Abstract
In his famous ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance (1873), Walter Pater evokes an intricate network, a ‘web’ of endlessly extending material threads, to describe the intimate, physiological rapport that exists between subjects and objects. Departing from Cartesian dualism, the passage suggests that the shared materiality — ‘phosphorus and lime and delicate fibres’ — of the human body and inanimate matter makes it impossible to define with any precision where the self ends and the material world begins. Pater’s study frequently resolves the subject-object relationship into a universal aesthetic impressionism. However, even in instances in which he asserts the autonomy of the perceiving subject (‘[e]very one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation’), the subject remains so thoroughly permeated by the sensory experience of the material world that his or her whole being is determined by it: ‘It is with this movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off — that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves.’2 The deliberate vagueness of phrase in Pater’s ‘Conclusion’ emphasizes the ambiguous positions of subject (as possessing agency) and object (as lacking in agency). In this excerpt, Pater’s syntax transforms the human self into the passive object of the sentence: ‘the elements of which we are composed’; reciprocally, the material forces that act upon the self exert an agency that seems to contradict their object status.
What is the whole physical life … but a combination of natural elements to which science gives their names? But those elements, phosphorus and lime and delicate fibres, are present not in the human body alone: we detect them in places most remote from it. Our physical life is a perpetual motion of them — the passage of the blood, the waste and repairing of the lenses of the eye, the modification of the tissues of the brain under every ray of light and sound — processes which science reduces to simpler and more elementary forces. Like the elements of which we are composed, the action of these forces extends beyond us: it rusts iron and ripens corn…. That clear, perpetual outline of face and limb is but an image of ours, under which we group them — a design in a web, the actual threads of which pass out beyond it.
— Walter Pater, The Renaissance1
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Notes
Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. Donald L. Hill (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 186–7.
See Lyn Pykett, ‘The Material Turn in Victorian Studies’, Literature Compass, 1 (2004), 1–5.
Asa Briggs, Victorian Things (London: Batsford, 1988), pp. 14, 12.
See Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990);
Andrew Miller, Novels behind Glass: Commodity, Culture, and Victorian Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin, 1993), p. 92.
Krista Lysack, Come Buy, Come Buy: Shopping and the Culture of Consumption in Victorian Women’s Writing (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008); Women & Things, 1750–1950, ed. Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009).
Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006);
John Plotz, Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008);
On agency, see Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998);
on animation, see Andrew Jones, Archaeological Theory and Scientific Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)
and Christopher Tilley ‘Objectiflcation’, in Handbook of Material Culture, ed. Christopher Tilley et al. (London: Sage, 2006), pp. 60–73.
Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 4.
Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, Things, Special Issue of Critical Inquiry, 28 (2001), 4.
Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Trance (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), pp. 68–9.
See also The Secret Life of Things, ed. Mark Blackwell (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell, 2007);
Cynthia Wall, The Prose of Things: Transformation of Description in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006);
Julie Park, The Self and It: Novel Objects in Eighteenth-Century Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 215.
On reversibility and intertwining, see Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968).
See Nicholas Dames, The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
On the body as anatomical exhibit, see A.W Bates, ‘Dr Kahn’s Museum: Obscene Anatomy in Victorian London’, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 99 (2006), 618–24 and ‘“Indecent and Demoralising Representations”: Public Anatomy Museums in Mid-Victorian England’, Medical History, 52 (2008), 1–22; on labouring bodies, see, for instance, Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1990); on body-snatching,
see Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987); on prostitution, see, for instance,
Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delights: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (London: Virago, 1992)
and Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004);
on colonial exploitation and ethnological shows, see Jane Goodall, Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin: Out of the Natural Order (New York: Routledge, 2002)
and Sadiah Qureshi, Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence E. Schehr (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), p. 225.
Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 73.
Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 10–11.
Joanna Sofaer, The Body as Material Culture: A Theoretical Osteoarchaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 84.
Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 1.
See Holly Furneaux, Queer Dickens: Erotics, Families, Masculinities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009);
William A. Cohen, Embodied: Victorian Literature and the Senses (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston, ‘Introduction: Posthuman Bodies’, in Posthuman Bodies, ed. Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 19.
See, for instance, Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999);
Chris Hables Gray, Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age (London: Routledge, 2001);
Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnological Revolution (London: Profile, 2003).
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© 2012 Katharina Boehm
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Boehm, K. (2012). Introduction: Bodies and Things. In: Boehm, K. (eds) Bodies and Things in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137283658_1
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