Fables of the Bees: Species as an Intercultural Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Scientific and Literary Texts. L'Esprit Créateur. Volume 46, Number 2, Summer 2006 . Anne Milne

8/13/2019 Fables of the Bees: Species as an Intercultural Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Scientific and Literary Texts. L'Espri

1/10

Fables of the Bees: Species as an Intercultural Discourse in Eighteenth-Cent

Scientific and Literary Texts

Anne Milne

L'Esprit Crateur, Volume 46, Number 2, Summer 2006, pp. 33-41 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/esp.2006.0023

For additional information about this article

Access provided by Humboldt State University (25 Dec 2013 21:45 GMT)

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/esp/summary/v046/46.2milne.html
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/esp/summary/v046/46.2milne.htmlhttp://muse.jhu.edu/journals/esp/summary/v046/46.2milne.html


2/10

Fables of the Bees: Species as an

Intercultural Discourse in

Eighteenth-Century Scientific and Literary Texts

Anne Milne

MUCH OF THE ANALYSIS OF THE CULTURAL meaning of thebee in early-modern England has focused on the seventeenth-cen-tury political associations and cross-associations between bees, thecommonwealth, and the monarchy. As Timothy Raynor has thoroughly

demonstrated, for example, the complex cultural meanings of the bee reflectnot only this economic and political balance but, as a page in the Book ofNature, the bee contains undeniable evidence of Gods laws.1 WhileRaynor also documents an instability in bee-meaning to illuminate the viableeconomic promise beekeeping held in the seventeenth century and its sym-bolic importance as a potential means of increasing indigenous wealth pro-duction at a time in which the English economy needed bolstering, little atten-tion has been paid to the construction of a bee subjectivity as a result of such

ideological positions. The promise of bee-generated wealth in the seventeenthcentury manifested itself technologically with a flurry of new bee box inven-tions designed to maximize honey production for the British climate andreduce the necessity of destroying swarms. If science and spectatorship con-struct reality, it is possible to argue that scientific technologies such as themicroscope and multi-storied and glass-fronted bee boxes collapse the rela-tionship between scientific observation and communication into an assump-tion that observable behavior constitutes a form of dialogue between the

observer and the observed. Indeed, as I have noted elsewhere, Joseph Warder,in his The True Amazons: or, The Monarchy of Bees (1713), claims that he haswith a Studious Delight, for nearly Twenty Years past, conversd with theseInnocent Creatures the Bees and with this assertion naturalizes both domes-tication and the right of humans to mediate and control bee business.2

Cristopher Hollingsworth has aptly demonstrated that the ability to view acomplete insect community (such as a hive) from above or from a distancepermits both the illusion that we know or understand the whole and that, fromthis illusory observation, we can create a metaphor, a blending or a shared pat-tern between human and animal organization.3 Donna J. Haraway goes furtherto say that the subject-in-technoscience undergoes a material refiguration [inwhich] the natural kind becomes a brand or trademark, and that once nature

LEsprit Crateur, Vol. 46, No. 2 (2006), pp. 3341


3/10

begins to produce or embody labour, the human legally [becomes] naturesauthor not just its inhabitant, owner, steward.4 Human-generated technolo-

gies intended to contain bees and the resulting and observable bee-behaviorscreate an architectural stage upon which any cultural representation of beesthat is played out is one which has already been human-constructed and con-trolled; as a result, any truth generated from it has to be suspect.

Still, the bee-subject proves resilient. In one example Raynor describeshow the Wren-Wilkins storied hive (1655) fails because the two scholars mis-understood the axiom that bees work downwards, due to an exaggerated esti-mate of apian rationality (Raynor 105). Believing that the bees would real-ize they were in a three-storey hive, and would start working at the top level,

they enabled external entry only at the lowest level. Access to the upper levelswas internal only, and this access was quickly blocked up by combs as the beesworked only in the lowest level of the hive. As Raynor explains it, the beesfailed to conceive of the hive as a larger structure. One of the questions, then,that Id like to raise here is: can, should and how do we recognize an animalresponse such as this one as evidence of animal subjecthood, instead of (appar-ently) dismissing it as an overexuberant human error which was subsequentlyand, I suppose, finally resolved in the mid-nineteenth century with

Langstroths moveable-frame beehive? Could the bee behavior played out inthe Wren-Wilkins hive be read and acted upon in any other way, with an eyeperhaps to recognizing the subjecthood of the bees and the possible rights thataccompany such a recognition? And why should we? Why does it matter?

This avid seventeenth-century interest in the economic viability of bee-keeping as a British industry was not just randomly generated but reflected amajor change in the human behavior and habits of the times; that is, the appar-ent need for an intensified bee industry reflected the enormous increase in the

consumption of and desire for sweets. Ultimately, honey and the bees were thelosers in this cultural transformation of British taste. But the shift in the mean-ing of the bee, the increasing association of the bee with industry, is related tothe ascendancy of sugar in several important ways.

Bees in production in Britain offered a sanitized model representation thatcould visually substitute and/or stand in for the (mostly) invisible reality ofBritish West Indies sugar production and its dependence on human slavery.The work of producing sweetness and satisfying what was increasingly man-ifesting itself as Britains sweet tooth (something suddenly integral to theBritish character) could be symbolically contained by the perfection of thehoney-bee production model despite the fact that the vast desire for sweetnessafter the seventeenth century was fueled by sugar.5 Furthermore, the model of

34 SUMMER 2006

LESPRIT CRATEUR


4/10

the beehive as a British-based hive of activity supported and promoted severalof the subgoals of British West Indies sugar production: the plantation system

secured overseas markets for finished British goods and helped to sustainBritish marine activities which, in turn, bolstered British nationalism. Theincreasing prominence of sweetness and the relationship between sweetnessand industry was quickly reflected in the popular culture.

In this article, I would like to look at the representation of bees in a sampleof late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century fables of the bees by Jean de LaFontaine, John Gay, and Bernard Mandeville. All three fables conceive thebee within this sugary paradigm, subjecting the bee moreover to a new wayof meaning that streamlines its former broadly idealized meaning that encom-

passed even the divine into a narrower way of standing for an emerging indus-trial imperative.

Because I am interested in the bee subject, I have decided to focus on thespeaking bee and what the bees say in my three fables. Literary genres andforms are also technologies capable of imposing conceptual and ideological lim-itations on bee subjectivity. Dialogue, for example, is a method of creating aspeaking bee who reflects a human-imagined bee subjectivity. The bee productthat is engendered through human language usurps or overdetermines any actual

beeness or bee subjectivity existing separate from human consciousness. Thismatters within a human-dominated natural world, and I suggest that there arequite remarkable implications that result. Putting words into beesmouths in theseventeenth and eighteenth centuries (as well as before and after) generatesfables of the bees which bear a relationship to current environmental concernsabout bee depopulation, global warming, failure to pollinate crops leading tofood shortages, and an increased reliance upon biotech foods. Read from such aperspective, these fables recount more tellingly the perils of the bees.

Bees (including honeybees) are important natural pollinators currentlyresponsible for pollinating about 30% of the crops grown in the U.S. Since1991, about 70% of wild honeybees and about 50% of cultivated honeybeeshave disappeared. (Though cultivated bees can be replaced with new colonies,there is apparently a shortage of supply.) The causes of these disappearancesare complex, but they are mostly due to the pandemic spread of the trachealmite and the varroa mite as well as to inadvertent poisoning with pesticidesand habitat destruction.6 Further, Gary Paul Nabhan reminds us that honey-bees have inhabited North America for approximately only 400 years, thusqualifying as a classic example of a colonizer [] an exotic invader on a tra-jectory of ecological conquest (Buchmann and Nabhan 170). This naturalhistory underlines a relationship between bees and colonialism that expands

VOL. 46, NO. 2 35

ANNE MILNE


5/10

beyond the idea that bees merely mask the sordid business of sugar produc-tion. Industrialization itself is implicated as a practice that inherently, even

naturally, includes or requires colonization. Our inability or unwillingness toread stresses on the environment as texts or as statements, assertions, speechacts, even as we simultaneously invest great effort into reading the meaningsof and meaning into other kinds of natural signs, is itself an ironic and dis-turbing sign of the illusory human relationship to authority and control. Toread the natural order of the beehive into an axiom for human structuralideals is a good example of this irony.

In order to understand this complex observation more clearly and morespecifically in its relationship to bees, I will document ways in which the

space between bees and humans is confidently and unselfconsciously medi-ated by humans and how that mediation always circumscribes beenesswithin a human-defined paradigmin the eighteenth century, for example, asan emblem of industry. In this way, paradigms of fixed class positions are rep-resented as natural or based in nature or exemplified by nature, while otherobservations that can be made about beesconcerning gender, for instancecan be conveniently ignored. Dror Wahrmans enlightening work on the shiftin the human conception of the Queen Bee throughout the eighteenth century

from monarch to mother keenly reveals a cultural anxiety about womensplace in the social hierarchy. Wahrman points out some of the sophisticatedstrategies writers used to quash the potential for subversive gender norms. Forexample, Wahrman cites Robert Maxwell, the author of The Practical Bee-Masterwho doubted even the scientific evidence that the head bee was femaleand accused Joseph Warder of making her so in order to flatter Queen Anne.7

None of the three fables I will examine here confronts the fact of femalesupremacy in the social organization of the hive. Thomas Fletcher Royds

notes that this gender issue had been a problem since the seventeenth centurywhen the head-bee or king bee was discovered to be female.8 A numberof writers pointedly refused to acknowledge that this perfect societal modelplaced a female at the head of things, women in a central position of work,and men at the bottom of the hierarchy. Writers, including La Fontaine, Gay,and especially Mandeville, happily embraced the notions of hierarchy andindustry apparently represented perfectly by the beehive, but they neglectedto analyze this hierarchy along gender lines. The speaking bee in these poemsis almost always a male bee. Females scarcely appear in the poems.

La Fontaine foregrounds class-based interests in The Drones and theBees by making the first line of his poem the epigrammatic A Workman byhis Work you always Know.9 Gay sarcastically fills the mouth of his not-to-

36 SUMMER 2006

LESPRIT CRATEUR


6/10

be-admired cunning Bee with misguided admiration for the popularly-reviled wasp and the drone who you must agree/ live with more elegance

than we.

10

And Mandevilles list of the bee trades at the beginning of TheGrumbling Hive damns willing wretches to scythes and spades.11

La Fontaine structures The Drones and the Bees in classic fable modethrough the use of two speaking subjects. The wasp-judge speaks first and dis-counts the witnesses testimony because it is based on faulty observation. It istoo general, he says (based on colour, which is the same for both drones andbees), instead of reflecting the available technologies of the times and themanly observational skills that go along with those technologies. Measuredagainst the rubric of an eighteenth-century CSI Beehive, the naked eye and

casual, ordinary observations (of the ordinary witnesses) are no longer validmeasures of truth and justice. This is not unlike Joseph Warders dismissal ofwomens folk knowledge in an embedded cautionary tale called The OldWomans Mistake About Her Bees which works towards naturalizing anindustrial norm (Milne 118). But as in all visual cultural practices which the-orize an idealized viewer, it is necessary to consider that the currently validwitness is constructed via the currently valid scientific apparatus and the ide-ologies that are part of that viewing situation. This is not unlike what Donna

Haraway describes as the modest witness, an early-modern subject positionthat displays modesty as a mantle of credibility. Contingent facts can thenemerge without the taint of transcendent truth and carry the power of remark-able authority (Haraway 121). In this case, La Fontaine ironically attacks themodern trend. Apparently, the whole judicial scenario constructs the necessityto pass judgment based on evidence. But, as La Fontaines plot demonstrates,judgment based on evidence is not always the most efficient and profitableway to arrive at a judgment, and we never actually achieve a judgment

because of the intervention of a second voice. As a fable, this second voice isrequired to provide the necessary ethical counterpoint.Typically, the fable begins with the rash, emotional, and incorrect perspec-

tive re-presented sensibly in the second part by another speaker. The secondvoice we hear in La Fontaines poem is that of the wise Bee who points outthat the decision-making process is taking too long and the honey (whose own-ership is the crux of the case) is spoiling. The wise Bee rejects evidentiary jus-tice in favour of good common sense (41), suggesting that a competition to seewho best can build and store the sweetest juice (35) is a better measure of jus-tice. Naturally, then, the drones are exposed as inferior, performing poorly astheyve done of yore (36), which is understandable though, since the artsbeyond their knowledge, quite beyond (37). But despite the subversive poten-

VOL. 46, NO. 2 37

ANNE MILNE


7/10

tial of his approach, La Fontaine fails to take into account the holistic perspec-tive and fails to imagine bees as essential to a larger biological community. The

human-centred anxiety about how best to represent drones in the light of biolog-ical evidence that places them lower in the bee hierarchy than female bees isemphasized too much. Industrial metaphors in the fable narrow their possibili-ties, explain away any need to understand their real complex role, and reify theminto less than what they are. Drones, then, become subject to their observed nat-ural role as under-resourced (stingless, unable to feed themselves, lacking pollenbaskets, wax glands, royal jelly) mating-machines who are driven out of the nestsat the beginning of winter to die. Their necessary social and biological functionwithin a bioregion (or biological community) is subsumed by a prerogative to

assert commodity ownership and champion hierarchy. The scenario played outin La Fontaines fable is completely unnatural and uncharacteristic of bee behav-ior (as, arguably, is the behavior of characters in most fables). The major truthderived is not that of a cooperative, socially-dependent ecosystem but of a socialhierarchy that emphasizes power relations and imperatives of ownership.

In The Degenerate Bees (1738), John Gay consciously locates the beefable within a human context by addressing the fable to Jonathan Swift andattaching a 36-line preface. Clearly, for Gay, the bees naturally decorate a

political allegory, and this itself is recognition of the powerful culturalpotency of fables of the bees as appropriated symbols of industry. But heapproaches the issues of justice and societal balance from a perspective dif-ferent than that of La Fontaine. By casting the majority of the bee populationin a negative light, he exposes the frailties of the followers of an unnaturalbee, a bee of cunning, not of parts (37) who displays none of the lauded beecharacteristics already discussed. Gays hive resembles nothing like the bio-logical hive. In this twisted version, the imperative of honey production is set

aside completely in favour of a wanton genius:Like gentlemen [] sport and play,No busness interrupts the day;Their hours to luxury they give,And nobly on their neighbours live. (63-66)

The bee of cunning silences almost all dissident voices by laughingthem to scorn (48). Highly influential, he sways the swarm [to] forg[e]t thecommon toil/ and share the gleanings of his spoil (55-56). As in LaFontaines poem, the second voice counters the opinion of the first boththrough the moral content he espouses and through the fabular placement ofhis speechthe tradition moral positionin the final lines of the poem. The

38 SUMMER 2006

LESPRIT CRATEUR


8/10

second voice in the poem advocates for the honour of the race (75), and heis scoffd and hissd (84) and ejected from the hive with a friend or two

(85). He is not silenced though and is indeed given the last word. Thus Gayrenaturalizes industry as the virtuous labour of the bee, connecting it to thehonour that raisd our sires to powr and fame (79).

At one level, Bernard Mandevilles The Grumbling Hive: Or, KnavesTurnd Honest (1705-24) pushes the possibility of reading bee subjectivityeven further into the margins. Mandeville establishes colonizing linguisticpower over the bees in the very first lines of the poem, smoothly moving fromthe mere allegorical observation that These insects lived like Men and all/Our Actions they performd in small (13-14) to an assumption that because

humans (and specifically Englishmen) cannot comprehend bee language, it isunknown and that liberties with such language are a necessity.

Yet weve no Engines, Labourers,Ships, Castles, Arms, Artificers,Craft, Science, Shop or Instrument;But they had an Equivalent:Which, since their Language is unknownMust be calld, as we do our own. (19-24)

In Mandevilles poem, bees always appear not in the role of the subaltern butin an even more subjugated role, that of sub-nothing. The meaning of the beehere is utterly appropriated and attributed to human society. There is lessattention here to reading observable bee characteristics as applicable or evenenviable traits for humans to internalize. Mandeville does not suggest thathumans be like the bees. His interest in real bee behavior is limited to pro-moting a class society in which some Body must do the work while another

enjoys the fruits of his inferiors labour. The effect is to naturalize the non-human subjects inferiority and lack of agency.12 In Samuel Johnsons incisivecritique of Mandevilles Fables of the Bees, Johnson defends innocent pleas-ures and insists that Mandeville far too narrowly defines vice. As MalcolmJack has noted, Johnsons critique initiated a trend that would be followed byseveral other commentators, including F. B. Kaye and Martin Stafford.13 Anarrow conceptual frame either necessitates, creates or perpetuates an equallynarrow conceptualization of the bee within the poem, and the bee subject istraced into future representations and conceptualizations based on the tracesleft by previous human portrayals, whether they are accurate or not. Thatmeans that there is likely to be a gap between what the unmediated bee saysit is and how humans represent bee subjectivity.

VOL. 46, NO. 2 39

ANNE MILNE


9/10

On the other hand, Mandeville understands and exploits the taut balancewithin the hive in ways that mirror nature. In lines 169-76, for example, he

uses his understanding of the cooperation within a hive ecosystem to argue forhis paradise in Vice:

This was the States craft, that maintainedThe whole, of which each Part complaind:This, as in Musick Harmony,Made Jarrings in the the Main agree;Parties directly oppositeAssist each othr, as twere for Spight;And Temprance with Sobriety

Serve Drunkeness and Gluttony. (169-176)

Mandeville values balance in his undoing of it. The first instance in which weencounter the speaking bee in the poem, when One, that had got a PrincelyStore,/ By cheating Master, King, and Poor,/ Dared Cry aloud (216-18) andbegan (in a movement opposite to Gays Fable) a chorus of voices whichbring about a vast and sudden alteration (243), the hive paradise falls apartin an ironically accurate portrayal of the disintegration of natural systemswhen pieces of the whole are removed. Ironically, this is an accurate portrayal

of how natural systems fragment and disintegrate when parts are removed.It is also necessary to discuss Mandevilles poem as a fable in which the

form of the fable determines the notion of bee subjectivity and subjects bees toa framework of truth. On the one hand, fables are clearly fiction, often trivial-ized in the hierarchy of literary genres even as they are associated with didacticchildrens literature. Jean de La Fontaine recognized the power of teachingthrough the fable, suggesting that one learns best when one is least aware thatinstruction is taking place (La Fontaine iii). But it is crucial to ascertain what

fables teach us about animals and how that teaching is transferred into culturaland political practices. Why not do it with bees? And as the unasked question,the unsaid of a text or a discourse, always reveals an unspoken ethical position,is our silence on this subject saying that we just do not think that it matters whatwe say or what we teach about the bees? Yet as hundreds of didactic and non-didactic texts for children have taught us, this is not the case generally with howwe view representations of animals. We really do want to anthropomorphizeanimals, to underline a moral position in relation to them, and we do say thingsabout animals and about our relationships to and with them all the time. Dier-dre Dwen Pitts forcefully argues that the tendency to anthroporphize is psycho-logical and reflects a deeply-held cultural ambivalence towards animals: loveof the animal rising naturally from our traditional acceptance of him as an

40 SUMMER 2006

LESPRIT CRATEUR


10/10

extension of ourselves, hatred of the animal resulting from his traditional sym-bolic association with our instinctual or (pejoratively) bestial nature.14

As my own work becomes increasingly ecocritical, I find it imperative toraise questions about the meaning of the representation of nature in literaryand cultural products and to listen, as we have done in race, gender, andlabour studies, to what the bees and other sentient beings have to say for them-selves. Donna Haraway, for example, suggests that this is a practice thatabsolutely needs to take place in the contemporary context of bioengineering.We must, according to Haraway, take stock of the emerging new normal. Inthe twenty-first century, it is not only animals who have become metaphorsand technologies even as they continue to live sentient-animal lives; humans

also increasingly live these kinds of simultaneous identities (Haraway 83). Iffables of the bees establish or merely reflect a powerful metaphor that archi-tecturally shapes and contains our built environment, the silence of the natu-rally speaking bee signals that the full story has not yet been told.

McMaster University

Notes

1. Timothy Raylor, Samuel Hartlib and the Commonwealth of Bees, in Michael Leslie andTimothy Raylor, eds., Culture and Cultivation in Early Modern England: Writing and theLand(Leicester: Leicester U P, 1992), 106.

2. Anne Milne, Gender, Class and the Beehive: Mary Colliers The Womans Labour (1739)as Nature Poem, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 8.2 (Summer2001), 117.

3. Cristopher Hollingsworth, Poetics of the Hive: The Insect Metaphor in Literature (IowaCity: U of Iowa P, 2001), 6-7.

4. Donna J. Haraway, Modest_witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan_Meets_Onco-Mouse: Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997), 66, 90.

5. See Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New

York: Viking, 1985), 39.6. See, for example, Gary Paul Nabhan and Stephen Buchmann, The Forgotten Pollinators(Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1996).

7. Dror Wahrman, On Queen Bees and Being Queens: A Late-Eighteenth-Century CulturalRevolution?, in Colin Jones and Dror Wahrman, eds. The Age of Cultural Revolutions:Britain and France, 1750-1820 (Berkeley: U of California P, 2002), 259.

8. Thomas Fletcher Royds, The Beasts, Birds and Bees of Virgil (Oxford: Blackwell, 1914),60-61.

9. Jean de la Fontaine, Selected Fables (New York: Dover, 2000), 1.10. John Gay: Poetry and Prose, Vinton A. Dearing, ed., (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), 2:61-62.11. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, Philip Harth, ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin,

1970), 41-43.

12. Phillip Harth, Introduction, Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, 39.13. See Malcolm Jack, Mandeville, Johnson, Morality and Bees, in Charles W. A. Prior, ed.,Man-deville and Augustan Ideas: New Essays (Victoria: English Literary Studies, 2000), 85-96.

14. Dierdre Dwen Pitts, Discerning the Animal of a Thousand Faces, in Francelia Butler, ed.,Childrens Literature: The Great Excluded(Philadelphia: Temple U P, 1974), 3:170.

VOL. 46, NO. 2 41

ANNE MILNE

Documents

Fables of the Bees: Species as an Intercultural Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Scientific and Literary Texts. L'Esprit Créateur. Volume 46, Number 2, Summer 2006 . Anne Milne