Neurology and Literature, 1860-1920 (review)

The development signaled by the appearance of Neurology and Literature is a welcome one: the rediscovery of the often rebarbative work of "hard" Victorian neuroscience and the attempt to assess, through the century's literature, the cultural impact of this most rarified of the biological sciences. Each of the volume's eight essays tries to stay true to this mission, although inevitably each offers a slightly different version of what such a mission might look like in practice. The crux seems to be the title's innocuous "and," neurology and literature: what might this paratactic connection mean? At times, as in Laura Otis's opening piece "Howled out of the Country: Wilkie Collins and H. G. Wells Retry David Farrier," the title's "and" seems closer to an "in": Otis traces the after-effects of Farrier's 1881 trial for violation of the Cruelty to Animals Act in Collins's Heart and Science (1883) and Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896). Focusing on the question of vivisection—a fundamental aspect of neurological science throughout the nineteenth century—Otis narrates a cultural episode that can then be read into late-century fiction as the specific incitement for more general ethical concerns. The volume's second piece, Don LaCoss's "Our Lady of Darkness: Decadent Arts and the Magnetic Sleep of Magdeleine G.," despite narrating a similarly unfamiliar cultural episode, looks methodologically quite different; LaCoss's story of the somnambulist dancer Magdeleine G. investigates neurological ideas as a kind of early-twentieth-century aesthetic, rather than a context of aesthetic work. The lack of shared agreement about how to read the title's conjunction is as intriguing as it is troubling. Anne Stiles's introduction argues that "exchanges between literary and scientific writers during these six decades were not simply reflective—science influencing literature or vice versa—but rather dialogic or circular, a conversation where literary and scientific authors were mutually responsive to one another" (2). This notion of circular cultural exchanges is a capacious and wise one, and current interdisciplinary literary work has largely taken it as a model, but in practice scholars have to make decisions that spin this circle in particular ways, either by deciding on where to start (with an aesthetic act, or a scientific idea?) or how broadly to pitch their investigations (with precise histories, or general concepts?). Arguments like Stiles's, in other words, act as openings for further work rather than conclusive models. The opening she extends in this volume allows for a variety of different approaches, even if that variety suggests some implicit debates.

The differences are most salient in the matter of scale. For interdisciplinary scholars, this is where much will be at stake. The essays in Neurology and Literature tend toward the historically particular, such as Mark Micale's piece on the absence of trauma as a diagnostic category in the American Civil War, or specific to certain authors, such as Kristine Swenson's article on Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's Doctor Zay (1882) or Randall Knoper's piece on Oliver Wendell Holmes's A Mortal Antipathy (1885). These pieces illuminate cultural niches, such as Swenson's account of the woman-doctor novel in the 1880s and 1890s, that only close-up research can reveal. Knoper's essay in particular reveals the potential wealth of the narrow focus: his account of Holmes's oddly avant-garde conception of the relation between trauma and sexuality helps the reader better gauge the role neuroscience had to play in topics (such as sexual "inversion") that initially seem far from its purview. However, pieces by James Kennaway on "nervous music" in the later decades of the century and Jill Matus on "Victorian mind shock" arrange their parameters more widely, offering a looser and more suggestive approach to the subject matter at hand. Tastes will differ on which kind of essay succeeds best here: the specific, narrowly focused case studies or microhistories exemplified by Knoper's reading of Holmes, or...