Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century

Considering the recently released second edition of J. C. D. Clark's well known English Society 1660-1832 in the forthcoming Year's Work in English Studies (vol. 81, 2002), Lee Morrissey notes, "It is not too much to say that the implications of [Clark's] central thesis-that those living in the eighteenth century had no idea they were also living through an emerging modernity-are still working their way through eighteenth-century studies" (6). Laura Brown's Fables of Modernity implicitly addresses the implications of Clark's argument for questions of empire, finance, and alterity by persuasively demonstrating the complex, pervasive connections between modernity and difference in the English eighteenth century. Fables of Modernity is a fascinating study of prominent imaginative figurations that recur throughout eighteenth-century English literature and culture, persistent images and stories of the city sewer, torrents and oceans, Lady Credit, the "native prince," the orangutan, lap dog, and parrot, which Brown demonstrates are multifaceted constituents of and engagements with the material realities and ideological myths of early capitalist modernity. In her analysis Brown inaugurates the concept of the "cultural fable" as a critical mode for exploring the networks of such complex imaginative events and examines these fables as they reflect three primary facets of modern experience: expansion, exchange, and alterity. By exploring the representations of women and non-Europeans that permeate these fables, Brown effectively illustrates that not only were individuals acutely aware of emergent modernity, they were fascinated by it, and for Brown, if we miss this fascination and the significance accorded to difference in the constitution of modernity, we miss the heterogeneous mixture of imaginative potency and material reality that structured early modern experience.

Fables of Modernity is divided into three main sections. The first section addresses fables of "Expansion," which Brown locates in the recurrent poetic images of the sewer and the torrent. Chapter 1, "The Metropolis: The Fable of the City Sewer," explores images of the city rain shower and sewer in the poetry of Swift, Pope, Rochester and Gay, contrasting eighteenth-century depictions of the city sewer, which for Brown are characterized by movement and variety, to those of seventeenth-century poetry, which Brown shows lacks these qualities. Brown argues that the material realities of a sewer system unable to keep pace with a rapidly growing metropolis find expression in a collective fable that bespeaks the diversity and vitality of early modern urban experience most often through feminized representations, and contends that the fable of the city sewer relies on the female body to comprehend and characterize the unpredictability, fluidity, heterogeneity, and transformative potential of modernity: "Both the sewer and the female body, by mingling, mixing, or joining, generate indiscriminacy, level hierarchy, repudiate genealogy, or overturn order" (49). While chapter 1 foregrounds Swift's Description of a City Shower, employing the poem as a focal piece to Brown's reading of other urban and misogynist poetry of the period, chapter 2, "Imperial Fate: The Fable of Torrents and Oceans," centers on a reading of Samuel Johnson's The Vanity of Human Wishes, situating Johnson's poem within the nationalist and expansionist poetry of such authors as Dryden, Pope, and John Denham, and exploring in these works the pervasive imagery of torrents and oceans. Considering these poetic representations of torrents and oceans within the historical context of the growing shipping industry, Brown notes a consistent rush of energy in the techniques of such imperialist poetry, an energy similar to that of the feminized representations of sewer floods, finding an inescapable historical thrust within the shape of national identity and imperial fate that this poetry constructs, a textual effect of momentum qualified by a composite of "hope" for Britain's glory and her benevolent global expansion and "fear" of collapse or failure.

Part 2 of Brown's study, concerned with fables of "Exchange," finds the figure of woman closely connected with emergent capitalist modernity as well. In chapter 3, "Finance: The Fable of Lady Credit," Brown reads the representations of Lady Credit in Defoe's Review and Addison's Spectator alongside specific historical frameworks of the financial revolution and contemporary medical assessments of hysteria, and claims that by embodying both the promising, procreative power and the hysterical, threatening potential of finance, Lady Credit served as a mode for understanding England's modern credit-based economy. Brown further argues that the feminized volatility associated with Lady Credit and modern finance that circulated in the collective imagination of the English set the stage for the culture of sensibility of late eighteenth-century prose fiction. Chapter 4, "Capitalism: Fables of a New World," puts into specific practice the critical method and argument set forth in the first three chapters with a close reading of Pope's Dunciad. In this chapter Brown explores how the Dunciad synthesizes the "new world" cultural fables of national identity, empire, finance, commodification and urban expansion and analyzes this synthesis in the context of the commercial printing industry, contending that within the material and imaginative milieu of the print trade Pope elaborately maps out capitalist modernity through the central female figure Dulness.

The book's final section, "Alterity," shifts in emphasis from the cultural fable's engagement with the female figure to consider how the British confrontation with difference in the eighteenth century, evoked in part through fables of both the non-European and nonhuman, shaped and defined modern experience. Chapter 5, "Spectacles of Cultural Contact: The Fable of the Native Prince," analyzes historical and literary depictions of non-European (African, Polynesian, North American) visitors to the English metropolitan scene, most commonly "native" male aristocrats. Brown's study of the historical accounts of such visitors intersects with and is illuminated by her readings of the theme in Behn's Oroonoko and Southerne's dramatic adaptation, as well as in popular ballads and poetic redactions of such visits by authors such as Joseph Wharton, Edward Jerningham, and William Dodd, and in the prose fiction of Defoe, Edward Kimber, John Shebbeare and others, texts which reflect and facilitate a complex, problematic sympathetic identification with the non-European Other. In the book's concluding chapter, "The Orangutan, the Lap Dog, and the Parrot: The Fable of the Nonhuman Being," Brown looks at the prominent cultural fables of animals in a variety of texts. Giving detailed historical background to the eighteenth century as the period that witnessed the "discovery" of the great apes, the development by biologists of a modern system of classification, and the establishment of the household pet, Brown examines fables of interspecies miscegenation (tales of apes abducting and raping women), talking parrots with controversial potential capacity for abstract thought, and lap dogs with their tendency in narrative to expose or complicate the assumptions of their "fashionable owners." Brown convincingly argues that in blurring the boundaries between human and nonhuman, self and other, these fables of the nonhuman being often serve to reflect upon the broader category of difference, especially the position of the African slave, and thus tend to ironically destabilize the early modern English conceptualization of difference as distinction.

If a book review is conventionally expected to find at least one weakness in a scholarly text, then this one must fail. Brown's study is meticulously researched and organized, powerfully argued, and strikingly original. Each chapter contains detailed, complex historical analysis as well as innovative approaches to both canonical texts and heretofore critically under-appreciated ones. Fables of Modernity is a commanding voice in the debate on the formation of early modernity and, like Brown's widely influential Ends of Empire (1993), will have a tremendous impact on eighteenth-century cultural and literary studies.