Andrew Marvell, Upon Appleton House

Here are the notes I took on it in the basement of Alderman:

MAR-vuhl

• prospective poem (like "Cooper's Hill"; also bring in Cindy on description?)
• rural shit—"Georgics," "The Task," but there are HUMANS in "Appleton House"
• buildings and their ruins and STRUCTURE—of building described, AND of poem—Pamela as a story about the interiors of buildings/characterological interiority. And trying to get inside buildings as an allegory for rape—Pamela, Shamela, Evelina.

"Height with a certaing race doees bend,

But low things clownishly ascend." (59-60)

—something about satire, maybe even Burney's mockery of middle-class pretensions in Evelina

later men become grasshoppers in "the abyss.../Of that unfathomable grass"—poetry about the English Civil War, class-warfare, the Levellers/Diggers had a rebellion that Lord Fairfax (Appleton's owner) was involved in squashing. Will Hume's history of the Civil War explain enough of this to me???

Puritan woodpeckers chopped down the royalist oak with their beaks 'cause it was rotten inside.

• Building as chastity belt:

XII

And oft she spent the summer suns

Discoursing with the subtle nuns.

Whence in these words one to her weaved,

(As 'twere by chance) thoughts long conceived.

XIII

'Within this holy leisure we

Live innocently as you see.

These walls restrain the world without,

But hedge our liberty about.

These bars inclose the wider den

Of those wild creatures, callèd men.

The cloister outward shuts its gates,

And, from us, locks on them the grates.'

(93-104)

Allegories of temptation—the evil prioress wants Isabella Thwaites to become a lesbian slut nun

• and "Paradise Lost"
• and Pilgrim's Progress
• allegory of the Protestant Reformation in England—but how does work with contemporary Puritan/Anglican stuff?

This is the same year Leviathan comes out—what can I say about THAT???

Does a Herrick and has a sexy dream about ivy:

And ivy, with familiar trails,

Me licks, and clasps, and curls, and hales.

Under this antic rope I move

Like some great prelate of the grove.

Then languishing with ease, I toss

On pallets swoll'n of velvet moss. (591-6)

What??? Why is the speaker an embodied person here? Is this an appropriate move for young Maria Fairfax's tutor to make in a poem? What is Marvell doing? (naughty tutors and sex in gardens: see Julie)

Rousseau's Julie: Or the New Eloise

I'm reading William Kenrick's 1761 (first) English translation, on ECCO. (Kenrick decides to cal the novel Eloisa, instead of Julie; I'll be referring to the translation by Kenrick's title.) Kenrick's pretty wacky, and the novel itself is great too. It's also fun to read things that are clearly referenced by other things, and so now I can pick out the fact that Horace Walpole must have been a fairly big fan of Eloisa. The footprints of a scene like this one are all over The Castle of Otranto:

On this [suggestion that Eloisa marry the poorer Saint-Preux) your father expressed himself in a violent passion: he treated the proposal as absurd and ridiculous. How! my lord! said he, is it possible a man of honour, as you are, can entertain such a thought, that the last surviving branch of an illustrious family should to to lose and degrade its name, in that of nobody knows who; a fellow without home, and reduced to subsist upon charity. Hold, sir, interrupted my lord, you are speaking of my friend; consider that I must take upon myself every injury done him in my company, and that such language as is injurious to a man of honour, is more so to him who makes use of it... (v.1 216-217)