Abstract
After the English Civil War (1642–50), poets on both sides of the conflict, royalist and parliamentarian, debated the proper representation of emotion. Recognizing this illuminates one of the most puzzling poems of the period: ‘Upon Appleton House, to my Lord Fairfax’, the country-house poem Andrew Marvell wrote for his patron, the parliamentary war hero, Sir Thomas Fairfax.1 Although this poem does not describe the battlefields of the Civil War, war pervades its difficult language and relentless philosophical wrestling. It is a profound response to the aftermath of a protracted war founded in political and religious differences that fractured families and communities and caused much bloodshed. Marvell’s primary aim in writing ‘Upon Appleton House’ was not to document the pain caused by war in sympathetic terms, but to intervene in its management through a new species of poetry suited to the post-war Parliamentary age. About this, Marvell is clear. From the outset he praises Fairfax’s house as a ‘sober frame’ (line 1) and not a ‘great design, in pain’ (line 5). Through such terms, ‘Upon Appleton House’ advocates forms of art that stoically govern the dangerous emotions of pity, fear, sorrow, and vainglory unleashed by war and thereby guides viewers, or readers, towards reasoned moral behaviour. Stoic virtue is gendered in Marvell’s poem. Predictably Fairfax and his forebear William Fairfax, both military men, possess a stoic constancy that makes them impervious to postwar chaos, but hope for the future is vested in a woman: Fairfax’s daughter, Maria Fairfax.
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Notes
Andrew Marvell, Pastoral and Lyric Poems 1681, ed. David Ormerod and Christopher Wortham (Nedlands: UWA Press, 2000), 196–271.
Derek Hirst and Stephen Zwicker, ‘High Summer at Nun Appleton, 1651: Andrew Marvell and Lord Fairfax’s Occasions’, The Historical Journal, 36.2 (1993), 247–69; Nigel Smith, Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 88–9.
According to Ian Gentles, Fairfax’s military success was due more to personal popularity than strategic genius, see his ‘Fairfax, Thomas, Third Lord Fairfax of Cameron (1612–1671)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online edn. <http://www.oxforddnb.com.ezproxy.library.uq.edu.au/view/article/9092> Accessed 2 January 2014.
Bulstrode Whitelock, Memorials of the English Affairs from the Beginning of the Reign of Charles I to the Happy Restoration of Charles II (London, 1732), 461.
Don E. Wayne, Penshurst: The Semiotics of Place and the Poetics of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984); Annabel Patterson, Marvell: The Writer in Public Life (Harlow: Longman, 2000), 32–3.
Rosalie L. Colie, My Echoing Song: Andrew Marvell’s Poetry of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 280–1.
Colie, My Echoing Song, 292. When Colie attributes the difficulty of Marvell’s verse to his indecision, she rehearses an established view of Marvell. Critics from Cleanth Brooks to David Norbrook describe Marvell’s ‘richly divided’ political ‘sympathies’ (‘A Response to Peter Rudnytsky’, in Trauma and Transformation: The Political Progress of John Bunyan, ed. Vera J. Camden (Red Wood, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 38); see also Cleanth Brooks, ‘Literary Criticism: Marvell’s “Horatian Ode”’ (1947), repr. in Literary Criticism: Idea and Act: the English Institute, 1939–1972, ed. W. K. Wimsatt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 423–43, esp. at 438; or more recently Takashi Yoshinaka, Marvell’s Ambivalence: Religion and Politics of Imagination in Mid-Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Brewer, 2011).
I argue that Marvell presents stoicism as a means of managing emotion in public life, rather than a means of ‘encourag[ing] Fairfax and his detractors to understand his Stoicism in the most vigilant and politically dangerous senses imaginable’ as Andrew Shifflett argues, see Stoicism, Politics and Literature in the Age of Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 37. On Lipsius’s Christian stoicism see Jan Papy, ‘Justus Lipsius’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2011), ed. Edward N. Zalta <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2011/entries/justus-lipsius/> Accessed 5 June 2014.
H. J. C. Grierson, Introduction, in Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler, ed. H. J. C. Grierson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1921): xiii; Craig Raine, T. S. Eliot (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2006), 139–41.
For a useful overview of the seventeenth-century view of this opposition see Susan James, ‘Reason, the Passions, and the Good Life’ in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, vol. 2, ed. Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1358–96.
Karl Krockel, War Trauma and English Modernism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 89–127.
T. S. Eliot, ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, The Times Literary Supplement (20 October 1921), 669–70, at 669.
T. S. Eliot, ‘Milton II’ [1947] in On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber, 1957), 146–61, at 153.
T. S. Eliot, ‘Andrew Marvell’, in Andrew Marvell, 1621–1678, Tercentenary Tributes, ed. William H. Bagguley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1922), 63–78, at 65.
Daniel Wickberg, ‘What is the History of Sensibilities? On Cultural Histories, Old and New’, American Historical Review (June 2007), 668–9, at 682.
Frank Kermode, ‘Dissociation of Sensibility’, The Kenyon Review 19.2 (1957), 169–94, at 174.
David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge, 1984), 1–2.
Peter L. Rudnytsky, ‘Dissociation and Decapitation’, in Trauma and Transformation: The Political Progress of John Bunyan, ed. Vera J. Camden (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 14–35, esp. 16–17; and David Norbrook, ‘A Response to Peter Rudnytsky’, in Trauma and Transformation, ed. Vera J. Camden (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 36–40.
Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 38–55, 89.
Plato, Book X, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955), 432–7.
Aristotle, Poetics, trans. with an intro by Gerald F. Else (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967), 25.
Sir Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, ed. J. A. Van Dorsten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 45–7.
William Davenant, ‘The Author’s Preface to his much honor’d Friend M. Hobbes’, in Sir William Davenant’s Gondibert, ed. David Gladish (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 13, 4.
Davenant, ‘Preface’, 5; on Davenant’s view of history see Elliott Visconsi, Lines of Equity: Literature and the Origins of Law in Later Stuart England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 26.
Nevertheless, as Brandon Chua argues, Davenant does not recommend entirely unbridled emotion, see ‘The Purpose of Playing on the Post Civil War Stage: The Politics of Affection in William Davenant’s Dramatic Theory’, Exemplaria 26.1 (2014): 49–51.
‘Upon the Preface’, Certain Verses written by Several of the Authors Friends to be Re-printed with the second Edition of Gondibert, in Davenant, Gondibert, 273; see also Marcus Nevitt, ‘The Insults of Defeat: Royalist Responses to Sir William Davenant’s Gondibert (1651)’, Seventeenth Century 24.2 (2009), 287–304.
John M. Wallace, Destiny his Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 252ff.
On Jonson’s stoicism see Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1945), 104–10; Robert C. Evans, Jonson, Lipsius and the Politics of Renaissance Stoicism (Wakefield: Longwood, 1992); Smith, Andrew Marvell, 97, 99.
See Blair Worden, ‘Friend to Sir Philip Sidney’, London Review of Books 8.12 (3 July 1986), 19–22; Marta Straznicky, ‘“Profane Stoical Paradoxes”: The Tragedie of Mariam and Sidnean Closet Drama’, English Literary Renaissance 24.1 (1994), 107–14; interestingly Robert Sidney wrote poetry himself and translated Seneca, see Millicent V. Hay, The Life of Robert Sidney, Earl of Leicester (1563–1626) (Washington: Folger, 1984), 195–208, esp. at 200.
Hobbes cited in Keith Thomas, ‘The Social Origins of Hobbes’ Political Thought’, in Hobbes Studies, ed. K. C. Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 185–236, at 213.
On Marvell’s argument for right religion see Gary D. Hamilton, ‘Marvell, Sacrilege, and Protestant Historiography’, in Religion, Literature, and Politics in Post-Reformation England, 1540–1688, ed. Donna B. Hamilton and Richard Strier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 161–86.
Andrew McRae, Literature, Satire and the Early Stuart State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 157.
Diane Purkiss, ‘Thinking of Gender’, in The Cambridge Companion to Andrew Marvell, ed. Derek Hirst and Steven N. Zwicker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 68–86, at 68.
On the mock-heroic mode, see Claude Rawson, ‘Mock Heroic and English Poetry’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Epic, ed. Catherine Bates (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 167–92.
Sarah Monette, ‘Speaking and Silent Women in Upon Appleton House’, SEL 42.1 (2002), 155–71, at 158.
Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature 1641–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 192; Susan A. Clarke, ‘Royalists Write the Death of Lord Hastings: Post-Regicidal Funerary Propaganda’, Parergon 22.2 (2005), 113–30; Catharine Gray, ‘Tears of the Muses: 1649 and the Lost Political Bodies of Royalist War Elegy’, in Gender Matters: Discourses of Violence in Early Modern Literature and the Arts, ed. Mara R. Wade (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2014), 133–54.
Anthony Welsh, ‘Royalist Retreat, and the English Civil War’, Modern Philology 105.3 (2008): 570–602; and Victoria Kahn, ‘Reinventing Romance; or, The Surprising Effects of Sympathy’, Renaissance Quarterly 55 (2002), 625–61.
Justus Lipsius, Two Bookes of Constancie, trans. John Stradling (London, 1594), I, xii, 29.
Julianne Werlin, ‘Marvell and the Strategic Imagination: Fortification in Upon Appleton House’, The Review of English Studies, 63.260 (2012), 370–6. See also Katherine O. Acheson, ‘Military Illustration, Garden Design, and Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House”’, English Literary Renaissance 41.1 (2011), 146–88.
On stoical virtue see Graeme Hunter, Radical Protestantism in Spinoza’s Thought (Aldershot: Ashgate 2005), 162; on sacred pain see Ariel Glucklich, Sacred Pain: Hurting the Body for the Sake of the Soul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
On Maria as apotheosis see A. D. Cousins, ‘Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’, to my Lord Fairfax’, in The Political Identity of Andrew Marvell, ed. Conal Condren and A. D. Cousins (Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1990), 53–84, at 77.
Margaret R. Graver, Stoicism and Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 6.
Derek Hirst and Steven Zwicker, ‘Andrew Marvell and the Toils of Patriarchy: Fatherhood, Longing, and the Body Politic’, English Literary History 66.3 (1999), 629–54, at 631, 646.
Richard Sorabji, ‘Did the Stoics Value Emotion and Feeling?’ The Philosophical Quarterly 59.234 (2009), 150–62.
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Barnes, D.G. (2015). Remembering Civil War in Andrew Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’. In: Downes, S., Lynch, A., O’Loughlin, K. (eds) Emotions and War. Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137374073_11
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