Insolent Women and Crest-fallen Men: Christopher Smart, The Midwife, and Literary Travestism Ross King In Jubilate Agno, a collection of fragments written in a Bethnal Green madhouse during the early 1760s, Christopher Smart makes a number of observations on the relationship between gender and what he perceives to be a deterioration of the cultural and political order. Though a prolonged hymn of praise to God, the poem is infected by a deep sexual bias and dwells at some length, and with much bitterness, on `mischief concerning women', Perhaps the most striking instance of this link between the sexual and cultural orders involves Smart's narrative of man's loss and recovery of his `horn', which, like the beard, is a token of masculinity whose loss or removal indicates `impaired' manhood and an upsetting of the patriarchal order: For I prophecy that we shall have our horns again. For in the day of David Man as yet had a glorious horn upon his forehead. [C.118-19]For it was taken away all at once from all of them. For this was done in the divine contempt of a general pusillanimity. | |
|
