British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (review)

Alan Richardson's foray into the relationship between the "brain science" and literature of the Romantic period is a welcome contribution to the recent wave of writings on Romantic medicine and literature by the likes of Alan Bewell (Romanticism and Colonial Disease, 1999) and Roy Porter and George Rousseau (Gout: The Patrician Malady, 1998). Such works are helping to place a hitherto rather formalist school of literary-critical writing, connected as it has been with the likes of Derrida and De Man, in a much-needed cultural-historical context. An abstract, literary-theoretical notion of the body is now giving way, paradoxically, to a more medical-historical one. Andrew Bennett, in his Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (1999), has urged literary critics to allow a more "unhealthy" image of the period to emerge, rather than attempting to make the Romantics "respectable" by countering Victorian condemnations of the supposed physical and moral degradation of poets like Keats.

Richardson argues that British neuroscience in the Romantic period was, for a too-brief moment, revolutionary in all senses of the word. Preaching a materialist notion of the body that abandoned more dualistic concepts of the soul/mind, physicians and scientists like Erasmus Darwin, Gall, Spurzheim, Cabanis, and Bell laid down a broad, if unstable, set of precepts for a "neural Romanticism" that challenged more traditional and less politically threatening ideas. As did the notorious William Lawrence later, this collection of thinkers located the mind firmly in the brain, arguing for the ultimately material origin of thought. Biological rather than mechanical, an active creator of experience rather than a passive Lockean tabula rasa: such a potential reduction of the immortal soul to the matter of the body seemed, to the medical and literary establishment, a subversive, Frenchified, Jacobin assault upon the supposedly stable body politic of the stoutly conservative British.

As Richardson convincingly argues with evidence from contemporary debates, the stakes were indeed high: the new neural Romanticism threatened reassuring ideas of the "conscious and 'superintending' ego," the hierarchy of the soul/mind over the body, by showing how the mind was embedded in the body and itself partly the product of preconscious or unconscious instincts (p. 24). God himself could be seen as unnecessary to this more sophisticated, organic version of La Mettrie's homme machine. All the proponents of this neurological revolution except the more circumspect Charles Bell were savaged in the press as "materialists," with William Lawrence being forced to recant his position in order to save his career.

In addition to bringing a deft and illuminating touch to the medical history of the period, Richardson shows how this science was part of the broader culture by demonstrating how major literary figures of the Romantic period responded to this new definition of the body and its relationship to the environment beyond. In a series of convincing readings, he analyzes Coleridge, Wordsworth, Austen, and Keats to prove their (at least partial) enthusiasm for a set of revelations about the body that seemed of a piece with general Romantic ideas (a divided, instinctual subject; organicism; the creative mind; preconscious modes of being). Keats is most obviously indebted to a positive formulation of the brain as a subtly differentiated organ capable of processing internal and external experiences before the conscious mind can interpose itself. Austen, too, changes her style in Persuasion to enact a more embodied, "nervous" mind. Wordsworth's poetic subject, "creator and receiver both," is enabled by the active, creative brain of neural Romanticism; while Coleridge too, perhaps the figure most hostile to materialism, was swept away on the tide of this new unconscious in Kubla Khan. Or at least momentarily: for the sad irony is that the reaction to the French Revolution crushed the science too, at least in its more...