Sam Reed

Professor Li

ENGL 332

29 September 2023

World of Glass: Visions of Apocalypse in Andrew Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House”

Andrew Marvell’s 1651 “Upon Appleton House” has garnered a reputation among some critics as an example of the “queer early modern,” refusing normative economic and sexual orientations in its meanderings through the history and landscape of the Fairfax estate. But while Marvell’s liberties represent an obvious departure from traditional poetry, his overarching political goals remain unclear: for critics like Katie Kadue, Marvell’s refusal to adhere to the narrative standards of the period represents an effort to “sustain, rather than threaten, heterosexual norms” and traditional power (641). While its focus on Mary Fairfax, in particular — incapable of continuing the patrilineal Fairfax name — would seem to laud non-traditional forms of womanhood, Kadue views Mary’s role in preserving and “vitrifying” the world as another form of heteronormative labor. Marvell’s efforts to sustain things in the “meantime” before her marriage gloss over the troubling reality of Fairfax’s lineage, while reconfiguring Mary’s role in the strictly patriarchal function of preservation. For Kadue, this scene, captured in stanza 86, does not represent the apocalyptic end-times that other critics have speculated, but a “regular, secular phenomenon,” akin to the domestic labor of a housewife preserving foodstuffs (654). This perspective, however, neglects the clear religious and social meanings behind Mary’s vitrification of nature and the fact that — even prior to Mary’s labor — the landscape is already turning to glass. In ignoring these details, Kadue’s analysis misses a complication in Marvell’s political viewpoint that both acknowledges the realities of normative society and considers the possibilities for an alternative.

As Mary walks the grounds of the Fairfax estate, the landscape seems to resettle and subside into place: “Nature, in respect / To her, itself doth recollect” (657-658). This process culminates, in stanza 86, with the vitrification of Nature, the entire landscape apparently turning to glass. Maria “doth hush / The world”; “by her flames, in heaven tried, / Nature is wholly vitrified” (681-682, 687-688). This transformation, Kadue argues, is akin to the regular, household labor of food preservation; but the broader religious significances are difficult to ignore. As the notation for stanza 86 points out, two of St. John’s visions involve the vitrification of the seas. Others speculate that the final Judgment Day would involve nature turning to glass: “glass is the end of everything” (p. 239). Where vitrification may, as Kadue points out, represent a kind of preservative labor over the natural world, it is neither secular nor regular. Rather than confining Mary to the household work of food storage, the poem appears to see her role as transformative and apocalyptic. Mary, outside the patrilineal line and the structure of patriarchal life, embodies the possibilities for both an intense, world-altering end-time, and — in the final stanzas of the poem — something entirely new, free from the sin and fallenness of humanity. Given the idyllic, Eden-like nature that Mary’s presence ultimately heralds — with the landscape of the Fairfax estate offering “Paradise’s only map” — Marvell’s ultimate meaning is unclear (768). The vitrification of nature and the new map of Eden use religious images as measures of Mary’s transformative existence: Mary’s opposition to traditional social roles offers the possibility for extreme reorganization, good or bad. As Kadue sees it, this tidying solidifies a uniquely conservative ideology — but Marvell’s religious invocations render his predictions ambiguous. In either case, it is not, as Kadue argues, simply a “regular, secular” process.

While Mary’s emergence appears to see the ultimate vitrification of nature, other complications arise out of the fact that natural objects throughout the poem already appear to be turning to glass. Even before Mary’s arrival, the river winding through the Fairfax estate is described as like “a crystal mirror slick; / Where all things gaze themselves, and doubt / If they be in it or without” (636-638). From above, the cows at pasture look like a “landskip drawn in looking-glass”: like tiny fleas in the meadows, Marvell’s play with size and scale sees a world turned upside-down (458). In both cases, Marvell’s fascination with glass instruments lauds their function to show, to magnify, and to render fixed — exactly as Mary’s vitrification later turns the entire landscape to glass. In this, Marvell seems to hint at the meaning of a vitrified nature: doubting whether “they be in it or without,” the world under Mary’s re-organization becomes increasingly critical and self-aware. While Mary’s presence — a counter-narrative to patrilineal necessity — offers a powerful catalyst for this transformation, nature is already moving in that direction. A world made of glass becomes a metaphor not for the preservation of social norms, but the transformation of society; whether that transformation is good or bad is not for Marvell to say, but by centering Mary, the poem appears to suggest the possibility of a world outside traditional heteronormative roles.

Andrew Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House” is neither queer text nor conservative repudiation: Marvell’s political orientation appears to fall somewhere in the middle. Cautioning a possible apocalypse at the hands of Mary Fairfax, Marvell provides obvious reservations; but the vitrification of nature, as an ongoing and progressive transformation, also presents the opportunity for self-reflection and correction. Whatever the case may be, Kadue’s descriptions of preservative labor do not adequately address the profound religious and social consequences of Mary’s role.

Works Cited

Kadue, Katie. “Sustaining fiction: Preserving patriarchy in Marvell’s upon Appleton House.” Studies in Philology, vol. 114, no. 3, 2017, pp. 641–661, https://doi.org/10.1353/sip.2017.0023.

Marvell, Andrew. Upon Appleton House. 1651, https://moodle.oxy.edu/pluginfile.php/1029005/mod_resource/content/1/Upon%20Appleton%20House.pdf.