Enlightenment in Ruins by Griffin Michael

Author:Griffin, Michael [Griffin, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Published: 2013-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

Auburn, Goldsmith’s literary village, is a nostalgic, utopian depiction of a natural landscape which is home to an organic community. The poem moves knowingly from an integrated past to a ruined present in which the costly spectacle of success masks a more profound, widespread poverty. Its movement from past to present is equally a movement from England to Ireland; in this contrast, Goldsmith illustrates starkly the extent to which one nation has, through ostentation and absenteeism, undone the other. The landowner, wealthy, luxurious, and proud, has taken the wealth generated by peasant rents and labor to use for his own amusement. Part of this money he uses for landscape design in order to enhance his estates; the rest he spends on metropolitan entertainment. In sum, the wealth generated in Ireland is taken out of circulation in Ireland; and the country is left to wither. Yet the land, the Irish land, by luxury betrayed, attempts to dress herself. Ireland thus becomes a mixture of wildness and a shabby, neglected gentility. The landowner has agency, but so, in a much more limited way, does the land, figured here as a once beautiful but now neglected woman. This image is redolent of the aisling mode, in which Ireland is personified as a forlorn woman whose agency is limited, subject as she is to dynastic conflicts beyond her control.61 “Like Swift,” writes Murray Pittock, “Goldsmith may have had connexions with the nationalist culture which reflected itself elsewhere in the stylized protests of the aislings.”62 Unlike Swift, however, Goldsmith’s protest was embedded and obscured in an unlikely convergence of influences. His orientalism was an allegorical screen for his Irishness; and his version of the aisling was modified according to contemporary issues in gardening. Chinese gardening, if its fashion went unchecked, threatened to disrupt the preeminence of the English style; the defense of the latter was thus characterized by the chauvinist vim of such as Mason and Walpole. The English tradition they defend finds itself opposed by a coalition, in defense of the Chinese style, consisting of two Irishmen and a Scot. The political subtext of residual Jacobitism is compounded, in Goldsmith’s case, by use of the aisling metaphor. Thus the political malaise and the ruination at the heart of The Deserted Village are adumbrated in the landscapes of The Citizen of the World. It is according to the allegorical levels delineated here, and the acquaintances that informed their mutual vocabularies, that a fair female unadorned and plain becomes a garden, and a grave.

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