Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature by Robert Mitchell (review)

Experimental Life presents a fascinating, fresh approach to intersections between the sciences and literature in the Romantic era and today. The book identifies three eras of “experimental vitalism”—a Romantic-era transnational European movement, a fin-de-siècle movement, and a third at present—and argues for the endurance of Romantic-era concepts in current vitalist thought. Romantic-period “experimental vitalism” was particularly concerned with entities that “confuse the line between life and death” (p. 3). This blurred line was explored through blurred disciplinary lines, as scientists and writers “produc[ed] new possibilities for individual and social life through new sensations and perceptions of life” (p. 3, emphasis original). Romantic-period writers adopted the concept of experimentation and applied it to “social and political platforms of life” (p. 13) in a rich variety of ways.

Chapters 2 and 3 analyze scientific ideas about suspended animation and literary ideas about modernity. In 1794, the surgeon John Hunter, defying the Aristotelian link between life and movement, coined the term “simple life”—to designate a body that had induced self-suspension in order to prevent death. Coleridge harnessed Hunter’s principles in his contributions to an essay on scrofula by his physician, James Gillman. Coleridge’s activity here, Mitchell suggests, signals his awakening from the torpor induced by his sense that Wordsworth had plagiarized his own poetic theory and prolonged by the use of laudanum. Coleridge’s despair over his continued addiction led him to question the power and freedom of the human will. Coleridge’s addiction-induced suspension embodies Romantic-period discourses on suspended animation, autonomy, and definitions of life.

Building on the theme of autonomy, Chapter 4 expounds the links between paranoia and nausea, what Mitchell designates “collapsurgence.” Romantic-period literary experimentation, he argues, produced modern literature’s advocacy of nausea as a means to alert readers to a system that controls them. Mitchell focuses on paranoid “chylopoietic” discourses, which critically linked ingestion, digestion, and thought; the system entered and became assimilated into the human body via foodstuffs. Most famously, Coleridge’s “Lecture on the Slave Trade” (1795) chastens Britons for consuming the blood of slaves; nausea alerts the reader to their complicity in the slave trade through their consumption of sugar.

Chapter 5, “The Media of Life,” cites Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire as the source of a new understanding of bodily transformation as the result of the media and milieu surrounding the body (“media” here designates the means for the possibility of life). Saint-Hilaire experimented by changing the milieux (varnish, wax, fluids) of poultry eggs and measuring the changes’ effect on fetal development. As a result, life as the movement of the subject came to be seen through different media and the emergence of new organisms as a response to changing milieux. Media were the means of physical, social, and political transformation.

Mitchell suggests extending the traditional categories of the sublime, beautiful, and picturesque, of pain and pleasure, “in order to consider other ways in which texts provide audiences with opportunities to experience transformative events” (p. 108). The final chapter, “Cryptogamia,” concerns plant love in Romantic poetry, identifying the “seduction of the human by vegetable vitality,” a stronger Romantic fascination with plants than love and respect for nature (pp. 191–92). By the late eighteenth century, scientists came to doubt that plant was a simpler version of animal life. Mitchell explains Romantic poets’ love of plants in terms of a delight in their uncanniness—an “apprenticeship, an active, patient practice of becoming a part of something foreign to oneself” (p. 208)—as they coil, bend, interpenetrate each other, and create milieux by providing shade. Romantic plant poetry emerges as a new institution among others, such as the royal botanic gardens and the expanding, lucrative markets for exotic vegetables.

Mitchell’s fascinating work of literary criticism and of history and philosophy of science confronts the political, ethical, and legal implications of its claims. The...