Modern masturbation can be dated with a precision rare in cultural history. It was born in, or very close to, the same year as that wild and woolly and profoundly self-conscious exemplar of “our” kind of human, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It arrived in the same decade as Daniel Defoe’s first novels and the first stock-market crashes. (Readers will remember the repeated jokes – new at the time – in the first chapter of Gulliver’s Travels that Swift began in 1719: “Mr. Bates, my master”; “my good master Bates.”) It—by which I mean masturbation as a moral and medical problem that attracted the serious attention of the likes of Kant, Rousseau, Samuel Johnson, Voltaire and S.A.D. Tissot, the most read medial authority of the century– is a creature of the Enlightenment. And more specifically it is intimately bound up with the question of solitude in eighteenth century thought. 

To be precise, sometime between 1708 and 1716 – “in or around 1712” – the then-anonymous author of a short tract with a long title not only named (Onan had not before been associated with masturbation) but actually invented a new disease and a new highly specific, thoroughly modern, and nearly universal engine for generating guilt, shame, and anxiety.  Its title: Onania; or, The Heinous Sin of Self Pollution, and all its Frightful Consequences, in both SEXES Considered, with Spiritual and Physical Advice to those who have already injured themselves by this abominable practice. And seasonable Admonition to the Youth of the nation of Both SEXES…. 

Onanism was loosed upon the world. 

The problem that had been so long ignored but that would come to play such a large role in the modern Western understanding of self and sexuality was this:  That unnatural Practice by which persons of either sex may defile their own bodies, without the Assistance of others. Whilst yielding to filthy imagination, they endeavor to imitate and procure for themselves that Sensation, which God has ordered to attend the Carnal Commerce of the two sexes for the Continuance of our Species.  

Modern masturbation is profane. It is not just something that putatively makes those who do it tired, crippled, mad, or blind but an act with serious ethical implications. It is that part of human sexual life where potentially unlimited solitary pleasure meets social restraint; where habit and the promise of just-one-more-time struggle with the dictates of conscience and good sense; where fantasy silences, if only for a moment, the reality principle; and where the autonomous self escapes from the erotically barren here- and-now into a luxuriant world of its own creation. It hovers between abjection and fulfillment.  

“The solitary vice” as the most common synonym for masturbation is an early nineteenth century neologism but the perceived moral and medical dangers of solitary sexual pleasure— solitary both in the sociological sense of being alone and unwatched and, more importantly in the psychological sense of the self being alone with itself—were there at the start. Notice in the description I just quoted “for themselves,” “without the assistance of others,” “yielding to filthy imagination.” Onanism as a paradigmatic pathology of solitude, of the mind un-moored.  

Barbara Taylor in her review of my Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (LRB, 6 May 2004) argued that the book was essentially a history, writ on the body, of a new sort of self in society: “the sexuality of the modern self” I called it. Laqueur, she notes,  “presumes a caesura between the modern and the pre-modern. The modern masturbator stands on the near side of a cultural divide whose far side is a world where the moral hazards of sex were not those of rampant individualism but violations of a hierarchical, providential order.” In other words a new pathology of solitude, a new and powerful engine of shame, was born and flourished as a bulwark against rampant individualism, against the hazards of un-moored moral autonomy.  The roots of Onanism in Laqueur’s account lie in “the predicaments of secularized subjectivity.”  

Taylor accepts these claims but argues, rightly, that it does not fully account for the novel shamefulness of Onanism, the new pathology of solitude. The shame, she continues, is rooted in the Christian notion of concupiscence, the idea most profoundly articulated by Augustine, that the estrangement of the soul from God is marked in the flesh by the autonomy of sexual desire—and speaking as he does from a male perspective— signaled by the un-unruliness of the sexual organs. Adam’s shame at his nakedness came from an unwilled erection. (For Augustine the key is un-willed and un-willable.  In a letter to Paulinos of Nola that he wrote in his old age he said that his present impotence was just as much a sign of concupiscence as the erections of his youth.)  

If we think of the new shame of Onanism as grounded in the old shame of concupiscence then the stakes of a history of the solitary vice has to account not just for “a new relationship between self and society but [the] self’s relationship to the self.” “We are none of us, female or male, masters in our own house,” Taylor writes:  Augustine redux without original sin.  She concludes with a Freudian twist: “Shame’ Jacqueline Rose wrote recently, ‘is one of the ways we try to forget part of ourselves’ and it is this amnesia that ultimately lay behind the masturbation panic. 

We do not have to choose between these perspectives. On the one hand there is the novelty of a new pathology of solitude that cannot be explained by adducing an abiding engine of shame.  Something changes on or around 1712 that demands an explanation. On other hand we need to account for the wild success of Grub Street pamphlet that makes its way into the inner sanctums of the high Enlightenment and generates torrents of guilt at a practice that before had received almost not attention. It somehow mobilized a deep disquietude about the self’s relationship to its desires that did not suddenly appear with the early philosophes. 

I propose briefly to make the case for my history of self and society. That is I want to offer an explanation for what it was about solitary sex—as opposed to sex that was not practiced in solitude–that was purportedly so dangerous—medically and morally– in the particular circumstances of the eighteenth century and beyond. I then want to return, by offering the sketchiest of sketches of a social and cultural history of shame, to Taylor’s argument about the persistent shamefulness this one particular form of sexual activity–sex with ones self– that had for so long gone un-noticed. Shame is an emotion that precisely bridges the space between society and self, outer and inner. As Protagoras tells Socrates, after Prometheus had distinguished humans from other animals by giving them fire Zeus gave them all equally both shame (Aidos) and justice so that they could live together in harmony. I will end with a modern redemptive twist on the solitary vice as a form of healthy self-discovery in solitude. 

Readers will have to accept, for the purposes of this discussion, that there is something specifically modern about the medical and moral anxiety surrounding sex in solitude. It really did emerge more or less from nowhere around 1712.  The editors of the most exhaustive of the nineteenth-century medical encyclopedias allotted more than twenty- six pages and a long bibliography to the article “Onanisme.” No problem more deserves the attention of philosophers and doctors, the author announces, which is presumably why it deserves so much space. entitled Onania had enormous repercussions.  The rabbis had had all sorts of views of how exactly Onan had spilled his seed upon the ground—anal sex, intracrural sex, coitus interruptus, and, yes, perhaps also masturbation—but what became his eponymous sin in the eighteenth century was of no concern. God struck him dead because he refused to have a child from whom would grow “the tree of Jesse” with his widowed sister in law Tamar.  The backstory as But the ancients—Galen, Hippocrates and the nearly two thousand year tradition built on their work viewed it “with the most serene indifference.” Only in the eighteenth century, the article continues, did onanism become important:  “book to why this was so bad fills volumes but is irrelevant to this conference.  

A long line of Church fathers and the theologians who followed them developed an exquisitely refined hermeneutics of sexuality– concupiscence was a central but by no means the only issue—but they had almost nothing to say about solitary sex. St. Thomas includes what we might interpret as the act—mollities, from the L. mollius-e, condition of softenss—but they are included in a long list of non-reproductive sexual acts and are not singled out as worth especial note. One unpublished fourteenth century tract by Jean Gerson about which Foucault makes a great deal does seem to address the subject but it is a rare exception that proves the rule. Solitary sex is a problem connected somehow with modern questions of the condition of the self with her or himself and outside the nexus of society. 

What then is the problem that captivated the world of doctors and moral philosophers and through them and through them made men and women, boys and girls guilty and ashamed of a practice that in earlier ages would have passed notice. It was not sexual excess per se. S.D. Tissot, the best read doctor of the century whose 1759 book on Onanism was translated into twenty languages over hundreds of editions that it is “far more pernicious than excesses with women” because these were mitigated by some measure of reciprocity and engagement. (Although much was made of the dangers of solitary sex for women– and  for children of both sexes– no-one made the comparative argument about excesses with men.) 

When Tissot and the Encyclopédie – the obscure pamphlet of 1712 had made its way to the inner sanctum of the Enlightenment in half a century–pronounced on the subject, they located the evil genius of masturbation not in the lusts of the flesh but in a generally benign faculty of the mind. Both distanced themselves from theological condemnations based on violation of the telos of sex—reproduction– or the triumph of concupiscence. Menuret de Chambaud, writing for the Encyclopédie, was more straightforward. Leaving theology aside, as he clearly wanted to do, masturbation would not be so bad if – and here comes the big “if” – it were not in the thrall of an unmoored psyche: “Masturbation which is not so frequent, which is not excited by a fiery and voluptuous imagination, which is, in a word, spurred only by one’s need,” is not harmful at all.  

In other words, if masturbation were natural – that is, the result of real sexual need – it would be fine. de Chambaud’s point in the Encyclopédie article is that it is not so easy to maintain moderate masturbation simply as an alternative way of satisfying ordinary, sociable sexual desire. Solitary sex was almost by its nature immoderate, because the imagination was not easily restrained. It had “the greatest part of the crime,” and thus the seat of the imagination – the mind and all that is connected to it – was most severely punished for doing it. A central problem with solitary sex as understood by the canonical text of the high Enlightenment was that it was generally driven from within, driven by a “voluptuous, a fiery imagination” that had only the most tenuous connections with all those charms, tricks, arrangements – and physiological natural processes – that drive a more social passion.  

Rousseau, always ready with the psychologically astute reflection, always poised to transform a personal anxiety into a general truth, got it right when he considered masturbation in his Confessions. It was, he famously said, “the dangerous supplement”: there was always something more, something unbounded, something that could not be satisfied and laid to rest. When he masturbated, the greatest and most original of the philosophes tells us, he would conjure up a sexually exciting image or story, become excited, and satisfy his desire, all without recourse to anyone. There was nothing to stop him from doing it again and again, “with” whomever he wanted, whenever he wanted, and without any natural satiety. Masturbation was outside not just this or that form of restraint but all bounds whatsoever. There was no stopping it because it was so terribly easy, because it was so alluringly free, because it seemed to escape from any and all consequences, because it was so perfectly outside civilization. 

The moral foreboding about masturbation that haunts the sexual awakening of Emile, Rousseau’s eponymous protagonist, and, by extension, that of all adolescents has to do with the threat poised by the solitariness of a practice born out of the self, out of the imagination.  And the secrecy of the act makes it all the more difficult to teach the practitioner that it is shameful. “If he [an educator’s pupil] were to know one time the dangerous supplement” as a way of satisfying his sexual instincts, “he is lost,” declares Rousseau unequivocally. Not only would “he carry the doleful [triste] effects of this habit, the most disastrous to which a young man can subjugate himself, to the grave,” but by the very act he would be lost to his teacher. But even more troubling is the fact that through masturbation Emile would become hopelessly enslaved to himself. Better to fall in love with an inappropriate woman; from such a fate, Rousseau is sure, he might be saved. But to be rescued from himself as the engine of sexual desire and satisfaction would be altogether another matter.  

Ambivalent as Rousseau’s feelings were about the role of society in making us who we are, society still offered grounds for redemption; pure interiority was harder, perhaps impossible, to reach. And pure interiority, driven by the possibility of endless, self-generated sexual pleasure was the most extreme case. “Deceitful” and “counterfeit” were the adjectives that came to Rousseau’s mind when he wrote about the teacher’s worry in Emile about the collapse of his whole educational project should his pupil succumb to the secret vice.  

Taylor is right: for the old fashioned “concupiscence”—desires of the flesh as a sign of the estrangement of the soul from God, of the lack of singleness of heart– we could substitute “the fiery imagination,” something unbounded that could not be laid to rest– even if the doctors and moralists of the eighteenth century wanted to distance themselves from so theologically loaded a term. And she is right that “Protestantism, by drawing God—and the devil—into the individual psyche upped the ante. The inner world of the believer became a cosmic battleground, with sex as its front line.” But it is not the only line of battle.  A fiery imagination stimulated by the passions  “led believers to confuse inner states with outer objects, to mistake their own desires and fantasies for the living God.” Enthusiasm. I might add that other forms of secular concupiscence were also creatures of the Enlightenment; “alcoholism” was another eighteenth century neologism.  

The question remains why this one particular sign that we are “none of us, male or female, masters of our own house,”—solitary sex– became a new and lasting and paradigmatic engine of shame.  If the gods gave humans shame to allow us to live together the pedagogues, doctors, and philosophers of the Enlightenment worked so hard to make sex with ourselves shameful in an effort to allow us to live alone. It was a hard road to make something private—solitary—shameful because shame is an emotion evoked in public through the the real or imagined gaze of others.  It was their project to make it shameful in the eyes of the self. And, in the long Augustinian tradition, they located it in the desiring flesh: a secular appropriation of concupiscence. 

I find it puzzling how difficult it has been to shake off what they wrought: a new engine of shame, a new purported pathology of solitude.  In an age when the desiring flesh and the fervid imagination seem triumphant masturbation remains if not contemptuous then embarrassing: in need of defense. There is a redemptive feminist tradition beginning in the 1970s: Betty Dodson’s Liberating Masturbation: A Meditation on Self Love for example, straightforwardly makes the case that autoeroticism is not only a politically but also a personally liberating act. A lively market in sex toys and a trove of articles in women’s magazines makes the case. An avalanche of porn is in its service.  

But solitude still bears something of the sense that it is had behind closed doors. There is a passage early in Swann’s Way in which the narrator, certainly no enemy of he imagination writes of a room at Combray: it was the only room whose door I was allowed to lock. Whenever my occupation was such as required inviolable solitude: reading or day-dreaming, tears or sensual pleasure. 

Thomas W. Laqueur is Helen Fawcett Professor of History Emeritus at UC Berkely.

The post The Advent of the Solitary Vice appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

With their parallel lives, animals offer man a companionship which is different from any offered by human exchange. Different because it is a companionship offered to the loneliness of man as a species.

John Berger, ‘Why Look at Animals?’ (1980).

Any exploration of John Clare’s life and work in relation to solitude cannot ignore his most profound experiences of being ‘shut up’, as he described it, away from others.^[1] The poet spent the final portion of his life in asylums, after living with increasingly frequent mental, physical, and emotional disturbances that some have considered a form of bi-polar, some have likened more to schizophrenia, some have credited to the strains of poverty and malnourishment, and that Clare called simply his ‘indisposition’. A patient at High Beach Asylum in Epping Forest from 1837-41, Clare’s escape from Matthew Allen’s institution is captured in his prose account ‘Journey out of Essex’. Following an apparent delusion of being reunited with Mary Joyce, a childhood sweetheart whom Clare believed to be one of his two wives (the other being his actual wife, Martha ‘Patty’ Turner), the poet walked from Essex to Northborough only to find Mary Joyce long dead and himself ‘homeless at home’ when he got there.^[2] Later that same year, Clare was committed to Northampton General Lunatic Asylum where he remained until his death in 1864. For the purposes of historical accuracy and, perhaps, to rescue Clare from his sentimentalised Victorian reception as a dishevelled, mad genius being led away against his will,^[3] more recent biographers and critics are frequently keen to stress that Clare’s initial admission to High Beach was ‘voluntary’.^[4] Clare’s own written accounts, however, speak of the suffering and resistance endured under an ostensibly ‘voluntary’ admission. In April 1841 Clare wrote to his wife, Patty, from High Beach, that ‘I am still here […] enduring all the miseries of solitude’; in May that same year, he drafted a letter to his imagined wife, Mary Joyce, lamenting ‘how sick I am of this confinement […] if I was in prison for felony I could not be served worse then I am’.^[5]

Clearly, there are important tensions to bear in mind regarding ‘voluntary’ as a legalistic term used to confirm free will or choice, and its association with more purely volitional actions, thoughts, or feelings not born of compliance.^[6] Clare’s ‘voluntary’ admission to High Beach, if not forced, was certainly not a free individual choice, but more the result of collective negotiations between domestic and medical authorities. Akihito Suzuki’s study of ‘madness at home’ in the nineteenth century is alert to how ‘the “voluntary” committal of lunatics gave the family another means to resolve domestic discord by mobilizing public authorities’ intervention’.^[7] The result of discussions between Clare’s publisher John Taylor and the asylum’s owner Matthew Allen, the poet’s admission to High Beach was eventually agreed on ‘the authority of his wife’, as Jonathan Bate has it.^[8]

Yet although the asylum was often a place of profound loneliness and confinement for Clare, where solitude can never be truly exercised as a free choice, it was also a space from which he looked back on past solitudes, and from where he made some of his most profound statements about solitary pleasures. Writing to his son, Charles, in 1848 from Northampton General with some fatherly advice in lieu of his absence from family life, Clare advised that Charles take up ‘angling’ for its solitary, boyish charms:

Angling is a Recreation I was fond of myself & there is no harm in it if your taste is the same – for in those things I have often broke the Sabbath when a boy & perhaps it was better then keeping it in the village hearing Scandal & learning tipplers frothy conversation […] in my boyhood Solitude was the most talkative vision I met with     Birds bees trees flowers all talked to me incessantly louder then the busy hum of men’.^[9]

Clare’s attempt to find some common ground with his son across the distance of separation also leads him to anticipate their differences. His recollection of his own ‘recreations’ takes on the quality of confession, and not only because he describes enjoying breaking the Sabbath to sneak away from the rest of his church-going village. Clare’s sense that his early love of solitude may not be to everyone’s ‘taste’ is charged with an awareness of his own oddity. There are echoes here from the poet’s autobiographical writing, where he recalls being thought strange by local villagers as he went about ‘muttering’ stories to himself inspired by that most compelling study of solitude, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe: ‘new Crusoes and new Islands of Solitude was continually mutterd over in my Journeys to and from school’.^[10] Solitude has a hallucinatory quality in Clare’s letter as a ‘talkative vision’ in sympathy with his own childhood ‘mutterings’. It is never difficult for the poet to find shades of madness in childhood pursuits. His poem ‘Emmonsales Heath’, for instance, recalls the ‘joyous rapture’ felt searching for ‘pismires’ (ants) as a boy; the young Lubin in ‘The Village Minstrel’ has a similarly rapturous communion with the natural world, where ‘Enthusiasm made his soul to glow / His heart wi wild sensations usd to beat / As nature seemly sung his mutterings did repeat’. Writing from an asylum about hearing the natural world as a voice that ‘talked to me incessantly’, Clare may invite us to hear echoes of pathology in his solitude, but he also reveals it as kindred with the companionable comfort of childhood self-talk. And, alongside any hints of delusion also run conscious choice and volition. Clare’s sensitivity to his own temperament and how it may differ from others is explored along broader lines of human and animal difference, and to be able to hear the incessant talk of ‘Birds bees trees flowers’ above the ‘busy hum of men’ is here to have made a deliberate effort to attend to the nonhuman company that solitude allows him to keep.

Clare’s admiration for Byron’s verse is well known, and it was to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage that he turned for solace in High Beach, writing his own version ‘to get myself better’.^[11] If ‘impersonating’ Byron on and off the page became a form of therapy for Clare in the asylum (rather than the outright delusion earlier critics have made it out to be), then we can also look to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage as a meditation on the reparative nature of voluntary solitude. Byron’s Childe Harold, who casts himself out to seek a form of ‘society where none intrudes’ (Canto IV, CLXXVIII, l. 3), discovers a ‘populous solitude of bees and birds’ when following the tracks of another outcast—Rousseau—in Switzerland (Canto III, II, l.1). It is the turn away from human to nonhuman ‘society’ that encourages Harold to re-envision solitude as a state ‘where we are least alone’, because we are open to and aware of other forms of being (Canto III, XC, l. 2).  The natural world as an alternative form of society away from the corrupting influences of human sociability is a recurrent theme in eighteenth-century reflections on the pleasures of retirement, as well as a Rousseauian form of retreat into the ‘state of nature’. We can hear in Clare’s recollection of his childhood encounters with ‘Birds bees trees flowers’ a form of Byron’s ‘populous solitude’, a tentative bridge between idiosyncrasy and inherited forms; what he sees as a marker of his difference from other boys also has its roots in poetic and philosophical tradition. Bolstered, then, by Byron’s transformation of exile into the pleasures of retreat, Clare is able to find in the ‘Bastille’ of High Beach a form of isolated sanctuary: ‘These solitudes my last delights shall be / The leaf hid forest – & the lonely shore / Seem to my mind like beings that are free’ (‘Child Harold’). What is this freedom found in loneliness? An opportunity, perhaps, to seek out the other forms of company gifted by an environment. Clare’s own fondness for a ‘talkative’ solitude full of animal presence shows him to have inherited what Barbara Taylor describes as the long history of paradoxical rhetoric around what it means to be solitary and the perennial question of ‘who are we with, when we are alone?’^[12] One way towards an answer might be to think about those nonhuman beings who, for Clare at least, are a source of consolatory companionship.

‘Emmonsails Heath in Winter’ is a poem from Clare’s ‘middle period’ (spanning roughly 1822-37). With its quick succession of birds that swing and flap into the poet’s view, the sonnet is characteristic of what Seamus Heaney described as Clare’s ability to capture the ‘one-thing-after-anotherness of the world’:^[13]

I love to see the old heaths withered brake

Mingle its crimpled leaves with furze and ling

While the old Heron from the lonely lake

Starts slow and flaps his melancholly wing

And oddling crow in idle motions swing

On the half rotten ash trees topmost twig

Beside whose trunk the gipsey makes his bed

Up flies the bouncing wood cock from the brig

Where a black quagmire quakes beneath the tread

The field fare chatters in the whistling thorn

And for the awe round fields and closen rove

And coy bumbarrels twenty in a drove

Flit down the hedgerows in the frozen plain

And hang on little twigs and start again

This is not, at first glance, a poem about solitude. There is, apart from the opening first-person ‘I’, a distinct lack of the speaker’ presence or sense of introspection, and more of what Heaney suggested was Clare’s ‘objective clarity’^[14]; the speaker is absorbed ostensibly in looking carefully, or lovingly, at things as they are, and as and when they appear, not as projections of his own emotional state. The scene laid out in this sonnet is, I think, expressive of a kind of ‘populous’ (to use Byron’s word) animal sociability that the speaker is happy to stand back and watch. Here, what might usually be thought of as a desolate and barren landscape—a ‘withered’ heath in winter—becomes crowded and busy under Clare’s watchful attention and appreciation. John Berger’s sense of the ‘parallel lives’ of nonhumans and humans is enacted in the poem’s form as much as its content, as its successive lines gather a haphazard company of leaves, birds, lake, trees, a gipsey, a quagmire, fields, hedgerows, and twigs that are held alongside one another and ‘mingle’ in the space of the sonnet.

Yet if Clare’s organisation of the scene fosters a form of mutual coexistence in this poem, it is also highly sensitive to things that stand out. I am drawn here especially to the ‘oddling crow’ that makes its ‘idle’ appearance in the sonnet’s fifth line. A Northamptonshire dialect word, ‘oddling’ refers to ‘one differing from the rest of a family, brood, or litter; generally applied to the smallest or to one with any peculiarity’. ^[15] As an adjective, however, it also means ‘solitary’.^[16] It is a word that, for Clare especially, bridges the gap between human and animal (human and nonhuman families, broods, and litters all have their ‘oddlings’), but also contains a potent reminder of solitude’s inherent oddness as well as its pleasures. Johanne Clare writes of Clare’s frequent depiction of lone animals and birds that he is drawn especially to the ‘aesthetic momentousness’ of solitude, the striking visual image of ‘catching sight of a lone heron circling an empty sky’.^[17] Indeed, the word ‘oddling’ recurs frequently in his verse as a means of visual placement. In ‘The Last of Summer’, for example, there are ‘oddling daisies peeping nigh, / Untouched by sheep that hither stray’ (ll. 82-83); in ‘March’ from The Shepherd’s Calendar (1827) Clare describes ‘ground larks on a sweeing clump of rushes / Or on the top twigs of the oddling bushes’ (ll. 85-86) as well as an ‘oddling bee oft patting passing by’ at the window of an ‘old dame’ as she works at her burring wheel’ (ll. 125-131); the ‘The Bumbarrel’s Nest’ opens with ‘The oddling bush’ that the bird has chosen as a ‘sheltered’ (l.1) place to build its nest. All of these ‘oddlings’ have been singled out for the poet’s attention, but their solitary nature comes to be counteracted with plurality or cohabitation. To notice ‘oddling daisies’ and ‘oddling bushes’ is to notice that there is more than one, and to see how ground larks and bumbarrels choose ‘oddling bushes’ for their perches or nests is to see solitude expanded into co-species togetherness. There is comfort for Clare, I think, in these incorporations of ‘oddlings’ into a scene or assemblage, and making them companionable with other beings. If we are attentive to how the word ‘oddling’ holds dual, but profoundly related, meanings of solitary and peculiarity or difference from the group, then we can hear how Clare’s awareness of his own solitary habits—and his sense of how this set him apart from the rest of his community—inflects the lone presence of the nonhuman with his very human sense of alienation and feeling out of place. What he finds in these nonhuman ‘oddlings’ is a companionable means of being solitary together.

To return to ‘Emmonsails Heath in Winter’, then, the ‘oddling crow’ that is both a solitary peculiarity in this scene and an integral part of it helps to uncover the human feelings and experience of solitude to be found in the poem, and to turn attention to the subject who looks upon its populous company. Johanne Clare, in an assessment similar to other critical appraisals of Clare’s representations of animals and the natural world, suggests that the poet’s frequent depictions of solitary animals and birds within landscapes do not function as mere ‘correlatives of his solitude’; rather, he ‘ensures the discrete integrity of both species seen, the perceiver and the object of his perception’.^[18] Continually admired for his ecological consciousness, Clare is often considered to be a poet who forgoes self-examination in the presence of the natural world in a manner separate from other Romantic-period poets, and does not corrupt its ‘integrity’ with forms of self-projection or pathetic fallacy. Why, then, is the lake ‘lonely’, and the heron ‘melancholly’? In a poem that appears to make no claims for its subject other than they ‘love to see’ what emerges before them, to describe the nonhuman in terms of solitude’s human affects is to seek subtle affinities and a form of companionship, or even to find in the dedicated close observation of animals another way of thinking about the solitary self as a species apart from its kind. Maureen McLane has argued that to read pathetic fallacy solely as an imposition of human consciousness onto nature is to risk losing sight of its crucial sympathetic potential:

not only is there no way out of sympathetic (or antipathetic) projection, it may be that this is precisely the required medium for an acknowledgement of common life. Or rather, we might say that what’s been called the “pathetic fallacy” registers not so much the human expropriation of the animate, or even the inanimate, world but rather an implicit recognition of and mapping of the interdependence thereof.^[19]

Clare, then, does not seek in his solitude an appreciation of the ‘discrete integrity’ of the human and nonhuman, but rather the ‘common life’ that can be built out of feelings of oddity and loneliness.  He would write in another sonnet, ‘The Sand Martin’, of how seeing the bird ‘far away from all thy tribe’ instilled ‘a feeling that I cant describe / Of lone seclusion and a hermit joy / To see thee circle round nor go beyond / That lone heath and its melancholly pond’ (ll. 9-14). Although Berger suggests that animals cause us to confront ‘the loneliness of man as a species’, Clare’s restorative ‘hermit joy’ is made possible by the sympathetic projection of pathetic fallacy, where loneliness made animal creates a new species of companionable solitude for this poet who so often felt like an oddling amongst his own kind.

[1] Clare, ‘To James Hipkins’, 8 March 1860, The Letters of John Clare, ed. Mark Storey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 683.

[2] Clare, ‘Journey out of Essex’, in John Clare: Major Works, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 432-37 (437).

[3] Frederick Martin, John Clare’s first biographer, described the poet’s admission to High Beach as Clare being ‘led away from his wife and children, by two stern-looking men’. The Life of John Clare (London: Macmillan & Co., 1865), 269.

[4] See, for example, Simon Kövesi, John Clare: Nature, Criticism and History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 143 and Seamus Heaney, ‘John Clare: a bicentenary lecture’, in John Clare in Context, ed. Hugh Haughton, Adam Phillips and Geoffrey Summerfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 130-147 (138).

[5] Clare, ‘To Patty Clare’, 18 April 1841, Letters, 645; ‘To Mary Joyce’, May (?) 1841, Letters, 646.

[6] See OED, ‘voluntary’, adj., adv., and n., senses 1-7.

[7] Akihito Suzuki, Madness at Home: The Psychiatrist, The Patient, and The Family in England, 1820-1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 9.

[8] Jonathan Bate, John Clare: A Biography (London: Picador, 2004),

[9] Clare, ‘To Charles Clare’, 26 February 1848, Letters, 656.

[10] Clare, By Himself, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Manchester: MidNAG / Carcanet, 1996), 15.

[11] Clare, ‘To Mary Joyce’, May 1841, Letters, 646.

[12] Barbara Taylor, ‘Philosophical Solitude: David Hume Versus Jean-Jacques Rousseau’, History Workshop Journal, 89 (2020), 1-21 (2).

[13] Seamus Heaney, ‘John Clare’, 137.

[14] Heaney, 133.

[15] Anne Elizabeth Baker, Glossary of Northamptonshire Words and Phrases, 2 vols (London, 1854), I, 71.

[16] See ‘Glossary’ in John Clare: Major Works, 513.

[17] Johanne Clare, John Clare and the Bounds of Circumstance (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987), 165.

[18] Johanne Clare, Bounds of Circumstance, 173.

[19] Maureen McLane, ‘’Compositionism: Plants, Poetics, Possibilities; or, Two Cheers for Fallacies, Especially Pathetic Ones!’, Representations, 140.1 (2017), 101-120 (104).

Erin Lafford (@ErinLafford) is a Lecturer in English at the University of Oxford.

The post John Clare’s ‘Oddlings’: Solitude and Non-Human Company appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

‘Social distancing’ is a phrase that makes you think. Of course, as an item in the lexicon of public health communication, that is its overt function—to serve as a handy reminder of what it is good to do in a pandemic, a guide to individual practices that will increase the safety of all. But it also implies further questions, about the reasons we give for maintaining distance from others, or practicing solitude, and, further, the social knowledge we may gain by such an ethical practice of voluntary solitude.

That is, the present public health crisis, as it has unfolded through a regime of ethicized practices of isolation and self-quarantine—impositions justified on the grounds that they protect not only the self but also others—may help us think in new ways about how we experience community. The philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy pointed this out as the crisis deepened in late March. He noted that the practice of isolation and the associated radical transformation of social life during the first phases of the pandemic had led some to imagine a more thoroughgoing alteration in everyone’s everyday relationship to capitalism and the environment. He said, ‘we should not scoff at this fragile euphoria, rather ask ourselves how far we can better understand the nature of our community’. One point Nancy made is particularly useful as we begin to emerge from an isolation that was never equitably distributed in any case, and start to reflect on what we may have learned: he insisted that if we are to think about community through these recent events, to reflect upon the fact that our mutual isolation is a paradoxical way of being (alone) together, then we have to displace the virus from the centre of our attention. ‘The problem’, he wrote, ‘is that the virus is still . . . [the] main representative’ of this emerging community of voluntary isolation.[1] That is, the virus is the icon or principal figure of, and justification for, our present practices of voluntary solitude. Insofar as they are governed by this figure, the political and technical apparatuses mobilized around the virus—the state and medical institutions devoted to our common biological life—limit a wider inquiry into the rewards of this voluntary solitude, what we may gain socially by self-isolating for each other.

There is, however, an archive of writing to be mined which involves self-conscious reflection on voluntary withdrawal, estrangement, and even (though the phrase is anachronistic in this context) ‘social’ distancing. This archive comes from social anthropology, and is comprised, perhaps paradoxically, of methodological reflections on the challenge of knowing through immersive social experiences. These reflections may be found in the broad genre of anthropological writing about ethnographic knowledge production—a genre in which experiences of solitude and withdrawal have a surprisingly prominent place. In fact, there is a long record of anthropologists wryly confessing that their field research was not nearly so convivial or participatory as the stereotype of hearty engagement in different ways of life might imply, and this confession usually comes twinned with an acknowledgement of the solitude demanded by the ethnographic vocation—although such rhetorical invocations of hardship in pursuit of knowledge are now completely out of fashion, to say nothing of the quasi-colonial trope of retreating to the privacy of one’s tent.

One genealogy of this kind of self-conscious account of ethnographic knowledge as the product of withdrawal or solitude might run (backward) from Clifford Geertz’s formulation of the ethnographic vocation in 1973—’what does the ethnographer do? He writes’—to at least Evans-Pritchard’s 1940 description of his relative solitude in the field, his abandonment by servants and guides, and the ‘Nuer-osis’ brought on by his Nuer ethnographic subjects’ (perfectly understandable) refusal to be interrogated by the interloper anthropologist (who formed part of the civilizing wing of an imperial apparatus that had not long before been employed in pacification). We might trace this even further back to Malinowski’s ‘Confessions of Ignorance and Failure’ in his fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands (conducted during World War I, though he only published his methodological accounting in 1935). A particularly influential example of an ethnographer documenting her own practices of withdrawal and isolation can be found in Jean Brigg’s 1970 ethnographic text Never in Anger. In fact, Briggs employs her retreat from her Inuit interlocutors’ social and emotional demands, and her need for time alone with her typewriter in her separate work tent, methodologically: she uses her own reaction of withdrawal and refusal when overwhelmed by daily personal proximity and intimacy in her fieldwork as a starting point for understanding the whole emotional complex of Inuit life.

These are wholly positive accounts of social distance and personal isolation as a starting point for ethnographic knowledge, and as a stage in overcoming, through reflection and comparison, the epistemic distance imposed by culture. There is also a distinct sub-genre of ethnographies in which a kind of retreat also produces a distinctive critical distance on the society under study, as opposed to deeper knowledge or greater sympathy. Such ethnographies often frame their data with an account of moments of doubt and uncertainty when the ethnographer found herself not only distant from the to-and-fro of daily (ethnographic) life, but also began to account for her own negative judgments upon the practices and goals of the people she is researching. Examples range from Hortense Powdermaker’s wry reflections on the difficulties of fieldwork in anti-Communist Hollywood in Stranger and Friend to the autobiographical introduction to Michael Moffatt’s study of caste, a quasi-allegorical account of his fieldwork in which he, as an instinctive democrat, is physically sickened by the ritualized humiliation of untouchability and can only think about it, and come to some understanding of its ultimate violence, by turning away from it.[2]

The line of reflections that includes Evans-Pritchard, Geertz, and Briggs, though marked by emotional drama, is notably positive in its assessment of voluntary withdrawal from the daily round of social life as part of the process of ethnographic knowledge production. The ethnographer retreats to her note-taking or gives up in frustration when receiving rehearsed and stale answers to ethnographic inquiries, but ultimately this all produces more insight into alien cultural patterns. The more frank and critical self-assessment given by Malinowski, a list of all the things he wished he had bothered to learn while in the field, is presented, likewise, as a positive catechism for future ethnographers, but was revealed by the posthumous publication of his fieldwork diary in 1967 to be more a record of true failures—ethical ones—produced by frustration and loneliness than simple lapses in method. Malinowski, his disciplinary descendants learned, committed bigoted expostulations to his private diary, was lonely, engaged in erotic reveries, and—perhaps most scandalous of all—read novels while he was in the field! That is, Malinowski not only complained rudely about the people he researched among, he read bad novels, and purely it seemed to escape from the pressures (and disappointments) of social interaction. He seemed to conform to the stereotype of the immature reader that the critic Francis Mulhern has recently identified as the key figure of mid-century cultural criticism: ‘the heteronomous reading subject, the stock life form of F.R. Leavis’s “mass civilization”.’[3] Even though the shock of these revelations has long-since faded, Malinowski’s double confession of ignorance and failure, the first methodological and the second a revelation of deeper frustrations, haunts all those who might write, still so anxiously, about the role of solitary reflection in the field, the necessity of withdrawal, and the conflicts brought on by spells of novel-reading. Such solitary practices seem like an escape from responsibility.[4]

Our professional judgement on Malinowski is perhaps kinder, today. I and others (including the literary historian Carlo Ginsburg) have written of other passages in the diary that reveal a rather more productive interchange between self-and-other in the moments of withdrawal and reflection that Malinowski recorded there. In this assessment, we have accepted that fieldwork cannot only be talk and interaction; it requires moments of isolation and even refusal of interaction, too, just as the elders acknowledged in their wry confessions—and, as they were less likely to observe, on both sides of the ethnographic relationship too.[5] But the questions I raised at the outset, in relation to social distancing, remain troubling: what could be offered as a justification for thus isolating or withdrawing, especially in the midst of a project of knowledge-acquisition and data gathering? Could it be that some distinctive knowledge is gained by practices of social distancing? Further, when might practices of personal withdrawal from society and its interactions, especially when these are willed or voluntary, still be ineluctably social, a pathway to learning and insight and even ‘good’ in an ethical sense?

Like most of my peers in my discipline, I am not inclined to embrace the hoary anthropological answer that we can achieve a transcendent perspective on the condition of culture and the patterns characteristic of other forms of life by cycles of immersion and withdrawal (usually accompanied by spatial movement from one ‘cultural’ place to another). On this out-of-date view, withdrawal and isolation are simply the other side of fruitful social immersion, and together they provide a way of achieving, through engagement followed by introspection, some comparative insight into others. This view of fieldwork proposes ‘value-free’ knowledge of other cultures, in their plurality, as the profit to be gained from this-worldly asceticism (or, at least, from going far away and leaving behind more immediate gratifications). This is too close to the Protestant ethic to be taken seriously as offering any kind of method free of its own cultural biases. We can, moreover, see clearly some formal similarities between this disciplinary self-justification and wider structures of ethical justification that link sacrifice to profit—for instance, the notion that the advent of the novel coronavirus requires us all, together, to engage in cycles of lockdown and re-opening, which are imagined, explicitly, to be both periodic and therapeutic. Giving up something now gives us greater reward later. More interestingly, perhaps, but equally problematically, knowledge becomes something that takes shape in stages, with cycles of withdrawal and re-emergence leading to new insights over time, rather than proceeding through analogy, comparison, or as something that comes from a stock of previous social experiences.

As an account of the production of ethnographic texts, of course, the stages sketched above are unobjectionable. One must participate, one must engage, one must write, and these are separate activities—so separate that several writers now advocate severing anthropological writing and theorizing from ethnographic experience altogether.[6] Their argument is that the particular ‘reward’ of ethnographic fieldwork (a term Malinowski used to describe his greatest results) is a broad and generally experiential one, which involves learning to live with new norms and to understand incommensurable values. If hitched too closely to textual representations, especially of ‘culture,’ this experience ends up being flattened into a product—on which one can earn a profit rather than win a reward. I tend to agree with this strong argument that what is most problematic in anthropology is the link that ties ethnography to culture and both to some written product, rather than a process of learning. Perhaps the same reservations apply to the practice of social distancing, and the effort to link it to specific results, whether gains in knowledge or skill at “management” of the virus.

The economy of such representations of social immersion and withdrawal as alternating phases of a broader and productive process, we might say, is inflationary. To escape from its debasement of the real value at stake, we might need to break the circuit which ties withdrawal to autonomy and hence to insight, and engagement to knowledge and understanding. Here is where I think we might return anew to the questions posed at the outset: what is figured as the motor of voluntary withdrawal, what justifies it or provides it with its particular set of incentives? How might these be linked to moral practices of belonging and solidarity? Malinowski’s practice of reading in fact provides one route toward an answer.

What if we take a fresh look at the notion that what one gains from reading or from aesthetic experience in general is insight not into other selves like oneself, fictive individuals, through a process of false equivalence or identification (the bugbear of heteronomy), but rather an imaginative grasp of a structure of relations? This is something akin to, but not exactly like, what the old account of ethnographic knowledge-production promised. The structure at issue may be culturally alien or veiled, ideologically, and thus difficult to access through direct personal experience; it may need to be mediated aesthetically in order to take on graspable form. Insofar as they are structured, such imaginary or alien relations can also serve as norms or models for action, and hence guide the development of culture in an old but still valuable sense—there is a social pedagogy that takes shape in the solitary act of reading, and in the practice of ethnography.

To be clear, according to Mulhern, Leavis disdained precisely the kind of novel-reading that sought models for imitation and moral instruction in the plots and characters of popular fiction—and I don’t want to seem overly instrumental in my account of reading. What I want to suggest, rather, is that it is neither immersion that is the pathway toward cultural knowledge nor the experience of isolation or withdrawal that uniquely allows reflection, but rather that a kind of voluntary withdrawal in the midst of interaction is a necessary condition for both understanding social relations and acting within them.[7] This claim reties the lines that connect ethnography to anthropology, experience to knowledge, engagement to reflection, and autonomy to community, but perhaps in novel ways.

Withdrawal or distancing is, I have said, productive—it makes us think, and think of sociality. It can even, perhaps, provide the decisive occasion for knowledge of social relations. But acknowledging this involves grasping that withdrawal is not necessarily the opposite of immersion or engagement—it can also be a kind of irony. In fact, it is a durable lesson of the anthropology of law, first articulated perhaps by Malinowski, that social norms cannot be known at all (or do not appear as norms) without the ‘moral irony’ of the mismatch between them and actual practices; this apperception of mismatch further imposes the endless effort to pull the two (practices and norms) back into alignment, and this is what makes it a moral irony rather than logical contradiction.[8] Withdrawal might not be a movement from involvement to a space of reflection, but rather the occasion for an awareness of that irony, and a heightened consciousness—albeit virtual or fictive in the absence of concrete others—of the moral duties it imposes.

Novel-reading, then, along with any aesthetic practice that involves the interplay of (affective) involvement (or absorption) and (distanced) judgment, can provide a type-case for a seemingly paradoxical kind of solitary-but-social knowledge. It provides readers with the possibility of evaluating other norms, other socialities, other rules, and allows them to follow how they might be worked out in worldly practice. Heteronomy, that is, might not be such a bad thing, if it is an alternative to an airless world of entirely self-generated and fully inhabited norms.

In any case, this indicates that anthropologists’ accounts of the poles of withdrawal and sociality, and their respective roles in knowledge-production, has thus far been too individualistic, too much indebted to a subject-centred notion of volition (in which knowledge is a product of the will), and a Christian metaphysics of denial, effort, and return. Solitude is even less a state of autonomy than immersion; both states are relative, can be thrust upon one as a consequence of its apparent opposite, and the trick is neither to manage the transition between them, nor to arbitrage and thus profit from their differences, but rather to expend the rewards of solitude in interaction, and vice versa. This, then, is the lesson of our current moment and of practices of ‘social distancing’ for anthropology, and for social knowledge more generally: Withdrawal, solitude, and even isolation can be moments of social action, and a richer understanding of social possibilities can result from these practices, too, rather than only from more engagement.

To return to Nancy’s paradoxical notion that the practice of social distancing allows us to experience community anew, the questions that now become clearer are these: what is the form or shape of the community we experience in social distancing? Further, what would be the posture of double isolation or withdrawal-from-withdrawal that would allow one to reflect upon and understand the community of isolates produced by social distancing? How would one study it ethnographically, through a dynamic that combines the aspects and reaps the rewards of a no-longer polarized immersion and withdrawal, interaction and solitude? If a person practicing individual isolation in the midst of a pandemic is one kind of ethical or ‘pro-social’ subject (in the argot of the psychologists), what purchase does that practice give us on the very social formation of that ethical choice, the alternatives that are withheld and the collective forces that are mobilized in order to make must and ought line up, when they do?

As Nancy himself is aware, the shape and form of the collective provides part of the consciousness of the individual, a part that is as much other as self, and this makes thinking about collective forms and their affordances and demands even more crucial. Indeed, there is a connection between collective form and personal predicament that we allude to when we talk of ‘mass-subjects’ and even ‘crowd psychology’. The question Nancy leads us to ask is: What difference is introduced when the crowd is (physically) separated, virtually communicating, and mass-mediated? As these terms suggest, the answer might be more diagnostic of contemporary urban lives than a measure of exceptional—even pandemic—conditions.

I will leave open for now exactly how we might answer Nancy’s own question, of what figure could better occupy the space of the common in the age of viral infection, other than the virus itself to which we are all still, albeit unequally, vulnerable. What is clear is that this figure cannot be a lone and self-sufficient individual, and will not be a singular but rather a plural figure of solitude; it may be a distanced figure, one that withdraws, but that does so in concert with others and for others. And then, what devices, what tools, what media will intervene between—and connect—this withdrawn, distanced, but knowledgeable self and all the others whom it carries with itself into isolation? It can’t only be the novel (that would launch us back into value-laden contrasts between mass and elite culture). Still, I might propose that some form of reading, including reading of ethnographic texts, or—put differently—a voluntary retreat to solitary immersion in a projected world not of one’s own creation, is a type of the doubled withdrawal with which we have now to deal, the lessons of which we want to learn. Reading, that is, can be one’s own retreat from solitude as well as an entrée to other worlds—it can be both withdrawal and engagement. The way out is also the way further in.

This is also a way toward thinking, finally, about the withdrawn ethnographer, reading (and writing) in solitude while sustaining an imaginative relation, an immersive relation, to social difference, and by doing so learning about the structure and form of social relations that both impinge upon but also constitute them. This scene of voluntary and pedagogical withdrawal, with the ethical demands it imposes and its requirement of a lively consciousness of difference, offers one way of answering the question of what, other than a virus, can be a figure of our present historical experience in a community of isolates.

[1] Jean-Luc Nancy, “Communovirus.” Verso Blog 27 Mar 2020: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4626-communovirus

[2] Hortense Powdermaker, Stranger and Friend: The Way of the Anthropologist (New York, 1966); Michael Moffatt, An Untouchable Community in South India: Structure and Consensus (Princeton, 1979).

[3] Francis Mulhern, Figures of Catastrophe (New York: Verso, 2016), 13

[4] To be sure, the whole elaborate enterprise of ethnographic knowledge production was, of course, first justified by Malinowski in part through his accounts of crossing cultural boundaries, leaving behind one social world to engage in another. Voluntary withdrawal and a kind of social distance were a part of this exercise, but this was more in the nature of the kind of exile or estrangement that enables relativism than it was a retreat into the absorbed and world-denying solitude characteristically associated with novel-reading. That was the shock of the revelation that he had indulged in this way. The one form of distance (from “home” and its comforts) had been counterbalanced by a presumption of total immersion in the elsewhere of fieldwork, which his private confessions seemed to deny.

[5] See the discussion and citations in my article ‘“Functionalists Write II:” Weird Empathy in Malinowski’s Trobriand Ethnographies,’ Anthropological Quarterly, 90(4) (2017), p. 983.

[6] Tim Ingold, ‘That’s Enough about Ethnography!’ Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (1): 383–395;

Tobias Rees, After Ethnos (Durham, NC, 2018).

[7] I should note here that this is a fragment of a larger project, and in the fuller exposition of these thoughts a reading of some types of fictive characters who are always doubled in this way, both living out and standing apart from norms becomes a way of supporting this otherwise quite broad claim.

[8] Carol Greenhouse, ‘Law,’ in D. Fassin, ed., A Companion to Moral Anthropology (Malden, Mass., 2012).

Leo Coleman is a political and legal anthropologist at Hunter College, City University of New York.

The post The Paradox of Ethnographic Solitude and the Necessity of Withdrawal (with special reference to ‘social distancing’) appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.