Mandeville and Augustan Ideas: New Essays ed. by Charles W. A. Prior (review)

Abstract

186 Reviews Misunderstandings often appear when a scholar's quest forsubversive subtexts distracts attention from literal meaning. This happens with the ode, probably by Anne Killigrew, 'Upon a Little Lady under the Discipline of an Excellent Person'. The poetic persona, who loves Eudora, cries out in horror on seeing her smacking a little girl on the legs, or possibly higher; tumult among a flockof watching Cupids suggests that this is an outrage against love, beauty, and rank. Yet the observer's admission that Eudora chastens error and shows virtue vindicates her moral authority. The Cupids exchange their bows for lyres, to which they sing chaste airs. When the smacking is over, the girl's reaction indicates that it was justified: smiling, she joins Eudora in a 'heav'nly' song (p. 123). Andreadis believes the poem's subject is a sexual encounter (p. 123): 'a young woman is dominated and disciplinedby Eudora, an older and more powerful personage' (p. 121). Hearing a 'language of erotic ellipsis' (p. 123), she multiplies the difficulties in identifying the poem's speaking voices (see p. 122). She observes that the Cupids' lyres are 'inevitably associated with Sappho' (p. 208 n. 38), ignoring a reference to Apollo that forges thematically appropriate links with the god of harmony and sweet reason. Apparently working on the assumption that the beating continues, Andreadis finds the concluding change of mood 'opaque, unexplained, yet it is clear that the speaker has not only come to terms with what appears to be a transgressively erotic behaviour but now finds it desirable' (p. 123). Although the poem's harmonics reverberate with same-sex female erotics, it is unwise to ignore the melody. University of Reading Carolyn D. Williams Mandeville and Augustan Ideas: New Essays. Ed. by Charles W. A. Prior. (English Literary Studies Monograph Series, 82) Victoria, BC: University of Victoria Press. 2000. 144 pp. $15.50. ISBN 0-920604-73-0. Charles Prior manages to appear both dangerously equivocal and somewhat illogical in asserting that the collection focuses 'on what Mandeville was writing about and how he was writing it, rather than on what he wrote', claiming that 'This frees us from the impossible, and largely unrewarding, task of unravelling those points at which Mandeville is being serious, ironic, playful, or some permutation of the three' (p. 11). If the intellectual slipperiness of the good Doctor Man-devil seems to have infected his critics in such a fine semantic distinction, the idea that one can focus on 'how he was writing' without confronting the profound problems of irony or the seriousness of his intentions seems simply myopic. The very title of the collection does not help to focus attention on the more troubling question of Mandeville's ideas, their degree of coherence or conviction, and the editor's introduction does little to answer his own question: 'Who zvas Bernard Mandeville?' Scholars from a range of disciplines have discovered as many Mandevilles as one might find industrious/degenerate bees in 'The Grumbling Hive'. We have been offered a pious Dutch Reformed Calvinist, a cynical profligate libertine, a misogynistic capitalist, a proto-feminist, a behavioural psychologist, mercantilist, utilitarian, an emancipator of economics, a reafBrmer of Hobbes, a pre-Kantian integrator of ethical and social thought, a northern Vico, or a shrewd precursor of Adam Smith, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes; the doubt remains, however, that this bee might prove an intruding and disguised wasp-like if not waspish satirist. Sincerity is a notoriously difficultand critically unfashionable notion, but its etymology reminds us ofthe need to discriminate between honey and beeswax. Unravelling represents no easy task, but it is not impossible, and would certainly prove rewarding. Any paperback collection of essays by notable Mandeville scholars is neverthe? less to be welcomed. In the opening essay, '"State Hypochondriacks" Dispraised: MLR, 98.1,2003 187 Mandeville versus the Active Citizen', J. A. W. Gunn maintains that Mandeville's infamous paradox 'private vices, public benefits' depends upon 'a very conventional notion of what constituted a benefit to the public [. . .] conceived in [. . .] holistic, society-wide terms' (p. 16). The 'common good' ofwhich Mandeville writes, however, never seems to extend to anyone below the bourgeois public sphere...