Disgust, Metaphor, Women: Ecophobic Confluences

Abstract

When asked to compare England and Fez in Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West, Part 2, Clem explains to the black Queen Tota that she holds England “to be the cleanlier” (1.1.72–73). Claiming that the British (the whites, in other words) “never sit down with such foul hands and faces” (1.1.75–76) as the blacks of Fez, Clem rehearses a familiar text, where the polluting person, and his or her physical space, is unacceptable, disgusting. Indeed, as Mary Douglas has argued in her monumental Purity and Danger, “The polluting person is always in the wrong” (114). The contours of this wrong-ness both define the boundaries of the human and imply limits to ethical considerability of all that lies beyond those boundaries. Filth, of some kind or another, becomes a precondition for difference and exclusion. As Stephen Greenblatt argues in “Filthy Rites,” “The very conception that a culture is alien rests upon the perceived difference of that culture from one’s own behavioural codes, and it is precisely at the points of perceived difference that the individual is conditioned, as a founding principle of personal and group identity, to experience disgust” (“Filthy” 61).1 Disgust, then, designates difference, but the patterning of disgust, because it is constitutional in determining ethics, is also involved in configuring ecophobia, the writing of hostile geographies, Horace’s terras domibus negata (Odes, 1.22.22).