Pests, Parasites, and Positionality: Anna Letitia Barbauld and "The Caterpillar"
2004; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 43; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/25601672
ISSN2330-118X
Autores Tópico(s)American Literature and Culture
ResumoREADERS WHO WERE FIRST INTRODUCED TO ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD (1743-1825) the prudish school matron who wrote prose hymns for children and complained that Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Ancient Mariner lacks a moral (1) may be surprised to find this same woman supporting the thieves who prey immorally upon the rich: When a West India fleet has sailed into the docks, and wealth flowing in full tides into the crammed coffers of the merchant, can we greatly lament that a small portion of his immense by these means [fraud and thievery] diverted from its course, and finds its way to the habitations of penury? (2) Responding to A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis by Patrick Colquhoun (1796), Barbauld refuses to condemn the prowling poor who are forever nibbling at our property, suggesting that such thieves should be seen, albeit in macrocosmic terms, necessary to a balanced economy rather than agents of injury or damage. I would rather wish to consider she writes in her on the Inequality of Conditions (1807), as usefully employed in lessening the enormous inequality between the miserable beings who engage in them, and the commercial speculators, in their way equally rapacious, against whom their frauds are exercised (S 352-353). Barbauld recognizes, in other words, that the merchants in their colonizing and slave trading practices have no more to their than do the prowlers, and she ponders why the legal system protects the while perpetuating hegemony over the poor (S 347). Although she focuses in other texts on chastising the exploitative tyrants (Corsica, Epistle to Wilberforce, Sins of Government, etc.), she strives in her Thoughts essay to sympathize with those who plunder out of need rather than greed. And although she cautions, in her role middle class educator, that fraud and robbery are not right and that individuals with higher notions of virtue are forbidden to steal, she nevertheless returns to the immense satisfaction she receives from contemplating this providential system of imposition and peculation whereby property drawn off and dispersed, which would otherwise stagnate (S 354). ability to see the whole system in motion, to appreciate relations among individuals functions of a larger communal process, and to recognize the relative ethics of leveling practices regardless of the questionable contents raises Barbauld above the petty realm of technical morality to which Coleridgean scholars have often condemned her. (3) Indeed, her great acuteness of mind--which Coleridge admired and even envied in the early years of their acquaintance (4)--gives her insight into the dependencies and counter-dependencies underlying various subject positions and leads her to reject a static social system. I am apt to suspect that the greatest good done by the numerous societies for the reformation of manners, she writes, is by bringing the poor in contact with the rich (Thoughts S 355). Somehow she recognizes that the basis of morality more corporeal than love or pity. First comes a contact, a face to face meeting, a bodily interrelation. Only then there some hope that hierarchical oppression will be unsettled: The distress which might languish at a distance, will be amply relieved if it comes near enough to affect the nerves (S 351). And yet, at what point do prowlers come too close for comfort? At what point do the weak become the strong, the useless become the basis of meaningful relation? And at what point do the relative positions one plays become more significant than the contents one professes? This essay traces several of these issues in Barbauld's poem The Caterpillar, which struggles to articulate the interrelations between proprietor and prowler, privileged and unprivileged, victor and survivor, in conventional and yet potentially subversive ways. …
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