MDDM Ch. 12 Christopher Smart and Grub Street

[jbor]

'Insolent Women and Crest-fallen Men: Christopher Smart, _The Midwife_, and
Literary Travestism'

by Ross King

Interesting essay, well-documented, provides some pertinent details about
Smart's supposed lapse into insanity as well as his "earlier career as
transvestite actor and Grub Street journalist", and which might serve to
explain Pynchon's momentary focus on him here in _M&D_. The essay also
provides food for thought in regard to Pynchon's own narratorial
transvestitism in _The Crying of Lot 49_, fake personas and the need to
impersonate in general, madwomen in the attic, Wanda Tinasky et. al. I love
the idea of a "cat-organ, a harpsichord fashioned from live felines." Very
Surrealist. Excerpts:

    [...] it is interesting to consider the figure which Smart presents to
    the public ten years previously at the Castle Tavern in Paternoster Row
    and the New Theatre in the Haymarket. For beginning in December 1751
    Smart dresses in petticoats and acts onstage the transvestite role of
    'Mrs Mary Midnight' a grotesque old woman whom he invented a year or two
    earlier in the pages of his threepenny monthly journal _The Midwife_.
    Variously called 'The Old Woman's Oratory' and 'Mrs Midnight's New
    Carnival Concert', the performances display carnivalesque inversions
    whereby more 'serious' literary, theatrical, and musical practices are
    parodied by players in masquerade, by musicians with salt-boxes and
    wooden spoons, and by troupes of performing dogs and monkeys - all
    presided over by Smart's grotesque female figure of misrule, Mrs
    Midnight. Smart is attempting during this time to establish a serious
    literary reputation for himself by publishing imitations of classical
    verse, but, despite various learned allusions in the orations, these
    popular entertainments are enthusiastically plebeian, dedicated to the
    amusement of the rabble. As such they exemplify the debased literary
    palate which Pope condemns some years earlier in the first lines of _The
    Dunciad_ when he laments the spread of the `taste of the Rabble'
    manifested in the shows and entertainments of Barthomomew Fair. Smart's
    performances therefore subvert [...]


    [...] More important than the claim for comprehensiveness is the
    reversal of accustomed gender associations: qualities with traditionally
    masculine connotations - wit, learning, and judgement - are to be
    propagated by a woman, and by a woman, moreover, who voices her opinions
    in a threepenny journal. Furthermore, in an age which prizes women for
    their passivity and domestic virtue, Mrs Midnight, a witch and
    midwife, typifies instead a disorderly figure of musrule. Her name
    appears to allude to the 'Mother Midnight' figure Robert A Erickson has
    studied with reference to her identification in the early modern period
    - in Defoe's _Moll Flanders_ (1722), for instance - not only with
    midwifes but with other more unruly and socially marginalized women like
    witches, bawds, and whores. Smart draws on these pejorative
    connotations to emphasize her aggressive unruliness, and writing in _The
    Entertainer_ in 1754 Mrs Midnight boasts of herself as follows:


        I am what the World call an accomplished LADY ... I am married, and
        have several children, but I leave the poor little things to the
        care of my husband; my peculiar qualifications consist in the art of
        painting my face, and dropping my fan; I have acquired the most
        engaging motion of the eyes and lips; I can cheat at cards tolerably
        well, and in one word, I am possessed of all the qualities that make
        up an accomplish'd woman; I beat my husband one hundred times every
        day and spent twice the rent of his estate every year; I love
        pleasure, and give a ball at my own house every week.

    There is, however, another side to Mrs Midnight. Notwithstanding this
    unrestrained social conduct, she insinuates her way into the precincts
    of a more august culture, communicating regularly in the pages of her
    journal with the Royal Society, the Society for Antiquariens, and with
    various worthies in European court circles. In doing so she demonstrates
    the intrusion of women into traditionally exclusive circles of polite
    learning and also, through her irreverence, the inversion of this
    learning. This mixing of high and low, of a socially suspect figure with
    the institutions of more patrician culture, shows up clearly in the
    hybrid literary content of The Midwife, which encompasses a curious
    array of topics where learned allusions and enlightened social
    commentary are combined with parody and nonsense: imitations of Horace
    (2:155-6) or articles deploring the plight of families whose heads are
    jailed for debt (1:12-15) run side-by-side with a letter to the Royal
    Society describing the invention of an instrument called a 'cat-organ',
    a harpsichord fashioned from live felines (1:98-102), and one to the
    Antiquarians providing an account of the discovery in Cornwall of a
    monument of petrified human excrement (1:151-4).

    [...]

    In the London of the 1750s Smart turns not to aristocratic patrons but
    to booksellers like Robert Dodsley, John Newbery, and later Thomas
    Gardener, to the latter of whom, finding himself in straitened
    circumstances in 1756, he engaged himself for ninety-nine years to
    produce a weekly journal, _The Universal Visitor_, and nothing else. Yet
    the amphibious nature of his literary productions in the decade of the
    1750s should be noted, since contemporary with his magazine work for
    Newbery are more serious efforts at creating a literary reputation for
    himself by transmitting the cultural values privileged by Pope and his
    contemporaries a generation earlier. Besides more 'duncean' literary
    commerce like _The Midwife_, in 1750 Newbery also published Smart's
    'Horatian Canons of Friendship' and 'Ode on the Eternity of the Supreme
    Being': the former is an imitation of the third satire of the first book
    of Horace's _Satires_, while the second won the Seatonian Prize at
    Cambridge in 1750. Two years later Newbury published Smart's _Poems on
    Several Occasions_ (1752), which included Latin translations of Milton's
    'L'Allegro' and Pope's 'An Essay on Criticism' - a project Pope had
    suggested years earlier - and the volume listed among its 751
    subscribers Voltaire, Richardson, Gray, Collins, Garrick, Roubiliac, and
    the bishops of London and Gloucester. _Poems on Several Occasions_ is
    dedicated to the Earl of Middlesex, who was, however, rather
    parsimonious with his patronage, subscribing for only a single volume.

    The decline of patronage is blamed by writers like Oliver Goldsmith on
    Robert Walpole and the Philistine Hanoverian monarchs [....] However,
    the conditions of its demise go beyond individual practices and
    predilections of taste and include a more extensive change in the social
    economy of literature whereby the older aristocratic patronage
    disappears with the emergence of the modern commercial state. [...]

Continues at

http://www2.arts.gla.ac.uk/SESLL/STELLA/COMET/glasgrev/issue2/king.htm

best