>Last but not the least, Stallybrass calls attention to the gendered
>meanings of the term 'individual': "...it is precisely in this sense of the
>indivisibility of the sexes that the word 'individual' recurs throughout
>the seventeenth century, at the same time as the word is coming to be
>defined in the opposite sense of a separate element" (602).
>
> In _The English Dictionarie_ (1623), Henry cockerham defines
>"individual"
> as "not to be parted, as man and wife," but it is in Milton that
>this sense
> of individual as the indivisible relation between man and woman
>finds its
> apotheosis. When Eve flees from Adam, he says:
> to give thee being I lent
> Out of my side to thee, nearest my heart
> Substantial Life, to have thee by my side
> Henceforth an _individual_ solace dear. (IV. 483-486)
> (Stallybrass 602-3)
>
>This points to the crucial contradiction of the bourgeois ideology of
>individualism: while everybody is interpellated as 'individual' by this
>ideology, no woman is allowed to act as if she were an 'individual.' This
>paradox becomes the most apparent in the Right's war against women's right
>to abortion. In this sense, struggles over the meanings of the 'individual'
>have continued to the present.
Does Stallybrass mention the line of Lord Coke (the #1 opponent of Francis Bacon incidentally) that "husband and wife are one, and that one is the husband."? Many thanks for the precis of Stallybrass.
B.Tom Lehman wrote:
>
>Dear LBOers,
>
>Wasn't it one of the Bacons' who led a revolt in colonial America that sealed
>the fate of the Black slave and the American Indian---Bacon's Rebellion.
Shared *identity* of these two Bacons? (1) Francis (1561-1626) and (2) Nathaniel (1642 - 1676) Why not?
If this means something like "what in that which made each of them unique individuals is, nonetheless, the same" I think it's fun that the first recorded instance of this concept is from Francis Bacon. So he at least couldn't object at an attempt to guess what (1) Francis Bacon would have done if confronted with (2) Nathaniel Bacon. Despite the intervening civil war generation (& Milton). Is this, Carrol, an OK use of "generation" talk?
The identity of the 2 Bacons:
They shared at least one crucial part of their *identities* - they belonged
to, and were trained as common lawyers at, the same Inn of Court. Gray's
Inn. This mattered. A rough translation for the US: imagine that all
appellate and important trial practice (lawyers and judges alike) were
carried on only by lawyers from Stanford, Harvard and Columbia Law Schools
- oops, excuse me - there are four major Inns - and Yale. Even the order in
a list like that would then have been a source of good-natured [i.e. =
:->] dispute in much the same way. One difference would be that if a cousin
named Rehnquist were to turn up at Stanford Law School, while it would
matter (probably enough to make her life miserable),it would not matter
nearly as much as at any point from, say, 1580 to 1688 to be a (necessarily
male) Bacon at Gray's Inn. But this difference only increases the shared
*identity* of these 2 Bacons. And they certainly would have addressed each
other as "cousin."
The non-identity of the 2 Bacons:
It's clear from the life history of (1) Francis Bacon that if, say, in 1676 (2) Nathaniel Bacon had been captured by Berkeley the governor of Virginia (whose mother, I think, was niece of (1) Francis' uncle Henry Killigrew) and shipped back to London in order to be tried on the charge of having led the unauthorized slaughter of the Susquehannocks for which he had been declared a rebel, and if Francis had been able to go from his grave to Westminster - remember this began with Carrol's citing to Francis Bacon's Natural History of Life and Death - then (1) Francis Bacon would have led the prosecution of (2) Nathaniel Bacon, even authorized torture to discover concealed collaborators if he thought the rebellion were ongoing, and would have asked for and obtained the public execution of (2) Nathaniel Bacon, quite possibly carried out with preliminary torture ("drawing and quartering").
And quite properly so. No question, as you say, that Bacon's Rebellion was a fatal turning point for the Black slave and the American Indian. Punishing unauthorized slaughters severely may be the most you can hope for from the Bacons. (For example, the DNB says of Governor Berkeley "that for the zeal he displayed in checking the Indians (whom he treated with the utmost severity), he received the honour of knighthood.") But I'm inclined to argue that Francis Bacon's inheritance includes both Left Baconianism (ancestor of both Marx and Judith Butler, because among other things Francis Bacon was the ancestor of the enterprise of emancipatory critique of ideology) and Right Baconianism (ancestor of a lot of what's most vile in the 20th Century, seeing, say 1973 in Chile as an explainable development of 1776 in Philadelphia, and 1776 as an explainable development of 1676 in Virginia & "Bacon's Rebellion" & "Bacon's Laws").
John Mage