Criticism

Criticism 43.2 (2001) 135-168

Can't Buy Me Love:
Money, Gender, and Colonialism in Donne's Erotic Verse *

Shankar Raman

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SUPPRESSED BY THE LICENSER from the 1633 printed text of John Donne's poetry, the elegy "Loves Progress" seems also to have escaped sustained critical discussion, despite the twentieth-century revival of Donne studies. The comparative neglect does not, I think, derive simply from its being an "outrageous poem," ¹ but from a sense that the poem is perhaps too transparent. In the related--and much examined--elegy, "Going to Bed," an intricate and provocative equation of physical consummation with religious ecstasy complicates the exuberant colonial metaphorics of "My America, my New-found-land," sharpening the effect of transgression. By contrast, "Loves Progress" would appear to display the same guiding metaphorical thread--one that relates the masculine speaker to the woman's body in terms of colonial "discovery"--on its sleeve, not immediately prompting much critical analysis beyond the specification of its analogical procedure. Once one has articulated the specific alignment of colonial and misogynist discourses by demonstrating how Donne utilizes colonialism to talk about sex, there doesn't seem much else to be done other than to judge the comparison. Likewise, the valuation of the Elegies as a whole has often been to their (and the poet's) detriment--most controversially, perhaps, in John Carey's 1981 biography.

A lively attempt to 'save' "Loves Progress" does so by complicating our response to the poem's tone. Drawing on both Arthur Marotti's treatment of Donne as a coterie poet and Annabel Patterson's discussion of self-censorship, R. V. Young proposes that the poem be read as a "countertext" to colonial works of "essential duplicity": it critiques the colonial enterprise not by direct refutation, but by dismantling the rhetorical structure underlying contemporaneous textual celebrations of English explorers. "Loves Progress" rewrites these, according to Young, "as cynically erotic poems of unbridled desire": not only does Donne invert the background metaphor likening the discovered [End Page 135] land to the female body, but "coarse cynicism" parodies the pious exultation of colonialism in early modern discovery narratives. ² Thus, even as colonialism provides the frame for the poem's erotic wit, the topos of sexual mastery nonetheless strategically serves as colonial critique.

Jacques Derrida's term "invagination" seems particularly apt to designate the logic of Young's argument, which transforms what in the poem appears secondary (colonialism) into the primary frame, thereby relegating the original frame (sex/gender) to a secondary position. However, such a Derridean logic of reversal and displacement, strictu sensu, would instead emphasize a radical uncertainty or undecidability regarding what the poem is "about." Moreover, the critical procedure need not halt at this initial reversal: one could just as well extend the process yet a step further to argue that the metaphor equating colonial territory to female body--against which the poem ostensibly writes--itself rests upon an older (and broader) gendered frame that links the female to land, nature, and passivity (opposing these to the active male subject). Indeed, Donne's participation in military expeditions to Cadiz early in his career and his involvement with the Virginia Company (whose Secretaryship he unsuccessfully sought) might lend support to a reading which treats the poem's "coarse cynicism" not as parody but at face value. Undecidability or ambiguity is arguably, then, a logical outcome to which any reading can be pushed that connects the poem's sexual politics to its colonial politics in terms of a binary relationship between tenor and vehicle.

Emphasizing this undecidability, Catherine Belsey offers a valuable corrective to a still prevalent critical tendency to read Donne's poetry in terms of an opposition between love and politics that gets definitively resolved in one or the other direction. ³ Relating Donne's verse historically to an emerging distinction between an imagined private, "privileged, intimate world" and the public realm of "economy, politics and history," Belsey instead uncovers an anxiety at the heart of love itself, "an uncertainty about the degree to...