Lucy Cogan and Michelle O’Connell, eds, Life, Death and Consciousness in the Long Nineteenth Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) 280 pp. £119.99 Hb. ISBN: 9783021133626
The long nineteenth century was a time of vast scientific advances, when new knowledge of chemistry, anatomy and medicine developed at an unprecedented rate, changing the way people interpreted the world around them. With theories such as the vital principle, evolution, embryology and the emergence of resuscitation, even the nature of what it meant to be alive was being redefined. These ideas broke down the boundaries between ‘human and nonhuman, the healthy and pathological, the living and the dead’ (3). Even the boundary between self and other was questioned; the popular concept of sympathy that was further developed by Robert Whytt in 1765 demonstrated the potential not solely for each organ in the body to communicate between one another via the nervous system, but for the nervous systems of different people to communicate. The concept of nervous illness as something that could be transferred, contagious, between individuals via sympathy exemplifies the science of the period as one of a changing understanding of the self and its relationship with those around it. This is reflected in a literature that took these boundaries and pushed them to their limits. Essays in Life, Death and Consciousness in the Long Nineteenth Century ‘consider the cultural ripple effects of […] paradigm shifts in science and medicine on humanity’s understanding of being’ (19). The volume consists of an impressive selection of literary texts ranging from John Keats to Erasmus Darwin, and brings together an engaging collection of essays reflecting on these changing understandings in the literature of the period. With an introduction that succinctly yet effectively describes some of the scientific advances of the period, the collection is then divided into three sections: ‘The Limits of Life’, ‘Death’s Embrace’, and ‘The Veil of Consciousness’.
In the first section, essays under the heading of ‘The Limits of Life’ consider the changing relationship between the self and social order in the period. The new scientific advances of the time ‘emerged to colonise the shifting borders of existence’ (19). All three essays create a sense of the changing idea of what it meant to be alive in the long nineteenth century, and the increasing medicalisation of different aspects of life. They discuss the shifting boundaries of age, gender and ‘the disintegration of the conscious self’ inflicted by addiction (33). The first essay by Lucy Cogan explores depictions of drunkenness in the works of Maria Edgeworth and their intersections with issues of colonialism and the growing medicalisation of addiction, and alcoholism in particular, during the period. Cogan effectively demonstrates how Edgeworth took the ideas of Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia surrounding the deleterious effects of alcohol, and imbued them with a sense of moral judgement to explore the potential of alcoholism to degrade and destroy the self while the individual is still alive. In the second essay in this section, Jolene Zigarovich explores depictions of intersex bodies in the period, and demonstrates the changing attitudes of eighteenth and nineteenth-century societies toward intersex people, as new medical interest resulted in the search for ‘the existence of “true” hermaphrodites’ (55). Zigarovich explains how the intersex body disrupts ‘gender binary and heteronormative constructs which were essential to social functioning’ (83). Using Foucault’s argument that bodies were required by social and medical discourses to conform to gender norms, Zigarovich demonstrates how intersex people could prove ‘threatening and challenging’ to Victorian enforcements of the boundaries of identity. The section is concluded with Kieran Fitzpatrick’s ‘The Catheter Life’, which discusses aging masculinity and surgical innovation in urological medicine. Fitzpatrick identifies how the catheter became both a ‘palliative instrument and a symbol of their age and its meaning’ (93). He argues that the new scientific interest in the prostate ‘challenged constructions of maleness and masculinity’ and how new surgical techniques allowed for a reassertion of masculinity by saving the individual from the feminised ‘catheter life’ that was previously assumed to be almost a default condition in the older gentleman (19, 108).
The second part of the volume, ‘Death’s Embrace’, explores the ‘state of living death’ as a ‘potent site for imaginative exploration of the nature of life’ and how this is represented throughout the long nineteenth century in depictions of the corpse (21). In Matt Reznicek’s essay he utilises the theories of Hannah Arendt, and Giorgio Agamben’s concept of ‘bare life’, to explore the intersections between death and citizenship in the national tale, a genre he claims to be ‘monomaniacally focused on the body’ (121). It uses the dead body as a threat to enforce distinctions between citizen and non-citizen. The national tale, he says, ‘offers citizenship only to those bodies that are willing to surrender to the power of the sovereign’ (121). Following this, the section moves into a study of death and sympathy in Keats’s Isabella. In this essay Greta Colombani explores how Keats’s medical training informed his understanding of death and the body, and how his firsthand knowledge of death and corpses influenced his depictions of dying in Isabella. Utilising the multifaceted notion of sympathy, something that played a significant role in eighteenth-century medical thought, Keats uses sympathy and the corpse as a way to destroy the boundary between life and death, self and other. Throughout Isabella Keats explores the blurred lines of the self, in a manner which Colombani claims creates ‘a sympathetic bond between the two lovers that allows them to feel what the other feels’ (147). Through their sympathetic bond, Isabella becomes pale and closer to death, her life force depleted, due to the obliteration of these aforementioned boundaries. The final essay in this section is ‘Poe in Extremis’ by Robert Miles; Miles argues that Poe’s imagination was driven by ‘the quest to represent a material world in extremis’ (181). Miles positions the consideration of the consciousness that continues after the death of the body as a key aspect of the terror of Poe’s writing. His blurring of the boundaries between dead and inert, and alive and conscious, culminates in the ultimate terror of being buried alive.
Finally, in ‘The Veil of Consciousness’, essays explore the relationship between the mind and the spirit, and what is considered ‘consciousness’ in the long nineteenth century. Firstly it returns again to Keats, this time looking at his vanishing tubercular body and its reception following his death. Greta Perletti explores ‘the self that dissolves its borders’ and ‘becomes the instrument through which less finely-tuned organisms manage to perceive what cannot be grasped with ordinary senses’ (207). Keats is one of multiple vanishing bodies discussed in this essay, and is utilised as a figure to explore the popularity of the consumptive body in the period. Perletti argues that ‘the wasting body offered the spectacle of the gradual erosion of boundaries, turning the organism into an almost ethereal being’ (190). Following this is Dara Downey’s essay that explores the body of the female medium, and spiritualism at war with science. The female medium’s body is another example of a wasting body, being as it is consumed by the spirits she channels. With reference to The Tyranny of the Dark she claims that in this text, mediumship is depicted as ‘a form of indentured servitude’ that inhibits the female protagonist (228). She argues that ‘the medium’s body is offered up for public use’, linking this transcendence of the self to sexual perversion (229). Deborah Russel’s essay leads on well from Downey’s work, discussing female agency and the ways in which medical science in the long nineteenth century worked to rob women of this agency through the institution of the madhouse. The madhouse literature of the period reveals the manner in which the state was responsible for ‘the imprisonment of inconvenient women’ (238). Through examples such as Robinson’s Walsingham and Wollstonecraft’s Maria, she demonstrates how ‘the commercial institution of the madhouse services and profits from sexual inequality and exploitation’ (242). The final essay in the collection explores daydreaming and the boundaries of consciousness. In this, Athena Vrettos argues that through studies of wandering attention, we can see the development of theories of the conscious mind. The daydreamer’s expansive consciousness in Victorian literature is both a ‘dangerous distraction’ and ‘mental liberty in its purest form’ (264). It offered a dual role as both marking ‘the capacity and the incapacity for intellectual growth’, allowing for ‘freedom from mental coercion’ and also existed to challenge ‘the coherence of personal identity’ (271).
The collection brings together an array of scientific thought and literary analysis across the long nineteenth century. It effectively demonstrates the strength of literature and science studies as a way of exploring the breaking, challenging or reinforcing of boundaries that was possible in the period. It also demonstrates the diversity of literary thought in the period as a reaction to, or in communication with, scientific discovery. Through the range of essays, the collection illustrates the breadth of research that has come together to form the volume and gives an insightful overview of the huge changes that occurred over the period, and will prove a key point of interest to scholars of science and literature in the long nineteenth century.
Lucy Davies, Lancaster University
