Eros and Objecthood in ‘Upon Appleton House’

This essay explores the peculiar erotics of the material world in Andrew Marvell’s country house poem. The discussion builds upon previous scholarship regarding the role of sexuality in this text in order to offer new directions for interpretation by combining recent approaches from queer theory with those of the new materialism. The essay finds that the trope of mirroring subtends the poem and that tracing the operations of reflection allows us to draw linkages between the personified landscape’s ruins of a highly sexualized nunnery and the humans who await personal contact and long for the pleasure of connection. The analysis here dwells particularly on the speaker’s role in relation to the physical environment and how that interrelationship might fuel the erotic excitement explored in ‘Upon Appleton House’. The poem’s culminating fantasy ultimately allows the speaker to lose his position as a subject and instead feel what it is like to be an object—not just an object of desire but a material object. To better understand the speaker’s experience of desire in the absence of another subject, the essay draws our attention to his desire to take on the qualities of the natural environment, which is described in terms of the mirror. I ultimately argue that the speaker’s desire to be rendered an object relies on the notion that estrangement offers a potent experience that heightens erotic pleasure.