Material Spirits and Immaterial Forms: The Immaterial Materiality of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Abolitionist Poetry

Material culture methodologies have predominantly focused on the novel, with scholars either tracking the use and historical significance of objects that populate a narrative or examining the book itself as a consumer product that circulates in the marketplace. Few of the foundational studies of literary “things” have extended their analyses to poetry and poetic form. This absence raises several compelling questions about the very nature of literary materiality. Is the novel the only literary genre that can be designated as “material” or engage with thing theory? How does literary form challenge the materiality of the printed object? Is form itself “material,” or does it call for a fusion of the material and the immaterial? In How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (2012), Leah Price gestures toward the ambiguous materiality of literature. Although Price’s study is concerned with narrative and the novel as a physical object, her struggle to parse out the difference between the terms book and text exemplifies the nebulous category of materiality. Admitting that it takes considerable linguistic gymnastics to distinguish the two terms as independent from each other, book as decidedly “material” and text as “immaterial,” Price concludes that the two terms signify both objects and abstractions. The “book-object” or “text” is “grounded in a material substance or linked with a lofty abstraction, [and] the same object bound by its medium is credited with the power to free its users.”¹ The material object or “thing” of the book is thus dependent on the immaterial power of the text to transport its readers to the imaginary worlds bound within the pages. Price’s study is only one of the most recent to grapple with questions connected to the rise of thing theory and material culture studies. Bill Brown, whose work in many ways initiated the materialist turn, hints at the interpretative gaps or oversights that can result from a strictly object-centered methodology. As Brown asserts, this renewed interest in the “real” and objects from the external world presupposes that the “external world” is in fact stable and uniformly experienced. For Brown, the term thing itself does not suggest something concrete but rather connotes a sense of liminality, “hover[ing] over the threshold between the nameable and unnameable, the figurable and unfigurable.”² John Plotz points to this curious immateriality of material objects, in particular literary objects, when he briefly discusses the Bible as book-object. “Suspended between material and spiritual form,” the Bible is for Plotz an instructive example of how all books “are a mixture, in varying proportions, of the common stuff of earth and the ethereal stuff that flows through men’s minds.”³ Price, Brown, and Plotz, despite their purported focuses on material culture, all raise questions about the vexed materiality of literature.

While material culture methodologies are useful in helping scholars think about the “thingness” of texts and the things within texts, I argue that something is lost when we stop searching for the immaterial influences that shape the creation, presentation, and circulation of literature and, in particular, poetry. Rather than emphasizing the materiality of literature, I propose that we turn to its immaterial materiality. Although printed characters, metrical and rhythmic arrangements, syntactical constructions, paratext, and the very weight and tangible texture of paper between our fingers suggest a materiality that cannot be denied, the transportative potential of literature, its ability to embody abstract ideals and present a multitude of meanings for a wide variety of readers, implies that even the physical object of the book is infused with immaterial significance. Nineteenth-century literature is a particularly fruitful subject for a methodology that bridges the gap between material and immaterial culture because the Victorian world was one in which the borders of the “real” were constantly being blurred by technological advancements and popular religious practices that relied on the premise that unseeable forces informed and shaped everyday life. With the laying of the transatlantic cable in 1858, national boundaries and national literatures became more permeable than ever, with “invisible” messages crisscrossing the Atlantic and facilitating...