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Current Issue Article Abstracts Winter 2009 Volume 50 Number 4 • • • • • • • • The Covert Homoeroticism of A Spy on Mother Midnight Laura E. Thomason The anonymous author of A Spy on Mother Midnight (1748) applies libertine philosophy to commonplace elements of eighteenth-century amatory and erotic fiction, producing a story that offers omnisexual thrills and unmistakable homoerotic interest. This manipulation suggests that the boundaries of pornographic appeal in the period may have been more flexible than scholars have generally believed. At a time when public discourse on "sodomites" and "mollies" was almost uniformly negative, Mother Midnight's libertinism creates homoerotic allure without the intratextual or actual punishment expected in connection with both pornography and homosexuality. Though the tale embraces the amorality of the aristocratic libertines, it blurs social boundaries as well as gender boundaries, using class voyeurism to enable sexual voyeurism. With a letter from a man to his male friend as its framing device, Mother Midnight dwells on the erotic appeal and sexual usefulness of cross-dressing while allowing its readers, standing in for the letter's recipient, to partake of the transgressive adventures from a safe distance. Because its homoerotic content stays just under the radar, A Spy on Mother Midnight need not excuse itself with homophobic language. As the protagonist disguises himself to gain entrance to a lying-in, A Spy on Mother Midnight disguises its homoerotic sympathies, hiding them, so to speak, in plain sight for interested readers to discover. Ornament's Invitation: The Rococo of Vienna's Gardekirche Michael Yonan This essay contributes to the project of interpreting rococo ornament by demonstrating how the visual techniques of open-endedness, apparent incompleteness, and spatial complexity found inside one rococo church answer to a complex social network of institutional conflict over divinity and authority. The church in question is the Gardekirche, built in Vienna, Austria, between 1755 and 1763 by the Austrian-born Italian architect Nikolaus Pacassi. Through a close analysis of the church's ornamental program, this essay demonstrates that rococo ornament could and did harness semantic potentiality as a political tool. Although the rococo conveyed an openness of meaning to its viewers, that freedom was never infinite and it never granted the viewer total agency. The social relationships evoked in the Gardekirche's interior decoration routed its viewers along certain predetermined paths, while simultaneously giving them the conception, however misleading, of agency. "The Queen was not shav'd yet": Edward Kynaston and the Regendering of the Restoration Stage George E. Haggerty A discussion of the career of Edward Kynaston, both when he acted in women's roles and when he proceeded to act in male roles. The essay looks at the kind of male roles that Kynaston performs and makes some conclusions about masculinity in the later seventeenth century. Our Neighbors Observe and We Explain: Moses Mendelssohn's Critical Encounter with Edmund Burke's Aesthetics Tom Furniss This essay traces the impact of Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757-1759) on the evolution of German aesthetic theory in the second half of the eighteenth century, concentrating in particular on a close reading of the series of articles on aesthetics that Moses Mendelssohn published between 1755 and 1761. The essay argues that Burke's distinction between the sublime and the beautiful, his attempt to generate an empirical physiological aesthetic theory, and his radical severance of the links between aesthetics and ethics fundamentally challenged the rational metaphysical grounds of German aesthetic theory, provoking Mendelssohn into generating a series of creative but incompatible responses that both constituted a significant elaboration of German aesthetic theory and led into an impasse that only Kant could surmount. The Personal is Political: Domesticity's Domestic Contents Helen Thompson A review of Michael McKeon's The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (2005). The British Empire Live Onstage Gillen D'Arcy Wood A review of Daniel O'Quinn's Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770-1800, a book examining the relationship of politics, theater, and the East India Company in the Romantic period. Manual Dexterities Martha J. Koehler A review of Eve Tavor Bannet's Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1680-1820, a book examining eighteenth-century letter-writing manuals, their adaptations within England, Scotland, and America, and their complex historical agency in both helping to unify different regions of the British Empire and establishing distinct local and regional cultures. The Epistemology of the Gaze in Popular Discourse: A Re-Vision Elizabeth Johnston A review of Daryl Ogden's book, The Language of the Eyes: Science, Sexuality, and Female Vision in English Literature and Culture, 1690-1927 (SUNY, 2005), which sets out to recover a gaze that has been, to date, largely ahistoricized by psychological and evolutionary theories of surveillance and desire. Ogden's argument rests on two premises: that feminist theorists have not fully acknowledged the extent to which Freud and Freudian theory gendered the epistemology of vision and, more importantly, that this gendering of vision was actually shaped by eighteenth-century discourse. Literary works examined include those by Catherine Trotter, Samuel Richardson, Eliza Haywood, Maria Edgeworth, Fanny Burney, Jane Austen, William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, Olive Schreiner, Thomas Hardy, and Virginia Woolf. |
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