7 - Smart's bawdy politic: misogyny and the second Age of Horn in Jubilate Agno

Summary

For when men get their horns again, they will delight to go uncovered.

Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno, C 132

Enthusiastic rhetoric in the Cromwellian era was by no means free of the misogyny prevailing in seventeenth-century Britain. Nevertheless, the somewhat more egalitarian cultural space that female prophets were able to negotiate within the enthusiastic constellation made enthusiasm itself vulnerable to misogynist attacks. The female enthusiast thus looms very large in anti-enthusiastic invective. A Tale of a Tub, in its parodic representation of inspiration from below, typifies this anti-enthusiastic misogyny. Parodying the Quaker practice of permitting women to preach, the Tale transfers the imagery of anality and flatulence to the female genitals, which organs “were understood to be better disposed for the Admission of those Oracular Gusts, as entring and passing up thro' a Receptacle of greater Capacity, and causing also a Pruriency by the Way, such as with due Management, hath been refined from a Carnal, into a Spiritual Extasie.” A certain “emasculation” of plebeian authors is likewise implied here: for to indicate once again their “nothingness,” Swift also draws on the venerable equation of the feminine genitalia with absence. This vein of anti-enthusiastic misogyny has roots that can be traced back at least to the pointedly symbolic disguise – women's apparel – used by the male assailants in a brutal attack carried out against the Diggers' colony in Surrey in 1649, which left four male Diggers beaten senseless.