Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life (review)

What is filth? How is it experienced? How is it imagined? What is its significance? Is its meaning transhistorical and transcultural? Or is it primarily discursive and historically contingent? Is filth to be categorically dismissed as polluting, or does it have some redeeming value? Why is it, for many, at once, a source of repulsion and attraction? These are some of the vexed questions ambitiously addressed in this edited volume. In his lucid introduction, which splendidly details both the referential and figural use of filth, William A. Cohen underscores the imbrication of filth's history with that of human civilization itself, claiming that filth "is an enduring—perhaps foundational—feature of human existence" (viii). But despite the apparent essentialist or universalist bent of this statement, Cohen, along with many of his fellow contributors, display more of a nominalist understanding of filth. This approach is best evidenced by their attention to the singularity of filth in its late-nineteen-century European manifestation. What is particularly striking about these collected essays is their profoundly interdisciplinary and comparative outlooks. The reader learns quickly that to do justice to filth—to its complexity as a cultural site where "the human body, social hierarchy, psychological subjectivity, and material objects" are said to intersect (viii)—he or she needs to become a comparatist, drawing from an array of interpretative approaches (phenomenological, psychoanalytic, Foucauldian, Marxist, new historicist).

The volume is divided into four parts, loosely organized by chronological order, with a focus on Paris and London as key centers of modern European culture. The first section, "Fundamentals of Filth," begins with an essay by Christopher Hamlin, who contextualizes the nineteenth-century understanding of filth and sheds new light on the Victorian debate over cremation or burial by looking at historical examples for the treatment, management, and disposal of corpses (bodies that, when stripped of their souls, become filthy). David Trotter's article shifts away from the topic of exposure to decay to that of disgust. Drawing judiciously from Heideggerian phenomenology, Trotter considers the cultural specificity of the olfactory experience as a source of Angst—as "a disintegrative and agonistic principle" (38)—in George Eliot's Felix Holt (1866) and Charles Dickens' Bleak House (1852–53). In the second section, "Sanitation and the City," David L. Pike explores how national attitudes toward the sewer affected the topographical organization of urban waste. Along the same lines, Pamela K. Gilbert examines the ways Dicken's Our Mutual Friend maps the interrelationship between the control of water circulation and purity in London and the control of individual bodies and selves. In his comparison of the Great Stinks of London and Paris (the cities' responses to the nauseating stench emanating from the Thames in 1858 and the Seine in 1880), David S. Barnes reiterates Trotters' call to historicize the experience of disgust. More than a physiological, transcultural emotion (that is, the onlooker's affective, visceral reaction to filth), the experience of, and, more importantly, the response to filth, argues Barnes, reflects or, at the very least, is mediated by a national—and thus historically contingent—attitude toward the relation between odor and waste. The third section, "Polluting the Bourgeois," addresses the central role of filth in the ideological construction of middle-class national identities through an investigation of cultural products. Eileen Cleere investigates how sanitary science made its way into aesthetic discourse and the Victorian home. If the Romantic aesthetics of the grotesque and the sublime seems to have been displaced by a Victorian ethico-aesthetics of cleanness, this displacement also brought about a kind of nostalgia for dirt. Joseph Bristow takes up this question in his reading of George du Maurier's novel Trilby (1894) and its ambivalent idealization of Paris's filthy quartier latin of 1856–57. Neil Blackadder, for his part, discusses Alfred Jarry's play Ubu Roi (1896), which translates resistance to Parisian bourgeois aesthetics at the level of performance—through its scandalizing and disruptive use of the dirty word merdre. In a...