Why Selima Drowns: Thomas Gray and the Domestication of the Imperial Ideal

Abstract

Thomas Gray's ode on the death of Walpole's cat is paradigmatic of eighteenth-century English incidental verse. Such verse often draws strength from, and facilitates, the larger historical discourses of mercantile and imperial expansion. The images, themes, and worldviews of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century poems on public themes also extend into “occasional” private poems, which turn into palimpsestic records of the influence of empire on the poetic imagination. In particular, negative representations of female desires function as ideological surrogates for the playing out of the more anxious scenarios of imperial desire. Gray's ode, which takes the overt form of the animal fable, is also an allegorical satire on women and a displaced account of the eighteenthcentury British domestication of the imperial ideal. This essay unravels the representational, literary, and sociohistorical codes that enable the ode to perform equally and effectively at all these levels.