"Eternal Sunshine": Intertextuality as Environmental History in Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village

Abstract:This essay re-examines intertextuality in Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village, which foregrounds eighteenth-century anxieties about environmental depletion. On one hand, Goldsmith's allusion to Alexander Pope's Eloisa to Abelard reveals what might seem to be a fantasy, even in the later eighteenth century: namely, that one can escape environmental crises. On the other hand, when Goldsmith directs his readers to Joseph Addison's Cato, he identifies a work that exemplified environmental trauma in the eighteenth century. Cato describes how interlopers in North Africa encounter extreme weather that simultaneously operates as a surrogate for the resistance of "exotic" subjects and as a reminder that Europeans will never grasp their surroundings and therefore do not belong there, at least if they harbor the standard colonial attitudes that would efface the other. Goldsmith's allusion to this 1713 play, then, reinforces how environmental disasters triggered by Europeans get displaced abroad—and at home. At least for Goldsmith, though, allusions can point to cultural aporias that need to be resolved in order to address climate change.