The Curious Eye: Optics and Imaginative Literature in Seventeenth-Century England by Erin Webster

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Curious Eye: Optics and Imaginative Literature in Seventeenth-Century England by Erin Webster Wendy Beth Hyman Erin Webster, The Curious Eye: Optics and Imaginative Literature in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. 224 Pages. In these first decades of the twenty-first century, humanists all too often find our disciplines undervalued relative to the forms of knowledge produced by STEM fields (although as COVID has all too grimly shown us, we societally undervalue the conclusions of science, too). But in the early modern England wherein so many of our disciplinary divisions emerged, natural philosophy was continually influenced by metaphorical thinking, and, conversely, literary texts justly competed with scientific instruments by “acting as optical devices.” The domains of sight and insight, objectivity and imagination, did not constellate as they do now, i.e. as provinces of opposed fields of study. Instead, The Curious Eye: Optics and Imaginative Literature in Seventeenth-Century England traces early modern epistemological complementarity via an “important and understudied analogy between the optical technologies of the period and figuration itself” (9). In the realm of the literary, Webster is an adroit thinker across a range of poetic and prose works, and is an especially brilliant Miltonist. But she also writes with ease and clarity about the complex imbrications of literary and scientific approaches to in/visible and distant realms. The Curious Eye understands metaphors and microscopes as similar sorts of tools, but also makes a case for the ways of knowing most distinctive to literature. The first chapter, “Poetry as Optical Technology,” argues that the changing nature of early modern optics—especially the Keplerian discovery of the eye itself as an optical instrument—can be traced in shifting theories of poetics as well. At least since [End Page 94] Marjorie Hope Nicolson’s 1950 Breaking of the Circle, scholars have attended to the impact of the scientific revolution on the subjects treated by poets like Donne, Herbert, and Milton. But Webster is interested less in poetic conceits about compasses or stars than she is in poetry’s claim to perspectival potency—that is, its ability to correct both the distortions of the mind’s eye and to supersede the rudimentary nature of some optical instruments. Paradoxically, this idea gained traction simultaneous with Johannes Kepler’s discovery about the nature of human vision, which delineated the mechanics of sensory perception from the conceptualization of what was seen. In this shifting terrain, where all vision was mediated in some way, poetry had an equally legitimate claim as a vehicle for yielding insight into the nature of things. Chapter 2 shifts to the role of simile and figuration in natural philosophical writing. Conventionally speaking, scholars have understood the emergence of the Royal Society of Scientists as not only a methodological (Baconian) project, but also a rhetorical one. Webster resists the usual polarities of the scholarship, instead probing why similitude, in particular, was “singled out as among the most insidious of the idols of the marketplace” (48). In a Foucauldian reading, she points to similitude’s epistemological associations with outmoded theories of sensory perception, scholasticism, and arcane resemblances. Her reading is nuanced: natural philosophers might reject figuration qua “ornament and adornment,” but they also deployed it for utilitarian ends. That is because natural philosophers recognized that like mechanical instruments, “literary technologies… did something functional”: they created images (55). In Chapter 3, “Envisioning Empire in Bacon, Hooke, and Cavendish”—and to a lesser extent in Chapter 6, “The Optics of Virtue in Boyle, Cowley, and Behn”—Webster takes up some of the social and political implications of the “empire of knowledge” ruled by the natural philosophers’ eye. The realm of what Stuart Clark calls “ocularcentrism,” after all, is also a panoptical realm: a realm of categorization and domination of its objects of study. This chapter, aptly, considers how “vision plays a central role in the establishment and maintenance of political and epistemological authority” (77). Although Hooke and Bacon exemplify these tendencies without reluctance, Webster curiously finds Margaret Cavendish actually resisting the authoritarianism of the singular gaze. The argument rests on seeing within Cavendish’s Blazing World a celebration of the “embodied nature of all forms of knowledge” and...