|
COPYRIGHT 2004 Boston University
READERS WHO WERE FIRST INTRODUCED TO ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD (1743-1825) as the prudish school matron who wrote prose hymns for children and complained that Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner" lacks a "moral" (1) may be surprised to find this same woman supporting the thieves who prey immorally upon the rich:
When a rich West India fleet has sailed into the docks, and wealth is flowing in full tides into the crammed coffers of the merchant, can we greatly lament that a small portion of his immense property is by these means [fraud and thievery] diverted from its course, and finds its way to the habitations of penury? (2)
Responding to A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis by Patrick Colquhoun (1796), Barbauld refuses to condemn the prowling poor who are "forever nibbling at our property," suggesting that such thieves should be seen, albeit in macrocosmic terms, as necessary to a balanced economy rather than as agents of injury or damage. "I would rather wish to consider them," she writes in her "Thoughts on the Inequality of Conditions" (1807), "as usefully employed in lessening the enormous inequality between the miserable beings who engage in them, and the great commercial speculators, in their way equally rapacious, against whom their frauds are exercised" (S 352-353). Barbauld recognizes, in other words, that the rich merchants in their colonizing and slave trading practices have no more right to their property than do the prowlers, and she ponders why the legal system protects the rich while perpetuating hegemony over the poor (S 347). Although she focuses in other texts on chastising the exploitative tyrants ("Corsica," "Epistle to Wilberforce," "Sins of Government," etc.), she strives in her "Thoughts" essay to sympathize with those who plunder out of need rather than greed. And although she cautions, in her role as middle class educator, that "fraud and robbery are not right" and that individuals with "higher notions of virtue" are forbidden to steal, she nevertheless returns to the immense satisfaction she receives from contemplating this "providential" system of "imposition and peculation" whereby "property is drawn off and dispersed, which would otherwise stagnate" (S 354).
The ability to see the whole system in motion, to appreciate relations among individuals as functions of a larger communal process, and to recognize the relative ethics of leveling practices regardless of the questionable contents raises Barbauld above the petty realm of technical morality to which Coleridgean scholars have often condemned her. (3) Indeed, her "great acuteness" of mind--which Coleridge admired and even envied in the early years of their acquaintance (4)--gives her insight into the dependencies and counter-dependencies underlying various subject positions and leads her to reject a static social system. "I am apt to suspect that the greatest good done by the numerous societies for the reformation of manners," she writes, "is by bringing the poor in contact with the rich" ("Thoughts" S 355). Somehow she recognizes that the basis of morality is more corporeal than love or pity. First comes a contact, a face to face meeting, a bodily interrelation. Only then is there some hope that hierarchical oppression will be unsettled: "The distress which might languish at a distance, will be amply relieved if it comes near enough to affect the nerves" (S 351). And yet, at what point do prowlers come too close for comfort? At what point do the weak become the strong, the useless become the basis of meaningful relation? And at what point do the relative positions one plays become more significant than the contents one professes? This essay traces several of these issues in Barbauld's poem "The Caterpillar," which struggles to articulate the interrelations between proprietor and prowler, privileged and unprivileged, victor and survivor, in conventional and yet potentially subversive ways. Touched by one caterpillar from her garden, the speaker considers her complex identification with and resistance to systems of power, engaging several discourses of biology, politics, and ethics, in a movement that does not end where it began. By the end, the reader is left to ponder the whole system of moral virtue: is it virtuous to protect pests and parasites as necessary parts of this system or is such protection merely an indulgent weakness of a virtuous mind?
Recent critical studies of Anna Letitia Barbauld have persuasively argued that much of her insight into communal ethics is due to her upbringing in a Unitarian home, (5) which necessitated a position of "double dissent." (6) This position involves allegiance to the non-conformist tradition of Dissent--promoting religious and political freedom and equality--but it also involves independence from restrictions of gender to which Dissenters still subscribed. (7) Indeed, double dissent helps to explain not only Barbauld's political agendas but also her otherness from male Romantic writers who periodically indulged in melancholic solipsism. (8) Despite the increasing suspicion towards Dissent in the early nineteenth century, she does not relinquish her drive toward equality and justice for all, although her insights and positions do not appear rigid or unchanging. Responding to varying historical stimuli, she shifts readily from subversive wit to sincere patriotism, from superficial pleasure to austere critique, or from skeptical hesitation to indulgent generosity. In the process, she engages the pests and parasites who haunt the borders of equality and threaten to overwhelm the virtuous sympathies of Dissent.
Barbauld's "The Caterpillar" was written several years after she was critically condemned in 1812 for publishing "Eighteen Hundred and Eleven," a poetic castigation of British politics and society. By 1815, (9) Barbauld--age 72--had retreated from the public realm and was presenting herself as a tender-hearted and personable woman, an ethos that prevails throughout most of the caterpillar poem. Meanwhile, her fellow Britons had begun to soften towards Napoleon Bonaparte, who had dramatically returned from the Isle of Elba in March only to be defeated at the Battle of Waterloo in June. Seeming to echo this softening atmosphere, "The Caterpillar" moves from sympathy for a little insect to pity for a defeated enemy, employing a conventional analogy between garden pests and political adversaries. (10) But although the poem's kind sensibility brings a "fellowship of sense with all that breathes," the last lines suddenly announce that such sensibility is "not Virtue" (41; P 173). It is as if Barbauld regains her public voice and wins the emotional acquiescence of her audience, only to challenge their morality from the inside out. More is at stake than caterpillars and defeated soldiers. Oscillating between pest control and playfulness, parasitism and pity, positionality and piety, Barbauld's poem generates a dynamic revision of interpersonal ethics that extends beyond the preservation of humanity to which "Eighteen Hundred and Eleven" appears to be dedicated and in the shadow of which "The Caterpillar" appears to crawl. To see the challenge in this oscillation and revisioning, we need to look at the poem from the beginning.
Pests
The opening of Barbauld's "The Caterpillar" depicts a moth larva that crawls out of the speaker's clothing, down her arm, and onto her hand. (11) Unlike the stereotypical female such as "Little Miss Muffet" in the Victorian nursery rhyme, she is not frightened by the sudden proximity of a moving insect. Instead, she creates a relationship of trust with the creature, treating it as if it were an innocent child requiring her protection rather than a conventionally reviled pest. She is intrigued with the caterpillar's beauty and she promises not to kill it:
No, helpless thing, I cannot harm thee now, Depart in peace, thy little life is safe; For I have scanned thy form with curious eye, Noted the silver line that streaks thy back, The azure and the orange that divide Thy velvet sides; thee, houseless wanderer My garment has enfolded, and my arm Felt the light pressure of thy hairy feet; Thou hast curled round my finger; from its tip, Precipitous descent! with stretched out neck, Bending thy head in airy vacancy, This way and that, inquiring, thou hast seemed To ask protection; now, I cannot kill thee. (1-13; P 172-73)
The implication is that such a lovely creature is unable to fend for itself and certainly is not dangerous.
Unfortunately, though, the coloring of the caterpillar belies its seeming innocence. Barbauld does not identify the caterpillar she describes, but her description matches entomological illustrations and identifications of the European tent caterpillar, Order Lepidoptera, Family Lasiocampidae, Species Malacosoma Neustria, also known as the larva of the Lackey moth. (12) No other caterpillar quite matches "the silver line that streaks thy back, / The azure and the orange that divide / Thy velvet sides" (4-6). This caterpillar has a bright blue base, including its head, with orange (and sometimes black) stripes on both sides of a middle white line. Moreover, the skin is covered with reddish-brown hairs which are pleasant to touch, like velvet, unlike the Brown-tailed Moth larvae and other caterpillars whose hairs are irritants, causing severe rash. What an unsuspecting reader might not realize is that this beautiful Lackey caterpillar has the potential to be a severe pest, defoliating and disfiguring apple and other deciduous trees from April to June, and living until it is full-grown in a communal silken tent spun over...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
