Falling into Matter: Problems of Embodiment in English Fiction from Defoe to Shelley by Elizabeth R. Napier (review)

Gendered bodies, nervous bodies, sensible bodies, mechanical bodies, and vital bodies, among many others, all vie for our scholarly attention. Falling into Matter argues for the “deep implicatedness of the body in the rising genre of the novel” and seeks to show how novelists of the eighteenth century strove to “understand the relationship of the body to their art.” The book successfully achieves these aims, but does so within a slighter frame than its recent, interdisciplinary corporeal counterparts.

Ms. Napier’s six chapters each focus on a single text: Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, Clarissa, Tom Jones, A Simple Story and Frankenstein. The selectiveness of this study is acknowledged, and her concerted effort shows why these texts in particular are important in reflecting some of the period’s deepest concerns about corporeality and the “central if uneasy place of embodiment in the development of the novel.” The first chapter, on Robinson Crusoe, illustrates well that it is in the cogency and intricacy of its close readings where the main achievements of this book lie. Ms. Napier has lots of interesting things to say about Defoe’s rhetorical tactics, and the “seemingly perpetual movement between freedom and constraint.” She excellently examines Crusoe as travel writing, but it is a shame that Falling into Matter does not incorporate any analysis of contemporaneous illuminating travel narratives.

Some might balk at the inclusion of Swift’s masterpiece, but Ms. Napier convincingly suggests that “If Gulliver’s Travels is not a novel, it speaks to and registers the terms of the emerging genre, and one of its central procedural questions, with spectacular distinctness.” Her central argument—”Swift’s imagination is inextricably connected to the body”—cannot be denied, but the particular inflections of the Travels are perhaps treated too broadly, presenting Swift more as a sincere moralist than a playful satirist. The urgency of bodily matters to the eighteenth century is perhaps made most apparent in Clarissa, which asks: “What is the relationship of the will or desire to the body? . . . How can one, if at all, protect one’s autonomy and exercise free will in a world that is fallen and in which ideas of authority are contested?” Tom Jones crafts a “more forgiving—and hence comic—position on the human condition.” Analyses of A Simple Story and Frankenstein, in Chapters Five and Six, extend the discussion more thoroughly in relation to key areas respectively: the politics of bodily liberty and restraint, and the imaginative connections between the body and authorship.

The book’s methodology eschews paradigms from thing theory (or material culture studies more generally) and historically driven social models of the body. There is also little reference to the novelists’ wider oeuvres. Instead, Falling into Matter is focused almost exclusively on the six novels themselves, with attention paid to situating arguments in relation to previous secondary criticism. While the book does not make grand claims for its interpretation of eighteenth-century culture outside the novels it analyzes, this uncontextualized approach has limitations. For instance, Ms. Napier notes Clarissa’s complaint: “What a poor, passive machine is the body . . . when the mind is disordered,” but the subsequent discussion of mechanism is all within the novel’s own terms, rather than reaching out to the discourse of mechanistic physiology that was omnipresent in much of the century’s medical, scientific, and philosophical writing. Moreover, she refrains from exploring the possible influence on Clarissa of Richardson’s physician and friend, George Cheyne, author of the most significant medical writings of the period (including The English Malady, 1734).

Ms. Napier’s argument for the uniqueness of the genre might have been even stronger if the six novels had been placed alongside other forms of discourse. On its own terms, Falling into Matter, however, convinces us to think about the relationship between the body and mind, and between the eighteenth-century demands of the social and spiritual selves.