Loar - Political Magic: British Fictions of Savagery and Sovereignty

POLITICAL MAGIC

Copyright 2014 Fordham University Press

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An earlier version was previously published as The Exceptional Eliza Haywood: Women and Extralegality in Eovaai , Eighteenth-Century Studies 45, no. 4 (2012): 56584.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Loar, Christopher F.

Political magic : British fictions of savagery and sovereignty, 16501750 / Christopher F. Loar. First edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8232-5691-4 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Political fiction, EnglishHistory and criticism. 2. English fiction17th centuryHistory and criticism. 3. English fiction18th centuryHistory and criticism. 4. Politics and literatureGreat BritainHistory17th century. 5. Politics and literatureGreat BritainHistory18th century. 6. Politics in literature. 7. Authority in literature. 8. Aliens in literature. I. Title.

PR858.P6L83 2014

823'.509358dc23

2013037283

Printed in the United States of America

16 15 14 5 4 3 2 1

First edition

For Barbara

Contents

In the decade I spent working on this book, I received aid and comfort for which these words of thanks are but a paltry recompense. This work could never have been completed without the extraordinary mentoring and support I received as a graduate student at UCLA. Felicity Nussbaum patiently supervised this project in its early stages and has continued to offer advice and criticism in the intervening years. I owe an infinite debt to her for her relentless erudition and her boundless patience. During my first year of graduate study, I was lucky to take a seminar with Helen Deutsch; her class first triggered my interest in the eighteenth century, and the habit of energetic and creative reading she instilled has changed my life. Her support for this project has been unfailing and very, very welcome. I am also very grateful to Christopher Looby and Margaret Jacob for their sage counsel. Allison Harvey, Nicole Horejsi, James Masland, Manushag Powell, and Melissa Sodeman read with patience the earliest versions of these pages; I am as grateful for their bracing criticism as for the warmth of their friendship. Thanks as well to Robert Sterner and Molly Hiro for reading Adam Smith, Thomas Hobbes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau with me, and to boon companions Royce Dieckmann, Kevin Cooney, Andy Fleck, Christopher Flynn, Anthony Galluzzo, David Long, Julia Lee, Andrew Rosenblum, and Anne Stiles.

Most of this book was rewritten during my years at UC Davis, and to my colleagues there I also offer hearty thanks. I was fortunate enough to receive outstanding guidance and mentorship from three skilled department chairs: Margaret Ferguson, David Robertson, and Scott Simmon. Margaret Ferguson also read and commented on major pieces of the manuscript, as did Kathleen Frederickson, Alessa Johns, John Marx, Timothy Morton, Catherine Robson, and David Simpson. Many thanks to them for their suggestions great and small. Extra thanks are due to John Marx, who helped me wean myself from a dangerous preoccupation with forts. Frances Dolan and Gina Bloom provided astute hints and advice at key moments. Perhaps just as important was the generous friendship of Nathan Brown, Seeta Chaganti, Joshua Clover, Gregory Dobbins, Elizabeth Freeman, Desire Martin, Elizabeth Miller, Matthew Stratton, and Michael Ziser. I also learned much from students in my graduate seminars, whose creative and intellectual energies were a constant inspiration.

Farther from home, I have benefited from the counsel of many other generous and gifted scholars. Marc Redfield and Jill Benton encouraged me at an important and early stage in my career. I welcomed acute critiques and suggestions from Arne Bialuschewski, Nicholas Hudson, Jayne Lewis, Rivka Swenson, and Cynthia Wall, as well as the anonymous reviewers for my previously published articles on Defoe and on Haywood. Many thanks to the editors of Eighteenth-Century Studies and Eighteenth-Century Fiction for permission to reprint portions of those articles here. Faculty at my new institutional home, Western Washington University, asked probing and helpful questions as the book neared completion. I was blessed with two sensitive and brilliant referees for my manuscript, Elliott Visconsi and Laura Rosenthal. I am also grateful to my editors at Fordham University PressHelen Tartar, Thomas Lay, and Eric Newmanwho have steered this work from manuscript to book with keen eyes and steady hands.

Research for this project was supported by funds from the English departments at UCLA and UC Davis and by an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship at the Huntington Library. Important research for this project was conducted at the Huntington and at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. Many thanks to the able staff at these libraries for their assistance.

It might go without saying that this book would never have existed without the loving encouragement of my family. Thanks to my mother, Patricia Loar, for instilling in me a deep love of the written word. Thanks to my father, Darrel Loar, for showing me how to have the courage to make bold and life-changing decisions. Thanks to all my siblings for their faith and encouragement. Barbara Lehman may, at times, have wished that this book had not required so much of my attention, but she has never been anything other than supportive. To her this book is dedicated. Honorable mention goes to Micah Lehman-Loar, who has never lived in a world in which his father was not trying to write this book. Not until now, anyway.

Can a savage, remaining a savage, be civil? Were not we ourselves made and not born civil in our progenitors days? And were not Caesars Britons as brutish as Virginians? The Roman swords were best teachers of civility to this and other countries near us.

Samuel Purchas, marginal note in William Stracheys True Reportory (1610)

At first it frighted them to the last degree, and I may well say it frighted them out of their wits, for they that were near it started so violently that they fell down and lay speechless for some time; those that were farther off ran away as if it had been some new kind of lightning and thunder but when they saw the two creatures fall down dead out of the air, and could see nothing that flew up to them to kill them, they were perfectly astonished, and laid their two hands on their breasts and looked up to heaven as if they were saying their prayers in the most solemn manner imaginable.

Daniel Defoe, A New Voyage Round the World (1724)

Samuel Purchas is startlingly frank in his depiction of the role of violence in producing the civility that undergirds modern forms of government. For Purchas, there is no categorical distinction between savage peoples in the New World and the ancient inhabitants of the British Isles, who themselves required an armed conqueror to subdue them and fashion them into civil subjects. The modern English subject is separated from the wild Virginian more by temporality than by skin color. While most later British advocates of efforts to bring civility to savages would try to obscure colonialisms violence, Purchas highlights the brutal fact of conquest as a fundamental and inevitable moment in the transition from lawless savagery to civility. This book argues that for some writers, Romes civilizing project in England never ended: British fictions of empire in the century following Charles Is execution are centrally concerned not only with conquest, conversion, and slavery but alsoeven primarilywith reimagining fundamental political categories of the civilized world such as sovereignty, liberty, and civility.