Poetry Wars. Colin Wells

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СКАЧАТЬ discourse of Whig ideology, representing colonial resistance as a defense against tyranny and thus, paradoxically, a “support of our laws.” At the same time, in contrast to much anti–Townshend Act literature, which treated the issue of taxation indirectly (by way of abstract or legal language, such as “injustice” or “arbitrary laws”), Dickinson does not shy away from the economic dimension of the controversy, directly referencing “Purses,” “Money,” and the right of property in the refrain, and openly praising America’s colonial forefathers for pursuing their own economic self-interest so that their “Children can gather the Fruits of [their] Pain.” By this same logic, the song goes on to say, to give up one’s profits to tax collectors is tantamount to surrendering one’s birthright: “Their generous Bosoms all Dangers despis’d, / So highly, so wisely, their BIRTHRIGHTS they priz’d; / We’ll keep what they gave, we will piously keep, / Nor frustrate their Toils on the Land or the Deep.”³⁹

      While the success of the song may attest to Dickinson’s skill in drawing the economic issues of the Townshend Acts into the broader ideology of liberty, this same tactic would leave the song vulnerable to a satiric counterattack charging that the discourse of liberty, when applied to the Townshend duties, amounted to merely a pretense for individual self-interest. This is the satiric point of “A Parody of a Well-Known Liberty Song,” which appeared a few weeks later, recasting those whom Dickinson deemed brave defenders of liberty as an enraged mob of scoundrels who stand for nothing but a willingness to take what they can from their moral and social betters:

      Come shake your dull Noddles, ye Pumpkins and bawl,

      And own that you’re mad at fair Liberty’s Call;

      No scandalous Conduct can add to your Shame,

      Condemn’d to Dishonor. Inherit the Fame —

      In Folly you’re born, and in Folly you’ll live,

      To Madness still ready,

      And Stupidly steady,

      Not as Men, but as Monkies [sic], the Tokens you give.

      The sheer number of distinct attacks, both in this passage and throughout the “Parody,” is staggering: the Sons of Liberty are lowly, envious, mad, and unscrupulous; in the verses to follow, they are described as “vile Rascalls” willing to steal whatever “Chattels and Goods” they can get their hands on, and as knaves who justify such theft by railing against the “insolent Rich.” Though the determination by the leaders of the resistance is, on the one hand, dismissed as a sort of ideological stupor (as in the phrase “Stupidly steady”), more often it is unmasked as a sham, an excuse for “Reaping what other men sow.”⁴⁰ It is this latter critique that will prove particularly significant not only within the “Liberty Song” exchange but also within the larger history of literary warfare in the Revolution and after. The charge that the Sons of Liberty amounted to a pack of thieves directly countered the main argument of Dickinson’s original “Liberty Song,” that the new taxes themselves amounted to a form of theft. Thus did the dynamic of this exchange anticipate one of the crucial conventions of political verse more broadly—to transform or negate the ideological content of an opposing work of political verse by circumscribing it within a new ideological narrative.

      Beyond the arguments advanced, moreover, the “Parody” accomplishes its counterdiscursive strategy through its form, as a rival song. For notwithstanding its title, the song is not strictly a parody: it imitates the poetic and musical form of “The Liberty Song” but not its voice or speaker. Its ideological power arises from its invocation of a rival chorus—the “we” who speak back to the “you” of the mob—which calls into being an unacknowledged segment of the public that disagrees with the original song’s assertion of united resistance to the Townshend Acts. From the perspective of the “Parody,” the public invoked by “The Liberty Song” is an unrepresentative segment of the British American public, and in making this claim, the “Parody” projects a fundamentally different political meaning onto the conflict as a whole. In place of the original dynamic, which pitted “the people” against a group of corrupt ministers and placemen, the implicit dynamic of the “Parody” pits two parties against each other, thus recasting Dickinson’s own song as a representation not of widespread popular protest but of mere factional rivalry.

      More remarkable still, the circumstances of the publication of the “Parody” reveal additional layers of ideological import. For the song appeared not, as one might expect, in a British or Loyalist newspaper but in the Boston Gazette, whose editors, Benjamin Edes and John Gill, would become leading advocates of the Patriot cause. In addition, the song appeared under the heading “Last Tuesday the following Song made its Appearance from a Garret at C-st-e W-----m [Castle William].” Referring to the military garrison on Castle Island in Boston Harbor, the introduction explicitly attributes the song to one or more of the British soldiers stationed there. Whether or not this suggestion was accurate, in casting the “Parody” in this way, Edes and Gill transformed the song’s meaning once again, turning the throng of voices ostensibly undisturbed by the Townshend duties into a small cadre of occupying soldiers. In this new context, the song’s treatment of the Sons of Liberty appears as an example of British condescension toward colonial Americans. (This insinuation may have struck a nerve among the soldiers in the garrison, because in the same issue of the Gazette in which the song appears, one Henry Hulton wrote to the editors from Castle William, formally disavowing authorship of the song.)⁴¹ Thus, even as the parody’s own lyrics project the dynamic of the conflict as one of opposing parties within the colonies, the context surrounding its publication in the Gazette undercuts this claim and reasserts a version of the original binary opposition projected by “The Liberty Song,” with “the people” on one side and the occupying army on the other.

      Perhaps inspired by the subtlety of this maneuver to negate the ideological force of the “Parody,” another song, “The Parody Parodized,” appeared in the Gazette the following week. As with the “Parody,” the “Parody Parodized” took aim at the rival chorus projected by its immediate precursor, portraying this chorus as an insignificant “Tory” minority: “COME swallow your Bumpers, ye Tories! and roar, / That the sons of fair FREEDOM are hamper’d once more.” Against this sentiment, not surprisingly, the “sons of fair FREEDOM” repeat many of the assertions of Dickinson’s original—that their spirits will not be hampered by “Cut-throats” or “Oppressors” and that they will gladly risk their lives to defend their liberty. The function of “The Parody Parodized” is to wrest from its predecessor any claim to represent the voice of the people, and then to assert the same claim through the performance of the song: “Then join hand in hand, brave AMERICANS all, / To be free, is to live; to be slaves is to fall; / … / … / … / In Freedom we’re born, and, like SONS of the brave, /Will never surrender, /But swear to defend her, / And scorn to survive, if unable to save.”⁴²

      Though “The Liberty Song” was probably the most popular example of literary resistance to the Townshend Acts, it was far from the only one. Another well-known poem of protest—composed, coincidentally, by John Dickinson’s cousin by marriage, Hannah Griffits—was “The Female Patriots,” which is remembered today as one of relatively few works of political verse published by a woman during the entire Revolutionary period. And indeed, its unique contribution to the resistance movement originates from its character as a self-consciously gendered poem. First and foremost, “The Female Patriots” insists that women play a vital role in the movement because their otherwise limited power over domestic matters gives them considerable input over whether or not to support a boycott against tea, sugar, or imported fabrics. Beyond this, as the title suggests, the poem is important for its introduction into pre-Revolutionary culture another symbolic embodiment of the vox populi ideal—the female patriot, who speaks back not only to the administration in Britain but also to American men whose own commitment to the boycott may be less than resolute. This latter function is СКАЧАТЬ