Materiality and Satire in Marvell’s “The Last Instructions to a Painter”

Abstract

In “The Last Instructions to a Painter,” Marvell articulates and then critiques the idealizing ethos of the Stuart regime by using a rhetoric of corporeality to reveal the limitations and falsity of this ideological vision, and to censure the corruption and misgovernance at the center of the body politic. Marvell employs the tradition of ut pictura poesis to frame his analysis of Stuart political culture and its notions of agency embodied by king and court. But Marvell reconceives the notion of ut pictura poesis, so that instead of being a vehicle for the expression of cultural ideals he invests it with a new, transgressive energy that is able to challenge patriarchal understandings of power. In addition, by intertwining the political and artistic spheres, Marvell is able to develop a theory of satire grounded in the materiality of human/nonhuman bodies that anticipates the modern philosophy of vitalism. The focus on human/nonhuman bodies helps to open up an imaginative space that extends agential possibilities to a dynamic material realm that complicates human-centered notions of agency and calls into question hierarchies of power. This vitalistic philosophy in turn helps to clarify and explain how the entangling of the materialities of the human and natural worlds in Marvell’s “Last Instructions” helps the poet to develop a sophisticated and expansive satiric voice while at the same time enabling him to critique the debased political realm of seventeenth-century England.