4 - ‘Intellectual suicides’: The Man of Letters in Middlemarch

Summary

‘No sonneteer had insisted on Mr. Casaubon's leaving a copy of himself; moreover, he had not yet succeeded in issuing copies of his mythological key, but he had always intended to acquit himself by marriage’.

‘A learned author has said that one must choose between leaving to posterity works of genius or children’.

While the purposes and modes of George Eliot's medically minded novel Middlemarch and Francis Cooke's diatribe against non-normative sexualities, quoted above, are otherwise diametrically opposed, they do intersect at an intriguing juncture; namely, their interest in the properly functioning, reproductively oriented male body and what that body bequeaths to its community. In sonnet four, Shakespeare – the ‘sonneteer’ referenced above – attempts to persuade the reader that a male's obligation to himself as to nature is to reproduce: ‘Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend/ Upon thy self thy beauty's legacy?’ (lines 1–2), asks the narrator of his young male reader. Although the Oxford English Dictionary cites Samuel Pepys’ diary of 1662 as the earliest reference to the term ‘spend’, used as a verb meaning to orgasm or ejaculate, there nonetheless seems to be an undercurrent of erotic implication present in Shakespeare's reference to the young man's self-directed ‘spending’ in this sonnet. The autoerotic implications of the lines are heightened by subsequent euphemistic references to selfish sexual practices as ‘having traffic with thy self alone’, a habit which has the bad effect, the narrator chides, of misleading the young man: ‘Thou of thy self thy sweet self dost deceive’ (lines 10–11) declares the narrator, whose aim throughout is to encourage his reader to procreate rather than engage in the deceitful and temporary pleasures of selfish spending.

As both authors’ gestures towards Shakespeare's procreation sonnets suggest, what is at stake here is the (re)productive male body, one that should remain healthy in order to generate offspring. Of course, it is one's will – the intellectual capacity of an individual to choose a course of action – that can dictate whether one has a healthy body to begin with and how that body is, ultimately, employed. What one ‘leave[s]’ behind, in other words, depends upon the successful exertion of one's will to effectively produce children, those ‘cop[ies] of [one]self’ that the narrator of the sonnets so prizes.