THE THEME OF SIGNIFICATION IN MARVELL'S "UPON APPLETON HOUSE"
Abstract
This essay reads Upon Appleton House as an attempt to answer the question "What process of signification can assure fallen man that signifiers carry certain meaning?" It argues that the poem considers several inconclusive answers, each dependent on a particular perspective. To lay the foundations for the poem's first answer, Chapter One reconstructs the Pythagorean-Christian view that by employing God's cosmic design man can construct signifiers whose ultimate signified is God Himself. The second chapter argues that the poem's first nine stanzas revise the Italian architectural theory based on this Pythagorean semiotic; in order to take into account man's fallen nature, these stanzas establish the operation of God's grace as the guarantee of the significance of the exemplary Appleton House. Chapter Three contends that in the meadows episode Marvell examines what happens to signification when man is devoid of grace and when the stasis implied by his own architectural semiotic gives way to a world of constant transformation; under these conditions, human language may be an instrument of extreme power--able to generate metaphors and fictions, and even to re-make the world--but because it is also subject to paradox, its significance cannot be certain. The fourth chapter holds that when the persona retreats into the woods in order to read in Nature's book, he discovers an original language. But his interpretations of the texts of Nature are suspect because he fails to escape his egocentrism. Consequently, when he emerges from the woods he is entangled in the riverside paradox of within and without. The fifth chapter argues that because Maria has climbed a Platonic ladder of language whoe highest rung is heaven's dialect, she both "recollects" the speaker and Nature and restores a stasis to the estate that permits certainty of signification. But until Maria's marriage restores order to the larger world, man must oscillate between his hope for certainty of meaning and his recognition that it is attainable in the "Mean time."
Degree
Ph.D.
Subject Area
British and Irish literature
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