Parting the “New World” with an “Oar”: The “Pleasures” of Taxonomy and Cartography in Early-Modern Colonial American Discourse

We should recall that the eighteenth-century pleasures of the imagination included the contemplation not only of the beautiful and the tasteful but also of the novel and the unusual. … Paintings of whatever sort thus aimed, fundamentally, to please and delight the viewer, which they could accomplish not only through being beautiful but also through being unusual, imaginative, and surprising. 

(Earle 462-463)

The “Centers and Peripheries in English Maps of America, 1590-1685″ book-chapter by Ken MacMillan and the the “Pleasures of Taxonomy: Casta Paintings, Classification, and Colonialism” article by Rebecca Earle, cited below, serve as case studies for how cultural depictions can shift cultural perceptions (and vice versa). I am epigraphing (new word) this think piece with the above quote from Earle to expand my thinking about, but still maintain somewhat of a sharp focus on, as Earle puts it, the “pleasures of taxonomy” and the implications on our culture thereof, originating in the eighteenth century and continuing to the present-day. There is a titillating aspect of taxonomy and the “pleasures” that are derived from art works such as the casta paintings Earle examines. Clearly, “taxonomy” is pleasurable because procreation is based in—sex.

In my abstract ways of thinking it is easy to not see the forest through the trees. However, obviously cultural domination had to do with sex and the establishing of boundaries, likewise, was one of the side effects of empire which produced this titillating type of artwork that lives up to the phrase, “sex sells.” Not only is the eighteenth-century the scene of rampant colonial expansion but also of the rise of advertising, of the periodical and of the expansion of stuff.^[1] 

MacMillan writes that “Through various rhetorical and semiotic devices, the maps could emphasize both the peripheries’ allegiance to the center and the center’s obligation to protect the peripheries, without diminishing the notion of peripheral independence and without making the center appear to be exercising tyrannical overlordship” (p. 92). I am interested in, and we talked in class about, the role that maps played in shifting the dominant culture’s boundaries in seventeenth-century America: that French explorers’ maps would also serve to “name and claim,” as you put it today in class. Cadillac’s description of Detroit as that on the bodies of water he wrote that he “could part them with an oar”—the imagery of bounty and of abundance clearly proliferating and serving the explorers’ agenda for the “new” “world.”^[2]This imagery of bounty and abundance—the language of “parting” with an “oar”—is sexual in itself (I need not repeat my riff on “Virginia” and the phallic imagery of the maps, and of the British unicorn penis symbology). The fact that this was a trope, ties into the sexualized nature of empire expansion and its link to sexuality (aggressive sexuality including even the rape of the land, as symbolized in the form of the woman, i.e., Richardson’s Clarissa, which Doyle, cited in my response last week, ties to the “liberation plot” of Atlantic premodernity. 

What are these depictions of ‘virgin’ territory and phallic conquering doing and what is this rhetoric’s implication for femininity/masculinity in terms of empire expansion? This could be written about in a chapter or article, or so. I am interested, now, in looking at eighteenth-century maps and aligning them with novels about women and their “entrance” to the “world,” often epistolary (i.e., Clarissa and Evelina), tying together and examining the woman’s marriage-plot alongside maps and globes as Foucauldian “technologies of the self” (which link I provided in the chat during today’s class and which is probably going to be the underlying/governing theory for my dissertation). This class is excellent for helping me to form a global and more “Atlantic” perspective than just the smaller English “world” of literature that I was previously, Cadillac-like, “parting with an oar.” 

Works Cited

Earle, Rebecca. “The Pleasures of Taxonomy: Casta Paintings, Classification, and Colonialism.” The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 73, no. 3, 2016, pp. 427-466.

MacMillan, Ken. “Centers and Peripheries in English Maps of America, 1590-1685.” Early American Cartographies, pp. 67-92. University of North Carolina Press, 2011. 

^[1] See Cynthia Wall’s seminal The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century in which she argues that not only did “things” proliferate from the seventeenth into the eighteenth century but also that shifting literary representations shifted the cultural perception. 

^[2] Side note about the term “world”: recently I read Rachael King’s Writing to the World: Letters and the Origins of Modern Print Genres, in which she argues that for eighteenth-century female novelists the term “world,” which frequently occurs in book-titles of this period, refers simply to “London.” This coincides with the usage of the term “abroad” (as in, to go abroad) meaning to go about town—not “abroad” in the worldly sense that we think of it today. Since the world was “smaller” at this time, the word “world” connoted a smaller “world.” In this way, traveling to another “world” or a “new” “world” was possible.