The Consolation of Physiology: In Memoriam in G. H. Lewes’s The Physiology of Common Life

In The Physiology of Common Life (1859), George Henry Lewes quotes Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850) to explain how an individual comes to recognize one’s body as one’s own. This essay argues that Lewes and Tennyson are able to appear together in a physiological text because they share the biopolitical assumption that individuals are located in bodies governed by organic laws. In order to make a life subject to organic laws seem livable, both Tennyson and Lewes will insist that thinking of ourselves organically offers new possibilities for adaptation and consolation that were not available to the sovereign individual of the Enlightenment.