Hamlet, Hesperides, and the Discursivity of Cuteness

Using aesthetics alongside affect theory and queer philology, this chapter interrogates the ability of Shakespeare’s Hamlet(1604) and Robert Herrick’s Hesperides (1648) to endure and broaden the scope of what Sianne Ngai, Lori Merish, Dan-iel Harris, and others have theorized as the cute. Ngai, in Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (2012), explains the cute as a contemporary and commodity-driven category, an aes-thetic that discloses a “surprisingly wide spectrum of feelings, ranging from tenderness to aggression, that we harbor toward ostensively subordinate and unthreatening commodities” (1). To consider the cute, then, is to consider our documented fascina-tion with the private, the relations of subjects and objects, and the power dynamics between the appreciator and the appreci-ated, adorer and adored. Even so, I suggest we think otherwise. What if we think about the cute less as an aesthetic response to commodity, per se, than a discursivity? Cuteness is an aesthetic category that relies on a spectrum of appreciation, from disin-terested nonreaction (think, for example, of the inundation of “cute” things to respond to on websites like Buzzfeed or Reddit) to a heightened affective experience of an object or artwork, one more closely related to classic Kantian or Burkean experiences of beauty. But aesthetic experience demands a commodity-driven, consumptive closeness that Theodor W. Adorno finds goes beyond object relations to fuel our relationships to texts.