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Carol Houlihan Flynn. The Body in Swift and Defoe. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge, 1990. Pp. viii + 231. $39.50.
Ms. Flynn's book considers "the ways in which Swift and Defoe, speaking for their age, addressed the problems of the body." Arousing their concern are the following eighteenth-century issues: (1) the body as "passive receiver of sensation receives information which cannot be ordered"; (2) the "opaque, illusive nature of ... reality" undercuts "providential patterns that would inform matter with meaning"; (3) "meaning must be made by immersion into the matter itself," leading to a "radical uncertainty of expression." The topics and works through which these issues are explored include Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, with dead bodies obliterating all neatly delimited explanations and remedies; Moll Flanders and Roxana, with recurring children preventing or inhibiting escape from the recognition of body; the figure of the nurse as connected to childhood and sexuality in a variety of works by Defoe and Swift, including Moll Flanders, Gulliver's Travels, the Journal to Stella, and many poems; Robinson Crusoe, A Modest Proposal and cannibalism. Executions, eroticism, fear of impotence, and harems (Montesquieu's Persian Letters is productively used) also receive attention.
The book explores the rationale for its periodization of these issues-their eighteenthcenturyness-in various implicit and explicit ways. The most comprehensive assertion is through the economics of the age: "In this age of consumption, men and women began to locate themselves within the materials of their society. It became, by...