe's involvement in

the Societies, see Paula Backscheider's, Daniel Defoe: His

(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press,

-leiJ§se

 

IQ

Y.

UI

De
We

tl

146

1989), 235-40. Backscheider makes no explicit mention that
the Societies were active against sodomites.

14. Randolph Trumbach, "London's Sodomites: Homosexual
Behavior and Western Culture in the Eighteenth Century,"
ioumnal of Social History 11, no. 1 (1977): 6. Trumbach
identifies Italy as the other "home" of sodomy; G. S.
Rousseau, "The Pursuit of Homosexuality in the Eighteenth
Century: 'Utterly Confused Category' and/or Rich
Repository?" in 'Tis Natureis Fault: Unauthorized Sexuality
Duming the Enlightenment, ed. Robert Purks Maccubbin (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 132-68. According
to Rousseau, the supposed origin of sodomy depended greatly
on England's political relations of the moment and so it was
variously identified as Italy, France and Turkey.

15. Gilbert discerns such a reluctance in his study of
court martials records in the British Navy from 1700-1861.
Records show that buggery was treated as seriously as
murder, mutiny and desertion in that it was a capital
offence. Gilbert has found that during the most active years
Of the war of the Spanish Succession (1703-1710), death

Sentences for buggery in the navy made up twenty-seven
Percent of the total number of death sentences. Observing an
unwillingness to convict on the part of some court martial
b”ands, Gilbert convincingly argues that to acknowledge
participation in sodomy--even as a non-consenting partner--
was to expose oneself to the stigma of the sodomite and to

t: . . . .
1153 poss1b111ty of be1ng sentenced to death for buggery. The

147

reluctance to name buggery led to confusion about defining
the act and this later resulted in many cases where alleged
rapes were recounted in great detail.

16. James Joyce noted the sexual apathy of Crusoe in a
lecture on Defoe delivered in Trieste in 1912. An English
translation is available in "Daniel Defoe" Buffalo Studies
1, no. 1 (1964): 5-25. Eric Berne's brief discussion of
Rohinson Crusoe in "The Psychological Structure of Space
With Some Remarks on Robinson Crusoe," The Psychoanalytic
Quartemly 25 (1956): 549-67, offers some valuable insights
on the links between sexuality and oral incorporative urges
but he does not connect these with homosexual desire. In
Leye and Death in the American Novel (New York: Anchor
Books, 1966), Leslie Fiedler mentions Robinson Cruspe in
terms of a tradition of the "pseudo-marriage of males" (366)
but dismisses homoeroticism because he sees Friday as a
stock comic figure for the racial and social inferior.
Sexuality is seen as an important issue by Aydon Charlton
("The Appeal of Robinson Cruspe," Sphinx 2 [1974]: 21-37),
but: his essay does little more than trace evidence of the

Oral, anal and sexual phases of psychosexual development in
kOb-inson Crusoe. Robert A. Erickson ("Starting Over with
nghiauson Crusoe," Studies in the Literary Imagination 15,
I“’- 2 [1982]: 51-73) notes the frequent claim of an "absence
of Sex in the novel" and remarks on Crusoe's "literally
'womanless' condition on the island" (52) . Seeing the island

a: . . . .
1‘51 ‘wrecked Shlp as mother figures, Erickson cla1ms that

 

148

each is highly sexualized but he confines his discussion
solely to the heterosexual matrix. Martin Gliserman
("Robinson Crusoe: The Vicisstudes of Greed--Cannibalism and
Capitalism. Displaced Desire: Money, Mother, Eating, and
Encirclements," American Imago 47, nos. 3-4 [1990]: 177-
231), arguing that Crusoe's desire for the mother is
displaced into a desire for money, also focuses entirely on
female figures as objects of male desire. In his article,
"Orphaning the Family: The Role of Kinship in Robinson
Crusoe," RLR 55, no. 2 (1988): 381-419, Christopher Flint
makes the provocative claim that "Friday seems to answer
almost all of [Crusoe's] desires" (394), but his discussion
remains within the main critical corpus which frames desire
as male heterosexual desire. One notable exception to this
trend is Humphrey Richardson's novella, The Sexual Life of
Robinson Crusoe (Paris: Olympia Press, 1955). This work,
which invites analysis in its own right because of its
disturbing and pornographic luxuriation in sexual violence,
also deserves attention for the way that it exploits the
'absence' of sexuality to disclose the potential for rather
different sexual arrangements than those identified in the
Studies mentioned above. Richardson's work has been given
scant scholarly notice. For example, John A. Stoler's
bibliography (Daniel Defoe. An Annotated Bibliography of
\LMO ern Criticism. 1900-1980 [New York: Garland, 1984])
claims that a copy of Richardson's text could not be found

"€Er1 after an 1ntens1ve 1nterlibrary loan search. I myself

 

149

had no difficulty in locating the work in an ordinary
interlibrary search. In William L. Payne's bibliography ("An
Annotated Bibliography of Works about Daniel Defoe, 1719-
1974: Part II," Bulletin of Bibliography 32, no. 2 [1975]:
71) in which the novella is listed under "Studies, Reviews,
Criticism," does not annotate the novella. Helen H. Palmer
and Anne Jane Dyson's English Novel Explication: Criticisms
ho 1972 (Hamden, Connecticut: The Shoe String Press, 1973)
does not list Richardson's work at all.

17. "Satyr be kind and draw a silent Veil, / Thy Native

 

England's Vices to conceal..." The True Born Englishman
(1.145-6).

18. Daniel Defoe, Conjugal Lewdness; or, Matrimonial
Whoredom. A Treatise Concerning the_Qse and Abuse of the
Marmiage Bed (1727; reprint, Gainsville, Florida: Scholars'
Facsimiles and Reprints, 1967), 16, 385.

19. Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, vol. 2 of The
Histomy of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York:
Vintage Books, 1990), 215, 220-23.

20. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A

2L2!!! arative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,

1982), 421, n.18. Paul Rycaut's The History of the Ottoman
Emuange was first published in 1668; by 1670 it was in its

third edition, and by 1670, its sixth. An abridged form was
appended to Savage's "History of the Turks in 1701" and the
work was translated into French (1670 and 1677) , Polish

(1678) and German (1694).

 

150

21. On this point see Homer Obed Brown, "The Displaced
Self in the Novels of Daniel Defoe," ERR 38, no. 4 (1971):
567.

22. As Michael Seidel ("Robinson Crusoe" Island Myths
she the Novel [Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991], 42) has
observed, the area of Crusoe's settlement is located in the
mouth of the Orinoco. Because Walter Raleigh had hoped to
discover El Dorado, the city of gold, in the same river
basin, the location of Crusoe's island and the fact that the
vessel becomes stranded here gives the island a legendary
association with gold.

23. Annette Kolodny, The Lav of the Land: Metaphors_es
Empemience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 8-9. The
image of land in the New World as a fertile and bountiful
woman is available, for example, in the writings of Richard
Haklyt (1584), Robert Johnson (1609), John Smith (1616),
John Hammond (1656), Robert Beverley (1705), and Robert
Mountgomry (1717). For a fascinating discussion of how this
series of images is taken up in erotica of the period, see

Paltl Gabriel Boucé, "Chtonic and Pelagic Metaphorization in
Eighteenth-Century English Erotica," Eighteenth-Century Li fie
9' Two. 3 (1985): 202-17. Defoe himself represents land as a
woman in The True Born Englishman: "England, unknown as yet,
unPQOpled lay; / Happy, had she remain'd so to this Day, /
Ihn‘i- not to ev'ry Nation been a Prey. / Her open Harbours,

and her Fertile Plains, / The Merchants Glory these, and

 

151

those the Swains / To ev'ry Barbarous Nation have betray'd
her, / Who Conquer her as oft as they Invade her" (1.95-
101) .

24. Gliserman, 202-3.

25. Kolodny shows that land subject to excessive
demands was conceived as a generous mother raped and
violated by her own children. Embedded in the image of land
as bountiful mother, Kolodny claims, is a confusion of
filial and erotic responses which result in the horrors of
incest (12-22). See also Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid
and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise (New
York: Harper and Row, 1976), 104-5, 109. On the longstanding
association of the uterus with money, with a purse, and with
the idea of productivity in these senses, see Thomas
Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to
Eneng (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press,
1990), 64, 263, n.4.

26. Crusoe repeatedly seeks out female flesh, for
example: "I could have shot as many [fowl] as I pleased,
but... had more mind to kill a she-goat... which I could
better feed on" (123). When Crusoe's ammunition dwindles, he
considers another pregnant goat the source of a ready supply
Qf food (154). By contrast, male creatures such as the
"great lyon" shot by Crusoe and Xury are "game indeed. . .

but:- .. no food" (49). The lion, like the ravenous leopard
that Crusoe later gives to his "friendly negroes" (52) , has

tr13£>11y value. Keeping the leopard's pelt distinguishes

152

Crusoe as one who is able to overcome a 'maneater' and so
lends him a certain status.

27. Flint suggests that Crusoe duplicates his father's
economic order and then replaces him; a similar duplication
and replacement pattern is at work in the relations of
predation (388).

28. Diane Armstrong ("The Myth of Cronus: Cannibal and
Sign in Robinson Crusoe," Eighteenth-Century Fiction 4, no.
3 [1992]: 218) elaborates this through the figure of the
cannibal king. Patterson groups the twenty-nine meanings of
the word 'master' given in the Oxford English Dictionary
under four basic headings: a man with authority as the
captain of a sailing vessel; one qualified to teach; a title
or complimentary rank; an indication of superiority (eg.
mastermind). These four categories succinctly demonstrate
the ease with which brutal domination and pastoral
edification can be conflated (334-35). Cf. Richard
Braverman, "Crusoe's Legacy," Studies in thehNovei 18, no. 1
(1985): 1-26.

29. Pearlman, 43.

30. In Conjugal Lewdness Defoe links sodomy with
gluttony when he suggests that the inhabitants of Sodom

enj<1yed "diverse other Excesses, besides that one delectable
Grimme’ which bears the Name and Reproach of the Place to
this Day. Their gorged Stomachs discovered themselves, no
dc"1131t, in all the Excesses of a provoked Appetite, and an

in11FJLiamed Blood..." (320-21). In suggesting that food and sex

153

have similar and interrelated effects, Defoe might simply
have been making reference to common, if outmoded, notions
about bodily humors; nevertheless the two forms of appetite
coalesce in Conjugal Lewdness, as in Robinson Crusoe, about
the "Sins of spgem."

31. Edward D. Seeber ("Oroonoko and Crusoe's Man
Friday," Modern Language Quarterly 12 [1951]: 286-91), notes
the similarity of this passage to a description of the
enslaved African nobleman of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko. or. The
Reyal Slave (1688). The two descriptions function in similar
ways in that each renders its subject for the reader's
sensory delectation. Whereas Friday is represented as a
collage of body parts, however, Oroonoko is physically
dismembered so that the two descriptions occupy different
positions along a continuum of erotized violence. Richardson
exploits the full erotic potential and the latent violence
of the description in Robinson Cruspe (140-55). For a fuller
discussion of the interconnectedness of eroticism and
violence in slave-master relationships, see Jessica
Benjamin, "The Bonds of Love: Rational Violence and Erotic
Domination," in The Future of Difference, ed. Hester
Einstein and Alice Jardine (Boston: G. K. Hall and Co.,
1980), 41-70.

32. Pearlman astutely observes that by the time that

Crusoe steps into the chase (ostensibly to rescue Friday
fzwamn_ the cannibals) Friday has already outpaced his

purSUers. Crusoe's later confession that Friday would

154

probably would have very quickly escaped his pursuers
altogether, places a question over the issue of whether the
violence perpetrated on the cannibals can be explained as
necessary (defensive) violence (53).

33. Fakrul Alam also notes that colonized people who
are to become usable as servants in Defoe's narratives are
often tractable. They are very willing to learn to speak
English and it is implied that to speak is to speak English.
"Religious and Linguistic Colonialism in Defoe's Fiction,"
Rerth Dakota Quarterly 55, no. 3 (1987): 118, 120-21. Abdul
JanMohamed, "The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function
of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature," Critical
ingniny 12 (1985): 64.

34. Patterson, 54.

35. Naming declares integrity by establishing that a
collection of ideas is distinguishable as an entity. Naming
enables concepts to be framed as discoveries and points of
origin to be constructed much as Lennard J. Davis argues
that the 'New' World had to be imagined es new or novel
before it could be discovered. "The Facts of Events and the
Event of Fact: New World Explorers and the Early Novel," The
Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 32, no. 3
(1991): 241-43, 246.

36. Patterson, 337, 334-9.

37. Similarly, although Crusoe is proud of the fact
that he allows liberty of conscience, he presumes that

making allowances is his prerogative. As each subject

155

remains beholden to Crusoe, Crusoe claims the right to give
freedom when, freedom, by its very definition, cannot be
given: "First of all, the whole country was my own meer
property... I had undoubted right of dominion. 2ndly, my
people were perfectly subjected: I was absolute lord and
lawgiver; they all owed their lives to me, and were ready to
lay down their lives... for me.... we had but three
subjects, and they were of three different religions...
however, I allowed liberty of conscience throughout my
dominions" (241). In spite of its air of affectation,
Crusoe's speech actually describes with great accuracy the
code by which Crusoe lives; liberty of conscience is exactly
what his regime does not permit.

38. On the way that the presence of another being on
the island destroys security, see Brown, 571-72, 576. David
Dabydeen ("Eighteenth-century English Literature on Commerce
and Slavery," in The Black Presence in En lish Literature,
ed. David Dabydeen [Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1985], 28, 45) demonstrates that moral justification for the
slave trade by a number of prominent men including John
Dunton, James Boswell, Edward Long and James Grainger was
Offered on the grounds that slavery saved Africans. Slavery,
Dabydeen suggests, was also justified as an evil 'necessary'
to England's economic survival among the rival trading
nations of Europe. Charles Davenant's argument in An Essay

on the Probable,Methods of Making a People Gainers in the

fiallance of Trade (1699), echoed by Defoe in The Review of

156

February 3rd 1713 and in his writings on commerce, was that
England needed to participate in trade to survive as a
European and world power. On this point see also Carol
Houlihan Flynn, The Body in Swift and Defoe (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1990), 149-52. Cf. Daniel Statt,
"Daniel Defoe and Immigration," Eighteenth-Century Studies

24, no. 3 (1991): 293-314.

Chapter 3: Bringing Up a Chicken for the Father's Table.

nothing but the last extremity shall make me
abandon my father's house... if I can by any
means, by any honest pretences, but keep off my
evil destiny in it.... Whatever my motives, the
world would not know them: to complain of a
brother's unkindness, that one might do. It is too
common a case where interests clash. But where the
unkind father cannot be separated from the faulty
brother, who could bear to lighten herself by
loading a father?

 

A strutting rascal of a cock have I beheld...
chucking his mistress to him, when he has found a

single barley-corn... and when she has got the
dirty pearl, he struts over her with an erected
crest... sweeping the dust in humble courtship:

while the obliged she... by her cowering tail,

half-stretched wings, yet seemingly affrighted

eyes... lets one see that she knows the barley-
corn was not all he called her for.

the lady... thinks there can be no danger out of
this house equal to what she apprehends from me in
it.... The pretty simpleton knows nothing of the
world....

--Samuel Richardson, Clarissa

In the previous chapter I considered ways in which the
figure of cannibalism in Robinson Crusoe is linked with a

Particular kind of domestic economy reliant upon and
157

158

maintained by a power differential between father figures
and the members of their households. I suggested that
competition between men for resources and for political
control is powerfully figured through the trope of
cannibalism which works as a symbolic system to represent
sometimes conflicting, but more frequently interlocking,
hierarchies of power. In Clarissa, cannibalism is also
summoned to use to represent power and the mechanisms
through which it operates, as Raymond F. Hilliard has ably
demonstrated in his article, "Clarissa and Ritual
Cannibalism." Hilliard sees cannibalism as one of several
kinds of oral violence in the work and links it to cultures
preoccupied with orality and the mother imago.1

Ciarissa is, to be sure, replete with images of
aggressive orality as successive attempts to coerce the
exemplary daughter--into marriage with Solmes, into yielding
to Lovelace--are expressed through various men's threats to
devour her. Even though the son, James Harlowe, represents
daughters as "chickens brought up [by their fathers] for the
tables of other men" he assures Clarissa that the suitor,
Roger Solmes "will neither eat [her], or drink [her]."2
Solmes' convulsive gnawing at his cane, which belies James'
assurance, gives way to a ravishment of Clarissa's hand with
his "odious mouth" (319) in a menacing form of courtship.
Lovelace describes himself as a ravening hound with "froth
hanging about his vermillion jaws" and a "woman eater" (440,

720) as he anticipates his rape of Clarissa who is elsewhere

159

described as a "sweet lamb" singled out for the slaughter
(559). Drawing on the wealth of just such metaphors in
Qiamissa, Hilliard argues that Clarissa becomes a scapegoat
for collective psychic aggression and that "Lovelace shares
with the other tyrannical misogynists in the novel--James
and Mr. Harlowe, Uncle Antony, Solmes--a murderous,
infantile rage at all signs of female intentionality,
impulsivity, or independence" (1090). According to Hilliard,
Clarissa's ritual cannibalization expresses a peculiarly
male drive for autonomy and cannibalism is for Richardson
the nexus between personal and social aggression directed
primarily against women.3

Because Hilliard gives considerable attention to the
implied oral violence of the mother-son relation in Clarissa
and sees cannibalism in terms of the redirection of oral
aggressive tendencies away from the mother, his discussion
raises the question of how the other principal dynamic of
the family romance--that of father and daughter--might be
viewed through the frame of orality; if cannibalistic
violence represents a striking and predominantly male
penchant to devour and for power in Clarissa, the emaciation
of Hilliard's female 'cannibal victim,‘ Clarissa, following
her contracted oral activity--her virtual abstention from
food--surely offers itself as an equally powerful, if
inverted, image of orality. I suggest that whereas orally
aggressive acts in Clarissa assert autonomy on the part of

males, the act of not eating presents itself as the

160

asymmetrical counterpart that Western culture dominated by
the heterosexual matrix offers to females. I further suggest
that if the son's oral aggressiveness is associated with the
process of individuation from the mother, then perhaps the
daughter's emaciation may be linked to the father's capacity
to effect her diminution. Placing my emphasis in this
chapter on the rejection of food by a woman, rather than its
consumption by a man, I will argue that Clarissa's
alarmingly frequent food refusal, the circumstances under
which it is inaugurated, and its result--her bodily
emaciation--are in Clarissa powerful symbols of what it is
to be feminine in a cultural milieu that identifies the
propensity to consume as masculine--a milieu that measures
men's successes over other men through each man's bodily
mastery of the woman most completely in his power, his
daughter. Exercised by more than one orally-aggressive
father figure in Clarissa and underwritten by interrelated
features of the patriarchal code, this mastery constructs
the severely diminished body of the work's exemplary
daughter, Clarissa.

* 'k *

Samuel Richardson's Clarissa leaves an after
impression--a haunting specter of a young woman who, after
elaborate preparation and several months of slow wasting,
(dies. Why should a heroine who is robust for the first
taighteen years of her life undergo, during the course of the

ruarrative, such a process of emaciation as a result of not

161

eating? Some readers of Clarissa have suggested that, in
representing Clarissa's failure to eat in the novel,
Richardson renders her a Christian saint or martyr whose
wordly defeat is also her spiritual victory. Carol Houlihan
Flynn observes that, in keeping with Christian tradition,
Clarissa's self-denial enables her to nurture the poor
through the fund that she establishes. At the same time,
Clarissa's asceticism allows her to assume the "Christ-like
mask of forgiveness" to turn mealtimes--times when her
family was wont to punish her for her lack of compliance--
into "nightmares for her family." Margaret Doody, though she
rather peremptorily dismisses Clarissa's death by wasting as
"(probably galloping consumption)... [and] certainly a
trifle mysterious" nevertheless locates Clarissa within a
tradition of Christian asceticism in the West. Arguing that
Clarissa's meditations upon and desire for death are not
strictly Puritan (they follow a Catholic tradition well
documented in devout literature of the seventeenth century),
Doody claims that Clarissa undergoes a form of Christian
martyrdom emblematized by the figure of St. Cecilia. Cynthia
Griffin Wolff sees Clarissa's not eating as a form of bodily
mortification practiced when Clarissa discovers sinful pride
in herself; when she separates this pride from just pride in
her virtue Clarissa becomes like a Puritan Elect saint, and
so her death is a spiritual triumph.4

Clarissa's failure to eat as she moves rapidly toward

Ideath after the rape also bears resemblance to "holy

162

anorexia," a behavior that Rudolph Bell has identified as
characteristic of numerous female Italian saints in the

Middle Ages whose vitae he examines in detail. Like many of

 

the women of Bell's study, Clarissa is, for her first
eighteen years at least, an obedient, favored daughter
prized by her patriarchal family. Bell interprets the
asceticism of the 'holy anorectic' as a form of worldly
rebellion against bourgeois patriarchy. He argues that when
the women of his study abstained from food, they
deliberately chose their appetites and bodies as areas of
their experience through which they could exert a modicum of
social control.5 Even though the secular element of Bell's
understanding of women's food abstinence in this earlier
period counters the basis of Flynn, Doody, and Wolff's
readings of wasting as a purely spiritual triumph through
martyrdom and death, Bell's observation about the
paradoxical nature of any triumph that uses self-starvation
as its means suggests that readings of wasting as worldly
acquiesence, and wasting as worldy rebellion have much in
common. A woman's abstention from food, Bell points out,
will be ultimately "hailed as heroically virtuous by the
very patriarchy she is rebelling against"; she will be seen
as adopting an extreme version of the self-sacrifice that
Western culture deems appropriate to female behavior. Bell
shows that while self-starvation may constitute rebellion
against a particular power structure it nevertheless exists

within that structure and is inevitably created by and

163

through it, for, as Hilliard asks when he cites Bell to
argue that Clarissa's wasting is a form of collusion with
her oppressors, "what is Clarissa doing if not carrying
through the ritual cannibalism inaugurated by her
persecutors, achieving their ends for them, devouring
herself?".6

To read Clarissa's death by wasting as an outright
triumph, then, is clearly to apportion to the daughter an
inordinate degree of control. Although Clarissa's frequent
meditations and the constant references to her "fasts" as
she nears death may lend a voluntary and Christian religious
aspect to her abstinence, it should be remembered that these
references occur late in the work and toward the end of
Clarissa's life, and that they are found mainly in Belford's
letters to Lovelace about Clarissa's decline which are
colored by the bantering rivalry between the two friends.
Prior to the rape, Belford has sought to bring Lovelace to
repentence and to place himself, the reformed libertine,
morally above Lovelace. Even though Lovelace resolves to
deny Belford this victory (970), Belford's letters about
Clarissa during the period of her incarceration are replete
with details calculated to inspire pity and to assert
Belford's ascendency over Lovelace. Belford's letters, which
finally seek to create an "honour to [Clarissa's] memory"
(1176), linger over every morsel that Clarissa eats to
create a composite picture of a martyr's pious fast. When

the prostitute Sally Martin orders Clarissa's jailers to

164

press her to eat and greets their failure with the mocking
retort, "She must be fasting: nothing but her prayers and
tears, poor thing!" (1053-4) and the observation that death
by willfull starvation is unchristian, Belford curses Sally.
When Clarissa tries to eat, Belford represents peristalsis
as a feat performable only with the utmost difficulty: "her
tongue was ready to cleave to the roof of her mouth.... She
tried to taste [bread and butter]; but could not swallow it:
but eagerly drank the water; lifting up her eyes in
thankfulness for that!!!" (1054).

When Clarissa finally concedes to eat two days later,
Belford represents this as largely an attempt to mollify the
prostitutes (1058). He offers an explanation, on Clarissa's
behalf, for every concession to eating; Clarissa is
"prevailed [upon] to drink a dish of tea, and taste some
bread and butter... probably... to have an excuse not to
dine with the women when they returned" (1059). As Clarissa
draws closer to death, Belford augments the catalogue of
abstinence by reporting to Lovelace her physical weakness
(1276, 1308), the pathos of her barren cell, and even her
attitude "clasping her fingers and lifting up her eyes" in
prayer (1341). By representing attempts to make Clarissa eat
as virtual assaults instigated by the prostitutes and
Clarissa's refusal of food as her stamina in withstanding
their encroachments, and by framing each of these with
Clarissa's attitudes of submission, the woman who abstains

from food is gradually wrought into a piously fasting saint

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rejecting worldly corruption after Lovelace's sexual
attack.7

To cast Clarissa's abstinence as a virtue and to attach
value to it as a model, if extreme, response to persecution,
is to place great stock in Belford's letters which are
designed to exonerate their writer, to chastise his friend,
and to make the history of Clarissa palatable and honorable;
it is also to place aside the familial, social and cultural
factors discernible in earlier epistles that contextualize
the pattern of Clarissa's food refusal. The importance of
such factors in Clarissa's food-related behavior is
recognized by Paula Marantz Cohen who sees Clarissa as an
anorectic daughter whose anorexia is brought on by multiple
covert tensions within her family. Drawing on family systems
theory, Cohen suggests that Clarissa's emaciated body is an
exaggerated version of her role among the Harlowes; she
feeds the family members with power and self-definition
through her own lack of status and both mediates and
provides a target for tensions between the members of her
unharmonious family. I hesitate over Cohen's description of
Clarissa as the "original anorectic daughter" (31) because
of Cohen's anachronistic application of the term anorexia as
it is today used to describe a specific and modern disease.
However, Cohen's larger point, that food abstinence does not
arise ex nihilo, but that it is intimately bound up with

social, cultural, familial and institutional imperatives, is

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an important one, and one that students of eating practices
insist should not be ignored.8

For example, Caroline Walker Bynum's study of women's
eating practices and abstention from food in the Christian
West during the later Middle Ages confirms Cohen's point by
demonstrating that women have not historically merely
abstained from eating, they have been in charge of food
preparation and distribution, and concerned with the ritual
uses of food and its consumption. Although food abstinence
could certainly be one way in which women could exert
control over their bodies, the implications of such behavior
has always been intensely political; the communual nature of
food consumption and the distinctly ritual functions of
eating in the religious underpinnings of social life suggest
to Bynum that food-related behaviors ought not to be viewed
linearly as though they were divorcible from the wider
contexts of food consumption and distribution, collective
health and social malaise.9

Moreover, there is good reason to believe that
Richardson perceived food-related behaviors in a manner akin
to Bynum's at the time that Clarissa was written. Richardson
was a friend and patient of George Cheyne, a physician who
believed that poor diet and excessive eating each effect ill
health and nervous disorders. Richardson edited and printed
Cheyne's three main works, The English Malady (1733), An
Essey on Regimen (1740), and The Natural Method of Cureing

(1742). In the preface to The English Malady Cheyne

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attributes the ill health and nervous disorders of the
English to their wealth and high living. Elaborating on
diet, Cheyne writes: "the Manner of Dressing or Cooking [the
materials of luxury], is carried on to an exalted Height.

The ingenious mixing and compounding of Sauces with foreign

spices and Provocatives, are contriv'd... to rouze a sickly
Appetite to receive the unnatural Load... [and] to render a

natural good one incapable of knowing when it has enough".
The treatise that follows regards self-denial as a means of
obtaining greater bodily and national health.10

Cheyne's letters to Richardson from 1734 until Cheyne's
death in 1743 detail, in addition to matters of editing and
printing, the regimen of plain diet and purging that
Richardson followed from late 1741 until 1748. Cheyne's
letters accord to food abstinence the status of a
restorative; a way of managing disorder and reinstituting
order. The letters and Richardson's adoption of Cheyne's
regimen suggest that Richardson could not fail to be aware
of the symbolic importance of food avoidance as a means to
contain the excessive sensual indulgence that gives rise to
corruption in the body politic.11 Placed against this
background, Clarissa's failure to eat acquires a rather
different dimension than that of a purely religious fast or
even a willful rebellion against authority; eating and not
eating, gathering flesh and wasting, become ways of
articulating the orderliness or disorderliness of collective

life.

168

Clarissa's account of her not eating, as it appears in
her letters to Anna Howe, does indeed plot the harmonies and
disharmonies of collective life; her letters tell a

distinctly different story than the virtual saint's vita of

 

Belford's letters. Clarissa indicates that her failure to
eat occurs, not first in concert with Lovelace's
persecutions or following the rape as several commentators
have claimed, but at a much earlier phase of the events that
culminate in her death.12 Clarissa's food abstinence .
coincides with, and emerges out of, the exacting demands of
influential members of her family but principally those of
her father. Clarissa's failure to eat at Harlowe Place is
set in motion by her father during the period when three
very secular domestic crises--all deeply bound up with male
competition over resources and status--arise in quick
succession: the reading of her grandfather's will in her
favor, the duel between her brother and Lovelace and the
question of whom Clarissa should marry. During the period
directly following her refusal of Solmes, and prior to the
first record of Clarissa's failure to eat, mealtimes are
established as an indicator of domestic disequilibrium.

In Clarissa'a last letter of 25 February her state of
disgrace is signalled in the way that she is shunned at tea:
"My mamma's eyes were fixed on the teacups.... My papa
sat... [with] his head... turned from me.... My brother
looked at me with scorn, having measured me... with his

eyes" (63). Clarissa's customary office of making tea is

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removed to her mother and brother exposing her as a palpable
absence--a non-entity, "not know[ing] what to do with
[her]self" (63)--in the familiar family ritual. Mr. Harlowe
soon threatens Clarissa's complete exclusion from the circle
when, the other members of the family having departed on one
clumsy pretext or another, he utters in silencing terms the
only basis on which he will acknowledge his daughter's
existence: "No protestations girl!--No words--I will not be
prated to!--I will be obeyed--I have no child--I will have
no child, but an obedient one.... I ask nothing of you but
what is in your power... and your duty to comply with.... I
will be obeyed, I tell you!--and cheerfully too!--or you are
no child of mine!--" (64-6). Mr. Harlowe's oral violence
here precludes Clarissa's verbal participation in
establishing the terms to which he insists she adhere
silently and completely.

When Mr. Harlowe's brutality achieves Clarissa's
silence but not her compliance, he resorts to another
strategy. On March 3 Clarissa records the less overtly-
threatening, but nevertheless coercive withdrawal of her
father's favor when he denies her communually shared food.
Recalling the gouty father of Robinson Crusoe whose
affliction he shares, and identifying a domestic economy
that is established along similarly invasive lines, Mr.
Harlowe makes absolute obedience a condition of commensality
when he interrupts his wife's assignment to bring Clarissa

to accept Solmes. Addressing Mrs. Harlowe in Clarissa's

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presence, Mr. Harlowe announces dinner, and, observing that
the daughter's obedience ought to follow a simple assertion
of parental will, he adds: "Let us have you soon down--your
daughter in your hand, if worthy of the name" (93). In other
words, Clarissa may be nourished in the bosom of her family
only if her silent and cheerful compliance with her father's
unwanted solicitation marks her as dutifully filial. A full
week later Mrs. Harlowe is still attending meals without
Clarissa whose opposition to her father has confirmed her to
be "[un]worthy of the name of daughter" (103). At this point
Clarissa records a loss of appetite and a refusal of food:
"I thought I should have been commanded down; but [my
mother] sent me up a plate from her table. I wrote on. I
could not touch a morsel. I ordered Hannah... to eat of it,
that I might not not be thought sullen" (106). Clarissa's
failure to eat occurs, then, not first as an act of
volition, but as a result of the distasteful conditions that
are attached to the function of eating at Harlowe Place.
Thereafter, the daughter's failure to comply with her
father's demands results in an increasing exclusion from the
commensal circle as Clarissa is removed from the numerous
confabulations that take place at breakfasts and dinners to
determine her fate.

As commensality is widely, and cross culturally,
considered an affirmation of community, trust, familial
affection and favor, the refusal of Clarissa's presence at

mealtimes signals distrust and rejection.13 First

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articulated in Mr. Harlowe's refusal to own Clarissa, his
distrust appears again in his declaration of her
unworthiness as a member of the Harlowe clan. Again like
Robinson Crusoe's father, Mr. Harlowe figuratively offers
with one hand the sustaining paternal acknowledgement and
the mark of identity--the name--that he threatens to remove
with the other; Clarissa may continue to be a Harlowe and a
daughter only if she gives in and yields up her body to her
father's purposes. The father's dismissal of Clarissa here--
to be later reiterated in the vehemence of his withering
curse--withdraws the validation and sustenance that is
necessary to the daughter's psychic well-being. When Mr.
Harlowe casts Clarissa as "no child of [his]" he consigns
her to the unstable position of a nobody, a redundant being,
a being with neither name nor identity.14 Mr. Harlowe's
refusal to acknowledge Clarissa as a daughter is tantamount
to an erasure of her very existence as her futile plea to
her father after the rape makes clear: "I don't even know
what my name is!-- I never dare to wish to come into your
family again!... I yiii call you... for you are my own dear
papa, whether you will or not--And though I am an unworthy
child--yet I em your child" (890). Coinciding with
Clarissa's declaration that she will never eat or drink
again (895), and pointing up the erasure of Clarissa's
person effected by her father's determination to own her in

only the specified way, the plea underlines the 'no-body'

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status that is to become starkly literalized in the chronic
emaciation of Clarissa's frame.

The father's severity that repeatedly finds its center
in the refusal of commensality invites a scrutiny of the
alleged source of his displeasure, Clarissa's refusal of
Solmes' suit. Clarissa has of course turned down a number of
suitors favored by her father before without having incurred
Mr. Harlowe's wrath. We may presume that Clarissa has
suffered no chastisement for these earlier refusals because
Clarissa acknowledges that her trials are recently begun.
Furthermore, because Solmes is initially dismissed as an
unlikely choice of husband (he is entertained only after the
bloody confrontation between Lovelace and the younger James
Harlowe) it seems improbable that Clarissa's refusal of
Solmes would alone incur displeasure to such an extreme that
it would cause her to be disowned.

Although Clarissa's failure to eat follows her refusal
of Solmes, and his suit appears as a virtual side effect of
the interfamilial rivalry of Lovelace and Harlowe, there is
a form of rivalry closer to home that emerges as a
contributor to Mr. Harlowe's anger when it surfaces after
Clarissa's grandfather's death. Almost palpably entering the
narrative in the interval between Clarissa's refusal of
earlier suitors (Symmes, Mullins and Wyerley) and her
refusal of Solmes, and shortly before Mr. Harlowe imposes

his condition of obedience and Clarissa fails to eat, is the

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grandfather's will in Clarissa's favor. Clarissa sums up the

Harlowe response to the will in this way:
Nobody indeed was pleased: for although everyone
loved me, yet being the youngest child, father,
uncles, brother, sister, all thought themselves
postponed as to matter of right and power (who
loves not power?); and my father himself could not
bear that I should be made sole... and

independent, for such the will as to that estate
and the powers it gave me... made me. (77-78)

Especially ill-received by the son, James Harlowe, who
aspires to the peerage and sees his grandfather's wealth as
a means to fulfill personal ambitions, the will and its
reception uncover a widespread desire for power in the
nominally harmonious Harlowe household.

The contents of the grandfather's will link the
internal competition for power among the Harlowe men (which
is in place before the opening letter's narrative of
Lovelace's and James' interfamilial rivalry) to the
competition over Clarissa herself. Forced to the surface by
the will, the intrafamilial rivalry over Clarissa renders
her position as the hitherto dutiful Harlowe daughter a
highly problematic one at more than merely the level of her
refusal of Solmes. It is clear that even before the question
of whom Clarissa should marry has arisen, Clarissa's
presence has been eagerly sought by her kinsmen. Late in the
novel Clarissa describes her life prior to the family

"disturbances" of the opening epistle in the following way:

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I was the joy of [my uncles'] hearts; and, with
theirs and my father's, I had three houses to call
my own; for they used to have me with them by
turns, and almost kindly to quarrel for me: so
that I was two months in the year at one's house;
two months at the other's: six months at my
father's; and two at the houses of others of my
dear friends, who thought themselves happy in me:
and whenever I was any one's, I was crowded upon
with letters by all the rest, who longed for my
return to them. (1105-6)

Clarissa's presence has been very much "longed for" by her
various kinsmen, each of whom attempts to claim her for his
solitary joy and pleasure by having her board with him in
his own house. It is this vying for Clarissa's presence that
the grandfather's will brings to the fore; in short, the
will dramatizes the unspoken question about which Harlowe
man gets to enjoy the daughter's bodily presence. When the
will lays claim to Clarissa by naming her as the
grandfather's "own peculiar child" (53) and reinforces its
claim through the weight of inheritance, it cuts to the
heart of Clarissa's kinsmen's struggles over her and calls
attention to the erotic interest embedded in their struggles
to possess her. As Janice Haney-Peritz has astutely
observed, the preamble to the will--sent by Clarissa to Anna
Howe for her friend's perusal--is steeped in highly
eroticized language which signals the presence of desire
within the family:

the grandfather emphasizes the 'delight of [his]

old age' (1:21)... [which] he not only attributes

to his relationship with Clarissa but also

attempts to prolong by means of his will....
Refusing to observe the 'forms' of law, the

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grandfather couches his will in terms of need and
desire.... The emphasis on delight, the interest
in prolonging pleasure, and the references to need
and desire, all mark the emergence of a new kind
of will, a sexualized will that is intent on
privileging the feminine--the 'amiable,‘ 'kind,'
and 'tender' Clarissa.15

Whether the will is intended to privilege Clarissa or
not, what it actually does is to thrust Clarissa into the
midst of the crisis over possession. Because the
"sexualized" will identifies a Clarissa who may 'delight'
and 'pleasure' as part of the family's common stock of
erotic property, it marks Clarissa's status as a sexual
object within the family and therefore as a woman over whom
multiple and conflicting claims of possession may arise--and
have arisen. When the grandfather claims ClarisSa as his own
in the will, he advertises the nature of Clarissa's
problematic status in the Harlowe kinship group; Clarissa's
status is problematic because her erotic appeal threatens to
unhinge a basic tenet of the patriarchal code, the code
which comprises the incest prohibition, and which marks a
daughter as the property of her father.

Explicitly addressed to men, the rules prohibiting
incest and implicitly enjoining exogamy seek to maintain
internal lines of order and purity within kinship groups by
dividing women into discrete categories according to male
rights of ownership and exchange. The incest rules, as they
are given in Leviticus 18.6-16, presume that while men

initiate sexual relations, and all women are available for

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sexual consumption, women must be selectively consumed.
Women are categorized according to which man within a
kinship group has the prerogative to have intercourse with a
given woman and the incest rules prohibit the sexual use of

any woman who already belongs to a male relative:

6 None of you shall approach to any that is near
of kin to him, to uncover their nakedness: I em
the LORD.

7 The nakedness of thy father, or the nakedness
of thy mother, shalt thou not uncover: she is thy
mother; thou shalt not uncover her nakedness.

8 The nakedness of thy father's wife shalt thou
not uncover: it is thy father's nakedness.

9 The nakedness of thy sister, the daughter of
thy father, or daughter of thy mother, whether she
he born at home, or born abroad, even their
nakedness thou shalt not uncover.

10 The nakedness of thy son's daughter, or of
thy daughter's daughter, even their nakedness thou
shalt not uncover: for theirs is thine own
nakedness.

11 The nakedness of thy father's wife's
daughter, begotten of thy father, she is thy
sister, thou shalt not uncover her nakedness.

12 Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy
father's sister: she is thy father's near
kinswoman.

13 Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy
mother's sister: for she is thy mother's nearest
kinswoman.

14 Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy
father's brother, thou shalt not approach to his
wife: she is thine aunt.

15 Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy
daughter-in-law: she is thy son's wife: thou shalt
not uncover her nakedness.

16 Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy
brother's wife: it is thy brother's nakedness.

 

 

While the laws are reinforcible by the prior claim of a
kinsman in all other cases, this is not so in the case of a

father and his daughter; because the only prior claim to the

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daughter is the father's own claim, the prohibition of the
daughter is only implied. As Judith Lewis Herman observes,
"[although] the incest taboo forbids [the father] to make
sexual use of his daughter, no particular man's rights are
offended, should the father choose to disregard this rule.
As long as he ultimately gives his daughter in marriage, he
has fulfilled the social purpose of the rule of the gift."
Even though father-daughter incest may be technically
illicit, Herman suggests, it is socially explicable because
it conforms to overarching expectations about the nature of
male authority over women.16 In Clarissa, the right to
possess the daughter--that ought to be the father's right to
bestow upon her future husband--is both underlined and
problematized by the desires of her male kin for her bodily
presence. By virtue of the multiple claims that threaten to
infringe the code prohibiting the internal consumption of
women, Clarissa becomes an anomaly at Harlowe Place.17 When
the will shows the extent to which the interior space of the
family is sexualized, Clarissa is identifiable as a danger
to lines of order within the family; she is a potential
source of intrafamilial conflict because she heightens the
nexus of conflicting desires among the Harlowe men.

Seen against the backdrop of her kinsmen's desire for
Clarissa, the proposed marriage to Solmes would seem to
offer one way in which tensions arising from the daughter's
eroticized presence at Harlowe Place might be diffused. Yet

Clarissa's proposed marriage to Solmes itself generates

178

difficulties due to another irregular feature of the
grandfather's will. In leaving his wealth to Clarissa, the
grandfather has transgressed the law of primogeniture that
ought to ensure the easy transference of property (his sons'
and grandson's inheritance) along blood and kinship lines--
he has "lopped off one branch of [the grandson's]
expectations" (77). As the primary beneficiary of the
grandfather's will Clarissa becomes doubly a source of
tension; she is at once part of the store of wealth of the
father in whose house she is brought up, and physically part
of the father in that she carries his bloodline, and yet she
threatens to deplete the family's 'wealth' in both respects.

Because the rule of exogamy dictates that the daughter
must be given out of the kinship group in marriage, and
because giving her in marriage would deplete the family's
store of material wealth as well as its bloodstock, the
tension inherent in Clarissa's impending marriage, as it
intersects with the issue of the grandfather's inheritance,
uncovers the central conflict in the two main systems
defining value in Western culture. These two systems--the
idealized blood relationship connecting father and son, and
the system of property inheritance--are encapsulated in the
code of primogeniture that the grandfather puts aside in his
will. The heiress Clarissa's marriage would deny the Harlowe
family the material wealth that might enrich its stock and
it would deprive the family of her body. Clarissa is

therefore perched at the intersection of the two conflicting

179

codes of Western culture--the code that demands exchange,
and the impulse to amass and pass on wealth that favors her
retention.18

Recognizing these conflicting impulses in Clarissa,
John Allen Stevenson has argued that the proposed marriage
to Solmes marks a movement to retain Clarissa for the
exclusive use of the Harlowes. As a result of the terms to
which Solmes will agree (terms that will return much of
Clarissa's wealth to her natal family), marriage to Solmes
would satisfy both the need to give the daughter exogamously
in marriage and effect her retention. Rejecting the popular
argument that the Harlowe greed accounts for their treatment
of Clarissa, Stevenson sees the retention of Clarissa's
grandfather's estate as less directly the point than the
retention of the daughter herself; he sees the Harlowes'
relentless attacks on Clarissa as part of an attempt to
retain their skillfull housekeeper and admirable daughter.
Bitter about the idea of losing Clarissa, he suggests, the
Harlowes seek a literal form of endogamy when they try to
marry Clarissa to a man of a similar social rank to
themselves. Stevenson argues that while the Harlowes recruit
Solmes to their cause, he is largely a puppet for the
Harlowe machine: "they abuse him and exploit him... they do
not intend to give him Clarissa at all. He is only the
conduit by which they hope to reincorporate her" (765). In
marriage to Solmes, Clarissa would neither have to leave

Harlowe Place nor enter into sexual relations with any man

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from another group so that her marriage would be like a
marriage inpp the Harlowe clan. For this reason, Stevenson
argues, the Harlowes' attempt to bring about the marriage
bears "strongly incestuous overtones."19

Stevenson's discussion of the "incestuous" element of
the Harlowes' behavior, however, underplays Clarissa's
erotic appeal when it sees Clarissa's "excellence as a
Harlowe" and the family's wish to keep her as "one of them"
as primary motivations for retaining Clarissa.20 The
exogamic code is, after all, explicitly concerned with
sexuai availability and unavailability; the rule of exogamy
seeks not simply to prevent the retention of the daughter,
but to prevent her sexual consumption by the kinship group
itself. As a nubile daughter Clarissa's erotic value as an
object of titillation is at least as important as her
"excellence as a Harlowe," and her appeal as a fruit that
may be tasted only vicariously is unmistakeable in the
manner of her various kinsmen as they attempt to persuade
her to marry Solmes.

Clarissa's uncle, John Harlowe, takes an approach that
plays up and plays upon the eroticism of his paternalistic
claim to his niece. In her letter of April 2nd to Anna Howe,
Clarissa describes her uncle Harlowe's appeal for her
acceptance of Solmes: "Half-distant, half affectionate, was
the air he put to his daughter-niece, as he used to call
me.... and [he] kissed me, and called me, charming

creature!" (294). Brushing aside Clarissa's attempt to

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discuss the disgrace of her confinement, John Harlowe
repeatedly kisses Clarissa's glowing cheek and her hand in a
form of courtship marked by solicitation and denial that
Clarissa indignantly acknowledges: "I was vexed to be
thus... played upon: and how could I be grateful for a visit
that it was now evident was only a too humble artifice to
draw me in" (294). Because John Harlowe is Clarissa's "papa-
uncle," she his "daughter-niece," his attempt to 'seduce'
her into compliance strongly suggests an actively incestuous
desire. John Harlowe's courtship, moreover, seeks to
persuade Clarissa to yield herself to Solmes, a man very
much like her uncles and her father in age and in
temperament as well as in social status, out of a carefully-
coerced sense of filial duty and love.21 The erotic quality
of this exchange is heightened by the fact that Clarissa's
brother and sister linger in the vicinity "hand in hand,
lover-like" to exemplify the rewards of compliance, or, as
uncle John pointedly explains to Clarissa, "love me, as you
used to love me--Your grandfather did not do so much for
you, as I will do for you" (295).

The erotic play of Clarissa's uncle is predicated upon
the assumption that Clarissa's sexual compliance is her
kinsmen's to construct and direct. This assumption also
informs Clarissa's brother's assault. James Harlowe, named
for his father and a third older than his sister, early
adopts a strategy of verbal assault by assuming the paternal

voice: "you observe, miss... that it is not i, but your

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pepe, that tells you that you are not to receive the visits
of that Lovelace" (57). When Clarissa later persists in
refusing Solmes, James recommends that Solmes use violence
to make Clarissa wish that she had given consent, "I know no
other method of being even with her, than, after she is
yours, to make her as sensible of your power as she now
makes you of her insolence" (317). He himself, moreover,
treats Clarissa roughly: "Here, sir, said he, take the rebel
daughter's hand; I give it you now; she shall confirm the
gift in a week's time, or will have neither father, mother,
nor uncles to boast of" (306). In the brutal bodily handling
that accompanies these words and wrenches Clarissa's
shoulder, James takes upon himself the father's prerogative.
He claims the daughter in order to give her while at the
same time surveying Clarissa with an eye to the marital
pleasure that she offers: "Look at her person! Think of her
fine qualities!... me all gloried in her till noy... and
after two or three more struggles, she will be yours and,
take my word for it, will reward your patience!... depend
upon it, you will be as happy a man in a fortnight, as a
married man pen be" (first emphasis added, 306). Standing in
for Clarissa's father while employing a violence that pre-
enacts the struggles of James' own rival, Lovelace, to rape
Clarissa, James provides Solmes with an "unbrotherly" model
of how to force the unwilling sister-cum-daughter to

yield.22

183

As brother and uncle each identifies himself as having
authority because of his proximity to Clarissa's father,
each confirms that it is the father who is accorded primary
control over Clarissa's sexuality. For this reason it would
be a mistake to assume that internal rivalries function as a
predominantly divisive force among the Harlowe men. Indeed,
because the successive solicitations of uncle and brother
are united by the tacit understanding that the father has
ultimate power with regard to his daughter, it is curious to
see just how low-key the father's very effective control of
his daughter actually is after the early confrontations
staged around commensality. In fact, the question that is
most properly the father's to ask after the rape according
to the code of paternal authority is only asked in the
epistles by those who ought to have less reason than the
father to expect an answer.23 While John Harlowe's crude
question about Clarissa's intactness is notable for its
stinging insensitivity to Clarissa's plight (1192), the
letter from her uncle Antony that follows is positively
voyeuristic. Antony's letter lingers on Clarissa's sexual
contact with Lovelace as he has imagined it in its quotidian
detail: "You lived several guilty weeks with one of the
vilest fellows that ever drew breath, at bed as well as
board no doubt... pray don't be ashamed to be asked after
what may naturally come of such free living..." (1195).
Antony's letter juxtaposes this concern with Lovelace's

provision of Clarissa's board with passages from

184

Eeeiesiaspicus 42 pertaining to the rights of the father
whose daughter boards in his house.

According to Antony, a father's concern for his
daughter's well-being is first and foremost a jealous
watchfulness over who gains sexual access to her:

A father waketh for his daughter when no man
knoweth--When she is young, lest she pass away in
the flower of her age (and you know what proposals
yere made to you at different times): and being
married, lest she be hated: in her virginity, lest
she be defiled, and gotten with child in her
father's house (I don't make the words, mind

that).... Keep a sure watch over a shameless
daughter... lest she make thee a laughing-stock to

thine enemies (as you have made us all to this
cursed Lovelace)... and make thee ashamed before

the multitude. (1196)

While this passage asserts the father's intense concern
about his daughter's sexual state--his culturally-sanctioned
watchfulness over her--it also marks the father's house
itself as not entirely a safe space for the daughter to
inhabit precisely because the daughter's virginity is the
father's province. When taken together with Antony's coarse
enquiry about the conditions attached to Lovelace's
provision of board, Antony's representation of the father's
house as a place where the daughter boards inadvertently
suggests that the daughter may be as readily defiled within
the father's house as outside it. If the father's domain is
a place where his daughter may be made pregnant, it does not
stand outside the common understanding that any man who

provides acommodations and food (board) for a woman

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customarily exacts payment of a sexual nature (bed) in kind.
This subtle linking of paternal shelter with filial
indebtedness not only raises the question of how such a debt
might be discharged, it also points to virtually the only
asset in the maintained woman's possession--her sexual
value.

The easy transition between the sexual and non-sexual
functions of women whom one keeps in one's house as
dependents, a woman who keeps (maintains) one's house and a
woman that is 'kept' as a mistress in one's house, is
brought to light in the recurring figure of the housekeeper
in Ciarissa. The most notorious keeper of a house is, of
course, Sinclair. But Sinclair is not representative of
women who keep house in Clarissa because, even though she
earns money from the male clients who frequent her
establishment, she is the primary manager of her pyn house;
she is able to bring charges against and have Clarissa
incarcerated for her unpaid board. Women who keep house for
male owners in return for bed and board are more usual in
Ciemissa. Clarissa herself is the most memorable
housekeeper. Her grandfather "delight[s] to call [her] his
housekeeper" (1414) even when she attends to what he has
declared he; "dairy house." Clarissa is also an excellent
manager of her father's house and takes charge of most
domestic affairs that a wife would customarily oversee. When
James plans to have Clarissa as his housekeeper if the

designs to marry her should fail, Clarissa acknowledges the

186

lowly status and limited powers of a woman who keeps house
when she remarks to Anna Howe, "I have no mind to be his
housekeeper; and I am sure, were I to go with him, I should
be treated rather as a servant than as a sister--perhaps not
the better because I em his sister" (56).

The keeping of one's daughter and the keeping of one's
sister are each girt about by a culture of indebtedness that
establishes ideal conditions for her internal use. But
because Clarissa's kept status in her father's house has
more bearing on Clarissa's food abstinence than her
potential to become her brother's housekeeper, and because
the plight of the kept sister emerges with greater clarity
in Tem Jones and serves a more critical narrative function
in that work, I confine my present discussion to the
significance of Clarissa's kept status as it effects the
father-daughter relationship.24 If one accepts that the debt
incurred by the acceptance of board in the father's house
may be dangerous to the daughter and to the maintenance of
order, then Clarissa's movement beyond the debt-bound and
sexualized interior of Harlowe Place ought to offer the
reinstitution of the exogamic code even at the price of an
order fraught with the tension between Lovelace and the
younger James Harlowe. Yet Clarissa's departure with
Lovelace never suggests the restoration of even this
precarious form of order; her departure marks a further
"disturbance" when it is characterized as the daughter's

extreme disobedience--the high point of her failure to honor

187

the debt she has incurred by living in the father's house.
Clarissa herself acknowledges before her meeting with
Lovelace that to leave willingly with Lovelace would flout
the accustomed order embedded in the "Old Law" that
precludes the daughter from making a promise and frees her
from having to stand by any promise that she has
presumptuously made. Given by Richardson in a footnote, the
patriarchal code from Numbers 30. 3, 4, and 5 (which
Clarissa plans to use to break her agreement to leave with
Lovelace) pertains to the ineffectiveness of the daughter's

word while she is in her father's house:

3. If a woman voy a vow unto the Lord, and bind
herself by a bond. being in her fatheris house in

her youth;
4. And her father hear her vow. and her bond

yherewith she hath bound her soul, and her father
shall hold his peace at her; then all her voys
shall stand....

5. But if her father disallow her in the daysthat
he heareth; not any of her vows or of her bonds
yhereyith she hath bound her spul shali:stand: and
the Lord shall forgive her. because her father
disallowed her. (361)

 

According to the code, the daughter's subjection to the
authority of God is mediated by her father to whom she owes
complete obedience. In other words, she ought not--and
cannot--legitimately oppose her earthly father; and any
attempt to do so will amass the symbolic weight of a
disobedience of the heavenly Father himself. Although the
edge of the garden at Harlowe Place with its ruined chapel

and overgrown oaks falls short of Paradisal verdure (352),

188

it is nevertheless the site of what Clarissa identifies as
her Fall when she likens herself and Lovelace at St. Albans
to "the first pair, I at least driven out of my paradise"
(393). Clarissa's analogy for her disobedience in leaving
her father's garden does indeed lend her departure the
mythic dimension of the temptation of Eve rather than the
mere flight of an undutiful girl. Lovelace, however, appears
not, as Clarissa seems to suggest, as a traditional Adam led
astray by woman, but as a disruptive force--a rebel son--
who, Satan-like, coerces her with whispered promises of
something denied by her father.25 Clarissa's likeness to the
tempted Eve is strongest when Lovelace offers to remove the
constraints of the patriarchal code from Clarissa. When he
offers to take Clarissa 'at her word' and to thereby free
her from what he calls her "disgraceful oppression" (375),
Lovelace offers Clarissa freedom from constraint in the
manner that Satan has offered it to Eve. And, like Eve,
Clarissa is offered an empty promise as becomes clear in
Lovelace's power over her following the flight and
culminating in her rape.

The particular mode of power that Lovelace acquires
through the forbidden liaison is in itself rather singular
for it offers a form of domestic salvation, to use Nancy
Miller's phrase, that is problematic to say the least.
Partly as a result of Mr. Harlowe's early promise to disown
his daughter in her disobedience, and partly through

Lovelace's management of the situation at the garden gate,

189

Lovelace gains in Clarissa not so much a lover and potential
wife, as a fatherless daughter.26 Lovelace represents
himself, moreover, not first as husband material, but as a
kinsman: "Remember only that I come at your appointment, to
redeem you at the hazard of my life from your gaolers and
persecutors, with a resolution... to be a father, uncle,
brother, and as I humbly hoped, in your good time, a husband
to you, all in one" (377). When it conflates the title of
husband with other relationships that identify blood
linkage, Lovelace's declaration suggests that these roles--
and by implication the functions associated with each,
including the power to control what and when the kinswoman
may eat--might have a significant degree of overlap.

While Lovelace's identification of himself as
Clarissa's kinsman first hints that there may be more than
merely superficial similarities between Mr. Harlowe's prior
and Lovelace's subsequent treatment of Clarissa, Lovelace's
isolation of Clarissa, the limits he imposes upon her
movement and actions, and his mediation of her transactions
with the world beyond her lodgings at St. Albans and at
Dover Street, gradually heighten and confirm these
similarities. Far from freeing Clarissa from her oppression,
far from rescuing her from her jailers and persecutors,
Lovelace comes increasingly to replace them and to duplicate
the tenor of her principal jailer's demands as he
progressively reintroduces the indignities that Clarissa

suffered in the father's house.27 As Lovelace's insistence

190

on Clarissa's complete compliance and blind trust are almost
identical to the demands made by her father, it is as though
the rivalry among the Harlowe men for control of Clarissa
extends beyond that family to encompass Lovelace. Once
Lovelace has Clarissa in his custody, the opening epistle's
narrative of interfamilial rivalry seems at one level to
become secondary to the rape narrative dealing with
Lovelace's abuse of power over the woman under his
protection.

On another level, however, Lovelace's desire for
Clarissa is quite clearly inflamed by a desire for mastery
over her brother; when Lovelace outlines his motives for
pursuing Clarissa in his first letter, his intention to
"brin[g] that sordidly-imperious brother to kneel at the
foot-stool of my throne" (145) precedes his litany of
Clarissa's perfections. As Lovelace reconstructs the
conditions of Harlowe Place and especially the terms of Mr.
Harlowe's authority over his daughter, his appropriation of
Clarissa gathers meaning as a usurpatory act--the act of a
son clamouring for the power of a father, and, in the
process vying with another son who might also aspire to the
father's power. As in the case of those earlier power-hungry
sons, Satan and Robinson Crusoe, bodily possession of a
woman that properly belongs to the father signals an attempt
to establish the son and his own authority and becomes a

consummate passion and a passion to consum(mat)e.

191

Almost as soon as Clarissa is removed from the garden
of Harlowe Place, Lovelace begins what is to become his
relentless testing of her--supposedly to ascertain her
virtue, obedience and loyalty. In this he repeats the test
of duty set by Mr. Harlowe. Lovelace's first trial for
Clarissa is based on the premise that because Clarissa has
entertained Lovelace's letters against her father's wishes
and has been disloyal where she owes the greatest duty,
Lovelace cannot be sure of her loyalty to himself. Lovelace
figures Clarissa's regrets about having disobeyed her father
as signs of her knowing disobedience and of her
unreliability:28

She blames herself for having corresponded with
me....

Has she been capable of error?--Of persisting in
that error?.... What must be those inducements...
that were too strong for duty, in a daughter so
dutiful?.... Was a person of virtue to be
prevailed upon to break through her apparent, her
acknowledged duty upon any consideration?.... Can
she suffer herself to be provoked to promise to
abandon her father's house, and go off [with a
lover], knowing his character?.... May there not

be... other Lovelaces; other like intrepid
persevering enterprisers...? (427-28)

According to Lovelace, Clarissa's error is not in actually
leaving Harlowe Place, but in entertaining and articulating
the notion of doing so. As such a notion both signals a lack
of trust in her father and casts aspersions on his house by
implying that all was not as it should have been therein,

Lovelace argues Clarissa's potential to similarly dishonor

192

him were she to become his wife (429). Even though Lovelace
has offered to take Clarissa at her word from her father's
house, he further insinuates himself into a position of
authority like that of her father when he engineers the
frightful situation at the garden gate that brings about her
bodily compliance in spite of her verbal negative:
"terrified, I was got out of sight of the door... he put my
arm under his, his drawn sword in the other hand, and
hurried me on still faster: my voice, however, contradicting
my action; crying, No, no, no, all the while" (380). Like
the father whose "terrible voice" has sought to silence his
daughter's refusal to yield up her virginity upon demand,
Lovelace's machinations force his charge into a consenting
negative that anticipates the drugged conditions under which
she will be raped.

Subsequently, and in keeping with the code that marks
the endorsement of his daughter's word as a father's
prerogative, Lovelace begins to speak for Clarissa and to
expect her silence. His assumption that Clarissa will
maintain silence and the fact that in several instances she
does, signal the power that Lovelace gains through his self-
assigned guardianship--through his pledge to be "father,
uncle, brother... husband... all in one." Maneuvering
Clarissa into silence in the matter of their actual
circumstances by means of a lie that she is unable to
contradict with credibility, Lovelace has Clarissa endorse

by default the lie that they are brother and sister.

193

Representing himself as the brother of an unruly sister and
manipulating Clarissa into silence, Lovelace implicates her
in the lie in a way that makes Clarissa's later objections
to his freedoms less effective. Moreover, Clarissa's silence
gives her adoptive kinsman license to act as he might under
the pretense of offering her protection because it places
her in a "state of obligation... to her new protector"
(398). It is because he assumes the role of her brother, for
example, that Lovelace gains free access to Clarissa's
bedchamber at St. Albans (388). And it is in the same letter
in which he boasts to Belford of "topp[ing] the brother's
part before the landlady" (414) that he describes the first
kiss given to Clarissa as a moment of heightened sexual
pleasure: kissing Clarissa es s brother pleases Lovelace as
much as "the ultimatum with any other woman" (413).

While playing the brother's part affords greater sexual
access to Clarissa than the lover's part, it must be
remembered that the brother's power is effective because it
is endorsed by his father; it is therefore fitting that
Lovelace's greatest 'triumphs' over Clarissa are to be
achieved once he assumes the paternal role more fully. When
Clarissa's status as a fatherless daughter is confirmed in
her father's curse relayed in Arabella Harlowe's letter of
April 15th, Lovelace condemns Mr. Harlowe's renouncement of
Clarissa as extreme and unpaternal. Lovelace then responds

with his own form of murderous oral violence and an

194

impassioned reiteration of his undertaking to be Clarissa's

father:
I found her recovering from fits, again to fall
into stronger fits; and nobody expect[ed] her
life.... Nor wonder at her being so affected; she
whose filial piety gave her dreadful faith in a
father's curses; and the curse of this gloomy
tyrant extending...to both morlds--Oh that it had
turned in the moment of its utterance to a mortal
quinsy, and sticking in his gullet had choked the

old execrator, as a warning to all such unnatural
fathers. (518)

Imaginatively killing Mr. Harlowe by making him eat his
own words, Lovelace establishes himself as Clarissa's author
and lays claim to the author's sweetest privilege: "I
[brought] her back. More than a father to her; for I have
given her a life her unnatural father had well-nigh taken
away; shall I not cherish the fruits of my own benefaction?"
(emphases added, 518). The self-proclaimed father's idea of
what it means to cherish becomes abundantly clear when,
merely two days later, he reports to Belford that the
remainder of his family, "our mother and her daughters" are
in preparation to receive him, the "name-father," and his
latest 'daughter,' Clarissa (569). Lovelace's family
consists of 'mother' Sinclair; the confraternity of rakes
are her sons, and the prostitutes her deflowered daughter-
nieces.29 In what is at once a parody and a duplication of
her position in the Harlowe family, Clarissa is inserted
into Lovelace's family bearing exactly the status, virgin

daughter under seige, that she bore when she left Harlowe

195

Place. Clarissa's position in Lovelace's household--where
lines of incest are hopelessly tangled by brethern/sons who
initiate daughters into sex and by the sexually-available
mother, herself a sometime 'niece'--further mirrors
Clarissa's position in her father's household; she is again
subject to the demands of a 'kinsman' (a "father, uncle,
brother... all") who insists that she yield her virginity to
his purposes. It should come as no surprize that, in the
midst of these new but oddly familiar circumstances of
coercive solicitation, the pattern of absence from
commensality is reinaugurated.

Clarissa's absence from meals at Sinclair's identifies
a slightly different configuration of power than that of her
absence from the table at Harlowe Place. At home Clarissa
has been forbidden to eat with the family by her father to
make her comply with certain demands. At Dover Street she
initially appropriates her father's tactic of withdrawal
from commensality to establish terms when, "not choosing
either tea or supper" she informs Lovelace of her choice to
be sequestered (525). Lovelace, likening her behavior to the
futile protest of a caged bird, believes he understands her
tactic (557) and gloats over his power to create strategems
to manage her: "I am a great name father.... Preferments I
bestow.... I degrade by virtue of my own imperial will,
without any act of forfeiture.... What a poor thing is a

monarch to me!" (569).

196

When Clarissa's retirement takes up a period of three
weeks, spent in illicit correspondence with Anna Howe,
Lovelace takes it upon himself to punish the women for both
their defiance of parental authority and their writing of
"treasonable" letters (573). Yet rather than acting with the
absolute authority of the sovereign he professes to be,
Lovelace becomes as jealous as a father--as jealous, in
fact, as Mr. Harlowe whose attitude and actions he begins to
mimic: "He went out this morning; intending not to return to
dinner, unless (he sent me word) I would admit him to dine
with me. I excused myself. The man whose anger is ppm to be
of such importance to me was, it seems, displeased"
(emphasis added, 590). Lovelace's displeasure is heightened
considerably at a solus breakfast four days later when a
copy of one of Anna Howe's disparaging letters confirms that
Clarissa's distance is deliberately instituted (634). While
Lovelace names the correspondents as "[u]ndutiful wretches"
and imagines himself as the parent whose authority has been
flouted, his fantasy of raping the "sister-beauties" and
becoming their master suggests the sexual expediency of such
authority (635, 637).30 As Lovelace increasingly aligns
himself with the disobeyed father, the tensions around
mealtimes intensify and commensality--or its refusal--
becomes once again an elaborate dance of solicitation and
denial.

Lovelace's letters from Sinclair's at this time

represent Clarissa's absence from meals as a tendency to

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disobedience and as her contempt for the man with whom she
ought to be compelled to share them. Barely tolerating
Clarissa's absence at other times, Lovelace takes umbrage at
her retirement at mealtimes when her presence might be
expected to maintain his facade of domestic harmony. In a
curious inversion of the father who banished Clarissa from
the tea and supper table until she would agree to his terms,
Lovelace sues for Clarissa's presence at every meal. Despite
this inversion, however, the underlying significance of
shared meals remains largely unchanged.31 Viewing Lovelace's
wish to eat with her as dangerous lest it increase her
contact with him and make way for his greater familiarity,
Clarissa understands the refusal of commensality as also a
way of signifying her disapproval of other demands of the
man who provides the repast. Because Clarissa approaches
shared meals with caution, her choice to avoid them signals
her distrust of Lovelace's motives from the beginning of her
stay at Sinclair's: "We had some talk about meals....I told
[Sinclair]... I chose to dine by myself.... They thought me
very singular; and with reason.... I was less concerned for
what they thought.... as Mr. Lovelace had put me very much
out of humor with him" (532).

But the very fact that Lovelace is implicated in
Clarissa's choice to dine alone allows him to implement an
inverted system of compliance and reward which, though it
seems to demand compliance on Lovelace's part, ultimately

works in his favor. In her letter of May let Clarissa

198

explains the workings of this system to Anna Howe:
"[Lovelace] demanded... to be admitted to afternoon tea with
me: and appealed by Dorcas to his [appropriate] behavior to
me last night; as if... he thought he had a merit in being
unexceptionable" (641). When Clarissa responds to this
solicitation by repeating an earlier agreement to breakfast
with Lovelace, his raving response shows that her power to
refuse a favor is largely an illusion. As Clarissa is
compelled to give into one demand if she is to avoid worse,
her concession to a supper meeting is coerced out of a fear
of Lovelace's anger ("[a]s we had been in a good train for
several days past, I thought it not prudent to break with
him for little matters" [641]), so that she is, as she puts
it, "threatened into his will" (641).

Lovelace's reception of Clarissa at supper not only
replays the fierce physical struggle that has been part of
her experience at Harlowe Place, but concludes with Clarissa
begging Lovelace's permission to withdraw. This meeting lays
the ground for the promised breakfast meeting which confirms
that even when it is Clarissa who refuses commensality, it
is Lovelace who dictates terms. When Clarissa appears for
breakfast dressed for church and clearly with no intention
of partaking of the repast except in the most cursory way,
the dining room becomes an arena for intimidation and an
angry struggle across the rattling teacups ensues. The

struggle forces Clarissa into a solitary confinement from

199

which she emerges, upon Lovelace's insistence, at teatime

with this illuminating observation:
I was guilty, it seems, of going to church.... of
desiring to have the whole Sunday to myself....for
these [faults] I was to be punished: I was to be
compelled to see you, and to be terrified when I
did see you by the most shocking ill-humor that
was ever shown to a creature in my
circumstances.... You have pretended to find free
fault with my father's temper, Mr Lovelace: but
the worst that he ever showed after marriage, was
not in the least to be compared to what you have
shown twenty times beforehand.... Oh my dear papa,
said the inimitable creature, you might be spared
your heavy curse, had you known how I have been

punished ever since my swerving feet led me out of
your garden doors to meet this man! (650)

His anger likened to Mr. Harlowe's tyranny, and his manner
of punishing Clarissa's lack of compliance linked to her
father's attempt to terrify his daughter into obedience,
Lovelace stands as a horribly exaggerated caricature of
Clarissa's father.

Like Mr. Harlowe, then, Lovelace surrounds eating with
distasteful conditions which coalecse about his insistence
that Clarissa fulfill his demands. Rather than nurturing
Clarissa as he has earlier promised to do, Lovelace wants
Clarissa to pacify and nurture him. Because Lovelace renders
Clarissa in terms of how she can fulfill his needs, because
he establishes her availability to feed his self-image and
to thus perpetuate himself, it should come as no surprize

that another long-awaited meeting in the dining room gives

200

rise first to an oral ravishment of Clarissa's bosom, and
then to an erotic fantasy of literally dining on her:
I would not forgo the brightest diadem in the
world for the pleasure of seeing a twin Lovelace
at each charming breast, drawing from it his first
sustenance....

I now, methinks, behold this most charming of
women in this sweet office, pressing with her fine
fingers the generous flood into the purple mouths
of each eager hunter by turns: her conscious eye
now dropped on one, now on the other, with
maternal tenderness; and then raised up to my
delighted eye, full of wishes, for the sake of the
pretty varlets, and for her own sake, that I would

deign to legitimate; that I would condescend to
put on the nuptial fetters. (706)

Where James has characterized daughters as "'encumbrances
and drawbacks upon a family'" and claimed that "'a man who
has sons brings up chickens for his own table... whereas
daughters are chickens brought up for the tables of other
men'" (77), Lovelace's fantasy of feeding on Clarissa alters
the function of the daughter to make of her a 'chicken' that
Lovelace--her "name- father"--can consume. By imagining
Clarissa as a mother, the daughter's meeting with her name-
father is translated into the duty of the daughter/mother to
nourish her father, the father of her children and the male
children who will--if Lovelace condescends--bear his name.
While Lovelace's fantasy marks his desire as simultaneously
that of a father, sexual partner and son, his power derives,
the fantasy suggests, from his own transformation into a
father, and his pleasure from the very vulnerability of the

woman over whom absolute power is wielded. When Clarissa

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uses her by now customary abstention from commensality to
create the ruse that allows her to escape to Hampstead,
Lovelace is determined to regain her on his own terms and to
turn Clarissa's "crushed rebellio[n]" to his own advantage
in his self-assigned role of "sovereign in possession"
(761).

It is entirely fitting then that when Lovelace finds
Clarissa at Hampstead whither she has flown after his
attempt on the night of the fire, he enters the house in the
guise of a gouty old man who recalls the unspoken physical
threat posed by the similarly-afflicted Mr. Harlowe. The
sexual suggestiveness of Lovelace's transformation from an
old man reminiscent of Clarissa's father to the would-be
rapist are difficult to miss in light of Lovelace's
flambouyant self-exposure ("I unbuttoned... my cape...
pulled off my hat... threw open my great coat" [772]), and
his gleeful corruption of Milton's lines to displace the
potency of Ithuriel's weapon onto his own body: "I started
up in my own form divine, / Touched by the beam of her
celestial eye, / More potent than Ithuriel's spear!" (772).
As Erickson has so evocatively expressed it, rather like the
"gout-ridden father stumping up to her room and killing her
in his rage" that Clarissa has feared at home, Lovelace
administers "another shock in the guise of a hobbling old
man, whose sudden appearance in his true colors also
reenacts that earlier surprise in the garden of her father's

house when 'he threw open a horseman's coat' and confronted

202

her" (158). Clarissa claims she "cannot eat" after the
confrontation at Hampstead. She avoids the dining room that
Lovelace engages and marks as his own territory, she eats
only sparingly, and she insists upon paying her own 'bed and
board' for the remainder of her time at Hampstead.

The next (indeed final) refreshment that Clarissa
accepts from Lovelace proves to be the tea laced with a
sedative that dulls her senses prior to the rape. It is
particularly significant that the rape is enabled by
Clarissa's momentary lapse in her guarded refusal to
countenance the terms that Lovelace has set. When Clarissa
accepts the supposedly restorative dish of tea, Lovelace
takes advantage of her lapse to reinstitute (through his use
of the drug) the terms adumbrated by Mr. Harlowe; Clarissa's
acceptance of Lovelace's condition-bound sustenance is
turned into his license to dispense with her virginity in
the manner of his choosing. Clarissa's taking in of
Lovelace's hitherto rejected sustenance at this crucial
moment turns out to be the key to his success in translating
her refusal of his sexual advances into a drug-induced and
enforced acceptance. Through the orally-administered drug
that deprives Clarissa of her senses during the rape,
Lovelace exactly reproduces the power relation between
father and daughter. By allaying Clarissa's apprehensions
with the assurance that it is only the milk--that most
nurturing of all foods--that she is unaccustomed to,

Lovelace equips himself to override any objection that

203

Clarissa might make. He doubly guarantees his success by
actually incapacitating her from articulating the negative--
her non-consent--during the rape; in so doing he implicitly
calls upon the code that decrees that a daughter's word
requires endorsement by the man who has her under his
protection and who is therefore at liberty to coopt her
agency.32

Shortly after the rape, Clarissa takes up the theme of
annihilation by oral means in one of the accusatory
fragments that uses the metaphor of parasiticism: "Thou
pernicious caterpillar, that preyest upon the fair leaf of
virgin fame, and poisonest those leaves which thou canst not
devour! Thou fell blight, thou eastern blast, thou
overspreading mildew, that destroyest the earliest promises
of the shining year!... Thou eating canker-worm that preyest
upon the opening bud..." (892). Apparently directed at
Lovelace, the accusation might just as easily be levelled
against Clarissa's father given the withering effect of his
curse and the conditions with which he has blasted his
daughter's existence.

After the rape, of course, Clarissa's wasting reaches
chronic proportions. Rejecting the terms that Lovelace
forces upon her through the violence perpetrated on her non-
consenting body, Clarissa's failure to eat after the rape--
accompanied by violent stomach aches and other disorders
(932)--accelerates the pattern of food abstinence first seen

at Harlowe Place where the daughter's trust was initially

204

eroded by terms she could not stomach and by an
incapacitating oral violence. In the rape, moreover,
Lovelace has enacted almost exactly the violence that the
Harlowe men have threatened. Not only has Lovelace taken
James' advice to Solmes, to make Clarissa as sensible of his
power as she once made him of her insolence (317), but
Clarissa is gained by Lovelace after two or three struggles
just as James has promised Solmes she would be (306).
Echoing the Harlowe intention to deliver her up to Solmes
under any circumstances, furthermore, Clarissa's incapacity
is to prove no obstacle to Lovelace, as, "ill or well" his
'ceremony' too is to be forcefully conducted and legitimated
by the retroactive consent that Lovelace hopes to secure by
taking Clarissa to wife. Rather than being simply a rake and
a rival, an outsider against whom the Harlowe daughter must
be protected, Lovelace--the paternalistic protector turned
rapist--dramatizes the latent threat of the work's other
terrifying protector, that preternatural insider, the
father.

Clarissa's failure to eat and her resulting emaciation
speak the violation of filial trust by the father; his is a
violence that is literalized in the bodily violation of the
daughter by the other man who undertook, father-like, to
nurture and to love her. Given the incestuous nature of
paternal-filial love in Clarissa, the daughter's return to
her father's house in death can hardly be conceived as a

triumph for her at any level. Rather, her return speaks the

205

daughter's eternal bondage to the terms of daughterhood
within her earthly father's house; constructed through her
father's almost endlessly displaced desire, the daughter can
have no existence beyond that desire, as the curse, an
intensely overdetermined expression of the father's wish to
retain power over his daughter, shows. Even when Mr. Harlowe
relents sufficiently, though belatedly and without
forgiveness, to withdraw the curse, his terms are sustained
by the other 'word'--the biblical codes--that preclude the
daughter's agency. The otherworldly Father's house,
accessible through a demise of corporeal substance that
results in death, offers neither respite nor a mitigation of
terms; it offers a redoubling of the conditions that wring
the daughter's body into a no-body. The crises of Clarissa's
marriageability and her potential to evade the father's
wishes conclude with her marriage to a heavenly Father
("never was a bride so ready as I" [1339])--a marriage that
brings the emaciated and violated daughter's body back to

its final residence in the father's house.

Notes

1. Raymond F. Hilliard, "Clarissa and Ritual
Cannibalism," BEER 105, no. 5 (1990): 1083-1097.

2. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa. or The History of a
Young Lady, ed. Angus Ross (Harmondsworth, Middlesex:
Penguin, 1985), 77, 267. All subsequent references will be
to this edition and page numbers will appear parenthetically
in my text.

3. Hilliard, 1090, 1084.

4. Carol Houlihan Flynn, Samuel Richardson: A Man of
Letters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 45;
Margaret A. Doody, A Natural Passion: A Studyiof the Noveis
oi Samuel Richardson (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1974), 171; Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Samuel Richardson and the
Eighteenth-Century Puritan Character (Hamden, Connecticut:
Archon Books, 1972), 83-4, 162, 158-9. See also Katherine

Cummings (Telling Tales: The Hysteric's Seduction in Fiction

 

and Theory [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991], who
claims that 'Sinclair' is a homophone that "casts Clarissa
in(to) the French figure of 'St. Claire'" who founded an
order devoted to the sick poor and was celebrated for

chastity (123). Cummings further suggests that Clarissa

206

207

identifies with Sinclair and that the antiphysical saint is
Richardson's antitype for the monstrosity in women

represented by Sinclair or sans Clair. Even Terry Eagleton's

 

Marxist reading, The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexualihy
and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1982), entertains the idea of
Clarissa's death as a potential, if highly-ambivalent,
spiritual submission (90).

5. Rudolph Bell, HolyiAnorexia (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1985), 18-19, 115. Bell makes
it clear that his term, "holy anorexia" is not the modern
illness anorexia nervosa, but that it shares many of the
physical and psychological characteristics of the modern
disease. Bell uses 'holy anorexia' as a shorthand term to
describe behaviors of food abstinence and/or appetite loss
among women and to consider factors that contributed to such
behavior. His term holy anorexia approximates to Hilde
Bruch's idea of an 'anorectic stance,' a resistance against
feeling exploited and controlled, in The Golden Cage: The
Enigma of Anorexia Nervosa (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1976), and in Eating Disorders: Obesity, Anorexia
Rervose and the Pemson Within (New York: Basic Books, 1973).
Bruch's interactive (rather than intrapsychic) approach to
anorexia, which emphasized the importance of agency and
identity to the potential anorectic, laid the groundwork for
numerous recent studies of the illness. The idea that food

abstinence is utilized by some women to rebel against

208

oppressive patriarchal ideology and practices in modern
Western culture has appeared in a variety of forms in self-
consciously feminist studies of anorexia nervosa in recent
years. See, for example, Susie Orbach, Hunger Strike: The
hnorectic's Struggle as a Metaphor for our Age, (London:
Faber and Faber, 1986); Noelle Caskey, "Interpreting
Anorexia Nervosa," in The Female Body in Western Culture:
Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1986),
175-189; Susan R. Bordo, "The Body and the Reproduction of
Femininity: A Feminist Appropriation of Foucault," in Gender
/ Body / Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and
Knewing, ed. Alison M. Jaggar and Susan R. Bordo (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 13-33; Matra
Robertson, Starving in the silences: An Exploration of
Anomexia Nervosa, (New York: New York University Press,
1992), 12-21 .

6. Bell, 116, 185; Hilliard, 1092.

7. For a detailed discussion of Belford's motives for
writing Clarissa into "Saint Clarissa," see Donnalee Frega,
"Pedagogy of the Perfect: Consumption and Identity in
Richardson's Clarissa" (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1989),

234-46.

8. Paula Marantz Cohen, The Daughter's Dilemma; Family

Pneeess and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Novel (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 24, 30-31, 52-3.

My own disinclination to use the term 'anorexia' in

209

connection with the case of Clarissa stems from the fact
that the term was not identified with the behaviors that
Cohen describes until comparatively recently. According to
Petr Skrabanek ("Notes Toward the History of Anorexia
Nervosa," genes: Revue Internationale de l'historie de la
phaimecie et de la teehnigue 70 [1983]: 117), the first
English fasting girl on record was Martha Taylor from
Richardson's native Derbyshire. She became of public
interest from 1668-69 due to a report on her fast by one J.
Reynolds. The earliest recorded case in medical literature
approximating to the modern condition anorexia nervosa which
usually involves considerable bodily emaciation among its
other symptoms, is found in Richard Morton's Phthisiologia:
o; e Treastise of Consumptions (London, 1689). Although this
treatise details the case of Mary Axe who is described as
having a nervous consumption and whose symptoms closely
resemble those of the modern disease anorexia nervosa, there
is nothing that shows that Richardson was aware of either
her case or that of Martha Taylor. Several eighteenth-
century physicians associated anorexia (which was understood

as a lack or loss pi appetite) with a broad range of nervous

 

 

disorders including hysteria and hypochondria giving rise to
works such as Giorgio Baglivi's The Practise of Physick,
(London, 1723), George Cheyne's The Natural Method oi
Qnieing the Diseases of the Body and the Disorders of the
Ming (London, 1742), Robert Whytt's Observations on the

Neiure, Causes. and Cure of those Disorders which have been

210

eommonly called Nervous, Hypochondriac, or Hysteric

(Edinburgh, 1767), and William Cullen's First Lines of the
Practice of Physic (Edinburgh, 1791). It was not until the
nineteenth century that the term came to signify anything
resembling the modern concept of the illness anorexia
nervosa. In the nineteenth century, bodily emaciation and
abstention from food became the subject of independent
reports by William Gull ("The Address in Medicine Delivered
Before the Annual Meeting of the B.M.A. at Oxford," Laneei 2
[1868]: 171-76; idem "Apepsia hysterica. Anorexia Nervosa,"
Trensactions of the Clinical Society 7 [1974]: 22-28) and

Charles Lesegue ("De l'anorexie hystérique," Archives

 

générales de médecine 21 [1873]: 385-403). Confused in 1914
with Simmonds disease, a condition arising from damage to
the pituitary gland, it was only during the 19308 that
anorexia nervosa was established as a disease of psychic
origin and taken up by Sigmund Freud and others who
continued to associate it with hysteria. For a fuller
history of the disease, see Hilda Bruch, Eatin Disorders,
chap. 12; Helmut Thoma, Anorexia Nervosa, trans. Gillian
Brydone (New York: International Universities Press Inc.,
1967), chap. 1; Ilza Veith, Hysteria: The History of a
Disease (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965); Mara

Selvini Palazzoli, Self Starvation: From Individual to

 

Eemiiy Therapy in the Treatment of Anorexia Nervose, trans.
Arnold Pomerans (New York: John Aronson, 1978), 3-25;

Skrabanek, 109-128; Rudolph Bell, Hol Anorexia, chap. 1.

211

For an overview of the most recent medical, psychoanalytical
and feminist work on the subject, see Robertson, 22-35, 40-
45.

9. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fasi: The
Reiigious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkley:
University of California Press, 1987), 207.

10. T.C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel
Richardson: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 42-
44, 154-6; George Cheyne, The English Malady: or e Treatise
of Nervous Diseases of all Kinds as Spleen, Vapours, Lowness
oi Spirits, Hypochondriacal, and Hysterical Distempers, &c.
(London, 1733), i-iii, 35.

11. Charles F. Mullett, ed. The Lettersyof Doctor

 

George Cheyne to Samuel Richardson (1733-1743), University
of Missouri Studies, vol. 18 (Columbia: University of
Missouri, 1943). Although Cheyne does associate self-denial
and abstention from food with religious virtue, he
emphasizes the value of temperance for restoring bodily and
social equilibrium in a culture given to the corruptions of
a disorderly sensual excess. In a letter of June 30 1742,
Cheyne writes: "I have often thought Low-living and its
Attendants to mend a weakened Constitution of Body, has a
great Analogy and Resemblance to the Meanest Purification
and Regeneration preserved in holy Writ. The Method of
Cure.... is called by [the ancient physicians] Cyclus
Meiesyncriticus...viz't by Evacuation... Bleedings now and

then, Thumb or other Vomits... these will answer all the

212

Designs of Evacuation to throw off the old corrupted Mass,
representing Repentance, Self-Denial, avoiding the Occasions
of Sensuality and Sin, and throwing off the old Man with all
his Works of Darkness" (101).

12. See, for example, Terry Castle, Clarissa's Ci hers:
Meaning and Disruption in Richardson's 'Clarissa' (Ithaca,
New York: Cornell University Press, 1982), 106, 119, 124-26.
Hilliard attributes Clarissa's food abstinence to her being
"'swallowed up' by her grief after the rape" (1091), and
John A. Dussinger ("Love and Consanguinity in Richardson's
Novels," Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 24, no. 3
[1984]) claims that Clarissa's refusal to eat and undress
follows "the trauma of sexual violence" and represents a
withdrawal from the world (n.18, 519). In The British Noveiy
Defoe to Ausien: A Critical History (Boston: Twayne
Publishers, 1990), John Allen Stevenson links the rape with
the onset of bodily denudation: it is "the fulcrum between
blooming good health and rapid [corporeal] decay" (39).
Frega's doctoral dissertation is a notable exception for she
considers the significance of mealtimes at Harlowe Place
(111-17).

13. Peter Farb and George Armelagos, Consuming
P ss ons: The Anthro 010 of Eatin (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Co., 1980), 4-6; Bynum refers to a family as "a
group of people who reside--and especially eei--together"
and suggests that "[t]o refuse commensality is both to

refuse the meal as a symbol of familial bond and to refuse

213

the most basic support that a father's money and mother's
household skill can provide: food" (223).

14. Clarissa's lack of identity is underlined when Mr.
Harlowe more emphatically severs Clarissa from the Harlowe
name and from the affective tie: "when Mr. Solmes can
introduce you to us, in the temper we wish to behold you in,
we may perhaps forgive his wife, although we never can in
any pihei character, our perverse daughter" (190).

15. Janice Haney-Peritz, "Engendering the Exemplary
Daughter: The Deployment of Sexuality in Richardson's
Qiarissa," in Daughters and Fathers, ed. Lynda E. Boose and
Betty 8. Flowers. (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1989), 189.

16. Judith Lewis Herman, Father-Daughter incest
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 60. On this
point see also W. Arens, The Original Sin; Incest and Its
Meening (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 140-150.

17. I use the term 'anomaly' here as Mary Douglas uses
it in Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of
Pollution and Taboo (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1966),
53, 113, to describe something or someone that breaches
lines of demarcation between different culturally-sanctioned
categories. Such a person (or such an object) is considered
;polluted and polluting and so frequently inspires fear,
contempt, anger, hatred, or some combination of these. It is
*worth noting with Douglas that the incest prohibitions are

informed by the operational logic of the dietary laws that

214

precede them in Leviticus 11.2-41, and that Leviticus as a
whole is devoted to the priestly principles of order and
wholeness. Both the incest and dietary prohibitions stand as
an elaboration of the injunction to be 'holy' (to be whole,
separate or complete) and any thing or person that cannot be
identified as clearly belonging to one category is
considered anomalous. The multiple and overlapping claims to
Clarissa render her such an anomaly. On the concept of
anomaly, see also Patricia Klindienst Joplin's "The Voice of
the Shuttle is Ours," Stanford Literature Review 1 (1984):
41-43.

18. Lynda E. Boose, "The Father's House and the
Daughter in It: The Structures of Western Culture's
Daughter-Father Relationship," in Fathers and Daughters, ed.
Lynda E. Boose and Betty S. Flowers (Baltimore and London:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 28. Douglas
usefully elaborates other threats posed by the daughter's
marriage in an exogamic social system. Because a wife
usually comes from a kinship group with which her husband's
group ordinarily competes for resources and for status,
marriage harbors the germ of conflicting material interests.
The potential for procreation within marriage further
identifies the daughter as potentially traitorous; at the
same time that her community of origin cannot consume her
because of the law prohibiting incest, the daughter may
increase the human resources of her marital kin through

childbirth. The daughter's ability to reproduce alarmingly

215

brings together the crossing of community/kinship lines in
marriage with the crossing of blood lines and bodily bounds
(147).

19. John Allen Stevenson, "The Courtship of the Family:
Clarissa and the Harlowes Once More," EAR 48 (1981): 757, n.
18, 760. For an elaboration of the greed argument see
Christopher Hill, "Clarissa Harlowe and Her Times," in his
Rnritanism and Revolution Studies in Interpretation of the
Engiish_Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (London:
Secker and Warburg, 1958), 370-71, 374, 383; Mark Kinkead-
Weekes, Samuel Richardson: Dramatic Novelisi (London:
Methuen, 1973), 131ff. For a discussion of women and

property in the period that also deals with Clarissa, see

Austin W. Flanders, Structures of Experience: History,

Soeiety. and Personal Life in the Eighteenth-Century British

Reyei (Columbia, S. Carolina: University of S. Carolina
Press, 1984), chap. 4.

20. Stevenson, "The Courtship of the Family," 765, 766.

21. Solmes is introduced as a friend of Clarissa's
uncles and several descriptions demonstrate his likeness to
them and to Mr. Harlowe. See especially Anna Howe's letter
of Thursday March 9 (letter 27) which describes Solmes,
Uncle Antony and Mr. Harlowe all as encroaching, dreary,
spendthrift suitors.

22. This point is not lost on Frederick R. Karl (The

Adversary Literature. The English Novel in the Eighteenth
Century: A Study in Genre [New York: Farrar, Straus and

216

Giroux, 1974]) who notes that "[i]n addition to the obvious
sadistic overtones of Clarissa's relations with James,
Arabella, and Mr. Harlowe are the lines of incest. We could
argue that James's insistence that Clarissa marry Solmes is
more than family-oriented.... Clarissa is surrounded by
father figures who loom as sexual threats" (133). Lynda

Zwinger (Daughters, Fathers, and the Novel: The Sentimental

Romance of Heterosexuality [Madison, Wisconsin: University

 

of Wisconsin Press, 1991]), who offers a parallel reading of
this episode to mine, observes that James' violent behavior
and language begin "with [Clarissa's] father's blessing";
she refers to James' suit for his sister as "a courtship by
proxy" (20)--a courtship that is ultimately on behalf of
Clarissa's father. On the power differential between male
and female siblings in modern Western culture, see Diana E.
H. Russell, Incest in the Lives of Girls and Women (New
York: Basic Books, 1986), chap. 18.

23. Mr. Harlowe's absence from much of the action of
Cierissa has caused more than one commentator to regard him
as an enfeebled patriarch yielding to the power of his
young, vigorous son. Florian Stuber ("On Fathers and

Authority in Clarissa," Studies in English Literature 1500-

 

1900 25, no. 3 [1985]: 537-575), goes so far as to suggest
that Clarissa is attracted to Lovelace because he has the

makings of a strong father and because Lovelace is unlike

her own weak father. More recently Haney-Peritz, whose

position is in other ways far removed from Stuber's, sees

217

Mr. Harlowe as an "unwitting accomplice" in James' struggles
with Lovelace and with Clarissa, and as a father "usurped
and sexualized without his knowing or wanting it" (192). I
maintain with Zwinger that Mr. Harlowe's power is critical:
his power is acknowledged by the Harlowe men and sustains
their frightening encroachments on Clarissa. As Zwinger
observes when she refers to James' use of the father's voice
as a form of ventriloquy (21), James' and Mr. Harlowe's
interests are, for the most part, closely aligned.

24. There are of course other kept women in Clarissa.
For example, Lovelace mocks Clarissa's uncle, John Harlowe,
as "an old sinner" for collapsing the distinctions between
housekeeper and kept woman (696). John Harlowe uses his
housekeeper as a mistress while at the same time criticizing
libertinage. But the case of Belton's housekeeper best
illustrates the problems that arise when one does not
maintain one's housekeeper at a proper reserve. Belton's
error, according to Belford and Lovelace, is not in having a
kept woman as such, it is in allowing one's kept woman,
particularly if she is a "consuming mistress," to deplete
one's house and attain control of one's estate (1088).
Having entrusted the keeping of his house to an arguably
unfaithful mistress, Thomasine, who is generally supposed to
be his wife, Belford jeopardizes his estate (612), and
Thomasine's sons "riot on the remnant of his broken
fortunes" (1089). Once Thomasine and her illegitimate

children have been ejected, a more fitting choice of

218

housekeeper for the purposes of consolidating Belford's
dwindled estate is found in Belton's despised, lowly and
impoverished sister who is ingrafted to the place vacated by
the mistress (1224).

25. On Clarissa and Lovelace as Edenic figures, see Tom
Keymer, Richardson's 'Clarissa' and the Eighteenth-Century
Reader (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 106-
14. Anna Howe's later description of Lovelace's voice and
his behavior at Colonel Ambrose's assembly also conjures an
image of Lovelace as a temptor of this ilk: "I heard
[Lovelace's] odious voice, whispering behind my chair... Qne
regnest--I started up from my seat, but could hardly stand
neither, for very indignation--Oh this sweet, but becoming
disdain, whispered on that insufferable creature!... but...
let me entreat from you one quarter of an hour's audience"
(1135).

26. Nancy K. Miller, The Heroine's Test: Readings in
ihe French and English Novel. 1722-178; (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1980), 188. For a discussion of Lovelace's
legal claim to Clarissa, see John P. Zomchick, "Tame
Spirits, Brave Fellows and the Web of Law," ERR 53, no. 1
(1986): 199-120. Zomchick suggests that Lovelace is able to
claim Clarissa as his property because she is abandoned by
her family. Flanders believes that Clarissa "repeated[ly]
attempts to create a family with which to replace her
original one. She continually asserts that she is in effect

an orphan... (154).

219

27. On this point see Linda S. Kauffman, Discourses of
Qesire: Gender. Genre. and Epistolary Fictions (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1986), 130, 132.

28. There are strong parallels between Lovelace's
reasoning here and the reasoning that Iago uses to persuade
Othello of Desdemona's infidelity in the third act of
Othello (3.3.155-61, 206-8). In letters 97, 245, 246 and
252, as in letter 31 where Lovelace recites a line that
captures Othello's anguish over Desdemona's supposed
infidelity, Lovelace frequently asserts that a daughter who
has betrayed her father's trust has the makings of an
unfaithful and deceitful wife and that she is deserving of
punishment.

29. 'Mother' Sinclair's daughters are also referred to
as her husband's "nieces." As Robert A. Erickson (Mother
Mignight: Birth, Sex, and Fate in Eighteenth-Century
Eiction: Defoe. Richardson. and Sterne [New York: AMS,
1986], 140, 278, n.37) points out, 'niece' was a common
slang term in the eighteenth century for a prostitute.

30. Lovelace's incestuous desire for the "sister
beauties" in this instance in which he specifically
identifies himself as a disobeyed father, reemerges in a
more complicated form in one of Lovelace's dreams. In the
dream Clarissa is living upon her inheritance and is visited
by Anna Howe: "Miss Howe... [is] enabled to compare notes
with [Clarissa]; a charming girl, by the same father, to her

friend's charming boy; who, as they grow up, in order to

220

consolidate their mammas' friendships (for neither have
dreams regard to consanguinity), intermarry; change names by
Act of Parliament, to enjoy my estate" (922). The children
offer proof of Lovelace's sexual conquest of both 'sisters.'
Whether or not the children's marriage would consolidate a
friendship based upon the sisters' common sexual interest in
Lovelace, it would certainly consolidate Lovelace's estate
by permitting his daughter's sexual and economic value to be
incorporated into, rather than circulated out of, his
family.

31. Cf. Frega, 166-167.

32. For the implications of Clarissa's unconsciousness
(and her resultant inability to consent to--or to refuse--
intercourse) in the context of women's status as legal
beings and the period's increasing demand for physical
evidence to establish truth, see Frances Ferguson's, "Rape
and the Rise of the Novel" Representations 20 (1987): 88-

112.

Chapter 4: Bre(a)d, Bed, and Bawd.

[Y]our sister was the mother of that child you
found between your sheets.
--Henry Fielding, Tom Jones

The lowing heifer, and the bleating ewe in herds
and flocks, may ramble safe and unregarded through
the pastures. These are, indeed, hereafter doomed
to be the prey of man.... But if a plump doe be
discovered to have escaped from the forest, and to
repose herself in some field or grove... every man
is ready to set his dogs after her; and if she is
preserved from the rest by the good squire, it is
only that he may secure her for his own eating.

I have often considered a very fine young woman
of fortune and fashion, when first found strayed
from the pale of her nursery, to be in pretty much
the same situation with this doe.... she is hunted
from park to play, from court to assembly, from
assembly to her own chamber, and rarely escapes a
single season from the jaws of some devourer or
other: for if her friends protect her from some,
it is only to deliver her over to one of their own
chusing....

--Henry Fielding, Tom Jones

"Three pounds at least of that flesh which formerly had
contributed to the composition of an ox, was now honoured
smith becoming a part of the individual Mr Jones.... This
particular. . . may account for our hero's temporary neglect

of [Mrs. Waters] .. .. [S]he was in love, according to the

221

222

present universally received sense of that phrase, by which
love is applied indiscriminately to the desirable objects of
all our passions, appetites, and senses, and is understood
to be that preference we give to one kind of food rather
than to another."1 So begins the famous Upton episode in Tpm
genes. In this episode, following his magnificent feat of
eating, Tom Jones engages in sexual relations with Mrs.
Waters that are later--mistakenly as it turns out--
characterized as incestuous. I refer to the Upton episode in
which Tom unwittingly has sex with the woman, née Jenny
Jones, believed to be his mother, not solely because it
marks a moment in Tom Jones where the main concerns of this
study--incest and eating-~come together. Occurring at almost
the exact mid-point of the novel at the end of the ninth
book, the Upton episode is also important as the spectacular
second in a series of three episodes in which Tom Jones is
found in a bed in which, according to prevailing social and
cultural codes, he ought not to be.2

During the Upton episode itself, as in all of Tom's
sexual encounters except that which produces legitimate
issue, Tom is cast as responding to woman's lasciviousness
:rather than initiating sexual relations himself. Mrs. Waters
apparently possesses an overwhelming seductive power. She
.launches an attack on Tom and he succumbs to the might of
that "royal battery," her bosom (456) . Yet Tom shows more
.initiative in the Upton episode than it would seem from Mrs.

Waters' campaign to conquer him and her "feast[ing] heartily

223

at the table of love" (461). Tom is first attracted to Mrs.
Waters by her "well formed and extremely white" (441)
breasts, whose very whiteness suggests their capacity to
nurse as well as to be objects that arouse male heterosexual
desire. Mrs. Waters' breasts are appealing precisely because
they offer the combined erotic/gustatory appeal of a literal
"quantity of delicate white human flesh" (252) which the
narrator identifies in the chapter on love in book 6 as
necessary to the curbing of both kinds of hunger. Once Tom's
appetite for two types of flesh is whetted, he gorges on
actual meat as a prelude to sating his sexual appetite.
Informed by the narrator's explanation of lust as the
propensity to consume a quantity of white human flesh, Tom's
lust for Mrs. Waters is a desire to devour her, or, more
accurately, to cannibalize her. This association of meat-
eating with manly prowess militates against the narrative's
persistent representation of women's bodies in general, and
maternal bodies in particular, as uncontained, powerful, and
dangerously predatory.

First of all, the long-standing link between meat-
eating and manliness in Western cultural tradition is
evident in several references in Tom Jones itself to the
purposeful eating of meat by veteran warrior heroes in
classical literature and myth. Probably the most memorable
of these references is the narrator's likening of Tom to
"Ulysses, who... had the best stomach of all the heroes in

that eating poem of the Odyssey" (453), and who, we are to

224

infer, was therefore among the most courageous of Odyssian
heroes. For Fielding, who wrote the popular contemporary
English ditty, "The Roast Beef of Old England," which
appeared in The Grub Street Opera (1731), and in Don Quixote
in England (1734) by the title "The King's Old Courtier,"
the eating of beef by soldiers in a mythologized past is
responsible for their manly vigor and bravery in battle as
well as their bellicosity. In the ditty, English manliness
compares very favorably with European effeminacy. By means
of a simultaneous and parallel comparison, Englishmen's
appetites are described as robust and healthy--as everything
that European men's appetites are not:

When mighty Rost Beef was the Englishman's Food,

It ennobled our Hearts, and enriched our Blood;

Our sgégéers were brave, and our Courtiers were

Oh the Rost Beef of Old En land,
And Old England's Rost Beef!

Then Britons, from all nice Dainties refrain,

Which effeminate Italy, France, and Spain;

And mighty Rost Beef shall command on the Main.
Oh the Rost Beef of Old England,

And Old England's Rost Beef!3

Extending the idea that there is a direct correlation
between diet and human characteristics, here national
character, the narrator of Tom Jones alludes to the capacity
of food to foster certain qualities in men when he
undertakes first to give human nature in the "plain and

simple" style of English cooking, and to "hash and ragoo it

 

wit
ail
Eu:
is
ma
ex
Fi

ir

225

with all the high French and Italian seasoning of
affectation and Vice thereafter" (53). By indentifying
European taste with corruption and effeminacy, English taste
is constructed as something that is wholesome; it is overtly
masculine and implicitly heterosexual. Against this
explanation of what it means to have a hearty appetite, and
Fielding's representations elsewhere of Englishmen turned
into fops by European diet, and fops made manly by English
beef, it is no accident that Tom has considerable prowess as
a fighter and that his lust for the hunt is matched only by
his lust for women.4 When Mrs. Waters launches her mammiform
attack on Tom, therefore, the heterosexual matrix subtly
established by the narrative's association of good appetite
‘with manliness and flesh-eating rewrites the purported
hostility of Mrs. Waters as a relinquishment of the bosom to
Tom's masculine faculty--his appetite for meat. Thus the
‘power of Mrs. Water's bosom to conquer Tom is considerably
abated by his predisposition to ravage rather than ravish
‘the white meat that Mrs. Waters proffers.5

In spite of all indications that Tom is extremely
tvilling to have sex with Mrs. Waters, moreover, and even
when we know that Mrs. Waters is Jenny Jones, and that Jenny
.18 mph Tom's mother, we are apt to attach to Mrs. Waters
1&11worthy's misdirected criticism of libidinous drives in
the unwed and supposedly besmirched Jenny:

How base and mean must that woman be, how void of
that dignity of mind, and decent pride, without

226

which we are not worthy the name of human
creatures, who can bear to level herself with the
lowest animal, and to sacrifice all that it great
and noble in her, all her heavenly part, to an
appetite which she hath in common with the vilest
branch of creation! (67)

The Upton episode is helpful in breaking down this erroneous
attribution. Because the Upton episode associates msie
libido explicitly with excessive eating in Tom's pre-coital
consumption of three pounds of ox, it draws attention to the
way in which sexually-active females across the social
spectrum in Tom Jones are depicted as sexual predators,
substantial eaters, or, more usually, both. In Mrs. Waters'
case, the exposed ample breasts that she is loathe to cover
on the road to Upton allude to the uncontainability of her
body in line with such well-known, excessive and appetitive
female bodies as Milton's Sin, Pope's Dulness, Swift's
goddess Criticism, and of course, Richardson's 'Mother'
Sinclair.6

The conflation of women's appetites for food and their
procreative functions is also evident in Tom Jones when the
mmse is represented as an obese mother who spawns hacks. The
"redundant sustenance" from the muse's ample breasts creates
sated, but intellectually stunted progeny (608). The muse is
depicted elsewhere as being fattened by the ancients upon
‘whom she is permitted to graze (552). Other versions of the
«devouring female body abound in the novel, as coarse or
indiscrete women and sexually incontinent ones are often bad

:mothers. That such women dine heartily is exemplified by the

227

gorging of the ironically-named Honour (480-81) who will
sell her fidelity to the highest bidder, Mrs. Fitzpatrick,
whose elopement and subsequent desertion of her child
through the offices of a potential future beau leaves her
appetite undiminished (526-27), and Nancy Miller, who,
having been "hungry" enough to have "sat down to dinner
before grace was said" narrowly averts having an
illegitimate child (674). Even Bridget Allworthy, cast as
the lean figure that might have inspired Hogarth's 'A Winter
Morning,‘ has trailing behind her in Hogarth's print a
"starved foot-boy" as she walks through that haven of loose
women, Covent Garden (79). The starved foot-boy foreshadows
the son that Bridget almost deprives of a fortune by her
incontinence: his wasted body emblematizes the mortification
of Tom's flesh by Thwackum as a result of Bridget's failure
to curb her lover-like longing for Tom over the would-be
suitors Square and Thwackum.7

Because these hungering women are represented as
caricatures of amorous spinsterhood, lower-class womanhood,
and of the unruly disobedient heiress, they are given a
familiar and easily-accessible (if sometimes grotesque)
comedic appeal. However, if one follows the inclination to
dismiss these figures of hungry female libido as mere
comedic effects, one is also compelled to dismiss their
counterpart, male libido represented in terms of the
ravening animal image. Such a summary dismissal would

obscure the novel's two most disconcerting arenas of male

228

predation which emerge with great clarity when they
facilitate or follow those other crucial instances in Ten
genes where Tom is found--as at Upton--in a bed in which he
should not be.

The first episode in which Tom Jones is in the 'wrong'
bed opens the novel. He is the unnamed illegitimate infant
who, against the backdrop of the narrator's bill of fare to
the promised feast, is found in Thomas Allworthy's--his
mother's brother's--bed. The third episode is located at the
close of the novel. It follows the public supper at Mrs.
Miller's celebrating the separate marriages of young
Nightingale and his cousin. In this episode Tom clasps
Sophia in a well-advertised wedding embrace that anticipates
his private, fruitful marital union with Sophia in a bed at
Sophia's father's house. In each case, the owner of the bed
that Tom occupies undertakes to provide for him and so to
maintain him. These two bed episodes do not simply create a
thematically coherent frame for the narrative, they also
share with each other--and with the Upton episode that lies
nestled between them--the novel's pervasive concern about
who may have the use of certain types of property. Of course
the Upton incident turns out not to be the case of incest it
is feared to be. But the peril it embodies--that a man may
have use of a woman he would be ordinarily prohibited from
enjoying--is the result of the confusion over parentage in
the first bed scene in Allworthy's chamber, and in some ways

anticipates the submerged irregularities of the closing

229

conjugal bed episode. Whereas Fielding's narrative sleight
of hand on the issue of who Tom's mother is glibly dispenses
with the potential for incest at Upton that arises from
Tom's illegitimacy and uncertain parentage, it does not
remove the tincture of incest from the two relationships in
the work marked by the bed episodes by virtue of which Tom
becomes a man of property at narrative's end.

In the remainder of this chapter, I will show that
although Tom's 'incest' with Mrs. Waters has most commonly
been treated as a device employed by Fielding for comedic
effect and to bring about Tom's ultimate maturation and
repentence, this episode points the way backward and forward
to Fielding's unfolding of the issue of property rights and
usage in Tom Jones.8 At the same time the spectacular manner
in which the Upton affair is treated (through its physically
and narratively central situation and through the scare that
incest has occurred) draws attention away from the novel's
other strategically-placed bed episodes, the domestic
arrangements that enable these episodes, and the novel's
persistent concern with who owns and who may therefore use
certain types of property. Even though incest is not
specifically named in the opening and closing bed episodes,
each episode raises afresh the questions of the kind of
ownership that arises from rearing and commensality, and the
usage rights that accrue from ownership. The submerged
incest theme is crystalized about the economies of food

provison, bride and land procurement and familial

230

regeneration in the first and third bed episodes. These
economies link the two bed episodes more closely with the
spatially central non-incest episode than has hitherto been
imagined, so that the two 'frame' episodes are finally more
important than the Upton episode for the novel's discussion
of property through its attention to incest and eating.9

A look at the ethos of Allworthy's household and the
circumstances that surround the discovery of the foundling
in Allworthy's bed provides a useful point of entry to this
discussion. At first glance, Paradise Hall, with its
classical lines, extensive grounds and its meadows "fed with
sheep" (58), epitomizes an ideal and bountiful Golden Age of
self-sufficiency and open-handed generosity. Its proprietor,
"replete" with benevolence, is said mph to be "one of those
generous persons, who are ready most bountifully to bestow
meat, drink, and lodging on men of wit and learning, for
which they expect no other return but entertainment,
instruction, flattery, and subserviency; in a word, that
such persons should be in the number of domestics, without
wearing their master's cloaths, or receiving wages" (74-5).
On the contrary, the narrator informs us, every person in
this house is the "perfect master of his own time... he
might at his pleasure satisfy all his appetites within the
restrictions only of law, virtue and religion... he might...
absent himself from any meals... without even a solicitation
to the contrary: for indeed, such solicitations from

superiors always savour very strongly of commands" (75). Yet

231

there are early indications that Allworthy--like Robinson
Crusoe's and Clarissa Harlowe's fathers--makes substantial
demands of those who live in his self-contained paradise and
eat at his table.

George Seagrim's ejection from Paradise Hall following
the partridge-shooting incident in book 3 is a case in
point, for the rationale that informs his ejection helps to
elaborate Fielding's concern with several kinds of property
in Tom Jones. George's nickname, Black George, links him
directly to the Waltham Black Act which was rapidly enacted
in the period from 30th April to 27th May 1723 to safeguard
propertied liberties and interests. Legislation had been in
existence in the seventeenth century for the protection of
landed property. However, the Black Act of 1723 took the
protection of individually-owned property further when it
created fifty new capital offenses through the generation of
fresh descriptions of offenses against property. The Black
Act was created to deal with a series of localized
disturbances involving illegal night hunting, or poaching,
by criminal gangs on private estates with deer parks,
enclosed coppices and fisheries. The two most sensational
incidents of poaching occurred in 1720 in Windsor Forest,
and in 1723 in the counties of Hampshire and Berkshire.10
Despite the fact that the Black Act sought to deal with very
specific incidents, its hasty enactment is seen by modern
analysts of game laws as indicative of a prevailing mood of

anger and fear about unlicensed encroachment on privately

232

owned property. The act is generally seen as emblematic of a
wider trend of change in legislation pertaining to land use
in the early modern period in which substantial tracts were
becoming less available to those of the lower social orders
as a result of the increasing enclosure of land for more
intensive agricultural use.

Enclosure (the conversion of common lands into private
property, or the substitution of 'enclosed' fields for the
open field system) had been going on since the fourteenth
century and had sparked civil unrest in the 15305, 15705,
and early 16005. But because the latter half of the
seventeenth- and the eighteenth century as a whole brought
important new developments in agricultural methods, products
and technology, this period saw an escalation and greater
codification of the practice of enclosure in parliamentary
law. Legislation further eroded the rights of the
unpropertied orders, of tenants and small landowners to use
common lands to graze livestock and to procure food,
building materials and fuel. As enclosure made it more
difficult for those without property to eke out a living, it
caused John Cowper and others to declare against the
practice as damaging to the national interest and to the
working poor. The preservation of resources for the use of
the relatively affluent propertied orders by successive acts
of enclosure and by the Black Act marks a decreased
availability of resources to those closest to subsistence

levels. That many poaching-related offences were for the

233

first time legally punishable by death as a result of the
Black Act in turn suggests the importance of landed property
in distinguishing between social orders in a period of
tremendous uncertainty about such distinctions brought about
by new methods of acquiring (and measuring) worth.11

While it is true that George's initial infraction of
the law concerning game--hi5 part in killing the partridge
sprung on Allworthy's land and shot on Western'5--is at odds
with his job as gamekeeper, George's dismissal has effects
which are, in common sense terms, disproportionate to his
trespass: "'your poor gamekeeper, with all his large
family... have been perishing with all the miseries of cold
and hunger'" (143). Influenced by Squire Western's fury over
the trespass, and inflamed by George's attempt to evade
detection, Allworthy honors the spirit of a law which
preserves "property in animals ieree naturae" for the
exclusive use of the landowners without regard for the cost
of such exclusivity to their minions (47-48).12 This
position closely aligns Allworthy with those like Western
who will "preserv[e] and protec[t]... certain animals...
[and] unmercifully slaughter whole horse-loads themselves"
(124). The juxtaposition of the benevolent ethos that
superficially graces Paradise Hall and Allworthy's actions--
which demonstrate a marked concern for safeguarding
privately-ownable property--embodies a philosophical
paradox. But this is a paradox easily resolved if one

understands that generosity like Allworthy's can only

234

function on an extended basis when resources belong to the
few who may choose whether or not to dispense largesse to
the many. It is therefore to the advantage of a landowner
like Allworthy to keep control of resources; preservation is
actually necessary if Allworthy's generosity, and in turn
his power, are to continue.13

The principle of preserving resources for one's own use
is everywhere evident in Tom Jones and especially so in the
power that Allworthy exercises over those, like Black
George, who are paid to serve him. Particularly interesting
in this regard is Allworthy's domestic servant and
housekeeper, Deborah Wilkins, to whose intimacy with
Allworthy the narrator more than once refers. Deborah is
thought so intimate with Allworthy that his own sister,
Bridget, does not trust Deborah with the secret of her
pregnancy. In spite of this level of intimacy between
employee and employer, it is somewhat disconcerting to
observe Deborah's lack of alarm at Allworthy's nocturnal
summoning of her to his bedchamber. The narrator invites the
reader to laugh at Deborah's vanity when she pauses to preen
herself at the looking-glass as though regardless of the
urgency of Allworthy's summons (56). Assuming we have not
missed the sexual innuendo in the narrator's speculation
that Allworthy might be lying "expiring in an apoplexy, er
in seme other fit" (emphasis added, 56) while he waits for
his housekeeper to come to his bed, the narrator then pokes

fun at the prudence and chastity of the old maidenish

235

Deborah under the guise of staving off any coarse notions

the reader might have entertained about her:

Mrs Deborah Wilkins... tho' in the 52nd year of
her age, vowed she had never beheld a man without
his coat. Sneerers and prophane wits may perhaps
laugh at her first fright, yet my graver reader,
when he considers the time of night, the summons
from her bed, and the situation in which she found
her master, will highly justify and applaud her
conduct; unless the prudence, which must be
supposed to attend maidens at that period of life
at which Mrs Deborah had arrived, should a little
lessen his admiration. (56)

But if the narrator's feint of defending Deborah's good name
emphasizes the superfluity of her prudence because Deborah's
age renders her sexually undesirable, this very superfluity
intimates what might be expected of a female servant of more
tender years were she to be summoned in like fashion.
Clearly the social, economic and sexual vulnerability of the
female who is enclosed in the realm of domestic property
that I have broached in my discussion of house-kept women
and housekeepers in Clarissa is not irrelevant to the case
of Deborah Wilkins who has grown elderly in Allworthy's
service. And it is certainly not an idea that would have
been novel to Fielding who, in November 1747, took his own
six-months pregnant housekeeper, Mary Daniel, as his second
wife.14

Because it is foregrounded by the narrator's
acknowledgement of a female dependant's sexual availability,
Deborah's initial response to the infant in Allworthy's bed

gives credence to the idea that he could very well be the

236

foundling's father. Deborah heaps insults on the
unidentified mother yet she does not pursue what ought to be
just as pressing a question; the identity of the foundling's
father. In this ommission Deborah tacitly subscribes to the
idea that the identity of the child's father requires no
questions. Drawing her conclusions from folk wisdom and from
where the infant is found, Deborah retreats to a position
that rather falteringly defends Allworthy only when he
expresses horror at the insinuation that he may be--or may

be thought--the foundling's father:

I don't know what is worse... than for such wicked
strumpets to lay their sins at honest men's doors;
and though your worship knows your innocence, yet
the world is censorious; and it hath been many an
honest man's hap to pass for the father of
children he never begot; and if your worship
should provide for the child, it may make the
people the apter to believe: besides, why should
your worship provide for what the parish is

obliged to maintain? (57)15

That this speech of Deborah's is the retraction of the comic
sychophant becomes clear during the episode of Allworthy's
near-death in book 5. When Allworthy is thought to be on his
deathbed Deborah repeats her first response to the

foundling:

It would have becomed [sic] him better to have
repented of his sins on his death-bed, than to
glory in them, and give away his estate out of his
own family to a mis-begotten child. Found in his
bed, forsooth! A pretty story! Ay, those that hide
know where to find. Lord forgive him, I warrant he
hath many more bastards to answer for, if the
truth was known. (230)

237

Once we learn that Bridget Allworthy is Tom's
biological mother, that Tom was conceived in an illicit
liaison that took place within the confines of Paradise Hall
itself, and the reasons why popular opinion maintains that
Allworthy is Tom's father, Deborah's reference to a truth
that may not be fully known, hovers darkly. It allows the
possibility that Tom is the product of both Allworthy eng
his sister and gilds with new meaning Mrs. Waters' later
revelation about Tom's parentage to Allworthy: "'your sister
was the mother of that child you found between your sheets'"
(836). As T. G. A. Nelson has rightly observed, the form of
this sentence is odd to begin with. It not only identifies
Bridget as the mother of the child, but it "calls attention
to a gesture on her part that pointedly invited her brother
to father it--almost, indeed, accused him of having done
so."16

Futhermore, as Homer Obed Brown has convincingly
argued, the very presence of the foundling in Allworthy's
bed strongly suggests "that something is wrong in Paradise,
that there is something deficient or excessive, something
less that all-worthy in the patriarch, something hidden"
(224).17 Given the sexual access of the householder to the
women in his household that has surfaced in the narrator's
crude joke about Allworthy's noctural summons to Deborah, it
is significant that Bridget, Allworthy's unmarried sister

and mother of the infant ensconced in her brother's bed,

238

also lives at Paradise Hall as a dependent. Although Deborah
is Allworthy's housekeeper in title, Bridget serves as the
keeper of Allworthy's domestic enclosure in another respect.
Bridget is first introduced as the physical occupant of the
place at her brother's table that has been vacated by
Allworthy's dead wife five years before:
Miss Bridget rings her bell, and Mr Allworthy is
summoned to breakfast.... The usual compliments
having past between Mr Allworthy and Miss Bridget,
and the tea having been poured out, he summoned
Mrs Wilkins and told his sister he had a present
for her; for which she thanked him, imagining, I
suppose, it had been a gown, or some ornament for

her person. Indeed, he very often made her such
presents, and she, in complacence to him, spent

much time in adorning herself. (59)18

As a result of Allworthy's oddly-named "present" to his
sister and the couple's exaggerated courtesy at the
breakfast table, the scene quickly develops an ironic
texture of conjugal harmony and domestic felicity. This is
heightened when "the little infant" is produced and
Allworthy resolves--against the background of Bridget's

sotto voce grumbling--to "take care of the child, [and] to

 

breed him up as his own" (59, 60).

When this parody of conjugal completeness and Bridget's
complacence to her brother in all matters down to that of
personal dress is placed alongside her observation that "all
men were headstrong, and must have their own way, and [her]

wish that she had been blest with an independant fortune"

239

(60), it does indeed seem as though something "less than
all-worthy" is afoot. Since Bridget's compliance in all
matters is born of obligation, it seems as though
Allworthy's generosity might not be entirely disinterested.
This in turn underscores the possibility that his charity in
other instances might likewise yield pleasurable returns--
or, equally, that it might be a return for pleasures already
enjoyed.19

When Deborah's outburst at the time that Tom is
discovered offers illegitimate paternity as the most
feasible explanation for Allworthy's magnanimity in Tom's
case, her explanation cannot be as hastily dismissed as the
narrator would have us at one level believe. The terms in
which Deborah expresses her response create an uneasy sense
that there has been something extraordinarily wrong in the
foundling's conception. Deborah attributes certain alien
characteristics to the foundling that underline "its"
anomolous status and non-personhood: "'it goes against me to
touch these misbegotten wretches, whom I don't look upon as
my fellow creatures. Faugh, how it stinks! It doth not smell
like a Christian'" (57). Moreover, Deborah refers to the
foundling (already marked as the product of a coupling
outside the law by "its" illegitimacy) as a creature that
defies classification, and so depicts Tom as what Brown
calls a "monster [that] results from an unnatural

coupling".20

240

Deborah's experience of Tom as an anomalous creature is
entirely consistent with the age-old belief in English
folklore that incestuous conceptions bring forth monsters.
Although the degeneration argument proper did not emerge
until the late nineteenth century with the rise of
biological 'inbreeding' theories, there is evidence to
suggest that monstrous births were being linked to incest in
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophical discourse.
When Deborah responds to Tom as though he were an object of
contagion to be reviled and avoided, she marks him as a
creature that is beyond the pale of all ordinary human
relationships and brings to mind the similarities between
the creature that hails from Paradise Hall and the hell-
hound creatures of Paradise Lost.21 Nothing can be expected
from "such creatures" according to Deborah, "than that they
will "grow up and imitate their mothers" (57). Certainly,
Tom's dalliances might be said to imitate Bridget's pre-
marital sexual activity. But then Tom's incontinence is
explained rather differently by Western and with a force
that is not substantially allayed by the narrator's later
assertion to the contrary: "'Allworthy loves a wench
himself. Doth not all the country know whose son Tom is?....
many a wench have we two had together. As errant a
whoremaster as any within five miles 0' un'" (182).

I have said that Allworthy's adoption and rearing of
the foundling in itself gives rise to the supposition that

he is the father of the illegitimate boy. Indeed, one is

241

forced to wonder later in the narrative how it is possible
for Allworthy to disown Tom if he has never owned him. But
Allworthy's decision to give the foundling his own name,
fittingly bastardized from 'Thomas' to 'Tom,' does more than
Tom's sexual promiscuity or Allworthy's adoption of the
infant to support the reading of Tom as Allworthy's natural
son. Tom is given not one, but two names. In place of that
important indicator of paternity, the surname, Tom is given
the name of the woman, Jenny Jones, who is publically named
as his biological mother. According to the logic that
ascribes Tom his matronym even when circumstantial evidence
provides him with a biological father in Partridge, 'Tom
Jones' ought to be renamed 'Tom Allworthy' once Bridget is
found to be his natural mother.22 Allworthy's lack of
attention to the rightful ownership of this name--especially
as it is his own name too--highlights the aliases and
potential designations (Jones, Partridge, Summer, Allworthy)
that compose the mystery of whose son Tom might be. In
underscoring the unreliability of proper names as indicators
of place and property, or as indicators of genealogy, the
retention of the name given by Allworthy allows Tom Jones--
more accurately, Tom Allworthy--to receive Thomas
Allworthy's property in the form of the Squire's "great
liberality" at the end of the novel; Tom gets to own
Allworthy's property without having had to adopt that marker
of blood relationship, the surname, that most publically

acknowledges paternity.23

242

Adding to his suspicious lack of attention in the point
of Tom's name, Allworthy is inconsistent in dealing with
pregnancy in unwed women. As Allworthy has been loquacious
and severe in his condemnation of Jenny's bestial qualities,
incontinence and immoral conduct when he supposes that her
sexual appetites have produced Tom, the paucity of his
comments upon the same failings in Bridget is especially
noticeable.24 In the case of his sister, Allworthy is more
aghast at the fact that she concealed having had a child
("'it was the most unjustifiable conduct in my sister to
carry this secret with her out of this world'" [837]), than
the fact that she has neg such a child. And he is most
disconcerted by the thought that the secret might have
prevented him from recognizing and rewarding the presence of
his own blood in Tom (848). Christine van Boheemen explains
Allworthy's failure to acknowledge Bridget's sexual activity
as part of an unwillingness to hold Bridget responsible; to
do so would "lend her autonomy and presence... as an
independent source of origin." van Boheemen also suggests
that Allworthy is culpable in Bridget's pregnancy at the
level of his failure to enforce the social code that
proscribes women's sexual activity before marriage.25

However, the impossibility of corroborating Jenny's
tale about Summer being Tom's father resurrects the specter
of the uncontainable, appetitive and duplicitous female body
in a way that implies that Allworthy may be more directly

culpable. If a woman's appetite makes her incontinent, her

243

uncontained fecundity makes her liable to conceive
illegitimate children. Because a woman may also lie about
who is her child's father--and the fact that it is Jenny who
has artfully perpetrated the lie about Tom's parentage--an
unquestioned acceptance of Jenny's 'revelation' becomes
impossible. As a result of the lies that have gone before,
one is compelled to question the truth of the deft narrative
turn that makes Summer Tom's biological father on the
strength of Jenny's word and the word of the once mendacious
Bridget. With an ambivalence reminiscent of Jenny's when she
allows herself to be believed the foundling's mother while
actually confessing only to having "conveyed it [to bed] at
the command of its mother" (835), Allworthy finally owns Tom
and acknowledges a blood relation to him: "'[Tom] is my own
sister's son--as such I shall always own him; nor am I
ashamed of owning him[.] I am much more ashamed of my past
behaviour to him; but I was as ignorant of his merit as of
his birth'" (848). Even here, Allworthy's precise relation
to the foundling is muddied by the phrase, "as such." The
phrase might simply mean that Allworthy will own Tom because
Tom is Allworthy's nephew. Yet it could just as easily mean
that, despite a failure to own Tom in some other unspecified
capacity--that although Tom is something other than a
nephew--Allworthy will publically acknowledge only that Tom
is his nephew. Notwithstanding Allworthy's early undertaking

to make any child of his sister's his heir (an undertaking

244

which he rescinds in Blifil's case), he finally accepts Tom
when Tom is identified as an Allworthy by blood.

The numerous clues that Allworthy is Tom's father, in
so far as they identify Tom as an both an extension and
recipient of Allworthy's property, offer a key to the text;
they move the narrative toward the resolution, Tom's
acquisition of property, that we know we can expect and that
makes the marriage between Sophia and Tom (and so the
closing bed episode) possible. It is worth noting too that
Tom turns out to be largely what Deborah Wilkins has deemed
him to be from the outset. Tom is a child of Allworthy
parentage who will be provided for after he is laid to the
bed of the man who is in most major respects his father.
Finally, Tom's generous spiritedness--the feature that he
has most in common with Allworthy--comprises so much a
foregone conclusion of his worth that we accept without
question that his claim to moral authority is ultimately
validated by blood and gentle birth on his mother's side
while failing to pursue the text's many suggestions that the
Allworthy blood could have been passed down by the
benevolent patriarch too.26

Just as Allworthy's naming of Tom and acceptance of the
illegitimate boy into Paradise Hall through his bed is
remarkable for its failure to observe proper place, property
and the trespass of social boundary lines, so the final bed
episode beginning with Tom's embrace of Sophia marks a

confusion of these features. It is to the series of events

245

that conclude with Tom firmly established at Western's that
I now turn. In order to understand the extent of confusion
signaled by Tom's domicile at Squire Western's, it is
helpful to consider how carefully the Squire, like his
neighbor, endeavors to observe boundaries of property and
social status elsewhere. Western gives a great deal of
attention to such boundaries and to the "difference of menm
and innm," for example, when he represents Sophia's
departure for London as Tom's 'theft' of her. At the most
basic level, Sophia's departure from Western's household
does mark a loss of property for him as he thereby loses
physical possession of Sophia without having given consent
to her departure. Because Sophia's departure results from
her refusal to marry where Western would have her marry, it
also has the potential to thwart Western's wish to decide to
whom property settled on Sophia would belong. In this sense,
as Western vehemently acknowledges, Sophia's flight does
constitute a kind of theft by her future husband, and
Western is determined to limit the amount by which his
individually-owned property will add to the personal
enrichment of another: "'if [Tom] will he nn, one smock
shall be her portion. I'll sooner ge my esteate [sic] to the
sinking fund.... Not one hapenny... shall she ever hae o'
mine'" (282-83).27

But there is a great deal more at stake in Western's
identification of Sophia as a possession that may be stolen

than the physical custody of his daughter and his money.

246

Following in the spirit of Fielding's cervine analogy that I
use as my second epigraph and which brings does and
daughters into close compass, Western links the theft of his
daughter overtly to the poaching of game; he categorizes
Sophia with items of livestock that are deemed food and
which the law permits Western to reserve for his exclusive
consumption. As a result of this alignment, Tom is initially
characterized by the Squire as an illegitimate upstart and a
poacher seeking to 'starve' his social superior by stealing
that superior's food:
I always thought what would come o' breeding up a
bastard like a gentleman, and letting nn come
about to volk's houses. It's well vor pm I could
not get at nn, I'd a spoil'd his caterwauling, I'd
a taught the son of a whore to meddle with meat

for his master. He shan't ever have a morsel of
meat of mine, or a farthing to buy it....(282)

Western would rather see this 'meat' "rot in the streets....
[and] be no better than carrion" (283) than that another
should eat it without his permission. In this matter Western
becomes "very low and despicable" for he exactly fits the
narrator's description of the "great personage" who, "by
confining [human necessities] to themselves... seems
desirous to prevent any others from eating" (453).

Western's continuation of the eating metaphor in his
lament on Tom's treachery suggests that his meat--Sophia--is
also sexual property. The connection between the procuring

of food and its consumption is developed in Western's

summ<
West
sugq
the
for
ref.

tim

Ir
ii

a:

247

summoning of the hunt analogy in speaking of his daughter.
Western's inapt use of the hunt analogy elsewhere might
suggest that he randomly refers to Sophia as the meat that
the underling filches from the Squire's table were it not
for his repeated references to Sophia as a 'puss' when
referring to Tom's theft of her. The use of 'puss' at this
time emphasizes the importance of Sophia as a sexual being:
The son of a bitch was always good at finding a
hare sitting; an be rotted to'n, I little thought
what puss he was looking after; but it shall be
the worst he ever vound in his life.... Little did
I think, when I used to love him for a sportsman,

that he was all the while a poaching after my
daughter. (283)

In the mid eighteenth century, the word 'puss' was used
interchangably with 'hare' to refer to smaller game as well
as actual hares during the hunt. Both puss and hare were
used as slang terms to refer contemptuously to women.28 A
coarser aspect of the latter form of puss--its use to refer
to the female pudenda--is evoked in Western's earlier
application of the term to Molly Seagrim when she and Tom
are disturbed in the bushes at the end of book five
"[Western] began to beat about, in the same language, and in
the same manner, as if he had been beating for a hare, and
at last cried out, 'Soho! puss is not far off. Here's her
form...'" (248). By the time Western uses the term to refer
to his daughter as game that is his rightful property (and

with which Tom ought to have no business), therefore, 'puss'

248

has acquired a layer of sexual meaning which in turn colors
the Squire's obvious enjoyment of his daughter's sexual
presence and his vociferous merchandising of her charms
elsewhere.

The identification of Sophia as a source of sensory
pleasure, as this intersects with her value as costly game,
emerges in a particularly striking manner in Western's
display of Sophia to Blifil. Whereas Tom has been permitted
to "come about volk's houses" like a gentleman on the tacit
understanding that a close but strictly limited admiration
of Sophia is the full extent of his privilege, Western
treats Blifil as a potential purchaser and consumer. This in
turn places Western in the position of a vendor and
supplier, one who, as Sophia's resistence to the marriage
continues, feels "the same compunction with a bawd when some
poor innocent whom she hath ensnared... falls into fits at
the first proposal of what is called seeing company" (746).
It is in keeping with this role that Western whets the
would-be son-in-law's appetite by inviting Blifil to ensnare
Sophia--to pursue her as forcefully as he would pursue other
edible game:

Follow her, boy, follow her; run in, run in,
that's it.... Dead, dead, dead. --Never be
bashful.... Women never gi' their consent.... [had
I] staid for her mother's consent, I might have

been a batchelor.... To her, to her, co [sic] to
her, that's it you jolly dog. (315-16)

249

The father's zeal is matched only by Blifil's measured
enjoyment of his quarry's distress, and, not surprizingly,
Sophia emerges as a rare culinary delicacy in the clutches
of some foul feeder:
not... ready to eat every woman he saw, yet
[Blifil] was far from... destitute of that
appetite... said to be the common property of all
animals.... [He] consider[ed] Sophia as a most
delicious morsel... regard[ed] her with the same
desires which an ortolan inspires in the soul of
an epicure.... nor was his desire... lessened by

the aversion which he discovered in her to
himself. (316)

Here Western is clearly base in his encouragement of
Blifil's perverse appetite against Sophia's will, and all
the more so because he incites the would-be son-in-law to
take his daughter by violent means. At the same time that
Western's enthusiasm over Blifil's anticipated consumption
of his daughter constitutes a second-hand enjoyment of the
sensual pleasure that Sophia's marriage promises, Blifil's
pleasure is heightened by Western's representation of Sophia
as a scarce and highly-prized commodity. By representing
Sophia in terms of the sport she will provide and her
enhanced flavor for being rare game, Western facilitates the
translation of Blifil's erotic but passive 'regarding' of
Sophia into an act of enforced conquest and possession, and
finally into an act of eidetic rape.29

Nevertheless, Western's encouragement of Blifil to take

Sophia by force makes perfect sense, rather than appearing

250

as a father's perverse pleasure in his daughter's distress,
when it is remembered that Western is a "preserver pi rhe
ame" who hires a known poacher to be his gamekeeper. If
Western's hiring of Black George presents the illogic of
setting the fox to guard the hen house (to borrow James
Harlowe's characterization of daughters as chickens) it also
offers an analogue to his promotion of Blifil's pursuit of
that most highly-prized game, Sophia. In each case,
established codes pertaining to ownership and use are eroded
in the very action (the hiring of a gamekeeper, the choosing
of a son-in-law) that ought to shore them up.

In the same way that Western both preserves game enp
tacitly endorses the illicit consumption of game by hiring
Black George, he endeavors to give his daughter in marriage
where he can continue to enclose her to himself--where he
can have vicarious access to her person. In Western's own
words, "'[He] had rather bate something, than marry [his]
daughter among strangers and foreigners'" (257). Because a
substantial portion of land is attached to Sophia's person,
Western's retention of access to his daughter also means
that he will maintain access to the land that, in the
ordinary pattern of settlement, the daughter would
eventually contribute to her husband's family. Western's
promotion of Blifil's suit therefore acknowledges the need
to give Sophia in marriage for the sake of forming a strong
alliance with the future owner of neighbouring lands

("'nothing can lie so handy together as our two estates...

alr
'mh
str
six
co:
fa
We

at

251

[which] are in a manner joined together in matrimony
already'" [257]) even while it seeks to avoid the loss
inherent in giving his daughter away.31 In short, Western
strives for an endogamous arrangement that will
simultaneously satisfy his desire to retain power and
consolidate property, and the counter imperative for the
father to give up his daughter in marriage. Because
Western's invitation to Blifil relies very heavily on his
advertisement of the sensual pleasure she will yield, it
becomes increasingly clear that Sophia has sexual as well as
property value for Western in the way that Clarissa
represents both forms of value to the Harlowe men.

These interpenetrating values are further complicated
by the repeated appearance of Sophia's muff in Tom Jones. At
one level, the muff is simply a small accessory or item of
Sophia's clothing; Tom's reverence of it alludes to the
romance convention of an artifact carried by a lady's
champion betokening her fidelity to that champion. However,
the muff is also an emblem of Sophia's availability for
sexual use in the wider market. The vulgar use of muff since
the end of the seventeenth century to denote female
genitalia gives sexual meaning to the progress of Sophia's
muff inside Western's house and around the country.30 In the
eventual contest over the muff between Tom and Western, the
tension is almost tangible. The muff's last appearance, in
Tom's hand in the kitchen at Upton (after Sophia has placed

it in the bed Tom has vacated to go to Mrs. Waters),

252

generates considerable consternation because it (falsely)
signals the daughter's liberation as sexual property from
paternal control. There follows a banal exchange between
father and would-be husband over the latter's possession of
the muff:
"My daughter's muff!" cries the squire, in a rage.
"Hath [Tom] got my daughter's muff! Bear witness
the goods are found upon him. I'll have him before
a justice of the peace this instant. Where is my
daughter, villain?" "Sir," said Jones, "I beg you
would be pacified. The muff, I acknowledge, is the

young lady's; but upon my honour, I have never
seen her." (491)

Western wants the same satisfaction over Tom's possession of
the muff as the law could give in a case of elopement. Hi5
failure to be appeased by Fitzpatrick's treatment of the
matter as simply a crime against ordinary property ("'the
law concerning daughters was out of the present case...
stealing a muff was undoubtedly felony, and the goods being
found upon the person, were sufficient evidence of the
fact'" [492]) and the conflation of property and use value
made possible by the vulgar meaning of muff reconfirms this
item's importance in representing both types of value.
Because it echoes the language and action of the early
partridge-shooting episode in which Tom's possession of the
partridge is taken as proof of poaching (125), however,
Fithatrick's treatment of the muff as simply a variety of

stolen property points again toward the extensive confusion

of w

syst

muf'
mat
the

its

the
to
We
pa
11

CC

253

of women, landholdings and material possessions in the value
system of Tom Jones.

Fithatrick's pronouncement on Tom's possession of the
muff casts Tom as an interloper gaining access to Western's
material possessions. Not only does Tom have no right to
these possessions, but for Tom to have them on his person in
itself constitutes a serious breach of a fundamental
principal of the host-guest arrangement. After all, Western,
the rightful owner of the muff has opened his house and land
to Tom against his more usual tendency toward enclosure. As
Western's boon companion, frequent dinner guest, drinking
partner and friend, Tom appreciates all along that he has
little hope of Sophia. Tom does not expect Western to
consent to a marriage between him and Sophia, and he
recognizes the impropriety of any attempt to gain such
consent. As the recipient of Western's largesse, Tom
understands that "to frustrate the great point of Mr
Western's life... [would be] to make very ill use of his
hospitality, and a very ungrateful return to the many little
favors received" (280), in much the same way that Square
casts Tom's dalliance with Molly as base because it takes
advantage of George's friendship with Tom.32 Tom and
Western's longstanding friendship and the confidence implied
in Western giving Tom the run of his estate should make a
very good case as to why Tom should not be found in this
instance with Sophia's muff--and later with Sophia herself--

in his possession. During his friend's visits Western has

had:
tit
han
as

the

to

ac

254

made it no secret that he expects to procure property,
title, wealth and social status in exchange for Sophia's
hand in marriage (208). Tom's inability as a foundling and
as a man who cannot inherit property to give Western any of
these, and Western's candidness about Tom's ineligibility as
a husband for Sophia should make Western's actual opposition
to Tom's courtship of Sophia unsurprizing and his final
acquiesence to the marriage rather remarkable.

Indeed, as Western explicitly offers to reward Tom's
rescue of Sophia on one occasion with anything hpi his
estate or Sophia herself, and feeds and houses Tom in excess
of all usual forms of hospitality, the Squire might be
characterized as a kind of surrogate father to Tom; he
extends to Tom both a generosity that echoes that of
Allworthy, and provides Tom with a sensual education to
complement the rational education that Allworthy seeks to
provide. As Western has elsewhere shown that he applauds
Tom's sexual pursuits as long as these do not involve
Sophia, Tom's desire for Sophia acquires the characteristics
of that basest ingratitude of the 'son': the coveting of a
woman that is forbidden because she belongs to the father.

Yet at the same time, and largely because Western so
emphatically designates Sophia as that part of his property
that is out of bounds for Tom, his open invitation to Tom to
be in Sophia's company and almost incidentally to witness
her charms is odd. It is particularly so when Sophia returns

as a nubile young woman from her aunt's house to sit at the

255

head of her father's table where her presence is likely to
enchant Tom (163). This pattern of simultaneous invitation
and denial in Western's house is explicable in the way that
the terms of Allworthy's house are explicable--by recourse
to the rationale for hiring a gamekeeper. Put simply,
George's appointment and Tom's commensality each give a
titilating theoretical access to what is withheld at the
practical level. At the same time, Tom and Black George are
in different ways best positioned--as well as most likely--
to use Western's property (George his land, Tom his
daughter) in a manner that is overtly prohibited. In view of
the similarities between Western's approach to land
preservation and daughter preservation--where each may be
accessed from within by special permission--it is perhaps no
coincidence that Black George who also has a nubile daughter
has a fundamental philosophical affinity with Western. For
both fathers, in spite of their vastly different social and
economic positions, the nubile daughter is a means of
acquiring property. And in each case, Tom's association with
the father results in first social, and then sexual access
to his friend's daughter while it materially enriches the
friend.33

The way that Sophia is described when she first enters
the narrative suggests a more profound link between the
Squire's daughter and his property in the form of land.
Sophia's body is shown emerging out of a verdant landscape

like the "lovely Flora [to whom] every flower rises to do...

256

homage" (154) and then as a collection of "perfectly bred"
body parts--symmetrical limbs, luxuriant hair, high
forehead, regular ivory teeth, lustrous eyes and alabaster
bosom (155). When this early itemization of Sophia's body is
taken together with Western's later display of Sophia's
prospects to Blifil and Tom's inclusion of Sophia in an
inventory of Western's wealth that includes his plate and
his fortune (168), the sense that Sophia is, like the land,
a part of Western's stock and a measure of his worth is
compounded.

What is in operation here can be best explained by a
phenomenon that Patricia Parker describes in her discussion
of land cast as at once fertile woman, private property and
as 'landscape' in early modern reports of New World
discovery. Parker suggests that the logic of private
property embodies a desire to simultaneously display and
boast of possessions to others to incite envy and
admiration, and to establish "definite boundaries around
[property] to make sure it was 'enclosed'" and therefore
safe from theft. Parker further suggests that the economic
motive for detailing a woman's parts as an inventory of
goods is intimately connected with the motive of "shaping,
controlling, or limiting [her] fertility in a particular
way."34 When Western continues to invite Tom to his house it
is as though he deliberately seeks to display to Tom what
the younger man cannot have--to establish Tom as a less

powerful and economically less well-endowed bidder for land.

257

Western's determination to give his daughter as a bride only
where she will procure further resources or enable him to
more clearly delineate and consolidate his existing
resources makes Sophia not merely the game, but virtually
indistinguishable from the land over which Western maintains
so jealous a guard. Especially because Western hoards
Sophia's prospects--her person, her attributes and potential
fucundity--he would enclose her within the boundaries of the
neighboring estate in order to remain privy to the manner in
which her properties are utilized. Failing this, Western
would enclose Sophia, incarcerate her, and let her fertlity
go to seed, so to speak, rather than have the unpropertied
Tom have access to her.

It is fitting that this stance of Western's should be
quickly revised when Tom stands to gain from his
reconciliation with Allworthy and from Allworthy's
liberality. From the point that Allworthy owns Tom as his
blood relative, Tom becomes a man who can fullfil Western's
desire for a son-in-law who brings breeding, wealth,
property and alliance. Because the land that is to become
Tom's and the estate already owned by Western are adjacent
to each other, the marriage of Tom and Sophia emblematizes a
form of enclosure, a consolidation rather than a division,
of landholdings and of neighboring families. Western's
sudden resurgence of interest in his daughter's body once
Tom becomes a viable choice of husband is unmistakeable, and

it is nowhere more strongly expressed than in Western's

258

enthusiasm leading up to, and his vociferous commentary
during, the wedding supper and the wedding night.

As Western encourages Tom to procure Sophia's consent
to marry, he virtually recreates the episode in which Blifil
salivates over Sophia's charms. Western repeats the hunting
call with which he has earlier rallied Blifil's perverse
appetite for his daughter: "'To her boy, to her, go to her.-
-That's it, little honeys.... I thought thou' hads't been a
lad of higher mettle, than to give way to a parcel of
maidenish tricks'" (867). He then facetiously lingers over
Tom's "tousling" of Sophia. The principal difference between
Western's encouragement of Blifil to take Sophia and his
encouragement of Tom is that in the latter instance Western
gloats over the vigorous male offspring that is sure to be
born nine months from the wedding night (863, 868). As he
bawdily revels in Tom's rifling of his daughter's charms
under Mrs. Miller's roof then, Western anticipates the
reaping of its rewards under his own roof. In so doing,
Western simultaneously completes the voyeuristic possession
of his daughter that has been deferred by the failure of
Blifil's suit, and takes stock of projected productivity; in
taking stock, Western claims his part in the future
management of Sophia's fertility and procreativity.

In stark contrast to the unruly bodies of the
lascivious Mrs. Waters and the mendacious Bridget Allworthy
(who might have thwarted the reconciliation of a son and a

father when they concealed the information that would have

259

prevented Tom's exile from Paradise Hall), the body of
Western's daughter is anything but uncontained, excessive or
disorderly. Chaste Sophia, who dines daintily and who must
sometimes be coaxed to eat (527, 748), is as unalike Bridget
and the other sexually-incontinent female figures in Tpm
ipnes as she could be. As the marriage becomes imminent,
Sophia's body is no longer conceived of as solely an erotic
sexual body; it is explicitly represented as the source of
domestic growth and well-being. Sophia's fertility promises
to cement the harmony between Tom and Western, and Tom and
Allworthy, with all the benefits that Allworthy, as well as
his neighbor, expects to arise from "'[a]n alliance between
two families... between whom there had always existed so
mutual an intercourse'" (783). With its moderated fertility,
Sophia's body contains the potential for the enclosed
genealogical progression of two families become one and so
demands that the final bed episode be considered anew. Even
though the closing bed episode marks the licit union of a
husband and wife, and so contrasts with the opening bed
episode and the Upton episode which mark illicit or
potentially illicit unions, it simultaneously contains the
germ of endogamy--of a hermetic (en)closure that is
(re)productive.

By virtue of the common blood that makes Tom able to
benefit from Allworthy's liberality, the son-in-law comes to
reside in the house of his father-in-law. Western, for his

part, averts the painful necessity of dividing up the

260

property he would retain intact when forced by the social
imperative to marry his daughter to another man; by novel's
end, "Western hath resigned his family seat, and the greater
part of his estate to his son-in-law, and hath retired to a
lesser house of his, in another part of the country" (873).
Western experiences neither the theft of the daughter's
person, nor a loss of the sensual pleasure Sophia has always
given him:
[Western] is often a visitant with Mr Jones, who
as well as his daughter, hath an infinite delight
in doing everything in their power to please
him.... he gets drunk with whom he pleases, and
his daughter is still as ready as formerly to play
to him whenever he desires it; for Jones hath
assured her, that as next to pleasing her, one of
his highest satisfactions is to contribute to the
happiness of the old man; so great the duty which
she expresses and performs to her father renders

her almost equally dear to him, with the love she
bestows on himself. (873)

Sophia simultaneously keeps her father entertained,
dutifully complies with her husband's wishes with regard to
her treatment of her father, cheerfully tolerates the
drunkenness that her dead mother was loathe to countenance
and provides Western with a prattling girl-child like her
former self on whom to dote. Blending the functions served
by Bridget at Paradise Hall and her own mother at Squire
Western's, Sophia "d[oes] the honours of the table" in lieu
of a dead wife who, like a "faithful upper servant" oversaw
the preparation of meals and bore a child that was destined

to materially enrich her husband (871, 309). At the same

261

time, Sophia improves on the performance of the absent dead
wives in Tom Jones. She does not deplete her own father's
reserves through marriage, and, while she keeps her
husband's house, this is a domain into which her father has
unrestricted access and which he therefore, in a manner,
never gives up. Finally, Sophia bears legitimate issue whose
health bodes well for the next generation.

Meanwhile, Tom enjoys Western's house and Allworthy's
blessing and liberality upon his marriage to Sophia. The
offspring that Sophia bears him, "two fine children, a boy
and a girl," recreate a pattern that is familiar from
Allworthy's house (873). The children of Tom and Sophia
symbolically reproduce the enclosed, self-sufficient, if
superficial, harmony of Paradise Hall. And it was out of
that self-sufficient domestic enclosure that a pair of
siblings, one male, one female, originally--and almost

spontaneously--generated Tom Jones.

 

Notes

1. Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, ed. R. P.
C. Mutter (London: Penguin, 1985), 454. All further
references to this work will appear parenthetically in my
text.

2. Bruce Stovel's article, "Tom Jones and the 0d sse ,"
(Eighteenth-Century Fiction 1, no. 4 [1989]: 263-79) first
drew my attention to the fact that a bed appears at the
opening, the center, and the conclusion of Tom Jones.

3. Henry Fielding, Don Quixote in England: A Comedy
(London, 1734), 1.6. Martin C. Battestin ("Fielding's
Contributions to the Universal Spectator [1736-71," Studies
in Philology 83, no. 1 [1986]: 109 n. 22) also notes that
"[s]atiric references to 'ragout' and 'soupes maigre'" occur
in The Grub Street Opera, Welsh Opera (1731), True Patriot

(1745), Miser (1733) as well as in Tom Jones, and suggests

 

that for Fielding these foods "epitomized the effeminacy of
French cuisine" (109 n. 24). J. A. Ward ("Dining with the
Novelists," Personalist 45 no. 3 [1946]: 399-411,) also
observes that eating and drinking in Tom Jones is a

"dominantly masculine activity" (400).

262

263

4. Battestin ("Fielding's Contributions," 108, n. 20)
gives several examples of Fielding's use of the
transformative powers of diet: Don Quixote in England
(6.25); The Grub Street Opera (9.259); The Champion of 8th
April 1740.

5. Tom's hearty appetite for the hunt, as for
heterosexual sex, stands in stark contrast to Blifil's
habitual lack of enthusiasm. Blifil's "appetites [are]... so
moderate that he [is] able, by philosophy or by study, or by
some other method, easily to subdue them" (263). In battle,
too, Blifil lacks prowess: Tom easily defeats the larger
Blifil in boxing (131-32) and later disposes of both Blifil
and the tutor Thwackum when he is caught with Molly Seagrim.
For a careful and thought-provoking treatment of how
ambiguous sexual identity was linked with the Jacobite cause
in anti-Jacobite propaganda pamphlets, and a brief
discussion of the homoeroticism of the tutor-pupil bond, see
Jill Campbell, "Tom Jones, Jacobitism, and Gender: History

and Fiction at the Ghosting Hour," Genre 23, nos. 2-3

 

(1990): 161-90. Paul Gabriel Boucé ("Sex, amours and love in
Tom Jones," in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth
Qeninry, ed. H. T. Mason [Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation,
1984], 31) also suggests the homoeroticism of the Thwackum-
Blifil relationship.

6. Cf. Claude J. Rawson, "Cannibalism and Fiction, Part
II: Love and Eating in Fielding, Mailer, Genet, and Wittig,"

Genre 11 (1978): 233.

264

7. Local gossips see Bridget's interest in Tom as a
sexual interest. On Bridget's sexual appetitiveness, see
Patricia Brfickman, "An Early Hint of Miss Bridget's Affairs,
with a Parallel Note on Mr Allworthy," in Man and Nature;
Rropeedings of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century
Siupies vol. 6, ed. Kenneth W. Graham and Neal Johnson
(Edmonton: Academic Printing, 1987), 73-79. If Bridget's
sexual appetite does not preclude Tom whom she knows to be
her son, Bridget's interest in Tom marks her as both
unrestrained and unwholesome in her appetites. Robert L.

Chibka ("Taking 'The SERIOUS' Seriously: the Introductory

Chapters of Tom Jones," The Eighteenth Century: Theory and

 

Interpretation 31, no. 1 [1990]: 33-4) sees Bridget's desire
for Tom as a potential incidence of incest too lightly
dismissed. Molly Seagrim and Lady Bellaston are the novel's
other sexually appetitive women, but their more emphatically
economic (rather than affective) tie to Tom places them in a
slightly different relation to him than Bridget. It should
be noted, however, that Lady Bellaston supplies Tom with the
means to eat in exchange for sexual favors, and that Tom
supplies Molly's family with foodstuffs while she is his
sexual partner.

8. There is a long tradition of scholars who see the
scare of incest as instrumental to Tom's maturation or
repentence. They include, William Empson, "Tom Jones,"
Renyon Review 20 (1958): 241; E. Taiwo Palmer, "Fielding's

Tom gones Reconsidered," English 20, no. 107 (1971): 46;

265

Martin C. Battestin, The Providence of Wit: Aspects of Form
in Augustan Literature and the Arts (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1974), 152-63; Gene S. Koppel, "Sexual Education and
Sexual Values in Tom Jones: Confusion at the Core?" Studies
in the Novel 12 (1980): 8; Michael L. Hill, "Incest and
Morality in Tom Jones," The South Central Bulletin 41, no. 4
(1981): 102; Boucé, 36; John Zomchick, "'A Penetration which
Nothing Can Deceive': Gender and Juridical Discourse in Some
Eighteenth-Century Narratives," Studies in English
Literature 29, no. 3 (1989): 539.

9. William Park ("Tom and Oedipus," Hartford Studies in
Literature 7 [1975]: 207-25) and T. G. A. Nelson ("Incest in
the Early Novel and Related Genres," Eighteenth-Century Life
16, no. 1 [1992]: 127-62) are rare exceptions in that they
seriously consider other incestuous possibilities in Tpm
ipnes in addition to the Upton episode.

10. For a detailed discussion of the Black Act and the
political climate that surrounded its enactment, see E. P.
Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act
(London: Allen Lane, 1975), 27-32, 190-198. Douglas Hay
("Poaching and the Game Laws on Cannock Chase," in Albion's
Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England,
ed. Douglas Hay, Peter Limbaugh and E. P. Thompson [London:
Allen Lane, 1975], 189) observes that by an act of 1670 a
man had to be a manoral lord or have substantial property to
kill even the smallest of game on his own property. On the

amount of property that one was required to own to have

266

hunting privileges in the eighteenth century, see William
Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of Englang 4 vols.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1765-69), 4.13.174-75. See also
Maaja A. Stewart, "Ingratitude in Tom Jones," Journal of
English and Germanic Philology 89, no. 4 (1990): 528; and
James Thompson, "Patterns of Property and Possession in
Fielding's Fiction," Eighteenth-Century Fiction 3, no. 1
(1990): 21-24. For the difficulties of identifying what I
refer to as the 'lower orders' as commoners or peasants, see
J. M. Neeson, Commoners, Common Right, Enclosure and Social

Qhange in England, 1700-1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993), 297-304.

 

11. For the chronology of Enclosure Acts, see Michael
E. Turner, English Parliamentary Enclosure. Its Historical
ergraphy and Economic History (Folkestone and Hamden:
Archon Books, 1980), chap. 3, 68, table 10. From Turner's
data a steady increase in enclosure acts is discernible
between 1730 and 1760, and a considerable increase occurs
from the 17605 into the 18205. J. A. Yelling (Common Field
eng Enclosure in England 1450-1850 [Hamden, Connecticut:
Archon Books, 1977], 170-213) is particularly useful on the
changing technologies and yields of plant and animal
husbandry. John Cowper, An Essay Proving that Inclosure oi
mempns end Qommon Field Land is Contrary to the Interest of

the Nation (London, 1732), 1, 5-7, 22-24, 45-46. Thomas

Andrews (An Enquiry into the Encrease and Miseries of the

267

Roor oi England [London, 1738], 38) also protested against
enclosure.

12. On the "property in animals ferae naturae" in this
period Blackstone observes that a man "may have the
privilege of hunting, taking, and killing them, in exclusion
of other persons." He defines game animals as "transient
property" and adds that as long as they "continue within [a
man's] liberty... [he] may restrain any stranger from taking
them therein: but the instant thay depart into another
liberty, this qualified property ceases" (2.25.394-5).

13. Thwackum offers another example of Allworthy's
power; when Thawckum criticizes Allworthy for readmitting
Tom to his favor and for by-passing himself in the Westerton
living, he suffers the consequences (dismissal) of biting
the hand that feeds him (825). Thwackum's position is not
unlike our own, for if we partake of the feast that
Fielding's narrator spreads, we are bound by the terms of
the "public ordinary" not the "eleemosynary treat" (51); we
allow the narrator to set the terms on which we continue to
read. On this point, see Eric Rothstein, "Virtues of
Authority in Tom Jones," The Eighteenth Century: Theory and
Interpretation 28, no. 2 (1987): 107-8; Timothy O'Brien,
"The Hungry Author and Narrative Performance in Tom Jones,"
Studies in English Literature 25 (1985): 618-19. Cf. Michael

Bliss, "Fielding's Bill of Fare in Tom Jones," English
Literary History 30, no. 3 (1963): 240.

268

14. Martin Battestin and Ruthe R. Battestin, Renry
Rieiding: A Life (London and New York: Routledge, 1989),
421-23.

15. It is perhaps useful to provide a context for
Deborah's question about why Allworthy would undertake to
keep a bastard whose maintenance ought to be the
responsibility of the parish. According to Blackstone, "the
duty of parents to their bastard children, by our law... is
principally that of maintenance. For, though bastards are
not looked upon as children to any civil purposes, yet the
ties of nature, of which maintenance is one, are not so
easily dissolved" (1.16.446). Allworthy's undertaking to
bring Tom up at his own expense might therefore be
considered an admission of paternity.

16. Nelson, 155.

17. Whereas Homer Obed Brown ("Tom Jones: The 'Bastard
of History,'" Boundarypi 7, no. 2 [1979]: 225) goes on to
suggest that Tom is a sign "doubly displaced" in Allworthy's
bed, I believe that the reader is carefully led to dismiss
this significant clue that Allworthy might easily be Tom's
father.

18. Clothing more than once transmits information about
social, economic and sexual relations in Tom Jones. In Tom's
financally propitious affair with Lady Bellaston, the
condition of being 'kept' is most obvious in the quality of
clothing that Tom wears after he becomes Lady Bellaston's

lover. Earlier in the narrative, the assault of Molly

269

Seagrim is precipitated by her peers' envious rage when
Molly appears in a cast-off gown of Sophia's. The gown and
Molly's trinkets infuriate the envious 'respectable' women
at Molly's church. These items (wrongly) signal Molly's
status as a kept woman in her affair with Tom; they affront
by brazenly advertising the rewards of unchastity (177-78,
208). The repeated appearance of Sophia's muff--that most
suggestive item of female attire--is a subject to which I
shall return.

19. Bridget's residence with her widower brother in
some ways parallels Fielding's own experience. According to
Battestin and Battestin, (Henry Fielding: A Life , 378)
Fielding had his sister Sarah live with him and manage his
household after the death of his first wife, Charlotte, in
1744. Sarah moved out of her brother's house upon his
marriage to Mary Daniel in 1747. There is no known record of
anything untoward having taken place in the 1744-47 period
during which Sarah lived with Henry. However, there was
apparently an episode in Henry's childhood that Martin
Battestin ("Henry Fielding, Sarah Fielding, and the Dreadful
Sin of Incest," prei 13, no. 1 [1979]: 6-18) refers to as
Henry's "shocking erotic experiment" with his sister
Beatrice (23).

20. Brown, 224.

21. W. Daniel Wilson ("Science, Natural Law, and

Unwitting Sibling Incest in Eighteenth-Century Literature,"

Siudies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 13, no. 19 [1983],

270

251-52) looks at two related notions, that a monstrous birth
is indicative of an incestuous conception, and that the
threat of monstrous offspring accounts for the prohibition
of incest, as these ideas appear in contemporary
philosophical discourse. He claims that these beliefs can be
traced back as far as Pope Gregory in the sixth century. In
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they are found in
Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1612), Capanella's he
Monarchia Hispanica (1640), and Buffon's Histoire naturelle,
générale et particuliere (1753). The prevalence of these
beliefs in folk myth and superstition in the early modern
period is touched upon in my treatment of Sin and her
incest-bred progeny in Paradise Lost. On contagion resulting
from incest, see Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An
Aneiysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York and
Washington: Frederick A. Praeger, 1966), 30, 113.

22. On Tom Jones' name, see Brown, 202; Christine van
Boheemen, The Novel as Family Romance: Language. Gender, and
Authority from Fielding to Joyce (Ithaca and London: Cornell

University Press, 1987), 45-56; and Douglas Brooks-Davies,

Rielding, Dickens. Gosse. Iris Murdoch and Oedipal 'Hamlet'

 

(London: Macmillan, 1989), 7-8. Allworthy foists paternity
on Partridge on the basis of flimsy (part inadmissible, part
circumstantial) evidence. Jenny's position at the Partridge
house and her disappearance on the day she is to face
Partridge before Allworthy are circumstances that work

against Partridge. Mrs. Partridge's unlikely and obviously

271

ill-motivated allegation of her husband's infidelity ought
to be inadmissible because, in contemporary English law, a
wife could not give evidence against her husband.
Allworthy's readiness to accept that Tom is Partridge's
child because Jenny has lived in the Partridge household as
a servant is perhaps telling with regard to his own position
as a household head with female dependents. Finally, in
order to conclude that Partridge is Tom's father, Allworthy
takes the word of a household member, Mrs. Partridge,
against its legal head, Mr. Partridge (106-7).

23. It is unclear whether Tom actually inherits
Allworthy's property per se. Most criticism of Tom Jones
tacitly assumes that he does. Because he is illegitimate,
however, Tom would be ineligible in English law to inherit
Allworthy's property. Blackstone describes the bastard's
ineligibility to inherit in this way: "The rights are very
few, being only such as he can acquire... for he can inherit
nothing, being looked upon as the son of nobody... and
sometimes called filius nullius, sometimes filius populi....
Yet he may gain a sir-name by reputation... though none by
inheritance.... The incapacity of a bastard consists
primarily in this, that he cannot be heir to any one,
neither can he have heirs, but of his own body... for, being
nullius filius, he is therefore kin to nobody, and has no
ancestor from whom any inheritable blood can be derived"

(1.16.446). On this point see also Martin C. Battestin, ed.,

The history of Tom Jones, a Foundling, by Henry Fielding. 2

272

vols. (Oxford and Middletown, Connecticut: Oxford University
Press, 1975), 79. Whether Tom actually inherits Allworthy's
property as a son or not, he certainly enjoys Allworthy's
"liberality" after his marriage to Sophia. For an
informative discussion of the legal forms that Allworthy's
"liberality" could take in contemporary English law, see
Susan Staves, Married Women's,Separate Property in England,
iGQQ-i833 (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press,
1990), 62-65.

24. Allworthy's severity in his lecture to Jenny pales
beside his treatment of Molly Seagrim when she is found to
be with child. Molly is immediately sent to a house of
correction by Allworthy because she is pregnant with an
illegitimate child and because she will not name her child's
biological father. Allworthy's actions here are more than
simply severe, they are in violation of three explicit laws.
According to Blackstone, a woman could not be lawfully
compelled to disclose paternity until one month after her
delivery in case the strain of interrogation should
negatively affect the fetus. For the same reason she could
not be committed before she gave birth. Finally, before she
could be committed, two justices were required to sign the
order to commit her (1.16.446). See also Rothstein, 104.

25. van Boheemen, 80.

26. As Homai J. Shroff (The Eighteenth-Century Noveii
rhe idea of the Gentleman [London and Baltimore: Edward

Arnold, 1978], 19, 25) has pointed out, if Tom had been the

273

biological son of Jenny Jones or Partridge--if he had not
belonged to a 'gens' or stock--his generous instincts and
physical beauty would not alone have secured Sophia in
marriage for him. Cf. Leopold Damrosch, Studies in the
Fictional Imagination from Milton to Fielding (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 286.

27. The Sinking Fund established by Walpole in 1717
sought to reduce national, that is, collective, debt.
Western is clearly more concerned with protecting privately-
owned assets.

28. A connection between hares and daughters is also
suggested by a description of Sophia's distress. When her
father incarcerates her, Sophia behaves exactly like a
terrified hare: "she began to thunder with her foot and
afterwards to scream" (744). On the long tradition of hares
as emblems of lechery, see Boucé, 32.

29. The Squire's urging of Blifil's sexual conquest of
Sophia is explicit in an earlier conversation between Sophia
and her father. Western attributes Sophia's reluctance to
marry to her "squeamishness." He reassures Sophia that, as
in the case of her mother whose "whimper[ing] and whin[ing]"
were overcome in twenty-four hours, Sophia's own
sqeamishness about marriage will be overcome by Blifil's
'briskness' (272). Even before this conversation, the maid,
Honour, couches Western's promise of Sophia to Blifil
without Sophia's knowledge in sexual terms: "'More shame for

[Western]... you are to go to bed to him, and not master'"

274

(270). Western's encouragement of Blifil to conquer Sophia
is strongly reminiscent of the way in which the younger
James Harlowe bolsters Solmes' pursuit of Clarissa. Like
James, Western seems to derive pleasure from Sophia's
response to a situation that mingles cannibalistic violence
with sexual desire. At the same time, the perverse joy that
Blifil derives from his anticipated conquest recalls the
"odious" Solmes' convulsive gnawing at his cane as he awaits
Clarissa's submission. On this last point, see Raymond
Hilliard, "Clarissa and Ritual Cannibalism," RhLA 105, no. 5
(1990): 1090, 1084.

30. Western's sister has earlier acknowledged this
function of Sophia in the proposed marriage to Blifil: "'It
is the honour of your family which is concerned in this
alliance; you are only the instrument. Do you conceive,
mistress, that in an intermarriage between kingdoms, as when
the daughter of France is married into Spain, the princess
herself is alone considered in the match? No, it is a match
between two kingdoms, rather than between two persons. The
same happens in great families, such as ours. The alliance
between the families is the principal matter. You ought to
have a greater regard for the honour of your family, than
for your own person...'" (306-7).

31. Jones DeRitter, "'How Came This Muff Here?‘ A Note
on Tom gones" English Language Notes 26, no. 4 (1989): 45.
The muff first appears with Honour's warning to Tom that his

toying with it and kissing of it will ruin it (197).

275

Retrieved from Honour by Sophia because of Tom's admiration,
the muff subsequently so interferes with Western's sensory
pleasure when it interrupts Sophia's amusement of her father
at the piano that it is flung by Western into the fire, and
has to be hastily rescued from perishing by his daughter.
This action foreshadows Western's repeated threat that he
will have his daughter perish if he cannot have complete
control of her. The muff makes its next appearance at Upton
where it is left as both a rebuke and a form of invitation
to Tom whose dalliance with Mrs. Waters has become known to
Sophia (486).

32. Square is quick to cast Tom's lie to protect George
Seagrim and Tom's affair with Molly Seagrim in the most
negative light "'the sacrifice of truth... imagined to have
been made to friendship, was, in reality, a prostitution of
it to a depraved debauched appetite.... [Tom] supported the
father, in order to corrupt the daughter, and preserved the
family from starving, to bring one of them to shame and
ruin" (187). In spite of its obvious malice, Square's
accusation does have a ring of truth. Tom acknowledges that
the misuse of a friend's daughter is a poor return on any
father's friendship (169, 208), and Seagrim himself is far
from insensible that he is obliged to Tom (817).

33. Black George's activity as a trader marks another
intersection of sexual and property interests in Tom Jones.
A dealer in flesh of one kind--the game he poaches and sells

illegally (291)--George is also nominally that other kind of

276

dealer in flesh, a keeper or pimp, because he derives
benefit from the sexual traffic of his daughter. With both
Molly and Sophia, Tom's sexual use of the daughter emerges
out of an economy of friendship and exchange--in George's
case, the gifts of meat and coin that maintain the Seagrim
family and its next illegitimate generation, in Western's
case, those of land and legitimate issue that promise to
maintain the intactness of property at narrative's end.

34. Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric-
Gender..Property (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), 152-

53, 131.

 

CONCLUSION

Although this essay has considered the incidence of
eating and incest and their deployment as metaphors in
narrative during the first half of the eighteenth century,
these concerns are in evidence in narratives of the latter
part of the century. Frances Burney's Evelina (1778) and
Matthew Lewis' The Monk (1796) both exploit mistaken
identity plots which eventually unfold as potential incest
narratives. Not only does each of these narratives consider
the ramifications for a daughter of her father's illicit
sexual activity and corrupt ambition, but Burney and Lewis
each construct graphic tableaux of oral violence as ways of
talking about familial relations gone awry. Following in the
tradition of brutal sexual aggression, incestuous longings
and murderous urges inaugurated by Horace Walpole's The

Castle of Otranto (1764), The Monk also provides a taste of

 

the bewildering array of clerical 'brOthers' and 'sisters,'
'mothers' and 'fathers' in Gothic narratives whose vows of

abstinence from a range of oral and sexual pleasures weaken

277

278

under the strain of irresistible attraction to characters to
whom they are later found to be connected consanguineously--
and whose stories raise the possibility that blood is drawn
to blood.

When incest and eating appear in twinned fashion in
nineteenth-century prose narrative, the forbidden and
potentially scandalous possibilities of family relations
have considerably abated. Who can forget, for example, the
luxurious abundance of costly fruit, wedding confection,
meat distribution, and ritual meals that contextualize
Emma's father's declaration to his marriageable daughter
that he will put up with no more weddings? Who will not
remember sickly Fanny Price and her marriage to her first
cousin Edmund after she has been extracted from the poverty
and squalor of Portsmouth to be healthily reared in the
luxury of her uncle's productive estate at Mansfield, or the
plight of Jane Eyre in Charlotte Bronte's novel of 1847 who
arrives near-starved at the cottage of the cousin who feeds
her but later demands her hand in marriage? In a century
during which women's bodies and bodily functions were to be
increasingly regulated by conduct books, in which women's
ailments were to be newly scruntinized and codified by the
revision of terms such as anorexia and hysteria in medical
treatises, and in which a vigorous debate on vegetarianism
was to link diet and food consumption with relations of

power and domination, nineteenth-century English narrative

 

279

repeatedly represents intrafamilial attraction within a
commensal domestic household as normative.

It is perhaps no accident that the attention to the
political significance of women's bodies in eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century literary studies has coincided with the
raised profile of incest and child sexual abuse, food
refusal and disordered eating in our own age.1 I attempt no
simple extrapolation from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
literary representations of incest and eating, to eating
disorders and allegations of actual incest in the the late-
twentieth century. However, the upsurge of interest in these
issues since the early 19805 does suggest that they have
become pressing concerns in our own period, characterized as
it has been by changes in the composition of the workforce,
shifts in the distribution of wealth and power, and the
proliferation of 'alternative' lifestyle choices, each of
which has substantially reshaped family composition and
structure as well as ideas about what is deemed appropriate
as food.

It is interesting, too, that recent popular media
attention to incest--especially criticism of the theory that
memories of childhood sexual abuse are repressed by the
cultural taboo on incest and the latent fear on the part of
the abused that disclosure will breach family trust and
break up the family--has styled itself as seeking to hold
families together or to 'mend' families ruptured by ill-

motivated or misguided professionals. Critics of repressed

280

memory theory have frequently accused psychiatrists and
social workers employing memory retrieval techniques of
inducing purported victims to manufacture memories where no
sexual abuse has occurred. Such professionals have more than
once been accused of trying to destroy otherwise harmonious
families and of being motivated by feminist, anti-family
militance to seek the ruin of successful men through false
allegations of incest.2

It is clear that a great deal of the research on incest
and on eating behaviors carried out during the last two
decades has been undertaken by self-consciously feminist
scholars in a variety of disciplines. This attests to the
importance with which the issues of incest and eating have
been regarded in the re-thinking of gender relations and in
the analysis of gender configurations arising from
heterosexual nuclear family organization since the early
modern period. It is equally clear in literary treatments
and in modern studies of incest and eating as distinct
entities that incisive questions still need to be asked
about what constitutes nurture and rearing, about the kinds
of obligations and loyalties that are fostered by children's
dependence on their parents, and about the sexual pressures

that each of these places on those receiving nurture.

 

Notes

1. Literary scholars dealing with the political
significances of women's bodies in the eighteenth and
ninteenth centuries include Annette Kolodny (The Lay of the
Land: Metaphors as Experience and History in American Liie
and Letters [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1975]), Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (The
Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-
Century Literary Imagination [New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1985]), Nancy Armstrong (Desire and
Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novei [New
York: Oxford University Press, 1987]), Helena Michie (The
Riesh Made Word: Female Figures and Women's Bodies [New
York: Oxford University Press, 1987], Frances Ferguson
("Rape and the Rise of the Novel," Representations 20
[1987]: 88-112), Ruth Perry ("Colonizing the Breast:
Sexuality and Maternity in Eighteenth-Century England," in
Forbidden History: The State. Society. and the Regulation of
Eeruality in Modern Europe, ed. John C. Fout [Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1992], 107-38), and
Charlotte Sussman ("The Other Problem with Women:

Reproduction and Slave Culture in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko," in

281

282

Rereading Aphra Behn: History, Theory, and Criticism, ed.

Heidi Hutner [Charlottesville and London: University Press
of Virginia, 1993], 212-33). Recent research on incest and
child abuse in the twentieth century includes scholarship by
Florence Rush (The Best-Kept Secret: Sexual Abuse of
Children [New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1980]), Judith Lewis
Herman (Father-Daughter Incest [London and Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press, 1981]), Jeffrey Masson (The
Assault on Truth: Freud and Child Sex Abnse [New York:
Farrar, Strauss and Giroux Inc., 1984]), Diana E. H. Russell
Incest in the Lives of Girls and Women [New York: Basic
Books, 1986]), and a second work by Judith Lewis Herman
(Trauma and Recovery: From Domestic Abuse to Political
Terror [New York: Basic Books, 1992]). On food refusal and
disordered eating in the twentieth century, see Hilde Bruch
(Eating Disorders: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa and the Person
Within [New York: Basic Books, 1973]), Susie Orbach (Hunger
Sirike: The Anorectic's Struggle as a Metaphor for our Age
[London: Faber and Faber, 1986]), Noelle Caskey

("Interpreting Anorexia Nervosa," in The Female Body in

 

Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Susan Rubin
Suleiman [Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University

Press, 1986], 175-89), and Matra Robertson (Starving in the
silences: An Exploration of Anorexia Nervosa [New York: New

York University Press, 1992]).
2. Frederick Crews is a particularly virulent critic of

memory retrieval. His review of books in what he calls the

 

283

repressed memory "movement" ("The Revenge of the Repressed:
Part II," New York Reviey of Books 41, no. 20 [December
1994]: 49-58) represents male relatives identified as child
sexual molestors through memory retreival as the victims of
anti-family militance (50, 52). Other articles in a similar
vein are Carol Tavris, "Beware the Incest-Survivor Machine,"
The New York Times, 3 January 1993, Book Review Section;
Alasdair Palmer, "Guilty When Proved Innocent," The
Spectator, 14 August 1993, 9-11; Frederick Crews, "The I
Revenge of the Repressed: Part I," The New York Review of

Books 41, no. 19 (November 1994): 54-60.

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