"A greater gust": generating the body in Absalom and Achitophel.

Publication: Papers on Language & Literature

Publication Date: 22-MAR-04

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When my study of the "normative basis" of Absalom and Achitophel first appeared, it challenged the prevailing interpretation of the poem by arguing that Aristotelian hylomorphism provides a basis for structuring references to the begetting of sons, that the contrasting father-son pairs were crucial to understanding the norms of the satire, that Dryden implies muted criticism of the king's morals while wholeheartedly supporting his politics in the Exclusion Crisis, and that the ethical norm of the poem is contained in the relationship between the figures of Barzillai and his son. Critics whose work focused on the poem as a series of parts--from Dryden's opening lines on the king's promiscuity as an example of his wit, to his satiric portraits, to his use of biblical allegory, to his orations by the king and the poem's titular characters--had overlooked the trajectory of the poem, which includes the contrasts of characters, including the contrasts of pairs as paternal figures, related to their sons. However disturbing these findings may have been to some of Dryden's critics, those who disagreed with this new reading simply skirted it in subsequent discussion, or else professed not to see the features I had delineated. But they did not provide refutations. Others developed their own readings based on my fathers and sons argument. (1)

For all its innovations, deconstruction has treated Dryden with the same hostility exhibited by many of his more traditionally-minded critics. Nowhere is this attitude more apparent than in a critical approach to Absalom and Achitophel, where feminism has joined deconstruction in making Dryden an absolutist both in his sexism and in his politics and where, despite the poem's title and its seeming concentration on paternity, we are told that representations of maternity are "equally important." Such is the approach of Susan Greenfield, whose position serves as a convenient point of departure for a reconstruction of the poem's sexual roles and their concomitant values. (2)

Her argument depends largely on a tradition concerning bodily generation that derives from Aristotle, who, along with Dryden, is presumed to operate from a sexist position. By asserting that the poem embodies "Dryden's attack on maternity" (267), Greenfield perpetuates a tradition of assailing Dryden under the guise of examining his poems, a tradition often involving misrepresentations that began during the poet's lifetime with John Dennis, the Duke of Buckingham, and perhaps most notably Jeremy Collier, who, as Dryden rightly complained in the "Preface to Fables," "perverted my Meaning by his Glosses; and interpreted my Words into Blasphemy and Bawdy" (Poems 1462). (3) Collier had misrepresented Dryden in describing him as implicitly materialistic:

Our Minds (says [Dryden]) are perpetually wrought on by the Temperament of our Bodies, which makes me suspect that they are nearer Allied than either our Philosophers, or School-Divines will allow them to be. The meaning is, he suspects our Souls are nothing but Organiz'd Matter. (4)

My contention is that Greenfield has performed a modern equivalent of what Dryden describes as Collier's efforts and that, in her discussion of form and matter as Dryden associates them with the male and female contributions to generation, she labors under a confusion as egregious as that of Collier. While I do not wish to dwell on her argument, Greenfield deals with the poem almost as if it demanded an esoteric reading, yet instead of finding hidden fissures in the text, she creates them in her reading. My own argument consists simultaneously of a refutation of her position and a reading that rehabilitates the values embedded in Dryden's poetic treatment of the male and female contributions to body and soul in procreation and how those roles are integral to the experience of the poem.

Greenfield argues that "Dryden develops a model of maternal generation in order to defend the royalist tradition ..." (286), a model that exposes Aristotle's "emphasis on female subordination," since generation involves the active male and passive female supplying, respectively, the Aristotelian principles of form and matter. Furthermore, Greenfield claims, Dryden uses this traditional account to blame "maternal creative power ... as the primary and most dangerous source of any challenge to the [political] status quo" (271) and to attribute Absalom's decision to rebel to "his ignoble part, the mother's half" (277); that is, female "passivity" shows up in his "feminine readiness to be seduced" (280). Other influences of generation show up as she posits the relationships of the king to his mistresses as that of a rapist and his relationship to his son as homoerotic. That Dryden "figures maternal generation as the ultimate horror" (283) is evident, she concludes, in his having David allude to the begetting of the Exclusion Crisis as a "Mother Plot" and to the conspirators as "Viper-like," an allusion to the ancient belief that the female viper bites off the head of the male during copulation, then gets her comeuppance when her newborn offspring destroy her. This reading construes Absalom and Achitophel as a poem that denigrates the female in bodily generation, makes her a passive material object, and links the female with voraciousness and rebellion. (5)

Central to her argument is the passage referring to the progeny that David's promiscuous scattering of his Maker's image has produced. Greenfield quotes the passage in which Dryden distinguishes David's lawful spouse, the barren Michal, from

the rest; for several Mothers bore To Godlike David, several sons before. But since like slaves they did ascend, No True Succession could their seed attend. (13-16)

Even though this passage consists of one of the poem's most forthright and unambiguous statements of exposition, Greenfield insists that it is "confusing" (272). Yet the confusion would seem to lie not in the lines but elsewhere; her deconstruction requires confusion as a basis for re-reading, even if the difficulties have to be manufactured in order to rewrite the poem. First, she speculates that since these mistresses were "like slaves," it follows that "perhaps they were forced to lie with the king" (273), even though such totally unsupported speculation diverts attention from the culminating point in the last line of the passage. That is, since the concubines had no more legal status than slaves, David's children by them have no claim to succeed him as king. For Greenfield, the implication seems otherwise: "it is because the women were passive objects of David's desire and possibly even victims of rape that their children are not fit for royalty" (273). No evidence is offered, and, indeed, the evidence is to the contrary. I need hardly explain the less than passive activity implied by the language of the text, as the concubines "Ascend" to dally with David. The historical Lucy Walters, mother of the Duke of Monmouth, Dryden's Absalom, was thought to have played an active role in making herself available to the young Charles, as Clarendon later recalled. James Kinsley, in some ways Dryden's best modern editor, suggests that his use of the word "slaves" may be "a sly inversion of the belief that Charles, as Pepys reported, was 'at the command of any woman like a slave'" (1827). (6) Yet, female passivity and rape are crucial to Greenfield's argument, so that the retrospectively modest claim, "perhaps [his mistresses] were forced to lie with the king," transmogrifies fantasy into fact. Her seemingly tentative but actually gratuitous use of "perhaps" soon becomes a more insistent reference to "the king's capacity to rape," which before long becomes an allegation of fact, as David's wife, becomes "clearly distinguished from the 'several Mothers' ..., for there is no indication that she has been raped" (274). Based on speculation out of thin air, David becomes "the man who has not only demonstrated the potential to rape but has also done so with women" (279).

Aristotle fares little better than David. For Greenfield, and for others, Aristotle has become a kind of godfather of Western phallogocentrism and held to be an arch anti-feminist. Accordingly, Greenfield traces the "erasure of the mother" (267) to the Aristotelian theory that in conception the active male supplies the form, while the female is the "passive principle" (270) and supplies only the matter. The assumption concerning matter in this reading is a commonplace, but it is not completely accurate. Since this issue of generation is important to the poem, it is...

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