ECSTATIC ALCHEMY: JOHN DONNE
AND THE MATTER OF
WOMEN
by
Sonia A. Darbonne
B.A., The University of West Florida, 2004
A thesis submitted to the Department of English
College of Arts and Sciences
The University of West Florida
In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts
2008
The thesis of Sonia A. Darbonne is approved:
R.F. Yeager, Ph.D., Committee Member
Date
Katherine Romack, Ph.D., Committee Chair
Date
Accepted for the Department/Division:
R.F. Yeager, Ph.D., Chair
Date
Accepted for the College:
Jane S. Halonen, Ph.D., Dean
Date
Accepted for the University:
Richard S. Podemski, Ph.D., Dean of Graduate Studies
ii
Date
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I‟ve always been fascinated with the interrelation of the visual and the verbal arts,
and I saw in the poetry of Donne an opportunity to explore and experiment with those
genres. This project grew out of a paper I did in Dr. Romack‟s seminar on the Amatory
Tradition. I extend my thanks to her for laboring with me through many, many drafts. Dr.
Yeager‟s seminars in Courtly Love and Medieval Romance, which introduced me to
Andreas Capellanus‟ Art of Courtly Love, Alan of Lille‟s The Complaint of Nature, and
Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun‟s Romance of the Rose, were indispensible to my
understanding of the romantic tradition that informs metaphysical expressions of love in
the seventeenth century. Many thanks also go to Gabriel Steeves, Rebekah Wilmoth and
Stephen Willoughby for their help with grammar and style.
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................. iii
ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................................ v
INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. 1
CHAPTER I.
“A BODY THAT IS NEXT TO NOTHING” .................................. 5
CHAPTER II.
THE METAPHYSICAL BODY .................................................... 11
CHAPTER III.
THE HOLY BODY ....................................................................... 20
CHAPTER IV.
ECSTATIC ALCHEMY ............................................................... 29
CHAPTER V.
“T‟OUR BODIES WE TURN THEN” ........................................ 34
CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................. 40
WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................... 42
iv
ABSTRACT
ECSTATIC ALCHEMY: JOHN DONNE
AND THE MATTER OF
WOMEN
Sonia A. Darbonne
The first of a seventeenth-century group of male poets affiliated with the
metaphysical style, John Donne is known for his unconventional form and unusual
imagery. During the Baroque, a volatile period of religious turmoil, scientific discovery,
and economic expansion, subjects and objects were increasingly polarized along the lines
of gender. In Songs and Sonnets, Donne troubles this newly-gendered ontology. By
collapsing individuals into the objects that surround them, Donne disrupts the growing
association of subjects with the masculine mind and objects with feminized matter. This
thesis argues that Donne, more so than any other metaphysical poet, questions the ethics
of an impending Cartesian subjectivity by insisting upon the centrality of the body and in
so doing displaces consciousness as the defining element of the modern subject.
v
INTRODUCTION
Donne‟s Songs and Sonnets is both an aesthetic and philosophical exploration of
poetry‟s tendency to objectify woman, to reduce her to an image, to inventory her parts,
and to atomize her into oblivion. In spite of the risk of unsettling a confident and selfassured male poetic tradition, Donne confronts his own annihilation as he performs what
I will term “ecstatic alchemy.” Ecstatic alchemy is an aesthetic strategy that responds to
the masculine fear of annihilation by the Other. Drawing upon the art-historical concept
of ekphrasis, I argue that Donne‟s treatment of love restructures self-other relations in
terms of interrelation and surplus by way of the supplement. As Jacques Derrida has
remarked, “the supplement supplements. It adds only to replace. It intervenes or
insinuates itself in-the-place-of; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void. If it represents and
makes an image, it is by the anterior default of a presence” (Of Grammatology 145). “The
Flea” exemplifies Donne‟s utilization of the supplement as it transforms a simple flea that
has sucked both his and his lady‟s blood into a sacred marriage bed: “It suck‟d me first,
and now sucks thee,/And in this flea our two bloods mingled be” (lines 3-4). In the flea‟s
“living walls of jet” (line 15), the speaker and his lady are united in such a way that the
mingling of their bloods dissolves self-other boundaries without “sin, or shame, or loss of
maidenhead” (line 6). Niall Lucy notes that “the defining characteristic of the
supplement, namely that it can be detached or dispensed with, makes it not less but all the
more necessary to the work it performs in helping to constitute the idea of the object in
1
2
terms of its own originary completion” (137).1 Lucy uses Kant‟s examples of an
ornamental frame or a statue‟s drapery which can be viewed as both intrinsic and
secondary to the work itself. The indistinct inside-outside boundary created by the
supplement suggests that at the origin of every beautiful object lies a lack that the
supplement conceals by its very addition to a thing. In “The Canonization,” the
supplement appears in the narrator‟s claim that “We‟ll build in sonnets pretty rooms”
(line 32) so that “all shall approve/ Us canonized for love” (line 35-36). Once fettered by
verse, the love between the narrator and his lady becomes a model for all to imitate. Both
individuals co-exist, “And we in us find th‟eagle and the dove” (line 22), even as the
boundaries between self and other are suspended “By us; we two being one are it;/So, to
one neutral thing both sexes fit” (lines 24-25).
Before Donne, male subjects demonstrated their transcendence of the body by
fissuring woman, obsessively anatomizing her parts in order to expose her fabricated
nature. Donne‟s poetry, on the other hand, insists upon the vitality of matter by turning
objects into the poetic speaker‟s consciousness, thereby re-establishing the subject‟s ties
to materiality. In “A Valediction of My Name in the Window,” for example, the narrator
reduces himself to his name etched on the window of his lady‟s house, taking on the
position of a conscious other that trembles when she carelessly opens the window. The
narrator is surprisingly feminine, his body a glass pane that quivers when his lady touches
him. The narrator‟s self-conscious objectivity reveals the critical role otherness has in
determining subjectivity:
1
Niall Lucy brings Derrida‟s musings on the supplement to bear on the problem Kant‟s parergon has in
defining a thing‟s aesthetic totality. See Niall Lucy, A Derrida Dictionary (Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishing, 2004).
3
„Tis much that glass should be
As all-confessing and through-shine as I;
„Tis more that it shows thee to thee,
And clear reflects thee to thine eye.
But all such rules, love‟s magic can undo:
Here you see me, and I am you. (lines 7-12)
The vitality of Donne‟s poetry arises from his awareness of what Julia Kristeva
has termed “our own foreigness” (Howells 220) – the otherness that resides at the heart of
subjectivity. Donne‟s use of the blazon and conceit to disarticulate new configurations of
subject-object relations might initially appear to make Donne complicit in a dualism that
values form over representation in so far as they reaffirm the unreliability of the senses.2
However, his treatment of the woman in such poems as his nineteenth elegy, “To His
Mistress Going to Bed,” has, I think, more to do with Donne‟s quest to represent a
woman‟s subjectivity without negating her agency than with reducing her to an object of
dissection.
A poetics of pleasure unfurls in Songs and Sonnets through the love relation,
specifically through the narrator‟s continual disavowal of bodily penetration, as he
chooses instead to traverse across the body‟s surface or fuse his being with another‟s
body. In both cases, the immediacy of skin – whether it be wet and spongy with tears in
“A Valediction of Weeping,” hot and meteor-like in “A Fever,” turned to ash in “The
Canonization,” embalmed in “The Funeral” and “The Relic,” or fettered in “The Triple
Fool” – suggests that subject formation should occur not at the level of the etherealizing
mind, but at the boundaries of the material body. Metaphysical poets are adept at
2
I use the term “form” in the sense of Plato‟s theory of forms that proposes that the intellectual word is
more real than the physical object itself. See Thomas Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith. “Plato,” The
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Eds. James Fieser and Bradley Dowden, 2008, 20 Feb. 2008
<http://www.iep.utm.edu/p/plato.htm>.
4
countering and subverting Cartesian dualism. When the subject shifts to women, ethnic
difference, or the poor, however, such subversions become much less playful and more
ambivalent, knotted with perspectival anxieties about gender, race and class.
CHAPTER I
“A BODY THAT IS NEXT TO NOTHING”
Seventeenth-century England experienced dramatic social and economic
revolutions that would forever transform the way people related to their world. The
religious turmoil of the period, culminating in civil war, forced individuals to rethink
their relationship to both political and religious institutions. Advances in the new science
prompted a rethinking of what it meant to be human. Moreover, the radical acceleration
of primitive accumulation and overseas exploration not only exposed a once-enclosed
island country to different cultures, resources, and ideas, but also transformed it into a
formidable, imperialist nation, driven to map and conquer the world for economic profit.
The medieval idea of man as a microcosm of the universe was dismantled in the
seventeenth century as the radical conception of the body as alienated and disjointed
called into question the certainty of a complete and present self. These developments
radically altered subject-object relations and gave rise to what T.S. Eliot would call a
“dissociation of sensibility.”3
People began to perceive the world differently as relationships between people
and things came to be understood in terms of distance. A new recognition of
3
Eliot uses this term to describe the way English poetry from the seventeenth century onward has divorced
thought from feeling. See “The Metaphysical Poets,” in Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, Ed. Frank Kermode
(New York, Harcourt, Inc., 1975).
5
6
“perspective” prompted male thinkers like René Descartes to insist that the senses were
an unreliable source for knowledge:
I find, for example, two completely diverse ideas of the sun in my mind;
the one derives its origin from the senses… according to this idea the sun
seems to be extremely small; but the other is derived from astronomical
reasonings… in accordance with it the sun appears to be several times
greater than the earth… these two ideas cannot, indeed, both resemble the
same sun. (Philosophical Works, Meditation III, HR, I, 161)
Noting that the sun can be both visually small and mathematically immense, Descartes
challenges the idea that the body can be a trustworthy vehicle for acquiring truth through
one‟s immediate experience of the world. Cartesian self-other relations rely on a
distancing principle: "Je pense, donc je suis" – the only thing a person can be sure of is
his own subjectivity.4 Descartes figures the subject as something psychological,
intimately inside, as something separate from an otherwise-illusory and distant outside
world. The Cartesian mind-body split, a derivation of Plato‟s forms and ideas, draws
from a long philosophical tradition that aligned masculinity with the immutable soul and
conflated female bodies with matter.5 As a result of Descartes‟ internalization and
disembodiment of the subject, the idea of woman undergoes a more thoroughgoing
detachment from subjectivity: woman no longer animates a generative body; instead, she
is a mechanistic composite of objectified parts.
Focusing on the distancing of subject from object in the work of Descartes, Susan
Bordo emphasizes the gendered aspects of this seventeenth-century intellectual sea
4
See Descartes: Selected Philosophical Writings. “I think therefore I am,” Discourse on Method (1637)
part IV. Descartes would later repeat this phrase in the Latin in his Principles of Philosophy (1644) s7.
5
“The classical association of femininity with materiality can be traced to a set of etymologies which link
matter with mater and matrix (or the womb) and, hence, with reproduction. The classical configuration of
matter as a site of generation or origination becomes especially significant when the account of what an
object is and means requires recourse to its originating principle.” See Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter:
On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993) 31.
7
change, characterizing this change as a “drama of parturition” through which a new
“sense of locatedness, or situatedness, of self in space and time” was born through the
labors of male rationalists (The Flight to Objectivity 62). To know the world became a
heady endeavor for male thinkers. Modern man‟s need for objectivity demanded
psychological distance from the world as he experienced it. Consequently, the human
mind assumed a new centrality as it exercised its rational powers over the objects of its
scrutiny. Ultimately, Cartesian dualism would become the formal axis of a new
epistemological grid upon which binaries plotted the terms of a newly dichotomized
order of things. Thus Descartes, in his pursuit of objectivity, found perspective to be the
body‟s major impediment. In order to circumvent this problem, Descartes removed the
body from the realm of knowing, and in doing so de-animated it. Man became pure mind,
his body, a mechanical instrument of the cogito.
Descartes consistently equated the body to a soulless, cold machine. He
“suppos[ed] the body to be nothing but a statue or machine,” affiliated “the body of a
living man” to “a watch or other automaton,” and even “toyed with the notion of
constructing a human automaton activated by magnets” (Tiffany 50).6 Just as Descartes
mechanized the body, concerns about corporeality inundated all fields of seventeenth
century discourse. In the field of science, for instance, anatomists splayed cadavers for
public viewings. In the field of art, the Baroque body was contorted and twisted to test
the limits of its representation. Indeed, it is in the seventeenth century that the body,
6
Descartes‟ familiarity with living machines is often retold in a curious anecdote involving the
philosopher‟s travels with an automaton fashioned in the likeness of his dead daughter, Francine. As Bordo
reports, Descartes brought the mechanical girl with him on a sea voyage to Sweden, and the ship‟s
superstitious captain, horrified upon its discovery, threw the thing overboard. See “Introduction,” Susan
Bordo, Feminist Interpretations of René Descartes (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 1999) 12.
8
separate and distanced from the self, became a thing, a lifeless object of scrutiny. During
this time of sensual intrigue and distrust, women‟s bodies came to be figured as
mysterious machines. Their alterity made them ethically suitable objects for sadistic
dissection.7 Made into the object of the scientist‟s gaze, the anatomized body became
feminized as it took on the position of an alien other whose “unwillingness to obey” and
“speak” its secrets linked it also to the resistant objects of colonial exploration: as
Jonathan Sawday observes, “the diseased body” was “an image of rebellion” (36). In
order to justify the conquest and exploitation of the body for the greater good, the alien
body was made cadaverous, an empty shell that housed no soul: “the modern body had
emerged: a body that worked rather than existed” (32).
Metaphysical poets were particularly responsive to this epistemological
reframing, offering a cultural challenge to the new science‟s evisceration of the body.
Robert Herrick‟s poem “Julia‟s Petticoat” describes the garment as if it were alive:
“sometimes 'twould pant, and sigh, and heave” (line 5). Similarly, the very letters
comprising George Herbert‟s “Easter Wings” wax and wane as if the poem itself were a
breathing torso. Andrew Marvell‟s “A Dialogue Between the Soul and Body” imagines
the body and the soul fighting for sovereignty, while Richard Crashaw‟s “The Flaming
Heart” transposes the position of the female saint with the male seraphim embarking on a
cross-disciplinary intertextuality. In each of these poems, gendered binaries subjectobject binaries are denaturalized.
Six years prior to the publication of Descartes‟ Discourse on Method, Donne had
already challenged the growing estrangement of the mind and body, as well as the
7
Jonathan Sawday, in The Body Emblazoned, details the ways the early modern body becomes at once both
mechanized and hyperbolically sexed in a culture obsessed with anatomy.
9
gendered conceptions accompanying dualistic thinking by making the idea of the
objective self an object of study. Since the publication in 1921 of Eliot‟s essay “The
Metaphysical Poets,” scholars such as Arthur Marotti, Thomas Docherty, Ben Saunders
and Michael Holmes have found in Donne‟s poetry a radical re-conceptualization of the
self as a generative composite of socialized parts.8 As Eliot observed, by recombining
antipodal ideas through a “telescoping of images and multiplied associations,” Donne and
other metaphysical poets achieved a unification of thought and feeling (60).9 Recognizing
one‟s self as an object of study alters subjectivity because in unseating consciousness as a
masculine privilege it reveals the capacity for agency in objectivity. Donne‟s collection
of lyrical poems Songs and Sonnets uses perspective in a way that attempts to unify
things and selves metaphorically in order to present the self as a supplement exceeding
binary categorization. Donne‟s poetry exhibits a deep preoccupation with the body‟s
8
Arthur Marotti claims Donne viewed himself as a coterie poet by “treating poetry as an avocation, part of
a life and career whose main goals… were social status and advancement” (John Donne, Coterie Poet 3).
Unlike Marotti, who believes one can come to know the “real” Donne by historicizing literature, Thomas
Docherty problematizes the pursuit, focusing instead on the “three main culturally significant and
historically problematic areas which bear on Donne‟s writings: the scientific, which troubles secular
historicity itself; the socio-cultural, in which woman raises certain defences in this male poet; and the
aesthetic, in which mimetic writing itself becomes fraught with difficulty” (John Donne, Undone 1). Ben
Saunders develops this point of interpretive contention by pinpointing “the representation of desire [as] the
fundamental locus of interpretive disagreement over Donne‟s works” (Desiring Donne 92). Michael
Holmes views metaphysical poetry as “disturb[ing] and estrang[ing] fictions of „natural‟ perception, desire,
and identity that continue to inform Western Culture” (Early Modern Metaphysical Literature 1).
9
In a conversation with Donne‟s contemporary Ben Jonson, William Drummond remarked how Jonson
declared that “Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging” even as Jonson divulged “he esteemeth
John Donne the first poet in the world in some things: his verse of the lost chain he hath by heart; and that
passage of „The Calm,‟ That dust and feather do not stir, all was so quiet” (179). Conflicting opinions
about Donne would continue to sustain the poet‟s reputation in literary circles as distinctly paradoxical.
Stanley Fish labels the poet “sick… his poetry is sick; but he and it are sick in ways that are interestingly
related to the contemporary critical scene” (223). C.A. Patrides, on the other hand, blatantly remarks,
“Donne is in the first instance coarse. The judgment is ventured in earnest, and meant not in denigration but
in praise” (14). Catherine Martin surmises it is Donne‟s “play with glaring inconsistencies [the] resulting
tensions [of which] have long prevented the libertine „Jack Donne‟ from being fully separated from the
devoutly or despairingly questioning „Dr. Donne‟” (122) even as Michael Holmes stresses the “recognition
of „instability‟ as a principal element of Donne‟s poetics” (125).
10
metamorphosis from subject to object: a flea becomes a marriage bed; a pair of lovers
turn into compass legs; faces are hemispheres; and a lady‟s tears are minted coins.
Donne‟s Songs and Sonnets collapses time and fuses the distance between mind
and matter, thereby rejecting a dualism that would distance bodies from consciousness
and knowledge, while unraveling the ideological barriers that would separate bodily
subjects from material objects. In this collection of poems, Donne makes himself a
subject of partition, even marking his own body as distinctly feminine. At the same time,
Songs and Sonnets points to Donne‟s investment in the conceit as an ethical response to
the epistemological desire to cut otherness to pieces, a recurring gesture in modernity.
Donne turns the poetic blazon onto himself, and what was once a device used by male
poets to categorize and thereby gain mastery over women‟s bodies becomes a means for
rediscovering one‟s body in the midst of the corporeal dissolutions of a nascent
epistemology.
CHAPTER II
THE METAPHYSICAL BODY
One of the most arresting features of the Holy Sonnets is the poetic speaker‟s
feminization in his quest for absolution through bodily pain. In “Holy Sonnet 3,” the
speaker tells God to “Impute me righteous” because previously, in “Holy Sonnet 1,” he
has asked God “Why doth the devil then usurp in me?/ Why doth he steal, nay ravish,
that‟s thy right?” (lines 9, 10). “Holy Sonnet 7” particularizes the speaker‟s fascination
with pain through his identification with Christ‟s suffering: “Spit in my face, ye Jews,
and pierce my side,/ Buffet, and scoff, scourge, and crucify me: For I have sinn‟d, and
sinn‟d” (lines 1-3). “Holy Sonnet 10” is the most uninhibited poem about violence in the
series as the speaker requests the Holy Spirit to
Batter my heart, three-person‟d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o‟erthrow me; and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I like an usurp‟d town t‟another due, (lines 1-5)
and then he instructs the Holy Spirit to
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste except you ravish me. (lines 10-14)
Early modern poets contend with the subject of rape in horrific depictions of
violence against women because the male early modern poet unavoidably wrote out of a
11
12
long tradition that relied on the ego-affirming reduction of women to objects and the
figuration of poetry itself as rape, as the violent penetration and capture of inanimate
matter.10 Literary rape silences the feminine, but it also serves as the re-combinatory
power that interweaves selves (female bodies) to raw materiality (earthly matter). In these
texts, women‟s weaving of their selves onto their objectified otherness (as objects of
desire) one finds, in the breakdown and reassessment of representation, a matter of
contending with women‟s subjectivity. In other words, women gain agency by
representing their trauma in verbalized pictures. This feminized subjectivity is adept at
coping with subject-object relations structured by lack. Metaphysical poetry, influenced
by the eroticism of Ovid‟s Metamorphoses, prompts the salvaging of matter, the
rethreading of pleasure through the holes of desire, and finally the reconstitution of the
very design of these women‟s sexed bodies in order to sustain their selves in the newborn
world of the disembodied, masculine subject.
Donne was not the first to experiment with the elasticity of gendered self-other
relations. In an attempt to explicate Spenser‟s ideas about allegory and poetry‟s long
affiliation with rape “where meaning is violently imposed on the material (and hence
feminine) world” (Eggert 5) Katherine Eggert examines the “ontologically incompatible”
programs of rape and rapture in The Faerie Queene (10). Eggert finds that The Faerie
Queene‟s consistently slips from rapturous to rapine scenes, a maneuver that arises from
poetry‟s gendered construction out of rape and masculine desire. Additionally, Eggert
posits that the vitality in The Faerie Queene comes from the poem‟s suggestion of “how
10
“It is necessary… that allegory somehow capture the substantiality of beings and raise it to the
conceptual plane. But for this to occur any integrity those beings may have must be negated. The negation
of the integrity of the other, of the living, is the first moment of allegory‟s exertion of its power to seize and
to tear.” See Gordon Tesky, Allegory of Violence (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996) 18.
13
rapture might replace rape as a model for the interface of human and other physical
bodies” and the problem of doing so (9). In other words, The Faerie Queene offers
glimpses of a poetics of rapture and feminine pleasure that counters masculine desire.
This feminine poetics finds its beginnings in the image. Specifically, Eggert‟s
identification of the Busirane episode as “the most important meditation upon the contrast
between rapine and rapturous poetry,” brings to the surface the narrative sensuality of the
episode‟s dependence on physicality (11). What The Faerie Queene offers its readers is
the disruption of a masculine poetics grounded in lack. Donne‟s metaphysical poetry
furthers this disruption by embarking on a feminine program of “ekphrastic frisson.”11
Since Plato‟s description of love in The Symposium as “the pursuit of the whole”
(54), desire has been inextricably linked to lack. In a modern economy of self-other
relations that locates wholeness not in one‟s self, but in the other desire is construed as an
urgent impulse to fill a void. As Jacques Lacan defines it, desire is “a relation of being to
lack” (223). For early modern commentators, the question of desire was an ethically
charged one because the means of realizing the whole, especially if it entails annihilating
the other, was an issue wrapped up with their definition of the Good. During the
Renaissance, eros and passion were almost universally regarded as ethically suspect. As
the seventeenth century wore on, however, desire became increasingly regarded as an
intrinsic human trait. An interrogation of desire on ethical grounds became increasingly
difficult to advance. It is this naturalization of desire that Donne resists in his poetry.
11
I use the term “ekphrastic frisson” to define the unique capability of the verbal image to metamorphosize
allegorical rape and penetrative desire into rapture and surface pleasure, the implications of which involve
the ability of objectified, material bodies to exhibit consciousness and agency.
14
The English poetic and dramatic tradition is littered with the remains of brutally
raped and silenced female characters. The Renaissance humanist return to the heroic
tradition exploited Philomela, Persephone, Io, Callisto, Daphne, and Europa and a reinvigorated interest in Ovid‟s works threw forth a slew of early modern raped bodies,
including Spenser‟s Britomart and Shakespeare‟s Lucrece and Lavinia. What is
interesting is the frequency with which these women find power and voice in silent
pictures. These women‟s representational means of pictorial storytelling coupled with the
ethical desire for vocalizing trauma is converted by the Metaphysicals into a new mode of
symbolic representation: “ekphrasis.” Ekphrasis is akin to confession in its meaning of
“speaking out,” a “telling in full” (OED). By the eighteenth century, the term was used in
rhetoric to mean “a plain declaration or interpretation of a thing.” During the seventeenth
century, anxiety about surface materiality still exerted a dominating presence in all modes
of discourse, extending beyond the body to the underlying motives of individuals.
Ekphrasis thus retains more a confessionary signification in the early modern period, and
its appearance in metaphysical poetry points to epistemological worries about interpretive
practices. In his seminal text, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign, Murry Krieger
defines “the ekphrastic impulse” as “the semiotic desire for the natural sign; the desire,
that is, to have the world captured in the word… the word to which it belongs” (11).
Ekphrasis attempts to create presence out of suspension – time/space, being/becoming,
and self/other. The ekphrastic act is in effect a baroque act – a call for presence in the
midst of absence, a trace that demands recognition of its self as a subject in spite of its
absent object. Ekphrasis, like the baroque, ultimately entails dissecting the anatomy of
becoming – the violent subjugation of an object (usually a woman), the object‟s
15
subsequent subjection (her rape), and the drama‟s final supplementary act, the birthing of
the symbolic gesture (the hermeneutic text).
James A.W. Heffernan notes “the word of [Doris] Lessing, who decreed that the
duty of pictures was to be silent and beautiful (like a woman), leaving expression to
poetry,” as one example of how verbal and visual representation become gendered (7).
Under this aesthetic framework, agency (subjectivity itself) is ethically problematic for
women. Men are agents because they are vocal, and women are agent-less because they
should not be vocal. Consequently, pictures and women are good only if they are
dutifully silent; thus any vocal attempt by a woman demonstrating a desire for agency
results in her violent punishment. However, Heffernan argues agency is not limited to
vocal acts alone. In fact, he pinpoints several literary examples where pictures speak
precisely because they resist vocalization:
In the Aeneid, the fixating power of the image that threatens the forward
progress of the hero is decisively linked to pulcherrima Dido, a queen of
picture-perfect beauty and – like Cleopatra later – threat to male authority.
In Keats‟ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the figures sculpted on the womblike
urn that is called an unravished bride of quietness refuse to cooperate with
a male narrative of desire and consummation. . . And in the Ovidian myth
of Philomela. . . a picture of rape woven by a mutilated woman unweaves
the story told by a man. (6)
In Songs and Sonnets, Donne focuses on unhinging what Heffernan calls the “gendered
antagonism… between verbal and visual representation” by occupying both feminine and
masculine perspectives, concomitantly depicting himself as an inaccessible image and
confessionary speaker (7). Through his manipulation of the common association of
masculine with the verbal and feminine with the visual, Donne complicates the gendered
character of agency. Donne attacks both a tradition of poetics and a new instrumental
16
reason by rejecting a myopic focus on representation as mimesis. Consequently, Donne‟s
own investment in poetry comes into question as his manipulation of the gendered imageword binary undermines poetry‟s dependence upon a tradition of mimetic representation,
even as it unveils the illusory distance between agents and non-agents.
“The Relic” reveals Donne‟s concern with the way interpretive practices affect
physical bodies. “The Relic” centers on the speaker‟s becoming a miraculous object
when a grave-robber misinterprets a love-token as a mysterious sign. The narrator posits
his exhumation to his beloved as if it were rape; his use of the term “woman-head”
conjures up the image of a lost maidenhead: once his “grave is broke up again… he that
digs it, spies/ a bracelet of bright hair about the bone” (lines 1, 5-6). The conceit of the
“bright hair about the bone” eroticizes the love token and feminizes the male speaker as
the image doubles as both a phallus entering the vaginal cavity and the reader‟s
voyeurism. Both the transposition of gender roles and shift in point of view are brought
together in the image of a male narrator‟s grave being violated as if he were a young lady.
It is by becoming a feminine body subject to rape that the narrator can reassure his
beloved that this poem testifies to the real miracle: that both he and his lady participate in
a love that is not centered on physical penetration: “Perchance might kiss, but not
between those meals;/Our hands ne‟er touch‟d the seals,/Which nature, injur‟d by late
law, sets free” (lines 28-30). In fact, the love shared between the narrator and his beloved
exceeds language itself, for representing love in the traditional manner would risk
reducing her to an image: “all measure and all language I should pass,/Should I tell what
a miracle she was” (lines 32-3). In becoming an object, the narrator departs from a
patriarchal form of love that depends upon the social control and regulation of female
17
bodies. This kind of love, manifested in the silent image of the bracelet of hair, entails the
sort of relation Donne advances as a way to resist programs of masculine desire. To
further emphasize the point, Donne‟s male speaker takes on the feminine position of the
penetrated woman by becoming emblazoned, the parts of his body are converted into
relics “in a time or land,/Where mis-devotion doth command” (lines 12-13).
The bracelet is also the subject of “The Funeral.” Giving instruction to whomever
will bury him, the speaker warns the gravedigger not to “harm/nor question much/That
subtle wreath of hair, which crowns mine arm” (lines 2-3). In the end, both “The Relic”
and “The Funeral” are concerned with the risk of misinterpreting a simple love-token for
a miraculous object, and even the narrator in “The Funeral” cannot attest to the true
meaning behind the gift when he discloses “Whate‟er she meant by‟t, bury it with
me,/For since I am Love‟s martyr, it might breed idolatry,/If into other hands these relics
came” (lines 17-20). In both poems, the silent image is given priority over the woman‟s
intent, and readers are left with the lucid image of “a bracelet of bright hair about the
bone” (line 6).
The feminized speaker does not confess, since to break silence and speak trauma
opens one up to penetration again. Instead, by weaving the story into an impenetrable
image, the speaker denies poetic desire and instead engages in a program of pleasure. If
poetry is secured by desire because it depends upon a perpetual lack that is
characteristically masculine and in service of the male subject by aiming at annihilating
the other, then Donne‟s poetry is anchored in the supplementarity of the verbal image. In
a poetics of pleasure, penetration and annihilation of the other is not the means for
wholeness. Instead, readers can traverse only across conceits as if they were the surface
18
of skin. In Donne‟s poetics of pleasure, the urgency of sex is displaced as the distinction
between self and other dissolves under the frisson of his conscious objects.
Metaphysical poets drew upon divergent ideas from various disciplines in order to
construct radical arguments that complicate the foundational role of the sexed body. Ilona
Bell suggests that Donne‟s works anticipate a modern conception of gender (214), while
Susannah B. Mintz locates this work “in the threshold spaces mapped out by images of
liminality [where] Donne reconfigures [and] reposition[s] male self and female other in
ways that elude stock oppositions of „center‟ and „margin‟”(603). Kenneth Gross
contends that in Donne‟s poems “one is aware of certain positional shifts in the argument
that force one continually to re-evaluate both the limits of the speaker‟s power and the
shape of his desire” (390) and Nancy Selleck argues for Donne‟s “commit[ment] to a
radically interpersonal [idea of] selfhood – a sense that the root or cause or locus of one‟s
self lies in others” (168). What these critics gesture towards is the primary function of
metaphysical poetry: to disarticulate the unquestioned primacy of sex in forming
politicized subjects. Using the conceit, these poets playfully posit the body‟s potential for
generative surplus while reaffirming sexual difference.12 The intent of the metaphysical
conceit is, then, to exploit the representational limits between image and word in order to
yield a surplus of metaphor, a recombination of affect and effect, a metaphor that will rip
apart, replace and sew again a newly stratified subjectivity to a body that has been
changed by its interaction with the Other (whether it be God, the Word or Knowledge
itself). Metaphysical poetry, in short, performs ekphrastic acts. Donne, in particular, uses
12
The conceit is “an extended figure of speech… involv[ing] the use of paradox, images from arcane
sources not usually drawn upon by poets, and an original and usually complex comparison between two
highly dissimilar things,” Ross Murfin, “metaphysical conceit” (The Bedford Glossary of Literary Terms)
262.
19
ekphrasis to account for his own complicity, as a male poet, in the older word-picture
dualism even as he understands the potentiality of the picture to usurp language itself.
Both baroque art and metaphysical poetry define a subject that comes into existence only
in the moment when the surface tension of its body is ruptured by a power beyond. Fully
inhabiting and thus limited to a world of subjective perception in the Cartesian view, a
self can meet with the other only through a body that is at once inconsistent and
hyperbolically sexed. This ruptured body is the metaphysical body, a fabric remnant of
rape, the last hermeneutical vestige of a world soon to be supplanted by the sovereignty
of Cartesian dualism and epistemology.
CHAPTER III
THE HOLY BODY
The highly eroticized, permeable body of early modern poetry is the effect of a
cultural uneasiness produced by new conceptions of identity rooted not in the body, but
ideologically applied to the surface of materiality itself. Richard Rambuss has
characterized Crashaw‟s fascination with penetrable orifices as indicative of
metaphysical poetry‟s desire to convert objectified bodies into meaningful subjects.
Rambuss claims,
In Crashaw‟s poetry, then, gender never really poses a limit to what the
devout body can perform or what can be performed on it. The subject
positions of penetrator and penetrated, possessor and possessed, can
variously and successively be assumed by both male and female bodies…
which themselves regularly speak back and forth across genders. (271)
One interesting connection Sawday makes between the rise of anatomy theatres and early
modern poetry is the utilization of the “blazon,” a type of conceit that anatomizes female
bodies into commercialized parts (eyes are jewels; hair is gold, etc.) “as a form of
homosocial meditation amongst men in which the female body was the currency” (202).
Sawday draws from the blazon‟s association with the shield (as a protective and
identifying device) when he argues that the blazon is a strategic contrivance used in early
modern poetry to protect and reaffirm masculine bonds. The body emblazoned in
metaphysical poetry is, by contrast, often curiously male. In Crashaw‟s poetry, the body,
20
21
as it becomes feminine through the blazon, is a (w)holey body: Truth‟s lack is located at
the points of inflection created from the body‟s gaping holes, upsetting the fantasy of
obtaining wholeness through the other and thereby allowing a transubstantiation of being,
a transgression of normalized sexed positions of power that otherwise anchor feminine
and masculine subjectivities to material bodies.
In metaphysical poetry, the body is at once a devotional subject and spiritual
object. As evidenced in Crashaw‟s poetry, the place of the self must continuously shift in
relation not only to the acts of penetration and possession, but also, and more
importantly, to the public act of observation in order to separate and distance the public
self of society from the private self for God. Michael Holmes looks at Crashaw‟s use of
hagiology and he adds a political dimension to Rambuss‟ claim by asserting,
“[Crashaw‟s] baroque gender transitivity… depends upon an initial recognition that
public identity is a product of malleable and contingent signifiers” (132-3). Identity is
thus a rhetorical drama. The self is purely composed on the surface, and yet it
simultaneously looks inward towards a reconciliation of its split center. Because
Cartesian subjectivity is irrevocably split from the body, the very anchor of a thing‟s
humanity is ultimately relative. Determined from the outside, the self is not a unified
thing, but rather a point of focus, always judged by the anterior Other who watches.
Donne was very conscious of the dividing effect of being under the scurrilous
public eye. In Songs and Sonnets, Donne exploits the dissonance between public and
private identities by manipulating the body precisely to disarticulate dualism‟s hegemonic
hold on the complete and present self. More often than not, Donne challenges the very
possibility of acquiring wholeness in his poetry by questioning the place women are
22
supposed to occupy in the love exchange between self and other. In “Love‟s Alchemy,”
Donne works against society‟s positing of woman as that locus of complete otherness.
“Love‟s Alchemy” is split into two stanzas that knot, as it were, a dualistic whole. The
first stanza, dealing with the body, translates the way that fantasies (specifically the
fantasy of autogenesis) structure reality through the consumption and exploitation of
matter. The second stanza, concerned with the mind, questions neo-platonic love as an
ethical good. The stanza‟s last two lines unravel the poem‟s little universe by contesting
the use of matter as a means for sublimation.
In stanza one, the narrator has already experienced the shortcomings of trying to
obtain wholeness through the other, ultimately deeming the whole pursuit impossible.
Looking for wholeness in the “centric” part of women is “imposture” (lines 2-6). The
pursuit is, in fact, alchemical: the fantasies of transmuting base metals to gold, creating a
panacea and gaining eternal life will always be unattainable. The alchemical fantasy of
autogenesis is ultimately an infertile quest, like a pair of lovers who fantasize that their
intimate union with one another can propel them beyond the bounds and regulations of
space and time.
The second stanza provides a radical example of the political implications of the
framework laid out in stanza one. The narrator looks specifically at one form of social
and religious unification – marriage. Stanza one questions dualism by interrogating the
integrity of sexual difference. Stanza two restates the problem neo-platonically. The
narrator begins by setting up a conversation about ethics: “Our ease, our thrift, our honor,
and our day,/ Shall we for this vain bubble‟s shadow pay?/ Ends love in this?” (lines 1315). The narrator exposes the ideology informing this relationship between class and
23
ethical value when he makes an unlikely comparison between a wedding ceremony‟s
pageantry and a woman‟s body. The rationalization of neo-platonic love, “‟Tis not the
bodies marry, but the minds,” is undercut by the narrator‟s tone, depicting a man‟s
participation in this kind of fantasy: “Which he in her angelic finds,/ Would swear as
justly, that he hears,/ In that day‟s rude hoarse minstrelsy, the spheres”(lines 20-23). As
in stanza one, the narrator in stanza two still finds trouble in those who envisage the
possibility of wholeness obtainable through materiality, or more precisely, through
women, for one cannot make the leap from representation to the Real through
performative means.
By equating the philosophical pursuit of alchemy with the earthly purpose of sex
and then contending with the ideals of neo-platonic love in light of this relationship, the
narrator mimes Cartesian skepticism precisely to muddle the finality inherent in dualistic
thinking. As the last two lines suggest, men cannot use women to cure a lack inherent in
themselves: “hope not for mind in women. At their best,/ Sweetness and wit, they‟re, but
mummy possess‟d” (lines 23-24). It is a false hope to think one can overcome the
abysmal distance between subjects and objects by using the other as an intermediary
vessel. The economic conversion of women‟s bodies into commodities cannot bring men
completion. In fact, the poem‟s revelation of women‟s bodies as esoteric otherness points
to a different conception of the metaphysical body at work in Donne‟s poetry.
While Crashaw‟s body can be describe as (w)holey, a series of penetrable and
penetrated holes, Donne‟s body is holy and hermetically sealed. He extols a closed,
24
rhizome-like body.13 Songs and Sonnets maps an impenetrable body that consists of an
assemblage of the new science and the new philosophy. Cartographic, astronomical and
anatomical images abound throughout Songs and Sonnets: lovers are compasses in “A
Valediction Forbidding Mourning”; their faces fold into one another a composite map in
“The Good Morrow”; their tears combine to create a globe and its sea in “A Valediction
of Weeping”; alchemical emblems arise with the phoenix in “The Canonization” and the
mandrake in “Song” and “Twicknam Garden”; and dissection runs rampant as the
narrator partitions himself in “The Will,” “Love‟s Exchange,” “The Funeral,” The
Relic,” and “The Damp.” In all these poems, Donne‟s body is transversal, intersecting the
realms of subjectivity and objectivity without incapable of being entirely incorporated
into either.
Donne scholars have repeatedly returned to defining Donne‟s body in terms of
desire, for ultimately desire threads this holy, composite body. Ben Saunders rightly
names desire as Donne‟s central theme when he contends that it “constitutes the
fundamental locus of interpretive disagreement over Donne‟s work” (92). Though his
project is to reinvigorate literary criticism through his use of a rhetorical Donne as the
site for critics to recognize their own practices in interpretive desire, Saunders is
particularly important to consider when thinking about subject-object relations in
Donne‟s lyric poetry. Saunders is sensitive to the dynamism of Donne‟s desire to
13
See “Introduction: Rhizome,” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987) 3-25. Deleuze and Guattari respond to what they
find troubling about western philosophy, mainly its basis in representational thinking which naturalizes the
subject and its surrounding objects as mimetically congruent (self-other relations). With its root-branch
structuring, the image of the Saussurian tree dominates philosophy. A Thousand Plateaus is an attempt to
expose the shortcomings and suggest alternatives to this philosophy, primarily through the image of the
rhizome, a root-less, underground stem that “has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between
things, interbeing, intermezzo… the tree imposes the verb „to be,‟ but the fabric of the rhizome is the
conjunction, „and… and… and…‟,” 24.
25
construct a particular kind of body, “the simultaneous co-presence and mutual exclusivity
of two postures toward sexual difference – the posture of reinscription and the posture of
collapse” (141).
Donne spiritualizes the body throughout Songs and Sonnets. By closing the body
and making it holy, Donne centers on hagiological acts of bodily union – love relations
between the holy body and one‟s self that become the means by which the Other can
rupture, de-materialize and re-stratify the subject in relation to the world. In this kind of
reliquary love, the body is a holy vessel in which the possibility for mundane matter to
alchemically transmute into a purer, ethereal substance of being becomes bound up with
subject formation. Holmes argues, “Donne recognized that early modern hagiology
[literature devoted to the study of saints] is, in large measure, a „science‟ of possession
and domination. [Hagiology] was means of cohering and controlling individuals and
entire populations” (117). Additionally, Richard Halpern contends, “Donne‟s erotic
space does not coincide with that of subjectivity; it is, rather, a social sphere or domain to
which the subject tries to repair… the effects of social differentiation” (66). Donne
subscribes to a desexualizing mode of bodily violence as a means of interrelating self and
other in order to alter self-other relations.
Both Holmes and Halpern allude to the body‟s surface as metonymy. Through the
metaphysical poet‟s lyrical blazoning, the body can reaffirm sex even as it subverts its
normalization. Alma Altizer resists equating profane and spiritual love in Donne
precisely because she finds his conflation of the two an ironic gesture. Donne, she argues,
uses religious language “to describe a love situation or, more often, an attitude towards
love” (75). Altizer defines Donne‟s parody of love and religion in Songs and Sonnets as
26
“ironic seriousness” (77). She points out the rhetorical work underlying “The Ecstasy”
that obscures the reader from seeing the narrator‟s fundamental desire for physical
copulation through his exploitation of ecstasy‟s religious underpinnings. Catherine
Martin also analyzes “The Ecstasy” in the context of reading lyrical love as a conflation
of both mundane and spiritual realms, and like Altizer she too conceives it as a serious
extension of Donne‟s ethical concerns. Martin pinpoints Donne‟s erotology as one arising
out of a platonic mimesis when she proposes, “Donne‟s central point is that since love
provides the one true path from the finite to the infinite, the natural/divine course of the
will or appetite (voluntas) is to expand into voluptas, or pleasure” (131). For Martin,
there is continuity between desire, mundane love and spiritual love.
Pleasure limits the subject‟s exposure to God (and that which is beyond
representation) by prohibiting the self from enjoying pain. It is in the transgression of
pleasure, of one‟s bodily surface, that a self can be released from its status as subject. In
Holy Sonnets, this release is made explicit through the expression of bodily violence
committed during a subject‟s experience of spiritual rapture. The narrator in Holy Sonnet
15 asks God to “burn me… with a fiery zeal” (line 14), and in Holy Sonnet 10 he needs
God‟s “force to break, blow, burn, and make me new” (line 4). Altizer contends that
these poems are examples of Donne‟s “plea for personal apocalypse” where the holy is a
“sheer destructive-creative power,” the “devastating aggression from outside [that] will
change the old habits of mind and break open the prison of selfhood” (86-7). This
transgression of pleasure is a continuous theme throughout Donne‟s poetry. In Songs and
Sonnets, transgression happens through the composite rhetoric of alchemy while in Holy
Sonnets it transpires using martyrdom‟s deconstructive verse.
27
Songs and Sonnets is profuse with alchemical images of transmutation, especially
in its treatment of matter and its inextricable connection to the perversely sexed female
body. In “Community,” this body is perverted because it is grotesquely genital, serving
the purpose of conspicuous consumption. The poem‟s argument, that women‟s bodies are
merely the means of pleasure, assumes that women are all body, or more specifically, all
genital. The narrator begins by first removing women from the ethical realm, claiming
“wise nature” created women “that we may neither love nor hate, / Only this rests: all, all
may use” (lines 11-12). In this poem women are devoid of consciousness. They are pure
materiality, a natural resource Nature provides for men‟s profit. The narrator continues by
comparing one‟s relations with women to the consuming of fruit:
He that but tastes, he that devours,
And he which leaves all, doth as well;
Chang‟d loves are but chang‟d sorts of meat;
And when he hath the kernel eat,
Who doth not fling away the shell? (lines 20-24)
Both “Community” and “Love‟s Alchemy” are two poems in Songs and Sonnets that
point to the capacity for metamorphosis underlying all feminized bodies. This body is a
holy body, impenetrable and capable of exhibiting traits that are particular to both
subjects and objects. Like “Love‟s Alchemy,” the centric part – the kernel – of a woman
is figured as the base material that must be consumed by men in order for it to transmute
masculine subjectivity. “Love‟s Alchemy” ends by claiming women are without “mind”
and are “mummy possess‟d,” effectively confusing the Cartesian distinction between
subjects and objects (lines 23-24). Additionally, “Community” invests women‟s bodies
with surplus value as they are divested of consciousness; the kernel is made consumable
and the excess disposable. Once obtained, the beloved becomes an abandoned shell, an
28
empty home, a memory that consists between subjectivity and objectivity. What one does
with this seemingly empty shell, the residual of the woman used, is ultimately what is at
stake. Donne upholds this metaphysical body in Songs and Sonnets, suspending the act of
genital copulation in order to prolong the fantasy of the “mummy possess‟d.” He affects
and maintains a woman who appears curiously cold and devoid of empathy. Donne‟s
mummified woman becomes a Holy Grail that works first to annihilate and then to
reconstitute subjectivity. The critical role Donne‟s woman plays in his poetry can be best
understood when she is viewed alongside the heroic tradition with its female masochists.
CHAPTER IV
ECSTATIC ALCHEMY
Consciousness is central to Descartes‟ creation of the modern subject, but it is a
consciousness that works to distance and erase a generative femininity from the realms of
understanding and reason. Traditionally, women are reduced to their bodies, purely
metonymic matter always in need of re-signification through penetrative means.
Metaphysical poets do well to highlight the gender discrepancies of this new
epistemological framework. In Songs and Sonnets, Donne actively seeks to politicize the
modern subject by de-territorializing its sexed body (through the blazon) and reterritorializing it as a matter of social consciousness (through the conceit). Donne effects
a new relationship between people and things, a recombination of self immersed in
otherness, through a lyrical play of blazons and conceits that culminate in an “ecstatic
alchemy” – an incorporative folding of self and other that frames power relations not
through sexual difference, but through the interrelation between bodies. By understanding
Donne‟s portrayal of the body as a space for suspension and recombination, one can
arrive at a new way of thinking about the relationship between aesthetics and its role in
the politicizing of the modern subject as supplement.
Gilles Deleuze‟s work on the baroque and masochism is critical to fleshing out a
theoretical framework for ecstatic alchemy because he focuses precisely on the problem
29
30
underlying representation: the materiality of time and space, and especially how matter
relates to the de-territorialization and immediate re-territorialization of bodies.14 Deleuze
defends masochism, especially the politicizing and re-stratifying of bodies, by turning to
psychoanalysis and masochism‟s role in fissuring identity. He does so even as masochism
foreshadows the potential of agency through one‟s subjectification:
[T]here is. . . a superpersonal element that animates the masochist: this is
the story in which he relates the triumph of the oral mother, the abolition
of the father‟s likeness and the consequent birth of the new man. Of course
the masochist must use his body and his soul to write this story. . .
(Masochism 100).
The masochist aims to subvert the Law, defined as that mediating, social “no” barring a
subject from obtaining his primary desire, the mother.15 The ultimate goal for a masochist
is “to become a man… to be reborn from the woman alone, to undergo a second birth.
This is why castration… cease[s] to be an obstacle to or a punishment of incest, and
become[s] instead a precondition of its success with the mother, since it is then equated
with a second, autonomous and parthenogenetic rebirth” (100). Masochism is, in effect,
one way to disrupt the ever-increasing alienation and distancing of a modern individual
framed out of normalizing binaries. Amber Musser argues for the significance of the flesh
in masochism: “[it] is everything; it grounds the process of becoming and allows the
14
“De-territorialization” and its inverse “re-territorializtion” refer to the process of politicizing bodies
(collapsing the previous hegemonic power and restructuring it to effect a new one) through the decoding
and immediate recoding of materiality. Several examples Deleuze and Guattari include “the mouth as a
deterritorialization of the snout… the lips as a deterritorialization of the mouth… human females have
breasts, in other words, deterritorialized mammary glands” (61).
15
See Dylan Evans, “Law (loi)” in Dictionary of Lacanian terms. The Law is that social, structuring
principle which regulates sexual behavior. “Desire is born out of the process of regulation” and thus
maintains a dialectical relationship with the Law (99). The Law functions in relation to the Oedipus
complex to structure power positions, the desirous/lacking subject is held in place by the Father who
prohibits access to the mother. The castration complex, which allows a subject to position him /her self as a
man or as a woman, occurs at the end of the Oedipus complex to ensure identity is heterosexualized under
gendered norms.
31
masochist to relinquish identity while remaining in existence. Masochism shows the flesh
to be a valuable commodity in and of itself, not something [discourse excludes], but a
necessary active part of subjectivity” (15). In masochism, sexuality itself is re-evaluated
in terms of its role in subject formation. The subject‟s place in this newly framed
modernity, this hyperbolic desiring world that occasionally ruptures in pleasure, is
exactly what Donne makes the pertinent theme in Songs and Sonnets. Masochism‟s
delving into the constitution of the subject as a perpetual flux of territorializations signals
what Deleuze would come to equate with the Baroque – the continuous fold. For
Deleuze, the Baroque is another way of understanding the world as rhizome. “Folds
replace holes” in the baroque – the world is not constructed out of distance (desire is
lack), but aggregation (pleasure in proliferation) (The Fold 27, 91).
Both Deleuze and Donne make the case that safeguarding the body is the key
ingredient in breaking free from a subjectivity framed in patriarchal terms. Masochism
depends upon a contractual allegiance between two individuals who must take up
normalizing positions of power (male child – oral mother) and hyperbolically perform
these positions in order to break free from them (Masochism 65-6). In this world,
compatible selves and others meet at the vinculum, a bonding of two separate bodies, and
reconfigure individuality even as the distinction between the upper and lower spaces of
the baroque house (inside-outside, private-public, self-other) fold into one another like a
map (The Fold 137).16
16
“The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. It
fosters connections between fields, the removal of blockages on bodies without organs, the maximum
opening of bodies without organs onto a plane of consistency. It is itself a part of the rhizome. The map is
open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant
modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group,
32
Both the masochist‟s subversion of the law, through prohibition and the meeting
of monads through the fold‟s vinculum, lend to a subject‟s ecstatic meeting with the
Other on the grounds of the body, a meeting that smothers temporally the individual
within its folds. As Donne illustrates in the image of the “stiff twin compasses” in “A
Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” this reconfiguration of subject-object relations
through interrelation instead of distanced autonomy is critical. The process is a discursive
one, allowing for a newly a-signifying self to will a re-territorialization, a new relation to
Otherness through the alchemical re-crystallization of one‟s shattered body. Donne
clearly articulates this reconfiguration of subjectivity in “The Ecstasy” when he writes:
T‟our bodies turn we then, that so
Weak men on love reveal‟d may look;
Love‟s mysteries in souls do grow,
But yet the body is his book. (lines 69-72)
This process, what could be termed an “ecstatic alchemy,” reveals an underlying surplus
that shapes into a reconfigured subject defined by its expansion of consciousness, its
expressivity being framed out of ekphrasis.
Ecstatic alchemy is an aesthetic retreat from the sadistic structuring of identity
through lack. Rapine activity so rampant in baroque texts displays the metamorphic
violence underpinning such feminine figures as Saint Teresa, Philomela, Lucrece and
Lavinia. These women suffer horrible acts of violence against their sex, but their
subsequent turn to their bodies, the ekphrasis arising from the politicization of their
bodies‟ volatile image (the hyperbolic spectacle of the ineffable via their ravished
bodies), disarticulates the fundamental split of dualism by insisting upon the image‟s
or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political
action or as a meditation” (Introduction: Rhizome 12-3).
33
supplementary ecstatic potentiality. This, in effect, turns a woman‟s body into a Holy
Grail. Ultimately, ecstatic alchemy reveals representation to be a gendered matter that
works against female agency by denying women subjectivity. Bordo‟s “masculinization
of thought,” the birthing of the disembodied man solely from the Father, is only one part
of the seventeenth-century “drama of parturition” (The Flight to Objectivity 9, 5). Against
Cartesian dualism, baroque artists produce feminized selves. At stake in ecstatic alchemy
is the idea of the subject, or how, at least, to rescue it from a disembodied and alienated
autonomy. Donne‟s work is a critique of the idea of the soul as it determines
representation and, hence, the subject as masculine privilege.
CHAPTER V
“T‟OUR BODIES WE TURN THEN”
Metaphysical poetry finds its subjects-turned-objects pursuing an aestheticism
that echoes a masochistic discourse precisely to effect an ecstatic alchemy in its reader,
and Donne‟s lyric poems are inundated with these performances. All of Donne‟s conceits
in Songs and Sonnets suggest how metamorphosis of the self through its interrelation
with materiality becomes the ethical way to live in the newly-abstracted modern world.
Donne achieves this by responding aesthetically to how women historically have coped
with bodily trauma. In these poems, Donne‟s speaker embodies the baroque body, a
feminized, ravished, body pregnant with epistemological violence. Several of Donne‟s
most cited poems (“The Flea,” “The Canonization,” “Air and Angels,” “A Valediction
Forbidding Mourning,” and “The Relic”) all point to a metamorphoses of the body that
transforms the disembodied, autonomous soul into a material one.
One poem that has not garnered much attention for its baroque sensuousness is “A
Nocturnal Upon Saint Lucy‟s Day, Being the Shortest Day.” “Nocturnal” is a poem that
has curiously eluded much attention because its subject is bodily elision. Among the
various poems in Songs and Sonnets, “Nocturnal” most embodies the problem of the
metaphysical body as the site of engendering subjectivities precisely because it deals with
physical disintegration and spiritual remains. In this poem, Donne‟s ethics concerning
34
35
subject-object relations emerge in the form of a composite assembly of the matter
of women.
“Nocturnal” is a poem about the way space and time condition gendered binaries
in their interaction with a non-generative state of matter. Donne detaches matter from this
non-generative state first by de-territorializing the body through the blazon, by making
his poetic speaker into an object of study, and then by re-territorializing the anatomized
lover through the conceit. His substantiality is a fluid-like light, the space-time perception
of the gendered self undergoes a process of de-territorialization, liquefaction, and a
metamorphic rebirth.
Central to “Nocturnal” is the concept of the epitaph. After naming himself the
epitaph of a memory of the world in its more vivacious, animated days, the narrator
projects his image to next year‟s lovers, cautioning them to “study me… For I am every
dead thing,/ In whom love wrought new alchemy” (lines 10, 12-3). Krieger notes the
epitaph‟s haphazard transition from a protective to an effacing subject-placeholder: “in its
early moment it was to function primarily as a pointer to the accompanying monument. . .
but it could also perform in several ways unavailable to its object [that] could drive a
wedge between the monument and its referent, thus undermining any pretense that the
material object was a natural sign” (Krieger 15). Krieger notes one of the epitaph‟s more
special capabilities being the introduction of time (16). The narrator‟s address to next
year‟s lovers on the shortest day of the year, St. Lucy‟s Day, creates an awareness of
time. The narrator repeats temporal suspension in the opening line, “‟Tis the year‟s
midnight, and it is the day‟s,” and the poem‟s melancholic last lines, “Let me prepare
towards her, and let me call/ This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this/ Both the year‟s
36
and the day‟s deep midnight is” (lines 1, 43-5). Miller comments on the significance of
Donne‟s repetition of the first and last lines of “Nocturnal.” According to Miller, both
“Nocturnal” and the nocturnes of matins exercise “the movement from a dead world to
renewal through grace” (81). Recreation and regeneration are the two processes Donne
invests in “Nocturnal,” “a „ritual‟ lyric that traces with great subtlety and power the
recreation of a mind destroyed by grief, the arduous course from utter desolation to
expectant resignation” (86). Equally important to Miller‟s claim of recreation and
regeneration, however, is the work of metaphor (the metaphysical conceit) that requires
one to occupy the substitutive position of the symptom itself. In Donne‟s poetry, the male
narrator consistently occupies the position of feminized body matter precisely to
disarticulate the historical association of women‟s bodies with matter. One moves past
desire and metonymy to pleasure and metaphor, finally embracing the body as a floating
signifier, purely surface frisson.
The central conceit in “Nocturnal” is the comparison of the narrator‟s body to “a
quintessence even from nothingness” (line 15). By way of annihilating his viscous body,
alchemically distilling it to where “If I an ordinary nothing were,/ as show, „a light, and
body must be here,” Donne‟s speaker becomes “next to nothing.”17 The animating fluid
17
Published the same year as Johannes Kepler‟s treatise on the snowflake, Donne‟s “The First Anniversary:
An Anatomy of the World” reflects on the individual‟s place in a world where “new philosophy calls all in
doubt” (line 205). Both Descartes and Donne were familiar with Kepler‟s works, specifically those texts
dealing with ideas about bodies. Kepler‟s snowflake treatise, “which situates the snowflake in the science
of „meteors,‟… deploy[s] exquisitely the device of the Metaphysical conceit” when he equates the
snowflake to “a body that is next to nothing” (Tiffany 97-99). Descartes also examines the phenomenon of
bodies in Meteorology, where he references “the subtle fluid permeating all bodies” (Tiffany 136). In his
Treatise on Man, Descartes employs the conceit when explaining the fluid‟s function on bodies: “the spirits
have the power to change the shape of the muscles in which the nerves are embedded, and by this means to
move all limbs. Similarly, you may have observed in the grottoes and fountains in the royal gardens that the
mere force with which the water is driven as it emerges from its source is sufficient to move various
machines” (Tiffany 100). The fountain image is also the central conceit in Songs and Sonnets‟ “Twicknam
Garden” where the narrator declares, “make me a mandrake, so I may grow here,/ Or a stone fountain
37
underlying Descartes‟ and Kepler‟s bodies is embodied in the narrator of “Nocturnal”
who describes December‟s light as a watery-like substance which, by the time of St.
Lucy‟s Day, has run dry: the sun “send[s] forth light squibs” from its flasks because “the
world‟s whole sap is sunk:/ The general balm th‟hydroptic earth hath drunk” (lines 3-6).
Donne‟s narrator is the epitaph, the trace of the thirsty earth‟s life fluid that “Whither, as
to the bed‟s feet… Dead and interr‟d” (line 7-8). The narrator embodies that very fluid by
insisting to the reader he is a body next to nothing: “[Love] ruin‟d me, and I am re-begot/
Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not” (lines 17-19); “I, by love‟s limbeck,
am the grave/ Of all, that‟s nothing” (lines 21-22); “I am by her death…/ Of the first
nothing” (lines 28-29); “If I an ordinary nothing were,/ As shadow, „a light, and body
must be here” (lines 35-36); and “I am none; nor will my sun renew” (line 37).
The poem condenses in stanza three as the narrator relates his un-becoming, an
expanding and collapsing into nothingness described by Murray as “Donne‟s stupendous
reversal of Genesis in lines 22-29… [as] he sweeps back from the flood, to the creation of
the world, to the chaos out of which it was formed, to the nothing before chaos, to the
„Elixir‟ or quintessence of that nothing” (86). The narrator wrenches apart Cartesian
subject-object relations by insisting upon his nothingness apart from his beloved‟s
animating physicality: “often absences/ Withdrew our souls and made us carcasses”
(lines 26-27). In stanza four, the narrator questions what the conditions are for becoming
a man – “Were I a man, that I were one/ I needs must know” (line 30) – and finds
weeping out my year” (lines 17-8). In the same vein as Kepler, the narrator in Donne‟s “The First
Anniversary” defers to “meteors, as none can see,/ Not only what they mean, but what they be,” when he is
describing modern man‟s fractured relationship to an animate earth (lines 387-8).
38
absolution through dissipation (he is nothing) and reassurance through his resulting
metamorphosis in stanza five where he can finally “prepare towards her” (line 43).
In the current Cartesian state of separation and lack, the narrator takes a
masochistic turn by making that which is prohibited – castration – the very condition for
both his and his beloved‟s reconstitution as subjects. He becomes a “no-thing,” a bawdy
pun about the vagina, so that he can receive his beloved‟s mercy and reconnect with her
through his transgression of the Law. In other words, by first becoming a feminized nothing (the epitaph), and then sustaining a fluid-like state that surges and mixes with his
beloved (the conceit), both the narrator and his beloved undergo a metamorphosis that
points to Donne‟s re-evaluation of the hierarchy of time and space in the matter of
constituting subjects.
“Nocturnal” is structured on the principle of relative time (the narrator creates an
awareness of time even as the absent beloved suspends it). Additionally, “Nocturnal”
draws its vivacity from its conception of space as the obscurity of matter (the poem forms
a tie with the legend of St. Lucy).18 By restructuring his poetic out of pleasure
(suspension and darkness) instead of desire (extension and clarity), Donne contests the
notion that subjectivity is an exclusively masculine privilege. He accomplishes this by
18
Donne was himself invested in the issues of sainthood and martyrdom. His mother was the great niece of
Catholic martyr, Thomas More. Additionally, Donne‟s brother was sent to prison for harboring a priest and
eventually died in captivity. Legend has it that Lucy‟s mother, a noblewoman, visited St. Agatha‟s shrine
and was healed of an incurable disease. Lucy subsequently gave away all of her wealth to the poor, but this
act angered the man to whom she was betrothed. Lucy was turned in and sentenced to death for being a
Christian. However, soldiers could not physically move her because she became very heavy in mass and
flames did not touch her when the governor ordered her burned. Lucy was finally killed when a soldier
stabbed a poniard in her neck. Martyrs necessarily suffer bodily violence. Curiously, the legends of both St.
Lucy and St. Agatha incorporate violence particular to female bodies. St. Agatha and St. Lucy were
reputedly very beautiful women who were pursued by many suitors. Angered by rejection, one of Agatha‟s
suitors, Quintianus, had her undergo various tortures, one of which included having her breasts torn off
with shears. Lucy tore out her eyes to give to a bothersome suitor who had become bewitched by her
beauty. See George Ferguson, Signs and Symbols in Christian Art (New York: Oxford UP, 1966) 130-1.
39
positing an aesthetic of ekphrasis that arises from his critique of representation as a
recapitulation of mimetic norms that equate words with masculinity and images with
femininity.
It is with “Nocturnal” that Donne fully expresses his critique of the Cartesian idea
of the subject. By focusing on the body, specifically as something next-to-nothing, Donne
puts forward a different kind of poetics that reevaluates the place art has in forming
politicized citizens. “Nocturnal” accomplishes what Eggert finds The Fairy Queene
gesturing towards – that is, “Nocturnal‟s” narrator is a rapturous body that, through
ekphrastic frisson, undergoes a metamorphosis of self. This metamorphosis disrupts
representation by creating slippage between word and image, in effect exposing the
supplement holding together an emergent mind-body dualism that is newly attendant to
gender norms.
In “Nocturnal,” Donne‟s male narrator does not operate in the traditional manner
that poetry‟s longstanding tradition has defined for the masculine subject. “Nocturnal‟s”
narrator is a non-referential picture, a conscious representation – an “epitaph” that makes
itself subject to voyeurism. One may say that what Donne unveils as the subject is an
oscillation between self and thing. In other words, depending on the angle of one‟s
perception, the subject can appear to shift between a self and a thing. By making his
narrator “a body next to nothing,” Donne resuscitates an agonistic unity between things
and selves, thus putting forward an idea of self as a supplement exceeding binary
categorization.
CONCLUSION
Donne‟s reversals of gender and mixing of representational media rely on a
complex understanding of perspective that allows him to portray feminine subjectivity
without negating the woman who is historically violated, maimed, and silenced in the
name of male subjectivity. In “Nineteenth Elegy,” or “To His Mistress Going to Bed,”
Donne manages to suggest the possibility of representing women‟s subjectivity without
negating feminine agency by shifting perspective.19 Though the woman in “Nineteenth
Elegy” is described as a fantasy object for the male narrator, Germaine Greer argues that
the woman of the poem resembles in fact more a reliable wife than a licentious woman
teasing her lover before bed:
The behavior of Donne‟s woman is not that of Ovid‟s Corinna, a
complaisant mistress seizing amorous opportunity, but of a woman going
to bed for the night. The man observing her as it were through the bed
curtains, as post-modern man might listen for sounds beyond the bathroom
door, is acting less as a lover than as a husband. . . If he were as interested
in raping and colonizing as is often suggested, it is the more remarkable
that he lies naked in his bed imagining the woman undressing rather than
undressing her himself. . . he enacts passivity; his aggression is all in the
mind. She will come bedward, as any decent woman would in her shift.”
(219)
In “Nineteenth Elegy,” the woman is the image, but she is not the victim. Modeling the
woman as a wife enables Donne to portray the woman as something other than the victim
19
Donne modeled his poems after Ovid‟s love poetry, and Germaine Greer notes that as in Ovid‟s elegies
“the subject [in “Nineteenth Elegy”] is not the woman who is its apparent occasion, but the man who is
sniffing around her” (216).
40
41
who must be violated in order to buttress the male consciousness that Descartes would
later equate with subjectivity. The “unassailability” of Donne‟s mistress challenges
previous determinations of what a subject embodies (the conscious mind) (220). Instead,
the relation between this woman and the male narrator proves to be an interrelation.20 It
is precisely because the narrator cannot represent the woman‟s consciousness without
penetrating her that the law of lack folds in upon itself. Its superfluous gravity transfers to
the woman who, in her disinterest, displaces consciousness as the defining characteristic
of subjectivity.
Donne‟s use of perspective to manipulate the traditionally gendered masculine
word and feminine image reveals that Donne, unlike the male poets before him, is not
defeated by sex but is empowered by embracing its otherness. In his poetry, Donne
rethinks the human by restructuring self-other relations out of surplus instead of lack. In
“Nocturnal,” as we have seen, the self exists somewhere between subjectivity and
objectivity. Donne makes a case for agency in objectivity by continuously representing
the conscious objects in his poetry as conscious. “Nineteenth Elegy” suggests that the
impenetrability of the woman‟s body, not the narrator‟s Cartesian clarity, characterizes
the human agent. In the midst of a corporeal mystification and anatomization, Donne
salvages the body from complete erasure by spiritualizing its remains. By insisting upon
the centrality of the body in subjectivity, Donne displaces consciousness as the defining
element of the modern subject. Donne‟s “ecstatic alchemy” reshapes poetry and in doing
so makes possible the representation of woman without negating her agency.
20
“The function of the masochistic contract is to invest the mother-image with the symbolic power of the
law… according to Masoch, it is essentially the work of art and the contract that makes possible the
transition from a lower nature to the great Nature, which is sentimental and self-conscious” (Masochism
76).
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