Understanding experience: subjectivity, sex, and suffering in early modern England
Understanding experience: subjectivity, sex, and suffering in early modern England
It comes as little surprise that Andrew Marvell in his verse should have endangered as well as touched with eros the figure of the child, though the potential implications often escape attention. We tell ourselves that our attitudes to what we call child abuse are distinctively modern, but how different might early modern imaginings have been? To address that unsettling question, this chapter considers seventeenth-century applications of familiar categories like ‘child’ and ‘abuse’. Focusing on the position of the tutor – well known of course to Marvell – and on passages in the schoolroom, it finds in print controversy signs of early modern awareness of what seemed then, as now, an unmistakably sexualised violence, with its predatory gratifications and its shame. The conclusion, that some contemporaries could apprehend and even articulate not just suffering but even subjectivity, can only further perplex the question of Marvell’s sexual identity and the meaning for him of the child.
Keywords: Andrew Marvell, Child abuse, Tutor, Schoolroom
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