Transfusion: Blood and Sympathy in the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination by Ann Louise Kibbie (review)

Many Victorian studies scholars will know the "tiny canon" of Victorian literature's transfusion texts, but perhaps not as such (62). When prompted to consider blood transfusions, most will certainly note Dracula (1897). Perhaps they will recall George Eliot's "The Lifted Veil" (1859) in that capacity, along with Mary Elizabeth Braddon's "Good Lady Ducayne" (1869). Likely, they will also be familiar with Jules Law's influential and oft-cited The Social Life of Fluids: Blood, Milk, and Water in the Victorian Novel (2010). But there is a much broader corpus here: a longer history, a vast archive of periodical texts—medical prose and fiction—and familiar texts like The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) that pertain to the operation of blood transfusion and its cultural work. There is also a private, intimate, and sympathetic dimension to transfusion, not quite accounted for in the public, technocratic social life of blood.

Ann Louise Kibbie's Transfusion: Blood and Sympathy in the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination proves a persuasive, captivating study of what we might already know of blood transfusions in the nineteenth century and what we should know as well. Transfusion lifts some part of the veil that Meegan Kennedy has characterized as "the vast river of periodicals," both fiction and prose, to provide an expansive view of the cultural work of blood transfusion at the intersections of literary and medical history (qtd. in Kibbie 62). Nineteenth-century blood transfusion, Kibbie contends, "represents an unprecedented convergence of biotechnical innovation with the discourse of sentimentalism that had already exploited a physiological model in order to represent the vital exchange between persons" (13). Works of fiction that occasion transfusion share, with their contemporary medical discourse, an imaginative "interest in bodily economy that extends beyond the boundaries of the individual person, creating both promising and threatening exchanges" (2). This line of inquiry reworks the established destabilization of the hermetically sealed liberal subject through a much older imaginative and medical tradition.

After a thorough introduction detailing some longer histories and interdisciplinary context, Kibbie's first chapter looks to the eighteenth century and the use of the term transfusion. In the figurative sense, transfusion denotes the transference or invasion of the self into another. The chapter then carries this denotation into the nineteenth century and the legacy of sentimentalists as represented by sympathy in William Godwin Jr.'s Transfusion; or the Orpheus of Unwalden (1832) and Eliot's "The Lifted Veil" (1859). Chapters 2 and 3 document the increasing appearance of blood transfusion in the periodical press as well as in contemporaneous literary productions. While the scope of periodicals remains centered around forms of "medical news" in the second chapter (63), Kibbie's third focuses specifically on works of fiction and how they express anxieties about the recipient's mutable identity—"the transfused transformed," to borrow from a title from a text discussed (91). Chapter 4 attends to William Delisle Hay's Blood: A Tragic Tale (1888), and how Hay "uses the fiction of transfusion to present readers with a kind of thought experiment that animated discussions about personal identity since Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding" (121). Hay's Blood, Kibbie contends, problematizes sexual identity relative to a consciousness that is not one's own. In doing so, Blood subverts misogynist conventions surrounding the familiar femme fatale vampire. Kibbie continues working through vampirism in the final two chapters. Chapter 5 considers the convergence of medical practices of transfusions with vampires. This intersection reveals a messy relationship between blood transfusion, the new surgical procedure, and the much older practice of bloodletting while illustrating how Braddon's "Good Lady Ducayne" transmutes "phlebotomy into a vampiric surgery" (153). Readers waiting for Dracula will find satisfaction in the concluding chapter, so aptly titled "Delivering Lucy." In this chapter, Kibbie shows how, almost eighty years after its reintroduction into the [End Page 583...