'Intestine conspiracies': rhetoric, the body and interiority in Donne's devotional writing and sermons

Abstract

The vivid and dynamic images of bodily disease and decay in Donne's devotional writing and sermons have often caused them to be treated with suspicion by modern critics: the corporeal rhetoric in these texts has been regarded as an outwardly confident and assertive façade disguising an inner psychological drama that is morbid and deviant, or, more recently, has been unmasked as a theatrical display of power which reproduces the authoritarian politics of Donne's culture. I examine how interpretations of Donne's corporeal rhetoric have shifted from a melodramatic performance of self-assertion to a public form of cultural self-definition: in tracing this shift I consider some of the broad historical claims made about Donne's 'public' body by critics who contextualize his writing in relation to a teleology of modernity, reading his corporeal rhetoric insofar as it differs from or anticipates the seventeenth-century emergence of a privatized and individuated 'modern' body. The work of two influential theorists, Michel Foucault and Mikhail Bakhtin, has significantly shaped some of the broad historical claims which critics make about Donne's 'early modern' body, and I aim to assess the plausibility of some arguments which (explicitly or implicitly) apply the insights of these theorists. In response to the Foucauldian and Bakhtinian readings, I present an analysis of Donne's Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions and Death's Duell, which considers some of the traditional rhetorical assumptions that underwrite his powerful and dramatic corporeal language and that illuminate its performative dimension. I argue that Donne's vivid representation of the diseased, disintegrating, dying body constitutes a rhetorical performance which enables the author and the audience to participate collectively in a public mode of self-expression and self-definition, and which aims to establish a vital form of control over the body and to realize its essential integrity and order.