I’ve got an exam on this nightmare angel of linguistic deviance, so I might as well try to kill one bird with two stones (or rather, merge two hemispheres with one compass) and spew out some kind of commentary on his identity as a woman-hating sleazy bastard. I guess I'm also, rather conveniently, spreading venom about Conservative politicians. Anywayy, the twentieth century vision of Donne, outside of Eliot’s opinion, certainly seems to be one of unaffected scorn towards metaphysical poet and ‘massive priest’ John Donne. This is, of course, understandable because feminism has become saturated into not only popular culture but also a healthy dose of post-modernist (whatever the hell that is) works, and so any derogatory comment levelled against females is, according to the masses, an implicitly misogynistic comment.
There is more than a germ of truth in that last sentence, regardless of whether one attacks Donne as a feminist, a historicist, or a fellow misogynist. Lines in his poetry such as ‘nowhere lives a woman true and fair,’ or ‘Hope not for mind in woman, at their best, sweetness and wit they are, mummy possessed,’ stand as potent ammunition for anyone who wants to brand the ‘M’ word onto Donne’s pious forehead. However, I would imagine that the same people who count Donne in this dubious circle of writers also include Bret Easton Ellis, Martin Amis and of course Ernest Hemingway. I haven’t got a god-damned clue if Amis is a woman-hater, I still haven’t got around to reading Money, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he’s regarded in this way due to the presentation of females in his novels.
However, most readers who bring up these rather dubious comments that Donne has made –and apparently if you think those are offensive, wait until you get an eyeful of his letters – will of course neglect statements which imply the complete opposite if misogynistic impulses. There is a pervasive theme of spiritual equality in Donne’s work – the sexual union is a spiritual union – and both the female and male entities are equal participants. Take The Good Morrow – ‘my face in thine eye, mine in thine appears’ weaves the image of two lovers equally fixated upon each other. Likewise, ,Donne’s statement in The Fever, that her sickness will burn out fast because ‘much corruption needful is to fuel a fever long’ contradicts somewhat the bitter epithet of Twicknam Garden that ‘alas, hearts do not appear in eyes, Nor can you judge what woman thinks by her tears, than by her shadow what she wears .’ It’s also an exaltation of purity in woman that contrasts violently with his smug assertion in an early Song that ‘nowhere lives a woman true and fair.’ People seem to neglect the fact that Donne, to a certain extent, has steeped most of these poems in imagination – although scholars are hell-bent on proving otherwise – and therefore the opinions expressed within them are not necessarily supposed to correspond with each other. Nobody thinks that the internal monologues of Browning belong to the same character- so why think the same about Donne’s poetry?
The second reason to suspect Donne’s identity as a misogynist is the fact that everybody was a misogynist during the 17th Century, just like everybody was terrified of going to the Hell in the 16th and everybody wanted to burn witches in the 15th. We don’t brand Conrad as a racist –ok some people do – so we shouldn’t blame Donne for being a product of his environment. By the same token, the entire artistic community was possessed by the theme of female infidelity and mindless fucking. We see it everywhere else, but we only reprimand Donne for it.
There are all kinds of reasons to hate Donne – he was deeply religious, his poetry was shamelessly egotistic, he, to paraphrase Ben Johnson, ‘deserved hanging for not keeping accent’ and perhaps most frustratingly of all he weaved insane threads of deviant logic to come to fucking weird-ass conclusions – twisted ‘iron pokers to true love-knots’ indeed. Oh man, I’m exhausted. I think I left some cider in my wardrobe – Big Time...
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