中山人文學報 Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities Number 33_July 2012

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1 中山人文學報 Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities Number 33_ July 2012 主編創刊年月 / Founded in Editor-in-Chief 1993 李美文 (Mei-Wen Lee) 出刊頻率 / Publishing 半年刊 (semi annually) 執行編輯 Executive Editor 出版者 / Published by 徐漢昌 (Han-Chang Hsu) 國立中山大學文學院台灣. 高雄市 804 鼓山區蓮海路 70 號編輯助理 College of Liberal Arts Editorial Assistant National Sun Yat-sen University 楊雅琄 (Ya-Chuan Yang) 70 Lienhai Road Kaohsiung 804 Taiwan Tel: +886(7) ext Fax:+886(7) 行政助理 cla@mail.nsysu.edu.tw Managing Secretary sysjoh@mail.nsysu.edu.tw 楊媛淳 (Yuan-Chuen Yang) 電子版網址 / Website 編輯委員 Editorial Board 展售處 / boorstore 王儀君 (I-Chun Wang) 國家書店林朝成 (Chao-Cheng Lin) 台北市松江路 209 號 1 樓 (02) 徐漢昌 (Han-Chang Hsu) 五南文化廣場殷偉芳 (Wini-Fred Yin) 台中市中山路 6 號 (04) 張屏生 (Ping-Sheng Chang) 張淑麗 (Shu-Li Chang) 定價 /Price 黃芳吟 (Fung-Yin Huang) 新台幣 NT.$300 元 編輯顧問 GPN Advisory Panel ISSN 余光中 (Kwang-Chung Yu) 杜維運 (Wei-Yun Tu) 沈清松 (Ching-Sung Shen) 馬水龍 (Shui-Lung Ma) 許倬雲 (Chuo-Yun Hsu) 黃宣範 (Hsuan-Fan Huang) 國立中山大學文學院版權所有 *Cover painting: Chi-Mao Chen, 小溪流, 1998, oil on canvas 封面畫為台灣畫家陳其茂先生一九九八年油畫作品 小溪流 ( 局部 )

2 中山人文學報 Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities Number 33_July 2012

3 中山人文學報 Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities Number 33_ July 2012 Martin Elsky Ya-Feng Wu Tien-Yi Chao Jen-Yen Chen Ovaborhene Idamoyibo Michaela Keck T. S. Eliot and the Play of Belief: Reading Dante in the Aftermath of World-War I Corinne s Tarantella: Germaine de Staël s Performance of Cultural Authority The Chymical Theatre : Alchemical Imagery in Margaret Cavendish s The Convent of Pleasure Antonio Caldara in Vienna ( ) and the Indigenization of an Italian Composer at a Foreign Italianate Court Musical Arts Composition and Performance-Composition as Indigenous Knowledge Systems in Okpe Culture: The Poetic Essence Female Self-Possession and Material Feminism in Elizabeth Stoddard s A Study for a Heroine (1885) 張繼光小戲 花鼓 之源流系統與歷代演出探究 151 劉彥玲法蘭茲 李斯特的 交響詩 釋義 : 對 Dichtungen 做為一種樂種的思考 181 何騏竹 從醫書到杜甫 盧綸 李商隱 : 消渴病的一重與二重模塑系統 203 編輯室撰稿格式 235 徵稿啟事 243

4 中山人文學報 Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities Number 33_ July 2012 艾士廷 T. S. 艾略特和信仰思辨 : 第一次世界大戰後對但丁的閱讀 1 吳雅鳳蔻瑞的塔朗泰拉舞 : 史黛夫人表演文化權威 21 趙恬儀 逸樂修道院 劇中的鍊金意象 51 陳人彥卡爾達拉 (Antonio Caldara) 在維也納 ( ) 與在異國義大利化宮廷中義大利作曲家的 本地化 71 Ovaborhene Idamoyibo Michaela Keck Chi-Kuang Chang Yen-Ling Liu Chi-Chu Ho 在歐克帕 (Okpe) 文化作為音樂藝術的成分和性能 組成的土著知識系統 : 詩學本質 在伊麗莎白斯史塔特 女主角的研究 中的女性自主權和唯物女權主義 (1885) Research of Xiaoxi HuaGu in the Development and Presentation So Far Franz Liszt's Symphonic Poems :Thoughts on the Symphonische Dichtungen" as a Genre The Primary and Secondary Modeling Systems of Dispersion from Medical Books to Do Fu( 杜甫 ), Lu Lun( 盧綸 ) and Li Shang Yin( 李商隱 ) Appendix Contribution Style Guide 235 Call for Papers 243

5 T. S. Eliot and the Play of Belief: Reading Dante in the Aftermath of World-War I Martin Elsky City University of New York Introduction In Act II, scene 2 of Hamlet, Hamlet welcomes the players to Elsinore castle and asks the lead player to recite an intensely emotional speech. Hamlet specifically instructs him to recite the speech which he heard once before, about Priam s slaughter. The speech gives lurid details of Pyrrhus s horrific murder of Priam and Hecuba s irreconcilable grief at witnessing the mutilating murder of her husband. The recitation of the lines produces tears in the actor and makes him turn colors. Hamlet experiences the emotions of the lines through the emotions of the actor. In the monologue that follows, Hamlet praises the actor for his ability to force his soul to his own conceit, even in a fiction, in a dream of passion. That is, he could force his imagination to participate in an emotion that reaches across centuries and across distant cultures. Moreover, the capacity for this kind of emotional identification separates those with nobility of spirit from those who are shallow. Polonius is amazed at the emotional impact of the speech on the actor, but complains it is too long and clearly has little respect for those who can produce and those who can themselves feel emotion through a mere dream of passion, in a fiction. The actor s sorrow for the imagined murder of Priam strongly contrasts to Hamlet s real, but unrealized occasion for action and Gertrude s real, but unrealized occasion for grieving. The scene is a compelling example of the power of poetry to excite empathetic identification with a fictional crystallization of emotion and, as a result, to move to action within circumstances that are both personally and politically traumatic the murder of a father and a king. Hamlet attributes much to both the ability of poetry to excite emotion and the ability to feel the emotion excited by poetry. Poetry can provide the chronicle of the times and can hold the mirror up to nature, revealing the true faces Received: May 14, 2012/ Accepted: June 25, 2012 Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities 33 (July 2012): 1-20

6 2_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities of vice and virtue. Hamlet s interest in the players art nicely summarizes a view of poetic reception that combines emotional identification, political instruction, and moral teaching. The little scene in which the player recites Priam s slaughter defines the cultivated person, the person of emotional and moral depth, as one who is receptive to the power of poetry. Coleridge famously gave a name to Hamlet s experience; he called it the willing suspension of disbelief, or the capacity to leave ourselves behind and enter the persona of another. The term appears in Chapter XIV of the Biographia Literaria (II, 6). Coleridge uses the term to describe a literary experience that goes beyond Hamlet s. He famously uses this term in to explain how rationally minded readers could accept the supernatural or fantastic in Wordsworth s poetry in order to enable the imagination to encounter a higher level of experience. I would venture to say that Coleridge s notion of the imaginative identification with a text is a form of play; the suspension of disbelief is a kind of ludic double or ludic mimic of actual belief. In this paper, I would like to explore the connection between religion and play as they relate to an aesthetic problem implied in Hamlet s identification with Priam s slaughter and Coleridge s willing suspension of disbelief. I would like to focus on this ludic sense of imaginative identification as it applies to a religious text. Beyond that, and more to the point, I would like to focus on the transition, or conversion, as it were, that occurs when ludic identification becomes real identification. Moreover, I would like to explore this transition at a particular historical moment in the reception of a particularly strong religious poet. The poet I have in mind is Dante and the historical moment of reception I have in mind is the period begun by the sexcentenary of Dante s death in The sexcentenary took place in the immediate aftermath of the First World War when various European intellectuals on both sides of the war, both victors and vanquished, turned to Dante for spiritual, intellectual, and political sustenance to heal the trauma of the war. My focus will fall specifically on the relationship between belief and the suspension of disbelief in one of the twentieth-century s most influential commentators on Dante, T. S. Eliot. My theme has to do with the historical manifestation of what the philosopher Paul Ricoeur called the hermeneutics of faith, or interpretation that aims to uncover an almost sacred meaning revealed in and through the surface meaning of the text (20-36). Ricoeur went so far as to argue that the very act of recovering this underlying meaning moves the interpretand from second order participation in the meaning of the text to assimilation into its meaning, or from the suspension of disbelief to belief. This aesthetic predates the post-1970s dominance of what Ricoeur called the hermeneutics of suspicion associated with Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche, or the unveiling of a text s underlying, true meaning that is masked by its surface language, that is, an aesthetic that moves in reverse from belief to disbelief, as in deconstruction. The aesthetic question underlying Ricoeur s hermeneutics of faith has to do with whether the intensity of emotion experienced through the ludic suspension of disbelief ( participation in the text) can be so powerful that it leads to belief ( assimilation into the text). In the case of Eliot, I hope to show, the

7 Martin Elsky_ T. S. Eliot and the Play of Belief_3 movement between these two poles of reader response, as discussed in his critical prose, had important cultural implications. In a sense, my approach is an inversion of a major issue in Dante criticism. Instead of asking how much Dante believed of the allegory of the Divine Comedy, I am asking what Dante s reader needed to believe at a particular troubled historical moment. 1 The question here, then, is not about play in the Middle Ages or Renaissance; it is about play as an attitude we as readers of the Middles Ages or Renaissance adopt under certain circumstances; it is also about the temptations and consequences of turning play into reality, of turning the suspension of disbelief into actual belief as poetry, politics, and religion intertwine in Eliot s writing about Dante during the 1920s. Eliot s Dante in The Sacred Wood (1920) Eliot turned to Dante over and over again throughout his critical writing as a model for poetry as an instrument of the construction of a culture in which emotional fulfillment was possible. Looking back at his career in A Talk on Dante in 1952, Eliot observed that I still after forty years, regard [Dante s] poetry as the most persistent and deepest influence upon my own verse (178). Eliot first turned to Dante in an essay published in The Sacred Wood, which appeared in 1920, on the eve of the Dante sexcentenary. Dante s poetry, he begins by asserting, belies Paul Valery s assertion that poetry and philosophy are incompatible. On the contrary, he argues, Dante s philosophy is essential to the structure of the Divine Comedy, and structure is essential to poetic beauty. Nevertheless, the poem s nearly unintelligible scientific, allegorical, philosophical scaffold (168) does not have to be understood; only the emotional structure (168) provided by the scaffold needs to be understood. The philosophical scaffold provides an ordered scale of human emotions. The significance of every emotion depends on its place in the scheme of the whole. Dante s is the most comprehensive, and the most ordered presentation of emotions that has ever been made (168). The philosophical framework thus provides a unified whole by which every detail of the poem becomes intelligible. Eliot ends by agreeing with Valery that the modern poet should produce in us a state (170); he explains that the poet must make us see (literally, through his imagery) and perceive the vision of life embodied in his philosophy. Dante is supremely successful at this task. He makes us perceive his philosophy, and see a mode of life that embodies his philosophy. But nowhere in this essay does Eliot say we must believe Dante s embodied philosophy. The philosophy is there only to provide the means to enrich our emotional life. In this version of Dante s importance for a twentieth-century audience, the reader must imaginatively assume the emotional structure and perception of the Divine Comedy by imaginatively identifying with the text. In this essay, Eliot is roughly analogous to Hamlet listening to and being moved by the account of Priam s slaughter. 1 For a summary of the issue of what Dante believed, see Barolini, 3-20.

8 4_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities Eliot s Dante (1929) Eliot s next full scale treatment of Dante appears in his 1929 short monograph on Dante published in England by Faber and Faber in a series entitled Poets on Poets. Once again Eliot approaches the question of Dante s philosophy, though here his treatment of the issue is much more complex. Here he directly confronts the question of religious belief as it is forced on us by the theological system underlying Dante s poetry. Eliot s monograph has nearly the rhetorical structure of a conversion narrative as he goes from suspension of disbelief to belief. Perhaps the most important new element in Eliot s life that explains this change of approach is his conversion to Christianity in 1927 and his formal declaration of Christian faith and membership in the Church of England. The monograph moves toward a nearly full illustration of Ricoeur s view of the hermeneutics of faith. The premise of the monograph is that Dante is a poet of major importance, but in a post-enlightenment age of unbelief, he is separated from us by an alien, complex, recondite, and vastly unfamiliar philosophical theology. This was a common theme in writing about Dante at the time. Throughout these years Eliot maintained a public dialogue with I. A. Richards about the relevance or irrelevance of belief to the appreciation of poetry. Richards Practical Criticism came out in the same year as Eliot s Dante monograph (1929), and Eliot generously quotes from it. Richards had provided the New Critics with a method for reading poetry as poetry even when the propositional value of a poem contradicted a reader s belief, especially religious belief, as Richards explains in Part III, Chapter 7 of Practical Criticism ( ). He opened a vastly increased canon of poetry and a vastly increased imaginative landscape for generations of students and general readers as well as scholars. Eliot poses two seminal questions that come directly out of Richards: first, how much of Dante s theology does one have to understand to appreciate Dante? and how much of Dante s theology does one actually have to believe? As the essay moves on, Eliot inches his way from an aesthetic position to a religious position in which aesthetics becomes secondary. Eliot s discussion begins with the aesthetic appreciation of Dante. The goal of reading, he contends, is pleasure, enjoyment, and appreciation ; these goals are reached through understanding. The line of Eliot s argument, however, is slippery and ambiguous. He begins with the observation that if we enjoy (15) Dante s poetry we will be moved to learn about Dante s theology, but Dante s theology in itself will not move us to enjoy the poetry. It is not essential to understand (16) the philosophical scheme of the poetry for appreciation (16) of it. But pleasure and enjoyment (16) in the poetry will naturally move one to fuller knowledge of it (16), that is, of its theology. In the course of commenting on the residents of the Inferno, he adds to the category of enjoyment the category of experience ; repeated readings of the Inferno go beyond enjoyment to result in experience as we encounter the figures who inhabit hell as mediated through poetic imagery. He does not define what he means by experience, but throughout the essay, the term implies some kind of

9 Martin Elsky_ T. S. Eliot and the Play of Belief_5 resonating emotion of the reader with the characters. Our experience of the poem takes us beyond enjoyment and even understanding to a deeper meaning (32). We have thus moved from pleasure, enjoyment, and appreciation to experience or empathic emotion. This kind of imaginative identification with the text does not require understanding, but emotional identification naturally moves us to fuller knowledge of the theology. Thus far, Eliot s argument further develops much of what he said in the 1920 essay. When Eliot comes to a theological passage in the Purgatorio, he brings up the issue of belief almost as a digression. Eliot asserts that while we are indeed obliged to read and not to skip the theological passages of the Divine Comedy, we are not obliged to believe them. To read Dante we must enter the world of thirteenth-century Catholicism, by which he means imaginatively enter, but we do not have to believe what Dante believed (42). Nevertheless, Eliot complicates this assertion by introducing an ambiguous middle term, assent. Appreciation of the poem requires not belief, but poetic assent (42) to its theology. Eliot explains that by assent he means that you suspend both belief and disbelief (43). When he says What is necessary to appreciate the poetry of the Purgatorio is not belief but suspension of belief (44), the standard of proof is the agnostic, unbelieving reader. Even an agnostic can appreciate the poetry of Dante, because even an agnostic can accept [Dante s] theology (44) by giving poetic assent to Dante s theology through temporary suspension of his own belief as an agnostic. As we will see, this heuristic figure of the agnostic will play a troubling role in Eliot s thought. He further explains that by assent he means a state of mind in which one sees certain beliefs... as possible, so that we suspend our judgment altogether (44) and imaginatively entertain beliefs we do not ordinarily hold. (This is roughly analogous to Ricoeur s notion of participation. ) Eliot seems to be suggesting a form of intellectual empathy in which we enable ourselves ludically to conceive what is like to inhabit Dante s world with all its beliefs. Appreciating and understanding Dante requires us, for example, to give poetic assent to the possibility of sin. Eliot s implicit assumption is that the modern reader of Dante is the unbeliever who will in some way benefit by engaging the possibility of sin and redemption though a ludic reading of Dante. We are all familiar with this type of reading as normative pedagogical practice. However, Eliot, like Ricoeur, does not let the matter rest there. In an extended Note to this chapter, more like an appendix, he takes the question of belief a good deal further and presents a conclusion that seriously qualifies, if not completely contradicts the conclusions he reached in the text of the monograph. He begins by placing the principle of suspension of belief in the context of I. A. Richards treatment of the matter in Practical Criticism. Eliot maintains with Richards that the very existence of poetry as a vibrant, widely experienced form of expression depends on the possibility that one may achieve full literary or poetic appreciation without sharing the beliefs of the poet (57). He concedes, however, that he is only assuming, without defining, what full appreciation means. He adds that the same is true for the enjoyment of

10 6_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities poetry. He reiterates that to deny these maxims is to assert that there is very little poetry you can appreciate, and to accept the unacceptable, that appreciation will be the function of one s philosophy or theology or something else (58). He upends Richards argument, however, when he takes into consideration the perspective of the poet rather than the reader. There must be some connection between what the poet says in his poem and what the poet himself believes. If this is so, we must examine what we mean by the word understand. Eliot reflects on the ambiguity of the word. On the one hand, to understand means to understand without belief. On the other hand, if you firmly believe in something, if you yourself are convinced of a certain way of life, you irresistibly and inevitably will believe that anyone else s understanding must terminate in belief (58). This was the case with Dante. He was convinced of his Christian way of life and believed that anyone else who understood it would have to believe in it as he did. Eliot takes the next step and proposes that understanding Dante s own believing words requires the reader to believe those words. Thus, It is sometimes possible, and even necessary, he goes on, to argue that full understanding must identify itself with full belief (58). It all depends, he concludes on how much weight one puts on full (58). Eliot illustrates his point by relating the levels of belief in three lines by Keats, Shakespeare, and Dante respectively. The Keats line ( Truth is beauty, beauty is truth ) is meaningless; it is either not understandable, or it is simply untrue. The Shakespeare line ( Ripeness is all ) is full of emotional depth; here, understanding, he implies, leads to emotional empathy. But his understanding of a line from Dante ( la sua voluntade è nostra pace ) leads him to see its beauty precisely because it seems to me literally true (59; emphasis in original). Most significantly, Eliot refers to his own conversion as the basis for this conclusion. It has more beauty for him now, he confesses, when my own experience has deepened its meaning (59). The experience he refers to is his conversion. His awareness of the impact of his conversion on his view of poetry leads him to conclude that he cannot wholly separate my poetic appreciation from my personal beliefs (59). The confession repudiates all his reasoning and that of Richards about assent and suspension of belief. Statements with imaginative value pseudo-statements requiring poetic assent cannot always be distinguished from those that have actual truth value statements, or we might say propositions, requiring belief. In the particular case of Dante, full appreciation depends on an understanding deepened by actual religious belief (59). Richards theory is incomplete, he concludes, until Richards can further clarify what he means by belief. In the final paragraph of the Note, Eliot admits the difficulty of his position. He concedes that there is an intellectual pleasure in reading and assenting to a poet whose beliefs one does not share (60), like the agnostic reader of Dante. However, he also knows from his own experience that what he calls, according to Richards standards, aesthetic heresies (58) are true, namely that there is probably more pleasure when one shares the belief of the poet. Eliot concludes with a rejection of Richards purely aesthetic presuppositions in his theory of reading: It would appear

11 Martin Elsky_ T. S. Eliot and the Play of Belief_7 that literary appreciation is an abstraction, and pure poetry a phantom; and that in both creation and enjoyment much always enters which is, from the point of view of Art, irrelevant (60). This final sentence of the Note repudiates the aesthetic terms of the entire discussion. It repudiates the very notion of appreciation, a term which has governed the monograph from the start, and in general it repudiates the notion that literature itself is an aesthetic activity. This position cannot but leave the agnostic reader hanging, the reader whose appreciation proved the power of Dante s poetry. To be a Hamlet before the player s speech about Prima s slaughter might not be enough. The creation and reception of literature depends on the degree of belief expressed by the poet and accepted by the reader. The experience of literature will be different depending on whether the reader offers assent or belief. If Eliot presents himself as the model reader of Dante, one who finds Dante s poetry beautiful because true, then the model reader is one who is brought to Christian belief by understanding Dante. Nevertheless, and this is important to emphasize, Eliot expresses his view with a degree of unease. He places his conclusion about belief in a Note, not in the text of the monograph, and however much he is willing to give up all that is gained by Richards approach, he clearly sees its value and holds on to Richards view or the viewpoint of the agnostic reader as far as possible. That the issue was not fully resolved for him is suggested by his further discussion of the problem in his lecture on Keats and Shelley in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (96-99), an irresolution that could only have been reinforced by his puzzlement, as he records in his lecture on The Modern Mind, in the same volume, that Richards could have thought that The Waste Land effects [quoting Richards] a complete severance between poetry and all beliefs (130). Eliot s Conversion: For Launcelot Andrewes (1928) Eliot s Dante monograph, as we have seen, is the product of his conversion to what he called Anglo-Catholicism. The conversion took place in Oxford in The term Anglo-Catholicism comes from the Victorian Oxford Movement, which emphasized the connection between the Church of England and the Roman Church. Eliot s conversion explains the difference between his 1920 and 1929 writing about Dante. Eliot s implied explanation for his conversion appeared in his essay for Launcelot Andrewes, in a collection with the same title. In the Preface to the volume, Eliot dissociates himself from his position in The Sacred Wood, where the first Dante essay appeared. In the current essay, he defines the Anglican Church of the seventeenth-century divine Launcelot Andrewes as the precursor to the Anglo-Catholic church to which he has converted. The essay is an attempt to declare the inseparability of religion and aesthetics. Toward this end, the main focus of the essay is the connection between literary style and spirituality in the orderliness of Andrewes prose. Eliot s highest praise for Andrewes sermons is that his passion for order in religion is reflected in his passion for order in prose (22). In the following year, he would make a similar claim about Dante. This connection between

12 8_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities spirituality and aesthetics was not the creation of a single individual but comes out of Andrewes church, whose achievements can be measured in its literary, aesthetic, and intellectual fruits. Eliot counts Andrewes prose among these achievements, which include the architecture of the Elizabethan Church of England as well as the devotional poetry of the seventeenth century. Andrewes prose is one dimension of the art of the Elizabethan Church. Eliot explains his absorption in Andrewes method of scriptural exegesis as if it were a form of literary criticism, particularly Andrewes precision in his use of words, his ability to reveal unsuspected meanings of words. For Eliot, Andrewes treated scripture as a poetic text to be parsed, and he parsed scripture in a language that was itself poetic. The provocation to Eliot s conversion, then, came not from an epiphanic experience of the spirit, but from the literary, aesthetic, and intellectual qualities embodied in Andrewes prose style. The intensity of these qualities had the power to command what Eliot calls assent, a word, as we have seen, that will play a major role in the Dante monograph, still a year away. [T]he achievement of Hooker and Andrewes was to make the English Church more worthy of intellectual assent (17), he declares. Total immersion in the prose of Andrewes, the process of following his movement of thought and the examination of his words leads, Eliot trumpets, to the ecstasy of assent (24-26). The meaning of the word here is closer to belief than in the later Dante monograph. The powerful intellect that allows Andrewes to understand the essence of scripture, his powerful interpretive capacity to deal with the words of scripture, and his powerful verbal abilities to express his intellectual and hermeneutic insights in precise and well ordered words of his own produced Eliot s assent to Anglicanism, first as intellectual understanding and then as religious belief. Andrewes ability to find in words the power to use words to order and intellectually illuminate the scriptural basis of Anglicanism parallels Dante s use of a theological scaffolding to order and thus more powerfully express emotions. Both command assent that ends in belief. Eliot s reading of Andrewes prose prepared the way for his new reading of Dante s poetry in the Dante monograph within the context of Ricoeur s hermeneutics of faith. The 1928 Andrewes essay made the connection between poetry and belief that was to be discussed in the 1929 Dante monograph. Nevertheless, the nice interlacing of aesthetics and belief in the Andrewes essay is far more fraught and even challenged in the Dante monograph, as perhaps suggested in the change of the meaning of assent from belief to only the possibility of belief. For Launcelot Andrewes projects forward another aspect of Eliot s view of Dante., though with more constancy and less ambivalence. Andrewes effect on Eliot was not the result of an exchange across history from one individual to another. Andrewes intellect and prose style were themselves products of a tradition embodied in the Elizabethan Church that ultimately connect it to a larger European culture. Both his intellect and his aesthetic had deep seated civilizational roots connected to institutions of religion and politics. Throughout the essay on Andrewes, Eliot compares the achievements of the Elizabethan Church to those of the Roman Church. The City churches of London, notably St. Paul s, for example, can compare to the

13 Martin Elsky_ T. S. Eliot and the Play of Belief_9 great Catholic churches. Eliot takes pains to insist that Elizabethan churchman like Andrewes and Hooker had a breadth of culture, an ease with Humanism and Renaissance learning (18) that placed them on terms of equality with their [Catholic] Continental antagonists and as a result elevate[d] their Church above the position of a local heretical sect (18). In other words, the cultured intellect and aesthetic sensibility of Andrewes connected the Elizabethan Church and by implication, Eliot himself to European universality. This is what Eliot meant when he styled himself an Anglo-Catholic. High Church Anglicanism saves Eliot from sectarianism, from a sense of belonging to a mere Protestant sect. Instead, through a local, or national, church Eliot connected himself to a European movement. Unlike the Edwardian Bishop Hugh Latimer, Hooker and Andrewes spoke not just for a church that was narrowly English and merely Protestant. Andrewes is the first great preacher of the English Catholic Church. Hooker and Andrewes were fathers of a national church, and they were Europeans (18), as Eliot puts it. By making Anglicanism a European movement, Eliot thus twists history to make the Church of England a parallel church rather than a rival to the Roman Catholic Church. As early as 1923, Cook (343) points out, Eliot published Notes in The Criterion which observed that England is a Latin country. Without Rome all that would be left in England would be a few Teutonic roots and husks (104). Barry Spurr points out that Anglicanism performed both a Catholic and a catholic function for Eliot in so far as it recognized an authority transcending national boundaries and traditions (313). Spurr argues that only Eliot s attachment to England prevented him from joining the Roman Church. He did not join the Roman Church, Spurr continues, only because of its disconnection from the cultural life of England, where Roman Catholics had become a cultural curiosity ; neither doctrinal nor liturgical reservations kept him away from the Roman Church. Indeed, when he was on the continent, he attended Catholic services(313). High Church Anglicanism, that is, satisfied Eliot s fundamental requirement that a church participate in the universal, not in the abstract, but through local, national roots. 2 In the end, it is not England per se that is Eliot s connection to the larger world; Rome supplies that connection, as is implied by later essays like What is a Classic? (1944) and Vergil and the Christian World (1953). European culture is the goal and England is his connection to Rome and Europe. One of the more recent trends in Eliot studies is to appreciate Eliot s European internationalism. Jeroen Vanheste argues that Eliot advocated a common European culture over against the nationalisms that erupted during WWI. 3 He made this position the view point of his literary-cultural journal, The Criterion. Vanheste includes The Criterion with such journals like La Nouvelle Revue Française, Europäische Revue, Neue deutsche Beiträge, Die neue Rundschau, and Revista de Occidente. Eliot in this regard 2 For Eliot on England and Rome, see What Is a Classic? and Vergil and the Christian World. 3 See also Commentary (1926): 222.

14 10_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities belonged to the company of writers that included von Hoffmansthal, Mann, Curtius, Benda, and Ortega (52). From this perspective, Eliot s Anglo-Catholicism had less to do with a personal faith than with a belief in the civilization benefits of adherence to a church that connected its members to European origins in Rome. Eliot and Europe Eliot s essay on Launcelot Andrewes gives us some indication about what was at stake in how one responded to Dante: the embeddedness of literature in European origins through Roman religious institutions connects us to membership in European society and culture. We come now to the larger context of the argument about belief in the Dante monograph, which has to do with broader cultural issues, with cultural politics in the post-world War I era. Dante is for Eliot the poet of Europe, and as such belief in Dante s theology has direct consequences for the idea of Europe and its culture in this troubled period. Eliot s choice of Dante to work out his difficulties with belief, assent, and the suspension of belief is not accidental. Dante represents one of the starting points of the tradition inherited by Andrewes. As Andrewes Renaissance humanist learning connected him to Rome and Europe, Dante is for Eliot the poetic fountainhead of the Europe to which Andrewes was connected, and as such, just as attachment to Andrewes church defined Eliot s connection to English culture, his attachment to Dante s theology stood behind the English church and had direct consequences for the idea and politics of Europe during the trauma that followed the First World War. Indeed, in the 1929 Dante monograph, Eliot wrote about Dante with a heightened awareness that the cultural condition in which the contemporary poet writes is defined by the Treaty of Versailles. For Eliot, the cultural circumstances in which the contemporary poet writes is defined by the condition of Europe envisioned in the Treaty of Versailles, the treaty that set out the conditions that brought the war to an end. The process of disintegration for which our generation culminates in that treaty (20), Eliot observed. And that process began soon enough after Dante s time (20). We now write in a period that post-dates Dante, a period of separation of nation from nation that began long before the treaty of Versailles (19), but was cemented by it. Dante, on the other hand, situated at the linguistic and geographical center of Europe, wrote at a time when Europe was still more or less one (21). Eliot fantasizes that Dante wrote in an atmosphere of near total cultural homogeneity: Dante, he muses, thought in a way in which every man of his culture in the whole of Europe then thought (22). Europe was mentally more united than we can now conceive (19). This cultural unity is embedded in Dante s very language. In a discussion of how easy Dante s Italian is for the foreigner, Eliot observes that Dante s Italian was very close to the universal Latin of the Middle Ages (17), and thus shared with medieval Latin the tende[ncy]to concentrate on what men of various races and lands could think together (18). The thought embodied in the Latin of the philosophers whom Dante read was trans-european, but it was also theological:

15 Martin Elsky_ T. S. Eliot and the Play of Belief_11 Aquinas was Italian, Albertus German, Abelard French, and Hugh and Richard of St. Victor were Scots (20). The thinkers that held Dante s Europe together as one were Church fathers. Dante s language did not reflect a particular civilization, that is, any particular national civilization, because Dante culture was not of one European country but of Europe (19). The defining institution of Eliot s Europe was thus the Church. This same pan-europeanism was characteristic of Dante s Florentine speech because it cuts across the modern division of nationality (18). Dante s trans-europeanism made him the most universal of poets in the modern languages (17). For Eliot, then, Dante, though an Italian and a patriot, is first a European (18). Dante is for the twentieth-century post-versailles reader an entry point into this Europe. Assent and belief offer two ways to be part of this Europe, and Eliot s decision for one or the other is equivocal in his Dante monograph. For Eliot, assent and belief in Dante was tantamount to assent and belief in this imagined Europe, a better Europe than the one created by the Treaty of Versailles. Eliot and Maurras However irenic Eliot s transnational ideal, one of Eliot s chief sources for it, perhaps his most important source, was the very belligerent and not very irenic French literary and political figure Charles Maurras. Much has been written about Eliot and Maurras. In fact, their relationship has much to do with Eliot s eclipse in the English literary canon. Maurras was not only a literary figure; he began his political career as an anti-dreyfusard and rose to prominence as head and founder of the Action Française, the reactionary, anti-semitic French party that supported the return of the monarchy and opposed, sometimes violently, democratic parliamentary government. 4 Eliot himself witnessed this political violence when he first became attached to Maurras on his visit to Paris in Maurras died in prison in 1952 as a Nazi collaborator. As Eliot himself later came to recognize, his relation to Maurras was highly problematic, though he never completely dissociated himself from him, as is evident in his post World War II Hommage à Charles Maurras. Eliot has been accused of subscribing to political ideas not much different from Maurras. Eliot took from Maurras the notion that one becomes European not in the abstract, but through belonging to a local, national community. As Maurras explained in his essay, A Prologue to an Essay on Criticism (which originally appeared in French in 1896), European culture is the culmination of Greek and Latin civilization as it was disseminated throughout Europe in the Middle Ages and came to rest primarily in France in the modern era. French civilization epitomizes and embodies universal European civilization. Maurras aggressively asserted that that the two institutions that held together the ancient tradition of European civilization in France were the monarchy and the Catholic Church. These were the institutional bases of 4 Eliot s anti-semitism and his relation to Maurras have been widely discussed. See Asher, Julius, Margolis, and Ricks.

16 12_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities Maurras literary classicism. Eliot himself translated Maurras essay and published it in his own journal, The Criterion, in Eliot himself put these literary ideals into practice by becoming a subject of the British monarchy and by converting to the Anglo-Catholic Church. It makes complete sense, then, that Eliot dedicated his 1929 Dante monograph to Maurras as a signal that his devotion to Maurras idea of Europe, the Church, and monarchy was reflected in his view of Dante. Maurras himself wrote an extended essay on Dante, Le Conseil de Dante, a passage from which Eliot used as the motto of the same Dante monograph. (Eliot removed the dedication in later appearances of the Dante monograph in collections of essays.) Eliot s Europe and Charles Maurras Much has been written about Eliot s close friendship with Maurras and his admiration of the politics of Action Française. Eliot made a trip to Paris in , and after initial attraction to Bergson s lectures at the College de France (Marx 29), he was swayed by Bergson s opponents, especially by Catholic right wing and anti-semitic sources like Massis and Lasserre (Marx 30). (Bergson was Jewish.) It was also at this time that he came under the influence of Maurras and the Action Française. It is also well recognized that the connection with Maurras is more than literary, but that they both saw their literary ideas as the basis of a social polity based on monarchism and orthodox Christianity with strong sentiments about who should be excluded from this polity. Eliot defended Maurras even after the Vatican had repudiated the political positions he associated with Catholicism as the basis of French society. Eliot in fact proposed a social and political agenda that mirrored Maurras own. Eliot s agenda became explicit in later works like The Idea of a Christian Society (1939). The extent of Maurras influence on Eliot may be seen in Maurras Prologue to an Essay on Criticism. The essay originally appeared in French in 1896, and was re-issued by Maurras in Eliot himself translated the essay and published it in two parts in 1928, the year in which he declared his conversion in the essay on Launcelot Andrewes. The most obvious similarity lies in the importance Maurras attributes to order. Order is that condition in which the natural harmony of body and soul are in conformity with the elements of nature so that feelings and passions are guided and ruled by an intellect (205-06). The underlying anti-romanticism of these lines, a sentiment Eliot shared with Maurras, is the basis of Maurras view of style. Orderliness is the signal mark of style. Style consists of the order in which we present our thoughts (207). Far from being a separate external form added to thought, style reveals how a thought has been conceived in so far as a thought is a universe that contains within it perception and emotion. Eliot s analysis of Andrewes style is a development of this idea. Maurras goes on to apply this notion of individual style to literary style as a national attribute. Here we can see the political underpinnings of Maurras literary

17 Martin Elsky_ T. S. Eliot and the Play of Belief_13 criticism that were shared and adapted by Eliot. Literature, he declares, is style, and A national literature means a body of work the style of which is appropriate to the national genius (210). Maurras maintains a strict unity of national language, national style, and national content that rigorously separates one national literature from another. Literature must therefore adhere to the genius of the tradition of its own language. Tradition councils, aids, guides, and supports the poet (213). However important traditions might be, Maurras makes it clear that Not all traditions are equal (214). It is the critic s duty to observe rather than to redress this fact of history, that some traditions are superior. One tradition above all others embodies what he had defined as taste because it express[es] humanity raised to its highest point (214). This tradition starts in Ionia as from the ashes of Homer ; it found a new home in Rome; and it continued to persist, attenuated he implies, in France and Italy in the Middle Ages. It then reforms itself and occupies the whole of Europe... (214). At the present, however, Maurras insists, this tradition is above all preserved in Paris just as it once was preserved in Athens. This tradition has been in France from the mid-sixteenth to end of the seventeenth centuries. This is the classical spirit, refined to an Attic point of taste, [and it] never lacked representatives among us [in France], or an elite worthy of understanding and loving it (214). Paris is the center of the classical European tradition; Paris thus most authentically represents the true European sensibility. [T]his tradition is essential and natural to France, a position he claims which can hardly be contested (214). Maurras defensiveness reminds us that in the background is an ongoing debate with Germany about who is the true heir of Greek civilization in Europe. Indeed, the unity of France as a nation was most likely, he speculates, created by classical architects whose fine and energetic hands (215) can be found in the fundamentally Roman French institutions of the Catholic Church and the monarchy. (He specifically refers to the Catholic Church, the Roman administration, and the ancient counselor of the kings of France.) The statement quietly announces Maurras royalism and Catholicism, a belief that these institutions are the continuation of the classical Roman tradition and the pre-condition of great European literature. The classical tradition, Maurras claims is ours, and is superior to all other traditions. Maurras view that European universality comes from a national context is echoed in Eliot s own views. Eleanor Cook s description of Eliot s view of Rome as the true center of Europe suggests just how close he was to Maurras. Eliot s 1923 article in The Criterion, as we have seen from Cook (343), proposes that Rome is the source of all significant European cultural developments in England, the source of everything we have from Norman-French society, from the Church, from Humanism, from every channel direct and indirect. Without Maurras inflammatory rhetoric, Eliot saw England in the same relation to Rome as Maurras saw France. Eliot s own sense of his parallel position to Maurras is perhaps nowhere better seen in that his declaration in the Preface to For Launcelot Andrewes that his work may be described as classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion (ix) closely

18 14_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities follows the characterization applied to Maurras as classique, catholique, monarchist proposed by Thibaudet, though, as Marx points out, these terms were much less incendiary in Britain than in France (31). It should be added that the view Maurras expressed in his Prologue had at least part of its context the French conflict with Germany. Maurras first published the essay in the period following the German occupation of Paris in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, and reissued it in the period following the French victory in WWI and the Treaty of Versailles. It is not surprising that Maurras considered Germany to be the main threat to this French classical spirit. Even so, he points out, the threat was present even in antiquity as barbarians swarmed in Judaea, Rome, and Carthage. The ancient threat received new life in barbaric Protestantism with its hebraisms. Maurras obsession with what he thought was the orchestrated, combined German and Jewish menace to France comes through in these lines as well. Maurras and Action Française in the 1920s For all his talk of order in classicism, Maurras created a disruptive politics. In the years before the war, in 1909 for example, just before Eliot first became attached to him, Maurras supported what Eugen Weber, in his still authoritative work on Action Française, called revolutionary proclivities, irreverent statue-smashing, cane-wielding activities, disruption of public ceremonies and attacks on public persons, and generally hooligan-like behavior (56). In 1910, in the year he became attached to Maurras, Eliot witnessed, as previously mentioned, the political violence in Paris of the Camelots de Roi, the youth movement of the Action (Marx 30). The violent proclivities of the Maurras-led Action Française for a time even led the Pretender, the Duc d Orleans, to threaten dissociation from the movement Action Française (57), though they reconciled a year later, when the Action Française succeeded in becoming the official mouthpiece of the king (61). Maurras and his followers continued their anti-dreyfusard agitation after the war by enlisting anti-semitic politics to promote nationalism and royalism, by characterizing the pre-war government of being a Judeo-Masonic regime (65) and by accusing Jews of being in a conspiracy with France s enemy, Germany. Action Française went so far as to accuse Woodrow Wilson (because of his support for the League of Nations) of being agent of Germany and Jews (116). In 1922, Leon Daudet, a prominent member of Action Française, similarly accused Clemenceau of being an agent of the Anglo-German Jewry (132). At its high point of influence in 1923, Action Française tried to promote itself as a conservative rather than a revolutionary subversive party (149). Nevertheless, there were strong reactions against Action Française for Camelot violence, for example in 1923 (Weber 144) and in 1926 (Weber 163). Weber charges that Action Française looked more and more like French Fascism, and there was indeed fear that Action Française, would stage a coup. Indeed, Daudet himself threatened a coup to be followed by purges (133).

19 Martin Elsky_ T. S. Eliot and the Play of Belief_15 The success of Action Française very probably had to do with its being regarded as a strong bastion against revolution and disorder in an atmosphere of fear of social revolution. Maurras and Action Française had from the beginning a strong following among conservative Catholics. Most recruits to Action Française before the war were Catholic, including priests and monks (Weber 65). After the war as well, Maurras and Action Française enjoyed great popularity with lay and clerical Catholics and Catholic student groups (230). But even long before the war, as early as 1902, official Catholic voices began to be raised against Action Française as pagan; the group, and Maurras himself, were charged with hiding behind the Catholic Church, and specifically with theologically incorrect treatment of Jewish scripture (65-66). By 1926 the Vatican dissociated itself from Maurras, accusing him of being an agnostic opportunist with fundamentally pagan attitudes. Maurras books and Action Française s newspaper were placed on the Index (230-35). Eliot s Defense of Maurras The condemnation of Maurras in 1926 as an agnostic just one year before Eliot s conversion in 1927 appears to have come back to haunt him, considering just how much Maurras linking of religion and poetry influenced him. The controversy surrounding Maurras condemnation continued for some years, and Eliot jumped into the fray in Eliot s came to Maurras defense in a manner that suggests that the Vatican s condemnation created something of a crisis in Eliot s connection between poetry, politics and religious belief. Eliot published his defense of Maurras in the very issue of The Criterion in which he published Maurras literary essay about classicism, A Prologue to an Essay on Criticism. Some, like Margolis (89), have seen this combination of Maurras literary essay and Eliot s religious, political defense as a tactic; Eliot in this view published his defense as a way of justifying his publication of Maurras literary essay. The connection between the two, however, seems much more integral. The Church s condemnation of Maurras undercut Eliot s own arguments about literature, politics, religion, and the idea of Europe, which were in large measure supplied to him by Maurras Prologue. As far as I know, no one has seen the connection between Eliot s view of Dante as the poet of Europe and the challenge posed by the Church s accusations against Maurras. The Church s condemnation of Maurras had to do with his level of belief, the same issue that Eliot was to tackle in his Dante monograph. The Vatican s accusations against Maurras were explained to an English-speaking public by Leo Ward in his book The Condemnation of the Action Française (1928). Eliot responded to Ward s recitation of the charges in his defense entitled The Action Française, M. Maurras and Mr. Ward. The basis of the condemnation, according to Ward, had to do with Maurras level of belief, or, more to the point, his unbelief. The Vatican s accusation was fundamental: Maurras was really opposed to Christianity, but was opportunistically using Catholicism as the instrument of royalism and reactionary politics. Maurras was in effect de-christianizing France and corrupting the Catholic

20 16_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities youth of France. The underlying reason for Maurras un-christian and even anti-christian attitude was that Maurras was at the very least a professed agnostic, even an atheist, an unbeliever. Maurras, Ward charged, would have no interest in the Church if it were not tied politically to royalism. The agnostic Maurras would disallow his followers to be Catholic if the Church supported democracy. The underlying reason for this fundamentally un-christian and even anti-christian attitude was that Maurras was at the very least a professed agnostic, even an atheist, and Ward warned that the Church could not allow itself to be dominated by what he called atheist Catholics. Eliot staunchly defended Maurras on grounds that bear closely on what would be his treatment of belief in understanding Dante. Eliot conceded that Maurras was an agnostic: His attitude is that of an unbeliever who cannot believe, and who is too honest to pretend to himself or to others that he does believe ( The Action Française, M. Maurras and Mr. Ward, 197). Eliot insists Maurras relationship to the church is sincere, but he concedes that Maurras main interest is only in the political dimension of the Church as a temporal institution. Eliot explains that Maurras is simply concerned with the aspect of the Roman Church which is not necessarily Christian because his point of view is that of an agnostic political philosopher ( A Reply to Mr. Ward, 372). Were we to use literary terms, we might say that Maurras imaginatively identified with belief through the willing suspension of disbelief. As Ricoeur might say, he participated in Catholic belief, but he was not assimilated into it. For Ward and the Church this was not enough. Mimicked, ludic belief could only lead to a political end, royalism, not the other way around. The Church s condemnation of Maurras put pressure on the validity of a ludic suspension of disbelief and on Eliot s unwillingness to place his argument for belief at the center of his reading of Dante in the text of the Dante monograph, as opposed to the Note. Nevertheless, Eliot argued that Maurras position would not actually discourage anyone from joining the church and would only encourage anyone sharing Maurras political beliefs (one thinks of Eliot himself) to actually become a believer. How could this in any sense be considered de-christianizing? Eliot asked. How can it be considered de-christianizing to argue that Christianity is essential to European civilization? In his continuation of his defense in the following issue of The Criterion, A Reply to Mr. Ward, Eliot argued that anyone interested in Maurras politics who had any tendency toward interior Christianity would only be encouraged to find that a political and a religious view can be harmonious ( A Reply to Mr. Ward, 375). Eliot s emphasis on interior Christianity suggests he accepts an exterior Christianity, a kind of civil religion for its civilizational benefits, a Christianity without belief. To use Ricoeur s terms, imaginative participation in Christianity could lead to assimilation into it. Or to use the term Eliot s deployed in his Dante monograph, understanding in a state of suspension of belief could eventually end in belief, even if it is the belief of someone else. The Church s condemnation of Maurras and Eliot s defense of him suggest that the stakes of figuring the relationship between belief and the suspension of disbelief

21 Martin Elsky_ T. S. Eliot and the Play of Belief_17 in reading Dante were high. Eliot s prevarication over the matter, his argument in the text of the Dante monograph in contrast to his argument in the Note is very likely related to the case of Maurras and all its implications, during this time of great political turmoil, for what it means to belong to and participate in the European polity. The debate over Maurras suggests the question of the reader s belief was more than a matter of literary history or literary theory pace Richards. Eliot s prevarication between belief and the suspension of belief in the Dante monograph is reflected in his own anxieties that surface as well in his defense of Maurras. He jokingly wonders if Ward s accusation against Maurras as being anti-christian might not apply to himself, presumably because he too thinks of the Church as a civilizational institution, an impression that could only be reinforced by the fact that his own profession of faith in For Launcelot Andrewes, for example, had more to do with the same quest for the orderliness that motivated Maurras classicism than with inner spirituality. Perhaps even more poignant is Eliot s fear about unbelief in the opening pages of After Strange Gods (1938), published on the eve of war with Germany, when Eliot worried much about the collapse of European culture. The book is based on the Page-Barbour Lectures he delivered at the University of Virginia to an audience he praised for maintaining a cultural unity long lost in the Northern U.S., an echo of Maurrasian ideology applied to his own native U.S. Eliot here makes his notorious statement, five years after the Nazi takeover in Germany, that What is still more important is unity of religious background; and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable (19-20). It turns out then that Maurras the agnostic is not so much different than those whom he thought most threatened France. It turns out, then, that entertaining the possibility of an agnostic reader of Dante, as he did in the Dante monograph, might not make him so much different than those he thought threatened his Maurrasian view not only of Europe, but the U.S. The anxiety could only have been increased by Richards perception that Eliot had severed all belief from poetry. It must have been a matter of some urgency that Eliot prevent the agnostic, atheistic but participating reader who suspends belief from collapsing into the looming threat that he and Maurras saw in the irredeemable figure of unbelief, the free-thinking Jew. In some sense, reading Dante performs that function. WORKS CITED A., R. Notes. Criterion 2.1 (October 1923): Asher, Kenneth George. T.S. Eliot and Ideology. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, Barolini, Teodolinda. The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. Ed. J. Shawcross (1907; rpt. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1967).

22 18_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities ---. Biographia Literaria, or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions. 2 vols. Ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, Cook, Eleanor. T.S. Eliot and the Carthaginian Peace. ELH 46.2 (Summer, 1979): Eliot, T. S. The Action Française, M. Maurras and Mr. Ward. Criterion 7.3 (March 1928), After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy. London: Faber & Faber, Commentary. Criterion, 4.2 (April 1926): Dante. London: Faber & Faber, For Lancelot Andrewes. For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order. London: Faber & Gwyer, Hommage à Charles Maurras. L Hommage de l etranger: Trois ecrivains anglais. Aspects de la France et du Monde [Paris] (25 Apr. 1948) 2: The Literature of Politics (1955). To Criticize the Critic, and Other Writings. London: Faber & Faber, The Man of Letters and the Future of Europe. Sewanee Review 53.3 (Summer 1945): A Reply to Mr. Ward. Criterion 7, 4 (June 1928): The Sacred Wood. London: Methuen, A Talk on Dante. Kenyon Review 14.2 (Spring 1952): Vergil and the Christian World. Sewanee Review 61.1 (Winter 1953): The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relationship of Poetry to Criticism in England (1933). London: Faber & Faber, What Dante Means to Me (1950). To Criticize the Critic, and Other Writings. London: Faber & Faber, What Is a Classic? An Address Delivered before the Virgil Society on the 16th of October London: Faber & Faber, Hay, Eloise. T.S. Eliot s Virgil: Dante. Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 82.1 (January 1983), Julius, Anthony. T. S. Eliot: Anti-Semitism and Literary Form. Rev. ed. London: Thames & Hudson, Margolis, John D. T. S. Eliot s Intellectual Development, Chicago: U of Chicago P, Marx, William. Paris. T. S. Eliot in Context. Ed. Jason Harding. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, Maurras, Charles Prologue to an Essay on Criticism. Trans. T. S. Eliot. Criterion 7.1 (June 1928): 5-15; 7.3 (Mar. 1928) Le Conseil de Dante (1913). Preface to Dante La Divine Comédie: L Enfer. Trans. Louise Espinasse-Mongenet. Paris : Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, Republished in Poésie et Vérité, Lyon: H. Lardanchet, 1944.

23 Martin Elsky_ T. S. Eliot and the Play of Belief_19 Miller, Andrew John. Compassing Material Ends : T.S. Eliot, Christian Pluralism, and Nation-State. ELH 67.1 (Spring 2000): Richards, I.A. Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment. London: Kegan Paul, Ricks, Christopher. T. S. Eliot and Prejudice. Berkeley: U of California P, Spurr, Barry Religion. T. S. Eliot in Context. Ed. Jason Harding. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, Thompson, David M. Making No Portraits: T. S. Eliot and the Politics of Mediterranean Classicism. Comparative Literature 50.1 (Winter 1998): Vanheste, Jeroen The Idea of Europe. T. S. Eliot in Context. Ed. Jason Harding. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, Ward, Leo. The Condemnation of the Action Française. London: Sheed and Ward, Weber, Eugen. Action Française: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth-Century France. Stanford: Stanford UP, ABSTRACT Referring back to Coleridge s notion of the willing suspension of disbelief, this paper explores the transition that occurs when ludic identification with a religious text becomes real identification. This transformation was particularly poignant in the reception of an especially strong religious poet, Dante, by an extremely influential critic, T. S. Eliot, at a major historical moment, the period of and after the sexcentenary of Dante s death in The sexcentenary took place in the immediate aftermath of the First World War when various European intellectuals on both sides of the war turned to Dante for spiritual, intellectual, and political sustenance to heal the trauma of the war. Eliot s short, widely read monograph on Dante, published during a continuing dialogue with I. A. Richards on religion and literature, reveals his difficulty with the concept of the willing suspension of disbelief. Eliot raises and then rejects the possibility that a twentieth-century reader could cross confessional lines and truly enter Dante s world through the suspension of disbelief and the imaginative assumption of belief in Dante s theology; actual identification with Dante s faith is ultimately necessary, Eliot concludes. The fraught political dimension of the willing suspension of disbelief during this tumultuous time is apparent in the monograph s now suppressed dedication to Charles Maurras. Eliot s was developing his thinking about belief and non-belief in relation to politics, society and literature during his friendship with this self-described reactionary, monarchist, anti-democratic figure. Keywords: T. S. Eliot, Charles Maurras, Dante, Dante sexcentenary, willing suspension of disbelief, First World War trauma

24 20_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities 摘要 參考柯勒律治的 自願終止懷疑, 本文探討對宗教文本的頑固認同成為實 際認同的一個轉變 這個轉變發表在一個重大的歷史時刻, 那是在但丁死亡六百 週年後的 1921 年, 是由一個非常有影響力的評論家, 艾略特, 對一個具有強烈 宗教信仰詩人但丁的評論所造成的 但丁死亡六百週年對第一次世界大戰帶來的 立即影響是, 歐洲知識分子為了醫治戰爭的創傷轉向但丁的精神 思維和政治願 景求取慰藉 在艾略特廣泛快速閱讀但丁的同時,I. A. 理查茲仍持續出版專著, 繼續宗教和文學上的對話, 揭示他難以苟同自願終止懷疑的論點 艾略特指出, 一個二十世紀的讀者不可能透過終止懷疑 透過對但丁神學信仰的豐富想像力而 形成的假設, 就越過自白線而真正進入但丁的世界 艾略特的結論是, 實際確認 但丁的信仰仍是最終的必要 ; 在這個動盪的階段, 充滿政治考量的自願終止懷 疑, 顯然會成為壓抑自我而奉獻給民族主義者查爾斯 莫拉斯的理論論述 在這 種有關對自述反動 君主 反民主的人物懷抱善意的政治 社會 文學的信仰或 無信仰爭辯中, 艾略特發展著他的思想 關鍵字 : 艾略特 查爾斯 莫拉斯 但丁 但丁六百週年 自願終止懷疑 第 一次世界大戰創傷 Martin Elsky is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at The Graduate Center and Brooklyn College, City University of New York. He is the former editor of Renaissance Quarterly and former director of the Renaissance Studies Certificate Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. He has published on Renaissance English poetry and prose (including Donne, Herbert, Jonson, Bacon, and Burton). His current projects include the spatiality of the Renaissance house as a setting for poetry and prose, and Erich Auerbach s Dante criticism in relation to inter-war politics.

25 Corinne s Tarantella: Germaine de Staël s Performance of Cultural Authority Ya-Feng Wu National Taiwan University What a charming amusement for young people this is, Mr. Darcy! There is nothing like dancing after all. I consider it as one of the first refinements of polished society. Sir William Lucas, Pride and Prejudice Introduction Germaine de Staël ( ) was the daughter of Jacques Necker, the Genevan banker who served for Louis XVI as the director of the royal treasury in 1776, and Suzanne neé Curchod, a celebrated salonnière. She was married to the Swedish ambassador to France, Baron Eric de Stael-Holstein in 1786 and legally separated from him in Her pronounced republican ideals caused her to be banished from Paris by Napoleon s order ( ). During exile, she traveled to Weimer and met Goethe, Schiller, and other important German intellectuals, and visited Italy in and again in In her writings, as Charlotte Hogsett observes, there is a pattern of paired exploration, private and public, fictional and discursive: Delphine (1802) with On Literature (1800); Corinne or Italy (1807) with On Germany (1810) (94-95). 1 Her influence was profound. Francis Jeffrey, in Received: July 8, 2011/ Accepted: Nov.21, 2011 Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities 33 (July 2012): This paper presents a partial result of my research-leave project, The Water Sprite in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Literature and Art (NSC I ), sponsored by the National Science Council of Taiwan. Here I extend gratitude to the anonymous reviewers for their meticulous reading and comments. 1 As Simone Balayé in her edition of de Staël s travel diaries notes, the genesis of Corinne comes about symbiotically with the genesis of On Germany. Madelyn Gutwirth calls

26 22_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities Blackwood s Edinburgh Magazine (Dec. 1818), summarizes the legacy of de Staël: The sciences have always owed their origin to some great spirit. Smith created political economy; Linnaeus, botany, Lavoisier, chemistry; and Madame de Staël has, in like manner, created the art of analyzing the spirit of nations and the springs which move them (qtd. in Isbell, The Birth 1). Italy and Germany were, at the time, regions whose development was seen hampered by their lack of a unified government. But for de Staël, it is the unorganized political structure that has permitted their culture to thrive. In comparison, France was mired in its post-revolutionary chaos and Britain stuck in its apparent unity. De Staël is actively engaged with re-interpreting the classical culture and ushering in Romanticism. Despite her fame in the nineteenth century, her novels lost their glamour in the twentieth century until Ellen Mores in Literary Women (1976) reinstates de Staël s Corinne as the eminent model for the nineteenth-century women writers, who include Felicia Hemans, L. E. Landon, Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Browning, George Eliot, etc. Two collections of essays devoted to de Staël, edited by Karyna Szmurlo (1988) and Madelyn Gutwirth, Avriel Goldberger, and Karyna Szmurlo (1991), encompass a range of theoretical approaches to de Staël s person and works. Scholars continue to investigate de Staël s negotiation with both neo-classicism and Romanticism, her struggle as a woman writer, and her vision for the European culture. Corinne remains one of the foci of de Staël studies. However, the Tarantella, the structural turning point of Corinne and dramatic embodiment of de Stael s cultural vision, has seldom attracted critical attention. There are only two exceptions. First, Chole Chard in Comedy, Antiquity, the Feminine and the Foreign (2000) treats the dance as an anecdotal evidence for the association between Corinne and Emma Hamilton and argues both as part of the Grand Tour kitsch. Second, Angela Esterhammer in Romanticism and Improvisation, (2008) considers the Tarantella to be an example of the ecstatic experience shared by performer and audience, almost on the par with improvisation, the art form for which Corinne receives her laurels on the Capitol of Rome. The dance at once expands the scope of poetic improvisation and heightens the specularity of the improvisatrice s performance (88). But Esterhammer s main emphasis on improvisation does not allow her to probe into the complicated historical dimensions of the Tarantella itself. This paper seeks to approach the Tarantella by first restoring it as a pagan ritual and then exploring de Staël s deployment of its ancient roots. Corinne or Italy, 2 takes the form of a Grand Tour guidebook, spiced with the Delphine the novel of the mothers and Corinne that of the fathers. In addition, Delphine and On literature are books of time, Corinne and On Germany are of space (qtd. in Hogsett 94-95). 2 Hereafter this novel is referred to in this essay by its shortened form, Corinne. Quotations of the novel are drawn from Germaine de Staël, Corinne, or Italy, trans., by Sylvia Raphael (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998) and referred to as C followed by page number.

27 Ya-Feng Wu_Corinne s Tarantella_23 dynamism of a roman à clef, 3 and eventually transcends both formulae. Her name, as de Staël s own note indicates, is derived from Corinna, the poetess and muse who inspired Pindar, the father of poetry (Isbell, Introduction xvi). It shows de Staël s design to reinstate the lineage of woman poet with this novel. Corinne chronicles the romance between two persons of contrary temperaments: the sunny Italian-English Corinne and the melancholy Scottish Lord Oswald Nelvil. Corinne s hybrid nationality allows her to understand Oswald without being overpowered by him. While touring around Rome, Naples, and Venice, Corinne not only shows the ruins of classical culture to Oswald but represents the best of it for him. The turning point of their tortuous courtship occurs in Naples. Corinne accepts the invitation of a Neapolitan Prince to dance the Tarantella. Her bodily performance proves to be more overwhelming than her poetic improvisation. In addition, the locale Naples foregrounds her double association with the local legends, the Cumaean Sibyl and Undine. Therefore, the folk dance allows her to fully inhabit the culture she has adopted. On the one hand, Corinne s role as the Sibyl sanctions her performance of the Tarantella. Jerri Daboo points out that sibylline prophecy, as shown in Robert Burton s Anatomy of Melancholy, is linked with melancholy and the Tarantella (107). On the other, the connection with Undine is provided in the occasion of the novel s composition. As John Isbell specifies in the introduction to Corinne, de Staël was inspired to write the novel after seeing an opera based on Friedrich de La Motte Fouqué s novella, Undine (Die Saalnixe, The Saal River Nymph), which was performed in Weimar in 1803 (Introduction xvi). It is interesting to see how de Staël transposes the Fouqué s nymph from the northern European folklore unto the Southern terrain of Naples, a place also steeped in the legend of Parthenope, the double-tailed mermaid. This background information provides a mythic depth to Corinne s hybrid nationality, suggesting a far deeper dimension for her struggle to make coherent the two opposing parts of her personality. The investigation into the mythic background of Corinne exceeds the scope of this essay. But it remains a crucial lead for us to examine the Tarantella, a kind of ritual that seeks to unite man and other creatures. The Tarantella as a cultural phenomenon has been investigated as a test case for religious history (De Martino), for the evolution of the concept of body-mind (Daboo), and so on. Drawing upon the richly enmeshed studies of the Tarantella and of de Staël, this paper examines Corinne s Tarantella in a four-fold prism: 4 sacred and secular dimensions of the folk dance, in situ archaeology and identity performance, Emma Hamilton, and Juliette Récamier. In the end, de Staël exploits the subversive potentials of the Tarantella dance and revitalizes the ancient 3 One of the popular ways of reading this novel reflects the most controversial ménage a trois in the early nineteenth century: Corinne as modeled on Emma Hamilton and the Scottish Lord Oswald on Emma s lover the British war hero, Horatio Nelson, or her husband, the English ambassador to Naples, William Hamilton. 4 This term, prism, is taken from Andromache Karanika s historical study on the ecstatic healing rituals in the Italy and Greece (27).

28 24_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities unity of word, music and the body that is implicated in the dance in order to stage her performance of cultural authority. 1. Corinne and Italy Corinne, or Italy, the yoked title follows the convention of Rousseau and Voltaire but the symbiosis between the public genius and the nation that she represents (Isbell, Introduction viii) is explored with more poignancy. By yoking Corinne with her chosen identity, de Staël capitalizes on a major Romantic trope, that is, Italy as a beautiful and wounded woman. Origins of such figuration can be traced back to Dante (Luzzi ). An example contemporary to Corinne is offered by Byron s Childe Harold s Pilgrimage (4.417, 419, ), which presents Italy as Europe s sacred female archetype and the source of culture (Luzzi 56). Corinne, a novel of twenty books, chronicles the tragic love between Corinne and Oswald. Corinne s English father is married to a Roman lady and lives in Rome. When his wife dies, he returns to England but Corinne stays on with her aunt for a few years till her aunt dies and she moves to her father s house in Northumberland. Her stepmother asks her to give up her pursuit in arts and languages. Having refused to comply with her stepmother s arrangement for marriage, Corinne relinquishes her name and to return to Italy where she then thrives as an improvisatrice. The novel begins with her coronation at the Capitol where she encounters Oswald who travels to Italy on a reprieve of his naval duty in order to get over his father s death, which he believes is caused by his reckless engagement with a French widow in Paris during the time of the Revolution against his father s wish. Oswald and Corinne are attracted to each other and their courtship is played out in the form of a six-month journey visiting historical monuments and ruins. Finally while visiting Naples they reveal to each other their separate but connected past. Later, Oswald returns to England only to find public opinion still adverse to Corinne. Even his father had objected to their prior engagement and preferred to see him marrying her blonde half-sister Lucile. After not receiving news from Oswald for a long while, Corinne goes to England only to find him marrying Lucile because he misconstrues Corinne s reticence. Brokenhearted, Corinne goes back to Florence and refuses to receive Oswald who visits Italy with his newly-wed wife and daughter Juliet. Before she dies, Corinne molds the dark-haired Juliet into a miniature of herself, as Juliet plays on the harp a Scottish tune, in the same pose as Corinne did for Oswald in front of a picture of Ossian at Tivoli (C 396). Meanwhile, Corinne teaches Lucile how to sustain Oswald s interest by incorporating the traits of Corinne with her own. In other words, her legacy lives on in Lucile and Juliet so that Oswald may never enjoy a feeling without recalling Corinne (398). Characters in the novel are paired like those in a morality play yet without the clear-cut division between good and evil. De Staël refers to two paintings to sum up the opposing ideals of woman: domestic virtue and public genius, that is, Madonna della Scala (1523) by Correggio and The Sibyl of Cumae (c. 1622) by Domenichino

29 Ya-Feng Wu_Corinne s Tarantella_25 (C ). 5 Madonna and the Sibyl, these two types of idealized womanhood crystallize the polarization between Lucile and Corinne. But their opposition is only deceptive. The paired pictures visualize the tension between the opposite desires of Oswald, which are finally integrated in Corinne s attempt to let herself live on in Lucile and Juliet. The Corinne s sibylline role is demonstrated in her three improvisations, first in her coronation at the Capitol, second near the vicinity of Vesuvius, the last one in Florence Academy before her death. The ability to improvise poetry accompanied by the harp on subjects requested from the audience is her crowning achievement but de Staël fails to let her compose in Italian, not to mention Italian verse. Instead, these improvisations are rendered in the French prose. In other words, we cannot approximate the essence of Corinne s art in its original medium. Improvisation, a word-based performance, is thus rendered inadequate to fully representing her art. This paper argues that it is in the folk dance that Corinne acts out the human scale and contemporary implications of classical culture. In dance, the more elusive and more interactive form of art, de Staël manages to allow Corinne to enact the spirit of the emerging modern archaeology. 2. In the Antique Land: Rome and Naples Corinne wishes to inspire Oswald s love for her and for the culture she has adopted by taking him around famous sites of Italy. The dynamism of the novel is a travel guide charged with a romance that is not consummated, as after his marriage to Lucile Oswald still has a kind of coquetry on Italy s behalf which was not satisfied (C 383). The novel itself was classified for a long period in the nineteenth century as a travel guide in the National Library of Paris. At that time, books dealing with classical culture, such as Johann Joachim Winckelmann s History of Ancient Art (1764), were often published in smaller formats which Grand Tour travelers could take with them on tour (Lyons and Reed 136). Corinne, the travelogue-cum-romance par excellence, explores both personal recollection and public exposition of the classical culture mostly through in-set vignettes of classical sites and objects. The narrator explains the visual emphasis of the novel: It is useless to rely on the reading of history to understand the spirit of peoples. Our ideas are stimulated much more by what we see than by what we read, and visible objects arouse a stronger emotion which gives to the study of the past the interest and life we find in the observation of contemporary men and events (C ). Two places turn out most noteworthy in the itinerary, Rome and Naples. They represent disparate dimensions of the classical culture. Rome itself provokes polar 5 Correggio s painting is available at < More than one versions of Domenichino s painting survives. For the one that is used as the cover of Oxford World s Classics edition of Corinne (1998), edited by John Isbell, please see <

30 26_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities reactions, melancholy or condemnation. De Staël shares Goethe s sentimental view of Rome as a world given life by feeling, without which the world itself is a desert, and that the once imperial city offers refuge to all the world s exiles (C 57, 60). For both of them, Rome seems to provide a safe haven away from the progressive developments of other European cities. Rome epitomizes what Joseph Luzzi describes as the shift in the conception of Italy from Europe s museum to mausoleum at the height of the Grand Tour for constant encounter with ruins reminded travelers from the northern parts of Europe to ponder upon their own fate. This mood is best encapsulated in the famous painting Geoethe in der Campagna ( ) by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein which features Goethe contemplating on the Roman countryside littered with architectural fragments (Luzzi 54). 6 Contrary to the sentimental picture of the Roman countryside, the imperial aspects of Rome are less palatable. Therefore, at the Roman Forum, Corinne asks Oswald not to judge these monuments with English principles of justice and morality. Nevertheless, Oswald does not agree with Corinne s admiration of the place for amidst the mixture of pomp and decay he only sees the master s luxury and the slaves blood (C 67). If Rome requires a special pleading, Naples proves more problematic to Oswald s Presbyterian upbringing and revolutionary spirit. Just as Naples occupies a unique place in the Grand Tour itinerary, so the novel pivots upon the chapters on Naples (Books 11-14). If Rome represents a possible fate of European civilization, the region of Naples overwhelms the existing frame of reference by marking a break from the rest of Italy in terms of topography, politics, climate, and even culture. Goethe registers in his Italian journals some sudden awareness of a different country as he crosses the reputably pestilent Pontine marshes and enters the Neapolitan area (25 Feb. 1787): By the time we reached the outskirts of Naples the sky was completely cloudless, and now we were in another country. The houses with their flat roofs indicate another climate (174). 7 Much more than Rome, Naples is a microcosm of European history, situated at the crossroads between north and south, east and west. Naples is described as the quintessence of the southern Europe whose mixture of cultures and peoples are exotic even to people from other regions of the peninsula. The uniqueness of Naples is attributed to having the Vesuvius and Pompeii in its environs. Goethe records his amazement at discovering Naples as the modern city, the prototype of which is miniaturaized in Pompeii: As we approached Naples, the little houses struck me as being perfect copies of the houses in Pompeii. Despite the lapse of so many centuries and such countless changes, this region still imposes on its inhabitants the same habits, tastes, amusements and style of living (March 11, 1787, 190). It is a wonder to see ancient way of life, as it is buried in Pompeii, become animated in Naples. This curious symbiosis between modern and ancient life, the optimal Grand Tour experience, is only available in Naples. 6 One image of this painting is available at < 7 Hereafter references to Goethe s Italian Journey include the date and page number.

31 Ya-Feng Wu_Corinne s Tarantella_27 The narrator warns us that the Vesuvius would make us forget all we know about mankind (C 193). The disconcerting river of fire (193) and the torrent of funereal color, and the triple image of fire which encompasses the volcano, the sky and nature (225), render the mountain somberly edifying. The volcanic eruptions destroy everything in its path but also provide nutrients for the land, as the fine wine Lacryma Christi is made next to the barren terrain. The city is also a living paradox as the houses are built with petrified lava and get buried beneath other layers of lava (199). In this ruins upon ruins, tombs upon tombs, eternal silence reigns supreme among the very semblance of life. One detail proves most humbling as Corinne and Oswald see the remains of a lady whose desiccated arms can no longer fill out the bracelet of precious stones that still encircles them (198). In the end, the ashes preserve the form which art manages to bring back to life (199). Pompeii thus becomes a site buried underneath the volcanic ashes but resurrected by archaeology. The volcano affects every aspect of Neapolitan life. It is even seen to have induced the ferocity of the inhabitants (192). This view is endorsed by Goethe, who after visiting the Vesuvius marvels at the contrast between the dangerous eruptions and the apparent serenity outside the affected area: the terrible beside the Beautiful, the Beautiful beside the Terrible, cancel one another out and produce a feeling of indifference. The Neapolitan would certainly be a different creature if he did not feel himself wedged between God and the Devil (20 March, 1787, 207). As Corinne and Oswald ascend the Vesuvius when the night falls, they are accompanied by the hissing of the restless flame and tolling of the church bells (198). Amidst such an apocalyptic landscape, Oswald s remorse resurfaces: All dangers can be faced, but how can a person who is no more deliver us from our self-reproach for the wrong we have done him? Never! Never! (226). As if to seek for absolution not from his dead father but from his love, he decides to reveal his past to Corinne. They then descend the volcano in heavy rain, accompanied by the legendary tribe of beggars, Lazzaroni, whose screams and cries make the scenario like infernal (228). After hearing Oswald s confession, she requests an eight-day reprieve before her confession. During this period, she organizes a party to allow Oswald to fully appreciate her art and person. The party passes by the tomb of Virgil, through a tunnel and finally by boat they reach the shore of Lake Averno, in whose neighborhood is located the Cumaean Sibyl s temple. When they arrive at Cape Miseno, Corinne is requested to improvise on memories aroused by these places (232). This scene is later enshrined in the painting Corinne at the Cape Miseno (1819) by François Gérard. 8 The audience in the painting, including local inhabitants, Lazzaroni, and a male figure suggesting Oswald, has come to listen to Corinne s improvisation with the Vesuvius in the background. This painting emblematizes de Staël s engagement (via 8 A detail of this painting is available at < _Cape_Miseno_(detail)_-_WGA08602.jpg>. For the intricate issues regarding the various portrayals of Corinne, see Sheriff (223-61).

32 28_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities Corinne) in the cultural revitalization in the form of re-instated improvisation which takes inspiration from local architecture and landscape. The Vesuvius smoking in the background of this painting reminds us of the ancient tradition that nourishes Corinne s art and the recurrent crisis that makes her art all the more precious. The paradox of art made invaluable by disaster is best illustrated in the case of Pompeii. On the other side of the Bay of Naples, overlooked by the Cape of Miseno, Pompeii was buried by volcanic ashes but resurrected by human ingenuity. Goethe remarks: [T]here have been many disasters in this world, but few which have given so much delight to posterity (13 March, 1787, 195). The eruptions on August 24, 79 AD sealed the two Roman resort towns, Herculaneum and Pompeii, into treasure troves of ancient art. The unusual condition of preservation makes Pompeii into a ruins of everyday life (C 198), in contrast with Rome as the ruins of public monuments. The excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum coincided with a revival of classical culture in the mid-eighteenth century. Charles VII of the Kingdoms of Naples began to look for antiquity in a large scale with excavations in Herculaneum starting in 1738 and Pompeii in He regarded the findings as providing authority for his statecraft. The official excavations and publications have long been criticized by scholars for their brutal de-contextualization of the findings and destruction of the sites (Coates and Seydl 9). Goethe would rather see Herculaneum excavated methodically by German miners, instead of being casually ransacked as if by brigands (18 March, 1787, 202). The Bourbon court in Naples wanted to extract individual objects as quickly as possible, without laying bare the entire towns to obtain better knowledge of the sites. The king also kept the sites secret, barring access even to Winckelmann. And the first official catalogue of the findings, the five-volume Prodromo delle antichità d Ercolano (1752) produced by Ottavio Antonio Baiardi, was used as exclusive diplomatic gifts. The Neapolitan s jealous exaltation of patrimony contrasted sharply with the attitude of the more liberal Enlightenment circles such as Rome (Gorden 38-39). At that time neoclassicism (in the Italian referring to buon gusto, meaning the true style ) was already a vibrant international trend but archaeological findings at Pompeii and Herculaneum challenged the hitherto idealized notions of antiquity mainly based on the Roman culture (Coates and Seydl 3).Winckelmann s studies fueled an imagination for ancient Greek culture but the Greek peninsula remained inaccessible well into the second half of the nineteenth century, whereas the newly excavated sites around the Bay of Naples, such as Pompeii and Herculaneum, continued to produce marvels to archaeologists and travelers alike. Eventually the gradual excavations at these two towns brought forth modern practice of archaeology. As Göran Blix explains, modern archaeology begins to take shape as the shift in perception from a purely aesthetic gaze to a historicizing one (9). In the case of wall paintings, which were prominent in Pompeii, an aestheticizing tendency was encouraged by the first official catalogue which often chose images easy to isolate and frame, such as panel pictures of mythological scenes and figures. The French artist and engraver Charles-Nicolas Cochin helped to romanticize these

33 Ya-Feng Wu_Corinne s Tarantella_29 wall-paintings by omitting the modern frames that surrounded the fragments and by rendering the works as thick pieces of plaster with rough and uneven edges that cast shadows along their sides, transforming them into almost 3D objects (Najbjerb 62). This tendency persisted into the nineteenth century in various forms. Only toward the end of twentieth century, new methodology emerges which seeks to reconstruct the original context of these images (67). 3. The Tarantella through the Four-Fold Prism De Staël s attempt to re-contextualize ancient culture reaches its climax in Corinne s performance of the Tarantella. The implications of the folk dance come into sharper focus when compared with Corinne s improvisation. Esterhammer provides a historical study of this cultural phenomenon, an Italian curiosity (6), which is a fad occurring outside Italy in the eighteenth-and-nineteenth-centuries Europe. Adopting a phenomenological approach, Esterhammer contends that improvisation is a mode of composition incommensurate with the normal span of time allotted to thought and writing. It privileges being in the moment and the experience is shared here and now as it takes in immediate feedback by fellow performer and audience (3-4). However, she does not explain the reason why de Staël fails to represent Corinne s improvisation in verse. In contrast to Esterhammer s positive reading, Luzzi considers Corinne s improvisation to be a sign of her inevitable defeat. As Luzzi points out, the epigraph of the novel, [Her name] will resound in the fair land parted by the Apennines and bounded by the sea and the Alps, which is drawn from Petrarch s elegy for Laura, anticipates Corinne s ultimate death (214). Luzzi argues that this epigraph-epitaph maps out the structure of the novel (218). In this perspective, when Corinne dies bodily, her literary vocation dies with her. She is denied the prosopopoeia, that is, the privilege given to male poets by the written text (215-16). Luzzi thus concludes that de Staël s failure to reproduce the verse improvisation in meter registers an admission that the art of poetry and impromptu singing seals off its own death. Between Esterhammer s phenomenological and Luzzi s defeatist approaches, this essay seeks to recuperate Corinne s art by reaching beyond the straightjacket of the improvisation. Transcribing the temporal art of improvisation is doomed to failure. No doubt, representing dance, an ephemeral and composite form of art, is even more precarious. Yet somehow because words are by their nature always already inadequate to represent dance so the description of dance seldom seeks to capture the fleeting reality but always refers to issues lying behind and reverberating around the act. The form of the Tarantella in the novel refers to the stylized and elevated social dance that has developed out of its peasant origins. The complicated ramifications are best analyzed in the connection between the sacred ritual of healing and the secular form of social cohesion. The ethnomusicologist Diego Carpitella tries to distinguish the liturgical and the profane versions of the Tarantella. Daboo explains that in fact the confusion of the two reflects the two-tier structure of Tarantism. He observes in

34 30_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities his field trip to St. Paul and St. Peter s festival in the south of Italy that the presentational ritual in the sanctuary was accompanied by the participatory dance outside the church (74). This observation allows us to see Tarantella the dance form (the participatory dance) as derived from Tarantism the healing rite (the presentational ritual). The dance serves as a conduit for de Staël to enact her belief in archaeology in situ and in performing one s identity in the present. Finally, de Staël diverts our attention from the apparent association with Emma Hamilton in Naples toward Juliette Récamier in Paris in order to invest Corinne with cultural authority through identification with the French salonnières. This transposition from Naples on the periphery, to Paris in the center, also reveals de Staël s desire to project her cultural vision while in exile via Juliette Récamier back to the center. 3.1 Sacred and Secular The Neapolitan dance acts out Corinne s lineage of votive and mythic female figures, including the Cumaean Sibyl and Undine. On the one hand, the first connection indicates the return of the father s wish as the Sibyl of Virgil s Aeneid guides Aeneas through hell to receive an oracle from his deceased father. On the other, the inspiration of the novel, the German tale of Undine, combined with the ancient icon of Naples as Parthenope, the double-tailed mermaid, signals de Staël s design to incorporate the traditions of the north and the south. 9 This Dionysian and hybrid subtext becomes more salient as we see into the ancient sacred roots of the dance. The Sibyl is connected with the founding myth of Rome, while Undine is associated with transformation / metamorphoses, revolt / revolution as J. M. W. Turner s painting Undine Giving the Ring to Massaniello, Fisherman of Naples (1846) implies. 10 These mythic associations bring up to the surface the historical and political dimensions of Corinne. All these elements are compressed onto the dance in a manner that evokes how the volcanic eruptions compressed time and humanity in Pompeii. It is her dance more than her poetry that convinces Oswald that she belongs to Italy. Taking her away to Britain would uproot her from the source of vitality and integrity. Unlike the touristic performance of local dance designed for cultural consumption, the composite form of the Tarantella in the novel only dawns upon Oswald that he could never possess Corinne in the way he collects art works. As a folk dance which permits variations and improvisation of the dancers, Tarantella is chosen as the art form that best showcases Corinne s virtuosity and willingness to accommodate her partner and the audience. The Tarantella demonstrates in the concrete physical form that Corinne s vitality is beyond verbal representation and Oswald s possessive desire. But to arrest her beauty is not in the agenda of the novel for her dance enacts a cultural expression shared by and lived in 9 For a detailed analysis on the role of Corinne as siren-sibyl and its connection with Naples, see Sweet. 10 For a political reading of this painting, please see Wu. An image of this painting is available at <

35 Ya-Feng Wu_Corinne s Tarantella_31 the community. In the end, de Staël s genteel rendition of the dance divests the dance of its exorcist roots and rarefies it above the list of must-sees for the tourists who wish to taste the authentic South. Corinne s Tarantella is placed in the chapter on the Italian Customs and Character. She accepts the invitation of the Neapolitan Prince to be his partner in the dance. Corinne s grace has everyone there in thrall: Shaking her tambourine in the air she began to dance, and in all her movements there was a graceful litheness, a modesty mingled with sensual delight, giving some idea of the power exercised by the temple dancing girls over the Indian imagination. (They are, as it were, poets in their dancing, expressing so many different feelings by their ritual steps and the charming tableaux they present to the eye.) Corinne knew so well all the poses depicted by the ancient painters and sculptors that, with a slight movement of the arms, placing her tambourine now above her head, now in front of her with one hand while the other ran along the bells with incredible skill, she brought to mind the dancing girls of Herculaneum and aroused, one after another, a host of new ideas for drawing and painting. It was not at all like French dancing, so remarkable for its elegant and difficult steps; it was a talent much more closely linked to imagination and feeling. The character of the music is expressed in turn by the precision and gentleness of the movements. As she danced, Corinne made the spectators experience her own feelings, as if she had been improvising, or playing the lyre, or drawing portraits. Everything was language for her; as they looked at her, the musicians made greater efforts to make their art fully appreciated, and at the same time an indefinable passionate joy, and imaginative sensitivity, stimulated all the spectators of this magical dance, transporting them into an ideal existence which was out of this world. (C 90-91, my emphasis) Then Corinne kneels while the Prince dances around her like a conqueror. As she stands up, her enthusiasm for life seems to give an assurance that to be happy she needed no one else. At the end of the dance, Corinne stands and the Prince kneels and all the people would like to kneel like him to worship Corinne. The Italians only abandon themselves to their enthusiasm simply because they felt it. Oswald alone cries: But amongst all these admirers and enthusiasts, is there a brave, reliable friend? Is there a lifelong protector? And should the empty uproar of applause be enough for a heart like yours? (C 92) Oswald s complaint only shows his narrow-mindedness that bars him from fully appreciating Corinne s art and love. The Tarantella, in its stylized format, is traced back not only to the wall paintings of Herculaneum but to the Indian

36 32_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities temple dancing. Such universal references spell out de Staël s intention to mold Corinne at once rooted in the local culture and reaching out toward the wide world. Corinne s performance requires to be situated in the Tarantella as a contested cultural phenomenon. Since the Middle Ages it has generated contention on all sides whether it manifested a physical illness, mental condition, or represented an ideological institution. Ernesto De Martino produces a landmark study in 1961, based on his extended field trip to Salento accompanied with experts from various disciplines. He regards the Tarantella as a form of subaltern expression. Karen Lüdtke (2005) also conducts a field trip to the same region with similar assumptions and chronicles the revival of the Tarantella in the community. Jerri Daboo (2010) supplements the findings of these two scholars with insights from performance study. These three scholars provide historical background and theoretical possibilities for our investigation of de Staël s deployment of the dance. First of all, Tarantella the dance needs to be distinguished from Tarantism the cultural phenomena. The Tarantella refers to a number of Italian folk dances, stemming from an exorcism ritual that existed in Greece around 2000 BC and was connected to Dionysus and Apollo. The name sprung from the city Taranto, and widely associated with Naples, Salento, and Sicily. It is the jovial dance that the Grand Tourists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries expected to see when they travelled to the south of Italy. The Tarantella thus dramatizes the mixed nature of the Southern culture. As Goethe once exclaims: To me Sicily implies Asia and Africa, and it will mean more than a little to me to stand at that miraculous center upon which so many radii of world history converge (March 26, 1787, 212). This region has been renowned for being a melting pot of cultures. Salento, for one, is the land between two seas and one that inhabits both West and East in its geography, history and culture (Daboo 12). In a nutshell, the Tarantella epitomizes the mixed culture of this fertile region. Tarantism refers to the larger cultural phenomenon that is related to the rite of healing. It involves various treatments for a cluster of symptoms, including nausea, paralysis, lethargy, spasm, headaches, irregular pulse and breathing, and fainting, as resulted from the bite of either spider, snake or scorpion (Lüdtke 38 n 4). And its putative cure is to dance to a form of indigenous music, the pizzica. 11 As Daboo describes, the musicians continue to play in a crescendo, as the victim gradually becomes more active, seeming to wake up from a state of trance, crawling along the floor, beating the ground in time to the rhythm of the tambourine, sometimes arching into a bridge position imitating a spider (2-3). However, only one specific mode of the music will wake up the patient from the trance. Then he / she would dance to the tune till the venom is out of his / her system. In some cases, the 11 The ritual began to decline during the nineteenth century, the revival of interest in pizzica music and dance began in the 1970s, and gained momentum in the 1980s and 1990s, and finally led to the growth in both tourism and research. It was called neo-tarantism, which raises questions of authenticity, ownership, and performance forms as cultural products (Daboo 5).

37 Ya-Feng Wu_Corinne s Tarantella_33 patients would relapse and the same ritual has to be resumed periodically (2). And the common instruments to accompany the dance include violin, guitar, flute, pipes, bagpipe, accordion, and tamburello, etc. The course of the dance moves between order (tamburello) and chaos (bells). Andromache Karanika explains the dynamism of the dance as a homeopathic magic whose primary concern is the union with god via a performance that demands exciting oneself and entering a new state of consciousness (33, 31). De Martino s La terra del rimorso (the land of remorse) presents a landmark in the study of the Tarantella. As Daboo explains, morso in Italian means bit. Therefore, ri/re-morso has the sense of both remorse in a religious context, and re-bite in terms of the tarantati re-experiencing the symptoms and needing the treatment each year (8). A native in the region of Naples, de Martino pronounces his task as to construct a religious history of the South which is to be understood as a new dimension of Southern question (De Martino 4-6). 12 Associated with the leftist intellectual movement, spearheaded by Antonio Gramsci, de Martino recognizes Tarantism as the bench test of a polemic persisting even today (248). Having repudiated biomedical explanations of Tarantism which had been dominant since the seventeenth century, he seeks to present a set of psychoanalytically tinged interpretation (Lüdtke 65). He acknowledges the contribution of the Jesuit father, Atanasio Kircher (c ), who examined Tarantism within the Baroque framework of iatromusic, referring to music employed as medical therapy. However, the revival of Neapolitan cultural life after the plague of 1656 spurred a new cultural movement, exemplified in Lezioni (1742) of Francesco Serao who was an anti-kirchean materialist (227-28). Refuting Serao and following Kircher, de Martino considers Tarantism a form of the musical-choreutic-chromatic exorcism (41), which can be traced to Pythagoreanism and associated with musical catharsis practiced all over Greece. The tarantate (the female participants of Tarantism) 13 are associated with those who are in the ancient orgiastic cults, including maenads, Bacchantes, and Corybantes (11). Tarantism is thus argued as an institution rather than merely a physical disease (245). It exemplifies the ways in which the Christian ethos clashed with the cults of antiquity, medieval symbolism, literature of toxicology, natural magic, the Neapolitan Enlightenment and positivism. Each of these in turn acquires a different cultural consciousness of the phenomenon which conditions its evaluation (247-48). As de Martino observes, tarantate often belonged to the subaltern class. Their afflictions were inseparable from a struggle against the larger hegemonic order, related to gender inequality and poverty. The symbol of the taranta (the spider) 12 The southern part of Italy has been referred as Italian India since the Counter-Reformation (De Martino 4). For a detailed discussion of the Southern question in the nineteenth-century Italy, see Petrusewicz. 13 As the translator Dorothy Louise Zinn notes, de Martino uses tarantato to refer to masculine singular, and tarantata to feminine singular, tarantate to feminine plural, tarantati for both masculine plural and mixed-sex plural (De Martino 37).

38 34_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities represents the mythical-ritual horizon of evocation, configuration, release and resolution of the unresolved psychic conflicts which re-bite in the obscurity of the unconscious. As a cultural model, this symbol offers a mythical-ritual order for settling these conflicts and reintegrating individuals into the group. The symbol of the taranta lends a figure to the formless, rhythm and melody to menacing silence, and color to the colorless in an assiduous quest of articulated and distinct passions, where a horizonless excitation alternates with a depression that isolates and closes off. This symbol offers a perspective for imagining, hearing, and watching what we lack imagination for and are deaf and blind to, and which nevertheless peremptorily asks to be imagined. (36) Following de Martino s vein of thought, Daboo further charts the historical inflections of Tarantism in three perspectives: pathologization, feminization, and Christianization. First, he sees Tarantism as a litmus test of the paradigm shift in the concept of the body and the world, which registers a movement away from the ancient humoural understanding of the bodymind, that is, a psychophysical unity of body and mind (39), to one that is informed by the discovery of the nervous system and anatomy. The shift from the ancient bodymind to the materialist model of the mind and the world is best illustrated in the dispute between Kircher and Francesco Serao. In the nineteenth century, Tarantism was mainly regarded as a physiological illness in a positivist manner. Second, Tarantism seems to afflict more women than men. In 1491, Giaovanni Pontano, a Neapolitan humanist, wrote a satirical dialogue Antonius, in which one of his characters explains why Apulians are considered to be exceedingly happy: Women are wont very often to be bitten by this spider; and then, since the poison cannot be extinguished in any other way, it is licit for them to unite with men, freely and with impunity. In this way what for others would be a shameful act, for Apulian women is a remedy (qtd. in Daboo 113). In 1704, Giorgio Baglivi, a physician, labeled the condition as Il Carnevaletto delle Donne (the little carnival of women) (qtd. in Daboo 139). During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, medical writings on tarantism were often in parallel with narratives of unrequited love, featuring a longing to be in union with the tarantula or St Paul who had caused the condition (109). This implicit desire for erotic union with the saint paved the way for our investigation of the Christianization of Tarantism. Third, the Catholic Church has tried various means to incorporate pagan rituals and vice versa. Just as the Catholic Church at times condemned Tarantism as obscene and at others co-opted it as grass-root support of cult worship, so have snake handlers in particular called themselves members of the house of St. Paul, for Paul emerges unharmed from his snake bite as accounted in Acts (Daboo 105, 148). Through

39 Ya-Feng Wu_Corinne s Tarantella_35 efforts of enculturation, Tarantism was able to survive in the Christian country. The fluctuating reception of the Tarantella is connected with the way in which dance has been defamed in Christian-dominated culture. In ancient Greece, music, words and dance operate in unity. And Mousikē is consigned in the realm of the Muses (86). However, in the middle of the ninth century, Pope Leo IV banned women from dancing and singing in church. Afterward, dance was strictly separated from music, condemned in connection with lust (95). These three historical dimensions provide the background for our understanding of the eighteenth-century representations of the Tarantella which mostly appeared in the form of travelogue. In the Travels in the Two Sicilies (1783, 1790), Henry Swinburne ( ), a popular English travel writer at the time, provides the most quoted source for contemporary account of the dance: They do not even dance to music, but perform the Tarantella to the beating of a kind of tambourine, which was in use among their ancestors, as appears by the pictures of Herculaneum. The Tarantella is a low dance, 14 consisting of turns on the heel, much footing, and snapping of the fingers. The Neapolitan girls dance to the snapping of their fingers and the beat of a tambourine, and whirl their petticoats about them. With greater elegance in the position, and more airiness in the flow of the drapery, striking likeness of them may be found among the paintings of Herculaneum (1.60, 117) Swinburne relishes this performance of the Tarantella as fulfilling his desire to see antiquity in the flesh (qtd. in Daboo 153). Having traced the roots of the dance to those rituals preserved on the walls of Herculaneum, he considers the phenomenon as grounded in the specific climate and locale of Southern Italy in that he sees Tarantati, the one who performs the dance, as exact copies of the ancient priestesses of Bacchus. He comments that [t]he orgies of that God, whose worship, under various symbols, was more widely spread over the globe than that of any other divinity, were, no doubt, performed with energy and enthusiasm by the lively inhabitants of this warm climate ( ). Despite his intention to write in a dry (i. e. factual) manner (1.vii), his eye-witness account of the Tarantella sounds amusingly ironic: As the music grew brisker, her motions quickened, and she skipped about with great vigor and variety of steps, every now and then shrieking very loud. The scene was far from pleasant; and, at my desire, an end was put to it before the woman was tired (1.392). He then expresses a note of relief as the introduction of Christianity abolished all public exhibitions of these heathenish rites, 14 Low refers to the lowered center of gravitation in the body, not necessarily a judgment on its obscenity, as Swinburne provides the following note: Persons of all ranks here dance very low, but mark the time as per fectly with their steps, as other nations do by springing from the ground (1.60).

40 36_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities and the women durst no longer act a frantic part in the character of Bacchantes. Unwilling to give up so darling an amusement, they devised other pretences; and possession by evil spirits may have furnished them with one. If at any time these dancers are really and involuntarily affected, I can suppose it to be nothing more than an attack upon their nerves, a species of St. Vitus s dance (1.393). The Catholic Swinburne is forthright in diagnosing the Dionysian roots of Tarantism as compounded with pathological causes. His account dramatizes the implications of the three historical dimensions of Tarantism: pathologization, feminization and Christianization. It provides a negative template for our reading of the Tarantella as it is modulated by de Staël. The Tarantella in Corinne is a stylized and elevated form of the peasant dance, which has gone through a long process of gentrification. Elba Farabegoli Gurzau, in Folk Dances, Costumes, and Customs of Italy (1981), points out that, the Tarantella acquired the use of castanets when Spain dominated southern Italy in late fifteenth century. It involves a man and a woman, with others dancing in a circle around them. When either is tired, he / she will be replaced from the circle. Women preserve a shy demeanor looking on the ground (qtd. in Au 6.104). The Tarantella experienced a revival as the national dance became a popular form of entertainment in the nineteenth century. Molly Engelhardt charts the rise of the national dance which develops out of dance in the court. It was only toward the end of the fourteenth century, the elite began to hold courtly dances taught by masters to the accompaniment of professional musicians in their halls and formal gardens (27). Dance manuals, such as the famous one written by the French dancing master Pierre Rameau ( ) (translated into English in 1728), created a semiotic of dance literacy that assigns meaning to each movement and became part of elite education (37). In the nineteenth century, national dances, also called character dancing, were incorporated into the ballet blanc. The most famous dancer of this subgenre is the American Fanny Elssler (Arkin and Smith 20). The Tarantella has evolved into its stylized format, elevated from its peasant origins and became eagerly learned by high society ladies. Debra Teachman in Understanding Jane Eyre (2001) quotes a passage from the diary of Frances Power Cobbe ( ), an Irish writer and suffragist, on her experience of learning various European national dances, including the Gavotte, the Bolero, the Mazurka and the Tarantella, in an expensive school in Brighton under the strict instruction of the famous Madame Michau [sic] (41). Peasant dances of other countries, elevated into genteel social dances, provide a means of reconstituting the aura of the former days. They help to create, and are also nourished by, the romance of peasantry as an imaginary other (Engelhardt 144). The craze for national dance, pointed out by Lisa C. Arkin and Marian Smith (11), shows the influence of the idea of the Volk (nationality) propounded by Johann Gottfried von Herder. As F. M. Barnard explains, Herder s central political idea lies in the assertion that the proper foundation for a sense of collective political identity is not the acceptance of a common sovereign power, but the sharing of a common culture. For the former is imposed from outside, whilst the latter is the expression of an inner consciousness, in terms of which each individual recognizes himself as an integral

41 Ya-Feng Wu_Corinne s Tarantella_37 part of a social whole (7). Herder argues that the determinants of a Volk are not racial characteristics or inherited physical factors but language, traditions, customs, folklore, folksongs and other things which he calls folkways (Barnard 32). Herder s campaign of a shared common culture as the basis of the nation speaks volumes for Germany and Italy, the two regions in the nineteenth-century Europe most afflicted with intrusion and internecine strife. Herder s theory of the Volk helps us to understand the pivotal position occupied by the Tarantella in de Staël s novel. Corinne s Tarantella contains qualities of what Daboo defines for the Tarantella, the presentational ritual and the participatory dance: Corinne s performance pays tribute to its classical origins enshrined on the walls of Herculaneum. It also shows her willingness to embrace the culture of the local people. Though not aiming at achieving sacred efficacy, Corinne s dance culminates de Staël s attempt to revitalize classical culture in the local context. Corinne s Tarantella initiates a wake up call for Oswald to participate, or at least to appreciate, what makes Corinne Corinne. 3.2 In situ and In the Present Corinne s Tarantella enlivens her representing Italian culture to Oswald. She inhabits the culture by performing an identity she has chosen. Her dance prefigures the emerging in situ archaeology and embodies the identity in the present. An enthnomusicologist, Marius Schneider, comments in Sword Dance and the Tarantella (1999): The tarantella is a dance of the spiders, that is to say a type of those animal dancers in which the participants desire to identify themselves with certain animals considered as an incarnation of the spirits of the dead (qtd. in Daboo ). Schneider s remark points out an almost vampiric aspect of Tarantella, which is exploited by de Staël in the reference to the wall paintings of Herculaneum. As if to revive the spirit of the dead, de Staël de-frames and re-contextualizes the ancient artwork which is buried under volcanic ashes and brutalized by reckless excavators. Being among the best-known images in the eighteenth century Europe, these paintings were taken down from the walls of excavation sites and reframed for museum exhibits or private collections. Images derived from them created a new fashion, such as Wedgwood s Etruscan vases, Pompeian interior designs, etc. As Lori-Ann Touchette clarifies, these paintings are not discovered in Herculaneum but in Pompeii, nor are they of dancers. Instead, they showcase how classical antiquity has been received and restated to satisfy the needs of the eighteenth century (135). 15 Opposed to the de-contextualization of the ancient art, de Staël in the novel quietly repatriates some of the artifacts pillaged by Napoleon and pilfered by dealers. Corinne s Tarantella marks the crowning achievement of de Staël s 15 The wall paintings were excavated in the Villa of Cicero on the Via dei Sepulchri in Pompeii in They were first made into engravings which are included in the first and third volumes of Le antichità di Ercolano esposte (1757, 1762) (Touchette 135). One of these wall paintings is available at <

42 38_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities re-contextualization. By having Corinne perform the Tarantella in Naples as she consciously gleans ideas from Herculaneum, India and elsewhere, de Staël infuses new life back into the site of culture from which the art is born and in turn helps it to prosper. Corinne prefigures the emergence of the modern in situ archaeology, which seeks to resituate the found objects in their original architectural and environmental contexts and to invest human interests in the cultural life that helps to produce those objects. As Göran Blix points out, the focus of modern archaeology shifts from the image of Pompeii as a site of curious artistic treasures ready for consumption to the romantic myth of the city as a lost world restored by the arts of archaeology. It is a vast change reflected in the perceived nature of the objects unearthed, in the value attached to the artifacts, and in the gaze of the beholder (10). Corinne presages the tenet of in situ archaeology and encourages a mode of contemplation on antiquity that is done in the human scale by having the heroine inhabiting the culture on site. This novel in a sense also prefigures works such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton s The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), in which personal spheres hitherto unavailable to archaeology were re-created and animated with characters (Lyons and Reed 145). In performing the Tarantella, Corinne demonstrates a harmony with herself in the present and foregrounds her choice of identity. Daboo as a theater scholar offers us insights on the Tarantella as a performance of culture. He proclaims that performance study as a mode of inquiry gathers insights from anthropology, ethnography and cultural studies on the body and the culture that shapes it and is shaped by it. Both body and self are understood as processes, and a unification of inner and outer of the lived experience and socio-cultural environment (57). He draws ideas from Anna Halprin, a modern dancer and dance theorist, who explains that the effect of the physical forces can be examined in a psychophysical aspect which encompasses both inner feeling and outer movement especially as experienced in the ritual. Daboo continues along this line of thought in seeing that within Tarantism the state of the illness is one of feeling stuck in immobility or locked into convulsive movement (184). The inner state is accompanied by the music characterized by sustained ground bass of the tambourine and the repetitive rhythm of triplets in a trochaic pattern, mirroring that of the heartbeat. The triplets allow the emotional release of the dancer, which is then grounded by the bass. Both the bass and rhythm work to provide a solid base to prevent the dancer from bursting out (185-86). On the whole, the sense of efficacy is achieved through the balance between control and abandonment, contained within the culturally determined form of the ritual, through the playing of the musicians, the support of those around him / her, and the framing of the contained space of the ronda (192-93). Daboo s psychophysical account of the Tarantella provides a solid background for our exploration into the Tarantella scenario of Corinne. The Tarantella as a communal ritual plays an important part in forging cultural identity and preserving cultural memory. As Theresa Buckland argues, dance has a particular propensity to foreground cultural memory as embodied practice by virtue of

43 Ya-Feng Wu_Corinne s Tarantella_39 its predominantly somatic modes of transmission (1). Buckland s views of dance as performance of culture are supported in the examples of Scotland in the nineteenth century and the western frontier of China in the twentieth century. Anne McKee Stapleton s study of the Scottish dance culture seeks to redress the neglect of the cultural role of dance by the mainstream and text-based academic scholarship. Stapleton argues that the Disarming Act in 1746 after the defeat of Jacobite rebellion does not paralyze the Scottish culture. Instead, it burgeons forth in the form of dance and music. The conventional emphasis on language and hierarchy of arts lead scholars even as great as Benedict Anderson to lament the absence of a Scottish nationalist movement in late eighteenth century. However, as Stapleton points out, it is the time when hundreds of Scottish dances and tunes were a thriving part of cultural life (1-2). Dance by its very nature is multi-media and incorporating music and poetry. Walter Scott s Waverly (1814) provides the optimum example of the way in which dance scenes choreograph national identity (Stapleton 9-10; 11-12). Right around the same time frame, the Italian culture, which is being presented in its best form in Corinne, has been sustained to an important degree by its regional dance despite its political disintegration. A similar use of regional dance as a means of consolidating national identity is found in China after the Second World War. This time it was the state, not the indigenous groups, that sought to rally behind their culture. Justine Jacobs advances on Dru C. Gladney s assertion that while every society tends to allow the exoticization and eroticization of the other and the stranger, in China [it] is an active project of the state (qtd. in Jacobs 546). Miao dance troupes from Xian-jiang in the western frontier of China were promoted especially in the early days of the Nationalist rule of China as representing the authentic culture that was part of Chinese identity. Their virtuosity even caused them to be ridiculed as ethnic automatons, expected to produce folk culture at a moment s notice for the reward of a mouthful of candy (579). Miao dance troupe toured Shanghai and Taiwan, the latter of which was recently repatriated from Japanese rule, as representing their indigenous culture and also demonstrating their contribution to the new modern Chinese identity. This imperial co-option of indigenous culture is severely questioned in de Staël s novel for Corinne is made to be half-english and half-italian. Corinne s performance of the Tarantella, far from automatic, will always already indicate a conscious endeavor to identify herself with one half of her origins. Stapleton and Jacobs dawn upon us the central role played by dance in preserving and enacting the vitality of culture. But their claims do not spring from the classical roots of dance. This is what makes de Staël more prescient than both. The Tarantella scenario in the novel works to revive the truly classical spirit of the dance, that is, the unity between word, music and the body. 3.3 Dissociating from Emma Hamilton Corinne s performance suggests an obvious link to the contemporary performer, Lady Emma Hamilton ( ). She was tutored by the English ambassador to the

44 40_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities Kingdom of Naples, the connoisseur-collector Sir William Hamilton, who later married her despite her questionable background and against all oppositions. Hamilton taught Emma to imitate those images of the friezes, sculptures and other objects in his collection as if from a pattern book. She thus learned to impersonate legendary figures in classical literature and mythology. Emma Hamilton s solo performance was lauded as one of the Grand Tour spectacles. 16 Goethe provides a perfect account of her performance in his journal: Sir William Hamilton has now, after many years of devotion to the arts and the study of nature, found the acme of these delights in the person of an English girl of twenty with a beautiful face and a perfect figure. He has had a Grecian costume made for her which becomes her extremely. Dressed in this, she lets down her hair and, with a few shawls, gives so much variety to her poses, gestures, expressions, etc. He sees what thousands of artists would have liked to express realized before him in movements and surprising transformations standing, kneeling, sitting, reclining, serious, sad, playful, ecstatic, contrite, alluring, threatening, anxious, one pose follows another without a break. She knows how to arrange the folds of her veil to match each mood, The old knight idolizes her and is enthusiastic about everything she does. In her, he has found all the antiquities, all the profiles of Sicilian coins, even the Apollo Belvedere. (16 March, 1787, , my emphasis) Goethe expresses a certain degree of envy that Hamilton has found the acme of all his joys in art and nature. Nevertheless, Goethe also notices that Emma is no less an artist herself. Her performance, called Attitudes, defined by Hammarsköld in 1817 as constitute[ing] the art of representing plastic works of art by mimic means, gestures and draping, and transforming their local and existing life into a successive temporal one (qtd. in Touchette 127). Emma s performance was developed in two stages: first in a black box with gilded frame like stills, then in flowing poses allowing her to shift from one identity to another (Touchette 139). The latter truly fits her volatile character. Scholars have studied this new genre of performance along the line of monodrama and revived ancient pantomime. In this way, Emma was seen fashioned as the embodiment of both the textual and visual traditions (Touchette 145). Besides classical poses, Emma was also reputed for her performance of the Tarantella. Pictures of this sort were widespread at the time. The most famous among them is 16 As the history painter William Artaud noted in May 1796, the environs of Naples are truly Classical Ground,... I have been at Herculaneum & Pompeii & the Museum at Portici, & saw Lady Hamilton s Attitudes, & made several drawings from the King of Naples Collection at Capo de Monte (qtd. in Jenkins and Sloan 261, n. 161).

45 Ya-Feng Wu_Corinne s Tarantella_41 Emma Hamilton as a Bacchante ( ) by Elizabeth Louise Vigée-Lebrun. 17 William Lock s Emma, Lady Hamilton Dancing the Tarantella ( ) 18 expresses a popular image of Emma, which contains a doubled vision suggesting the fluidity of her movements, comparable to the sketches of her attitudes done by Pietro Antonio Novelli (1791), 19 and by Frederick Rehberg (1794). 20 Emma s attitudes were designed to enhance Hamilton s role as ambassador by presenting the strength of Emma, that is, her beauty and vivacity, at the same time masquerading her weakness, especially her sub-standard English resulted from a humble background. Touchette maintains that the muteness of the ancient pantomime was retained in her performance to hide Emma s lack of classical education. However, she could not refrain from speaking once in a while. The embarrassment proved demeaning. As Lady Holland writes in her memoirs, Just as she was lying down, with her head reclining on an Etruscan vase to represent a water-nymph, she exclaimed in her provincial dialect: Doun t be afeared Sir Willum, I ll not crack your joug. I turned away disgusted (qtd. in Touchette 141). Once Emma spoke, the illusion of ideal beauty was shattered. To salvage her heroine from this impasse, de Staël makes Corinne perform the social dance version of the Tarantella, rather than a solo as Emma did, and arms her with the cultural memory that is precluded to Emma. In other words, de Staël s Corinne is her own impresario and agent. In two ways, Emma s attitudes are evoked only to be transcended. First, the kinetic and fluid nature of Emma s attitudes baffles precise one-to-one documentation. The visual record of her performance does not allow for the precise correlation between ancient statues, vases and wall paintings, and the poses struck by Emma. Likewise, the multiple associations made around Corinne s performance baffle precise identification. But the main difference between them lies in Corinne s wealth of classical knowledge and her ability to embody it. In contrast, Emma lacks the education and language to fully comprehend the emotive allusions that her movements would inspire. Second, a cross-media quality of both performances is unique and epoch-making. The Comtesse de Boigne in her memoirs remarks that it is in this way that she [Emma] was inspired by ancient statues, and that without slavish imitation, she recalled them to the poetic imagination of the Italians through a type of improvisation in action (qtd. in Touchette 128, my emphasis). The Comtesse makes an important connection for us. Just as Emma s attitudes, in the mind of the Italians (those in the know), recalled the poetic improvisation, so does Corinne s dance recall her own improvisation and surmounts it. 17 An image of this painting is available at < 18 An image of this painting is available at < 19 A reproduction of these sketches is available on Jenkins and Sloan 259, cat. 159, fig Frederick Rehberg. Lady Hamilton s Attitudes. Drawings Faithfully Copied from Nature at Naples. Rome, Dec < >.

46 42_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities As Chard maintains, the attitudes provide Emma with a means of forging her own continuities with the topography of the warm South for they evoke the Italian past, and so supply the travelers with a means of accomplishing the task of transmuting historical time into personal time (151). Similarly, the fusion of past and present is firmly accomplished by Corinne in her Sibylian attire when she receives the laurel on the Capitol of Rome. But more than an elision of past and present, or classical ideals embodied in current spots of time, Corinne s Tarantella, as a pas de deux in which the woman wins while yielding, points toward a break through Oswald s suffocating yet indecisive love. The different modes of relationship with their partner thus further set them apart. Emma suavely shifts between poses of classical personae and yet without the lead of William Hamilton, her movements would lose their anchor. In contrast, Corinne s Tarantella only demonstrates once again that her brilliance cannot be tamed in the way that Oswald desires in playing her ardent protector. 3.4 Identifying with Juliette Récamier De Staël allows her heroine emerge out of Emma s pathetic impasse by leading us away from the court of Naples to the salon in Paris. The shift can be analyzed in three aspects: personal, socio-political and aesthetic. In the note, de Staël admits that the Tarantella scenario was inspired by [t]his lady [Madame Juliette Récamier], so renowned for her grace and beauty, gives an example of showing, in the midst of adversity, such touching resignation and total disregard of personal interest that her moral qualities seem to all eyes as remarkable as her charms (C 406 n. 14). 21 The fact that Lucile s daughter is named Juliet suggests that de Staël entertains the idea of inviting her friend into her creative plot and envisaging a shared future with her. First, the extraordinary friendship between de Staël and Récamier has been chronicled in the latter s Memoirs (1859) by her adopted niece and in Amitié Amoureuse (1956) by Maurice Levaillant. The novel, Corinne, in a way, compresses de Staël s public concern for the future of Europe, and her personal concern of their friendship. The two-fold preoccupation also shows on the part of Mme. Récamier. In 1819, two years after de Stael s death, due to the financial crisis of her husband, Mme. Récamier alone moved to a small apartment in a convent, the Abbaye-aux-Bois. There she continued to host famous salon meetings for writers, musicians, and other leaders in the society. The hall was dominated by the huge canvas of Corinne at the Cape Misano by François Gérard as a reminder of de Staël s influence (Gladwyn 64-65). Memoirs and Correspondence of Madame Récamier, published in Paris in 1859, 21 To avoid possible mistranslation, I provide de Staël s note in the French original: C est la danse de mademe Recamier qui m a donné l idée de celle que j ai essayé de peindre. Cettte femme, si célèbre par sa grâce et sa beauté, offer l exemple, au milieu de ses revers, d une résignation si toucante et d un oubli si total de ses intérêst personnels, que ses qualitiés morales semblent à tous les yeux aussi remarquables que ses agreements. Corinne, ou L Italie, par Mme la Baronne de Staël (New York: Chez Leavitt et Allen, 1852), 428 n. 14.

47 Ya-Feng Wu_Corinne s Tarantella_43 describes the famous shawl dance of Récamier as the inspiration for Corinne s Tarantella: I do not know from whom she learnt the shawl dance which served Mme. de Staël as a model, in Corinne. Mme. Récamier only consented to execute it while very young. One day, during the sad winter of , which she passed as an exile at Lyons, she gave me an idea of this dance, in order to dissipate her ennui; and also, no doubt, to recall the memory of other days. With a long scarf in her hand, she went through all the poses, wherein the light tissue becomes in turn a girdle, a veil, and a drapery. Nothing could be more graceful, more decorous, or more picturesque than this succession of harmonious attitudes, worthy to be perpetuated by the pencil of an artist. (Récamier 5) The recollection of her aunt as the model of Corinne corroborates de Staël s note but the association of Récamier s shawl dance with Corinne s Tarantella betrays an omission of Emma s influence. Likewise, de Staël demonstrates her subtle sleight of hand in replacing the model in Naples with the one in Paris, which re-frames the unusual relationship in their shared exile under Napoleon s reign for Récamier was exiled for association with de Staël. Récamier provides de Staël a model who does not suffer any disadvantages. Emma s lack of access to the culture she is made to represent finally takes its toll as Goethe remarks about Emma s singing voice as a case of soulless beauties that ultimately disappoint (May 27, 1787, 312). To forestall all slanders, de Staël molds Corinne into an ultimate embodiment of the classical culture, by uniting word, music and dance onto her figure. Récamier, a celebrated salonnière like de Staël herself, certainly fits the bill. Second, there are social and political dimensions to the choice of Récamier. Salons led by aristocratic ladies started in the seventeenth-century France, gathered strength on the eve of the Revolution, carried abroad after the Terror and were encouraged by the Emperor Napoleon to secure prestige for his rule. They continued to flourish during the Bourbon Restoration ( ) and July Monarchy ( ). As Montesquieu once commented on the salonnières, they form a kind of republic... whose members, always active, aid and serve one another. It is a new state within a state; and whoever observes the action of those in power, if he does not know the women who govern them, is like a man who sees the action of a machine but does not know its secret springs (qtd. in Mason , my emphasis). As Steven Kale comments, salons became the principal centers of elite political networking and whose influence grew alongside political parties, voluntary associations, mass-circulation newspapers, etc. (3). Salonnières not only maintain pleasant conversations in elegant halls but perform their public task of guarding social conventions and maintaining the equilibrium and the advantages of civilized life (13). The rise of Récamier the salonnière, a banker s young wife, marks the change of patronage from the court to the bourgeoisie. The process is revealed in the accounts

48 44_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities about her unfinished portrait by Jacques-Louis David. 22 In terms of salon history, Récamier represents the closing page of the French salons (Mason 277). Récamier was famed for her beauty and even temper. As her niece recalls: what was the secret of her influence? It lay in the subtle power of a marvelous tact. This tact had its roots deep in her nature. The genuine admiration she felt for her literary friends stimulated as well as gratified them. She drew them out; and, dazzled by their own brilliancy, they gave her credit for thoughts which were in reality their own. She was a good listener. Like the continuous murmur of a brook, it gladdened as well as soothed (xi-xii). The literary critic, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve ( ), even suggests that she was the most prominent woman of her time: Party spirit was then in all its violence. She disarmed anger, softened asperities, smoothed over all the roughness, and inoculated everyone with indulgence (qtd. in Kale 109). For de Staël who has experienced turbulence both for her writings and her affairs, Récamier was an angel of peace (Kale 109). Identifying Corinne with Récamier enables de Staël to envisage her own cultural authority reinstated at the center of activities. Third, the connection between Corinne and Mme Récamier is also an aesthetic one. De Staël ushers in the change in fashion and performance by combining the vibrant Tarantella with the salon dance. 23 Both Mme Récamier s and Emma Hamilton s dances are celebrated as opening a new chapter in European dance history, as Judith Chazin-Bennahum notices (62). At the time of the French Revolution, the modes of neo-classical costume, which promoted and was encouraged by a more liberal view of dance as an expressive art, helped to enhance the popularity of the ballet pantomime or ballet d action. As Chazin-Bennahum explains, It may have been the soft, flat slipper, or the light textiles or the maskless face or the wigless head... Ballet abandoned the steppy sequence of Baroque forms and took to the air, to the notion of height, length and grandeur of movement, and began to flow more freely in the body and in space (67). Having allowed Recamier s shawl dance and the more sprightly Tarantella to complement each other, de Staël makes her unique contribution to modern aesthetics. Conclusion De Staël s novel on the famous improvisatrice taps into the phenomenon of the national dance which, like improvisation, plays an important part in the Romantic 22 As a friend of David recalls, when Mme. Récamier showed up in his studio to ask the master to complete the portrait, David told her: Madame, women have their caprices, artists have theirs, too. Allow me to satisfy mine, I shall keep your portrait. Then nothing could persuade him to finish it (qtd. in Lajer-Burcharte 236). 23 De Staël s and Emma Hamilton s contribution to the modern art has attracted scholarly notice, please see Carrie J. Preston, Modernism s Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo Performance (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011). However, Preston does not seem to see the Tarantella as a central aspect of de Staël s project.

49 Ya-Feng Wu_Corinne s Tarantella_45 myth of the primitive culture. Corinne s performance of the Tarantella allows her to inhabit the Italian culture in the full complexity of the land and its arts. In actively drawing ideas and images from art objects springing from their environment, Corinne liberates herself from the fate of becoming an object excavated from antiquity that Oswald can adore and possess. It is through the social dance form of the Tarantella, still attached to its sacred efficacy on account of its aiming to unify word, music and movement, that de Staël revives the culture in its own context and foregrounds the performing nature of identity. In thus molding her heroine, de Staël surmounts the impasse of Emma Hamilton by connecting Corinne with Récamier for personal, socio-political and aesthetic reasons. In the end, de Staël subverts the originally oppressive femininization of the Tarantella in order to bring forth her vision of a new world gaining its cultural authority from being rooted in antiquity. WORKS CITED Arkin, Lisa C. and Marian Smith. National Dance in the Romantic Ballet. Rethinking the Sylph: New Perspectives on the Romantic ballet. Ed. Lynn Garafola. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, Au, Susan. On Tarantella. International Encyclopedia of Dance. Ed. Selma Jeanne Cohen. Vol. 6. Oxford: Oxford UP, Vols. Barnard, F. M. Introduction. J. G. Herder on Social and Political Culture. Trans. and ed. F. M. Barnard. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, Blix, Göran. From Paris to Pompeii: French Romanticism and the Cultural Politics of Archaeology. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, Buckland, Theresa. Dance, Authenticity and Cultural Memory: the Politics of Embodiment. Yearbook for Traditional Music 33 (2001): Chard, Chloe. Comedy, Antiquity, the Feminine and the Foreign: Emma Hamilton and Corinne. Hornsby Chazin-Bennahum, Judith. A Longing for Perfection. Neoclassical Fashion and Ballet. Rethinking Dance History. A Reader. Ed. Alexandra Carter. London: Rutledge, Coates, Victoria C. Gardner and Jon L. Seydl, eds. Antiquity Recovered: the Legacy of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, Coates, Victoria C. Gardner and Jon L. Seydl. Introduction. Coates and Seydl Daboo, Jerri. Ritual, Rapture and Remorse. A Study of Tarantism and Pizzica in Salento. Oxford: Peter Lang, Del Giudice, Luisa and Nancy Van Deusen, eds. Performing Ecstasies: Music, Dance, and Ritual in the Mediterranean. Ottawa: Institute of Mediaeval Music, De Martino, Ernesto. The Land of Remorse: a Study of Southern Italian Tarantism (La terra del rimorso). Milan: EST, Trans. and annot. Dorothy Louise Zinn. London: Free Association P, 2005.

50 46_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities De Staël, Germaine. Corinne, or Italy. Trans. Sylvia Raphael. Oxford: Oxford UP, Corinne, ou L Italie. NY: Chez Leavitt et Allen, Engelhardt, Molly. Dancing Out of Line: Ballrooms, Ballets, and Mobility in Victorian Fiction and Culture. Athens: Ohio UP, Esterhammer, Angela. Romanticism and Improvisation, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, Gladwyn, Cynthia. Madame Récamier: A Romantic French Salon. Affairs of the Mind: The Salon in Europe and America from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century. Ed. Peter Quennell. Washington, D. C.: New Republic, Goethe, Johann Wolfgan von. Itanlian Journey Trans. W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer San Francisco: North Point P, Gorden, Alden R. Subverting the Secret of Herculaneum: Archaeological Espionage in the Kingdom of Naples. Coates and Seydl Gutwirth, Madelyn, Avriel Goldberger, and Karyna Szmurlo, eds. Germanine de Staël. Crossing the Borders. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, Hogsett, Charlotte. The Literary Existence of Germaine de Staël. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, Hornsby, Clare, ed. The Impact of Italy: the Grand Tour and Beyond. London: British School at Rome, Isbell, John. The Birth of European Romanticism: Truth and Propaganda in Staël s De l Allemagne. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, Introduction. Corinne, or Italy. Trans. Sylvia Raphael. Oxford: Oxford UP, vii-xx. Jacobs, Justine. How Chinese Turkestan Became Chinese: Visualizing Zhang Zhizhong s Tianshan Pictorial and Xinjiang Youth Song and Dance Troupe. The Journal of Asian Studies 67.2 (May 2008): Nov < b-8269-e0bf3812d84b%40sessionmgr14&vid=10&hid=7>. Jenkins, Ian, and Kim Sloan. Vases and Volcanoes: Sir William Hamilton and His Collection. London: British Museum, Karanika, Andromache. Ecstasis in Healing: Practices in Southern Italy and Greece from Antiquity to the Present. Del Guidice and Van Deusen Kale, Steven. French Salons: High Society and Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, Lajer-Burcharte, Ewa. Necklines: The Art of Jacques-Louis David after the Terror. New Haven: Yale UP, Levaillant, Maurice. Une Amitié Amoureuse Trans. Malcolm Barnes Rpt. NY: Books for Libraries P, Lüdtke, Karen. Dancing towards Well-Being: Reflections on the Pizzica in the Contemporary Salento, Italy. Del Guidice and Van Deusen Luzzi, Joseph. Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy. New Haven: Yale UP, Lyons, Clarie L. and Marcia Reed. The Visible and the Visual: Pompeii and Herculaneum in the Getty Research Institute Collections. Coates and Seydl

51 Ya-Feng Wu_Corinne s Tarantella_ Mason, Amelia Gere. The Women of the French Salons NY: The Century Co. 20 May, 2011 < books.google.com>. Mores, Ellen. Literary Women: The Great Writers. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Najbjerb, Tina. From Art to Archaeology: Recontextualizing the Images from the Porticus of Herculaneum. Coates and Seydl Petrusewicz, Marta. Before the Southern Question: Native Ideas on Backwardness and Remedies in the Kingdom of Two Sicilies, Italy s Southern Question. Orientalism in One Country. Ed. Jane Schneider. Oxford: Berg, Preston, Carrie J. Modernism s Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo Performance. Oxford: Oxford UP, Récamier, Jeanne Françoise Julie Adélaïde Bernard. Memoirs and Correspondence of Madame Récamier Trans. and Ed. Isaphene M. Luyster. 4 th edn. Boston: Roberts Brothers, Rehberg, Frederick. Lady Hamilton s Attitudes. Drawings Faithfully Copied from Nature at Naples. Rome, Dec < >. Sheriff, Mary D. The Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art. Chicago: U of Chicago P, Stapleton, Anne McKee. Negotiating Nationalism: Scottish Dance in Post-Culloden Literature. Ph. D. Dissertation. U of Iowa, Nov < chmode=1&sid=1&fmt=6&vinst=prod&vtype=pqd&rqt=309&vname= PQD&TS= &clientId=3740 >. Sweet, Nanora. Those Syren-Haunted Seas Beside : Naples in the Work of Staël, Hemans, and the Shelleys. Romanticism s Debatable Lands. Ed. Claire Lamont and Michael Rossington. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, Swinburne, Henry. Travels into the Two Sicilies London, vols. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Boston University Libraries. 22 June 2011 < =ECCOArticles&type=multipage&tabID=T001&prodId=ECCO&docId=CW &source=gale&userGroupName=bost84371&version=1.0&docLevel= FASCIMILE>. Szmurlo, Karyna, ed. The Novel s Seductions: Corinne in Critical Inquiry. Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell UP, Teachman, Debra. Understanding Jane Eyre: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents. Westport, CT: Greenwood, Touchette, Lori-Ann. Sir William Hamilton s Pantomime Mistress : Emma Hamilton and Her Attitudes. Hornsby Wu, Ya-feng. 火與水的交戰 : 透納的末世啟示 ( Contention in Fire and Water: Apocalypse in Turner ) 中外文學 (Chung Wai Literary Quarterly) 28.6 (1999): 7-40

52 48_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities ABSTRACT Germaine de Staël s major novel, Corinne or Italy (1807), takes the form of a Grand Tour guidebook, spiced with the dynamism of a roman à clef, and eventually transcends both formulae. It chronicles the romance between Corinne, half-italian and half-english, and her Scottish suitor, Lord Nelvil Oswald. Corinne hopes to cement their relationship not only by showing Oswald places of cultural interests but more importantly by representing their splendors despite the contemporary political chaos of Italy. Her endeavor reaches its climax with the performance of ancient Neapolitan dance, the Tarantella. This paper seeks to delineate how the Tarantella showcases the ways in which de Staël garners insights from the national dance craze and the emerging modern archaeology to articulate knowledge embodied in situ and performed in the present. The Tarantella, with its sacred efficacy and secular cohesiveness, allows Corinne to inhabit her adopted culture. In the end, de Staël ensures authority for Corinne by bypassing the controversial performer of attitudes, Emma Hamilton, and by associating Corinne with her confidante, the salonnière Juliette Récamier. De Staël exploits the subversive potentials of the Tarantella and revitalizes the ancient unity of word, music and the body in order to stage her performance of cultural authority. Keywords: Pompeii, salonnière, Emma Hamilton, Juliette Récamier 摘要 史黛夫人著名的小說 蔻瑞, 義大利 (1807) 在十九世紀的法國國家圖書館歸類為旅遊指南 這個通俗的類別其實點出小說的中心母題, 即以義英混血的蔻瑞與蘇格蘭爵士奧斯渥. 納維爾之間的戀情為基礎, 目的是推崇義大利的古典文化 蔻瑞希望藉由介紹義大利歷史文物 且體現其文化精華, 來消解奧斯渥對當時混亂的義大利所抱持的宗教與政治偏見, 以求凝聚他們的情感 蔻瑞在拿波里表演的塔朗泰拉舞是她所有努力的高潮 本論文企圖描述史黛夫人如何從民族舞蹈風潮與考古學的新重點, 發展出她對歷史的兩大詮釋方向 : 在場的知識 (knowledge in situ) 與 即時表演 (performance in the present) 塔朗泰拉舞, 因其神聖的效能與世俗的凝聚力, 促使蔻瑞能充分活出她所認同的文化 最終, 史黛夫人跳脫當代頗具爭議的英國駐拿波里大使夫人艾瑪 漢繆登 (Emma Hamilton), 轉向巴黎沙龍女主人茱麗葉. 瑞佳米耶 (Juliette Récamier), 作為蔻瑞的最佳模範, 為她的主人翁熔鑄文化權威 本論文依據小說的結構, 發展出

53 Ya-Feng Wu_Corinne s Tarantella_49 稜鏡式的四重檢視方向 : 神聖與世俗 在場考古學與即時表演 艾瑪 與茱麗葉 這四重稜鏡帶領我們進一步了解, 史黛夫人對拿破崙帝國新秩序所作的質疑與挑戰 關鍵字 : 塔朗泰拉舞 龐貝 史黛夫人 沙龍女主人 Ya-Feng Wu is Associate Professor of English at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, National Taiwan University. She obtained her M. Phil. from Oxford University, UK, her Ph. D. from Glasgow University, UK. Her research interests include Romantic literature, the Gothic, Aestheticism, women s writing, and dance. She has written both in English and Chinese on Percy B. Shelley, J. M. W. Turner, John Constable, Ann Radcliff, Charlotte Smith, Matthew Gregory Lewis, Maria Edgeworth, etc. Her monographs include Nature in Art (in Chinese) (2005) and Arcadia and Carthage in Turner (2000).

54 50_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities

55 The Chymical Theatre 1 : Alchemical Imagery in Margaret Cavendish s The Convent of Pleasure Tien-Yi Chao National Taiwan University MEDIAT. [Lady Happy] is not a Votress to the gods but to Nature. (Cavendish, The Convent of Pleasure ) [T]hough Chymists Pretend they can, they may Imitate Nature by Art, but not Create as Nature doth.in my Opinion, Chymists may Break their Limbicks, and Quench out their Fire, and Endeavour to get Natural Gold a Provident way, and not to Impoverish themselves with Art. (Cavendish, CCXI Sociable Letters 438, 442) Received: July 1, 2011/ Accepted: Dec. 7, 2011 Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities 33 (July 2012): This study was funded by a two-year research grant offered by the National Science Council in Taiwan [project number: NSC H MY2]. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Early Modern Alchemy: Ideas, Culture, and Literature International Conference at Academia Sinica, Taipei, on March 30, I am grateful to the delegates and the discussant for their useful suggestions. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments. 1 Based on the English translation of the title of Theatrum chemicum Britannicum (London 1651), written by Robert Vaughan.

56 52_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities Introduction In 1668, The Convent of Pleasure was published as part of Plays, Never Before Printed, the second collection of theatrical works by Margaret Cavendish. In this play, the heroine Lady Happy decides to establish an all-female community for the benefit of single women, including herself. However, she later falls in love with a prince disguised as a woman and eventually marries him, causing the collapse of her convent. The play s controversial plot has inspired numerous studies focusing on gender, sexuality, and feminism. Erin Lang Bonin (339-54), Hero Chalmers (81-94), and Joyce Delvin Mosher (11.1) examine the gender politics surrounding Lady Happy s convent, seeing it as a locus of female agency. Theodora A. Jankowski affirms that the convent provides Lady Happy and her ladies with an enclosed domestic space that encourages female creativity ( Good Enough to Eat 98). In addition, Jankowski s earlier study of homo-eroticism in The Convent and Shakespeare s Measure for Measure suggests that the single heroines in both plays are queer virgins who may experience pleasure in their cloistered lives (Pure Resistance ). Sophie Tomlinson reads The Convent as a dialogue between Cavendish s inner and outer selves, arguing that the author turns the fancies from her mental stage into theatrical experiences that are acted out in real life (176-84). Most of the above studies tend to categorize Cavendish as either a proto-feminist or antifeminist; many of them celebrate The Convent as advocating women s rights to be free and unite with other women, while others lament that the ending of the play fails to secure independence for the female characters. Even though The Convent has been one of the most studied among Cavendish s works, the play s philosophical and metaphysical aspects remain largely unexplored, though Lisa Sarasohn did briefly acknowledge the connections between the play and Cavendish s perception of a perfect world: Lady Happy, whose vision of a perfectly pleasurable world echoes the description of a happy world in Grounds of Natural Philosophy (173-74); Ground of Natural Philosophy reflects the discussion of pleasure and pain that preoccupies Lady Happy (178-79). More importantly, Sarasohn affirms the intertextuality between The Convent and Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668), both of which express the same vision of a perfectly pleasurable world (173). I am inspired by Sarasohn s study of natural philosophy in The Convent, though my interpretation of the play differs from hers. In this paper, I will place the text within the context of alchemy, examining the ways in which Cavendish exploits alchemical imagery as a literary device to articulate her stance in the art-nature debate. 3 I contend that the perfectly pleasurable world in Lady Happy s convent represents an artificial and unsuccessful imitation of nature, and that the sea masque in the play contains substantial alchemical imagery, especially the image of the chemical wedding that brings together the male and female forces in nature. 3 For discussions on such debates in early modern alchemy and natural philosophy, see Tien-yi Chao ( Between Nature and Art 50-56), Newman ( The Homunculus ), and Newman & Principe (62).

57 Tien-Yi Chao_The Chymical Theatre _53 Cavendish and Alchemy Cavendish certainly understood fundamental ideas about alchemy, a theme of study that was popular among early modern intellects and writers. According to Newman and Grafton s observation, alchemical imagery and allegories (such as the hermaphrodite) were pervasive in early modern literature, contributing to the development of contemporary literary symbolism (Secrets of Nature 387). Sarasohn also points out that alchemy was popular in courts in early modern Europe (149). Stanton Linden particularly contributes to the study of literary alchemy by revealing that the tradition of satirical and non-satirical literary use of alchemy was common among Cavendish s predecessors and contemporaries. For instance, Ben Jonson often treats alchemy and alchemists as subjects for mockery (Linden ); John Donne and George Herbert present a multitude of new forms, images, and uses of alchemy in their poems (155); Henry Vaughan combines hermetic philosophy and Christian mysticism in his alchemical writings (234-46); and, unlike the above authors, John Milton employs both satirical and non-satirical approaches to literary alchemy in Paradise Lost (246-52). Like Milton, Cavendish tends to incorporate alchemical concepts, lexicons, and imagery in her own writing, even though she frequently dismisses alchemy as useless and fraudulent. As Newman puts it, Cavendish opposed alchemy for its claims of artificial creation that granted human beings godly power ( The Homunculus and Its Forebears, ), but, for her, alchemy simultaneously provided a unique window into the issue of the artificial and the natural, with all that this implied about the limits of human power over nature (Promethean Ambitions ). Hence, there is a tendency toward ambiguity in Cavendish s writings about alchemy; as I point out in Contemplation on the World of My Own Creating, many of Cavendish s philosophical writings contain blunt criticism of alchemy and alchemists, while a number of her literary writings, especially The Blazing World (1666), draw from alchemical themes and images in a slightly more positive way (Chao 4-5, 62-3). Thus, one may wonder: why did Cavendish write about alchemy in her literary works, despite her skepticism of the Art? How does she present the art-nature debate in a literary text such as The Convent? And what is her stance in such a debate? To answer these questions, I will examine two cases of Cavendish s use of literary alchemy in The Convent. The first is the alchemical underpinning of Lady Happy s convent, especially in its design, development, and dissolution. I see the convent as a way for Cavendish to dramatize her views on the art-nature debate. The second is alchemical imagery presented through the sea masque used in the play, particularly the chemical wedding and virgin s milk. These discussions reveal the ways in which Cavendish exploits alchemical imagery to present her ideas about nature and relationships. The seeming discursiveness and inconsistency in her viewpoints suggest the coexistence and concoction of alchemies at all levels, while they simultaneously sustain her argument for nature s superiority over art: Art, like an Emulating Ape, strives to imitate Nature, yet it is so far from producing natural (Cavendish, Observations sig.2x1v).

58 54_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities Alchemical Discourses in Lady Happy s Convent The opening of the play is highly controversial: Lady Happy, a young woman who is well-bred, highly intellectual, extream handsome, young, rich, and virtuous ( ), decides to shut herself and her female companions off from male company by establishing a convent of pleasure, an all-female community: [T]hose Women, where Fortune, Nature, and the gods are joined to make them happy, were mad to live with Men, who make the Female sex their slaves; but I will not be so inslaved, but will live retired from their Company. Wherefore, in order thereto, I will take so many Noble Persons of my own Sex, as my Estate will plentifully maintain, such whose Births are greater then their Fortunes, and are resolv d to live a single life, and vow Virginity: with these I mean to live incloister d with all the delights and pleasures that are allowable and lawful. ( ) Her plan is challenged by Madame Mediator, a wise old woman who suspects the convent as nothing but an unnatural manifestation of vanity. A long exchange between the two women ensues, in which Lady Happy strives to defend herself against accusation that she is unnatural and vain: MEDIAT. But being done for the gods sake, it makes that which in Nature seems to be bad, in Divinity to be good. L. HAPPY. It cannot be good, if it be neither pleasure, nor profit to the gods; neither do Men any thing for the gods but their own sake. MEDIAT. But when the Mind is not imployed with Vanities, nor the Senses with Luxury; the Mind is more free, to offer its Adorations, Prayers and Praises to the gods. L. HAPPY. I believe, the gods are better pleased with Praises then Fasting; but when the Senses are dull d with abstinency, the Body weakned with fasting, the Spirits tir d with watching, the Life made uneasie with pain, the Soul can have but little will to worship.wherefore, if the gods be cruel, I will serve Nature; but the gods are bountiful, and give all, that s good, and bid us freely please our selves in that which is best for us. ( ) In the above passage, Lady Happy is confident and enthusiastic about the power of human effort over nature. She believes that her design will enable single women to experience an extraordinary life of joy and freedom for two main reasons: first, the best and most natural way to live is to satisfy one s senses, or, in other words, material

59 Tien-Yi Chao_The Chymical Theatre _55 fulfillment is more important than stoic spiritual practices; secondly, the main motivation for artificially intervening in the world is to serve Nature. These reasons remind one of a scene in Shakespeare s The Winter s Tale (1770), in which Perdita and Polixenes debate the extent to which artificial technology may improve nature: Per. For I have heard it said There is an art which in their piedness shares With great creating Nature. Pol. Say, there be; Yet nature is made better by no mean But nature makes that mean: so, over that art Which you say adds to Nature, is an art That nature makes; you see, sweet maid, we marry A gentle scyon [Sic] to the wildest stock, And make conceive a bark of baser kind By bud of nobler race. This is an art Which does mend nature, change it rather; but The art itself is nature. Per. So it is. Pol. Then make your garden rich in gilly-flowers, And do not call them bastards. Per. I ll not put The dibble in earth to set one slip of them; No more than, were I painted, I would wish This youth should say, Twere well and only therefore Desire to breed by me. Here s flowers for you; Hot lavender, mints, savoury, marjoram; The mary-gold, that goes to bed with th sun And with him rises weeping: these are flowers Of middle summer, and I think, they are given To men of middle age. ( ) As Jules Janick points out, In this extraordinary passage, Shakespeare wonderfully expresses the conflict between nature and science, between natural and unnatural (1402). When arguing about the appropriateness of cross-breeding, Perdita represents the pro-nature stance, while Polixenes supports artificially perfecting nature. Perdita s viewpoint thus contrasts with Lady Happy s optimism toward the potential of artificially bettering nature, particularly its material contents. Although Lady Happy succeeds in persuading Madame Mediator, her ideas are polemical and problematic. Her zeal for experimenting on a human-designed female community reminds the reader of the radical thought of intellectuals in the seventeenth century, including some members of the Royal Society of Science. These

60 56_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities thinkers are the target of Cavendish s bleak criticism in her philosophical books, especially Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666), where she writes, But the all-powerful God, and his servant Nature, know, that Art, which is but a particular Creature, cannot inform us of the Truth of the Infinite parts of Nature, being but finite it self (5). Accordingly, Madame Mediator criticizes Lady Happy s emphasis on materiality over virtue as Vanities, since a better use of mind should be to offer its Adorations, Prayers and Praises to the gods (The Convent of Pleasure, ). As we will see later, Lady Happy s emphasis on material pleasure causes even more severe problems that result in the collapse of the convent. Despite her worries and skepticism about the all-female convent, Madame Mediator is eventually convinced by the eloquent Lady Happy, who promises to enhance women s well being with her radical project. The convent bears very little resemblance to traditional Catholic monasteries or cloisters, since the material surroundings and the activities are intended to provide pleasure. It is almost like an Eden (though for Eves only), a virtual paradise on earth full of sensual enjoyment. As Lady Happy describes, My Cloister shall not be a Cloister of restraint, but a place for freedom, not to vex the Senses but to please them ( ). More importantly, even the interior design and the personal items are altered along with seasonal changes, bringing sensual pleasure to its fullest effect. In her lengthy oration, Lady Happy depicts in detail the material arrangement of her convent, which is intended to both provide ultimate luxury and imitate nature. Her plan is remarkable in terms of its use of textile, botanical ornament, and foods: Now give me leave to inform you, how I have order d this our Convent of Pleasure; first, I have such things as are for our Ease and Conveniency; next for Pleasure, and Delight; as I have change of Furniture, for my house; according to the four Seasons of the year, especially our Chambers and my Gardens to be kept curiously, and flourish, in every Season of all sorts of Flowers, sweet Herbs and Fruits, and kept so as not to have a Weed in it.and all the Ponds, Rivolets, Fountains, and Springs, kept clear, pure and fresh: Also, we will have the choisest Meats every Season doth afford, and that every day our Meat, be drest several ways, and our drink cooler or hotter according to the several Seasons. Change of Garments [is] also provided, of the newest fashions for every Season, and rich Trimming. and our Shifts shall be of the finest and purest Linnen that can be bought or spun. ( ) The depiction of the material surroundings not only oozes extravagance and luxury, but also illustrates a virtual space created by artificial means. Here, Lady Happy s attempt to create her own convent reminds the reader of similar attempts by alchemists who sought to prefect nature, or even bring out things that do not exist in nature. As Newman notes, the idea of creating a homunculus was once highly popular

61 Tien-Yi Chao_The Chymical Theatre _57 among alchemists (including Paracelsus) who believed that human creative power was practically unlimited ( The Homunculus 323). In addition, the garden in Lady Happy s convent may refer to a significant emblem in alchemy. As Lyndy Abraham points out, the garden is usually considered the alchemists secret vessel, in which the trees and plants are the symbol of the process of the opus, while fruits refer to the philosopher s stone (83). In The Philosophicall Aenigma (1604), Polish alchemist Michael Sendivogius describes the garden of the philosophers as Our blest Elysium : [T]he garden [is] the sacred place or vessel where the solar and lunar trees grow and the lily and rose of the white and red stages of the opus bloom [sic]. To sow the seed of gold in the pure white Elysian fields means to unite the soul/spirit of the Stone with the purified body at the chemical wedding. (qtd. in Abraham 69) Accordingly, an alchemical garden refers to Elysium, a sacred place for the generation of the Philosopher s Stone (Abraham 84). In Emblem 27 of Michael Maier s Atalanta Fugiens, the Rose Garden of Wisdom represents inner knowledge, and a similar emblem also appears on the fifth leaf of the hieroglyph in Nicolas Flamel s Exposition (1624). Viewed in this light, Lady Happy s convent can be seen as a milieu generating the desired outcome of artificial experiments; in her case, the desired outcome is a wonderland full of pleasure with no male companionship. Although there is no direct reference to alchemy in The Convent of Pleasure, Lady Happy depicts her convent as a dreamland perfected by human effort. Like the Elysium or alchemical gardens, such a place facilitates the desired result of the alchemical opus, namely artificial creation or improvement of nature through technology. The convent is not only a paradise for women, but also a utopia in which Art has the power of transmutation. This reminds us of early modern alchemists who believed their Work would change the material world (at least in a small controlled area). Lady Happy, like a majority of alchemists and experimental philosophers, focuses solely on changing the physical world. As mentioned earlier, her enthusiasm for creating a dreamland through human effort, as well as her focus on materiality, are problematic in the eyes of not only Madame Mediator, but also Cavendish, the author of the play. According to Sarasohn, Cavendish opposed alchemy and mechanic approaches to nature (2), since [n]ature cannot be ravished by man, who is subordinate to her (145). Cavendish once criticized alchemy in Observations, arguing, though Art, like an Emulating Ape, strives to imitate Nature, yet it is so far from producing natural figures (sig.2x1v). Like alchemists and natural philosophers who fail to achieve their desired results, Lady Happy focuses on pleasure obtained through material fulfillment. As the play progresses, Lady Happy s Work (i.e. the convent) proves to be in vain, as did the endeavors of those great Practitioners, finding, after much Loss and Pains, nothing but Despair, write Books of that Art; which, instead of the Elixir,

62 58_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities did produce Despair (Cavendish, Grounds 310). In the end of the play, the convent collapses after the disclosure of the prince s true identity and the marriage between him and Lady Happy. Feminist scholars tend to regard this as the author s protest against the helpless situation of single women, who had no choice within patriarchal society but to compromise. Lesley Peterson concludes that Cavendish is able to unsettle patriarchy without overturning it (8.25), while Mosher comments that Signified through gender reversals as lover rather than as master, Lady Happy s mate seems worth the risk of marriage, though Cavendish, true to her passion for variety, leaves the ending ambiguous (7.25). Both commentaries shed light on the complexity of Cavendish s gender discourse, though the seemingly abrupt shift from female celibacy to marriage remains unexplained. Here, I would like to offer two alternative interpretations to the ending of The Convent of Pleasure from an alchemical perspective. First, it can be seen as Cavendish s hidden criticism of alchemy s material approach to nature. The failure of Lady Happy s convent indicates the fruitlessness of artificial creation and artificial changes to nature. The fine clothing and food in the convent are all pleasant, though such enjoyment is temporary. Unlike traditional monasteries, the convent has no mechanism for dealing with natural human desire. While Lady Happy drives all men away, she is ambivalent about the possibility of loving and being loved by another woman a situation she perceives as unnatural. Ironically, the seemingly lesbian relationship between her and the prince(ss) happens in an artificial convent, but Lady Happy s reaction suggests that she does not regard this relationship as a refinement of the natural state of heterosexuality: But why may not I love a Woman with the same affection I could a Man? / No, no, Nature is Nature, and still will be / The same she was from all Eternity ( ). My second interpretation of the ending has to do with the opus alchymicum (alchemical operation) and the chemical wedding (see fig. 1), a key image in the opus depicting the conjunction of sulphur (usually considered male ) and quicksilver (or mercury, usually regarded as female ). Fig. 1. Woodcut illustration of the chemical wedding between King Sol (Sun) and Queen Luna (Moon). From Rosarium Philosophorum. British Library Board. MS. Sloane 2560.

63 Tien-Yi Chao_The Chymical Theatre _59 According to Lyndy Abraham, The alchemists were ultimately concerned with the union of substances, the reconciliation of opposites. Through this marriage of opposites the goal of the opus, the production of gold and its metaphysical equivalent, was obtained (35). Such a union, or marriage, is usually referred to as the chemical wedding. As I will elaborate in the next section, the chemical wedding of male and female power, as presented in the sea masque, foreshadows the fact that the single-sex convent is doomed to collapse after Lady Happy is united with the prince. Alchemical Imagery in the Sea Masque Cavendish may have drawn her dramatization of the chemical wedding from both contemporary court masques and alchemical fables. In the following pages, I will discuss the possible intertextuality among the sea masque in The Convent, Ben Jonson s The Masque of Blackness (1605), and the Christian-alchemical text of The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz (1616; 1690), 4 as well as alchemical emblems relating to the chemical wedding and virgin s milk. The opening scene of this sea masque fits well into the conventions of early modern court masques by presenting supernatural scenes and mythological figures. At that time, playwrights, such as Ben Jonson, worked with stage designer Inigo Jones to produce a myriad of extravagant works, usually featuring godly or super-human characters. The masques were performed mostly by royals and courtiers, and it was common to invite the most honorable guests (such as Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria) to play the roles of the hero and the heroine who bring the world back to order (Limon 112-6). The plot and settings of most court masques are imaginative and surreal, filled with grotesque, supernatural scenes involving magic and divine power, and iconic characters who contribute to an awe-inspiring extravaganza. More importantly, court masques, especially in the Caroline court, frequently highlighted the matrimony of the king and the queen. This is evident in the masques by Inigo Jones, who produced images represent[ing] an ideal unity, which was reinforced by the harmonious union of the King and Queen (Veevers 119). According to the stage direction in The Convent, The Scene is opened, and there 4 The original text, Chymische Hochzeit Christiani Rosencreutz anno 1459, was published in Strasburg in The English translation by E. Foxcroft was published in The text is regarded as one of the key texts associated with Rosicrucianism, a philosophical and mystical secret society active in early modern Europe. According to The Rosicrucian Manifestos (2006), another Rosicrucian text entitled Fama Fraternitatis Rosae Crucis ( The fame and confession of the fraternity of the Rosy Cross, which was published in German in 1614 and translated into English by Thomas Vaughan in 1650), contains a critique of alchemists: [T]he true Philosophers are far of another minde, esteeming little the making of Gold, which is but a parergon (37).

64 60_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities is presented a Rock as in the Sea, whereupon sits the Princess and the Lady Happy; the Princess as the Sea-God Neptune, the Lady Happy as a Sea-Goddess: the rest of the Ladies sit somewhat lower, drest like Water-Nymphs ( ). The scene is reminiscent of the setting in Jonson s The Masque of Blackness, which contains a scene of sea creatures and sea nymphs. For example, in this scene, the mermaids appearance and movement are portrayed as such: In front of this sea were placed six tritons, in moving and sprightly actions, their upper parts human, save that their hairs were blue, as partaking of the sea-color: their desinent parts fish, mounted above their heads, and all varied in disposition. (sig.a3v-a4r) In addition, the sea-god Oceanus is presented as an aged man whose skin, hair, and garments are the color of the sea: Oceanus presented in a human form, the color of his flesh blue; and shadowed with a robe of sea-green; his head grey, and horned, as he is described by the ancients: his beard of the like mixed color: he was garlanded with alga, or sea-grass; and in his hand a trident[.] (sig.a3v-a4r) Finally, the six sea monsters carry the twelve torchbearers, which contribute to the special stage effect of illumination. The following picture shows Inigo Jones s illustration of a torchbearer of Oceania: Fig. 2. Inigo Jones, Torchbearer of Oceania, By permission of Bridgeman Art Library.

65 Tien-Yi Chao_The Chymical Theatre _61 The sea masques in The Convent and The Black Masque share numerous features in terms of settings and characterization. However, in contrast to The Black Masque, the sea masque in The Convent not only provides Lady Happy and the Prince with a stage to demonstrate their love and power, but also serves as an arena in which Cavendish can manifest her argument in the art-nature debate. She does this by means of the chemical wedding imagery and iconography of female power in alchemical emblems. Although it is not certain whether Cavendish had ever heard about the 1616 German original of The Chemical Wedding, 5 to some extent The Convent resembles this famous Christian-alchemical treatise. First, both texts describe a protagonist s quest for a better mode of life, though Lady Happy s goal is far more material than that of Christian Rosenkreutz, who conducts an inner journey of personal transformation, which is often referred to as spiritual alchemy (Goodall 63). Secondly, both texts feature plays within plays, images of the chemical wedding (namely the symbolic and matrimonial union between royal couples), and the emblematic icons of male and female rulers. In addition, The Chemical Wedding also contains a song of the sirens scene, which is highly metaphorical and ritualistic: Now being thus passed over this lake, we first came through a narrow arm, into the right sea, where all the sirens, nymphs, and sea-goddesses had attended us; wherefore they immediately dispatched a sea-nymph to us to deliver their present and offering of honour to the Wedding. It as a costly, great, set, round and orient pearl, the like to which hath not at any time been seen, either in ours, or yet in the new world. (Foxcroft 37) Then the sirens form a ring and sing seven songs as to celebrate love and the weddings of the Bride and Bridegroom, as well as the two Kings and their Queens these chemical weddings refer to the alchemical process in which the philosopher s stone is obtained through a series of trials, conjunction, destruction, and resurrection. According to Adam McLean s commentary: [W]hen the company travel in a fleet of seven ships across the great lake, a host of sirens, nymphs and sea-goddesses come to them and begin to sing. Their [the sirens ] song dwells upon this transformative power that lies in Love, and this they address particularly to the King.Only when he has made a balanced relationship to the feminine through the power of Love can he be released from his awful destiny. (Godwin 140) The above scene, in which the chorus celebrates the power of love and union 5 The English version of the treatise was published in 1690.

66 62_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities between man and woman, gives an alchemical image of the chemical wedding. Such an image and the message of harmony and balance can also be seen in Cavendish s sea masque, which, I contend, is significantly alchemical. In the sea masque of The Convent, the sea-god sings about his position and achievement, corresponded by interludes of the sea-goddess s songs. The sea-god begins by proclaiming his ultimate sovereignty over the sea: I Am the King of all the Seas, All Watry Creatures do me please, Obey my Power and Command, And bring me Presents from the Land ( ) Thus from the Earth a Tribute I Receive, which shews my power thereby. Besides, my Kingdom s richer far Then all the Earth and every Star. ( ) The most common interpretation of the above passage regards the sea-god as Cavendish s stand-in, an advocate for the divine rights of kings or absolutism. This is understandable, since the Duchess was a Royalist author who often expressed her support of the monarch. However, my reading from a philosophical perspective suggests that the sea-god s song is not merely political propaganda on behalf of absolutism; it also represents masculine power based on reason. Furthermore, it conveys an ideal picture of an orderly cosmos and the ultimate harmony to be achieved by the chemical wedding of male and female forces. The focus of the second stanza of the sea-god s song shifts significantly from leadership to the relationship between human and nature: PRINC. What Earthly Creature s like to me, That hath such Power and Majestie? My Palaces are Rocks of Stone, And built by Nature s hand alone; No base, dissembling, coz ning Art Do I imploy in any part, In all my Kingdom large and wide, Nature directs and doth provide Me all Provisions which I need, And Cooks my Meat on which I feed. ( ) As the sea-god celebrates nature as the main building block of his kingdom, the actor playing the sea-god (the Prince) is transformed into an essential element of the chemical wedding who must seek another element to generate the effect of conjunction; hence, his presence and intervention inevitably have a huge impact on

67 Tien-Yi Chao_The Chymical Theatre _63 Lady Happy s artificial convent. The second part of the sea masque is the sea-goddess s song, performed by Lady Happy. In contrast to the masculine power of the sea-god, her power is feminine and gentle: L HAPPY. I feed the Sun, which gives them light, And makes them shine in darkest night, Moist vapour from my brest I give, Which he sucks forth, and makes him live, Or else his Fire would soon go out, Grow dark, or burn the World throughout. ( ) In these lines, the sea-goddess portrays herself as the mother of earth, a powerful source of female nurturing in nature. Such an image may refer to an emblem in Atlanta Fugiens (1989; originally printed in 1617), titled Nutrix ejus terra est ( Its [the philosophical child s] nursing-mother is the Earth ), showing a naked woman feeding the philosopher s child 6 with her milk: Fig. 3. Emblem 3: Nutrix ejus terra est. From Atalanta Fugiens, The Flying Atalanta or Philosophical Emblems of the Secrets of Nature by Michael Majerus, Count of the Imperial Consistory M...D... Eq: ex: &c. British Library Board. MS. Sloane According to Godwin s 1989 translation of the original epigram, Romulus was suckled by a she-wolf, and Jupiter by a goat. Who would be surprised when we say that the child of the wise is nourished by the Earth? (43). In addition to female 6 Or the philosopher s stone, born of the union of Sol and Luna (Abraham 211).