The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English

7. 1825–1880: The Network of Nerves

7. 1825–1880 The Network of Nerves nicholas dames Is there an ur-scene of the Victorian depiction of consciousness? One could do worse than begin with one of the Victorian novel ’s most famously shocking moments: Walter Hartright, one of the central narrators of Wilkie Collins’s 1859–60 The Woman in White, meeting the eponymous apparition on a moonlit Hampstead Heath: I had now arrived at that particular point of my walk where four roads met—the road to Hampstead, along which I had returned, the road to Finchley, the road to West End, and the road back to London. I had mechanically turned in this latter direction, and was strolling along the lonely high-road—idly wondering, I remember, what the Cumberland young ladies would look like—when, in one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop by the touch of a hand laid lightly and suddenly on my shoulder from behind me. I turned on the instant, with my fingers tightening round the handle of my stick. There, in the middle of the broad bright high-road—there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven—stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments , her face bent in grave inquiry on mine, her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London, as I faced her. I was far too seriously startled by the suddenness with which this extraordinary apparition stood before me, in the dead of night and in that lonely place, to ask what she wanted. The strange woman spoke first. “Is that the road to London?” she said. (Collins 1973 [1860], 15) The scandal of the passage, at least as far as a history of the depiction of consciousness might go, is that it scarcely seems to evoke 215 216 nicholas dames consciousness at all—at least what conventionally goes under the umbrella of such a term. The complicated by-play of memory, desire, and inner negotiation, the standard basis for novelistic analysis since Richardson, at least, is replaced here by a series of sudden, and automatic, physical responses. Hartright’s blood is “brought to a stop” in a vivid, if now rather clichéd, image for the physiological response of fear; his hand (involuntarily?) clenches; his powers of speech desert him. All but visual acuity is removed, and what presents itself to Hartright’s vision is oddly still, as if his sensorium can only process a frozen image. Furthermore, the scene is literally momentary, dotted with reminders of a speed—“in one moment,” “on the instant”—that is closer to the speed of neural operations than to fully conscious deliberation. Lest we imagine this sudden seizure of fright and shock as an interruption of a fully self-aware process of thought, we are told that Hartright had been previously walking “mechanically ,” engaged in a half-formed reverie, his mind proceeding numbly on the rails of mental drift. In the terms of, say, Jane Austen’s alert and continually ratiocinative protagonists, Hartright is, we might say, not all there. Hartright himself seems to confirm it shortly thereafter: “Was I Walter Hartright? Was this the well-known, uneventful road, where holiday people strolled on Sundays? Had I really left, little more than an hour since, the quiet, decent, conventionally-domestic atmosphere of my mother ’s cottage?” (Collins 1973 [1860], 18). Neither is it anachronistic to point to the various psychic automatisms on display in this scene. In her acute and aesthetically conservative 1862 attack on the sensation novel, Margaret Oliphant mounted a full-scale close reading of this scene, and one other from The Woman in White much like it, to demonstrate its odd dependence on nerves rather than conscious thought. “It is a simple physical effect, if one may use such an expression,” Oliphant claims. “It is totally independent of character, and involves no particular issue, so far as can be foreseen at this point of the story . . . these two startling points of this story do not take their power from character, or from passion, or any intellectual or emotional influence. The effect is pure sensation, neither the network of nerves 217 more nor less” (Oliphant 1862, 572). “Pure” sensation, “simple” physicality: Oliphant is reaching for a language adequate to what seems like Collins’s discovery of a mental response reduced...