Abstract
In the last chapter, we saw how Donne, through recounting his bout with relapsing fever, challenges Bacon’s situating humanity in a dominant position to Nature. While Bacon holds out the promise that humanity could make the natural world mendable to its own ends, Donne reasserts humanity’s submissiveness to Nature. As Donne reveals, any control humanity might seem to gain over Nature is finally predicated on Nature’s own complicity. Donne offers a narrative that resists the anthropocentricism that is the hallmark of the Baconian narrative. In this chapter, I continue to analyze the resistance to Bacon’s narrative of humanity’s scientific conquest of the natural world, now as it is reiterated by Andrew Marvell. The return to a pristine, Edenic state with Nature and the human perversion of the natural world are two significant themes Marvell explores in pastoral poetry of the 1650s. Most likely written during his time at Appleton House, Marvell’s pastoral poems realize the paradisiacal space, marked by an intrinsic harmony between humanity and Nature, as beyond our ability to return to. Often Marvell concludes his pastoral poetry with a perspective looking to a prelapsarian moment that has been irretrievably lost. Moreover, Marvell depicts human intervention into the natural world as a corruption, one he realizes in highly sexualized language.
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Notes
Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980), 165.
See Susan Snyder, Pastoral Process: Spenser, Marvell, Milton (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998) 11, 16.
Francis Bacon, The Essays, in Francis Bacon, The Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 187.
Francis Bacon, Novum Organum—With Other Parts of The Great Instauration, ed. Peter Urbach and John Gibson (Chicago: Open Court, 2000), bk. 1, civ.
Bacon, Masculine Birth of Time in The Philosophy of Francis Bacon, trans. Benjamin Farrington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 72.
Nicholas Murray, World Enough and Time: The Life of Andrew Marvell (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 48.
Linda Anderson, “The Nature of Marvell’s Mower,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, Winter 1991, 131.
For accounts of the scandalous circumstances surrounding the publication of Miscellaneous Poems, see Murray, World Enough, 253–55; and John Dixon Hunt, Andrew Marvell: His Life and Writings (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), 184–85, 189–90.
Andrew Marvell, The Poems, 131, 152. In the Penguin Classic Edition of Marvell’s complete poems, Elizabeth Story Donno suggests a similar dating of “The Garden,” “The Mower Against Gardens,” and the Mower Poem sequence. Andrew Marvell, The Complete Poems, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 100–110.
Robert N. Watson, Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 124.
Judith Haber, Pastoral and the Poetics of Self-Contradiction: Theocritus to Marvell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 114.
James J. Bono, The Word of God and the Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 217.
Richard Foster Jones, Ancients and Moderns: A Study of the Rise of the Scientific Movement in Seventeenth-Century England (St. Louis, MO: Washington University Studies, 1961), 45.
Interestingly, Luce Irigaray makes much the same point regarding the imperative of procreation as obstructing any emotional closeness between heterosexual couples: “‘Mother’ and ‘father’ dominate the couple’s functioning, but only as social roles. The division of labor prevents them from making love. They produce or reproduce.” “The Sex Which Is Not One,” in From Modernism to Postmodernism, ed. Lawrence Cahoone (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 256.
For further discussion of Bacon’s fear of desire disrupting the reproduction of the state and scientific knowledge, see Peter Pesic, “Desire, Science, and Polity: Francis Bacon’s Account of Eros,” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 26, no. 3 (Spring 1999): 333–52.
Iddo Landau, “Feminist Criticism of Metaphors in Bacon’s Philosophy of Science,” Philosophy 73, no. 283 (January 1998): 54.
Also see Peter Pesic, “Wrestling with Proteus: Francis Bacon and the ‘Torture’ of Nature,” Isis 90 (1999): 81–94.
Perez Zagorin, Francis Bacon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 121–24.
Katharine Park, “Women, Gender, and Utopia: The Death of Nature and the Historiography of Early Modern Science,” Isis 97 (2006): 490.
Francis Bacon, Thought and Conclusions, in The Philosophy of Francis Bacon, trans. Benjamin Farrington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 83.
Robert Boyle, Certain Physiological Essays and Other Tracts (London, 1661), 41–42. Carolyn Merchant offers a similar reading of this passage from Boyle’s essay in The Death of Nature, 189.
William Harvey, The Works of William Harvey, trans. Robert Willis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 153.
Jonathan Crewe, “The Garden State: Marvell’s Poetics of Enclosure,” in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Burt Richard and Jonathan Michael Archer (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 273.
Tayler finds the syntax of the line ambiguous: “luxuriant” modifies either the grass in the meadows or Damon’s own thoughts. Edward William Tayler, Nature and Art in Renaissance Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 157. My reading of the line argues that Damon, through his own sexually aware perspective, sees the meadows as sexual.
Leah S. Marcus remarks on how the image of the blade of grass abutted on both sides by a flower recreates the phallus. The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell, and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 234–35.
Eric Katz, “The Big Lie: Human Restoration of Nature,” in Environmental Ethics: An Anthology, ed. Andrew Light and Holmes Rolston III (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2002), 392.
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© 2011 Anthony J. Funari
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Funari, A.J. (2011). “Companions of My Thoughts More Green”. In: Francis Bacon and the Seventeenth-Century Intellectual Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230337916_4
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