The Cell and the Garret: Fictions of Confinement in Swift’s Satires and Personal Writings HOPEWELL R. SELBY Reading Swift’s satires is almost always to experience claustro phobia of a sort. Who does not gasp for air as Gulliver, imprisoned in the Lilliputians’ temple, adds to its ancient pollutions new ordures of his own? Who does not gag as the Brobdingnagian monkey squeezes Gulliver with one paw and crams filthy food down his throat with the other? Or feel involuntary constrictions of the throat as he nearly drowns in Brobdingnagian cream? Or squirm as he wriggles in the marrow-bone? Few if any of us, I suspect, can read the Travels without feeling some if not all of these responses, which are almost involuntary reflexes. Similarly, few if any of us can experience the malodorous eructations in the Tale of a Tub's cramped quarters without sharing, to some extent, the wish to rise above the crowd and breathe free. A common satiric procedure with Swift is to confine his reader within a narrow space—conventicle, dressing room, or crowd—and then let fly with a full-scale assault on the nose. 133 134 / HOPEWELL R. SELBY Typically, Swift yokes together his reader and satiric speaker in a fearful embrace which threatens to strangle, suffocate, and choke. Theirs is the kinship of fellow prisoners. My aim here is to explore—selectively and doubtless in what Swift would term “Mignature”1 —the implications of this relationship as it appears in Swift’s protean prisons. This exploration can help to clarify the relation between Swift’s images of himself in the personal writings and their antitypes in the satires. The speakers of both kinds of writing have much in common beneath their apparent contrariety. Characteristically, Swift seeks to annihilate his satiric speakers— Gulliver, Partridge, the Tale’s mad scribbler—by imprisoning them and inflicting upon them the tortures of solitary confinement. But in the personal writings—including the Journal to Stella, the cor respondence, and “autobiographical” pieces such as the Holyhead Journal—Swift presents himself, in the guise of Presto and Punsibi, Dean and Drapier, as a similarly trapped victim, who is tortured as a prisoner by his keeper, by Patrick’s insolence, by his Dublin housekeeper’s tyranny, by the rudeness of an innkeeper’s wife. The two apparently different cases resemble each other in their common fictions of confinement, which are both psychological and epistemological in nature. Swift’s fictive prisons express his fears of the human mind’s tendency toward violent and anarchic disintegration, which results in its solipsistic alienation from the world of “outside” things.2 In this sense, Swift’s confinements are more than just another of the “special effects” which the satirist pulls from his proverbial bag of tricks. The claustrophobia generated by Swift’s satire has its nonsatiric counterpart in writings of the period as diverse as Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard, Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, and Richardson’s Clarissa, to name only three well-known examples. All of these works treat the problems created by individuals whose minds are isolated not only from the minds of others but also from what the empiricists were fond of calling “external objects.” All portray this isolation in the concrete image of the confined space: Eloisa’s cell, Clarissa’s closet, the small room through whose window H. F. observes the plague and his own ideas as well. It is Fictions ofConfinement in Swift I 135 not surprising that these fictions of confinement should proliferate in the age of Locke and the empiricists, who portray the mind, in the words of Sir Isaiah Berlin, as “a box containing mental equivalents of the Newtonian particles,” and for whom “threedimensional Newtonian space has its counterpart in the inner ‘space’ of the mind over which the inner eye—the faculty of reflection—presides.”3 In the nonsatirical writings of the period, this image of the mind appears in the external caves, grottoes, and other small spaces which are the setting for reflective contem plation and which may also represent one of the period’s uncon scious images of the mind itself.4 But whereas many eighteenthcentury closed...