Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction “The Dearness of things”: the body as matter for text
- 1 Dull organs: the matter of the body in the plague year
- 2 The burthen in the belly
- 3 Consuming desires: Defoe's sexual systems
- 4 Flesh and blood: Swift's sexual strategies
- 5 The ladies: d—ned, insolent, proud, unmannerly sluts
- 6 Chains of consumption: the bodies of the poor
- 7 Consumptive fictions: cannibalism in Defoe and Swift
- 8 Vital parts: Swift's necessary metaphors
- Afterword Suppose me dead; and then suppose
- Index
3 - Consuming desires: Defoe's sexual systems
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction “The Dearness of things”: the body as matter for text
- 1 Dull organs: the matter of the body in the plague year
- 2 The burthen in the belly
- 3 Consuming desires: Defoe's sexual systems
- 4 Flesh and blood: Swift's sexual strategies
- 5 The ladies: d—ned, insolent, proud, unmannerly sluts
- 6 Chains of consumption: the bodies of the poor
- 7 Consumptive fictions: cannibalism in Defoe and Swift
- 8 Vital parts: Swift's necessary metaphors
- Afterword Suppose me dead; and then suppose
- Index
Summary
One of the greatest Reasons why so few People understand themselves, is, that most Writers are always teaching Men what they should be, and hardly ever trouble their heads with telling them what they really are.
Mandeville, The Fable of the BeesAs he runs away from the needs of his harem, Usbek demonstrates an alienation typical of his age. The eighteenth century might not have invented loneliness, but it certainly refined it. Wondering why English pornographers of the late seventeenth century were compelled to make sexuality mechanical, disgusting, and shocking, Roger Thompson considers the social and intellectual changes that were to form the period. Taking into account the growth of commercialism, the shift from communal to self interest, the rise of the nuclear family dependent upon mutuality and privacy, he suggests the strains of private, and therefore diminished, lives existing between states of connection and dislocation. While
commercialism undermined old values and relationships … mobility produced rootlessness. Leisure might mean emptiness, boredom and uselessness … Self-control raised the threshold of shame and required the repression of the body. The nuclear family could become the neurotic, claustrophobic family, demanding new commitments from its members. Privacy could become introspective loneliness.
Loneliness could also become public spectacle. For at the moment that the body politic was being measured and found monstrous, the body personal was becoming, by virtue of its urban, commercial connections, an entity best studied in the street.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Body in Swift and Defoe , pp. 61 - 87Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1990