Solitude is a torment which is not threatened in hell itself.

John Donne, ‘Meditation V. Solus Adest’, Devotions upon emergent occasions (1624).

Miserable distemper! not to see God in the light, and see him in the darke: …not to see, where we all see him, in the Congregation, and to see him with terror, in the Suburbs of despaire, in the solitary chamber.

John Donne, ‘Preached at Hanworth, to my Lord of Carlile, and his company, being the Earles of Northumberland, and Buckingham, &c. Aug. 25. 1622. Fifty Sermons, Wing D1862 (1649), 274.

But, O my Soule, the Graue is fearefull: It is a retired solitude and a place of silence, a place of filthie stinke[.]

Zacharie Boyd, The last battell of the soule in death, STC 3447 (1629), 1135.

Solitude is not much better than a grave[.]

Thomas Adams, A commentary or, exposition vpon the diuine second epistle generall, written by the blessed apostle St. Peter, STC 108 (1633), 1610.

Society is the life of our life, and solitarinesse is a very living buriall. I might here move a Problem, why men naturally in remote and silent retirements and solitudes finde a kinde of horror and affrightfulnesse?

William Ince, Lot’s little one. Or Meditations on Gen. 19. vers. 20, STC 14073 (1640), 96.

So as this is the summe, if a man be alone, he shall be in misery; and againe, if a man be in any misery hee shall be left alone: Solitude and misery being like water, and ice, the one mutually producing the other.

John Jackson, The true euangelical temper, Wing J76B (1641), 185.

That it is true indeed, that to Man, by nature, or as Man, that is, as soone as he is born, Solitude is an enemy[.]

Thomas Hobbes, Philosophicall rudiments concerning government and society, Wing H2253 (1651), 6.

We tend to think that the inability to be alone is a problem of modernity, one that technological distraction has made particularly acute: indeed, in a 2014 study people of all ages found it so distressing to sit in a room alone for 15 minutes—without their phones—that some chose to relieve the boredom and fear by giving themselves electric shocks.[1] But many of our seventeenth century ancestors were so averse to solitude that it was embedded in their language: the Catholic lexicographer John Bullokar defined solitude as ‘A desert place, a wildernesse’, and many writers used ‘solitude’ as a synonym of ‘desolation’, the absence of life, desertion by one’s allies.[2] ‘Solitariness’ was the—somewhat—more neutral term, but, as the quotations above illustrate, whatever words were used, for many being alone was not merely a state of loneliness, but a source of existential dread.

Such a terror of being along is perhaps not surprising at a time when life was intensely communal. Early modern architecture afforded very little privacy, even for the wealthy, and few people expected or desired it. At all levels of society the chambers of a house were shared, and were not designed to impede access: servants slept in their masters’ rooms, rooms were strung together rather than opening off corridors, and poorer families were crammed into small spaces, often with their animals. Closets were not oratories but rooms that could be locked, used to store valuables and foodstuffs and for confidential business, and, as a secondary use, for reading and devotion. Even as a multi-functional lockable space they were a luxury; only the elite could afford to have a room dedicated solely to individual prayer. Early modern people of course experienced time alone, at work or travelling, and those who sought solitude could find it outside, in gardens or fields, or in the watches of the night between first and second sleep, when the rest of the household was quiet. But for most people, most of the time, life was lived with others’ care and guidance, watchfulness and concern, in a way that is difficult for us to imagine. It is no surprise that solitude was equated with illness, misery and the grave, that it was an ‘enemy’ to human life, that it led naturally to ‘horror and affrightfulnesse’.

That horror of isolation was coupled with a fear of what the mind might imagine when alone: ‘those disordered motions, which accompany our sequestred imaginations’, as Sir Thomas Browne called them. This fear of thought itself was not confined to Protestants. Roman Catholicism had a long history of personal devotional practises, but these were contained and controlled by an infrastructure of convents and confessors and set forms of prayer, and there was still an anxiety about might happen if people began to think and pray outside of those boundaries. In sixteenth century Spain, for example, Teresa of Avila had to guard her writings very closely; merely promoting the concept of ‘mental prayer’ (prayer in one’s head, without set forms) was enough to attract the attention of the inquisition. The Jesuits helped to overcome this fear and to popularise more contemplative forms of devotion, publishing handbooks that were widely circulated and translated. But in England the suspicion of solitary devotion was fuelled and maintained by the rejection of monasticism and everything associated with it, which had become a kind of Protestant shibboleth by the seventeenth century. Solitude, and monastic solitude in particular, was a dangerous source of temptation and disordered thinking. The devil had chosen to tempt Jesus in the desert for a reason, as Joseph Hall warned:

Woe to him that is alone, for if he fall, there is not a second to lift him vp. Those that out of an affectation of holinesse seeke for solitude in rocks and caues of the deserts, doe no other than run into the mouth of the danger of tentation, whiles they thinke to auoid it.[3]

The paranoia of this position is apparent from the way it is applied to other Biblical stories that would not seem to us to have anything to do with solitude. Lot, who had remained chaste in the ‘professed filthinesse’ of Sodom, would not have committed incest if he had not been alone in the mountains. Judah would not have been unwittingly seduced by his daughter-in-law in the guise of a temple prostitute if he had not been alone on the road. David would not have spied on and plotted to abduct Bathsheba and murder her husband if he had not been alone on the roof of his house. The traditional view is that early modern Protestants were great advocates of Matthew 6.5 (‘enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret’), when in fact they saw the dangers of solitude everywhere. Writers that encouraged solitary prayer quenched any enthusiasm with warnings about temptation and lists of ways of preventing ‘Satans filthy imbracements’.[4] ‘It is good, no doubt,’ admitted the godly minister of St Mary’s, Dover,

sometimes to bee alone, that wee may haue conuenience for holy Soliloquies, but wee must know, they are not solitarie Groues, silent walkes, a desolate Cell, or melancholly Hermitage, which can shut our selues from our selues: shew mee that holy recluse, that mortified Anachorete, whose walls can keepe out cares, sinfull and tumultuous thoughts[.][5]

The influential London puritan John Downame’s A guide to godlynesse provides an example of how suspicion of solitude infected Protestant practical divinity. Although he includes a chapter ‘Of the duties which wee ought to performe, when we are solitary and alone’, Downame is extremely reluctant to encourage solitude even for the purposes of prayer. Being alone is an ‘accident’ of daily life that must be used for devout purposes lest it become the source of danger. The ‘duties’ are not steps in meditation, but methods to avoid sin:

• . Sect. 1 That when we are alone, we must not be idle and vnfruitfull.
• . Sect. 2 That we must spend our solitary houres in good exercises, shunning vaine thoughts and intertaining Christian meditations.
• . Sect. 3 That in our solitarinesse we must auoyde carnall concupiscence and the pleasures of sinne.
• . Sect. 4 That we must in our solitarinesse beware of sinfull actions and secret sinnes.
• . Sect. 5 That it is pleasant, profitable, and necessary to spend our solitary houres in Christian duties.

Even that last section about the ‘pleasant’ benefits of solitude is full of warnings to ‘keepe this watch ouer our thoughts, hearts, and actions, when we are solitary, because then we are more in danger to fall into sinne, and to become slothfull and negligent in all good duties’ and because alone ‘we are destitute of the helpe of our religious friends’, their guidance and watchful admonitions. It is the end of this chapter that leads to Downame’s warnings about Biblical figures who fell while alone: Eve, Joseph in Potipher’s house, Lot alone in the mountains with his daughters, David spying on Bathsheba, even Christ in the wilderness. ‘[W]ee are in our solitarinesse to watch most carefully ouer the purity of our soules,’ Downame warns, ‘because they are then most indangered to these spirituall rapes.’[6]

What underlies all this concern is an almost paranoid fear of not being watched: the vigillance of other Christians is what keeps us from falling into temptation. This paranoia finds its opposite in the following chapter, ‘What duties wee ought to performe when wee are in company’. Downame allows that ‘there is a fit time for solitarinesse,’ ‘yet we are not chiefly to affect it, much lesse to put such perfection in it, as to deuote our liues wholly vnto it[.]’ We are ‘to preferre ciuill conuersation before solitarinesse, and a life taken vp in vertuous action, before that which is spent in bare theorie and contemplations.’ It is in communal life that we can be examples to one another, ‘stirre vp Gods graces in one another, both by word and good example, helping to remooue impediments that lye in the way; and exhorting one another to cheerefulnesse in their iourney.’ The anxious tone of the previous chapter is transfigured; in ‘sweete society’ believers ‘hasten their speed towards the Kingdome of heauen’.[7]

The terror of solitude that is evident in Downame’s Guide and many other godly texts was balanced by a number of other influences, and in the seventeenth century an increasing number of Protestant writers began to concede that solitude, although dangerous, was probably necessary to the Christian life. Richard Rogers’ influential Seuen treatises on practical divinity (1603) features a chapter detailing ‘how we should behaue our selues in solitarinesse’ (376-84). Like Downame, Rogers spends considerable time warning against the ‘idle and vaine wandrings and fantasies’ that ‘swarme’ in the minds of most people when they are alone. But he also offers the examples of Cicero, Scipio and Cato, who valued their solitary meditations, and these pagan classical writers offered an example of stoic retreat from the world of the court, politics and business to a quieter life that was romanticised (and satirized) in pastoral literature.[8] Joseph Hall’s The arte of diuine meditation (STC 12642, 1606) introduced continental forms of meditation to Protestant readers, and guidebooks such as Daniel Featley’s Ancilla Pietatis (STC 10725, 1626) presented straightforward patterns of private prayer not unlike Catholic books of hours. But the ambivalence remained. Featley wrote his handbook while confined to his house by a non-infectious disease during an outbreak of plague; meditating on the emptiness of the church, ‘the danger and desolation of her solemnest assemblies’, Featley ‘fell into a serious consideration of the vse and most vrgent necessity of PRIVATE DEVOTION’ to reconnect believers to public worship. He dedicated his book to Katherine Manners, praising her piety but implying that she was in need of a Protestant form of prayer since she had renounced Catholicism to marry George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, in 1620. (He was not wrong; she reverted to Catholicism shortly after Buckingham’s assassination in 1628). John Donne could call solitude ‘a torment which is not threatened in hell itself’ in the Devotions, but also keep a time of ‘solitarinesse and arraignment of my self’ in preparation for receiving the sacrament. In his time alone Donne ‘digested some meditations of mine, and apparelled them (as I use) in the form of a Sermon’, a reminder that writing was one solitary pursuit that seems to have caused far less panic for his contemporaries than thinking without the aid of pen and paper, without the interlocutor that writing imagines.[9]

Like many of his contemporaries, Donne was influenced by Roman Catholic models of prayer and meditation that were much more positive about the value of time spent alone. Classics of practical devotion by Luis de la Puente, Luis de Granada, Francis de Sales, Peter of Alcantara and others were translated into English in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, and under the influence of Hall and others found their way into Protestant hands. Successive translations of one of these texts, the late medieval Devotio Moderna guide De Imitatione Christi (c. 1427), provide a final example of how suspicion of solitude left its trace in Protestant culture. The original includes a chapter ‘De amore solitudinis et silentii’, translated as ‘Of the loue of onlynes and scylence’ by the Roman Catholic Richard Whitford in 1535, ‘Of the loue of Solitude, and Silence’, by the Jesuit Anthony Hoskins in 1613, but ‘Of solitarines, and silence’ by the Protestant Thomas Rogers in 1580.[10] Rogers’ translation is subtly reforming, inserting scripture references that anchor the text in Protestant Biblical scholarship, and slightly altering the wording, as in the omission of ‘love’ in the title of chapter 20. For example, Rogers translates ‘Maximi Sanctorum humana consortia ubi poterant vitabant et Deo in secreto vivere eligebant’ as ‘after the example of the most godlie, who shunned the companie of men, as much as they might, and choase to liue apart vnto God.’ Rogers’s language evokes Senecan retirement from public life rather than outright solitude; ‘living apart’ in an early modern context could mean retreat to the country rather than seclusion. Hoskins’s translation is clearer, and much closer to the Latin: ‘The greatest Saints auoyded the company of men as much as they could, {{Heb. 3.}} and chose to liue to God in secret.’[11]

Hoskins also emphasises secrecy in a paragraph that describes solitary meditation as the only source of godly remorse:

5. Si vis corde tenus compungi, intra cubiculum tuum, et exclude tumultus mundi. Sicut scriptum est, In cubilibus vestris compungimini.

If thou desirest true contrition of hart, retire thy selfe into some secret and solitary place, and exclude from thy mind the tumultes, & vnquietnes of the world, as it is written: In your chambers be ye sory. {{Psal. 4.}}

Rogers, on the other hand, chooses the more neutral term ‘chamber’, more closely aligning the instruction with Jesus’s rules for praying in the gospel of Matthew:

the which thou shalt the more easilie attaine, if thou enter into thy chamber {{Matth. 6, 6.}}, and shut thy selfe from trobles of the worlde, as it is written {{Psalm. 4, 4.}}, Examine your owne hart vpon your bed, and be stil.

Rogers’s translation is closer to the Latin ‘cubiculum tuum’, but Hoskins’s ‘some secret and solitary place’ is much more explicitly solitary. ‘Chamber’ usually referred to a bedroom, and early modern beds and bedrooms were surprisingly communal places.[12]

Most telling is a slightly confusing passage about how the wonders of the world are ultimately unsatsifying:

Quid potes videre alicubi, quod die potest sub solem permanere. Credis te forsitan satiari, sed non poteris pertingere.

Hoskins renders this as

What is there any where to be seene that can long continue vnder the sunne? Thou thinkest perhaps to satiate thy selfe, & haue thy fill; but thou shalt neuer attaine it[.]

But Rogers turns this into a warning about too much thinking:

What seest thou in any place that abideth euer {{1. Cor. 7, verse. 31. 1. Iohn. 2, verse. 17.}}? Perchance thou thinkest to satisfie thy self with contemplation; but thou shalt neuer do so.

Rogers goes on to make the same point that the devout should ‘lift vp thine eies’ to God, rather than looking on earthly things, but the hint that ‘contemplation’ might be unsatisfying and even distracting is a reminder that fear of thought crept in even to this adaptation of a classic of Roman Catholic devotion.[13]

Many of my fellow early modernists would be startled to read these passages; we still tend to think of Protestants as those who are happy to enter into their closets. We cannot understand the evolution of Protestant devotion, and thus of early modern concepts of the self, until we take this suspicion of solitude into account. But this phenomenon has implications beyond histories of the reformation. It provides evidence of the long and deep-rooted history of the pathology of solitude, of the natural ‘horror and affrightfulnesse’ that many still feel at the prospect of time alone. It also problematises the questions at the heart of today’s seminar about inner presence and the inner voice, and changing perceptions of the source of that presence. Godly writers may warn of Satan’s ability to manipulate those who are alone, but the dangerous thoughts come from within, from the sinful nature of the individual, not an external spiritual force. The fear articulated here is fundamentally a fear of the unguarded, unwatched self: no solitary space is sufficiently holy to ‘shut our selues from our selues’.

Erica Longfellow is Dean of Divinity at New College, Oxford.

[1] Timothy J Wilson et al, ‘Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind’, Science 4 July 2014, pp. 75-77, http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6192/75.full

[2] J[ohn] B[ullokar], An English expositor, STC 4083 (1616), 100; OED, ‘solitude, n.’, 2, 3, 4.

[3] Joseph Hall, The vvorks of Ioseph Hall Doctor in Diuinitie, STC 12635b (1625), 1192.

[4] John Downame, A guide to godlynesse or a Treatise of a Christian life, STC 7143 (1622), 302. Richard Rogers, Seuen treatises, STC 21215 (1603), 381.

[5] John Reading, Dauids soliloquie Containing many comforts for afflicted mindes. As they were deliuered in sundry sermons at Saint Maries in Douer, STC 20788 (1627), 181.

[6] [6] John Downame, A guide to godlynesse, 297, 299, 300, 301, 302.

[7] John Downame, A guide to godlynesse, 302, 303, 304.

[8] Richard Rogers, Seuen treatises, 384, 383.

[9] John Donne, ‘To my worthy friend F. H.’, Letters to severall persons of honour, Wing D1864 (1651), 228.

[10] Richard Whitford, trans., A boke newly translated out of Latyn in to Englisshe, called The folowing of Christe, STC 23964.7 (1535); Thomas Rogers, trans., Of the imitation of Christ, STC 23973 (1580); Anthony Hoskins, trans., The follovving of Christ Deuided into foure bookes, STC 23987 (Saint-Omer, 1613).

[11] Thomas Rogers, trans., Of the imitation of Christ, 41; Anthony Hoskins, trans., The follovving of Christ, 47.

[12] Anthony Hoskins, trans., The follovving of Christ, 49; Thomas Rogers, trans., Of the imitation of Christ, 42.

[13] Anthony Hoskins, trans., The follovving of Christ, 51; Thomas Rogers, trans., Of the imitation of Christ, 44.

The post Solitude and authenticity after the Reformation: or, Puritans out of the closet appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

In Carmen Maria Machado’s short story, ‘Inventory’ (2017), a solitary woman compiles her life’s list of sexual encounters. ‘Every person I’ve ever loved. Every person who has probably loved me.’ She remembers women of all ages, and men too. From drunken high-school couplings to more risky pleasures: hook-ups with friends or random strangers; melancholy sex on the floor of empty houses, ‘skin reflected silver from the moon’; an abusive wife; one-night-stands who grimly masturbate in solitude after the human coupling has concluded. As the list grows, incidental details gather into narrative. In news reports playing in late night diners, planes are grounded; ‘a list of symptoms of the virus blossoming a state away’; meetings on ‘how to stockpile food and manage outbreaks…should the virus hop the firebreak’; a relationship endured ‘because I was afraid of what the world was catching all round us.’[1] People and places must be abandoned in order to survive. ‘The fucking thing is only passing through physical contact’, one character complains, ‘if people would just stay apart.’ Against a background of death, physical intimacy becomes an increasingly queer remnant of a shockingly-recent past: as an archive of touch, the list fortifies against loneliness. Her final lover is a woman with grey hair and green eyes. But when she symptoms begins to display symptoms ‘there is no time to mourn’ her. Abandoning her coastal home, the woman holes up on an island, gazing back to shore, imagining ‘the virus blooming on the horizon like a sunrise’ and compulsively writing.  Posthuman life becomes matter-of-fact, ‘the world will continue to turn, even with no people on it. Maybe it will go a little faster.’[2] A catalogue of the human compulsion to love against the odds, ‘Inventory’ mourns the end of love even as its narrator persists.

Machado’s brief inventory of the lost recalls Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722), another hybrid text which gestures at the impact of contagious disease by shifting between bare enumeration, anecdote, and the isolated perspective of its first-person narrator—the quasi-anonymous H.F. Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year also furnished Mary Shelley with an historical template for the ravages of individual alienation. In her 1826 novel, The Last Man, scenes of death accumulate. Shelley’s bills of mortality are unremitting—infants, parents, wives, husbands, brothers, sisters—an impossible calculus of loss. But unlike that eighteenth-century avatar of loneliness, Robinson Crusoe, love is central to these survivors’ stories, even if its purpose seems unclear. Desolate ‘monarchs of the waste’ all may be, but the materials that solitude furnishes are used to very differing effects.[3] These extinction fictions, use the psychological extremities of solitude to quarantine the past in order to mourn it. Under the sign of the secular apocalypse which is extinction, these writers process the labours of love, and the estrangements of self and gender that occur in the wake of its loss.

The Last Man was described by Muriel Spark as ‘a compound of the domestic romance, the Gothic extravaganza, and the sociological novel’.[4] It is also an extinction fiction, a story of the very last remaining human left adrift after accidents of plague, war, or climate has extinguished all others. In this futurist vision a plague sweeps across continents, annihilating civilizations and causing global unrest. A novel that begins as the collective biography of a circle of friends, loosely based on Shelley’s own, gradually gives way to a tale about the inexorable power of disease, until only one individual remains—the solitary narrator, Lionel Verney. Verney’s predicament crystallizes the idea that ‘the condition of the individual is essentially isolated and therefore ultimately tragic’, exploring a ‘metaphysics of alienation…the threat of man’s aloneness in an unintelligible universe.’[5] An extreme version of the Wordsworthian Solitary, Shelley’s work self-consciously percolates her own autobiography. The character of Adrian acts as a literary idealization of her husband Percy Bysshe; the figure of Raymond a part-portrait of Byron. But the last man’s status as a curious compound of Shelley herself and other women (including Clair Clairmont) seems blithely accepted by critics as an unremarkable act of literary transvestism. Shelley’s grief-stricken journal entry following Percy’s death turns her into a universalized cipher for devastation: ‘The last man! Yes, I may well describe that solitary being’s feelings, feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me.”[6] I wonder whether extinction fictions ‘scale up’ individual loss that might otherwise be dismissed as essentially ‘female’, amplifying felt magnitudes of pain: the intimate loss of life that is miscarriage; children’s death as the foreclosure of the futurity; the self-reproach of a body that will not reproduce despite the prompts desire; the dissolution of family itself. It seems to me that, in its transexual shift, The Last Man is in part about the gendered crisis that such losses produce. In the ‘last relic’ of humanity, Lionel Verney, the novel generates a curious sense of melancholy: a literary example of ‘extinction debt’, of survival without recovery expressed through something approximating a transgender imaginary.

It is a familiar principle of Shelley criticism that her own anguished familial background contributed to her literary preoccupations. Ellen Moers suggests that Shelley was ‘not a secure mother, for she lost most of her babies soon after they were born’ and not a ‘lawful’ mother since she was not married to Percy Bysshe until afterward.[7] Thus Frankenstein is routinely accepted as the Romantic ur-text of maternity, birth, pain, and death. Written after the first of Shelley’s infant losses, the novel is the literary by-product of a teenage pregnancy. Shelley lost several children shortly after birth—the common brutality of that age—and by miscarriage. But she also lost her son, William (she called him ‘Willmouse’), at the age of three: an age when a child’s character comes out in play and chatter. William would die in Italy, where the Shelleys were living a peripatetic life amongst picturesque ruins and real people. In December 1818, with Clair Clairmont, the Shelleys visited the Bay of Baie, and Elysian Fields; in June the following year, William was taken ill, and died at Rome. Disconsolate, and pressurized by her husband to move yet again, the losses of her five years, she wrote, felt like suffering meant ‘to wean me from the world if I were too fond of it.’ Devastating for both parents, for Mary Shelley in particular it caused a profound alienation from human relations. Writing to Irish ex-patriot Emilia Curran, Shelley asked that Curran tend William’s tomb at Rome ‘near which I shall lie one day, and care not, for my own sake, how soon. I never shall recover that blow… the thought never leaves me for a single moment; everything on earth has lost its interest to me.’[8] Maternal desolation is not just personal grief, but complete alienation from the natural world so often conceived as a Romantic source of solace. Percy Bysshe, too, theorized nature as a force for community when human sympathies failed.

In solitude, or in that deserted state when we are surrounded by human beings, and yet they sympathize not with us, we love the flowers, the grass, the waters, and the sky. In the motion of the very leaves of spring, in the blue air, there is then found a secret correspondence with our heart…by their inconceivable relation to something within the soul, awaken the spirits to a dance of breathless rapture, and bring tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes… Sterne says that if he were in a desert he would love some cypress. So soon as this want or power is dead, man becomes the living sepulchre of himself, and what yet survives is the mere husk of what once he was.[9]

To exist without love is to subsist: to be a ‘living sepulchre’, a relic, condemned to survival without recovery. As Mary Jacobus has shown, Shelley’s writing is ‘suffused with maternal mourning as well as survivor guilt’: a primal ache of anguish and loneliness.[10]

Denatured and dispossessed, Verney’s grief is that of the childless mother. There is no way to call her boy back to life but to witness his absence in the world. In the years leading up to the publication of The Last Man, Shelley was engaged in editing the posthumous poems of her husband. At the last moment, the work was aborted and withdrawn due to her father-in-law’s demands. The novel acts as a creative proxy for the literary memorialization that Posthumous Poems was meant to have performed. As editorial mediator, Shelley acts as a kind of midwife to the dead: bringing forth living memory from the scraps of living memory. In the preface to The Last Man, she makes her role as medium crucial to the vatic scope of the speculative novel. Reworking Shelley’s memories of the Italian landscapes visited before her son’s death, the preface recalls visits to the ‘Sibyl’s Cave’ (5) near Naples, where she and her companion find ‘frail and attenuated leaves’ containing prophetic writing. Deciphering the leaves’ meaning was once their joint labour, but is now a solitary task: an act of creative translation. Shelley’s sibylline framing ‘pointedly refashions British prophecy’s longstanding patriarchal idiom…to accommodate female authors and their perspectives.’[11] Doubly mediated—author as a medium channelling a seer—Shelley’s preface constructs her as an interpreter ‘of real sorrows and endless regrets’ into ‘ideality, which takes the sting from pain’ (7). If mediums in fact were generally female or feminine conduits, genderswitching from the avatar of ‘Mary Shelley’ to ‘Lionel Verney’ might be one way of swerving accusations of excessive sensibility. As she mourned the death of her child, her father William Godwin rebuked her for her failure to rise to her social responsibility. ‘The human species’, he charged her,

may be divided into two great classes: those who lean on others for support, and those who are qualified to support. Of these last, some…can support a world, contributing by their energies to advance their whole species one or more degrees in the scale of perfectibility…You were formed by nature to belong to the best of these classes, but you seem to be shrinking away, and voluntarily enrolling yourself among the worst.[12]

In depicting of the end of humanity, Shelley imaginatively expands her grief to fill the world. Conceiving a (male) survivor whose stoicism cannot change the brute fact of extinction, she instead suggests both the pain and pointlessness of enduring lastness. A character formed for both intellectual service and love, Verney endures an insupportable solitude where the care of elegy is now the only office of love.

Global in its scope and energies, the novel is nonetheless ineluctably drawn to the site of Shelley’s personal apocalypse: as if uncovering a kernel of trauma at the heart of its prophecy of extinction. Fleeing England, the band of plague survivors pursue a final desperate ‘scheme of migration’ to Italy in the hope of salvaging the remnant of humanity. But Shelley is unsparing in her depiction of the limits of individual agency and the fallacy of personal exceptionalism. Each person ‘trusted that their beloved family would be the one preserved’, but the plague demolishes ‘that pertinacious optimism which…characterized our human nature (409).’ The final section of the novel is unremitting. Verney’s son Evelyn, ‘dear even to pain’, like Shelley’s William, dies of typhus. It is his death which turns the remnants on their ‘pilgrimage towards Rome’ (436).  In The Last Man’s crowning catastrophe, Verney’s two remaining friends are drowned in a storm. He finds himself alive on the shore of Italy:

For an instant I compared myself to that monarch of the waste – Robinson Crusoe. We had both been thrown companionless – he on the shore of a desolate island: I on that of a desolate world. (349)

The schemes of material accumulation and improvement that Crusoe finds diverting cannot comfort Shelley’s relic. While Defoe’s desert island is reassuringly temporary, Shelley’s castaway’s predicament is permanent. ‘Shall I wake, and speak to none, pass the interminable hours, my soul, islanded in the world, a solitary point, surrounded by vacuum?’, Verney asks. Such a sublime sense of isolation, both temporal and existential, fuels the vertigo of the final pages of The Last Man. Humanity has receded ‘like a tide…leaving [the individual] blank and bare in the midst.’ Plague is merely Shelley’s pretext for presenting a condition of pathological intensity: the malaise of ‘utter irremediable loneliness’.

The Last Man thus deconstructs the optimistic possibilities of transcendence found elsewhere in Romantic writing. In her novel Mathilda, Shelley was able to imagine a ‘perfect solitude’ where generous stores of self-subsistence meant you ‘wished for no friend’ because your own thoughts were company enough. Verney, wandering disconsolately from one empty town to another, leaves in each a desperate message: ‘Friend, come! I wait for thee!’ The irony of this long novel is that it is narrated without hope of a readership, yet desperately seeks an audience. Caught on the cusp between the need to communicate and consciousness of its futility, this is Beckett without the jokes. Who is Verney in an empty world? The ‘unveiled course of my lone futurity’ (458), demands ‘how could I resign myself? Without love, without communion, without sympathy’ (463). Such stark conditions of a friendless futurity dramatically reframe the philosopher David Hume’s lament, ‘Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return?’

The final pages of the novel answer that question, in a way. They remind me of the plaintive lines of one of her husband’s fragments, inscribed ‘To my Lost William’: ‘With what truth I may say | Roma Roma Roma | non e piu come era prima’.[13] The holy city, a vast storehouse of history and memory, provides a ‘medicine for many and vital wounds’ (462). It is now a vast sepulchre, reverberating with Shelley’s loss. If Rome lies at the heart of Shelley’s solitude it is also the place where Verney comes to terms with his fate, to begin living his solitude in earnest. Both a cause for sorrow, and a condition which is also a kind of strange psychic resource, Rome provides a lesson in resignation—or durance, perhaps. It is where Verney reads and dreams, and starts writing. ‘O, worn and beating heart, may I dissect thy fibres?’ (465), he asks, before embarking on his life’s work. Verney’s heart (like Shelley’s, I suspect) pulsed with maternal affection, its pain an embodied testimony. As one sixteenth-century physician writes, ‘The love of the mother is so strong, though the child be dead and laid in the grave, yet always she hath him quick in her heart.”[14] Such unrecoverable loss, as in Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, is the novel’s ‘kernel’: ‘its hub, its epicenter, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns. This moment is the absent mother’s.’[15] Verney, who had hoped to write for posterity, becomes instead a different type of author: one who preserves the loved not just in elegy but through the care of writing.[16] Though he claims to be leaving a ‘sole monument’ of himself as the last man, what he produces is a living testament of love. It is an account of rich lives: political and personal passions—of friends whose ineffectual highmindedness is delineated without the bitterness of personal reproach; of the astonished wonder and love that children prompt; the way that even infant lives can carry the traces of care and anxiety bequeathed by parents to them. By writing, Verney creates a future of sorts: the makeshift form of hope that is creativity. ‘Capricious and childish’ in his despair, he suddenly imagines ‘this world re-peopled’ through ‘the children of a saved pair of lovers’ (466). Shelley’s extinction fiction swiftly rejects the existence of some such ‘tender offspring of the re-born world’ (341): Verney affirms ‘loneliness is my familiar, sorrow my inseparable companion…none shall ever come’ (467). But what is offered in its stead is a mother’s generative rebellion against death: literature committed to keeping the lost alive. Through writing Verney saves what he can of his lost son and feels again, despite it all.

The Last Man is an astonishing but unsparing work. It domesticates the inevitability of nineteenth-century ‘extinction discourse’ through its grim prophecy.[17]  Its vision of the hapless survivor living a kind of posthumous existence resonates with contemporary feelings of climate grief as well as our sense of helplessness as yet another wave of Covid-19 rises. Peter Melville has argued that Verney’s despair becomes ‘a kind of antibody that allows him to live with and confront the devastation and loneliness of his tragic fate’. By the close of the novel, Verney’s persistence makes him a monument to human endurance: ‘a figure whose psychical fortitude sustains and produces an enduring synthesis between contrary mental states—between hope and despair—which in turn embodies … the spectral image of good health.’[18] Framing Shelley’s novel within the current Covid-19 crisis, Eileen Hunt Botting notes that ‘Verney realizes that even if he is the last man on Earth, he must live as though he is not. He must sustain humanity by acting upon his profound sense of the interconnectedness of his fate with other forms of life — human or not.’[19] If the literature of loneliness inoculates against the risks of enforced, unwilled isolation, it does so by reminding us of what we stand to lose if we forget our duty of care to each other.

[1] Carmen Maria Machado, ‘Inventory,’ in Her Body and Other Parties (Profile Books, 2019) p. 35.

[2] Machado, p. 43

[3] Mary Shelley, The Last Man, ed. Morton D. Paley (Oxford: World’s Classics, 2008), p. 349. All further references are to this edition.

[4] Muriel Spark, The Child of Light: Mary Shelley (London: Tower Bridge Publications, 1951), p. 2.

[5] Hugh Luke, ‘The Last Man: Mary Shelley’s Myth of the Solitary’, Prairie Schooner Vol. 39, No. 4 (WINTER 1965 / 66), 316-327: 325.

[6] Mary W. Shelley, Journals, May 14 1823.

[7] Ellen Moers, ‘Female Gothic: The Monster’s Mother,’ in Literary Woman (New York: Doubleday, 1976), pp. 216-224, p. 217.

[8] Mary W. Shelley, Letters, pp. 249-250.

[9] P.B. Shelley, ‘On Love,’ http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~djb/shelley/1880onlove.html

[10] Mary Jacobus, First Things: Reading the Maternal Imaginary (Routledge, 1995), p. 107.

[11] Ruppert, Timothy. “Time and the Sibyl in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 41 no. 2, 2009, p. 141-156. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/sdn.0.0054. See also Mellor, Anne K. “Blake, the Apocalypse, and Romantic Women Writers.” Romanticism and Millenarianism. Ed. Tim Fulford. New York: Palgrave, 2002. 139–52.

[12] Godwin to Mary W. Shelley.

[13] See http://shelleygodwinarchive.org/sc/hu/to_william/#/p1 for image and transcription. ‘It is not as it was before’.

[14] Stephen Greenblatt, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/01/14/hamnet-shakespeare-wisewoman-stratford/

[15] Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet (Tinder Press, 2020), p. 8.

[16] On learning to read and write Verney says ‘I acquired new sympathies and pleasures…Suddenly I became as it were the father of all mankind. Posterity became my heirs’, p. 120.

[17] Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800-1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 8.

[18] Peter Melville, ‘The Problem of immunity in The Last Man’, SEL: 1500-1800, 2007, 47:4.

[19] Eileen Hunt Botting, ‘Mary Shelley Created ‘Frankenstein,’ and Then a Pandemic’, The New York Times, March 13, 2020.

Rebecca Anne Barr (@R_A_Barr) is Assistant Professor in Gender and Sexualities in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge.

The post Extinction rebellion: solitude, love and gender appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

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.

The young man in Goya’s famous “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” is alone. With no one around to disturb him, he has fallen asleep while working at his desk. Yet, while this young man is in a state of solitude, he does not seem to be quite alone, for he is surrounded by the wonderful and terrifying products of his mind. Goya’s aquatint is accompanied by a short epigraphy, which reads “imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels (La fantasía abandonada de la razón produce monstruos imposibles: unida con ella es madre de las artes y origen de las maravillas).” But how, exactly, can our imagination act in this way? And under what conditions? Would this young man’s imagination produce such impossible monsters had he not been alone? Could it be, then, that our imagination produces terrifying creatures not only when abandoned by reason but also when abandoned by other people?

It is commonly argued that Goya is expressing here the Enlightenment ideals of reason and rationality. Yet, the basic sentiment that motivates the “Sleep of Reason” and the idea that “imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters” is as old as the concept of imagination itself. It can be traced back to the earliest attempts to theorize the cognitive and epistemological roles of the imagination and it remains common throughout most of the history of philosophy, at least until the eighteenth century.

In this short essay, I would like to investigate this idea of the “Sleep of Reason” and of imagination’s capacity to produce impossible monsters when abandoned by reason. Turning to the history of philosophy and science, I am interested here in how philosophers, scientists, doctors, and theologians have thought about the nature of imagination, its relationship to reason, and its ability to radically depart from reality and produce wonderful, incredible, and terrifying images and appearances. Importantly, I seek not only to understand the effect that the abandonment of reason has on the imagination but also to explore this relationship between reason and imagination in the context of loneliness. I would like to ask why we are likelier to be “abandoned by reason” when we are alone, or why the imagination is prone to produce such terrifying images under the condition of solitude.

The first question, then, is why does the imagination, when abandoned by reason, produce impossible monsters? Throughout the history of philosophy and science, the first and most straightforward answer to this question is that the imagination, in itself, is fallible and prone to error. For Plato, the imagination (phantasia or eikasia) is the mental faculty that process the impressions of phantoms (phantasmata) or likenesses (eikones). The instability and fallibility of this faculty are tied both to the imperfection of our senses—on which it depends—and to the inherent and natural instability and imperfection of the objects of sensual perception.[1] Aristotle had a broader—and significantly more influential—understanding of the cognitive and epistemological roles of imagination. For him, the imagination (phantasia) is present in nearly all mental activity: from processing sensual input and providing the foundation for abstract thinking to motivating any kind of animal movement and a broad range of emotions. Yet, unlike the so-called ‘proper senses’ or reason, phantasia could be either right or wrong and is often associated by Aristotle with dreams, hallucinations, and error more generally.[2]

The imagination is not unique to humans. In fact, many animals are guided and “live by” this faculty.[3] Yet humans, according to a common argument, are distinguished from animals by the presence of reason in their soul or mind and by its simultaneous operation with the imagination. Gregor Reisch expressed this idea in his 1503 Margarita Philosophica, arguing that “in man this power [phantasia] is adorned with reason” whereas “in brutes, by contrast, the phantasy is ruled by the instinct of nature.”[4] Giovanni Francesco Pico della Mirandola similarly held that “he who lacks reason, then, is not man, but rather a brute to be dragged hither and thither at the beck of the imagination.”[5] And Robert Burton argued in his 1621 Anatomy of Melancholy that “in man it [imagination] is subject and governed by reason, or at least should be; but in brutes it hath no superior, and is ratio brutorum, all the reason they have.”[6]

While humans are aided and guided by reason, the imagination remains a potential source of error and confusion in their souls. The imagination, Pico explains, “is for the most part vain and wandering.”[7] Expressing a nearly identical sentiment to the one grounding Goya’s much later epigraphy, he concludes that “granted that imagination is necessary; nevertheless it is irrational and devoid of correct judgment, unless aided by the guidance of a superior power. Hearkening to this, imagination beatifies man; disobedient to it, imagination dooms him.”[8] Beyond basic perceptual errors and optical illusions, the imagination can produce wonderful and terrifying images. According to Burton, for example, “although this fantasy of ours be subordinate faculty to reason, and should be ruled by it, yet in many men, through inward or outward distemperatuers, defects of organs, which are unapt, or otherwise contaminated, it is likewise unapt, or hindered, and hurt.”[9] In the melancholic man, “this faculty [imagination] is most powerful and strong, and often hurts, producing many monstrous and prodigious things, especially if it be stirred up by some terrible object, presented to it from common sense or memory.”[10] Similarly, Reisch concludes that “sometimes, from the composition of different species of intentions it [imagination] makes monsters, the like of which it has sometimes not seen before.”[11]

We now, then, have a clearer sense of why the imagination, when unguided and unaided by reason, may produce terrifying images and terrible monsters. The imagination is tied to our senses and is responsible for processing various sensual inputs into mental representations. These representations are later stored in the memory and used by our intellect and can be brought back to mind independently of the original thing that caused them. However, the imagination, in itself, is irrational (or, more accurately, pre-rational). Guided by reason, it plays an important role in human epistemology and cognition. Abandoned by it, it may act freely, combining past impressions into absurd and impossible mental representations, including images of monsters and other terrifying creatures.

Having briefly established the reasons behind imagination’s capacity to produce such terrifying images, we may now further inquire into the claim that it is more prone to do so under conditions of solitude. Why, then, is the imagination likelier to be “abandoned” by reason when we are alone? One potential starting point for such an investigation is the state of sleep, which represents a paradigmatic case of the solitary abandonment of reason. “In time of sleep,” explains Burton, “this faculty [imagination] is free, and many times conceives strange, stupend, absurd shapes.” In sleep, he further argues, “the fantasy alone is free, and his commander reason; as appears by those imaginary dreams, which are of divers kinds, natural, divine, demonically, &c.”[12] Therefore, “this we see verified in sleepers, which by reason of humors and concourse of vapors troubling the fantasy, imagine many times absurd and prodigious things.”[13]

Although sleep provides us with the paradigmatic example of the wonderful things created by a free imagination under conditions of solitude, such effects can be found in waking humans as well. Reisch, for example, explains that “the working of this power [imagination] […] are not absent from people awake.”[14] Burton also holds that “the like effects almost are to be seen in such as are awaken; how many chimeras, antics, golden mountains and castles in the air do they build unto themselves?”[15] According to him, fear can stimulate such effects. As he explains, “fear makes our imagination conceive what is list, invites the devil to come to us […] and tyrannizeth over our fantasy more than all other affections, especially in the dark.” And, he concludes, “’tis strange what women and children will conceive unto themselves, if they go over a churchyard in the night, lie, or be alone in a dark room, how they sweat and tremble on a sudden.”[16] Indeed, this sentiment has a long history: it was already expressed by Plato, who was concerned with how “mothers under the influence of such poets terrify their children with harmful tales (μύθους κακῶς), how that there are certain gods whose apparitions haunt the night in the likeness of many strangers from all manner of lands.”[17] And Hobbes, Burton’s contemporary, held that “even they that be perfectly awake, if they be timorous, and superstitious, possessed with fearful tales, and alone in the dark, are subject to the like fancies, and believe they see spirits and dead mens Ghosts walking in Church-yards.”[18]

It is quite clear why the solitude of sleep allows for the imagination to be “abandoned by reason.” During sleep, our senses are inactive. In the absence of new sensual input, the imagination is free to recreate previous sensual impressions without being disturbed by new stimuli. At the same time, it is commonly assumed that reason, too, is inactive during sleep. Unconstraint by the senses or reason, the imagination is entirely free during sleep and thus able to produce impossible and wonderful images. But why should our imagination produce such terrifying monsters when we are alone and awake? Since both our senses and reason are fully active, we should expect our imagination to operate ‘normally’ under these conditions. Yet, as we saw above, philosophers from Plato to Hobbes assumed that when people are “alone in the dark” they may experience very similar things to those found during sleep, despite being fully awake.

To see why solitude can cause this “abandonment of reason” and facilitate the creation of such terrifying monsters by our imagination we should recognize that our imagination is one of the primary causes of subjectivity and difference in opinion among humans. As Pico explains, for example, the imagination is “the source of the shining, the manifold, differences in opinion.”[19] Unlike our senses and reason—which are considered to be rather stable and similar across individuals—our imagination tends to be highly subjective. It is both prone to error and depends on our individual physiology,[20] which means that different individuals are likely to have different “imaginative” experiences.

When we are with other people, we can communicate and share our experiences to distinguish between the “imaginary” and the “real.” We can ask “did you see this?” “Did you hear that?” “Am I imagining, or did [X] just happen?” Through the presence of others, we can stabilize our imagination, “normalize” it in accordance with the experiences of others around us and thus become confident that the things we see, hear, and experience are “real” and not just “in our minds.” We are unable to do so when we are alone. Even though we are perfectly awake, our reason does not always provide a sufficient constraint on our imagination. It still requires the presence of others in order for us to confirm certain things as “real” and rule out other experiences as “imaginary.”[21] The imagination, then, produces “terrible monsters” not only when abandoned by reason. It may do so also when we are abandoned by other people—when we are alone.

I would like to conclude this brief investigation by considering the political implications of these claims about the human imagination. The idea that “imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters” has posed a challenge to political thinkers, from Plato to Hobbes. One of their primary concerns was that humans possessed by such imaginative fears are much likelier to become the targets and victims of vicious and ambitious individuals—particularly religious leaders who seek to gain influence and undermine the civil sovereign. Burton, for example, argues that “for the most part by threats, terrors, and affrights, they [evil priests and other bad men] tyrannize and terrify their distressed souls; knowing that fear alone is the sole and only means to keep men in obedience.”[22] Hobbes expressed this concern even more clearly. According to him, “if this superstitious fear of Spirits were taken away, and with it, Prognostiques from Dreams, false Prophecies, and many other things depending thereon, by which, crafty ambitious persons abuse the simple people, men would be much more fitted than they are for civil Obedience.”[23]

The political problem expressed in these and many other texts can be formulated as follows: the imagination is an unchangeable fact of the human soul. It plays crucial cognitive and epistemological roles and is necessary for nearly all mental activity—from sensual perception to abstract thought. At the same time, the imagination is prone to error and highly subjective. When it is abandoned by reason—for example, when we are asleep or alone in the dark—it can produce wonderful and absurd images and appearances, including terrible and terrifying monsters. These images and appearances, in turn, can be used and manipulated by clever and ambitious individuals who seek to obtain power and control. For Plato, this threat is represented by the poets who, for example, persuade mothers to terrify their children with “bad stories” (μύθους κακῶς) that reinforce false and harmful beliefs.[24] For Hobbes, it is represented by religious figures—and above all prophets—who take advantage of the fears of the common people to undermine the power of the sovereign and establish themselves as an alternative source of authority. This, according to Hobbes, is a major cause of civic unrest and political instability. As he explains in Leviathan, “if men were at liberty, to take for Gods Commandments, their own dreams, and fancies, or the dreams and fancies of private men; scarce two men would agree upon what is Gods Commandment; and yet in respect of them, every man would despise the Commandments of the Common-wealth.”^[25]

How did thinkers like Plato and Hobbes solve this problem? While an attempt to fully explore such solutions goes well beyond the scope of this essay, we may briefly sketch its outline here. As we have seen, the imagination is likelier to produce terrible monsters and terrifying images when one is alone. When we are with others, we are better able to “normalize” or “standardize” our imagination so that we may distinguish the “imaginary” from the “real.” If we “normalize” or “standardize” our imagination, and if we could thus remove the subjective fear of solitary individuals, we may be able to make these individuals less vulnerable to the abuses of priests, prophets, and other ambitious persons, and thus secure order and stability. This seems to be what Plato has in mind, for example, when he defines bravery in the ideal city as the “quality that under all conditions will preserve the conviction that things to be feared (τὴν περὶ τῶν δεινῶν δόξαν) are precisely those which and such as the lawgiver inculcated in their education.”[26] And, above all, this idea seems to be motivating the powerful Hobbesian image of the Leviathan. “The great power of his governor,” he explains, “whom I compared to Leviathan, taking that comparison out of the two last verses of the one-and-fortieth of Job; where God, having set forth the great power of Leviathan, calleth him king of the proud. ‘There is nothing,’ saith he, ‘on earth to be compared with him. He is made so as not to be afraid. He seeth every high thing below him; and is king of all the children of pride.’”[27]

Like the Platonic lawgiver, the Hobbesian sovereign will not eliminate individual fear. Instead, both will seek to establish the “correct” objects of fear across individual subjects, thereby “normalizing” and stabilizing the subjects’ imagination, even in the absence of other people around them. Once the lawgiver or sovereign has determined the “incorrect” objects of fear—for example, by ruling out spirits and ghosts as “absurd” and “impossible,” as in the case of the Hobbesian sovereign—their subjects become less prone to the abuses of crafty and ambitious individuals who might take advantage of such imaginative experiences. At the same time, this lawgiver or sovereign will determine the “correct” objects of fear to be shared by their subjects. Thus, in Hobbes’s case, the subjects will be freed of the “erroneous” individual monsters produced by their solitary imagination. But instead, they will now come to share in a collective fear, imagining together one single monster—the mighty and all-powerful Leviathan.

[1] For example, Plato, Republic, trans. Paul Shorey (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), 510d–11.
[2] Aristotle, De Anima, trans. R.D. Hicks (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1907), 428a6-20.
[3] Aristotle, De Motu Animalium, ed. and trans. Martha C. Nussbaum (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 700b15-20.
[4] Gregor Reisch, Natural Philosophy Epitomized: A Translation of Books 8-11 of Gregor Reisch’s Philosophical Pearl (1503), trans. Andrew Cunningham and Sachiko Kusukawa (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), Book X, 2.23.
[5] Giafrancesco Pico della Mirandola, On the Imagination, trans. Harry Caplan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930), 78.
[6] Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1905), 212.
[7] Pico, On the Imagination, 29.
[8] Ibid., 43.
[9] Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 336.
[10] Ibid., 213.
[11] Reisch, Margarita Philosophica, Book X, 2.23.
[12] Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 213.
[13] Ibid., 337.
[14] Reisch, Margarita Philosophica, Book X, 2.23.
[15] Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 337.
[16] Ibid., 348–49.
[17] Plato, Republic, 380d.
[18] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Noel Malcolm (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2012), 2, 78.
[19] Pico, On the Imagination, 47.
[20] As we saw, Burton held that “through inward or outward distemperatuers, defects of organs, which are unapt, or otherwise contaminated, it [imagination] is likewise unapt, or hindered, and hurt.” Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 336.
[21] Indeed, Hobbes seems to reflect a similar sentiment in his discussion of language. Words, according to him, produce “signs” and “marks,” which can be used to stabilize the products of our imagination and allow for communication across different individuals. For example, Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law: Natural and Politic, ed. J.C.A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 35.
[22] Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 385.
[23] Hobbes, Leviathan, 2, 34.
[24] Plato, Republic, 380d.
[25] Hobbes, Leviathan, 26, 446.
[26] Plato, Republic, 429b.
[27] Hobbes, Leviathan, 28, 496.

The post Imagining Monsters, Together and Alone 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.

Barbara Taylor

When I was awarded the Wellcome Trust grant for this project I had ideas about the type of people with whom I would like to work, but never could I have imagined the wonderful team with whom it’s been my pleasure to collaborate over these last four years.

The appointment of Clare Whitehead as project manager gave us leadership that has been brilliantly efficient and wonderfully empathic. It was Clare who held the project together as it passed through some difficult times, most notably during the pandemic. She and I then went on to recruit Akshi, James and Charlie. In the final year of the project Tasha joined us.

What have we become to each other? Co-workers, friends: but also, I want to suggest, part of our inner lives, the realm of fantasy that we experience most powerfully when alone.

During the project I began to dream about members of my team. I felt myself drawn to them, as they are, but also to images of them. They are very different people although with much in common: personal warmth, generosity, a great sense of humour. I like to flatter myself that I share in these qualities, but over time I learned so much from them!

Sometimes the learning curve was steep. This was particularly the case with regard to issues of race and ethnicity where Akshi Singh took the lead and in doing so transformed our project. Her work, along with Nisha Ramayya and Tasha Pick, has resulted in some of the most exciting outcomes from the project, as is readily apparent from our website.

I am a historian of subjectivities. It’s long been my belief that understanding solitude is key to our understanding of human subjectivity. Solitude is not a unitary experience but a fantasy scenario, an imaginary staging of self that is far too complex, too psychically dense, to be captured by any simple opposition between absence and presence. Historians have been reluctant to tangle with this complex psychological state but history, I believe, offers us many insights. My own research is an investigation into this: into the long history of solitude as a story of what Aristotle dubbed phantasmata, the figures that appear in our dreams, but also – I argue – in our waking lives as fantasies of others, the unconscious inner presences that compose us.

Psychoanalysis offers many insights into these presences, but it has its limits. Literature, especially poetry (as James Morland shows) can be a rich source of imagery of solitariness that reach deep into people’s psychic lives, especially during experiences of bereavement and grief. Recent years, with the Covid 19 pandemic, have made such experiences all too common, especially in communities that lack the resources to deal with a major health crisis.

The enforced solitude of the pandemic pushed our project online. The meetings we had held in our ‘Solitude’ office at QM – with its delicious baked goods from James and Indian sweets from Akshi – abruptly came to an end. I found this extremely painful. These meetings had, for me, been joyful occasions (as were our informal meetings in each others’ homes). Suddenly my team went digital. The sense of loss was enormous. And the sense of loneliness that attends such loss. Now I really did need to hold my team in my mind, to feel their presence in their physical absence. Zoom was better than nothing but no substitute.

In this final blog I want to warmly thank all my team for the happiness they have brought me. I am sure we will keep in touch, but it will be different. I am so glad to have worked with them and to know that they will remain a part of me, both consciously and unconsciously, as we move our separate ways.

James Morland

Through the course of this project my research has become focused on the dualities of solitude in the eighteenth century. While the fact that solitude has positive and negative ramifications might seem a fairly obvious point, the way that these are expressed can give a nuanced history of how solitude has been seen and experienced. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, solitude was often a condition that enabled contemplation, but with that came severe risks. Solitude was a productive and perilous place to be. A moment of peaceful retirement in a shaded grove that brought a deeper connection with oneself or the divine, could also quickly turn sour if the mind turned to ‘sickly musings’.

A late eighteenth-century example of this can be found in the English translations of Johann Georg Zimmermann’s Solitude Considered with Respect to its Dangerous Influence Upon the Mind and Heart. Zimmermann argued for a balance between the ‘comforts and blessings of society’ and the ‘advantages of Seclusion’, with chapters attempting to balance the positive and negative effects of solitude. In the 1799 translation of Zimmerman’s treatise, a quotation from an English physician-poet, John Armstrong, appears at the opening of the chapter on ‘The Disadvantages of Solitude’, providing a poetic explication of the view of solitude ‘allowing a weak and wicked mind leisure to brood over its own suggestions [that] recreates and readers the mischief it was intended to prevent’:

Chiefly where Solitude, sad nurse of Care,

To sickly musing gives the pensive mind.

There Madness enters; and the dim-eyed Fiend,

Sour Melancholy, night and day provokes

Her own eternal wound.  [Preserving, IV.90-4]

Armstrong’s lines are used to depict what Zimmerman depicts as solitude ‘keeping the mind free to brood over its rank and noxious conceptions, [becoming] the midwife and nurse of its unnatural monstrous suggestions’. Solitude’s status as a midwife of its own ‘unnatural monstrous suggestions’ is key to understanding the duality of solitude across the century. Solitude’s withdrawal had a specifically curative and nourishing quality, hence its close association with the imagery of nursing, but simultaneously could allow a weakened mind to brood and foster its own melancholy habits.

But these dual aspects of solitude were not just confined to the eighteenth century and the continued questioning of the duality of solitude through history has been apparent throughout many of the conversations I’ve had with members of our research network. I’m so grateful to the network for enriching the ways I have thought about the history of solitude. Some of these connections have come through in the blogs published on our website.

Hetta Howes gave an insight into the conversely sociable solitude of the enclosed spaces of medieval anchoresses, where solitude ‘in its most perfect form [ends] up being full of sociable heavenly chatter’, itself a significant trope in eighteenth-century poetry where solitude allowed a deep connection with the divine. Nick Jones took us on a journey through outer space and notes that in these contemporary films while space ‘may have the potential to be overwhelmingly lonely, [this] serves not as an opportunity to sever all human bonds but a chance to remind ourselves  of their importance’, a point made by Mark Akenside, a mid-eighteenth century physician who argued that the a pensive ‘absent hour’ can remind one of the ‘sober joys of friendship’. Charlie Williams reflected on the rare pleasure of having the house to oneself in lockdown where ‘such moments are most enjoyable when they are the counterpoint to a busy and hectic life’, echoing Zimmerman’s balance between the ‘comforts and blessings of society’ and the ‘advantages of Seclusion’.

During the UK’s first period of COVID lockdowns, we began to form an archive of written testimonies about how the pandemic had changed people’s experiences of solitude. The responses often mirrored the dualities of solitude that I had been researching in eighteenth-century poetry. While for some the perils of solitude were evidently clear, there were also many pleasures to be found in the solitariness of lockdown. If for one person, a pandemic solitude ‘seems like the worst thing in the world’ for another the ‘forced solitude has given me time […] to re-evaluate what and who is important to us’. Solitude and contemplation have long been intimately linked, and these responses have echoes of the discussions between eighteenth-century poets and philosophers questioning what it means to ‘Know thyself’ in solitude.

While these accounts may not use the same language and diagnostics of ‘sickly musings’ or ‘sour melancholy’, there is a distinct similarity between these eighteenth and twenty-first century accounts of solitude. Solitude has historically been a difficult experience to explain, but its oppositional qualities have been central to attempts to define it.

A final thank you to the wonderful Solitudes team, who have become close friends and made time on this project a joy. They have been inspiring colleagues and have also been steadfast supports through difficult personal moments during the course of this project.

Charlie Williams

I have spent the past three years writing and thinking about the figure of the dropout in Britain and America during the early Cold War. Prior to this, ‘dropout’ had been either an administrative or derogatory term used to refer to university or school leavers, but in the 1950s and 60s it acquired far more loaded meaning; as a form of protest, a rejection of institutionalised life, experimentation with drugs and lifestyle, a symbolic identification with outsiders of various stripes, and often touted as a form of internal liberation or the start of a psychic journey. Though not all the counterculturalists that embraced the term dropout were solitaries (some actively rejected solitariness), much of the discourse on dropping out drew upon the long history of solitude. In our three years on the Solitudes Project it has been a privilege to work alongside our extensive research network and explore how themes of mental health, internal liberation, imprisonment, inner-dialogue, privacy, religiosity, individualism and sociality have percolated throughout the long history of intellectual thought on solitude. My research focuses on the way that the post war dropout reprised these themes amidst concerns about the growth of the human sciences and fears of so called ‘brainwashing.’ I’m incredibly grateful to all of those who participated in our seminars, colloquia and exhibitions, and those wrote blogs and contributed to podcasts for what they brought to the project and the way they have sharpened my thinking about the dropout.

Coming to the end of the project is also an opportunity to think about the past 3-4 years which, it goes without saying, have been unexpectedly turbulent times. For our team, the pandemic not only required us to change our way of work, but also to channel our focus into thinking about solitude and loneliness in the here and now. The testimonies we heard and discussions we had demonstrated the vast variety of lockdown experiences, too often felt unequally across society, which included overlapping feelings of loneliness, solitude as well as crowdedness and lack of solitude. The subtitle of my book, ‘the politics of disconnect’, refers to the 1960s interest in minds disconnected from mainstream culture, but it also speaks to contemporary discussions about the digital age. I suggest that in the last decade the utopian ethos that accompanied the arrival of the early internet has waned. Many of those same technologies that were once seen as connecting, creative and democratic have come to be seen as addictive, invasive and manipulating. But during the pandemic, many of us relied on our interconnected devices more than ever to mediate our social interactions. During one discussion, our colleague David Vincent pointed at that in many ways this moment revived that early vision of the internet as a tool of inventive sociality. As our research on solitude continues and merges with future projects, I am sure the conditions of the pandemic will remain an important touchstone in discussions about the role of technology in our solitary and social lives.

And finally, a massive thank you to the wonderful project team. Akshi, Clare, James and Tasha have been inspiring colleagues and cherished friends and I look forward to continuing our regular hangouts as we embark on our different journeys. On behalf of all of us, the last dedication goes to our fantastic project leader Barbara Taylor, who led the project with enduring curiosity, intellectual rigour and abundant warmth. We will miss her mentorship (generously supplemented with tea and biscuits) and the many great times we spent together hugely.

The post Final Blog: Who are we with when we are alone? 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.

(1)

1960. The psychiatrist Alexander Mezey, himself a refugee, has just published the results of his work running a temporary clinic at the Maudsley hospital in London for Hungarian refugees suffering from psychiatric illness.[1] One 24-year-old teacher who had difficulties finding anything other than labouring work in Britain described a sense of hopelessness and despair at the situation he found himself in: ‘I cannot live in this country, it is affecting my soul…Everything fills me with forebodings.’ Another, a mining recruit, ‘a solitary boy, very attached to his mother’ was so unhappy on his arrival that he wanted to return home and on receiving a letter from his mother advising him not to, experienced symptoms of hysteria and hyperventilation. Mezey suggests that those who had been ‘marginal’ people in Hungary seemed more susceptible to falling victim to the culture of isolation which resulted from their exile.

(2)

1968. The British Council for Aid to Refugees have released the results of their inquiry into the conditions of older refugees in Britain, those who had arrived from Europe’s displaced person camps after the Second World War. It makes for stark reading in the picture of isolation and penury outlined. ‘Where do this group of elderly people turn to for companionship, help and social support, bearing in mind that they have fewer children and close relatives, more ill-health and possibly greater financial difficulties than their British contemporaries?’⁠[2] A higher proportion lived on their own than older British people, especially in London, where many had ended up for work: ‘They often lived in virtual isolation, especially where their rooms were on the top floor of the house, and they were too infirm to climb stairs easily or to go out.’ One elderly refugee who had no knowledge of English was referred to BCAR when her daughter had a breakdown and was hospitalised. ⁠‘She was very distressed that she had not heard from her daughter for some weeks and, as she was unable to write either in English or her own language, it was not possible for her to ask the Hospital Authorities for news.’ ⁠Another woman’s English literacy had declined so significantly that she could not understand when a neighbour was trying to tell her that her kitchen was on fire. Those who were single were described as ‘intensely lonely’. ⁠

(3)

June 1983. The suicide of a thirteen-year-old Vietnamese girl, Nguyen Mau Phung, on a council estate in Lewisham has reached the national press. Her death ‘speaks for 16,000’, according to the Times. Estates like these have been increasingly reported about for the instances of racist attacks taking place, including those targeting Vietnamese refugees, and their connections to the National Front. In this case, it is the shock of Phung’s death which makes the news. Andrew Palmer, a case worker for the British Refugee Council, described how her death ‘raises questions about how many others among the Vietnamese refugees may be feeling so desperate, undetected by anybody.”[3] The ‘disaster’ of dispersal, which has spatially ‘managed’ the housing provided to Vietnamese refugees, a few here, a cluster there, has left many isolated and disconnected from support networks. It has deliberately made it harder for a diasporic community to develop. Language difference is a key barrier. In a later report, Refugee Action will describe the Vietnamese as an ‘unheard’ community.

(4)

The early hours of 18 January 1989. The Church of the Ascension in South Manchester is stormed by police and immigration officers. Viraj Mendis had taken sanctuary within the vestry of the church in 1987, as he appealed against a Home Office deportation order to return him to Sri Lanka. Mendis is seized in the church’s sacristy and is carried away in his pyjamas, shouting ‘Murderers, murderers’. He is subsequently held in Pentonville prison and deported. Timothy Renton, then Minister of State at the Home Office, made clear that the concept of sanctuary no longer existed in law: ‘We reserve our right to secure the removal of any immigration offender who has taken refuge in a church or temple, although it has not been thought necessary to do so in any case to date’, he said. As part of the press coverage of Mendis’ deportation, Refugee Forum – an umbrella group of refugee-run organisations – described its own version of ‘the underground railway’, committed to harbouring refugees against what its co-ordinator Ronald Moodley deemed the deliberate techniques of the Home Office to ‘isolate and scare asylum-seekers to make them feel alone and helpless when told they must go’.[4]

(5)

1993. Seventeen-year-old Vesna Maric has been living in Britain for over a year, first in Penrith where the coaches of Bosnian refugees have been brought through the sponsorship of a local charity, and now in Exeter, where she has been reunited with her mother. Each week, a local couple – Jack and Myra – come to visit them in their home, as volunteer refugee ‘befrienders’. Maric and her mother are baffled and bored by these strange yet regular visits, where conversation is tedious at best – ‘the weight of their silence dropping in the room like a bloated carcass.’[5] Through conversation with other Bosnian families, it is discovered that Jack and Myra are forcing their visits on different people every night of the week – except Sunday – not only boring the Bosnians but costing them valuable money as they cater for the couple. Maric’s mother eventually asks the pair if they could return the invitation and visit their home. This is enough for Jack and Myra to strike their family off the visiting list.

***

Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, the pathologisation of isolation and loneliness for refugees in Britain has been a key concern for refugee charities and organisations. Rather than the numbers and scale presented in press reports of refugee arrivals, either to bolster Britain’s reputation as a country of sanctuary, refuge or tolerance, or to limit further refugees from coming, life for refugees was much more fragmented and atomised than photographs at airports or of resettlement camps suggested. How could someone isolated or lonely be described as ‘(re)settled’? Isolation runs counter to the ‘integration’ project, whether demanding assimilation or multi-cultural ‘acceptance’. Yet it has been structurally enforced through polices of dispersal, of ‘green’ and ‘red’ zones which prevent diasporic connection, to share out the burden on local taxpayers and their tolerance. It is separation, from family and kinship network, left behind or elsewhere. Solitude and isolation have seen refugees ‘fall through the cracks’ of welfare statutory support, lost and impoverished in a bureaucratic web of increasingly restrictive process, unknowing or removed from the resources available to them. It’s been a symptom of Britain’s hostile refuge, the consequence of racism and xenophobia and bordering, bordering at every turn. It is a weapon used by the state, to separate families, to imprison, to detain, to deport, to take away belonging (see also the press). It can be a lack of recognition, of being without status or documents, of indefinite-ness, of lives lived precariously or in poverty.

Lack of connection within a society which sees you as an alien and which is itself alien to you has been seen by those with expertise, both through education and experience, to have an impact on your health and quality of life, on your mind, on your sanity. As Dina Nayeri writes, ‘displacement isn’t mental illness, but it makes visible the daily, hourly, work of staying sane – work that is unconscious in the rooted life. Suddenly, it takes effort to hold on to reason.’[6] ‘Acculturation’, as named by psychologists investigating and developing treatment for exile and mental illness in the 1960s, describes the trauma induced by being transplanted into a new society and culture, of being a stranger not through choice but through circumstance. Refugee charities, refugee community organisations (usually run by refugees and asylum-seekers), faith-based organisations and other non-statutory bodies have frequently been the ‘gap fillers’ within an increasingly hollowed-out welfare state, generating solutions for all manner of problems which trouble claims made for the UK’s ‘proud history of sanctuary.’[7] In my research into the activities of these groups in Britain after 1951, isolation is both a common cause and symptom of all manner of social ills and remains a problem to be solved: the Forum, a migrant and refugee charity, released ‘This is how it feels to be lonely’ in 2014, which revealed that 58% of the refugees and migrants who they interviewed for the research described loneliness and isolation as their biggest challenge in London.[8] What changes is how this problem is ‘cured’, how that sanctuary might be restored.

While the experience of exile has often involved the stripping of social and cultural capital, vulnerability to loneliness exists and intensifies for those least connected to resources, whether working precariously for cash in hand, tied to home caring responsibilities or ageing out of the workforce without kinship networks. As we might anticipate, isolation and loneliness for refugees is shaped by intersecting structures of social position and marginalisation: this is an experience which is gendered, as well as racialised and classed, influenced by age, health, language, education. Black feminist thought and its attention to the lives of migrant (including refugee) women has offered modes of understanding and organising to challenge the hostilities of life in the UK, some of which have been adopted by refugee organisations.[9] From the 1980s onwards, the particular issues facing refugee women were increasingly acknowledged and explored, particularly in humanitarian activity, though often in ways which have further isolated and marginalised this experience. The rise of refugee community organisations, including along gender and feminist lines, have offered opportunities to counter both isolation and the impacts of existing in a racist and patriarchal society.

***

What I want to offer now are some thoughts on how refugee isolation has been responded to and some of the questions this has raised for me in thinking about the interrelationship between charity, sanctuary, hospitality and solidarity.

Concepts of hospitality and welcome have long historical resonances, both in theological and secular contexts, and have found practical application by volunteers and professionals alike in the visiting, befriending and hosting of refugees, contemporaneously demonstrated through the charity, Refugees at Home.[10] Making someone ‘at home’ or visiting them in their ‘home’ suggests both the conviviality of the occasion and the transformation of a place in which one lives into this more meaningful site of habitation. Visitors and ‘friends’ have responded to charities’ calls to act as go-betweens, providing information and local knowledge, practicing English, driving refugees to job interviews. Local support groups of volunteers became increasingly important as the spatial management of ‘dispersal’ policies took hold, a particular practice of the charity Ockenden Venture. These have been seen as a way to counteract local hostilities and to help refugees better navigate the benefits and assistance available to them, often to the chagrin of those volunteering as they witness the statutory support offered to ‘non-belongers’.

The role of host has, most frequently, fallen to women: quasi-mothers to children on holiday in Britain from DP schemes in the 1950s and stalwarts of local refugee committees, which often drew on the existing networks of Women’s Institutes and parish councils. There is the possibility for volunteers to act in ways in which the state could not, providing warmth or facilitating ‘integration’. The extent of these visits as incidents of true hospitality have been questioned; the delicious descriptions of Jack and Myra from Maric’s memoir puncture the ‘do-gooding’ many may have imagined themselves to be undertaking. Paternalism and expectations of gratitude were frequently placed upon refugees for the welcome and hospitality they received from charities and volunteers, as Becky Taylor has demonstrated.[11] More sinister were those befriending schemes with explicit agendas; reports of the Vietnamese resettlement scheme in the 1970s and 80s critiqued Christian organisations for evangelising to those they sought to welcome.

In a blog for the Solitudes project last summer, Jane Shaw wrote about ‘curing solitude’ and the religious retreat, social loneliness, spiritual loneliness, perhaps even trauma. In the act of ‘entering a different community for a time in order to take stock, rest, refresh and reinvigorate oneself’, we can draw parallels to some of the solutions offered by refugee charities to those deemed most vulnerable to the psychological perils of isolation and of acculturation. The provision of communal spaces of shared language or culture, whether in lunchtime social clubs for elderly refugees, often revolving around religious centres, or longer stays in designated hospital wards or halfway houses, was a different kind of retreat: an opportunity to escape the challenges and demands of exile, to return to community, rather than seek a new one. The creation of spaces of belonging for refugees has evolved through refugee community organisations in the 1980s and 1990s and continues to the present.[12] The shift to spaces run by refugees for refugees, to eat together, to read newspapers from home, to have cultural events, tracks a corresponding trajectory to the rise of municipal multiculturalism and the availability of funding, often from individual councils like the GLC, to facilitate more organised group gathering than what might have taken place in private home.

I am interested in how these places where isolation was countered might also develop into networks of solidarity. In her 1970s study of the experience of Chilean exiles in Scotland, Diana Kay indicates the modes through which the Chilean solidarity movement, and affiliate organisations like universities and trade unions, offered opportunities for connection as well as practical or welfare support. However, she also discovered forms of political isolation and disenfranchisement: different ideas about communism in the trade union movement, the fragmentation of the political left in Britain, gender politics and women’s roles. Chilean feminists in Britain writing for feminist magazines expressed the difficulties of finding a space within the women’s movements, as exiles fighting for a cause, as ‘Third-World’ feminists, as refugees.

Within solidarity movements is support for the cause of refugees and their right to remain in Britain as refugees and asylum seekers have fallen under the scope of the hostile environment. The sanctuary movement of the 1980s saw all sorts of anti-racist and anti-fascist, immigrant, feminist, religious and charitable organisations come to support those resisting deportation in religious spaces to varying degrees of success. For Viraj Mendis in Manchester, Rajwinder Singh at the Guru Nanak Sikh Temple, or Pina Manuel at the St Aloysius Roman Catholic Church, these faith centres offered both protection and rallied support around their cause in vigils and media publicity.[13] These moments of solidarity through both public and necessarily hidden sanctuaries were acts of resistance preventing deportations and family separation, and sent out a message of compassion and communal support. The City of Sanctuary movement which began in 2005 has seen the revitalisation of these practices, aiming to build ‘a culture of hospitality’ and create ‘a network of towns and cities throughout the country which are proud to be places of safety, and which include people seeking sanctuary fully in the life of their communities.’[14] This work includes both the settling of newcomers and the unsettling (as Susanna Snyder has identified) of hostile attitudes and policies.[15] In Glasgow, for example, the work of No Evictions, draws the community together to combat Serco’s programme of lock changes targeted at people living in asylum accommodation.[16] Welcome, sanctuary and solidarity are being actively fought for and protected. And it has increasingly meant resisting categories of illegality in supporting those without the ‘right to remain’. We heard it on the streets of Pollokshields when hundreds came out onto the streets to stop a dawn immigration raid on 13 May: these are our neighbours, you can’t take them away like this.

Is it in these acts of solidarity, of resistance to the hostility of an environment designed to isolate and separate, that we can see the cure for loneliness? If refugees are no longer forced to fight every day for their humanity and existence in this country? The structural isolation and poverty of our immigration regime can only ever be ameliorated otherwise. And perhaps we may get to a point where the dignity and possibility of solitude can once more find a place to flourish.

[1] Alexander Mezey, ‘Psychiatric Illness in Hungarian Refugees’, Journal of Mental Science, 106 (1960), pp. 628-637.

[2] British Council for Aid to Refugees, Elderly Refugees. A report on a survey into their circumstances (London, 1969), p. 4.

[3] Neil Lyndon, ‘How a girl’s death spoke for 16,000’, The Times, 27 June 1983.

[4] Brian James, ‘Refugee cause swamped by a tide in search of sanctuary’, The Times, 19 January 1989.

[5] Vesna Maric, Bluebird: A Memoir (London: Granta, 2009).

[6] Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugees (Cannongate, 2019).

[7] Tony Kushner, ‘Truly, madly, deeply… nostalgically? Britain’s on–off love affair with refugees, past and present’, Patterns of Prejudice 52 (2018), pp. 172-194.

[8] The Forum, ‘This is how it feels to be lonely’. https://migrantsorganise.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Loneliness-report_The-Forum_UPDATED.pdf [accessed 29 April 2021]

[9] Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie, and Suzanne Scafe, The heart of the race: Black women’s lives in Britain (Verso Books, 2018); Amrit Wilson, Finding a voice: Asian women in Britain (Daraja Press, 2018).

[10] Refugees at Home (https://www.refugeesathome.org); Tom Lambert, ‘Hospitality, Protection and Refuge in Early English Law’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 30 (2016).

[11] Becky Taylor, ‘“Their Only Words of English Were ‘Thank You’”: Rights, Gratitude and ‘Deserving’ Hungarian Refugees to Britain in 1956’, Journal of British Studies, 55 (2016), pp. 120-144.  

[12] E.g. the Refugee Café in Lewisham (http://refugeecafe.org.uk).

[13] Paul Weller, Sanctuary – the beginning of a movement? Runnymede Commentary No. 1. (Runnymede Trust: London, 1987).

[14] City of Sanctuary (https://cityofsanctuary.org).

[15] Susanna Snyder, ‘Un/settling Angels: Faith-Based Organizations and Asylum-Seeking in the UK’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 24 (2011), pp. 565-585.

[16] No Evictions (https://no-evictions.wixsite.com/glasgow)

Anna Maguire is a Lecturer in Public History at University College London

The post Welcoming refugees: Solitude, Exile and Gender appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

We all have an inner voice which we correspond with and which we alone can hear. Perhaps some of us engage in such self-address more frequently and consciously than others, but this experience is something that will be familiar to everyone. Indeed, it may sometimes even be difficult to silence our inner voice, especially if it is saying something we don’t particularly want to hear, or which could be potentially harmful to our mental and physical wellbeing. To paraphrase Denise Riley’s comments from Episode 8 of the ‘Spaces of Solitude’ podcast, we have eyelids that enable us to close our eyes, but no ‘earlids’ that perform the corresponding function, leaving us with no way to stop listening to our inner voices. We are thus often enjoined to address ourselves more compassionately and patiently—a familiar dictum to help regulate negative self-speech is to ‘talk to yourself the way you would talk to your best friend’. At other times, our inner voice can help us to better understand what we are feeling or piece out what we ought to do in a tricky situation, something self-help books pick up on when they promise to unlock ways for us to harness ‘the hidden power of our inner voice […] to live a healthier, more satisfying, and more productive life’.[1]

I have recently become very interested in literary representations of such moments of selfaddress, where characters speak to themselves to resolve dilemmas, figure out their next course of action, or simply as a means of articulating their emotions. Such moments occur frequently in prose fiction works of the English Renaissance, to an extent where they may even be considered a distinctive motif of this genre. In what follows, I outline a rough sketch of a new project I am developing, which aims to explore such articulate moments of solitude and interiority in these works, paying special attention to the rhetorical strategies writers employed in the construction of such passages, how this motif interacts with modes of self-address in other genres, and their effects on the reader.

***

Mary Wroth’s work of prose fiction, Urania (1621), opens with the eponymous heroine in a meadow with her flock, on a fair day when ‘the Spring began to appeare like the welcome messenger of Summer’.[2] Despite the beautiful weather, all is not as tranquil as it seems, for Urania is in a considerable state of distress. Having recently learnt that she is not who she thinks she is, Urania begins to address herself about her newfound ignorance of her ‘owne estate or birth’ and the emotional turmoil that this causes.[3] Having discovered that she is not, as she believed, ‘a Sheperdes, and Daughter to a Shepherd’, Urania is ‘perplexed’ and ‘[m]iserable’, and professes to be in a state worse than her lambs, for ‘they know their dams, while thou dost live unknowne of any’.[4] Strikingly, in this time of distress and upheaval, Urania desires to be alone. Seeing ‘others come into that Meade with their flocks’ and ‘esteeming her sorrowing thoughts her best and choycest company’, Urania retreats from the presence of others, and continues to speak to herself more extensively in solitude, reflecting on her misery in the form of a sonnet:[5]

Unseene, unknowne, I here alone complaine

To Rocks, to Hills, to Meadowes, and to Springs,

Which can no helpe returne to ease my paine,

But back my sorrowes the sad Eccho brings.

Thus still increasing are my woes to me,

Doubly resounded by that monefull voice,

Which seemes to second me in miserie,

And answere gives like friend of mine owne choice.

Thus onely she doth my companion prove,

The others silently doe offer ease:

But those that grieve, a grieving note doe love;

Pleasures to dying eies bring but disease:

And such am I, who daily ending live,

Wayling a state which can no comfort give.[6]

In her inconsolable state, Urania speaks aloud to find her sadness doubled back to her by the natural landscape. Although she is ostensibly alone, the ‘Eccho’ invoked in Urania’s self-addressed poem points to a complex layering of reflexivity. The echo is not only Urania’s own voice, but also the mythological Echo of Ovidian origins.[7] As the story in Ovid’s Metamorphoses goes, Echo is a mountain nymph who incurs the wrath of Juno and is punished by the goddess, who takes away Echo’s ability to speak her own thoughts aloud, dooming her to repeat the words of others (‘Yet Echo of the former talke doth double oft the ende / And backe again with just report the wordes earst spoken sende’).[8] This, as one might expect, leads to tragic consequences: when Echo falls in love with the beautiful youth Narcissus, she is unable to communicate properly with him and her advances are rejected, causing her to retreat into ‘dennes and hollow Caves’, where she eventually wastes away pining for him.[9] While her bones ‘were turned to stones’, her ‘voyce yet still remaynes’, disembodied and yet permanently part of the physical landscape:

From thence she lurking still

In woods, will never shewe hir head in field nor yet on hill.

Yet is she heard of every man: it is hir onely sound,

And nothing else that doth remayne alive above the ground.[10]

One does not necessarily have to be alone nor in emotional distress to hear Echo (or an echo), but with Ovid’s account of this story, such a (re)vocalisation of one’s voice comes to be associated with these states, as Urania experiences at the beginning of Wroth’s work of prose fiction. In speaking to herself alone, Urania thus generates and occupies multiple selves: she is both the speaker and auditor of her complaint, which is ‘doubly resounded’ in her own voice carried back to her by the natural landscape, figured as a friend in the mythological figure of Echo.[11]

Other examples of self-address (either verbal or mental) abound in numerous prose fiction works of the English Renaissance. Characters in this genre frequently address themselves in lengthy discussions, to an extent where such passages eclipse or even halt the development of narrative action. For example, barely a few pages into Thomas Lodge’s Forbonius and Prisceria (1584), the titular characters begin to speak to themselves on the nature of their romantic relationship and the factors that keep them apart, with the narrative perspective switching back and forth between such passages for some considerable length.[12] Elsewhere, in Robert Greene’s Mamilla (1593), the eponymous heroine contemplates how she ought to treat the object of her affections, Pharicles, by entering ‘with her selfe into [a] meditation’, employing a range of rhetorical strategies such as the invocation of exempla and sententiae to assess his constancy.[13] In Greene’s other work of prose fiction, Pandosto (1588, then various editions), a variety of characters similarly undertake such forms of self-address in the face of moral uncertainty. For instance, when the cupbearer Franion is commanded by his king Pandosto to poison another monarch, Franion, ‘being secret in his chamber’, considers this act of treason and how its execution would affect his conscience.[14] Later in the narrative, when Pandosto imprisons Fawnia’s beloved Doratus and demands that she become his concubine, Fawnia frets over the choice between her virtue and the safety of Doratus: ‘being alone by her selfe, [she] began to enter into these solitarie meditations’ on her plight.[15]

As these examples show, characters in prose fiction speak to themselves frequently in different forms, considering a wide range of moral and political issues that resonated with early modern readers. However, despite the striking presence of this motif in works of prose fiction, scholarship on forms of self-address in English Renaissance literature have mainly focused on dramatic soliloquies (as indeed my own work has done), and studies of it in non-dramatic genres are few and far between. The project I am conceptualising thus aims to be the first account of this motif across prose fiction works of the English Renaissance. It begins in the 1570s, when writers such as Philip Sidney and Robert Greene began experimenting with the form, and closes in the early 1620s with Wroth’s Urania, the first published work of prose fiction by a female writer. In examining the rhetoric and poetics of such moments of solitary debate, contemplation, and reflection, I hope to accomplish several aims and objectives. Firstly, I plan to explore how such passages drew on classical and Renaissance rhetorical strategies in the way they are structured and constructed. These rhetorical strategies were outwardly oriented in the sense that students were taught to speak and write for the purposes of persuading others through forms such as parliamentary speeches, sermons, pamphlets, and the like. However, authors in this period frequently turned such strategies inward in their writing, creating for readers and audiences the effect/illusion of a rich interior life (one thinks, for example, of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, his soliloquies, and the way the character has been read throughout its critical history). By exploring the mix of interiority and exteriority presented by a rhetorical situation where one is both speaker and auditor, this work explores how the distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ speech is complicated in the process of solitary self-address.

The project’s next objective is to contextualise the moral and political questions that characters are grappling with. It will reconstruct what is at stake for these characters by reading passages of selfaddressed speech alongside contemporary works of moral and political philosophy, thereby providing an in-depth account of the questions that works of prose fiction are engaging with. The project will also track intertextual relationships between self-address in prose fiction and other genres where considerable (solitary) introspection and reflection also takes place. These include dramatic set speeches, forms of religious meditations, and autobiographical writing.[16] By analysing the overlaps these works share in their interrogation of the self, the project hopes to articulate new connections between such meditative and reflective practices and imaginative literary production. Lastly, this project is not only interested in situating this distinctive motif in its intellectual and cultural moment, but also in the larger trajectory of how interiority has been represented in literatures across time, from ancient Greek poetry to the psychological realism of the modern novel. Works from The Odyssey to James Joyce’s Ulysses feature characters addressing themselves in a variety of situations, and I am interested in tracking continuities and differences (much of all this, of course, is far out of my area of expertise, and I hope to engage with colleagues working on such themes).

By examining how early modern writers of prose fiction depicted the resolution of contentious questions in their literary works, I not only hope to contribute to the fields of literary studies and intellectual history, but perhaps also demonstrate the relevance of early modern literature to our present concerns. It can be difficult to see the light at the end of the tunnel during these trying times, when the emergence of new variants every so often threaten any attempt to return to ‘normal’ (whatever that ‘normal’ might be) and governments scramble to curb the spread of the virus by mandating restrictions on movement and social gatherings. Civic-minded, responsible, and lawabiding individuals may find themselves increasingly isolated from each other and in conversation with themselves more frequently than before. This was certainly my own experience, having relocated for a job far away from my network of friends and family in a country which adopted stringent lockdown measures. While technology offered valuable opportunities for me to stay connected with others, I found myself in conversation with myself more than usual, especially when faced with difficult and life-changing decisions. A study of self-address in prose fiction works of the English Renaissance therefore affords many significant parallels with our current conditions, and we may have much to learn from how early modern writers depicted ways of (productively) grappling with questions of moral and political significance on one’s own and in the physical absence of other interlocutors.[17]

This research could also prove highly relevant to the current communicative landscape. In recent times, public discourse seems to have become increasingly polarised, fragmenting into a multiplicity of opinions in a way that excludes consensus. While technology helps us to maintain social contact in a time of physical isolation, it has also contributed significantly to the creation of paradoxically isolating ideological silos, where individuals and groups talk only to themselves (by which I mean those who already share the same beliefs), leading to increasingly solipsistic visions of the world. In studying how prose fiction depicts characters thinking through issues of personal and public significance, this project demonstrates how early modern literary texts could provide strategies of rhetorical argumentation that may be useful for building consensus. In depicting a wide spectrum of characters thinking through varied issues of personal and public significance, passages of self-address in English Renaissance prose fiction constitute an important exploration of interiority that is not solipsistic but emerges from dialogical self-debate. In its depictions of how and why characters come to take out different moral and political positions, such passages may have the potential to cultivate an ability to think from a multiplicity of viewpoints. By recovering historical and literary representations of self-addressed speech, this research highlights real and fictional precedents to demonstrate that we are less alone than we realise, even when talking to ourselves.

[1] I am quoting the synopsis of Ethan Kross’s Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It (2021). Of possible interest is Charles Fernyhough’s The Voices Within: The History and Science of How We Talk To Ourselves (2016).

[2] Mary Wroth, The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (London, 1612), sig. Br.

[3] Wroth, Urania, sig. Br.

[4] Wroth, Urania, sig. Br.

[5] Wroth, Urania, sig. Br.

[6] Wroth, Urania, sig. Br.

[7] As Ross Lerner, ‘“Doubly Resounded”: Narcissus and Echo in Petrarch, Donne, and Wroth’, Modern Philology 118 (2020), 177 points out, this reference serves as the ‘organizing technique of the verse’ through ‘repetitions in diction, anaphoric iterations, and constellations of assonance on the ō that ends Echo’s name’, in words such as ‘alone’, ‘Meadows’, ‘sorrowes’, ‘woes’, and ‘monefull’.

[8] Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Arthur Golding (London, 1567), lines 459-60.

[9] Ovid, Metamorphoses, line 491.

[10] Ovid, Metamorphoses, lines 496-500.

[11] C.f. the Ciceronian and early modern trope that ‘a friend is another self’; the (modern) notion that our inner voice should be ‘friendly’.

[12] Interestingly, Forbonius also sings a sonnet—seemingly alone—in which he speaks of his ‘mournfull mone’ and invokes Echo. See Thomas Lodge, An alarum against usurers […] Heereunto are annexed the delectable historie of Forbonius and Prisceria (London, 1584). Such shared images, metaphors, and tropes is of great interest/relevance to the project.

[13] Robert Greene, Mamillia: A mirrour or looking-glasse for the ladies of Englande (London, 1583), sig. B3v.

[14] Robert Greene, Pandosto the Triumph of Time (London, 1595), sigs Br-v. This passage appears to be an addition to this later edition of the text.

[15] Greene, Pandosto, sig. Gr. Unbeknownst to both, Fawnia is Pandosto’s long lost daughter…

[16] The latter two coincide, for instance, in texts such as Puritan ‘self-examination’ diaries, which have yet to be read alongside forms of self-address in prose fiction

[17] Characters may of course deceive or mislead themselves, persuade themselves to engage in morally questionable deeds, or also engage in what might be thought of as ‘negative self-talk’, all of which may also provide interesting and useful parallels worth examining further.

Vanessa Lim (@vanessaolim) is Assistant Professor in the English Literature and Language department at Seoul National University.

The post ‘With herself into a meditation’: Self-Address in Early Modern English Literature appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

The perceived benefits of solitude were conflicting and often contradictory for many dissenting and Protestant nonconformist groups in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Many, like the Quakers, Baptists, Methodists, and Independents viewed solitude as a positive state because it was a means through which God and Christ could be reached, experienced, and known. This might be in the form of private withdrawal, meditation, silent worship, reading, or spoken prayer. The propensity of many dissenting groups to favour solitude and pious withdrawal from the society that surrounded them became a characteristic trademark of ‘enthusiasm’.[1] From the middle of the seventeenth century, dissenting solitude, sparked intense moral concerns as Anglicans and other mainstream religious groups were concerned about the corruptions and sinful behaviour that might take place behind closed doors. Many also connected the Dissenters’ wish to isolate themselves from the rest of society as a marker of their unsociability and general lack of social decorum. Samuel Parker, for instance, warned of the consequences of a tumultuous imagination, and spoke of the ‘sullen and unsociable Niceness’ of nonconformists, whose ‘morose and surly Principles’ made them the ‘rudest and most barbarous people in the world’.[2]

Even among the nonconformists there was a recognition that too much time spent in private contemplation was damaging and had the potential to encourage sinful behaviour or, at the very least, made it possible for impure desires and thoughts to intrude. It was therefore essential that these godly individuals were able to strike the correct balance in their everyday lives between pious withdrawal that was fulfilling and useful whilst also continuing to interact with their wider circle of acquaintances, many of whom might not share their beliefs. Dissenting men and women therefore had to find a space for themselves, even when in company. This was a theme that ran through much of their writing.

It is the negotiation between being both solitary and social that forms the basis of the following discussion. The case studies I will be drawing upon for the most part focus on the experiences of women from dissenting and nonconformist backgrounds in the aftermath of the 1689 Toleration Act. These were women who had to continually navigate time spent in the company of both coreligionists and those from other religious backgrounds in their daily lives. The experiences of this disparate group of women are of particular interest in this period because their solitude and wish to withdraw from the Establish Church was perceived as a threat to the stability of the church and state. Although the legislation of 1689 brought freedom of worship to Protestant Dissenters, its results were highly ambiguous and the subsequent debates surrounding the meaning of the Act caused significant religious and political tension. Many remained concerned about the dangers to the wider social order from these news freedoms for Dissenters.

Gender and Nonconformity

Questioning the impact of solitude on women’s experiences is of particular interest for a number of reasons. In the first place, most contemporary discussions of solitude excluded women from the benefits of solitary retreat. As David Vincent has argued in his recent book on this subject, the display of virtues achieved in solitude were believed to be ‘highly unlikely amongst women’. In addition, women were perceived as lacking the intellectual capacity necessary to counterbalance solitude’s destructive effects.[3]

Women’s time alone was not regarded as solitary. Since women were viewed as the more sociable of the two sexes, their identities were, for the most part, constructed in relation to their relatives and social acquaintances. Especial attention was thus placed on the companionship they needed to provide to their male relatives during times of solitude. This had Scriptural foundation, as Eve had been created to provide companionship to a solitary Adam as a devoted ‘help meet’. There was an expectation that wives were expected to support and sustain their husbands throughout the various trials they might face. It was only when women became widows, after they had lost the companionship of their husbands, that a solitary existence was regarded as a more acceptable and appropriate state.[4]

Even if women were not believed to be capable of solitude and might not deliberately seek solitude, many frequently experienced states of solitariness in their everyday lives. These moments of involuntary solitude were felt at particular times in the lifecycle. Marriage, for example, often brought about significant changes to women’s sociability, as decisions about how they spent their time, and with whom, were frequently out of their control. As Mark Philp has argued in his study of the middling ranks of London society in the 1790s, women’s social networks and social lives were strongly dictated by their husbands’ professional connections and interests. Few women were able maintain the friendships they had cultivated prior to marriage with the same degree of intensity.[5] Moreover, as Katharine Glover has underlined in her study of elite Scottish women, whilst marriage might provide agency and autonomy for some women, it could also be ‘a restrictive and at times lonely experience for those whose married homes were country houses far from their family or other female company’.[6]

Women from Dissenting and Nonconformist backgrounds often experienced the consequences of solitude more acutely than many of their female contemporaries. This is because they came to be regarded as outsiders from their wider communities and often faced social ostracism for their peculiar religious beliefs. Standards of dress, for example, especially among the Quakers, were strict, and contempt for fashion and vanity excluded many female Quakers from an important part of female culture.[7] Patricia Crawford has argued that women from nonconforming backgrounds faced a double exclusion from public life ‘on the grounds of gender and religious affiliation’ in the aftermath of the 1689 Toleration Act.[8] Noting the social ostracism they experienced, she argues that women were aversely penalised for their religious beliefs because women had traditionally depended on the support of members of their own sex in their daily household tasks. The ‘loss of neighbourliness’ thus became a handicap’.[9]

Dissenting experiences of solitude

Although women were understood by some contemporaries to be innately more pious than men, they were also considered to be unable to devote lengthy periods of time to examination of religious principles.[10] This meant that they were continually forced to negotiate the extreme impulse towards pious retreat with wider expectations of politeness. This is evident throughout the diary of Cheshire Presbyterian, Sarah Savage, who kept a regular journal for the majority of her adult life. Diary-keeping was an important part of her religious observance and was thus full of spiritual self-examination and observations of the merits and flaws of her social acquaintances. Her sociability and solitude were thus central preoccupations of her writing and show how her faith played a large role in how she perceived and described her social encounters. The pressure to be polite when confronted with uncomfortable social situations is encapsulated in an entry from January 1717, when she recorded that:

we dined at Wrenbury Hall with Mr Voice, a splendid entertainment – I envy not ye great mans’ state more inward satisfaction with a good Book in my own Closet than with all ye visits, modes & forms &c. yet think it duty to be friendly and respectful to those who are so to us.[11]

As a nonconformist, Savage’s competing impulses to retreat from company and to appear outwardly friendly continually permeate her writing. The pages of her diary demonstrate her commitment to solitude and quiet retirement above any kind of activity that involved social interaction. She believed it was books that taught her how to live an exemplary Christian life rather than ministers or other social acquaintances, and hours of her time were spent pouring over religious texts in the belief that they might offer her paradigms for living an exemplary Godly lifestyle. On 10 February 1717, she recorded that ‘I should have had my heart more rais’d & warm’d with a good book in my own closet, yet think it my duty when I can to attend Publick worship’.[12] Reading, as Carys Brown has recently argued, had a significant place in the puritan culture from which Presbyterianism and Independency emerged. Yet, as Brown notes, the preference of dissenting women like Sarah Savage to spend significant amounts of time reading religious texts rather than in engaging in other social activities could be damaging to their reputations and ‘undermine inclusion within wider social communities’.[13]

Undoubtedly, Savage relied on the connections and friendships she forged with those both within and outside her religious community. Yet one particularly striking feature of her writing was her active decision to eschew company altogether, preferring to devote herself to religious books and to writing in her diary. As Amanda Herbert has noted, the benefits of sociability for Savage, ‘were rendered better in a ritual of the mind rather than that of the body’.[14] Indeed, imagining conversations with deceased friends and relatives often had a stronger hold over her sense of Christian duty than physical encounters with friends, relatives, neighbours, and other members of her religious community. She recounted various scenarios where her memories of past conversations acted as comforts and spiritual guides.[15] In September 1715, she wrote that she had decided to remain at home with her Sister Tylston, while her husband and children took the sacrament at the local church. During her time alone, she read Richard Baxter’s Converse with God in Solitude, taking comfort from the fact that he believed conversing with friends in heaven was more profitable than transitory encounters in this life.[16] Interestingly, in choosing to retreat from public employment and duties to engage with the wider world, Savage was directly contravening Baxter’s recommendations. It suggests how she was able to appropriate his ideas for her own edification, at once finding his emphasis on heavenly rather than physical friendship uplifting, whilst also disregarding his emphasis on the selfishness of those who actively sought solitude over public service.[17] But it also may hint at the different ways in which men and women approached and encountered solitude, since public employment carried with it very different connotations for Baxter’s male and female readers.

Savage’s piety was central to her conception of solitude, and so was her sense of friendship. As a dissenting woman living in an Anglican town, Savage and her family frequently experienced hostility and even periodical violence. Yet rather than conveying her intense sense of social isolation, she instead documents her active decision to retreat from the unwelcome and unprofitable company of her neighbours. Many of the entries in her early diary recount the many hours she spent reading the letters and other personal papers of her deceased friend, Jane Hunt, who died in January 1716. This was made all the more poignant by the fact that Savage continued to write letters to Hunt after her death, as if the two women were still engaged in a continual conversation during her solitude.[18] As Herbert has noted, Savage’s dialogues with Hunt were unusual, especially since Hunt’s voice was given emphasis in the layout of the diary, as her phrases and expressions were separated from Savage’s punctuation forms like spaces and quotation marks.[19] Savage also wrote of her companion as if speaking in the present tense. For example, on 24 March 1717, Savage remarked how she had spent the whole afternoon alone, ‘yet not alone I read in dear Mrs H’s papers – s[ai]th she “How w[oul]d my Conscience startle at playing or idling away ye Lords day before others” … elsewhere s[ai]th she, “I do truly in judgment & Affection account it my chiefest Happiness to enjoy God”’.[20]

Savage’s imagined conversations with Hunt, which included spiritual, domestic, political, neighbourly, and family matters, gave meaning to her solitude and gave her opportunities to engage in self-examination. At other times, however, Savage’s imaginary conversations with Hunt instilled a profound sense of longing for the sociability that she had lost. In one entry, Savage explained that ‘in my sleep I oft converse with her [Hunt]’, and then ‘wake with a sad heart’.[21] Her regular interactions with her deceased friend nevertheless offer an important example of how time alone might be regarded by women as more profitable than time in company. As an outsider, facing social ostracism for her beliefs, she found strategies to pursue sociability that was compatible with her own spiritual and world outlook.

The tension between sociability and solitude was therefore present in every public (and private) activity that Savage performed. This was characteristic of a Calvinistic impulse for the individual believer to elevate themselves above the company they kept. This enabled Savage to distinguish herself from the corrupt and sinful practices taking place around them. The Rochester Presbyterian Anne Dawson viewed her sociability and solitude in similar ways to Savage. She placed great emphasis throughout her diary, which was penned between August 1721 and August 1722, on her own piety and how that compared to the company that surrounded her. She often lamented the time that she spent in company rather than at home. There were even occasions when she lamented the consequences of spending too much time alone rather than in company. On 2 June 1722, for instance, she recounted how acquaintances from Chowbent had spent the week staying at the family home. Although she regarded their company as ‘very agreable because of their parts and piety’, she lamented that she had been unable to profit from their visit because she had spent too much of her time ‘conversing with my self’.[22]

The delicate balance between sociability and solitude is especially evident in the writings of Quaker women. In their troubled early and more radical years, solitude came to epitomise the zeal of those who identified as ‘Friends’. The value Quakers placed on silence as a form of worship, and on waiting on the spirit, gave ascendance to a faith that centred on withdrawal, retreat, and quiet contemplation. According to Quaker beliefs, Christ was present in the person he inhabited. Group meetings were thus conducted in silence, where believers entered into their own internal dialogue with the divine. Withdrawal also came to symbolise the isolation that many Quakers felt and experienced.

Quaker silent worship at once epitomised the need to separate themselves from the corrupt and sinful world that surrounded them, whilst also underscoring the social ostracism of many individual believers following their conversion to the movement. Alice Hayes, for instance, ruminated on her urge for silence and private contemplation following her first attendance at a Quaker meeting:

I kept close and constant, as Opportunity permitted, in going to the publick Worship, and very often got alone into private Places to pray, and greatly delighted to read the Scriptures, and to get good Passages by Heart; and when my Hand has been in my Labour, my Heart was meditating on good Matter, and very glad that I was from my Father’s House, because of the Quietness I enjoy’d.[23]

On another occasion she described how ‘I spent all my spare Time either in reading, or in getting alone, or in some Religious Performance’.[24] Hayes’s solitary pursuits thus perfectly matched the ostracism she encountered from her family and former friends. Her husband, for instance, was so outraged that she had joined the movement that he threatened to leave her and went to the extremes of hiding her clothes before she went to meetings.[25] Mary Penington, who converted to Quakerism in later life and became an influential member of the community, similarly described how her intense zeal and desire to retreat into private prayer at least three times a day separated her from her wider household. She noted how she ‘sought remote places to pray in, such as the fields, gardens, or out-houses, when I could not be private in the house’.[26]

Shunning society was characteristic of early Quaker conversion narratives, as was eschewing many of the activities accepted as part of mainstream sociability, such as playing card games, drinking, dancing, and attending theatres and pleasure gardens. However, as Quakerism evolved and became more established, the intensely communal nature of Quaker life served as a crucial lifeline for members of the community. As I have argued elsewhere, the practice of friendship among early Quakers was strongly shaped by their faith.[27] Worship for Quaker men and women was intensely social and communal in its structure. Indeed, they found a form of worship that managed to seamlessly blend the sociability of attending meetings for worship whilst also facilitating individual introspection. In their daily lives too, the Quakers were exhorted to wait in silence for ‘renewal of strength’ when in company. Not only did Quaker meetings provide a safe environment for like-minded men and women to physically meet, but it also offered them an opportunity to share in spiritual communion.

Although not comprehensive, this discussion has sought to underscore the complex place of solitude in English nonconformist and dissenting culture in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. While acknowledging the ways in which their peculiar patterns of faith might have created moments of intense isolation, it has stressed the important ways in which many female dissenters sought to balance sociability and solitude in their daily lives. In doing so, it suggests a number of ways in which there may have been a distinctive culture of solitude for women from the religious sects, whose intense piety often put them at odds with their wider circle of acquaintances. This does not mean that they fully secluded themselves from the society that surrounded them, or indeed that they shunned all occasions for sociability, but it does underscore that solitude was not only a necessary counterbalance to their social activities, but also an essential part of their world outlook. It therefore shows that women from this period were not only capable of achieving solitude, but that they actively found time for solitary pursuits in their everyday lives. This sometimes came at the expense of their personal relationships. Above all, I want to suggest that greater recognition is needed of how women’s experiences of sociability and solitude were shaped by cultures of nonconformity and how these shifted as the landscape of religion in early modern England became more pluralistic.

Notes

[1] On the perils of solitude and enthusiasm see Lawrence Klein, ‘Sociability, Solitude, and Enthusiasm’, Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 60, No. 1/2, ‘Enthusiasm and Enlightenment in Europe, 1650–1850’ (1997), pp. 153–177.

[2] Samuel Parker, A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie (1670), pp. 65, 74.

[3] David Vincent, A History of Solitude (Polity, 2020), p. 25.

[4] A telling comparison of expectations of solitude for men and women can be seen in early modern conduct books, such as The Young Gentleman and Lady Instructed in Such Principles of Politeness (1747) and N.H., The Ladies Dictionary; Being a General Entertainment for the Fair-Sex (London, 1694).

[5] Mark Philp, Radical Conduct: Politics, Sociability and Equality in London 1789–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: forthcoming, 2020), pp. 93–122, esp. pp. 100–101

[6] Katharine Glover, Elite Women and Polite Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2011), p. 22.

[7] I have explored this issue in more depth in Female Friends and the Making of Transatlantic Quakerism, 1650–1750 (Cambridge, 2018), pp. 200–251.

[8] Patricia Crawford, ‘Anglicans, Catholics, and Nonconformists after the Restoration, 1660‒1720’ in Susan E. Dinan and Debra Meyers (eds), Women and Religion in Old and New Worlds (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 163.

[9] Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England 1500–1720 (London, 1993), p. 191.

[10] See Carys Brown, ‘Women and Religious Coexistence in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Naomi Pullin and Kathryn Woods (eds), Negotiating Exclusion in Early Modern England, 1550–1800 (Routledge 2021), pp. 68–87.

[11] Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS.Eng.misc.e.331, Sarah Savage Diary, 31 May 1714 to 25 December 1723, p. 123, entry for 9 November 1716. [hereafter Sarah Savage Diary]

[12] Ibid., p. 138, entry for 10 February 1717.

[13] Brown, ‘Women and Religious Coexistence’, p. 74.

[14] Amanda E. Herbert, Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain (London: Yale University Press, 2014), p. 169.

[15] One such scenario is cited by Herbert, Female Alliances, p. 182. In 1717, she wrote that she had spent the day alone, but had ‘call[ed] to mind some discurse I had with my dear mother lately …. [on] an excellent minister’.

[16] Sarah Savage Diary, 31 May 1714 to 25 December 1723, p. 65, entry for 25 September 1715.

[17] Richard Baxter, Converse with God in Solitude: Or, The Christian Improving the Insufficiency and Uncertainty of Human Friendship (2nd edition, 1774), esp. pp. 29–34.

[18] Sarah Savage Diary, p. 65, entry for 25 September 1715, e.g. pp. 87, 88 , 90, 92, 96, 106, 116, entries from 12, 14 and 26 February 1716, 25 March 1716 and 10 April 1716, 1 July 1716, and 22 September 1716.

[19] Amanda E. Herbert, ‘Queer Intimacy: Speaking with the Dead in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Gender & History, vol. 31, no. 1 (2018), p. 7.

[20] Sarah Savage Diary, 31 May 1714 to 25 December 1723, p. 144, entry for.  24 March 1717

[21] Sarah Savage Diary, p. 86, entry for 5 February 1716.

[22] Ibid., entry for 2 June 1722.

[23] Alice Hayes, A Legacy, or Widow’s Mite, Left by Alice Hayes, To Her Children and Others: Being a Brief Relation of Her Life (London, 1786), p. 17.

[24] Ibid., p. 19.

[25] Ibid., pp. 39–41.

[26] Mary Penington, A Brief Account of Some of my Exercise From My Childhood, in David Booy (ed.), Autobiographical Writings by Early Quaker Women (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 83.

[27] Pullin, Female Friends, pp. 152–199.

Naomi Pullin (@naomipullin) is Assistant Professor in Early Modern British History at the University of Warwick.

The post Solitude and Sociability in Early Modern Protestant Dissent appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.