Sympathy for Vanity: The Rhetorical Afterlife in Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia
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This article investigates Browne’s strategic appropriation of literary vanity beneath his ostensible critique of posthumous preservation in Hydriotaphia, and it challengs the mainstream reading of the text, which has predominantly emphasized Browne’s engagement with the vanitas tradition and its grim warning about the fragility of human life. This article argues that Browne’s underlying intent is to achieve a rhetorical resurrection through his distinctive use of vanity—uncovering the hidden afterlives of the dead’s remains in an exuberance of artificial life, born from the lucrative merging of life and art, the highest aspiration of the early modern Baroque artist. Accordingly, this study illuminates local places in the text where Browne’s literary vanity transcends the conventional limits of vanitas. It explores how the author’s literary fancy and verbal wit, beyond their surface meaning, manifest themselves in his quixotic speculations on burial artifacts—the rhetorical stage which he fabricates, attesting to vanity’s unacknowledged utility.
Abstract
This article investigates Browne’s strategic appropriation of literary vanity beneath his ostensible critique of posthumous preservation in Hydriotaphia, and it challengs the mainstream reading of the text, which has predominantly emphasized Browne’s engagement with the vanitas tradition and its grim warning about the fragility of human life. This article argues that Browne’s underlying intent is to achieve a rhetorical resurrection through his distinctive use of vanity—uncovering the hidden afterlives of the dead’s remains in an exuberance of artificial life, born from the lucrative merging of life and art, the highest aspiration of the early modern Baroque artist. Accordingly, this study illuminates local places in the text where Browne’s literary vanity transcends the conventional limits of vanitas. It explores how the author’s literary fancy and verbal wit, beyond their surface meaning, manifest themselves in his quixotic speculations on burial artifacts—the rhetorical stage which he fabricates, attesting to vanity’s unacknowledged utility.