Embodied: Victorian Literature and the Senses (review)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Embodied: Victorian Literature and the Senses
William Cohen's luminous new book recuperates a Victorian conversation on the body that complicates our easy dismissal—or embrace—of Victorians as simply enlightenment humanists invested in a mind-body division. Cohen rightly points out that another strand of the Enlightenment discussion was an intense interest in embodied experience. In this, he joins the rising tide of works on the body and perception during the period, beginning with, but not limited to, Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer, James Krasner's The Entangled Eye, and Nancy Armstrong's Fiction in the Age of Photography.1
Cohen observes that "[i]n proposing the body as the source and location of human essence, literary writers established a mode of representation—typified by characterological roundness, depth and interiority—that has long been regarded as the hallmark of high Victorian literary accomplishment," but, he points out, such "psychological depth is produced . . . through the depiction of physical substance, interaction and incorporation" (pp. xi-xii). This embodiment of consciousness, Cohen shows, has a complex relationship to humanism. The authors he examines explored this theme by "grappling tenaciously with the material existence of the human body" (p. xii): the Brontes, Dickens, Collins, Trollope, Hardy, and Hopkins. The theorists who inform his exploration are Bataille, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, and Guattari. J. Hillis Miller's foundational reading of Hopkins and Stephen Connor on skin are major critical influences, and through Connor, Michel Serres haunts these pages.2 Likewise, Foucault is, as he must be, a point of departure, although, Cohen argues, his own focus on interiority and perception is intended to "circumvent" the tendency to read entirely through the lens of discipline and surveillance that has marked the field for decades now (p. 25). [End Page 146]
The first chapter, on the subject, tours the Victorian thinking and writing landscape to set up its topic: namely, how the perceiver and the perceived come into contact or interpenetrate each other through bodily contact. Although Cohen is not, as he avows, interested in tracing direct lines of influence from scientists to literary authors, he does recur to a moment in Herbert Spencer, in which Spencer muses about the evolutionary development of the eyes not as an interior surface or conduit between outer and inner, as they are so often read, but as a specialized form of surface or skin. Readers of Serres will see the influence of Serres's own tendency to repeatedly describe skin as "ocellated"—covered with eyes—in Cohen's fascination with Spencer's observation. Despite Cohen's stated primary interest in touch, taste, and smell, this insight—one that draws vision back into the orbit of touch—focuses not only the later chapter on skin, but also this initial one on the subject and the terminal one on Hopkins.
"Self," the second chapter, offers a reading of Dickens and (Charlotte) Bronte in terms of their portrayal of the self as a material entity, enclosed or contained in a body as a vessel. The trope of the keyhole, especially in Dickens, is used to great effect here; Dickens recurs to the keyhole as a metaphor for the eye's contact with the world through the body, and with characters' contact through keyholes as interpenetration. The theme of interpenetration continues through Cohen's reading of Bronte's The Professor and its elaboration of masochistic power relations. In Cohen's reading, the senses "open the subject to the world" (p. 64) and, in turn, the body closes around sensation, transforming the outer into the inner self. The following chapter, "Skin and Sensation," is quite short, the one most obviously (and avowedly) indebted to Connor. Cohen traces the use of dirt and color (and dirt as racial color) in Trollope, in relation to the work of Didier Anzieu and Franz Fanon. Readers of Trollope will appreciate the bravura reading of "On the Banks of the Jordan," a piece of short fiction that has not received much attention.
Chapter 4, "Senses," focuses on a reading...
