The Social Life of Fluids: Blood, Milk, and Water in the Victorian Novel (review)

If someone asked you how to characterize the most important issues in Victorian literature and culture, would the first word that springs to mind be “fluid”? Maybe not. Yet the subject of fluids turns out to be remarkably suggestive in relation to the Victorian novel and Victorian society: it refers to both a material form and a series of ideational figures, both an inherent property of human bodies and an occasion for social regulation and contests over authority among different groups. Jules Law’s important book The Social Life of Fluids: Blood, Milk, and Water in the Victorian Novel shows how the liquescent permeability of human bodies and the social world supplies opportunities at once generative of creative possibilities and restrictive of social practices and identities.

The imaginative utility of the subject of fluids is that it is itself so fluid: the term can refer to many different things, which are united by shared properties of changeability, continuity, and flow. Summarizing his argument in the introduction, Law writes, “Fluids were regarded as the most alienable aspect of an otherwise inalienable human body, and paradoxically, as the least rational element of an increasingly rationalized environment” (2). By this he means that the influx and outflow of fluids from the human body trouble the presumed equivalency between the body and any stable or coherent individual identity. Moreover, in a society that labored heroically to regulate both the physical and the cultural landscape—by embanking rivers and standardizing behaviors, by rationalizing geographical space and closely monitoring wayward desires and impulses—the inherently unstable flow of liquids in and around bodies threatened the success of such containment.

Law traces a historical trajectory across the second half of the nineteenth century, revealing the limits of both absolute bodily containment and unimpeded circulation. Novels and other forms of public discourse stage dialectical exchanges between ideas about the natural, sometimes biological, regulation of fluids and increasingly scientific, technological, or bureaucratic efforts to manage them. At the center of this contest are ideas about breast milk, which Law relates to a series of debates over gender, labor, value, and identity. He reads the claims of public health officials and social scientists about the advantages of breast milk over bottle feeding as telling indexes of cultural values, at once political and symbolic, and he reads the wet nurse as a figure of intense interest because she stands at the threshold between practices designated natural and artificial, and between social spaces designated private and public. With all its suggestive implications for conceptions of personhood, family, and class, breast milk spills out, as Law’s argument develops, to other, less intimate fluids that run through, between, and around human bodies, primarily blood and water.

In each of the book’s three sections, Law focuses largely on two novels. The first, on Charles Dickens, considers the shift from the household as locus of fluid regulation in Dombey and Son (1846–48) to the social space of the city in Our Mutual Friend (1864–65), where the sanitarian discourse of public health prevails. The second section, on George Eliot, also contrasts an early novel with a late one, charting the “blockages and detours” of fluids, especially rivers, in The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Daniel Deronda (1876) (17). The third section emphasizes milk and blood in two sensational fin-de-siècle novels, George Moore’s Esther Waters (1894) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). In every case, placing limits on the circulation of fluids promises to control and contain both individual and collective bodies; and in every case, such a fantasy of limitation is doomed by the leaky nature of fluids to fail. In other words, as Law writes, there is a “paradox of fluids: that a medium through which human agency is extended is at the same time a medium through which it is neutralized” (145).

The complexity...