Discovering the Human: Life Science and the Arts in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries 9783847101376, 9783847001379, 3847101374

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Ralf Haekel / Sabine Blackmore (eds.)

Discovering the Human Life Science and the Arts in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries

With 27 figures

V& R unipress

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. ISBN 978-3-8471-0137-6 ISBN 978-3-8470-0137-9 (E-Book) Ó Copyright 2013 by V& R unipress GmbH, D-37079 Goettingen All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilm and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover image: Nicolas Henri Jacob, without title, in: Marc Jean Bourgery, Trait¦ complet de l’anatomie de l’homme comprenant la m¦decine op¦ratoire, par le docteur Bourgery. Avec planches lithographi¦es d’aprÀs nature par N.H. Jacob, tome 1, Paris: C. Delaunay, 1831, pl. 1. (Source: Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin) Printing and binding: CPI Buch Bücher.de GmbH, Birkach Printed in Germany

Contents

Ralf Haekel & Sabine Blackmore Discovering the Human – An Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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I. Eighteenth-Century Science and the Arts Christoph Heyl William Hogarth, Science and Human Nature

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Mascha Hansen Scientifick Wives – Eighteenth-Century Women Between Self, Society and Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Sladja Blazan Immanuel Kant’s “One Great Republic” – From Spirit Theory to Moral Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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II. Romantic Science and the Arts Catherine Clinger Speleological Interiority – The Mindfulness of a Spelunking Anatomist

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Ulrike Kristina Köhler Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic – A Subtle Plea for Female Education in the Arts and in the Sciences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Felix C.H. Sprang The Rise of the “Life Sciences” and the Dismissal of Plant Life in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115

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Contents

III. The Human and Media Change Hania Siebenpfeiffer (Imagining) First Contact – Literary Encounters of the Extraterrestrial Other in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Novels . . . . . . . . . . . 139 Helga Schwalm Lives of the Physicians – Samuel Johnson, Medicine and Biography

. . . 157

Birgit Mara Kaiser Electrified Humans – Of Inhuman Affects in Heinrich von Kleist . . . . . 171 Ute Berns Artificial Life, Science and Reflexivity in James Whale’s Frankenstein . . 187

Ralf Haekel & Sabine Blackmore

Discovering the Human – An Introduction

1.

Historical Transitions

Discovering the human? If the human is something to be discovered, as the title to this volume suggests, or even invented, it follows that it is an historical entity, i. e. a category whose existence has a discernible beginning and presumably also an end. This also entails that the human is not merely ontologically given. The chapters collected in this book give evidence of the wide-ranging influence that the reconceptualization of both life and the human in the long eighteenth century had on all kinds of areas of human activity from the beginning of the Enlightenment up to the nineteenth century. It is the aim of this introduction to provide the reader with a brief overview of the history of the life sciences in the eighteenth century and how they influenced the concept of the human in the early nineteenth century. Recent theory has shown that the human as a philosophical and scientific concept can be regarded as the outcome of a specific formation of discourses. In his study The Open of 2002, Giorgio Agamben investigates the several ways in which Western culture has defined the human in contradistinction, but not in opposition, to the animal. Agamben states: “Anthropogenesis is what results from the caesura and articulation between human and animal. This caesura passes first of all within man.” (79) He further argues that the human state is never fully achieved but constantly needs to be re-negotiated: This overcoming [of animal physis] is not an event that has been completed once and for all, but an occurrence that is always under way, that every time and in each individual decides between the human and the animal, between nature and history, between life and death. (79)

Earlier in the book, Agamben refers to Aristotle’s De Anima. This founding text of Western psychology and anthropology creates a link between the human and the other category that is under investigation in this volume: life. According to Aristotle, the soul is defined as “the form of a natural body, which potentially has

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life” (68), whereas the body is passive matter and the soul its form, its entelecheia. As such, the human body is not distinguished from those of animals or plants. What establishes this distinction is rather the nature of the soul that enlivens the body. Whereas plants merely have a vegetative or nutritive soul, animals additionally have a sensitive soul. Yet, according to Aristotle, only humans have a rational soul which therefore becomes the distinctive characteristic of the human race. Agamben reads this definition of human life as a repression of the animal within, rather than a proper definition or a clear separation of man and animal: It is possible to oppose man to other living things, and at the same time to organize the complex – and not always edifying – economy of relations between men and animals, only because something like an animal life has been separated within man, only because his distance and proximity to the animal have been measured and recognized first of all in the closest and most intimate place. (15 – 6)

Two questions are at the heart of this collection of essays: “What is a human?” and “What is life?” They were first brought into close proximity by Michel Foucault in his landmark study The Order of Things (1966), in which he famously yet notoriously claimed that “[b]efore the end of the eighteenth century, man did not exist” (336). The various sciences of the Enlightenment – a period Foucault terms the “Classical episteme” – may have had an anthropological knowledge, but there was no scientific discipline solely restricted to the study of human nature and hence no knowledge of the concept of the human: there was no epistemological consciousness of man as such. The Classical episteme is articulated along lines that do not isolate, in any way, a specific domain proper to man. And if this is not sufficient, if it is still objected that, even so, no period has accorded more attention to human nature, has given it a more stable, more definitive status, or one more directly presented to discourse – one can reply by saying that the very concept of human nature, and the way in which it functioned, excluded any possibility of a Classical science of man. (Foucault 336)

Earlier on, Foucault links the discovery of the “human” with the novelty of the concept of “life” itself: Historians want to write histories of biology in the eighteenth century ; but they do not realize that biology did not exist then, and that the pattern of knowledge that has been familiar to us for a hundred and fifty years is not valid for a previous period. And that, if biology was unknown, there was a very simple reason for it: that life itself did not exist. All that existed was living beings, which were viewed through a grid of knowledge constituted by natural history. (139)

Knowledge of the biological and organic constitution of the human is therefore not given or objective. It is the result of a discursive shift which links an immanent concept of life – i. e. life as no longer created by a transcendent divine

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entity – with the finitude of the human. The changing concept of life is thus connected with the modern notion of a human being characterized by its mortality. This also has consequences for the concept of the human itself – which may, as Foucault famously notes, fade “like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea” (422). In a word, the changing concept of life during the Enlightenment and Romanticism does not only create the modern notion of the human, it destabilizes this concept at the same time. According to Foucault, this paradigm shift in the history of the human sciences from the Classical to the Modern episteme occurs around 1800. This is, however, exactly the problem of this particular version of the history of science. Like the other groundbreaking twentieth-century work on the history and theory of science, Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Foucault presupposes one dominant preconception, or, in Kuhn’s terminology, paradigm, which structures and shapes the entire scientific knowledge of a discipline in a given age. However, the concept of the human as both the object and subject of scientific investigation around 1800 is the outcome of multiple changes in philosophy, art, theology as well as science taking place during the Enlightenment – the evolution of scientific thought about human nature may therefore be described as a transformation of key Enlightenment concepts.1 And yet, according to common scholarly opinion, the eighteenth century is not an era particularly famous for its groundbreaking scientific discoveries. Considering, however, the innovations made during the Enlightenment, e. g. the emergence of modern chemistry and the development of what today is called neuroscience, this belief may well be disputed: the human as the central category of this shift is not “discovered” completely unanticipated. Although the chapters collected in 1 Although today it is commonly agreed upon that knowledge of science is absolutely vital to an understanding of the development of literature in the period from the beginning of the Enlightenment to the close of Romanticism, systematic investigation into the field of science and literature is of a relatively recent date. The works of George S. Rousseau (see 1990, 2004), published from the late 1960s onwards, were seminal and paved the way for numerous publications to follow. The publications of the late Roy Porter have explored the many intersections of science, philosophy and cultural artefacts in the most comprehensive way possible: the Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Science in particular is the authoritative publication for the development of the sciences before 1800. From the 1980s onwards, studies such as Trevor H. Levere’s Poetry Realized in Nature (1981) have further investigated the convergence of science and literature. Furthermore, books like Romanticism and the Sciences (1990), edited by Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine, have looked into the interplay of the two cultures in general while others, like Coleridge and the Sciences (2001), edited by Nicholas Roe, focus on the impact of science and the output of an individual author. The life sciences have been especially prominent in two recent and important publications. In her book Shelley and Vitality of 2005, Sharon Ruston investigates the impact of late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century vitalism on the works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and most recently Denise Gigante has analysed the impact of the theories of life on authors like Coleridge, Shelley or Keats in her book Life (2009).

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this volume are based on the conviction that a decisive shift occurs from seventeenth- to nineteenth-century science, it would be wrong to presume this change to have taken the form of a clear cut, a revolution or a sudden break. Rather, this shift takes place in a period which lasts for more than a century and is characterized by numerous different facets; while some things change rather quickly, others show to be much more persistent. The decades around 1800 are therefore a period of transition that has been described as Sattelzeit by the German historian Reinhart Koselleck. The human, as an immanent, finite and self-sustained organism, does only become an object of the scientific gaze once the scientific system with its specialized branches and secular outlook has been established. This fundamental reconfiguration of human and artistic conventions around 1800 is based on the changes taking place in the realms of science and art, and it is accompanied by the development of the modern notions of selfhood and subjectivity. One may call this set of paradigm shifts, transitions and discoveries the invention of modernity – a period characterized by the specialization and differentiation of society in general and scientific and cultural disciplines and areas in particular. The “discovery of the human” would then be the result of this momentous, yet slow and gradual change. The articles collected in this book pay tribute to the deviations, ambiguities and paradoxes that give shape to the establishment of the human as well as of the life sciences. It is our contention that the aforementioned developments are based on the scientific, social and artistic developments taking place throughout the entire long eighteenth century. Against the background of fundamental seventeenth- and early eighteenthcentury scientific discoveries, such as Harvey’s blood circulation and Willis’s research of the brain and nervous system, as well as slowly moving changes in the sciences and the arts during the Enlightenment, a more detailed picture of the modern concept of human nature starts to emerge.

2.

Life

The long eighteenth century is arguably the most decisive historical period in the formation of the category of the human, and the present volume is an attempt to re-investigate the interplay of the discursive formation of scientific knowledge and the realm of art – especially of literature. Within this period, encompassing the end of the scientific revolution on the one hand and the Romantic period with the formation of the modern scientific system on the other, the changing scope of the life sciences is one of the most important aspects in the development of the modern concept of the human. The human is inextricably linked with the category of life; yet, whatever life is at the onset of the Modern age, how it can be

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defined, is far from clear. The many different scientific areas and disciplines that are involved in the definition of life include anatomy, physiology, zoology but also botany, palaeontology and even geology. Biology eventually emerges in the first half of the nineteenth century as the scientific discipline that subsumes all the different ideas of life in the human, animal and plant kingdoms. As there is no universally accepted definition of life, any history of the concept becomes necessarily schematic. But as with the macrocosmic notion of the Foucauldian epistemic shift from the Classical to the Modern age, the value of a microcosmic notion of the progressive history of the life sciences in the eighteenth century has undeniably heuristic merits. Traditionally, this history is written as a progression from mechanist physiology via vitalism to a biological conception of a living organism. The development of the so-called “vitality debate” is a case in point. Mechanistic models of living beings are based on the Cartesian dualist notion of the body as res extensa and the mind or soul as res cogitans: the body is compared with a machine or a mechanism which is enlivened and directed by an immaterial soul. Thus, the immortal soul was excluded from the realm of the body which enabled Descartes and his followers to investigate the workings of the body without having to mesh with problems connected with salvation and transcendence – which is presumably the reason why mechanistic philosophy was never attacked by the church. Whilst the mechanistic notion had its obvious appeals and merits in the age of scientific discoveries of the early Enlightenment, it was also almost immediately attacked by Descartes’s contemporaries for its limitations, most notably by Leibniz. Nevertheless, the rationalist concept of mechanism proved to be immensely successful until increased knowledge of physiology and subsequent scientific discoveries rendered it obsolete. But, of course, this did not happen out of the blue. Rather, this development, taking place in mid-eighteenth century, reaches back into the previous century. What triggered the debate on life in the first half of the eighteenth century was the question whether matter was in itself active or inactive – and the nervous system played an immense role here: did the senses merely register and pass the information on to the brain and the mind or is the body actively involved in sense perception? While mechanism regarded the body as merely passive, vitalist theories considered matter to be active itself. Thus, during the first half of the eighteenth century, the knowledge of the human body got more and more complex in a way that rendered a mechanistic explanation of human life implausible and eventually impossible. Especially the influence of Newtonian physics complicated matters. Newtonians such as Herman Boerhaave (see Schwalm in this volume) and Georg Ernst Stahl introduced new concepts into medicine and physiology that ran counter to mechanistic interpretations. Shirley A. Roe describes how the

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mechanistic philosophy was eventually undermined from within the realm of science: Mechanistic physiology, based on the analogy of living organisms with machines, was to be considerably broadened by the introduction of Newtonian forces into physiology. The clear borders between the animal and plant kingdoms, and even between the plant and mineral worlds, were to be called into question by new experimental evidence. And the comfortable synthesis of mechanism with reproduction from preexisting germs was to encounter serious opposition from new theories of gradual development that raised the specter of materialism. (S. Roe 397)

Among the first to come up with a theory of living matter that can be termed vitalist was Georg Ernst Stahl. Peter Hanns Reill has argued that Stahl’s concept of the chemical nature of matter fundamentally challenged the mechanistic concept of life: “In the phenomenal world, matter is always conjoined. … Because there were no such things as isolated, uniform blocks of nature, all of nature was connected through sympathies, rapports, or affinities.” (Reill 35 – 6; see Stahl’s explanation of the chemical structure of matter : 3 – 21) Stahl’s conception of vitalism or animism presupposed an active principle animating matter, i. e. “a conscious, rational soul, or anima” (S. Roe 405). Yet, as Lester S. King points out, this concept of the soul is not to be mistaken for the traditional religious and philosophical notion, rather “this force or anima, however mistakenly conceived, was a biological and scientific concept. Stahl made it unequivocally clear that all discussions of anima dealt with a force immanent in the body.” (123) Later on in the eighteenth century, the question whether a vital force governed matter or not became important in two areas: in the increasingly sophisticated investigation of the nervous system and in the debate on generation. Probably the most important aspect in this history is the investigation of the nervous system, as George S. Rousseau remarks: no topic in physiology between the Restoration and the turn of the nineteenth century was more important than the precise workings of the nerves, their intricate morphology and histological arrangement, their anatomic function. (1991: 129)

The investigation of the nervous system did not only pave the way for a thoroughly scientific conception of human nature, it also helped to create a new understanding of life – which in turn had a massive influence on the vitality debate. One of the key figures in the early history of neuroscience is Thomas Willis. Willis, whose students included William Boyle and John Locke, exercised an immense influence that went beyond a specialized interest in physiology. Moreover, the investigation of the nerves is pivotal for our understanding of the modern conception of art and literature: Baumgarten’s theory of aesthetics is a

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theory of sense perception, and the literary vogue of sensibility is also dependent on a different, indeed nervous conception of human nature. In the seventeenth century, the nerves were considered to be hollow tubes, a sort of transport channel for animal spirits, which were deemed to be a substance neither quite material nor quite immaterial, establishing a communication between the soul and the body. This notion of the spiritus was still taken seriously by, for instance, Isaac Newton and George Cheyne who discussed this volatile substance in his English Malady of 1733. In the 1750s, the nervous reflex gave rise to a debate between the Albrecht von Haller and Robert Whytt. Whereas von Haller, a Newtonian and a follower of Boerhaave, considered the notion of irritability to be merely a material effect that transports the information to the brain, Robert Whytt locates the sensation in the entire nervous system itself (on the controversy see Frixione as well as Fischer-Homberger 100 – 2). Whytt was of the opinion that the reflex is caused by a so-called sentient principle inherent in the body : Further, in man the sentient and rational principle must be acknowledged to be one; since we are all conscious that what feels, reasons, and exerts itself in moving the body, is one and the same, and not distinct beings. It is the mind, therefore, that feels, thinks, remembers and reasons; which, though one principle, is nevertheless possessed of these different powers, and acts in these different capacities. (283 – 4)

In the second half of the eighteenth century, the question of vitality also shaped the discourse concerned with generation. Natural philosophers such as John Hunter in England or Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in Germany came up with theories of generation that were clearly opposed to the traditional concept of preformation which “considered generation a mechanical realization, by way of nutrition, of already articulated parts” (Gigante 9; see also Sonntag 297). In his Theoria Generationis of 1759, Caspar Friedrich Wolff challenged this theory and proposed an essential force, a vis essentialis, to be responsible for the procreation and growth of living beings. Wolff ’s epigenetic theory was further developed and popularized by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in his work on the Bildungstrieb or formative principle. This formative principle is, according to Blumenbach, a force that is inherent in an organism shaping and controlling its growth. It thus renders the theory of preformation highly implausible: That no preformed seeds pre-exist: but that in a formerly unwrought procreative matter of organized bodies, after it has matured and reached the place of its destination, a special, lifelong drive becomes active to take on their [the bodies’, RH & SB] initially destined form, to conserve it for life and, if mutilated, restore it if possible. A drive therefore belonging to the vital forces, but one that is clearly distinct from the other vital forces of organized bodies (contractibility, irritability, sensibility, etc.) as it is distinct from the bodies’ physical forces in general; which seems to be the first and most important force of conception, nutrition, and reproduction, and which, in order

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to distinguish it from all other vital forces, can be designated with the name of formative principle (nisus formatiuus). (Blumenbach 24 – 5, our translation)

Writing in England at the same time as Blumenbach did in Germany, John Hunter came to quite similar insights. The second lecture On the Principles of Surgery bears the significant title “On the Vital Principle,” and it is here that Hunter most clearly argues for a vital force that animates the body : “Animal matter is endowed with a principle called, in common language, life.” (221) He explains that “animal matter” can either be in a state “endowed with the vital principle” or “deprived of it.” From this he concludes that life cannot depend on organization because matter is also organized in a lifeless state: From this it appears that the principle of life cannot arise from the peculiar modification of matter, because the same modifications exists where this principle is no more. … If life arose out of this peculiar modification, it would not be destroyed until the modification was destroyed, either by spontaneous changes, as fermentation, or by some chemical processes; and were it destroyed by the last, it might sometimes be restored again by another process. Life, then, appears to be something superadded to this peculiar modification of matter… (Hunter 221)

The vitalist theory of generation did not only challenge already outdated theories of preformation, it also signifies that mechanism could no longer provide satisfying answers to the question of life. The vitality debate thus shows that throughout the eighteenth century matters concerning life had become too complex to be answered by the rather simplistic mechanist philosophy. The debate bears witness to a crisis of Enlightenment science and the entire classical episteme which is also a crisis of language as the basis of the scientific system.

3.

Language

The Enlightenment or Classical episteme is, according to Foucault, based on the arbitrary concept of the linguistic sign. Andreas Mahler has shown how this concept shapes the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scientific system. At the beginning of the scientific revolution, i. e. at the turn of the seventeenth century, Mahler argues, “language itself loses its guaranteed meaning; it is no longer the place where a reality guaranteed by God is to be found; instead it becomes an instrument, designed by humans, to express a reality found and constructed elsewhere” (727 – 8, our translation). As the period of the Enlightenment came to a close, the scientific system based on the arbitrary sign also experienced a severe crisis. But, as the discussion of the vitality debate has shown, this development sets in much earlier. Already during the first half of the eighteenth century, the human or animal body ceases to be a simple scientific object. The question of life

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proves to be too complex to be solved in terms of a binary opposition of mind and matter. As a result, the human body comes into being in its own right as a complex object, as something that cannot be fully resolved or explained as merely passive matter. Humans begin to reflect on themselves as humans, using a scientific language that is, in turn, self-reflexive. This has consequences for the realm of art as well. At the onset of Romanticism, literature becomes the discourse where this self-reflexivity comes into its own, as Andreas Mahler maintains: With this, language begins to transcend the model of transparency ; it breaks free from the bonds of its own absolute functionalism and lays claim to an independent existence and independent functions. … it finds its place in literature. (753, our translation)

Thus, the crisis of Enlightenment science proves to be highly productive in that it brings about a new conception of man; it paves the way for a thoroughly immanent concept of the human. This becomes apparent when (re-)considering the line of demarcation between the human and the animal.

4.

Classification

The eighteenth century is the age of systematization and classification. To classify the entire natural world according to the laws of reason rendered God’s creation palpable for human minds. Roe, summing up this worldview, stresses the Enlightenment focus on reason: For much of the eighteenth century, the biological world was seen as a very ordered place. Plants and animals yielded to Linnean classification. Physiological functioning was envisioned in mechanistic terms. And the generation of new animals and plants proceeded from preformed germs that had existed since the creation. All this order arose from God, who had created and organized the world for humans to understand and thereby to appreciate His handiwork and lead moral lives. Even the seemingly disordered, such as monsters and wonders of Nature, were generally brought under the paradigm of order. (S. Roe 397)

Yet, although the classification of plants and animals into species and subspecies is somewhat carried to extremes by Linnaeus, it also helped to question the traditional border between plants, animals and humans. As mentioned above, the classical definition of what is a plant, an animal or a human being is based on the Aristotelian definition of the soul and its faculties. Once the soul loses its status as the basis of life, this traditional classification also loses its authority. Several discoveries of the natural world therefore challenged overcome definitions. The hydra or freshwater polyp, for example, which was discovered by Antoni van Leeuwenhoek and first investigated by Abraham Trembley (see

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Vartanian), was – on the basis of its green colour – originally considered to be a plant and only later classified as an animal. However, not only the border between animals and plants was debated but also the one between animals and humans. Especially the investigation and classifications of the orang-utan and the chimpanzee made it difficult, if not impossible, to find a line of demarcation. Carl Linnaeus, for instance, objected to a strict line of demarcation: In truth, Linnaeus’s genius consists not so much in the resoluteness with which he places man among the primates as in the irony with which he does not record – as he does with the other species – any specific identifying characteristic next to the generic name Homo. (Agamben 25)

During the second half of the eighteenth century, the orang-utan is widely discussed as the missing link between humans and animals, for instance by JeanJacques Rousseau in the Discourse on Inequality or later by Lord Monboddo (for an overview of this debate see Moran III). It is only later, with the development of the scientific system and biology, that the human as a defined species comes into being, as Agamben remarks: “in the Ancien R¦gime the boundaries of man are much more uncertain and fluctuating than they will appear in the nineteenth century, after the development of the human sciences.” (24) Thus, the discovery of the human appears to be a restriction, a new and even more severe classification than the Classical one. There is a striking parallel between this development and the occurrence of the notion of two biological sexes towards the end of the eighteenth century. In Making Sex of 1990, Thomas Laqueur has argued that not only gender, i. e. cultural identity as male or female, is a social construct, but the notion of the biological sex as well. Hence, what we take as a biological truth is not solely based on scientific fact but also dependent on social conventions and discourses of power : Anatomy, and nature as we know it more generally, is obviously not pure fact, unadulterated by thought or convention, but rather a richly complicated construction based not only on observation, and on a variety of social and cultural constraints on the practise of science, but on an aesthetics of representation as well. (Laqueur 163 – 4)

By the end of the eighteenth century, Laqueur argues, male and female bodies were conceived of as opposites. This development, he claims, is mainly down to political reasons: the patriarchal society was unconsciously looking for a scientific argument in order to maintain the cultural difference between the social genders. Hence, evidence for the difference between men and women was sought in the realm of biology. The conception of male and female as two different sexes is therefore not solely based on new scientific insights; rather, it is the other way round: new scientific insights were sought in order to establish a given moral

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and social order. In other words, in the eighteenth century, sex, the biological difference between man and woman, is made – not discovered. There is a cultural side to this development which ferments the difference between the sexes around 1800. In The Making of the Modern Self, Dror Wahrman describes the history of the changing gender roles in eighteenth-century Britain. Cross-dressing, for instance, or warlike behaviour was still possible for women at the turn of the eighteenth century, whereas around 1800, it was replaced by motherhood as an ideal of femininity, indeed as the only possible social function women could fulfil. The choice not to become a mother had become socially inacceptable at the turn of the nineteenth century : The suggestion, then, is that the distinctive shift peculiar to the late eighteenth century was one from maternity as a general ideal, broadly prescriptive but allowing for individual deviations, to maternity as inextricably intertwined with the essence of femininity of each and every woman. In the latter understanding, what was ruled out was the possibility of choice: a woman choosing not to exercise these essential maternal instincts, rather than being forced into such a situation through circumstances beyond her control, was now most likely to be branded “unnatural”. (Wahrman 13)

Wahrman’s theory is very closely linked with that of Thomas Laqueur : before the end of the century, gender and sex were established as social categories that made transgressions impossible. The notion of motherhood “naturalized” the difference between male and female as based on biological fact which, in turn, makes choice not only impossible but turns it into a violation against nature. Wahrman’s interpretation of this shift is most striking. The turn of the nineteenth century is usually regarded as a time when modern writings by women authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft, defending political rights of women, led to the emergence of modern feminism. Against the notion that these writings in the wake of the French Revolution have caused a new way of thinking about gender to emerge, Wahrman regards them as the consequence of and reaction to such a new and restrictive conception of human nature. In his own words: The late eighteenth century was the moment when the gender-transgressive woman was losing her ground culturally, and was thus forced to come into her own politically. … The edge of late-eighteenth-century feminism, which some might suppose to have been a cause of the changes in understandings of gender during these decades, should perhaps be seen more appropriately as their consequence. (Wahrman 34 – 5)

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Science and Art

The history of the life sciences is not only the history of the discovery of the human and the formation of the modern scientific system, it is also the birth of a different conception of art and literature in which these momentous changes are expressed and negotiated.2 This has a lot to do with the fact that the new concept of the human is closely linked with ideas of originality and ingenuity. Works of art, as M.H. Abrams has shown in his famous simile of the mirror and the lamp, are no longer primarily imitations of nature; rather, they have their origin in the minds of the artists and poets. Yet, and this is the other side of this development, the form of art itself changes as well. Around 1800, the notion of vitality came into conflict with a new kind of materialism or rather a materialist theory of life: organicism. In the second half of the eigheenth century, these two conflicting theories of life, vitalism and organicism, shaped the debate on life and eventually merged into the discipline of biology. As opposed to vitalism that considered life to rely on a vital principle, organicism considered life as independent of the soul and therefore immanent and ultimately materialist. The famous debate between John Abernethy and William Lawrence, taking place as a series of lectures in the 1810s, may be considered as the culmination of this conflict (see Ruston 38 – 63). Abernethy presupposes a vital principle in all of animated nature which he, in line with Romantic philosophy of nature, calls “Anima Mundi” (52). Lawrence is fiercely opposed to this notion, famously stating that an “immaterial and spiritual being could not have been discovered amid the blood and filth of the dissecting-room” (7 – 8). Instead, he considers life to depend solely on the organization of matter (see Lawrence 120 – 1), a notion that was heavily attacked at the time but eventually became the basis for the modern biological understanding of life. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, biology was based on the conception of the human and animal body as a self-sufficient organism: this newly emerging discipline defined the modern scientific concept of human and animal life as based on the organization of matter. Hence, today’s knowledge of humans, animals and plants is to a large degree the outcome of the formation of biology in the Romantic period. For the emerging scientific system, these transformations were indeed groundbreaking since they brought about an epistemic shift from the previous worldview to the modern scientific concept of the human. At the same time, literature and art sought to find new ways of depicting the 2 See, for instance, Raymond Williams: “In its modern form the concept of ‘literature’ did not emerge earlier than the eighteenth century and was not fully developed until the nineteenth century.” (46)

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human and human life. Enlightenment and Romantic aesthetics and poetics can only be understood against the backdrop of the new scientific understanding of the human and, in turn, the scientific discoveries only make sense when considering the cultural conceptions of human life. During the one and a half centuries investigated in this volume, one can speak of a strong interplay of science and literature (see Rousseau 1969). Literature and art, therefore, do not merely reflect the discoveries made in the life sciences during the Ages of Enlightenment and Romanticism, but, in a combined effort, they sought to find a new understanding of human life. Around 1800, the question “What is life?” dominated both the cultural and scientific production. The quest for an answer not only led to the concept of the human as a self-sustaining organism but also triggered the notion of the organic artefact. The impact of the life sciences on holistic aesthetics is stressed by Denise Gigante in her recent book Life: As the concept of vital power sparked a preoccupation with self-generating and selfmaintaining form, it quickened the category of the aesthetic, elevating natural researchers into natural philosophers attempting to account for a mysterious power buried deep within the structures of nature. Life scientists focused on the dynamics of organic form in an effort to explain how form emerged and maintained itself, despite the physical laws of an environment that worked, meanwhile, to reduce it to its constituent parts. Aesthetic theorists and practitioners alike focused on the vitality of form. (5)

Around the middle of the nineteenth century, the joint endeavour of the life sciences and the arts ends. The early nineteenth century, then, saw the formation of the modern system of science and with it the demarcation of the individual scientific disciplines. By the end of the Romantic period, science and the arts had evolved into two different cultures. Although Romantic Naturphilosophie soon “came to be dismissed as a sort of pseudoscience by the new breed of professional scientists” (Gigante 255, n. 64), two concepts remained: the human as an immanent and finite organism, and art, especially literature, as an autonomous system of cultural production.

6.

Discovering the Human

The focus of Discovering the Human lies on the decades in which this transition towards modern art and modern human nature takes place and yet this volume also goes beyond this scope. This collection of essays goes back to a conference of the same title held in Berlin in 2009, and it situates itself in a tradition that looks at literature, art and culture in the light of scientific and medical development.

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The essays collected in this volume are grouped into three sections –EighteenthCentury Science and the Arts, Romantic Science and the Arts, and The Human and Media Change –, each of which corresponding differently to our greater topic: the discovery of the human. These correspondences are both historical and topical and thus provide a deeper understanding of the essays and their quest for “the human” negotiated in the emerging life sciences and the arts throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first group of essays revolves around the idea of Eighteenth-Century Science and the Arts. The volume opens with Christoph Heyl’s chapter on William Hogarth whose works serve as a stark reminder that eighteenth-century developments in the life sciences and the “discovery of the human” met with considerable scepticism. In his essay, Heyl investigates Hogarth’s attitude to science in general and to the activities of the medical profession in particular which appears to have been utterly negative. Figures such as the bizarre scientific impostor, the unscrupulous quack, the mad scientist and the incompetent, evil or perhaps even diabolic doctor frequently appear in his engravings. Hogarth’s vastly influential prints helped to keep such stock characters alive and to develop them further. However, in spite of his deeply entrenched scepticism, Hogarth was not entirely immune from scientific thought, and Heyl reveals that some scientific concepts did find their way into his challenging depictions of “the human”. Mascha Hansen’s essay focuses on a gender-related aspect of eighteenthcentury scientific development: the fate of the wives (or sisters) as assistants of male scientists and their own subsequent careers as female scientists in a male world. Hansen looks at some of the prevailing images of female scientists, e. g. Caroline Herschel, in the late eighteenth century and the strategies with which women accepted or deflected such images, using letters and memoirs to reveal the importance intellectual women attached to science in their lives. The first group closes on Sladja Blazan’s change of perspective and integration of “the non-human”, or the ghost, in Immanuel Kant’s Dreams of a Spirit-Seer. Within the secure framework of an anonymously published treatise, Kant produced one of the most important writings on what can be called ghost theory. Blazan demonstrates how Kant’s preoccupation with spirit-seeing in his early work entails some of the central ideas developed in his critical writings on morality, ultimately exposing the ethical underpinnings of spectrality. Highlighting the connection between a general “sense of morality” to “spirit conjuration”, Blazan identifies telling echoes of Kant’s pre-critical writings on spirit-seeing within his later critical and moral philosophy in order to contextualize the complexities involved in eighteenth-century ideas about the free, self-determining subject. The second group of essays is concerned with Romantic Science and the Arts

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and continues the lines carefully developed throughout the Enlightenment. Slowly reaching the epistemological change around 1800 and its inherent discovery of the human and establishment of the life sciences, the essays illuminate the virulent debate on the human, its Romantic scientific concepts and artistic and literary negotiations. Amalgamating the exterior and interior landscape of the human, Catherine Clinger’s opening essay investigates visual material of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German physician Johann Christian Rosenmüller who pursued a strong research interest in otorhinolaryngology. The essay discusses subterranean imagery found within the representational procedures and aesthetic debates formed at the junctures between art, medicine and science; specifically, the description of caves previously unacknowledged in the histories of medicine or print. The innate quality of interiority that exists in the chamber of a cave makes it the ideal setting in literature for dreams and psychological crises. In the visual culture of medicine, however, the representation of cavernous space offered, according to Clinger, a unique perspective on anatomical metaphorization and was integrated into medical discussions of the brain and of consciousness. Continuing the focus on science and gender established in the first part of the book, Ulrike Kristina Köhler’s essay on the gothic novel determines the relationship between women and science in popular fiction. The connection between science – at the time still a predominantly male business – and the debate on female education does not immediately come to mind when thinking about Gothic fiction. Nevertheless, Köhler argues that the Gothic contains a subtle pledge for an education of women including the sciences. Ann Radcliffe’s heroines in The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Romance of the Forest, for instance, both receive an education in science and pursue their scientific aspirations. Moreover, Köhler continues, the female Gothic actually expresses a demand for a female approach to science in order to counterbalance the male system. That the life sciences in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were acutely aware of the anthropomorphic distortions resulting from the use of metaphors, similes and analogies is shown by Felix Sprang. Revealing the relationship of the discovery of the human and the fate of plant life, Sprang focuses on how the metaphorical umbrella term “life” became increasingly problematic in the emerging discipline of botany. With new inquiries into the ecology, the reproductive systems and the “behaviour” of plants, conceptions of life were more and more reserved for the animal world, including human beings, and deemed unacceptable with respect to plants. Illustrating this process, Sprang turns to the metaphorical field used to describe the active movement of plants. The investigation of plant movement and its repercussions with respect to changing conceptions of “life” are discussed in botanical tracts of the late

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eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, most notably in Erasmus Darwin’s poem The Botanic Garden (1799). Sprang argues that the process of discovering the human around 1800 was essentially rooted in downgrading plant life. In the third and last part of this volume, the focus shifts from the historical angle towards The Human and Media Change – i. e. the notion that the aforementioned reconfigurations also have a massive impact on the media in which the human is represented. Covering the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well as foreshadowing the developments of the early twentieth century, the essays explore a wide range of aspects intricate to the relationship between the discovery of the human and different media in which this discovery is conveyed. Hania Siebenpfeiffer’s essay, which opens this final section, examines the very beginning of literary science fiction in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with special focus on the narration of the extraterrestrial other. While Johannes Kepler in 1604 still used the Lucian narrative of a dream-voyage to present his theory of the planets’ movements, a more literary mode of outer-space travel is inaugurated by Francis Godwin in The Speedy Messenger of 1638. Godwin’s novel marks the beginning of a literary master narrative that combines the extrapolation of technical skills with an estrangement of former scientific knowledge. By confronting the theological idea of the human with new concepts of cosmic order, Godwin’s was the first novel to revaluate a pre-scientific discursive framework, thus opening up a new and enthralling debate on the essence of human beings that lasted throughout the eighteenth century. The ensuing chapter by Helga Schwalm, focusing on Samuel Johnson’s Life of Boerhaave, investigates the interrelation of lives of medical professionals and of poets in eighteenth-century biographical writing. Schwalm argues that Johnson’s fascination and literary engagement with the lives of physicians bears a significance beyond his obvious interest in medicine and its cultural dissemination. Against the topological charge of the physician’s scepticism and atheism, Johnson constructs Boerhaave as a modern practicing physician, a man of science, and a professional, both exemplary in piety and in method. At the same time, Johnson, by implicit analogy, establishes himself as a professional author and sceptical biographer. Birgit Mara Kaiser’s essay introduces one of the most important Romantic concepts of the life sciences: electricity. Her particular interest is the impact of the theory of electricity on the works of the German dramatist Heinrich von Kleist. Referring to Foucault’s writings, Kaiser argues that as life became increasingly conceptualized as biological, and as the human evolved as an empirical object at the turn of the nineteenth century, scientific explorations of electricity allowed for alternative conceptions of the human. The poetic engagements with, and adaptations of, theories of electricity were, according to Kaiser, ways to reconfigure the human, contesting his discursive sedimentation

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in the new life sciences as organic self-organization. She shows that literary texts challenged both the idea of the human as interiority and conscious reflexivity, and the belief in the empirical verifiability of life. Given Kleist’s insistence on an affectivity rendered in electrical terms, his texts display the inhuman limits of the human. The volume ends with an outlook, an investigation of the human in the early cinema of the twentieth century. Ute Berns analyses James Whale’s highly successful film adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, focusing on the way in which the medium of film reflects the story’s theories of life. In her novel, Mary Shelley envisions a scientist who artificially creates “human” life from parts of dead human bodies and animals. Modern critics have drawn an analogy between Shelley’s scientist and twentieth-century film directors, cameramen and editors who mechanically create “artificial life” on cinema screens. Berns highlights the scientific discourses of anatomy/surgery and electricity/light in Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), discussing the complex meta-cinematic gestures these scientific discourses engender in the context of film history and within a modernist framework. Rather than arguing that the self-reflexive potential of the Frankenstein narrative had to wait for the modern medium of film to be realized, she shows that this meta-fictional and meta-narrative potential can actually be traced back to the way in which Romantic novelists and poets re-conceptualized both the sciences of life and the human around 1800. To sum up, Discovering the Human highlights the transformative processes in the sciences and the arts resulting in the discovery of the human at the dawning of the modern age. This volume aims at contributing to recent discussions about the importance of the life sciences and the arts during the Enlightenment, Romanticism and beyond. The essays in this collection challenge former notions of the discovery of the human and seek to spark further research in the interplay of the life sciences and the arts fathoming the human – its nature and the underlying concept of life – as a central epistemological category of both the eighteenth as well as the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

References Abernethy, John. Surgical Observations on Injuries of the Head. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1810. Online. Abrams, M.H. The Mirror and the Lamp. Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1971. Print. Agamben, Giorgio. The Open: Man and Animal. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004. Print. Aristotle. On the Soul. Parva Naturalia. On Breath. Transl. W.H. Hett, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1957. Print.

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Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich. Über den Bildungstrieb und das Zeugungsgeschäfte. Göttingen: Dieterich, 1781. Print. Cheyne, George. The English Malady : or, A Treatise of Nervous Diseases of all Kinds: In Three Parts. London: Strahan, 1733. Online. Cunningham, Andrew and Nicholas Jardine (eds.). Romanticism and the Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. Print. Fischer-Homberger, Esther. “Railway Spine und traumatische Neurose – Seele und Rückenmark.” Gesnerus 28 (1970), 96 – 111. Print. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Print. Frixione, Eugenio. “Irritable Glue: The Haller-Whytt Controversy on the Mechanism of Muscle Contraction.” Brain, Mind and Medicine: Essays in Eighteenth Century Neuroscience. Ed. Whitaker, Harry, C.U.M Smith and Stanley Finger. New York: Springer, 2007. 115 – 24. Gigante, Denise. Life: Organic Form and Romanticism. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2009. Print. Hunter, John. “Lectures on the Principles of Surgery.” The Works of John Hunter. vol. 1. Ed. James F. Palmer. London: Longman, 1835. 221 – 8. Online. King, Lester S. “Stahl and Hoffmann: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Animism.” Journal of the History of Medicine 19 (1964), 118 – 30. Print. Koselleck, Reinhart. “Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert als Beginn der Neuzeit.” Epochenschwelle und Epochenbewusstsein. Ed. Reinhart Koselleck and Reinhart Herzog. München: Fink, 1987. 269 – 82. Print. Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1962. Print. Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Bodies and Gender From the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1990. Print. Lawrence, William. Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man. London: Callow, 1819. Online. Levere, Trevor H. Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981. Print. Mahler, Andreas. “Die Materialität der Transparenz: Sprache, Politik und Literatur in der englischen Aufklärung.” Europäische Sozietätsbewegung und demokratische Tradition: Die europäischen Akademien der Frühen Neuzeit zwischen Frührenaissance und Spätaufklärung. Ed. Klaus Garber, Heinz Wismann and Winfried Siebers. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1996. 721 – 54. Print Moran III, Francis. “Between Primates and Primitives: Natural Man as the Missing Link in Rousseau’s Second Discourse.” Journal of the History of Ideas 54 (1993), 37 – 58. Print. Porter, Roy (ed.). The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 4: Eighteenth-Century Science. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Print. Porter, Roy. Enlightenment. Britain and the Creation of the Modern World. London: Lane, 2000. Print. Porter, Roy. Flesh in the Age of Reason. How the Enlightenment Changed the Way We See Our Bodies and Souls. London: Penguin, 2004. Print. Priestley, Joseph. “Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit.” The Theological and Miscellaneous Works. Vol. 3. London: Smallfield, 1818. Print.

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Reill, Peter Hanns. “The Legacy of the ‘Scientific Revolution’. Science and the Enlightenment.” The Cambridge History of Science. Vol. 4. Eighteenth-Century Science. Ed. Roy Porter. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 23 – 43. Print. Roe, Nicholas, ed. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002. Roe, Shirley A. “The Life Sciences.” The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 4: EighteenthCentury Science. Ed. Roy Porter. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 397 – 416. Print. Rousseau, George S. “Science and the Discovery of the Imagination in Enlightened England.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 3 (1969). 108 – 135. Print. – (ed.). The Languages of Psyche: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought. Berkeley : U of California P, 1990. Print. – “Nerves, Spirits, and Fibres: Towards and Anthropology of Sensibility.“ Enlightenment Crossings. Pre- and Post-Modern Discourses. Manchester : Manchester UP, 1991. 122 – 41. Print. – Nervous Acts: Essays on Literature, Culture and Sensibility. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Print. Ruston, Sharon. Shelley and Vitality. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Print. Sonntag, Michael. “Die Seele und das Wissen vom Lebenden: Zur Entstehung der Biologie im 19. Jahrhundert.” Die Seele. Ihre Geschichte im Abendland. Ed. Gerd Jüttemann, Michael Sonntag and Christoph Wulf. Weinheim: Psychologie Verlags Union, 1991. 293 – 318. Print. Stahl, Georg Ernst. Philosophical Principles of Universal Chemistry. London: Osborn and Longman, 1730. Online. Vartanian, Aram. “Trembley’s Polyp, La Mettrie, and Eighteenth-Century French Materialism.” Journal of the History of Ideas 11 (1950): 259 – 86. Print. Wahrman, Dror. The Making of the Modern Self. Identity and Culture in EighteenthCentury England. New Haven: Yale UP, 2006. Print. Whytt, Robert. An Essay on the Vital and Other Involuntary Motions of Animals. Edinburgh: Hamilton, Balfour, and Neill, 1751. Online. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1977. Print. Wolff, Caspar Friedrich. Theorie von der Generation: in zwo Abhandlungen erklärt und bewiesen. Berlin: Birnstiel, 1764. Print.

I. Eighteenth-Century Science and the Arts

Christoph Heyl

William Hogarth, Science and Human Nature

If one goes through William Hogarth’s works looking for objects and activities related to scientific investigations into the natural world, one will very soon find a body of relevant material. However, it will also become readily apparent that Hogarth’s attitude to science, and to the activities of the medical profession in particular, must have been somewhat less than favourable. Most of the material in which science features can be found in his engravings and those paintings which formed the first incarnation of his pictorial narratives. There is very little in this respect among the rest of his paintings, i. e. among his portraits and conversation pieces. Perhaps regrettably, there is no such thing as a surprise scientific sujet lurking among Hogarth’s lesser-known conversation pieces. There is nothing that could even remotely be related to Wright of Derby’s famous (but of course much later) Experiment with an Air Pump. There are no groups of people gathered round some sort of scientific apparatus, and there are no individual sitters whose scientific interests are indicated by means of suitable objects.1 Although there would have been enough people who enthusiastically assumed the role of the virtuoso, their culture with all its paraphernalia does not feature in Hogarth’s portraits at all. It would appear that none of his sitters, not even a man like Martin Folkes, who was a very prominent member of the Royal Society (Paulson 1992, 2:169), asked to be painted in this way. In order to find material for a discussion of the ways Hogarth treated the topic of science, we must turn to his pictorial narratives (Hogarth’s own term for these was Modern Moral Subjects) and also to the entire corpus of his engravings. One of the first images – in terms of chronology – relevant here belongs to the formative phase in Hogarth’s career. In the early 1720s, he was already interested 1 The only object in Hogarth’s conversation pieces which could easily be associated with scientific investigations appears in the painting known as The Hervey Conversation Piece, c. 1740; now in the Bristol collection at Ickworth (National Trust). One of the figures, a clergyman, is peering at a church through an inverted telescope (Hallett and Riding 114 – 5).

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in telling stories by means of images, but he was still working as an illustrator of texts written by others. Around the year 1721 he began to illustrate Hudibras, a mock-heroic romance in verse by Samuel Butler which was set in the English Civil War. This text had first been published in 1664, and Hogarth eventually provided two sets of plates, a larger and a smaller one (Paulson 1989: 40 – 1 and 58 – 65).2 Plate 8 of the large-format series depicts an encounter between the hero Hudibras and an astrologer who makes a living out of exploiting the credulous (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1: William Hogarth, Hudibras, plate 8, 1725/6. Engraving. Author’s collection.

The astrologer is surrounded with objects which are meant to impress his customers: there are, among other things, dried animals, books, a celestial globe. In another engraving, he is also shown peering through a telescope (Paulson 1989: 41). This character is not a scientist (not even in the sense of an early eighteenth-century virtuoso), and of course he does not belong to the eighteenth century. At the time when Hogarth worked on these engravings, a character such as this astrologer represented the clich¦ of an impostor from the past. However, 2 Hogarth first worked on the smaller set of plates. However, these were only published in early 1726, just after the publication of the larger plates.

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Fig. 2: William Hogarth, Marriage-—-la-Mode, plate 3, 1745. Engraving. Author’s collection.

we need to look at this particular image because its basic formula re-surfaces in the third plate one of Hogarth’s most important later pictorial narratives, Marriage-—-la-Mode (1745, Fig. 2). This time, we see not an astrologer but a doctor. However, his wild array of paraphernalia clearly goes back to those of the astrologer in Hudibras, and conspicuous items such as the dried crocodile dangling from the ceiling and the skeleton lurking in the cupboard appear both in plate no. 8 of the Hudibras series and in plate no. 2 of Marriage-—-la-Mode. Once again, these are the props used by an impostor to impress his paying customers. Hogarth makes the doctor in Marriage-—-la-Mode use a whole collection of bizarre, outdated and obsolete objects as a kind of visual mumbo-jumbo. In this engraving, the attributes of the old-time impostor are combined with the trappings of scientific modernity. We can see an elaborate apparatus for the treatment of dislocated shoulder-bones, and another one for drawing corks from bottles (Fig. 3). This is accompanied by a publication describing both machines which have been approved by the French Royal Academy. Its title page is clearly legible in the engraving (see Paulson 1989: 119):

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Fig. 3: William Hogarth, Marriage-—-la-Mode, plate 3, 1745 (detail). Author’s collection.

William Hogarth, Science and Human Nature

Fig. 4: William Hogarth, Marriage-—-la-Mode, plate 3, 1745 (detail). Author’s collection.

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EXPLICATION DE DEUX MACHINES SUPERBES L’UN POUR REMETTRE L’EPAULES L’AUTRE POUR SERVIR DE TIRE BOUCHON INVENTES PAR MONSR DE LA PILLULE – VUES ET APPROUEÊS PAR L’ACADEMIE ROYAL DE SCIENCES A PARIS [sic!]

Hogarth’s doctor is a charlatan who bolsters his status by the use of complicated equipment, publications and the process of peer-review, and he does so in order to make money. The skeleton which is a direct borrowing from the charlatan’s room in the Hudibras series is accompanied by another anatomical specimen that can be identified as the flayed body of a man (Fig. 4). Right above these human remains, we can make out a miniature version of a structure which would have been familiar to eighteenth-century Londoners: the famous triple gallows at Tyburn. This object points to the origins of the skeleton and the flayed man; both of them are the mortal remains of criminals who had been executed and then anatomised. These anatomical specimens are not associated with research and knowledge but with punishment and violent retribution. The doctor, like all other doctors in Hogarth’s engravings, is absolutely useless. His face shows the typical deformations caused by syphilis (a medical condition he seems to share with his patients), so he is very obviously unable cure himself. This is not an isolated case of blatant incompetence: Whenever a doctor appears in one of Hogarth’s engravings, experienced “readers” of his works know that someone is going to die. In his pictorial narratives, even the appearance of the first tiny medicine bottle spells doom. In the world of Hogarth’s images, there is no such thing as a skilled doctor administering a successful treatment. There is no progress in this profession, the doctor always remains the harbinger of death. This is clearly expressed in an engraving entitled The Company of Undertakers in which doctors combine to form a macabre coat of arms, complete with the telling motto Et Plurima Mortis Imago (see Paulson 1989: 100 – 1). Hogarth’s medical men are not only depicted as exploiting the credulous, they can also be extremely credulous themselves. This is one of the main themes of a print entitled Cunicularii, or the Wise Men of Godliman in Consultation (Fig. 5). Cunicularii was Hogarth’s reaction to a series of bizarre events which began in late 1726. A woman called Mary Toft (or Tofts) claimed that she gave birth to rabbits, and that she did so on a daily basis. Very senior doctors began to investigate, and they were taken in by the hoax. This enigmatic lusus naturae was much debated, and “the general public was so moved that, until the imposture was exposed, rabbit stew and jugged hare disappeared from the dinner table” (Paulson 1989: 69). Hogarth’s satirical print poured scorn on the credulity and incompetence of the medical experts, and it did so in a number of ways. It is worth noting that this engraving mimicked a convention that was also frequently used in scientific

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Fig. 5: William Hogarth, Cunicularii, Or the Wise Men of Godliman in Consultation, 1726. Author’s collection.

illustrations: There are letters scattered all over the plate, and there are corresponding annotations. According to Ronald Paulson, “A” has been identified as Nathanael St Andr¦, a Swiss adventurer who was anatomist to the Royal household. “B” is Dr Richard Manningham, a top expert in the field of obstetrics. “C” is Cyriakus Ahlers, a German immigrant who was the royal surgeon (see Paulson 1989: 69). Hogarth had a marked tendency to depict medical men that were not only incompetent but also foreign; the doctor in Marriage-—-la-Mode is foreign as well (which is why he got the French Academie Royale des Sciences to approve of his inventions as described above), and another example can be found in the penultimate scene of A Harlot’s Progress. In the world of Hogarth’s engravings, medicine is not about knowledge but about ignorance. It is also about something more sinister, namely cruelty, punishment and retribution. His engravings sometimes contain subtle hints at this such as the combination of anatomical specimens and the miniature triple gallows of Tyburn in Marriage-—-la-Mode. In other cases, Hogarth’s treatment of this theme can be much more drastic. This can be seen in plate 4 of The Four Stages of Cruelty (Fig. 6). A murderer has been executed. Now, doctors, their assistants and medical students take the punishment beyond the grave.

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Fig. 6: William Hogarth, The Four Stages of Cruelty, plate 4, 1751. Author’s collection.

This image of a dissection is not about scientific knowledge, about a new discovery of the human in physical terms. It is about the human in moral terms, and here, there is nothing new to be discovered. The human body is being read not as a physical but as a moral object. The poem accompanying the image characteristically falls back on the age-old models of biblical diction. It tells us about the lustful eyes, the wicked tongue and the evil heart of this corpse:

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Behold the Villain’s dire disgrace! Not Death itself can end. He finds no peaceful Burial Place, His breathless Corse, no friend. Torn from the Root that wicked Tongue, Which daily swore and curst! Those Eyeballs, from their sockets wrung, That glow’d with lawless lust! His Heart, expos’d to prying Eyes, To Pity has no Claim: But, dreadful! from his Bones shall rise, His Monument of Shame.

It is thoroughly in keeping with Hogarth’s approach to the body that the skeletons shown here are not anatomically correct. They do not need to be because their role as a signifier does not depend on anatomical correctness; their purpose is emblematic rather than scientific. Hogarth’s work is full of visual echoes and internal cross-references. The doctor presiding over the grisly theatrum anatomicum appears even more sinister once we begin to consider similarities between this image and an earlier engraving, an illustration Hogarth did for Milton’s Paradise Lost in 1725 (see Paulson 1989: 57). In this print, he depicted Pandemonium, the grand infernal assembly ; there, we also see a round room in which a senior figure – Satan himself – is installed on a monumental throne. This figure is holding a mace to which the senior doctor’s staff corresponds. Given the structural similarities between his visualisation of Pandemonium and the last plate of The Four Stages of Cruelty, his depiction of the medical profession may well have had subtle satanic overtones. It is worth noting that, in The Four Stages of Cruelty, the dead malefactor goes to a modern version of hell, a hell complete with its modern devils and its equally modern hell-fire, a macabre cauldron in which skulls and bones are being boiled. Here we get a glimpse of the scary, evil, and perhaps even satanic scientist. Of course we are still far away from later Romantic embodiments of this figure. In Hogarth’s engraving, the scary scientist is not a loner; there is an entire team of such figures, with its own internal hierarchy (much like that of Milton’s devils). There is as yet no hint of the concept of the wicked Romantic genius. However, this image certainly forms part of the Romantic evil scientist’s pedigree. The Four Stages of Cruelty series contains another hint that there is a link between cruelty and the spirit of scientific enquiry. The first plate shows many instances of cruelty to animals, the perpetrators being children. These children are indulging in all manner of maiming, wounding and torturing, including a

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Fig. 7: William Hogarth, The Four Stages of Cruelty, plate 1, 1726 (detail). Author’s collection.

spot of animal testing (Fig. 7). Two of them have attached a pair of wings to a cat. The cat has just been thrown out of a high window to see whether it can fly. This experiment shows there are types of empirical research which bring out the worst in human nature – and, as the dissection scene demonstrates, this holds true not only for childish versions of such research. It appears that dissection and related activities are not about the discovery of the human but about the discovery (or rather : the highlighting) of the inhuman. The engravings discussed so far convey a rather unpleasant idea of the medical profession. But what about the wider field of scientific research beyond

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Fig. 8: William Hogarth, A Rake’s Progress, plate 7, 1735 (detail). Author’s collection.

what we today would call the life sciences? Here we get a glimpse of the emerging figure of the obsessed, deluded or even mad scientist. Two examples come to mind here, and they can both be found in A Rake’s Progress. Plate 7 shows the rake in a debtor’s prison, trying to get out, but not succeeding. In the background, as a thematic echo, we can see a man using an alchemist’s apparatus in an attempt to make gold (Fig. 8). On a shelf, there is a book marked “Philosophy”. There is also an inverted telescope, which makes the outside world appear even more remote than it has become anyway.

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Fig. 9: William Hogarth, A Rake’s Progress, plate 8 (third state), 1763 (detail). Author’s collection.

Here, science does not get you anywhere, and it certainly does not get you out of the debtor’s prison. It might, however, drive you mad. This can be seen in plate no. 8 of A Rake’s Progress, the famous Bedlam scene. Two of the inmates are scientific monomaniacs. One of them has become obsessed with stargazing, and the other with calculating the longitude (Fig. 9). The idea behind this would appear to be that science can induce tunnel vision. You focus on one problem until you lose sight of the rest of the world. In this engraving, Hogarth is building on an existing clich¦ of the obsessed researcher, or rather the obsessed virtuoso, which had been around since the 1670s and which was caricatured extensively in Shadwell’s comedy The Virtuoso

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(1676). The type of the obsessed or mad scientist is not yet linked with that of the deluded or evil doctor in Hogarth’s work; here they still exist side by side. Much later on, both types eventually merged. We are still far away from Frankenstein or Jekyll and Hyde, but basic elements which eventually needed to be combined to create such characters are already there. Did scientific developments, especially in the life sciences, affect Hogarth’s concept of the human? Being an artist, he constantly depicted human bodies; however, his main interest was not the physical but the moral nature of human beings. Hogarth’s prints would seem to indicate that the moral nature of man was not something that needed to be discovered. Man’s fallibility, feebleness and foibles had been well understood since ancient times. For Hogarth, the human had been discovered long ago. This is why he kept going back to the Bible and the texts of the ancient world. When he thought about how the intensely physical act of having sex affects people, he immediately went back to Aristotle. In an engraving entitled After – after a couple has had sex, that is – we can see a little book lying open on the floor, its text reads: “omne animal post coitum triste” / “Aristotle” (Paulson 1989: 321). In both this engraving, aptly entitled Before, and its companion piece, two pictures can be seen on a wall. The second one is initially concealed by a piece of furniture in Before and is eventually revealed in After. Hogarth frequently demonstrated what he seemed to regard as an ancient truth in a modern way, so Cupid is doing an experiment involving a rocket and the force of gravity. A little science creeps in here, but, to put it in modern terms, sex is hardly rocket science. In the world of Hogarth’s engravings, there are no surprises in human nature, there is nothing new to be discovered here. The only possible surprise lies in the amusement we get from a modern way of encapsulating ancient truths. In spite of his deeply entrenched scepticism, Hogarth was not entirely immune to scientific thought, and some scientific concepts did find their way into his images. In this context, one should perhaps also consider the concept of physiognomy which was of great importance to him. One might argue that, from a mid-eighteenth-century point of view, the coherent cluster of ideas associated with physiognomy could be regarded as science, as part of what we today would call the life sciences. However, there are also clearer cases such as an engraving sub-titled Some of the Principal Inhabitants of ye Moon, as they were Perfectly Discover’d by a Telescope … exactly engraved from the Objects (Fig. 12). The telescope reveals human nature; the inhabitants of the moon are of course all lunatic, but they are also very much like people on earth. This is another plate that mimics the conventions of scientific illustrations; tiny letters are scattered about the image. The figures shown here are interesting because they were clearly influenced

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Fig. 10: William Hogarth, Before, 1736 (detail). Author’s collection.

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William Hogarth, Science and Human Nature

Fig. 11: William Hogarth, After, 1736 (detail). Author’s collection.

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Fig. 12: William Hogarth, Some of the Principal Inhabitants of ye Moon, also known as Royalty, Episcopacy, and Law, 1724. Author’s collection.

not only by the emblematic tradition but also by the idea of the human body as a machine. Elements of both approaches can be seen, for instance, in the figure of the lady on the right (Fig. 13). Much of her body is composed of objects. On an emblematic level, the fan forming the upper half of her torso may stand for

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Fig. 13: detail.

flirting (“to flirt” originally meant to make a meaningful gesture with one’s fan), and the teapot, perhaps, for the tea table and the female gossip it was associated with. At the same time, the fan is a mechanical approximation of the lungs.

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Where her head should be, we can see a tea pot. Tea pots contain not only hot tea but also vapour, hence this object would seem to refer to the concept of the vapours rising up within the female body and ascending into the brain. There is more evidence for Hogarth’s interest in the concept of the body as a machine. In his theoretical work entitled The Analysis of Beauty, he discussed what he called the “living machines of nature” (Hogarth 70) and their aesthetic superiority to new-fangled automata such as the famous artificial duck. Another scientific concept Hogarth took on board was that of the scientific instrument in the shape of a measuring device. We find mock-scientific instruments based on the barometer in two of his engravings. The first one is the Masquerade Ticket of 1727 (Fig. 14). In this print, Hogarth brings together the ancient and the modern to attack masquerades. First of all, this image is replete with allusions to the ancient world and its lax sexual mores. There are statues of Venus and Cupid, and people are worshipping a herm of Priapus. Hogarth is showing, as it were, the downside of the new Augustan age, of London as the new Rome.

Fig. 14: William Hogarth, Masquerade Ticket, 1727. Author’s collection.

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Fig. 15: William Hogarth, Masquerade Ticket, 1727, detail. Author’s collection.

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Fig. 16: William Hogarth, Masquerade Ticket, 1727, detail. Author’s collection.

At the same time, he incorporates several modern elements in this engraving. These are mock-scientific instruments which are described as “A pair of Lecherometers shewing ye Companys Inclinations as they approach [th]em. Invented for the use of Ladys & Gentlemen by the Ingenious Mr H—––r.” “H—–-r” is Heidegger, a Swiss adventurer, who had introduced masquerades to London. The Lecherometers are based on the barometer.3 There was a substantial middle-class market not only for barometers, but also for scientific instruments to be used by amateurs as a kind of scientific parlour game. The text underneath the image mimics the language typically found in handbills advertising such instruments (see Calvert, passim). The playful notion of a barometer or thermometer revealing human inclinations was well-established in the first half of 3 A discussion of possible connotations carried by the barometer in the eighteenth century can be found in Golinski 69 – 93.

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the eighteenth century (see Steele 97), so Hogarth took up an idea that was around anyway. Hogarth’s lecherometers are fitted with scales on which the typical stages of male and female sexual excitement are marked (Fig. 15; the male version reads: “Expectation Hope Hot desire Extreem Hot Moist – Sudden Cold”). This is of course also the key idea of Before and After. And the similarities do not end there. Exactly as in Before and After, an element of modernity in the shape of the scientific apparatus is used to illustrate, in a playful way, age-old ideas about human nature. Even if the Lecherometer existed, it could not tell us anything radically new about human nature, nothing that has not been known since ancient times. There is yet another sophisticated mock-instrument to be found in Hogarth’s Masquerade Ticket. The clock surmounting the whole scene (Fig. 16) contains a visual pun. There is an actual face (i. e. that of Heidegger) in its clockface. The pendulum is marked “nonsense”, the long hand “impertinence” and the short hand “wit”. Heidegger is presented here as l’homme machine who delivers lots of nonsense, a fair amount of impertinence and meagre quota of wit with the regularity of a clockwork. The last engraving to be discussed here takes up the idea of the barometer (or perhaps the thermometer) again. It is entitled Enthusiasm Delineated, and it is a hard-hitting satire directed against Methodist preachers and their congregations. This engraving is extremely rare; it survives only in three proofs, two of which were annotated by Hogarth.4 A tamer version of this first state was later published. There are two mock-scientific measuring devices in Enthusiasm Delineated. Close to a preacher delivering a fire-and-brimstone sermon, there is a device measuring the “scale of Vociferation”, going from “Natural tone” to “Bull Roar” and eventually “Blood Blood Blood Chroist” (Fig. 17). Then, there is another instrument monitoring the congregation’s reactions to the sermon (Fig. 18). This is again a kind of barometer or thermometer. A column of mercury rises out of a brain which is heated or put under pressure by the sermon entering through the ear. Hogarth’s annotations5 make it clear this is no ordinary brain but the brain of a religious enthusiast. The Holy Spirit has been physically impressed in this brain in the shape of a black bird. This is the text Hogarth planned to engrave right underneath (transcribed in Paulson 1989: 175):

4 See Paulson 1989: 175; there is a proof annotated by Hogarth in the British Museum (Dept. of Prints and Drawings, BM 1858 – 4-17 – 582; reproduced in Paulson 1989: 408) as well as a reproduction of another proof, with different manuscript annotations by Hogarth, which was published by Samuel Ireland in 1795 (Dept. of Prints and Drawings, BM S, 2.142). 5 BM 1850 – 4-17 – 582, proof.

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Fig. 17: William Hogarth, Enthusiasm Delineated, c. 1761, detail. Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum, Dept. of Prints and Drawings. Author’s collection.

When this figure is found impressed in the Human Brain it shows the true Dwelling Place of the Holy Spirit from the Imaginary. See Dissections at Surgeons Hall and Bedlam. NB this mark of Salvation appear[s] but faintly in the Brain unless the person has commit[ted] a murder in his lifetime.

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Fig. 18: William Hogarth, Enthusiasm Delineated, c. 1761, detail. Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum, Dept. of Prints and Drawings. Author’s collection.

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These manuscript annotations establish a link between this engraving and the dissection scene from the Four Stages of Cruelty, which is set in Surgeons’ Hall. The key component of the imaginary scientific instrument shown here is the brain of a lunatic murderer. Hogarth is tarring the Methodists with the brush of anti-Puritan propaganda (the debate about the “mark of the elect” was an important feature of Puritan theology). The scientific instrument monitoring the level of religious enthusiasm is funny because it draws the spiritual into the realm of the physical: the mark of the would-be elect is physically imprinted in the brain. In Enthusiasm Delineated, we can once again see how, in spite of his scepticism, Hogarth made creative use of science. However, his concept of human nature was firmly focused on the moral rather than the physical. He played with scientific concepts, he used and satirised them, but they never had a chance to transform this idea of human nature.

References Calvert, Henry Reginald. Scientific Trade Cards in the Science Museum, London. London: H.M.S.O., 1971. Print. Golinski, Jan. “Barometers of Change: Meteorological Instruments as Machines of Enlightenment”. The Sciences in Enlightened Europe. Ed. William Clark, Jan Golinski, Simon Schaffer. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. 69 – 93. Print. Hallett, Mark and Riding, Christine. Hogarth. London: Tate Publishing, 2006. Print. Hogarth, Willliam. The Analysis of Beauty. Written with a View to Fixing the Fluctuating Ideas of Taste. London: J. Reeves, 1753. Print. Paulson, Ronald. Hogarth’s Graphic Works. London: The Print Room, 31989. Print. Paulson, Ronald. Hogarth. Vol.II: High Art and Low, 1732 – 1750. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1992. Print. Shadwell, Thomas. The Virtuoso. A Comedy. London: Henry Herringman, 1676. Print. Steele, Sir Richard. The Lucubrations of Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq., in Five Volumes. Vol. 4. London: Nutt, Bell et al. 1720. Print.

Mascha Hansen

Scientifick Wives – Eighteenth-Century Women Between Self, Society and Science

By the end of the eighteenth century, the learned lady had become a spectre, and even the bluestockings were rapidly losing the respect formerly paid to their intellectual achievements.1 The more surprising are contemporary celebrations of educated women. The editor of the Lady’s Poetical Magazine, James Harrison, boldly began his introductory address to the very first issue in 1781 with an encomium of scientific women and an attack on the men keeping them back: Too long has Man, engrossing ev’ry art, Dar’d to reject the Female’s rightful part; As if to him, alone, had been confin’d, Heav’n’s greatest gift, a scientifick mind. The rougher arts, ‘tis true, men justly claim; But let the smooth and tranquil paths to fame, Which ask not strength of body, but of mind, Be, as the soul, to neither sex confin’d. (1 – 8)2

The poem goes on to celebrate Queen Charlotte, consort to George III, and then still widely known to be interested in the sciences. Even if it stands in the long tradition of dedicatory epistles and poems flattering a royal patron, the encomium is unusual in its praise of women’s scientific achievements – to begin with, at least. However, already the engraving on the very same page seems to contradict the idea that the scientific mind is sexless, setting the male world of globes and geology apart from the female world of household and childcare. The daring 1 Sylvia Harcstarck Myers explains the gradual change in the public assessment of the term bluestockings and concludes: “The transformation of the term’s meaning reflects an awareness of the fact that women had broken the taboo against learning, and the taboo against their taking a public part in intellectual life” (10). 2 Thomas F. Bonnell declares that the opening poems (“by the editor”) were written by James Harrison, explaining that “Harrison urges women to respect the culture of the mind, and to recognize their own capacity for knowledge, but defines that knowledge largely along prudential lines within the domestic sphere” (322). Anne Shteir, however, supposes that Anna Seward was the author (240, n. 4).

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opening lines quickly give way to a more conservative view, their liberal stance undermined by the implied criticism of the female sex in general: Happy for England, were each female mind, To science more, and less to pomp inclin’d ; If parents, by example, prudence taught, And from their QUEEN the flame of virtue caught! Skill’d in each art that serves to polish life, Behold, in HER, a scientifick wife! (47 – 52)

Most women, it seems, are inclined to pomp rather than science. And what exactly is a “scientifick wife”? Does not the term re-introduce the concept of gender, the importance of which was denied in the lines before? The term “scientifick wife” is not, in this case, applied to the wife of a scientist. Yet would the poet’s “scientifick” mean the same if applied to a man? A scientific wife presumably has a strong interest in the sciences, is in possession of a scientific mind, and also defies custom to some extent: she is a married woman who actively seeks a role in the world of science. Yet what role could a woman, a wife, have envisaged? Queen Charlotte did indeed have a strong leaning towards botany, and if contemporary sources are to be believed, was quite knowledgeable in the field.3 She did not, it is true, make any discoveries herself but, like many other noblewomen, she patronised some of those who did, taking an active interest in their theories and experiments. Yet only in the last lines of the poem is the Queen’s love of botany alluded to, and here science is transformed into a moral ‘weeding’ of showy and poisonous plants in “Nature’s garden” (Harrison 3). The skills that might have proved hers to be a “scientifick mind” are not explicitly stated; instead, she is lauded for her educational interests, moral probity and exemplary piety. The Queen is, quite conventionally, presented first and foremost as a virtuous wife and dedicated mother, an image that has survived until today. Little is known about the impact her well-known scientific interests may have had on contemporary women, except that the bluestockings approved of her and vice versa (see Orr 236). Even less can be said about the importance she herself attached to her public image as a domestic but scientific wife. Did scientific women see themselves, and were they seen, as role models? To many, if not most of those even remotely interested in science as well as to those actively pursuing scientific interests, the “human element” – its practitioners, their characters and morals – was at least as fascinating as new theories and discoveries. The personality of the female scientist, or female philosopher as 3 Sir Joseph Banks, for instance, reported the Queen’s interest in botanical studies and her acquisiton of the Lightfoot herbarium in his correspondence, and noted her order of scientific journals from France (II: 262; IV: 309; IV: 411). On the Queen’s botanical interests, see also Hedley 48; 113; 137 – 9; 179 – 81 and Shteir 35 – 7.

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she was then called, was of immense interest since, by stepping into the public sphere with her results, she was seen to be setting a moral example – as does the Queen in Harrison’s poem. In this paper, I will present some of the ways in which eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century scientific women dealt with the image maintained of them in the public eye, how they perceived their own role(s) in the world of science and that of science in their lives. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are of particular interest to my analysis due to the changes taking place both with regard to the status of “science” – by then replacing the earlier “natural philosophy” – and the role of women within the field.4 For the sake of coherence, my paper will only briefly introduce women’s scientific interests and the image of and prevailing prejudices against them, and then focus on a particular circle of women who knew each other, or of each other : Caroline Herschel (1750 – 1848), Mary Somerville (1780 – 1872), Maria Edgeworth (1767 – 1849), and Frances Burney (1752 – 1840). These four women offer widely different views on the public image of female scientists and women’s involvement in the sciences: Herschel as practicing astronomer (and her brother’s assistant), Somerville as mathematician and physician (and “scientifick wife”), Edgeworth as educationalist and Burney as diarist and novelist. Despite the difference with regard to their origins, social status, education and intellectual pursuits, all of these women gained fame for their personal achievements. With the exception of Caroline Herschel, all of them were sociable, moving in the intellectual circles in which most of the eminent men and women of their day met to socialize. It is interesting to note that all wrote letters and memoirs describing their encounters with intellectually stimulating peers: Clearly, their own social standing necessitated a concern with the position and image of women in society, but their recollections often seem somewhat hap4 The term scientist was only coined in the nineteenth century : according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it was first proposed in 1834 in William Whewell’s review of, curiously enough, Mary Somerville’s Connexion of the Physical Sciences in the Quarterly Review. The reviewer begins by deploring the fact that not only were “the students of books and things … estranged from each other in habit and feeling” but “the mathematician turns away from the chemist; the chemist from the naturalist.” This loss of unity, he thought, was best illustrated by the fact that the various members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science woefully lacked an umbrella term that could be applied to all of its members: “Philosophers was felt to be too wide and too lofty a term …; savans [sic] was rather assuming, besides being French instead of English; some ingenious gentleman proposed that, by analogy with artist, they might form scientist, … but that was not generally palatable; others attempted to translate the term by which members of similar associations in Germany have described themselves, but it was not found easy to find an equivalent for natur-forscher. The process of examination which it implies might suggest such undignified compounds as nature-poker, or nature-peeper, for these naturae curiosi; but these were indignantly rejected” (Whewell 59 – 60). The debate concerning the term scientist suggested by Whewell would rage on until the 1890s, by which time the term had established itself in spite of Whewell’s opponents.

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hazard and anecdotal. Instead of offering a stringent analysis of the rights and wrongs of women, they describe social gatherings and private meetings, freely praising or censuring their acquaintances – and occasionally also each other – in what amounts to quite a different way in which to “discover the human”. Kathryn Neeley explains the anecdotal nature of Mary Somerville’s Personal Recollections (1873) as a Victorian habit: “Like many other Victorians, [Somerville] devoted considerable effort to evaluating other people as companions and conversationalists” (177). The same, however, may be said for almost all the women considered here, and the habit seems to have been established well before the moral probing we associate with Victorian society. Hand in hand with the evaluation of acquaintances went a self-positioning within or without scientific circles, for or against the critical voices and conduct-books advising women on how to behave in public. With regard to women’s role in the sciences, much excellent research has been done over the last decades, and many names have been rescued from oblivion. Historians stress the fact that, in order to assess women’s role in the sciences adequately, the many women who acted as assistants, collaborators, scribes to men of science, corresponded with them and translated their books – presumably Harrison’s scientific wives and their daughters – should be taken into account (see Fara 10). During the eighteenth century, women as yet profited from the fact that many scientists still experimented at home: women who wished to or were asked to participate did not have to leave the private sphere to do so. Science was still a matter of conviviality, and scientifically minded men and women met and mingled in their various homes, even though, or perhaps because, women were excluded from the academies. As so often in the eighteenth century, family circles (such as the Edgeworths) or clusters of men and women with similar interests (e. g. the Lunar society and its environs) seemed to spring up everywhere, and these circles knew of each other, their members often paid visits to, or corresponded with, each other. It is, as Patricia Fara cautions, “impossible to discover how many women collaborated in experimental research and took part in dinner-party debates” (16) . For a woman to get at least a smattering of education in the sciences, however, she would have had to rely on books or else male family members and friends to teach her.5 Women who did receive some kind of scientific training usually did so at home, at the hands of fathers and sometimes brothers who practised scientific research – and who were often in need of inexpensive but well-trained assistants (see Fara 10 – 3). Recommending that boarding school girls be taught botany, chemistry and mineralogy, Erasmus Darwin could only regret the scarcity even 5 See Phillips 137. Compare also Mary Somerville’s account of her studies, scattered throughout her Personal Recollections (1873).

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of books to explain the rudiments of scientific learning to young women “of more inquiring minds,” and advised them to watch experiments performed by “itinerant philosophers” if they were intent on learning more about “astronomy, mechanicks, hydrostatics, and optics, with the curious addition of electricity and magnetism” (Darwin 42). Despite his advanced views, he still thought it necessary to apologize for bringing science into the curriculum at all: But as in male education the tedious acquirement of antient languages for the purpose of studying poetry and oratory is gradually giving way to the more useful cultivation of modern sciences, it may be of advantage to ladies of the rising generation to acquire an outline of similar knowledge; as they are in future life to become companions. (Darwin 44 – 5)

Even to Darwin, the best a young woman “of more inquiring mind” could hope for was to become a scientific wife. Botany was generally considered the field most useful to females as it was supposed to give them a whiff of fresh air as well as knowledge – despite the dangerous introduction to the sexual lives of plants provided by Linnæus, mostly kept out of the books aimed at a female readership (see Shteir 17 – 24). Numbers of books were published during the later eighteenth century explicitly to bring science to ‘the fair sex’, many of them written by women. Newton’s Principia, to give only one example, were first explained to the ladies by Francesco Algerotti, whose Il Newtonianismo per le dame (1737) was translated into English by the bluestocking Elizabeth Carter (see Schiebinger 44 – 65; Fara 88 – 105). Even if book learning alone may not make a scientist, these works prove that eighteenthcentury women were, on some basic level, allowed and even expected to partake in the advancement of the sciences. Patricia Phillips points out that, for a while at least, the sciences were considered to offer means of improvement to the female sex, inducing reverence and modesty, domesticity and even a “curative for depression” (x). . Science, as well as literature, was considered to be an art serving to polish and advance the cause of virtue. This link between science and politeness, stressed also in Harrison’s introductory poem, was an important asset to women hoping to be allowed to participate in scientific debates, as it was backed up by the claim promoted by eighteenth-century salon culture that women polished and softened men’s rougher natures.6 Historians have shown how women such as Priscilla Wakefield, Charlotte Smith or Jane Marcet profited from this link by being able to write scientific works for the young based on literary techniques such as the didactic dialogue between a motherly instructress and a virtuous young girl (see Phillips 78; 105 – 10). With the growing distinction between 6 Londa Schiebinger suggests that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries natural philosophy was a part of elite literary culture (see 65).

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academic and popular scientific writing in the early nineteenth century, however, women inevitably lost out. The more famous for their scientific discoveries the women were in their own day, the more they tended to be vilified and ridiculed by those who believed women should restrict their ambitions to their homes and families. To save them from such harm, learned women were put on pedestals by those who tried to further the women’s cause. Londa Schiebinger discusses the paradoxical iconography of science, showing how typical it was for artists to represent geometry, botany, physics or optics as muses guiding the male scientific explorer, so that the scientific pursuit of these ‘nymphs’ would have seemed properly to belong into the hands of men (119 – 29). Small wonder, then, that those in favour of granting women intellectual space to roam in made use of these images, too, and presented their models as virtuous muses and motherly heroines. Presumably, though, such pedestals served equally well to put off young women from pursuing similar studies, if they were not already deterred by the common warnings against learned ladies such as those given by John Gregory (15). In his review of Mary Somerville’s Connexions of the Physical Sciences (1834), William Whewell admits that the qualities of Somerville’s book, “where we find a real and thorough acquaintance with these branches of human knowledge, acquired with comparative ease, and possessed with unobtrusive simplicity,” have defeated his prejudices against female acquirements. And yet, he cannot help adding that “there can hardly fail, in such cases, to be something peculiar in the kind, as well as in the degree, of the intellectual character” (64). He can only think of two more women who have mastered the most abstract of sciences, mathematics – Hypatia of Alexandria and Maria Agnesi – and thus firmly positions Somerville among the lusus naturae. The scientific woman’s personal qualities were observed and weighed no less frequently than her discoveries, and judged even less objectively. Caroline Herschel’s fortunes illustrate the typical meanderings of the path leading an eighteenth-century woman to science. Nothing in her early Hanoverian days had promised future renown: she was kept at home by her mother and taught the usual female accomplishments such as needlework, destined, she recalled, to unpaid housework for life, since marriage, due to the marks of smallpox and the lack of a dowry, seemed out of her reach (see Herschel 46 – 7). Fortunately, though, her brother William, a successful musician and composer at Bath, needed an assistant at home and a singer for his concerts, and therefore proposed taking his sister to England in the summer of 1772. With the help of breakfast lessons by her brother, Herschel trained herself to become first singer in her brother’s oratorios. Soon, however, she was gently pressured into assisting his astronomical interests, and expected to act as housekeeper besides, “one care after another devolving upon” (50) her. She fed her brother when he was too busy polishing mirrors to dine, copied papers, learned English, studied math-

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ematics, kept fires, made coffee at night and trained the choir while he was giving lessons in astronomy to the ladies of Bath (55 – 9). In her autobiography she dryly remarks that she “became in time as useful a member of the workshop as a boy might be to his master in the first year of his apprenticeship” (55). Her sarcasm barely masks her anger, either at the menial tasks she was asked to perform – or at the fact that her scanty education did not enable her to do better. When in 1782 William Herschel’s discoveries with his newly devised large telescopes persuaded the King to employ him as Royal Astronomer at a salary of £200 per annum, the same amount that Frances Burney received as Keeper of the Robes to the Queen, Caroline followed her brother to Windsor, knowing that this move was the end of her career as a singer (Gärtner 167). In her autobiography, she describes her feelings to have been “anything but cheerful, for a [sic] found I was to be trained for an assistant Astronomer” (Herschel 71). She also complained about their cramped fortunes – William had made almost twice as much at Bath (69). And yet, Caroline once more adapted herself quickly to the new circumstances, having been taught that “it was only in the thought of having done our duty, that we could expect to find contentment” (42 – 3). Some five years later, after Caroline had discovered her first comets and nebulae and was busy preparing a new version of the Catalogue of Stars, William Herschel wrote a letter imploring Queen Charlotte to provide a salary for his sister, “by way of encouraging a female astronomer” (Brook 158 – 9). Caroline became the only woman in Britain to make a living out of astronomy – on £50 per year – and was promptly caricatured as a “female philosopher” in 1790.7 Herschel’s dedication to science was unusually austere. As a foreigner and a scientist, she might not have found it easy to be accepted in the social circles of her day, but her work ethics prevented her from even trying to gain admittance. Regretting the fact that she never had a friend in her life, she seems to have remained unaware of the chilling remarks she made about the people who visited her home and the few women she met socially. Obliged to tolerate the company of a young lady at Bath, for instance, Caroline acidly remembered her as “very little better than an idiot” (123). Even though she deplored the scanty education she herself had received, she made snide remarks about “two lady scholars” whose company her eldest brother Jacob delighted in (31). She compared herself to men rather than to women in a note she wrote to the Astronomer Royal, Dr Maskelyne, in 1798: “I own myself to be vain, because I would not wish to be singular : and was there ever a woman without vanity? or a man either? only with this 7 Hawkins, “The Female Philosopher Smelling Out the Comet,” British Museum (Brook 165). The salary seems to have been paid by George III, not Queen Charlotte. Caroline mentions her famous discoveries almost in passing, only hinting at the excitement that kept her out of bed, but the first quarterly payment of her salary, the first money she ever knew to be completely at her own disposal, was fondly remembered even in old age (Herschel 89).

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difference, that among gentlemen the commodity is generally styled ambition” (qtd. in Brook 9). She, too, was ambitious: when William was away, she continued to sweep the skies, and she announced her own findings to the leading scientists of her day. Part of a self-made family, her memoirs reveal that she was proud of what she had personally achieved. She does not seem to have considered joining the fight for women’s educational rights; indeed, she does not even seem to have been curious about women who excelled in other branches of the studies she pursued with unceasing interest throughout her long life. Among the visitors Caroline Herschel so much deplored as they disrupted her daily routine was, in 1799, the Edgeworth family. Richard Lovell Edgeworth rarely missed an opportunity to visit scientific sites and would reproduce and devise experiments for the instruction of his many children. His Practical Education, co-written with his daughter Maria, offered easy experiments in chemistry for all children, girls as well as boys. After his death in 1817, his daughters and fourth wife kept up the family interest in science and scientific circles. They even visited France to move in the scientific salons superseding the literary ones in the early nineteenth century, but considered the English variety more to their taste (see Colvin 1979: xxii). Much in the traditional spirit of the Enlightenment, the Edgeworths spent their days visiting observatories and inspecting prisons and hospitals. The daughters went to public lectures whenever they could, but, to Maria’s annoyance, by 1822 the public lectures given by members of the Royal Institution and the Royal Society were no longer open to women: “With Sir Humphrey Davy’s grand Academical Conversaziones you know we can have nothing to do as no ladies are admitted” (to Mrs E., 4 April 1822, Colvin 1971: 383). Indeed, according to a biographer, “Maria was more readily responsive to scientific than to literary imagination” (Colvin 1971: xxiii). In many respects, the Edgeworths were an unusual family : unusual in their structure, their habits, their talents. However, the fact that their many friends and correspondents were men and women of similar interests indicates that there were many more like-minded families. To them, and to each other, the Edgeworths wrote letters detailing not only the nature of experiments, but also the personality of those performing them. In spite of their own broad-minded interests, they, too, were somewhat influenced by the prevailing prejudices against learned women. Thus Maria reported to her stepmother on having met the astronomer and mathematician Mary Somerville, who would become a lifelong friend: [We were introduced to] Mrs. Somerville – the famous learned Mrs. Somerville – nothing learned or famous in her appearance – little slight made… . She is timid not disqualifyingly timid but naturally modest with a degree of self possession through it which prevents her appearing in the least awkward and gives her all the advantage of her understanding at the same time that it adds a prepossessing charm to her manner

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and takes off all dread of her superior scientific learning (to Mrs E., 16 January 1822, Colvin 1971: 321).

To her amazement, Somerville and her friend, the chemist Mme Marcet, by no means considered themselves above “household minutiae” and happily advised their visitors about “all economical points” (to Mrs E., 4 March 1822, Colvin 1971: 361).8 Maria seems genuinely surprised by the affability and intellectual capacity of the women she met among the Somerville circle: “It happens that many of the wives of the scientific men and several of the scientific ladies themselves are remarkably agreeable, have taste and talents for painting and music and for good conversation” (to Mrs Ruxton, 10 April 1822, Colvin 1971: 389). Far from being awed, however, the Edgeworths could also be quite cutting in their remarks on the leading female scientists of the day. Thus, Charlotte Edgeworth reports back to a friend on having met the famous chemist Marie Paulze Lavoisier : “She is a large masculine woman and luckily for the men of science that surround her over twice a week, she possesses a pair of handsome legs which she knows how to betray” (to Mrs King, 29 December 1802, Colvin 1979: 63). Obviously, the Edgeworths weighed their acquaintance not according to their scientific worth – even if they were first attracted by that – but according to their personal amenability. William Herschel’s son John, whom Maria Edgeworth got to know late in life, impressed her by being “one of the cleverest and most amiable” young men she had ever met (to Mrs E., 12 June 1822, Colvin 1971: 412). He proved to be an excellent teacher : In one respect [his explanations are] more agreeable to the infirmities of my mind in that he permits similies and allusions and nonsense to mix with sense in explanations in a most refreshing style. For instance in explaining to me Newton’s theory of the fits of easy and difficult transmission of rays of light he supposed an hypochondriac patient who had taken it into his head that he could not go through a door with his right foot foremost. … This illustration was followed soon afterwards by admirable remarks on the dangers of allegoric expressions in science (to Harriet Butler, 29 March 1831, Colvin 1971: 501 – 2).

Edgeworth also devoured Somerville’s books explaining the Mechanism of the Heavens (1831) and the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1834), at one point feeling like “boa constrictor after a full meal” as she told their author (qtd. in Neeley 86). Somerville and Edgeworth kept up a lifelong friendship and correspondence, highly valuing each other’s skills and talents, but their background and education could not have been more different. Where Edgeworth was 8 Maria’s younger sister Harriet admired a similar tendency in her : “[A]fter the deepest arguments with most celebrated and the most scientific, she goes to order our gowns” (qtd. in Colvin 1971: xxv).

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spurred on and praised by a versatile father, Somerville was kept back not only by her family but also by a natural shyness which impeded her every move: she did not even dare ask for books. Nevertheless, she was granted some lessons in accomplishments deemed ladylike and spent her free time – early mornings and late nights – in learning Latin and Greek, algebra and astronomy. Having suffered her shyness to impede her progress in youth, she was no longer to be restrained as a widow and continued her course in spite of the disapproval of relatives. A remarkable self-taught woman, she did choose her second husband carefully : having experienced the setbacks of a spouse who did not believe women capable of intellectual efforts, she refused several offers and eventually accepted her cousin, the progressive William Somerville, whose pride in her achievements was noted even by her contemporaries (Somerville 263). During her long life, Somerville was careful not to offend the establishment (see Neeley 204), but she does not seem to have held back with her opinions concerning the disgraceful state of female education. In her Personal Recollections, she frequently rails against the limitations placed on intellectual women (23) and was outspoken about what she saw as women’s main drawback: “Age has not abated my zeal for the emancipation of my sex from the unreasonable prejudice too prevalent in Great Britain against a literary and scientific education for women,” she commented (278). She proudly claimed her allegiance to the women’s suffrage movement and praised John Stuart Mill’s On the Subjection of Women, supporting petitions to parliament for female suffrage and university grants (Somerville 277 – 80). She did not suffer fools gladly, feeling no compunction in putting women down who merely tried to pass for learned. Lady Davy, the wife of Sir Humphrey, she noted with disapproval, “like many of us had more pretension to the things she could not do well than to those she really could” (Somerville 202). With the exception of Mrs Chapone’s Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (1774), she openly despised conduct books and their writers: It was the fashion of a set of ladies such as Mrs Hannah More, Mrs Elizabeth Hamilton and Mrs Grant of Laggan to write on female education. I detested their books for they imposed such restraints and duties that they seemed to have been written to please men. (74)

Relations with her husband’s sister, who wrote to her on her marriage asking her to give up her studies and become a useful wife, never became cordial. And yet, Somerville was quite proud to record that she never neglected her household duties and gleefully noted the astonishment of those blinded by the prevailing prejudices when they found out that she was actually quite as capable of making currant jelly as any other housewife (74). However, coordinating her household and her career was an effort: “I rose early and made such arrange-

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ments with regard to my children and family affairs that I had time to write afterwards; not, however, without many interruptions. A man can always command his time under plea of business, a woman is not allowed any such excuse” (133). Like Jane Austen, she had to write in the common drawing room, training herself not to be distracted even by the noise of her daughters’ practicing scales (133).9 Her daughter Martha commented on the “great changes in public opinion” her mother had lived to see, and treated the prejudices she had met with as a curiosity of the past: My mother … used to remark that a commonly well-informed woman of the present day would have been looked upon as a prodigy of learning in her youth, and that even till quite lately many considered that if women were to receive the solid education men enjoy, they would forfeit much of their feminine grace and become unfit to perform their domestic duties.

Nonetheless, she, too, felt roused to defend her mother from any aspersions that could possibly be cast upon her as a scientific, “masculine” woman: My mother herself was one of the brightest examples of the fallacy of this old-worldly theory, for no one was more thoroughly and gracefully feminine than she was, both in manner and appearance; and, as I have already mentioned, no amount of scientific labour ever induced her to neglect her home duties. (Somerville 279 – 80)

Somerville might have been the ideal representative of the scientific wife: a happy wife and mother, mindful of her household duties, supportive of her husband despite a laudable desire to train herself in scientific thinking. She did not overstep the boundaries of femininity ; and even her scientific achievements could still be cast within the old mould of motherly advice-giving, “consistent with the notion of woman as moral guide” (Neeley 33). Perhaps Somerville’s dislike of conduct books stemmed from a similarly annoying comparison. However, according to Kathryn Neeley, Somerville was anything but a mere “scientific wife”: Somerville’s greatest resistance to the prevailing norms for women was that she did not see the object of her intellectual development as part of her role as a wife. She pursued science to develop her own ability, pursue her own curiosity, and demonstrate that women were capable of assuming a higher place in the intellectual world than that usually assigned to them. She enjoyed the companionship and support of her husband in the effort, but her career was not coextensive with her marriage. (33)

Mary Somerville valued especially those whose interests expanded over a broad range of both the arts and the sciences (see Neeley 177); she herself was an accomplished landscape painter and avid reader throughout her long life. In her 9 See Phillips (154) for the difficulties many women encountered if they tried to absent themselves from the family circle in order to study.

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memoirs, she remembers Maria Edgeworth, among others, for being “warmhearted and kind, a charming companion, with all the liveliness and originality of an Irishwoman” (Somerville 126). Her human ideal, however, she, too, found in Sir John Herschel: Sir John is by much the highest and finest character I have ever met with; the most gentlemanly and polished mind, combined with the most exalted morality, and the utmost of human attainment. His view of everything is philosophic, and at the same time highly poetical, in short, he combines every quality that is admirable and excellent with the most charming modesty. (219)

Unlike the Somervilles and Edgeworths, Frances Burney did not move in scientific circles, although she met quite a few of the eminent scientists of her day in the literary salons she preferred. She had just begun her depressing stint as Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte, whom she revered despite the fact that she deplored the honour conferred on her, when Caroline Herschel discovered her first comet on 1 August 1786. William soon presented himself to exhibit the find to the Royal Family, and Burney was invited to accompany them. “The comet was very small, and had nothing grand or striking in its appearance; but it is the first lady’s comet, and I was very desirous to see it,” Burney noted. She was far more impressed by William Herschel’s kindness in showing her “new-discovered universes” as if she had been a “sister-astronomer” (Burney 1843, vol. 3: 130 – 31). Ayear later, she met Caroline Herschel, too: “I was equally pleased with his Sister, whom I had wished to see very much, for her great celebrity in her Brother’s Science. She is very little, very gentle, very modest, and very ingenuous: and her manners are those of a Person unhackneyed and unawed by the World.” Equally “unawed” by the famous astronomer, Burney immediately proceeded to ask her “if she was still comet-hunting, or content now with the Moon?” (to Susanna Phillips, 17 September 1787, Sabor and Troide 252). Despite her flippancy, Burney was intrigued by the ingenious working methods of brother and sister, and, more important to her, their integrity of character. Years later, she would still remember Herschel’s excellence: “There, indeed, is knowledge & pre-eminence breath-ful!” (Burney 1972 – 84, vol. 4: 45). Generally, though, she evinced no particular awe when in company with natural philosophers. On the contrary, male scientists seem to have offered a welcome opportunity for exercising her wit: on being introduced to the French astronomer M. de Lalande, Burney records: “I could not help thinking it lucky for the planets, stars, and sun, they were not bound to hear his comments, though obliged to undergo his calculations.” (Burney 1843, vol. 4: 202) On Lalande’s leaving her to see Dr. Maskelyne’s observatory, she quipped: “Well! I have had him first in mine!” (Burney 1843, vol. 4: 204) Even William Herschel did not escape her censure on his marriage to Mary Pitt in 1788: “His wife seems good-

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natured: she was rich too! and astronomers are as able as other men to discern that gold can glitter as well as stars.” (Burney 1843, vol. 4: 220) Not surprisingly, Burney rarely describes scientists in her novels. To her, quite a few of these new-fangled scientific theories seemed ridiculous, especially when allied to old-fashioned notions concerning women’s nature. In her works, the allegedly objective stance taken by scientists who thought themselves above the subject they chose to observe turns out to yield only the predictable results of prejudice. Herbert Klein argues that the early modern novel generally “explores the tension between the (objective) constraints of the scientific world picture and the (subjective) relationship of the narrator to the narrated events,” stressing that this is not to say the narrators intended to position themselves as scientists, but that they “maintain attitudes which are representative of the scientific world view and its method” (280). It is not only the narrator, however, who is caught between the world of facts and that of opinions, the characters may be equally concerned, and can thus be used to convey some criticism of the new scientific individual, as well as of scientific ‘objectivity’ and experiments concerning the nature of human beings. Burney poked fun at the precepts introduced by seventeenth-century scientists such as Thomas Willis, who had revolutionized medicine by being determined “not to pin my faith on the received opinions of others, nor on the suspicions and guesses of my own mind, but for the future to believe nature and ocular demonstrations” (qtd. in Zimmer 174). In her novel Camilla, the observational skills required by the new scientific methods are adapted even to the process of choosing a wife. The hero, Edgar, is advised to watch his beloved most carefully before asking her to be his wife, in case she turns out to have some previously unsuspected “radical, inherent failing” (Burney 1972: 671). Even though he has known her from the time they both were children, he is told: “You must study her, from this moment, with new eyes, new ears, and new thoughts” (159). Yet his mentor, Dr Marchmont, is unable to see that to be able to do so the student would have to free himself from prejudices first. Instead, he blithely recommends the old-fashioned patriarchal view: “Whatever she does, you must ask yourself this question: ‘Should I like such behaviour in my wife?’“ (159 – 60). The maxim is punished within the novel as it fails to take into account the reasons and feelings of the bride-to-be, which can be ascertained only by means of conversation, not observation. Even though Edgar is soon afraid of losing her through “these experiments” (671), he is encouraged to persevere. His mentor is in fact a scholar of the classics, not a scientist, but he relies on an inductive reasoning that turns out to be flawed, as it is based on false premises. The personal experience his theory relies on is coloured by suspicion, as Dr Marchmont will find out to his cost: “regretting the false light given by the spirit of comparison, in the hypothesis which he had

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formed from individual experience, [he] acknowledged its injustice, its narrowness, and its arrogance” (913). In Burney’s opinion no observer, however objective he may think himself, is free from a liability to prepossession (see 703). Unlike the poet quoted at the beginning of this paper, Burney saw an ever-widening gap between the questions “is s/he a good scientist?” and “is s/he a good person?” To her, as to the Edgeworths, moral integrity was more important than scientific excellence. Decades later, she would still deplore the pre-eminent position science had gained even in education, when a governess “of the purest Morals, & a nearly exalted integrity” was no longer enough, “now, Botany, also, was necessary, & mineralogy, & metalogy, & shellelogy, & Natural history, & chymistry, & all the ologies” (Burney 1972 – 84, vol. 11: 659). In her opinion, the proper study of mankind remained man: “What, at last, so diversified as man? what so little to be judged by his fellow?” (Burney 1972: 913). The notion that by achieving scientific success women helped to “polish life” is largely absent in the writings of the women discussed in this paper. However, the “moral weeding” of their gardens was a major occupation. It is a striking coincidence that the two most famous female astronomers of their time – Caroline Herschel and Mary Somerville – decided to write their memoirs.10 The results – the one almost exclusively remembering her work and her brother, the other preferring to tell anecdotes about the people she met – could hardly be more different, except in two major aspects: both dwell on the difficulties they encountered when aspiring for a better education, and both present themselves as basically self-contained and exceptionally hard-working, devoting the time usually allotted to rest to their studies. In this respect, both did see themselves as role models, at least to some extent. This was picked up by reviewers: the success of Somerville’s autodidactic efforts were praised only to stress that women obviously had all the advantages necessary to study but only lacked the will to do so, and that they were clearly accepted in scientific circles if their achievements were up to the mark (see Neeley 207 – 10). The Athenaeum even declared her memoirs to prove “that the true path to power for women is not to be found in the rough road of popularity, but in devotion to the duties of the domestic home, and an unobtrusive, but persistent searching after knowledge” (qtd. in Neeley 208). For the four women discussed here, the need to recollect and redefine one’s life, to show to the world who was the person behind the discoveries, the distinguished successes, the important work achieved, seems to have been a strong 10 Herschel and Somerville never seem to have met: when Somerville visited William Herschel’s observatory, Caroline was abroad (Somerville 86). However, on being elected to an honorary membership of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1835 along with Caroline Herschel, Somerville paid tribute to her colleague: “[T]o be associated with so distinguished an astronomer was in itself an honour” (141).

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inducement to write memoirs and not to destroy old letters. The selves presented are shy but sturdy, strictly chaste and moral according to the standards of their own day, yet digressing the boundaries set by society almost as a matter of course. It seems to have been the best, if not the only strategy to achieve success and avoid notoriety.

References Primary Literature Burney, Frances. Camilla: or, A Picture of Youth. Ed. Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1972. Print. – The Diary and Letters of Mme D’Arblay, 1778 – 1840. Ed. Charlotte Barrett. 6 vols. London, 1843. – Frances Burney : Journals and Letters. Ed. Peter Sabor and Lars E. Troide. London: Penguin, 2001. Print. – The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (Mme d’Arblay), 1752 – 1840. Ed. Joyce Hemlow. 12 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1972 – 84. Print. Darwin, Erasmus. A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education at Boarding Schools [1797]. Repr. London: Routledge/ Thoemmes, 1992 (History of British Educational Thought). Print. Edgeworth, Maria. Maria Edgeworth: Letters from England, 1813 – 1844. Ed. Christina Colvin. Oxford: Clarendon, 1971. Print. – Maria Edgeworth in France and Switzerland: Selections from the Edgeworth Family Letters. Ed. Christina Colvin. Oxford: Clarendon, 1979. Print. Gregory, John. A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters. Repr. in Female Education in the Age of Enlightenment. Vol 1. Intr. Janet Todd. 3 vols. London: Pickering & Chatto, 1996. Print. Harrison, James (ed.). The Lady’s Poetical Magazine, or: Beauties of British Poetry. Vol. 1. London, 1781. Print. Herschel, Caroline. Caroline Herschel’s Autobiographies. Ed. Michael Hoskin. Cambridge: Science History Publications, 2003. Print. Somerville, Mary. Queen of Science: Personal Recollections of Mary Somerville. Ed. Dorothy McMillan, Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2001. Print. Whewell, William. “On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences by Mrs. Somerville.” Quarterly Review 51 (1834). 54 – 68. Print.

Secondary Literature Bonnell, Thomas F. The Most Disreputable Trade: Publishing the Classics of English Poetry, 1765 – 1810. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print. Chambers, Neil, ed. The Scientific Correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks, 1765 – 1820. 6 vols. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007. Print.

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Brook, Claire. The Comet Sweeper : Caroline Herschel’s Astronomical Ambition. Cambridge: Icon Books, 2007. Print. Fara, Patricia. Pandora’s Breeches: Women, Science, and Power in the Enlightenment. London: Pimlico, 2004. Print. Gärtner, Heinz. Er durchbrach die Schranken des Himmels: Das Leben des Friedrich Wilhelm Herschel. Leipzig: Edition Leipzig, 1996. Print. Hedley, Olwen. Queen Charlotte. London: Murray, 1975. Print. Klein, Herbert G.. “The Narrative I as Scientific Observer in the Early English Novel.” Proceedings of the Anglistentag in Gießen 1997. Ed. Raimund Borgmeier, Herbert Grabes and Andreas H. Jucker. Trier : WVT, 1998. 277 – 87. Print. Myers, Sylvia Harcstark. The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990. Print. Orr, Clarissa Campbell. “Queen Charlotte: ‘Scientific Queen.’” In: Queenship in Britain, 1660 – 1837: Royal Patronage, Court Culture and Dynastic Politics. Ed. Clarissa Campbell Orr. Manchester und New York: Manchester UP, 2002. 236 – 66. Print. Neeley, Kathryn A. Mary Somerville: Science, Illumination, and the Female Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Print. Phillips, Patricia. The Scientific Lady : A Social History of Women’s Scientific Interests 1520 – 1918. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1992. Print. Schiebinger, Londa. The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1991. Print. Shteir, Ann B.. Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science. Baltimore und London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Print. Zimmer, Carl. Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain – and How It Changed the World. London: Arrow books, 2004. Print.

Sladja Blazan

Immanuel Kant’s “One Great Republic” – From Spirit Theory to Moral Philosophy

But this, you see, is what I was saying – that no words can explain how either the dying are said to live, or how the dead are said, even after death, to be in death. (St Augustine 421)

“The superstitious man is to the rogue what the slave is to the tyrant,” Voltaire writes in his Philosophical Dictionary of 1764, marking superstition as one of the central interests of Enlightenment thinking (138). Juxtaposing the so-called dark sciences with the illumination of rationalism, the Enlightenment found a worthy antagonist necessary for its self-proliferation. In accordance with the demands of experimental reason, particularly the belief in ghosts was banned in the course of the eighteenth century. More recently, scholars such as Terry Castle and Simon During have pointed out that, far from disappearing, the very same ghosts found a new home within the human imagination. But how exactly did this shift take place? The answer comes from a highly unexpected source. In 1766, two years after Voltaire’s encyclopedia of reason entered intellectual discussions across Europe, one of the most unlikely spirit-seers decided to engage with the other side of reason in order to accommodate “the impetuous appeals from known and unknown friends” (Kant 1899: 39) by dedicating a whole treatise to analyzing ghosts. It is no-one else than Immanuel Kant who, even if anonymously, enters the discussion on spectrality, ultimately enfranchizing ghosts from their religious context by asking the simple question: “just what kind of a thing that is about which these people think they understand so much” (Kant 1899: 41). Within the secure framework of an anonymously published treatise, Kant produced one of the most important documents of what can be called ghost theory, Träume eines Geistersehers erläutert durch Träume der Metaphysik (1766, Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Illustrated by Dreams of Metaphysics). While the philosopher himself went on to become one of the favourite revenants repeatedly appearing in twentieth century scholarship, his theory of spirits within which he connects apparitional sightings with ethics can be understood as an (often unacknowledged) predecessor for a large body of work within the currently

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growing field of ghost studies. In what follows I will demonstrate that Kant’s occupation with spirits and ghosts in his early writing can be understood as an unusual response to the eighteenth-century adversarial debate between mechanists and vitalists that did not only influence contemporary readings of the human demand for conjuring spirits; this early work also entails some of the central ideas developed in Kant’s critical writings on morality which ultimately exposes the ethical motivation behind spectrality. Fleshing out the connection between a general “sense of morality” and the “conjuration of spirits”, using telling echoes of Kant’s pre-critical writings on spirits-seeing within his later critical work on moral philosophy, I will highlight some of the less discussed complexities involved in the discovery of the subject in the eighteenth century : the relation between ethics and the supernatural.

The Immaterial World On August 10, 1763 Kant writes to Charlotte von Knobloch: “I await with longing the book that Swedenborg will publish in London. I have made every provision for receiving it as soon as it leaves the press” (1899: 156). Kant was said to be one of the first customers to rush out and acquire a copy of Swedenborg’s Arcana Coelestia, only to follow the purchase with a slighting review in the form of his Dreams of a Spirit-Seer. Addressing the teachings of the famous mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688 – 1772), Kant pronouncedly states that the dedication of his time to “spirits” is due to a wish to “expose” this “Arch-Spiritseer among all the spiritseers” (1899: 93) and to show the world his rightful place as “a candidate for a hospital” (1899: 93). With unusually bitter scorn and cynical wit, Kant accuses the “hero,” whose name is now germanized to “Herr Schwedenberg”, to be nothing but “the Arch-Dreamer among all the dreamers” (1899: 93). As has been noted by Moses Mendelssohn as early as 1767, it is not clear if Kant intended to publish the treatise in the context of spirit-seeing or in order to expose the inadequacies of metaphysics (see Kant 2002: 13). Kant excuses his uncomfortable project with the fact that “he had bought a big work [Swedenborg’s Arcana Coelestia], and, what is worse, he had read it, and this labor was not to be thrown away” (Kant 1899: 39). The reason Kant offers for the aggressive censure of this work is that “the style of the author is dull” (1899: 50). Certainly a reasonable motivation, but hardly sufficient to explain the high level of energy and interest invested in this mission, which eventually proved to be quite effective. Swedenborg’s eight-volume work sold only four copies in the first ten years after its publication, and Kant’s reaction is at least partially responsible for the scarcity of its readers. In retrospect, Swedenborg seems to have found an impeccable reader in Kant.

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The markedly irritated tone kept throughout Dreams of a Spirit-Seer did not stop the advocate of reason to interlace his review with detailed theories of human imagination and its function within an ethical space of cohabitation. Current research has demonstrated that the many correspondences between his own work and Swedenborg’s writings must have been disturbing to Kant, which also might account for his refusal to sign this treatise. As has been pointed out most notably by Florschütz, even the expression “the “Realm of Ends” [“Reich der Zwecke”], traditionally referred to as the “Kingdom of Ends”, is a concept first developed by “the Arch-Spiritseer” Emanuel Swedenborg under the very same name.1 As a central element of moral philosophy, the “Kingdom of Ends” is the spirit-world in Swedenborg’s Arcana Coelestia, the publication that provoked the emotional reaction in the otherwise careful philosopher. Parallels between Swedenborg’s theories and Kant’s own work on transcendental idealism – the dualistic account of the cosmos, the differentiation in terms of space and time, the human as subject to spiritual and material laws, the “Kingdom of Ends” – have been, if only sporadically, explored by other scholars.2 And one must continue to raise, if not the spirits, then the question as to what extent Swedenborg haunts Kant’s oeuvre – pure and practical reason. But instead of focusing on this nevertheless promising conjecture, I will move a step further and highlight the correspondences within Kant’s own oeuvre, namely between his pre-critical work on spirits and the work of his critical phase. At once disavowed and ridiculed, Kant’s work on spirits continues to haunt his purportedly least ghostly elaborations, his work on morality. First I will need to delineate what Kant decides to term “the spirit world” in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer. In the introduction to this publication Kant accuses every writer who dares to think seriously about spirits and ghosts to be stuck in “the limbo of vanity”, only to proceed by offering to his readers a possible theory of spirits himself. In his admission that he does not know what spirits (Geister) and ghosts (Gespenster) are, Kant nevertheless demonstrates how it is possible to understand what is impossible to know (1899: 54). Safely cloaked in a hypothetical theory, he defines spirits as immaterial beings that have reason: “beings 1 On Kant’s troubling relation to Swedenborg see Florschütz 1992 and 1993. 2 Dreams of a Spirit-Seer received a proper critical attention only recently, most notably by Alison Laywine and Gregory R. Johnson. The German research group “Emanuel Swedenborg’s Position Within the European Enlightenment and Esoteric Discourse of the 18th Century” is exploring the connection between Kant and Swedenborg as part of the “Interdisciplinary Center for European Enlightenment Studies” at Martin-Luther-University HalleWittenberg.” Please see the center’s publication edited by Stengel 2008. See also Weissberg 1990. The relationship between Swedenborg and Kant bears many noteworthy and intriguing facets yet to be explored; particularly the question of Kant’s hauntedness, as Avital Ronell describes the significance for our reading of intellectual history through the work of recurring influences (see Ronell).

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who do not possess the quality of impenetrability, and who never form a solid whole, no matter how many you unite. Simple beings of this kind would be called immaterial beings, and, if they have reason, spirits” (Kant 1899: 44).3 This theorem does not imply that apparitions engage the domain of the possible; rather, while spirits are “not yet conceived”, they can be recognized (1899: 46). This working definition highlights the essential role of the spirit-seer, who appears already in the title as the actual object of inquiry – the one who can recognize the spirit. Possibly following the lead of philosophers such as Joseph Glanvill, Kant presents the topic of spirits as a metaphysical question, whereas metaphysics is understood as the science of the limitations of human reason (see Glanvill 1978). Kant’s theory of spirits, thus, circulates around human cognition. The peculiar laws of ghostly operations are hypothetically presented as external to human beings and described as “pneumatic” (Kant 2002: 5).4 These pneumatic operations can instrumentalize bodies as mediums in the material world, in which case Kant specifies that these laws must be considered to be “organic” (Kant 1899: 56). In this way, he differentiates within the spirit world between the world of material absence and immaterial presence. This dualism finds a correspondence in the human being, who merges the two in the form of an earthly spiritual existence within a somatic presence. The human is connected to both worlds. Insofar as the “soul” of a person is united with a body to form a “personal unit”, it senses only the material, while it receives “influxes” from the immaterial world (Kant 1899: 60). Kant delineates the separation and gathers the assemblage of immaterial beings under the phrase “the immaterial world” or mundus intelligibilis (1899: 56). This immaterial world, when situated within the human soul, can merge with a physical presence to form a “person”: Thus it would happen that man’s soul would already in this life have to take its place among the spiritual substances of the universe according to its moral state, just as, according to the laws of motion, the matter of the universe arranges itself into an order conformable to its material forces. (1899: 66; my italics)

Man is part of the immaterial world according to the “moral state” of the soul within the body. Upon death this union ceases to exist, “the community in which it at all times stands with spiritual natures alone remains and would reveal itself to its consciousness through clear intuition [Anschauung].”5 During life both 3 “Wesen also, welche die Eigenschaft der Undurchdringlichkeit nicht an sich haben, und deren so viele, als man auch will, vereinigt niemals ein solides Ganze ausmachen. Einfache Wesen von dieser Art werden immaterielle Wesen und, wenn sie Vernunft haben, Geister genannt werden” (Kant 1977: 928). 4 Goerwitz uses the expression “spiritual laws” but Johnson and Magee’s translation as “pneumatic” is closer to the original “pneumatische” and “organische Regeln” (Kant 1977, 928). 5 “Die menschliche Seele würde daher schon in dem gegenwärtigen Leben als verknüpft mit

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the material and the spiritual presences are united in the human body. After death the material shell is lost and the spiritual presence continues to exist in a now conscious manner. Kant offers a seemingly simple conclusion to this immaterial materialism. In his theory, which exposes the centrality of the living human being to spirit-seeing, he explains that because it is the living who conjure up the pneumatic spirits they come in thinkable forms. Constrained by the limits of our own imagination and language, these spirits with a body, or ghosts, inevitably appear to resemble humans: In this way, ideas that are communicated through spiritual influx clothe themselves in the signs of the language that the human being has in normal use; the felt presence of a spirit clothes itself in the image of a human figure; the order and beauty of the immaterial world clothe themselves in fancies that normally delight our senses in life. (Kant 2002: 25)6

Kant’s personal struggle with Swedenborg could have been put aside as an amusing episode in the philosopher’s haunted life, had he not moved on to apply a large part of the terminology developed in this hypothetical treatise to his groundbreaking theories of morality. The above presented provisional summary of Kant’s “Part First: Which is Dogmatic” of his “strangest book”7 already demonstrates how a working definition of the immaterial presence when united with a human body can lead to a theory of human “intuition” – a concept that will later become central to Kant’s work. Kant imagines the seat of the spirit to be the human, who finds a place among spiritual substances according to the “moral state”. Almost two decades after dismissing his enquiry by acknowledging to his readers that he “does not know” if “there are spirits” or even “what the word ‘spirit’ [signifies]” (1899: 54), Kant once again began to think about the zweien Welten zugleich müssen angesehen werden, von welchen sie, so ferne sie zu persönlicher Einheit mit einem Körper verbunden ist, die materielle allein klar empfindet, dagegen als ein Glied der Geisterwelt die reine Einflüsse immaterieller Naturen empfängt und erteilet, so daß, so bald jene Verbindung aufgehört hat, die Gemeinschaft, darin sie jederzeit mit geistigen Naturen stehet, allein übrig bleibt, und sich ihrem Bewußtsein zum klaren Anschauen eröffnen müßte.” (Kant 1977: 940) 6 At the risk of appearing inconsistent, I chose to quote the translation by Johnson and Magee in this case, as the translation by Goerwitz is simply wrong. Both translations are problematic, which makes it necessary to weigh them against each other in each individual quote. The original reads: “Auf diese Art würden Ideen, die durch einen geistigen Einfluß mitgeteilt sind, sich in die Zeichen derjenigen Sprache einkleiden, die der Mensch sonsten im Gebrauch hat, die empfundene Gegenwart eines Geistes in das Bild einer menschlichen Figur, Ordnung und Schönheit der immateriellen Welt in Phantasien, die unsere Sinne sonst im Leben vergnügen, u.s.w.” (Kant, Werke: 949). Further translations: Transl. John Manolesco. Dreams of a Spirit Seer. New York: Vantage Press, 1969; Transl. David E. Walford with Ralf Meerbote. Theoretical Philosophy, 1755 – 1770. Ed. David E. Walford and Ralf Meerbote. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992: 301 – 59. 7 In his introduction Gregory N. Johnson calls Dreams “Kant’s strangest book.”

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assemblage of immaterial beings that is gathered under the phrase “the immaterial world or mundus intelligibilis” (1899: 56), now, however, immediately in the context of morality. This central phrase that designates the spirit world in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer reappears in Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals), but is now “a world of rational beings (mundus intelligibilis)” (Kant 1977, 55). Thus, during Kant’s famous incubation phase there has been a shift from the spirit world to the rational world, a shift from ghostliness to morality.8 The significance of this reactivation of spectral vocabulary within the realm of ethics cannot be overstressed and, hence, will excuse my urge to reformulate what has already been said: Kant’s precritical “immaterial world” does not reappear as irrational in his critical work, but as the rational world or mundus intelligibilis. This pivotal move makes it necessary to revise Kant’s rather personal dispute with one of the most influential mystics of all times. The language developed in this unusually personal publication is reactivated for a later work intended for a general readership untrained in the history of ethical philosophy with the aim of nothing less than providing humanity with an explanation of the human conception of morality. The fact that Kant reaches back to his spectral vocabulary highlights the trust that he must have had in its expressiveness.9 So what exactly did Kant refuse to sign, only to reactivate it in his most influential later work?

Secret Power In Kant’s spirit theory the living receive “influxes” from the spirits of the dead and the spirits of the living which guide their relation toward other human beings. This “speculation and care of idle men” – as Kant himself called any work on ghosts and spirits – first of all addresses human relations (amongst the living as well as between the living and the dead) (Kant 1899: 121). Taking his reader by the hand, Kant offers a first step in (hypothetically) understanding the ghostliness of a “person”, which requires an analysis of connecting points between the spiritual existence and the somatic presence. In the attempt to trace this nexus, he begins with the impulses that are external to human beings, as they originate in the immaterial world. To these “incentives” (Triebe) or “secret power” (geheime Macht) Kant will keep returning to in his later work. In Dreams we read:

8 Kant’s famous “silent decade” is a period of 11 years (1770 – 1781) during which he refused to publish (Werkmeister 1979). 9 Jean-Luc Nancy demonstrated how important language and style was for Kant (see Nancy 2008).

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A secret power requires us to adjust our intentions to the welfare of others, or according to this alien will, although this often happens grudgingly and in strong conflict with our selfish inclination; thus the point at which the vectors of our drives run together is not merely in us, but rather there are powers that move us in wills other than ours. (Kant 1899: 20; my italics)10

In Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals this becomes: For we like to flatter ourselves with a pretended nobler motive, while in fact even the strictest examinations can never lead us entirely behind the secret incentives, for when moral worth is in question it is not a matter of actions which one sees but of their inner principles which one does not see.11 (my italics )

Both “secret powers” generated from the spiritual world and “secret incentives” that originate in the unknown are explained as a manipulative subconscious power that radiates from the will of the other, dead or alive. For Kant, spiritual influxes have always been connected to the idea that the conflict between seeking to please ourselves and seeking approval from “a community of all thinking beings” is what informs our actions (Kant 1899: 64). He concludes that this presence is a “secret power”, an impulse which leads to actions “often done unwillingly, and [it] conflicts strongly with our selfish inclination” (Kant 1899: 63). There are powers other than our own that move us – which implies that humans “are dependent upon the rule of the will of the all [Regel des allgemeinen Willens], and thence arises in the community of all thinking beings a moral unity [moralische Einheit]” (Kant 1899: 64).12 The moral unity in Kant’s later theory functions according to his early hypothetical “pneumatic laws” (Kant 2002: 5). The pressure to coordinate our egotistic tendencies with the will of this thinking community is a “moral feeling [das sittliche Gefühl] that originates in spiritual 10 “Eine geheime Macht nötiget uns, unsere Absicht zugleich auf anderer Wohl oder nach fremder Willkür zu richten, ob dieses gleich öfters ungern geschieht, und der eigennützigen Neigung stark widerstreitet, und der Punkt, wohin die Richtungslinien unserer Triebe zusammenlaufen, ist also nicht bloß in uns, sondern es sind noch Kräfte, die uns bewegen, in dem Wollen anderer außer uns.” (Kant 1977: 943) 11 “… es kann aber daraus gar nicht mit Sicherheit geschlossen werden, dass wirklich gar kein geheimer Antrieb der Selbstliebe unter der bloßen Vorspiegelung jener Idee die eigentliche bestimmende Ursache des Willens gewesen sei, dafür wir denn gerne uns mit einem uns fälschlich angemaßten edleren Bewegungsgrunde schmeicheln, in der Tat aber selbst durch die angestrengteste Prüfung hinter die geheimen Triebfedern niemals völlig kommen können, weil, wenn vom moralischen Werte die Rede ist, es nicht auf die Handlungen ankommt, die man sieht, sondern auf jene innere Prinzipien derselben, die man nicht sieht.” (Kant 1990, 23) 12 “Dadurch sehen wir uns in den geheimsten Beweggründen abhängig von der Regel des allgemeinen Willens, und es entspringt daraus in der Welt aller denkenden Naturen eine moralische Einheit und systematische Verfassung nach bloß geistigen Gesetzen.” (Kant, Werke: 944)

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influxes” (Kant 1899: 64).13 Death is not an interruption of this ethical web of human communication. Kant concludes that death is but a continuation of our (thinking and moral) existence, and consequently, the postmortal immaterial world is not exempt from but included in this earthly community of thinking beings. The living can only ventriloquize the spiritual world while being inscribed in it. In placing the continual encounter with apparitional figures within nonsomatic spaces that are never completely disconnected from the body, Kant not only offers a rational explanation for our tireless engagement with ghosts, but positions these inexistent presences within the realm of a functioning society : “Departed souls and pure spirits can indeed never be present to our external senses, nor communicate with matter in any other way than by acting upon the spirit of man, who belongs with them to one great republic” [my italics]. (Kant 1899: 72)14

One Great Republic Kant concludes his treatise generously allowing the reader to condemn all spiritseers from now on as “candidates for a hospital” instead of thinking about them as “half-citizens of the other world” (1899: 72). But how did they become partial citizens? And if their study seems idle and superfluous, why, even if only hypothetically, evoke spirits that together with “half-citizens” share the space of “one great republic” creating a sense of morality, “das sittliche Gefühl”? Kant’s application of a political vocabulary (republic, citizens) to spiritual matters underlines his insistence on reading spirit-seeing in the context of human relations.15 Not the effect of the incantation is at stake here, but the “half-citizens” who claim their place within “one great republic.” Viewed in the context of Kant’s complete oeuvre, it becomes clear that the link between the spirits of the living, on the one hand, and the spirits of the dead and the spirits of other living beings, on the other, mediated through a sense of duty that merges into moral regulations, can also be understood as Kant’s cartography of a functioning human community based on an a priori basis of morality. Considering this concerted action it is less of a surprise that the immaterial world or mundus intelligibilis, so minutely described in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer only to be half13 Kant later criticized attempts to ground morality on moral feelings. 14 “Abgeschiedene Seelen und reine Geister können zwar niemals unsern äußeren Sinnen gegenwärt sein, noch sonst mit der Materie in Gemeinschaft stehen, aber wohl auf den Geist des Menschen, der mit ihnen zu einer großen Republik gehört“ (Kant 1977: 951). 15 See Jacques Derrida. Spectres de Marx: l’¦tat de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale. Paris: Edition Galil¦e, 1993.

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heartedly rejected at the end of this work,16 becomes “a world of rational beings [eine Welt vernünftiger Wesen]”, the intelligible world in Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals published almost two decades later. Kant’s hypothetical treatise on ghosts can thus be understood as a precursor of his later work on morality. In Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant explores morality in its relation to duty, and he places the spirit world within the realm of ethics “according to which everything ought to happen” (Kant 1990, 3). The urgency with which the living decipher ghostly messages even today highlights this desideratum. In the passage that he calls “A Fragment of Secret Philosophy”, Kant explains in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer : The moral quality of our actions, according to the order of nature, can never be fully worked out in the bodily life of men, but it can be so worked out in the spirit-world, according to spiritual laws. The true purposes, the secret motives of many endeavours, fruitless by impotency, the victory over self, or the occasional hidden treachery in apparently good actions, are mostly lost as to their physical effect in the bodily state, but in the immaterial world they would have to be regarded as fruitful causes, and consequently, according to spiritual laws and on account of the connection between the individual will and the will of all, they would mutually produce and receive effects appropriate to the moral quality of free will. (1899: 65)

Merging the dead with the living in the will, Kant seals this theory many years later in Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals: “In this way, a world of rational beings (mundus intelligibilis) is possible as a realm of ends, because of the legislation belonging to all persons as members” (1990: 55). The spiritual influxes have found their permanent space in the human mind that now can function as an end in itself, because the world of rational beings retains the pneumatic laws. Kant, therefore, is not (and here he differs from his contemporaries) interested in the irrational elements of ghostly concepts or the analysis of the sense perception of alleged ghost-seers; it is the realm of the intelligible world that his spirits occupy – not the sensible. Furthermore, this concept of the immaterial world can be understood if not as a part of, then at least as one of the early steps toward the famous categorical imperative. The universal connectedness in the spirit world becomes a universal realm of ends: Consequently every rational being must act as if by his maxims he were at all times a legislative member of the universal realm of ends. The formal principle of these maxims is: So act as if your maxims should serve at the same time as universal law (for all rational beings). (Kant 1990: 55)

16 At the end Kant admits not to have enough information “to know” and foresees future research on ghosts doomed by the same destiny.

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Whether or not Kant was himself a ghost-seer, his treatment of the subject, at the very least, lays fertile ground for a mapping out of ethical principles. As the “universal realm of ends” includes activities formerly described as belonging to the realm of the immaterial presence, elements of the categorical imperative can be traced back all the way to the spirit world. When Kant writes in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer that “among the forces that move the human heart the most powerful appear to lie outside of it” (1899: 50) and continues to place these in the immaterial world that unconsciously directs the material world, he is already delineating the possibility of a systematic moral unity situated within the “Realm of Ends”. The two worlds that are initially combined within the human soul as immaterial and material in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer can be recognized in the intelligible world and the world of the senses combined in rational beings or persons in Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals: But we now see that, if we think of ourselves as free, we transport ourselves into the intelligible world as members of it and know the autonomy of the will together with its consequence, morality ; whereas if we think of ourselves as obligated, we consider ourselves as belonging both to the world of sense and at the same time to the intelligible world. (Kant 1990: 70)

I want to suggest that, in spite of his rejection of the spirit world, in order to develop a theory of morality by opposing the intelligible and the senses framed by the “Realm of Ends”, Kant took a walk through “one great republic” separating the immaterial presence/absence into organic and pneumatic realms that will later facilitate his ideas about autonomy, free of external authority. Severed from a physical presence, his specific concept now relies on human relations. Kant, in fact, solidifies the figure of the ghost as an integral part of the realm of the living presenting it as a form of disembodied morality. Concluding his thesis with one of the fundamental questions of his theory of morality, he already offers an early version of a definition of his categorical imperative: “What? is it good to be virtuous only because there is another world, or will not actions be rewarded because they are good and virtuous in themselves?” (1899: 120).17 Relocating spirits from outside the body into the mind, Kant delineated the confines of “another world” right within this one.

17 “Wie? ist es denn nur darum gut tugendhaft zu sein, weil es eine andre Welt gibt, oder werden die Handlungen nicht vielmehr dereinst belohnt werden, weil sie an sich selbst gut und tugendhaft waren?” (Kant 1977: 989)

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The Applicability of Dysfunctional Methodology As the magical and empirical aspects of knowledge slowly separate while giving birth to modern science in the eighteenth century, Kant poses a seemingly obvious question: how do we account for the persistence of ghosts in human communities in spite of the Enlightenment’s debunking efforts? A serious consideration of this question leads him onto the path of morality. Suiting the spirit of the Age of Enlightenment, Kant compares the sense of morality reached via his theory of spirits to Newton’s theory of gravitation and laws of attraction. Similarly to Newton’s general interaction of matter as explained in Principia Mathematica, Kant delineates a world in which all human spirits are connected (attracted to each other) in a general sense of morality. Drawing comparisons like this, Kant, with his analysis of apparitional structures, supplied the Enlightenment with a rational theory of ghosts. The much discussed “new” absorption of the supernatural by the imagination that came along with the rise of the Enlightenment meets a perfect theoretical analysis in Kant’s Dreams of a Spirit-Seer. Shortly after presenting this complex structure, Kant disavows the whole project urging his readers to, from now on, “hold fast to the useful” (Kant 1899: 114). But what his hypothetical treatise suggests (most usefully) is the productivity of dysfunctional methodology. Kant repeatedly comes back to defending the methodology of metaphysics and rejecting codes and regulations of reasonable academia in this treatise. What is more, it is this rejected publication, this pointless product of late night hours that shimmers throughout his “architectural system”. Beginning his study by admitting that he does not know what is not there, Kant continues by allowing his text to evolve into a text on this absence. Early in the book he mocks the academic style: It is actually becoming tiresome for me always to use the careful language of reason. Why should I not be allowed to talk in academic style … So it is as good as demonstrated, or it could easily be proven, if one would take the time, or better still, it will in the future, I know not where or when, yet be proven. (Kant 1899: 19)

Mocking academia, Kant enters the realms of scholarship. Moving beyond proof but remaining within the realm of science, Kant anonymously took a walk through “one great republic” in order to tame his personal demons, to find a language to express his urgent concerns, stopping somewhere in-between the antagonized mechanists and vitalists of his time, he found morality. This move also delineates perhaps one of the most important scientific developments of the eighteenth century : the refusal of prescription and a call for experimentation. Kant followed his interest in ghosts not in order to enter into a conversation with his adversaries of the occult but to advance his understanding of metaphysical questions within the idea of the new sciences. Thus, he allowed himself

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to dwell on the possibilities of the immaterial and the promise of experiment, strengthening the Enlightenment’s call for observation instead of prescription that Francis Bacon expresses perhaps most clearly : “if a man will begin in certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties” (293). What Kant’s treatise establishes most of all is a proposal for an open-minded investigation, or, as Joseph Glanvill, himself a spirit-theorist, called it, a “free philosophy” that shall replace the dogmatism of disbelief (44). Supported by the prominent voice of a scientist and rationalist, just when ghosts seemed to have reached the end of their earthly reign in European intellectual circles, they returned more fervently than ever under the protection of ethics. This perpetual return of ghosts, the revenant, will prove prototypical, as the tireless interest in spirit-seeing in literature and culture alike does not weaken even in our post-enlightened times.

References Primary Literature Bacon, Francis. Advancement. The Works. Vol. III. Ed. by J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D.D. Heath, London: 1887. Print. Glanvill, Joseph. Saducismus Triumphatus: Or, a Full and Plain Evidence, Concerning Witches and Apparitions. Ed. Bernhard Fabian. Vol. 9, Collected Works of Joseph Glanvill. Hildesheim, New York: Georg Olms, 1978. – “Of Scepticism and Certainty.” Essays on Several Important Subjects in Philosophy and Religion. London, 1676: 35 – 66. Print. Kant, Immanuel. Träume eines Geistersehers, erläutert durch Träume der Metaphysik. Werkausgabe: Vorkritische Schriften bis 1768. vol. 2. Ed. by Wilhelm Weischedel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977. Print. – Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics. Transl. Emmanuel F. Goerwitz. Ed. Frank Sewall. London, New York: Swan Sonnenschein/Macmillan, 1899. – Kant on Swedenborg: Dreams of a Spirit-Seer and Other Writings. Ed. and Transl. Gregory R. Johnson and Glenn Alexander Magee. West Chester, PA: Swedenborg Foundation Publishers, 2002. Print. – Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals and What Is Enlightenment. Transl. Lewis White Beck. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1990. Print. – Grundlagen zur Metaphysik der Sitten. Werke in zwölf Bänden. Vol. 7. Ed. Wilhelm Weischedel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977. Print.

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Secondary Literature Castle, Terry. The Female Thermometer : Eighteenth Century and the Invention of the Uncanny. New York: Oxford UP, 1995. Print. Derrida, Jacques. Spectres de Marx: l’¦tat de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale. Paris: Edition Galil¦e, 1993. Print. During, Simon. Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002. Print. Florschütz, Gottlieb. Swedenborgs verborgene Wirkung auf Kant: Swedenborg und die okkulten Phänomene aus der Sicht von Kant und Schopenhauer (Swedenborg’s Hidden Influence on Kant: Swedenborg and Occult Phenomena in the View of Kant and Schopenhauer). Würzburg: Könighausen und Neumann, 1992. Print. – Emanuel Swedenborgs mystisches Menschenbild und die Doppelnatur des Menschen bei Immanuel Kant. West Chester, Pennsylvania: Swedenborg Foundation, 1993. Print. Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Discourse of the Syncope: Logodaedalus. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008. Print. Ronell, Avital. Dictations; on Haunted Writing. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1986. Print. Stengel, Freidmann, ed. Kant und Swedenborg: Zugänge zu einem umstrittenen Verhältnis. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2008. Print. Voltaire. Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary. Ed. and transl. Herman Irvell Woolf. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1945. Print. Weissberg, Liliane. Geistersprache: Philosophische und literarische Diskurse im späten achtzehnten Jahrhundert. Würzbug: Könighausen & Neumann, 1990. Print. Werkmeister, W.H. Kant’s Silent Decade: A Decade of Philosophical Development. Tallahassee: UP of Florida, 1979. Print.

II. Romantic Science and the Arts

Catherine Clinger

Speleological Interiority – The Mindfulness of a Spelunking Anatomist

When I was an adolescent, I read a book entitled Cave of Danger.1 I remember nothing of the narrative, characters, or even when and where the story was set, however, I still can see in my mind’s eye details of the mysterious space of a karst cave chock full of stalagmites, stalactites and other subterranean forms defined by their particular mineral composition and crystal building habits. Recollecting the experience of reading the text summons an olfactory response as well; wafts of dank, sulphurous air insinuate themselves in my nostrils. There is a visceral reminiscence in the cavity of my stomach, a physiological reaction to the dread that infused my consciousness before I would drift off to a nightmarish sleep after finishing a chapter. This brief excursus into my early traumatic literary experience is a strategy to bring the reader down into a topical space of knowledge where I shall investigate the scholarship and graphic work of the medical doctor Johann Christian Rosenmüller (1771 – 1820), who was also an accomplished speleologist. His medical work concentrated on the skeletal structure of the skull, particularly the nasal and orbital regions, as well as the nasopharynx complex and female reproductive system. His work as a cave scientist was one informed by his interest in the developing cognitive sciences as well as his knowledge of otorhinolarynogological anatomy. This essay will associate the topographical metaphorization of the human brain and cranial structures in medical discourse and imagery with the print culture of geological science and the arts. By studying the texts and images produced by Rosenmüller and his contemporaries, the ties between visual and textual representations of bodily and geological caves and cavities become apparent. In Romantic science, the language of analogy and metaphor dominated discourse, and this circuitous course between language, image and body part, often dissolved theoretical boundaries within the sciences – and it changed the way scientists and philosophers imagined the confines of the human mind. The vernacular of picturing interiority in medical and geo1 Bryce Walton, Cave of Danger, New York: Crowell, 1967.

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logical scientific visual culture and the innate procedures of anatomical metaphorization which such imaging incites are informed by emergent philosophical programmes during this period, particularly those of Hegel. This essay examines these texts and representations in relationship to Johann Christian Rosenmüller along with the concomitant philosophies and literature which shadow the development of theories of the mind. How does one make visible a thing embedded in darkness; picture a world without images from a place that Friedrich Wilhelm von Schelling would describe as the Urgrund, a primal place that precedes all distinction (see Schelling 99)? What better person to undertake such a task than a Romantic, spelunking proto-neurologist and cranial anatomist who draws? Johann Christian Rosenmüller was fascinated with cavities, channels, and orifices of all natures and scale. This is particularly evident in both his medical and speleological research, where bodily cavities are equated with caves, and vice versa. Rosenmüller, who was awarded a medical doctorate at Leipzig in 1797, is considered one of the founders of neuroscience and an expert on laryngeal function. His interest both in the larynx and the brain reflects the broad trend found within eighteenth-century comparative anatomy to investigate an inconsistency concerning the apparent lack of function in the vocal organ in certain higher primate species and its use by humans. This perceived absence of vocal utility in primates perplexed anatomists given that no major cerebral structure seemed to be unique to humans. The medical texts devoted to this inquiry into the generation of sound within certain mammalian anatomical structures also contain passages which resonate with those in geological writing that focus on the formation of sound in underground spaces. For Rosenmüller, it was the passageways which housed the sensorial network that drew his interest. Immediately following medical school, Rosenmüller published several articles on his research regarding the structure of the human skull. These academic studies were followed by his two-volume work: Beschreibung merkwürdiger Höhlen. Ein Beitrag zur physikalischen Geschichte der Erde (Descriptions of Strange Caves: A Contribution to the Physical History of the Earth) in 1799 and 1805. In these two volumes, Rosenmüller describes the unusual features of several well-known and a few lesser-known show caves in Europe, both in text and image (Fig.1). Caves were popular destinations for both natural scientists and tourists as documented in a letter describing the remarkable qualities of the Liebensteiner Höhle from Die Zeitung für die elegante Welt (no. 9, 1802) that Rosenmüller reprinted in the section on the cave in his Beschreibung merkwürdiger Höhlen (2: 236). Rosenmüller came to know these caves while he carried out research for his medical dissertation at Leipzig. In the work of Rosenmüller, as well as that of his contemporaries, the physical history of the earth, human history, and natural history existed as analogous processes of

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development. Medical education required study in mineral and fossil collections; and, the inner earth was also valued as an archive of natural history. Seeking analogues memorialized as fossils from the ancient past, natural scientists journeyed to caves and sites of excavation to locate objects for the comparative study of living and dead specimens. Rosenmüller, like Georges Cuvier and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, spent a great deal of time investigating bear bones found in the caves of Germany – in fact, the significant anatomical discovery of the cave bear, Ursus spelaeus Rosenmüller, was named after the spelunking anatomist (see Rosenmüller 1794). As part of the qualification for earning his doctorate from the faculty of medicine at Leipzig, he published his findings on the cave bear in 1794 (see Rosendahl and Kempe 146). Caves throughout Germany used to contain numerous bones of the gigantic bear that lived over one hundred thousand years ago. Novalis’ Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802), a masterpiece of early German Romantic literature, featured a subterranean world filled with the bones of ancient creatures. The Swiss geologist Jean Andr¦ de Luc visited the region around Muggendorf in Bavaria known for its many caverns, and he “went first to one of those which contained the bones of bears, or rather, which had contained them; for such quantities have been carried away, it is difficult now to find even a few remaining fragments” (see de Luc 194).

Fig. 1: “Liebensteiner Höhle.” Rosenmüller 1805: Plate V, etching.

The wholesale pilfering of bones from caves was having a detrimental effect on natural history collections throughout Europe and the absence of quality specimens for study engendered the development of the “proxy” print. The proxy print should be understood not as an illustration on paper but a scientific instrument. Some of these prints were loose-leaf; others were bound in books; Höhlenproducte from Rosenmüller’s Beschreibung merkwürdiger Höhlen is one

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example (Fig. 2). A proxy differs from standard graphical illustration as the print is given agency as an examinable surrogate for an object; it has full representational authority within the collaborative network of the international scientific ommunity (see Rudwick 40). Documentary data in the form of engravings and etchings were utilized not only as stand-ins for rare, delicate, or immobile specimens that could not travel, but also as the means with which to assemble fragments from distant collections so as to reconstruct, by ephemeral agency, long-dead animals whose fossilized parts were strewn across continents. Cuvier famously drew a distinction between North American and Siberian mammoths based upon his examination of the paper proxies of the animal de l’Ohio by Charles Willson Peale (see Cuvier). Rosenmüller was the author of such proxies. He also skilfully illustrated many of his published anatomical texts. Images based on his drawings were engraved by J. F. Schröter for numerous of his publications (Fig. 3). Many of these were exceptional views of the human body. The representation of the trunk of a female figure without a head from Plate II from Part Two of his 1805 Chirurgischanatomische Abbildungen für Ärzte und Wundärzte is a startling departure from the conventions of medical illustration. Rosenmüller has depicted the gaping chasm where her head was formerly attached. The vertically situated form of the cadaver’s trunk and shoulders, described with a linear syntax of volumetric modelling, is crowned with a cavernous crater – similar to the mount of an erupting volcano. The viewer is situated as though he or she is on the edge of a pit between the shoulders. A range of means for a descent into the lifeless form is offered, from the narrow passageway of the windpipe to the wide breach behind the chest wall. This treatment of pictorial space suggests less an illusion of surface depth than the penetration of it. It is an accomplished feat of illustration and, taken with others, representative of his unusual approach. His interest in drawing led to his authorship of a drawing manual for students of medicine, Prodromus anatominae artificibus (1819). Despite their eccentricity, Rosenmüller’s illustrations for anatomical volumes are rational receptions of human structure. In many ways, these medical prints are the quintessential remedy for the grotesque image prevalent within eighteenth-century graphic arts. Rosenmüller’s objective representations of fossils and anatomical interiors are opposed to the phantasmagorical settings below the surface of the earth found in his cave mappings. In the context of the reconstruction of a physical reality under the direction of an expert, the print of a fossilized skull gained authority as a proxy for an absent physical specimen. In order to function as a scientific instrument, the image requires the suspension of subjective judgment (this is not a real skull) for the simulation of an objective mental procedure (this is the skull). The proxy or paper specimen serves as a site for the groundwork of science; a point of de-

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Fig. 2: “Höhlenproducte.” Rosenmüller 1805: Plate IX.

parture for deeper examination. In the absence of its subject, it is a picture of the thinking of a thing. Hegel states that thought, “in so far as it takes time and belongs to the immediate individuality, has a corporeal manifestation, is felt,

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Fig. 3: J. F. Schröter. “Plate II.” Johann Christian Rosenmüller, Chirurgisch-anatomische Abbildungen für Ärzte und Wundärzte. Weimar : Landes-Industrie-Comptoir, 1805.

especially in the head, in the brain, in general in the system of sensibility, of the simple general inwardness of the sentient subject” (Hegel 1971: 85). Having established that thought is thinghood through our awareness of it as a felt sensation in his Philosophy of the Mind, Hegel goes further in staging of how consciousness appears to itself. According to Hegel, three forms of memory – one that retains the name of a thing, one that reproduces the thing, and finally the mechanical memory – lead to thinking based on recognition and rediscovery, “the double signification of the universal … its own unity overlapping and including its other being” (224). The proxy is the actual object made profoundly present as an intermedial juncture which has the capacity to expand, rather than restrict visual, theoretical, and mental discourse. This paper specimen represents a deepening of knowledge rather than a shallow surrogacy. The previously observed thing is mediated by an experienced mind which saw it, recognized it, and then re-stated it, thus enacting the Romantic theory of the mind through imagining, reasoning, and memorializing. Rosenmüller’s scientific illustrations do not have the same authority as his proxy prints; however, they are projected as accurate, dispassionate representations of the subject in the text to which they are linked. In Beschreibung merkwürdiger Höhlen, Rosenmüller takes the reader on an underground journey. The spelunking anatomist describes waterways, dry channels, and the shape of rock formations in vivid detail. As we enter into his text, he warns us that we are leaving the realm of the living and entering a decaying world filled with danger but also one in which we can find insight into the origins of the world – although difficult to read through the veil of darkness, the cave is an archive of the past (1: ix-x). In comparison to images within his anatomical works, his etchings of cave interiors have a very different relationship to text. Rosenmüller’s prints are profane proxies for the experience of a place,

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not the place itself – a Romantic epistemology of space. These prints signify what thinks the experience of the underground chamber. Some of the images approximate the form of the thinking (see Fig. 1). The central field in Liebensteiner Höhle by Rosenmüller is shaped like the profile of a human head facing towards the left of the picture frame. Its dark shape is delimited by a light array of stone; lumpy and ridged like the medulla turned inside out. Four men encircle a fire on the floor of the large cavern and their shadows stretch dramatically to the bottom edge of the image. Darkened apertures are in evidence suggesting at least four other passages through which an explorer might travel, a fifth man walks away from his companions, looking back over his shoulder as he makes his way to another wall of the cave. A proxy typically represents a concrete object fixed in a particular space and time. It is not a metaphor of, or a metonym for, something else – if one insists on finding a rhetorical cognate for the paper specimen, it would be metalepsic as it refers back to a previously beheld fragment of something once seen. Rosenmüller transumptively adopts the proxy as an instrument for picturing thought as a cave, not an instrument of science in the conventional sense of the word. His cave etchings are the geological cognates of his anatomical proxies. Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons (1749 – 50, 1761) come to mind; however, these illustrate non-existent architecture, human-made spaces. They are invented interior spaces where scaffolds may be said to perform as many-layered aerial traps for thought and memory, but they are not of nature and they did not pre-exist in the physical world. Rosenmüller chose caves as stand-ins for living crania, containers for memory and thought, because they are natural stores for the backlog of the past. Unlike his anatomical illustrations, Rosenmüller’s descriptions of caves in the context of the geographical volumes in which they are located pictorially degrade the notion of scientific objectivity. Despite this apparent rejection of empirical vision, his cave illustrations also stand far outside the artistic convention of picturing the natural world as landscapes – paradoxically, they more closely resemble interior details of the autopsied figures found within his anatomical studies than the late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century landscape views or geological mappings drawn by fine artists or trade illustrators. Even more disconcerting, they are profane – they awaken the darkness, will the depths, and seek to particularize the disjuncture of mind and matter. So can his etching of a cave’s interior serve as a subverted proxy for void rather than an illustration of the physical world? Could its unstable status within the hinterland of the proxy transpose the enlightenment ordering of culture over nature and confront the viewer’s subjective understanding of interiority? As Rosenmüller’s subterranean etchings displace themselves from scientific discourse of the geological and yet, at the same time, geologize the human as cavern, I propose they perform a metaphoric function as signs for the non-linear structures of the

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mind. Propelled by their affinity with cranial illustrations, they are relocated in the less empirical and more speculative theories of the mind. Natural philosophers of the age equated their theoretical musings to conscious thought and its material objectification in the brain, thus assigning corporeality to thought as evidenced by the tangible organ that thought it. This radical idea, a development from Kantian philosophy, had a remarkable influence on the medical profession’s view of the biological function of the brain. An example of this new model of the mind and brain can be found in the work of the medical doctor Johann Christian Reil (1759 – 1813). Reil, an accomplished physiologist, dug deep into human anatomy in order to understand the imbalances in human mental states through charting the physicality of the mind. Reil hypothesized that mental illness resulted from the fragmentation of self which occurred when the imaginative faculty of the mind did not achieve a balanced synthesis with nature (see Richards 263). “The brain,” Reil argued, “may be conceived as a synthetic product of art, composed of many sounding bodies that stand in a purposeful relationship with one another” (qtd. in Richards 265). According to Reil, the mind is the brain; when our thoughts cannot differentiate between what it real or imagined, it is because the brain has become physically unhinged. Reil’s ground-breaking exploration into the deepest centres of the human brain in the cerebral cortex was recognized by his colleagues through their identification of these sites as the Islands of Reil. The names of numerous anatomists and physicians were used as eponymic titles for their discoveries. Two anatomical structures were named after our amateur speleologist: Rosenmüller’s Fossa, the nasopharyngeal recess located at the back of the throat and Rosenmüller’s Organ, a vestigial structure associated with the ovary which resembles tiny canals which are interconnected through tubes and ducts. Other speleologically-derived eponyms for anatomical features coined in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that are still in use include: Meckel’s Cave located in the skull and named after the physician and anatomist Johann Friedrich Meckel (1724 – 1774) and, the Cave of Retzius, a retropubic space located in the vaginal passage named for Anders Adolf Retzius (1796 – 1860), a Swedish anatomist who specialized in cranial structures. Medical eponyms empower the claim to authorship, they are human things named for human authorities. Proxies, on the other hand, are empowered to represent; they enable authorship. Reil, like Rosenmüller, was a cartographer of the brain. He mapped its ducts, hollows and pathways, and from this exploration he sought to understand how human mental powers of imagination, reason, and memory were connected through physical pathways – and how, when these pathways were altered in an individual or the centres of these powers were out of kilter, he could treat them. Reil’s empathy with psychologically unstable, yet highly creative individuals

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(including Emanuel Swedenborg), made him amongst the first to call for a complete redesign of the asylum, offering architectural as well as pharmaceutical solutions for curing mental illness (see Reil 1811: 288). According to Reil, an auditorium for music and theatre is critical for patients undergoing treatment, and these spaces should include the installation of virtual grottoes and caves whose acoustics accentuate a sense of psychic withdrawal when needed (462). Rosenmüller was less interested in the treatment of mental illness than in the anatomical mechanisms that enabled or disrupted thought as well as those which permitted the senses to operate. Passages from his Handbuch der Anatomie (1815) employed speleological terminology to describe the implementation of sensory communications with the brain: the interior of bone, cavity of the brain, holes in the nose, and orifice of the mouth are Höhlen (cavities) joined by canals and other cavernous structures (270 – 71). The anatomical text contains written descriptions of physical structures which allow the reader to move through the body as if traversing corridors, entering openings, and sliding down stairways in order to find the pathways which link the body with the brain; experience with the mind. Johann Reil stated that “the mind in self-consciousness, rolls up the immeasurable thread of time into a ball, reproduces the long-dead centuries, and gathers into the miniature of one representation mountain ranges, rivers, woods, and the stars strewn through the firmament” (55). He goes on to equate the unconscious mind to a cave, where this amalgam of time and place are stored just like the detritus of time recorded in geological stratum. As suggested by Reil’s metaphorical linking of mind, time, and landscape – textual and visual analyses of medical books and images concerned with the cavernesque allow us to seek ties between medicine, artistic conventions, and geology that are buried in related artistic productions which have previously gone unnoticed or have been misunderstood. Rosenmüller’s work is less analytical than descriptive. He was not a philosopher, nor was he theoretician. His works were based on direct observation and he found that drawing images of underground spaces in situ was a challenge, so he undertook to use his memory. (1: 125 – 6) Plate 6 in the second volume of Rosenmüller’s tract on strange caves is an aquatint illustrating the Adelsberger Grotte (Fig. 4). Rosenmüller identifies it as the largest and most magnificent cavern in Europe with stalactites that resemble trees, humans, and animals (see 2: 307). The unusual calcite formations and magnificent mineral ornamentation in the Adelsberger cave attracted visitors who had read about them in the many travelogues reporting their existence. Of these formations Rosenmüller wrote:

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Here our eyes feast on the wondrous. At the sight of forms which nature wrought through the petrifaction of water, various acts of crystallization and stalactite formation, our imagination deceives us with strange illusions (1: vii).2

In the Rosenmüller image, two men are looking up towards the fantastical formations in/of the cave; one points with his walking stick and the other holds a torch aloft to illuminate the features. Plainly, they perform as gawping observers as the convention dictates for staffage in topographical prints; their function is to provide the viewer with a sense of the awe inspired by the monumental scale of the subterranean spectacle. The features of the stalactites recede and emerge in the light of the flambeaux; dwarfing the two explorers. The medium of aquatint has allowed this effect. Aquatint enabled printmakers to create tonal intricacies and here it is used to superb effect even if the character of the drawing itself is somewhat nave.

Fig. 4. “Adelsberger Grotte.” Rosenmüller 1805: Plate VI.

2 “Hier weidet sich das Auge an den wundervollen, unsere Phantasie mit den abentheuerlichsten Bildern tauschenden Ansichten der Formen, welche die Natur durch versteinerndes Wasser, durch mancherlei Kristallisationen und Tropfsteinbildungen hervorbringt.” (Rosenmüller, Vol. 1. 1799, vii, my translation)

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For the journeyman printmaker who was not as accomplished as the masters of other intaglio techniques, the visual conventions used by the etcher or engraver to document geological phenomena above the ground are not as useful to represent certain subterranea where surface detail is obscured by the low level of light – thus, the pictorial plasticity of aquatint functioned well for communicating general impressions of the underground world. The aquatint Adelsberger Grotte displays a litany of comedic visages. The whole of the cave contains an inventory of gargoyle-esque projections from a helter-skelter form of Gothic architecture. The hall of the Adelsberger Grotte from this outlook appears to be structured similarly to the vaulted nave and side aisles of a medieval cathedral whose columns have metamorphosed into pillars covered, base to capital, with blasphemous encrustations. This subterranean chamber makes visible the realm of the profane. Conceivably, this is the quintessential grotesque image – the phantasmagorical setting brimming with implausible creatures exists below the surface of the earth, appears to have been “unearthed” by human vision, and, in the context of the volume in which it is located, pictorially degrades the notion of scientific objectivity. Rosenmüller’s vision of the cave is more inspired by Oehlenschläger’s Gods of the North or the Tales of Ossian than by contemporaneous geological science. Within the Rosenmüller aquatint, shape won out over detail when it came to the appreciative spelunkers who note the profiles of geological formations. The Rosenmüllerhöhle discovered by Johann Ludwig Wunder in 1790 and entered three years later by its namesake, Johann Christian Rosenmüller, was legendary because of the two human skeletons found on its steep floor. The cavern is located in Northern Bavaria and is entered via a vertical shaft that drops sixteen meters, straight down to the natural tomb of the two unfortunate souls. The cave is comprised, more or less, of a single enormous chamber. The mouth of the cave was known for centuries as it was located on a corridor between settlements, yet, had not been entered because of the dauntingly precipitous drop directly inside of the entry. At the end of the eighteenth century, the story of the discovery of human remains in the cave circulated throughout popular periodicals, journals, and coffee houses. It is a seductively beautiful, though dangerous cave as testified by the two fossilized humans; so, naturally, adventure-seekers added the site to their itinerary. When the first visitors discovered two human skeletons on top of the debris at the foot of the pit, it was easy to see how they arrived there; but it was not possible to find out if they were the victims of a crime, an accident or if they were ritually buried in the pit; therefore, their identity has remained a mystery. This is, of course, part of their appeal to public curiosity. In 1830, concerned that gentrified visitors, unaccustomed to strenuous climbs might fall to their death, the authorities constructed a tunnel into the side of the hill so that access to the cave would be less treacherous for those on tour.

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Rosenmüller described coming upon its entry, looked back across the beautiful valley, entered the cave by way of ropes, found the human remains, and then tried to find forensic evidence with which to identify the two skeletons. (2: 362 – 76) He drew three images of his namesake, which were made into aquatints, for Die Merkwürdigkeiten der Gegend um Muggendorf (1804). One of the prints appears less a geological interior than a view through a speculum into a bodily cavity. When the entomologist, Johann Friedrich Esper (1742 – 1810) began to publish information about the local caves in German-speaking lands in 1774, the interest of tourists and the scientific community in casual spelunking grew (see Esper). Esper reported that “the enormous mass of animal earth, the prodigious number of teeth, jaws, and other bones, and the heavy grouping of the stalactites, render the place a fit temple for the God of Death” (Good 195). This description appealed to the newly developed Gothic taste of his readers and to personages such as William Buckland, eminent English geologist and paleontologist. Buckland visited the caves of Germany after having received a copy of Esper’s account of them. William Buckland’s Reliquiae Diluvianae (1823) contains lithographs made from his drawings of German caves, the Scharzfeld being one (Fig. 5). Goethe entered the Scharzfeld cave in the Harz Mountains in 1784 by way of a staircase built for the arrival of König Georg II sixty years earlier (see Winkelhöfer). The poet-scientist was interested in examining the bones of what locals asserted was a unicorn – Goethe eventually identified the bones as belonging to a brown bear. The illustrations within Reliquiae Diluvianae provide excellent examples of pictorial cross-sectioning of the earth’s crust in order to expose a nearly accurate rendition of the interior spaces within it; therefore, the book provided the arm-chair explorer an impossible-vision of caves. Plate 14, Vertical Section of the Cavern at Gailenreuth in Franconia reveals the various caverns of the subterranean complex in terms of their general shape and specific depth. These transverse views through earth differed from the aquatints found in the Rosenmüller’s text on caves and his images of skeletons in them that Buckland references (99). The Rosenmüller prints share a similar “tunnel-vision” quality with the elevation drawings for contrived garden-grottoes designed by Romantic architects. The amateur speleologist adopted an interiorized picturesque style for the images, whereas Buckland attempted through his images to situate the cavities within the earth’s strata in a way that revealed their relationship to the surface. However, transverse sections of the earth, except as generalized schematic images of the earth or idealized views such as those found in Agricola’s De re metallica were extremely rare. It is unusual for an artist to utilize a crosssectional visual trope to structure an image of an object below the surface. I have yet to discover more than a very few prints that cut away the earth to show its interior in such a spatially accurate fashion before Buckland’s study of German

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Fig. 5: “Vertical Section of the Cave of Scharzfeld.” Buckland 1823: Plate XIV. Lithograph.

caves. The graphicacy of this impossible vision was the result of the dramatic extension of knowledge concerning the underworld in the late eighteenth century through mining technology ; this amplification of understanding engendered a new way of seeing. The cavernous cut-away was the bathetic twin to the panorama which was developed on large and small scales during the same time period. Seeing through everything was the conceptual cousin to seeing all-round everything. Without the usual reference points above-ground that humans utilize in order to register the passage of time and the boundaries of cultural space, the mental experience within a cave can be immensely disorientating and confusing; much like a bad dream. Popular writers in Germany used the cave as a setting for these kinds of experiences. Johann Jakob Engel presented an unsettled view of a cave in his Die Höhle auf Antiparos (1801). Engel portrays the cave as an inner world that sets the imaginative faculties into action and incites dramatic physiological responses. Engel, through the artifice of a conversation with a young nobleman speaks of an encounter with his own mind in the cave of Antiparos that both confirms and questions its knowledge. Things in the cave are not as they appear

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to be outside of it. The cave here is mind, a feminized male space which competes with the notion of a generative womb. Sophie Tieck Bernhardi von Knorring, poet, dramatist and the sister of Ludwig Tieck, explored this type of psychological dystopia in her novella, The Old Man in the Cave. The tale details the consequences following a young man’s request of the hermit in a cave for “the gift of seeing my own thoughts standing before me after I have crafted them, so that I might be able to judge what my soul is thinking and whether it deserves to be called good or evil, clever or nave.” (Tieck 78) Very soon after this demand, the young man is confronted by a series of misshapen, monstrous replicas of himself; an imaginative warning from the hermit to deter his desire for thoughts to manifest in physical form. Amalie von Helwig’s The Symbol documented the tour of a young man led by a young sorceress through a cave with remarkably female features. The author describes the mineral formations of the cave as if they were eroticized botanical matter. After following a hedge where flowering cypresses intertwined with wild cherries, the protagonist found himself at “a row of sinuous gargoyles whose graceful gestures and expressions spoke to him of other, heathen times” (Helwig 120) – then he found himself suddenly in a damp, narrow passage where he surrendered himself over to the wiles of his seductive guide. The reader understands where the tale goes from there. The formations in the Adelsberger Grotte that have been wildly exaggerated by Rosenmüller are not pictured as a geologist would have described them but as a psychologist might have illustrated what the enthralled spectator thought he saw. The aquatint envisages the distorted inner vision of an awestruck psyche rather than what a scientist-observer would document of the cave. Rosenmüller wrote: All at once, we become aware of thousands of objects that demand our complete attention. Strange objects exist in raised relief; many we mistaken for works of art. Here beside the bones of forgotten creatures where eternal night and deathly silence prevail in these gruesome vaults; where having left the realm of the living and standing at the gates of the eternity and Elysium, we abandon ourselves to the illusions of fantasy – it is perhaps pardonable, compelled by fear and lack of control over our reaction to these objects, we feel a need to abscond (1: vii-viii).3

3 “Kurz, wir werden tausend Gegenstände gewahr, die theils durch die täuschende Aehnlichkeit mit Werken der Kunst, theils durch ihre eigene erhabene Organisation unsere ganze Aufmerksamkeit rege machen. Dann ist es verzeihlich, wenn wir hier in diesen grausenden Gewölben neben den Gebeinen vergeßener Geschöpfe, wo ewige Nacht und Todesruhe herrscht; wenn wir da, losgerißen von dem Reiche der Lebendigen, uns den Bildern der Phantasie überlassen, uns an den Pforten der Ewigkeit und des Elysiums wähnen, bis uns andere Bedürfniße, vielleicht auch Angst und Entfeßen von diesen Gegenständen hinweg drängen.” (Rosenmüller, Vol. 1, vii-viii, my translation).

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This passage sounds less like the report delivered by an empirically inclined scientist than the description of a bewildering dream. Yet, we recall that the amateur speleologist was a highly accomplished surgeon and brilliant anatomist. It is easy to imagine that Rosenmüller, far from being terrified, had many moments of revelation when spelunking through a cave. According to Schelling, philosophy is the Natural History of our mind and, “there is no longer any separation between experience and speculation. The system of Nature is at the same time the system of our mind … once the great synthesis has been accomplished, our knowledge may return to analysis” (Schelling 1988: 30). Rosenmüller operated as a conductor in the midst of Schelling’s great synthesis of the systems of nature and the mind, manoeuvring between the two through his experience of these wild spaces and his journeys within the dead heads which he opened up for examination. His etchings of caves are grotesque; and perhaps, we could understand these as documentations of the imbalance between the state of the collective human psyche and nature. His method of composing a space that appears to be far “under” the horizon, some without reference to surface and only to edges creates a sense of envelopment. The prints describe not topography of surface; rather they embody the notion of a geodic cavity, interiography. They are grotesque proxies for the inside of our head because, “even language has sufficient understanding to employ heart for courage, head for intelligence … science is bound to show the necessary connection prevailing between a specific inner feeling and the physiological significance of the organ in which this assumes a corporeal form” (Hegel 1971: 84). There are many narratives, historical, literary, and theological, that describe journeys to the tops of mountains by individuals seeking enlightenment. The opposite, in terms of spatial location, of a summit-experience (Gipfelerlebnis) is a cave-experience (Höhlen-Erlebnis); although both share an experiential affinity to one another. From the highest point to the deepest abyss, the vertical axis of these combined experiences encompasses a spatial typology of knowledge. The voyage downwards adds a new dimension to the act of knowledge. It is, both figuratively and physically, a spatial depth of knowledge. The summitexperience emphasizes one’s own sense of interiority (one goes to the mountaintop to find oneself by losing oneself in space) and the cave-experience embodies it (one goes to the cave to lose oneself in oneself). An essential difference between the two experiences is that in the underworld, lacking the benefit of light from without, the rationality of our mind within is tremulous signalling the lapse of reason. The cave-experience becomes so extraordinarily subjective, that one no longer is aware of the boundary between interior of self and the interior of the earth. It is the antithesis of the enlightened journey to a summit – the subterranean voyager finds his or her identity in a bathetic relationship to self. Picturing these places, which are impossible to see in their factual state of

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darkness, is a complicated imaginative procedure. This new depth of vision is a hermetic act of knowledge achieved through a type of recall that was defined by Henri Bergson over one hundred years after the Romantic Age as a memory that is a progression from the past to the present, rather than a regression from present to the past; it requires a mythologico-consciousness of self (see Bergson 319). The visual representation of a cave derives from a mental synthesis that operates on the superimposed planes of memory, time, and cognition. For Hegel, sense-certainty, perception, then understanding is the process. This is where Rosenmüller’s representations of caves meet the Romantic theories of the mind; he seeks to reconcile imagination, reason, and memory in these geological, anatomically conjured hollows illuminated by reason, distorted by the imagination, and bounded by recollection. The harrowing description of the cave that I have quoted from Rosenmüller earlier is the result of an encounter with the grotesque. Hegel portrayed the earth as “the giant corpse of the life which was formerly immanent in it but has now fled” (Hegel 2004: 298). Rosenmüller imagined the earth in terms closer to Hegel’s corpse than to any of the fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm – Snow White and her companions are not in evidence; although one could argue the isolated temperaments embodied by the dwarfs might be alluded to. Rosenmüller’s relationship to the corpse was not metaphorical; it was real. In Plate V of Beschreibung merkwürdiger Höhlen Vol. 1, the view could just as well be the prospect one would see when looking out from inside the nasal cavity of a giant corpse, observing the light entering the head by way of the hollows of the two nostrils (Fig. 6). Rosenmüller tells his reader that he entered this very cave through one of the two large openings and continued into the large hall into the channel, past large vertical structures leading to smaller chambers which penetrate even deeper tunnels and it is not much of a leap to draw an analogy between cave exploration and a cranial examination – peering into the mouth of a cadaver and seeing the uvula at the back of the throat, the anatomist would then spy the windpipe as it divides off from the central channel. The mineralogist Franz von Kobell in his Sketches from the Mineral Kingdom informs the reader that the Baumannshöhle in the Harz was known for its unusual stalactites that an unnamed natural scientist had suggested were the windpipes of monumentally scaled fossilized skulls (see Kobell 282). It is unlikely that the adept anatomist Rosenmüller was the undisclosed author of this statement but the analogy to mammalian structures was made. The famous show-cave at Antiparos is noted in Rosenmüller’s text. Finding the entry into the cave at Antiparos, past lush hedges and pungent vines, he enters a large cavern then, having advanced only a short distance, notices that there are steep precipices leading down to a dark abyss. Only by using ropes and ladders with which to make a descent, will he see the world-famous stalactites.

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Fig. 6: “Inneres der grossen Höhle von Alcantara ohnweit Lissabon.“ Rosenmüller 1799: Plate V. Etching.

Although William Wordsworth found the tourist trade at the most popular showcaves disheartening, he describes the great hall reached by ropes in the eighth book of his Thirteen-Book Prelude: With torches passed into some vault of earth, The grotto of Antiparos or the den Of Yordas among Craven’s mountain tracts; He looks and sees the cavern spread and grow. Widening itself on all sides, sees, or thinks He sees, erelong the roof above his head, Which instantly unsettles and recedes – Substance and shadow, light and darkness, all Commingled, making up a canopy Of shapes and forms and tendencies to shape That shift and vanish, change and interchange Like spectres, ferment quiet and sublime Which after a short space works less and less, Till, every effort, every motion gone, The scene before him lies in perfect view, Exposed and lifeless as a written book. (VIII: 712 – 27)

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The innate quality of interiority that exists in the chamber of a cave makes it the ideal setting in literature for dreams, psychological crises, and anatomical metaphorization. In his work on the metaphor of the cave, Hans Blumenberg describes the very sense of hesitancy that Rosenmüller expresses about remaining in the Adelsberger Grotte as he “attempts to outline the ambivalence about the cave: It invites one to stay, and it forces one to leave … It is the dislike of the “real reality” that the prehistoric as well as the mythical-metaphorical inhabitants of a cave share with each other” (799 – 800). The structure of a cave is analogous not to a cultural production of space, rather to telluric development, the strata of an inner space whose “earthy” formations radiate magnetic energy, the invisible. The Romantics employ the cave as a setting for the allegorical performance of interiority so then it becomes a cultural production of selfrevealing the cognitive capacity of the mind to illuminate itself. The Romantic cave operates, as Hans Blumenberg would insist, as a place from which one may advance in order to create new spaces; it shows the way out. It is notable that the long shadows cast by the figures in Rosenmüller’s Liebensteiner Höhle fall across the floor, not on the walls of the cavern; this is not Plato’s cave. There is no wall between the fire and the humans, the shadows cast are their own and fall behind them. Rosenmüller’s thoughts as he created the drawings have collided with those thoughts represented by his memory of the object of his attention. This collision results in the concealment of inner sight in its metaphorization. As philosophers attempted to understand the subconscious and physiologists such as Reil linked mind to matter, creating new models of thought; our anatomist charted the container of it. In Ueber das Organ der Seele (1796), Samuel Thomas Soemmerring attempts to identify, not the locus of mental powers, rather the seat of the soul. Soemmerring, like his colleague Rosenmüller, was known for his keen ability as an illustrator of medical texts and as a consummate brain researcher. Soemmerring is better known today for his insights into the operation of the human brain, but it is his attempt to find spirit which informs our reception of Rosenmüller’s proxies. His etched works are an expression of his desire to enter the recesses of the human skull as he could a cave by using ladders, ropes and flambeaux, instead of tongs, specula, and trepans. Rosenmüller simply could not fit into a head. His cave experience was an inversion of scale from anatomical dissection to speleological expedition; one journey a proximation to the other. These images are glimpses into the invisible laws of nature’s structure which is a non-sensible kind of being that is behind or below the real things. We can see the emergence of the understanding of consciousness as a material fact in the work of Rosenmüller. These are the inverted proxies for an inaccessible, deep world. The cavernous realm is a model of the mass of flesh perforated with tubes and tunnels, orifices and holes in our skull that can only be explored in death.

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The Romantic mythologist, Georg Friedrich Creuzer would say that Johann Christian Rosenmüller enables his subterranean representations to define the present through the depths of the past. Through his exploitation of the proxy as a metalepsic agent, he creates a new symbol for thought that wants to “measure the immeasurable, and to squeeze the divine into the narrow boundary of corporeal form … the ineffable prevails that, seeking expression, will by the infinite power of its quintessence, ultimately explode the terrestrial form that is too weak a vessel … the clarity of looking is itself destroyed, and only speechless wonderment remains.”4

References Primary Literature Buckland, William. Reliquiæ Diluvianæ; or Observations on the organic remains, contained in caves, fissures and diluvial gravel, and on other geological phenomena, attesting the action of an universal deluge. London: John Murray, 1823. Print. Creuzer, Georg Friedrich. Symbolik und Mythologie. Vol. 1. Leipzig: Heyer and Leske, 1819. Print. Cuvier, Georges. “Memoire sur les especes d’elephans tant vivantes que fossils.” Magasin encyclopedique 2.3 (1796): 440 – 5. Print. Esper, Johann Christoph. Description des zoolithes, nouvellement de´couvertes. Nürnberg, 1774. Print. Good, John Mason. The Book of Nature. Hartford: Belknap and Hamersley, 1837. Print. Hegel, G.W.F. Philosophy of Mind: Part III of the Enyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences. Trans. William Wallace. London: Oxford UP, 1971. Pritn. – “Section Three: Organics,” Philosophy of Nature: Part Two of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. Print. Helwig, Amalie von. “Die Symbole.” Die Sage vom Wolfsbrunnen: Mährchen. Berlin: Realschulbuchhandlung, 1812. 35 – 52. Print. – “The Symbols.” The Queen’s Mirror, Fairy Tales by German Women, 1780 – 1900. Ed. Shawn C. Jarvis. Lincoln and London: UNP, 2001. 119 – 20. Print. Knorring, Sophie Tieck Bernhardi von. “Der Greis im Felsen.” Bambocciaden, Berlin: Friedrich Maurer, 1800. Print. Kobell, Wolfgang Franz Xaver von. Charakteristik der Mineralien. Nürnberg: Schrag, 1830 – 1. Print. Luc, Jean Andr¦ de. Geological Travels in Some Parts of France, Switzerland, and Germany. Vol. 1. London: Rivington, 1813. Print. Reil, Johann Christian. Rhapsodieen über die Anwendung der psychischen Curmethode auf Geisteszerrüttungen. Halle: Curtsche Buchhandlung, 1803. Print. – Ueber die Erkenntniss und Cur der Fieber. Vol. 4. Wien: Doll, 1811. Print. 4 Creuzer 73. Partially adapted by the author from the translation by Barasch 235.

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Rosenmüller, Johann Christian and W. G. Tilesius von Tilenau (eds.). Beschreibung merkwürdiger Höhlen. Ein Beitrag zur physikalischen Geschichte der Erde, 2 vols., Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1799 and 1805. Print. Rosenmüller, Johann Christian. Handbuch der Anatomie, Leipzig, 1815. Print. – Quaedam de ossibus fossilibus animalis cuiusdam, historiam eius et cognitionem accuratiorem illustrantia. Leipzig: Sommer, 1794. Print. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von. Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der Menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhängenden Gegenstande. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975. Print. Tieck Bernhardi von Knorring, Sophie. “The Old Man in the Cave.” The Queen’s Mirror, Fairy Tales by German Women, 1780 – 1900. Ed. Shawn C. Jarvis. Lincoln and London: UNP, 2001. 75 – 87. Print. Wordsworth, William. The Prelude: The Four Texts (1798, 1799, 1805, 1850). Ed. Jonathan Wordsworth. London: Penguin, 1995. Print.

Secondary Literature Barasch, Moshe, Theories of Art: From Winckelmann to Baudelaire. New York: NYUP, 1990. Print. Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Transl. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1911. Print. Blumenberg, Hans. Höhlenausgänge. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1987. Print. Heidegger, Martin. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Transl. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly. Bloomington: UIP, 1994. Print. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Hegel: the Restlessness of the Negative. Trans. Jason Smith and Steven Miller. Minneapolis: UMP, 2002. Print. Richards, Robert J. The Romantic Conception of Life. Chicago: UCP, 2002. Print. Rosendahl, W. and S. Kempe. “Johann Christian Rosenmüller und der Höhlenbär (1794 – 2004) – ’Lebensbilder’ aus 210 Jahren.” Natur und Mensch (2003): 145 – 99. Print. Rudwick, M.J.S. Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution. Chicago: UCP, 2005. Print. Schelling, F.W.J. Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature. Transl. P. Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. Winkelhöfer, Roland H. Durch Höhlen der Sächsischen Schweiz. Dresden: Verlag Der Höhlenforscher, 1998.

Ulrike Kristina Köhler

Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic – A Subtle Plea for Female Education in the Arts and in the Sciences

Sublime landscapes and poor orphaned heroines locked up in ruined castles by good-looking but ruthless villains are probably the first images which come to mind when thinking about Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic. The issue of female education is usually neither associated with the author nor the genre. In the following, however, I would like to show that two of Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic novels contain a subtle plea for female education not only in the arts but also in the sciences. These are The Romance of the Forest, published in 1791, and The Mysteries of Udolpho, published in 1794. Moreover, I will demonstrate that the aim of female education in the sciences is primarily to render women capable of perceiving the sublime and beautiful in landscapes. For this, I will explore the parallels Radcliffe’s novels exhibit with Burke’s and Kant’s concepts of the sublime and beautiful. In this context, I will show that Radcliffe’s plea for female education in the sciences is inseparably bound up with aesthetics and the arts. The sciences are presented as a necessary prerequisite to maintain a better understanding of the latter. Towards the end of my paper I will make a detour by taking a further key text of the so-called female Gothic (see Moers 138) into consideration. Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein is not only one of the best-known characters of British Romantic literature, he also embodies the negative prototype of the male scientist who by tampering with nature opens Pandora’s box rather than bringing any good into the world. Finally, I will situate my argument in the debate revolving around the discovery of the human as it is presented in the articles in this book. Before looking more closely at the two Radcliffean novels, the idea of female education they suggest and its impact on landscape perception, I will briefly outline the situation of female education at the end of the eighteenth century and in the contemporary educational discourse. In this context, I will refer to both the arts as well as the sciences. The professionalization and specialization of the scientific disciplines is a development of the early nineteenth century (see Yeo 326 – 8); but the late

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eighteenth century witnessed the onset of this development. Science was a masculine domain. There were nonetheless a few notable women scientists. Among them were the chemist Elizabeth Fulhame (see Rayner-Canham 28 – 9) and the German-British astronomer Caroline Herschel (see Mascha Hansen’s article in this book). Caroline Herschel discovered a number of comets and was given credit for it since the Royal Society published her Catalogue of Stars (see Schiebinger 263). The development in the sciences also had an impact on female education, even if it was only a small one. Educationists such as Anna Laetitia Barbauld put botany, chemistry, physics and astronomy on the list as appropriate subjects for girls and women (see McDermid 317). The more radical Mary Wollstonecraft added mechanics and experiments in natural philosophy (see 293). Throughout the century, a lively and often heated discussion about female education was going on. Key questions were: should girls be taught at home or at school? Should a co-educational system of girls and boys be established as propagated by radicals like Mary Wollstonecraft and Catherine Macaulay (see Britain 162)? Although female education was making progress and schools for girls were set up, it was not as advanced as the education for boys (see Britain 167). The chief aim of female education was to prepare girls for their destined role as mother and mistress of the house (see De Bellaigue 2). Subjects apart from reading, writing and arithmetic were the so-called “female accomplishments”: sewing and other needlework, dancing and French and Italian sufficient enough to sing songs in these languages (see Miles 29). Although some voices in the debate advocated that education should turn girls and women into more cultured beings (see McDermid 314), girls were excluded from public schools with a Latin and Greek curriculum. The reason behind this lack of instruction was that the classic languages were suspected of raising an unfeminine interest in learning, thereby challenging “the prevailing ideal of womanhood” (De Bellaigue 177). Nevertheless, the masculine domain of the classics was invaded. Among the few women who were taught Latin were the writers and educationists Hannah More, Frances Burney and Anna Laetitia Barbauld (see Leranbaum 284 – 5). Ann Radcliffe never explicitly addresses the question of female education in the two novels which are the subject of this paper. However, by informing the reader about the education of her female characters and the way in which they receive it, the author does implicitly touch upon the issue. Notably, the education her female characters receive not only comprises the arts but also includes the sciences. Emily, protagonist of The Mysteries of Udolpho, and Clara, a minor character in The Romance of the Forest, are educated by their fathers. “He gave her [Emily, U.K.K.] a general view of the sciences, and an exact acquaintance with every part of elegant literature” (Radcliffe 1998: 6; cf. Radcliffe 1999: 275).

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Clara is later joined by Adeline, the protagonist of The Romance of the Forest. Both St Aubert, Emily’s father, and La Luc, Clara’s father, personify the perfect image of the paterfamilias, dedicated to his family and the instruction of his children (see Radcliffe 1998: 5 – 6; Radcliffe 1999: 275). With this model of domestic education, Radcliffe certainly struck a chord with many conservative educationists of the day who warned that the gathering of girls in schools might lead to frivolity as well as to an unfeminine competition in the classroom (see Leranbaum 283). It is striking, however, that, unlike most of her contemporaries, Radcliffe’s “model fathers” carry out the instruction of their daughters without worrying whether too much learning might turn a girl into a frightful bluestocking destined to die a lonely spinster as, according to general opinion, no man in his right mind would ever be tempted to marry such a woman. Disregarding the common prejudices against girls learning Latin, St Aubert teaches his daughter this language because he wants Emily to understand and enjoy classical literature (see Radcliffe 1998: 6). Apart from allowing her female characters to study and read Latin, there are further aspects in which Radcliffe clearly deviates from the guidelines of female education. In The Romance of the Forest, girls and boys are co-educated, for La Luc teaches his daughter and son together. Moreover, this paterfamilias applies Rousseauian principles for boys to his daughter. Clara is a passionate harp player, which makes her forget household duties as well as her lessons. But instead of reprimanding her for this serious affront against female virtues, La Luc explains: “‘Let experience teach her her error, … precept seldom brings conviction to young minds’” (Radcliffe 1999: 249). Similarly, St Aubert not only instructs his daughter but also “watche[s] the unfolding of her infant character, with anxious fondness” (Radcliffe 1998: 5). Emily, Clara and Adeline have liberal access to a well-equipped library, which is another remarkable deviation from the perceptions of female education, especially when considering the fact that reading was generally believed to damage the fragile body as well as the delicate mind of young women, luring them from their destined path of duty. A quote from The Romance of the Forest demonstrates how the female desire for knowledge is unrestricted in the novel: “La Luc had an excellent library, and the instruction it offered at once gratified [Adeline’s, U.K.K.] love of knowledge” (Radcliffe 1999: 259). Like the author herself, Radcliffe’s characters are particularly well-read in English literature. St Aubert teaches Emily “English, chiefly that she might understand the sublimity of their best poets” (Radcliffe 1998: 6). Likewise, Adeline is taught English in the convent in which she lives until she comes to stay with the La Luc family after her trials. Adeline’s favourite authors are Shakespeare and Milton (see Radcliffe 1999: 261). Around the mid-century a Gothic

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taste began to take shape in Britain, which was part of a search for national identity. The Gothic era designated the past essential to the development of an idea of Englishness (see Miles 29 – 30). According to general opinion, the Middle Ages came to a close with the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603. Shakespeare and Milton, although the latter wrote his Paradise Lost more than sixty years after the death of Queen Elizabeth, were considered writers “uniquely expressing the national genius” (Miles 30). These authors were not only set beside the classics but they were raised patriotically above them (see Miles 30). In contrast to the classics, Shakespeare and Milton were accessible to women. Robert Miles states that, “given that Gothic values were also associated with chivalry, women could advance their ‘Gothic’ education without injuring their modesty or threatening propriety” (30). One might interject that the female characters from the two novels are after all French, for which reason reading English poets may not be of any help in maintaining their maiden modesty. However, this interjection can be countered by saying that Radcliffe’s heroines are English, so to speak, in a French disguise. Their modest, calm, and virtuous character echoes Richardson’s Pamela rather than the French hetero-stereotype of a frivolous, sanguine woman. In his study Alien Nation. Nineteenth Century Gothic Fiction and English Nationality, Cannon Schmitt even argues that the heroine of the Gothic novel acts as a metonym for England (see 2). Of Radcliffe’s female characters, it can be said that despite their learning they manage to maintain their good reputation after all. Even more striking than Emily’s and Adeline’s knowledge of English and Latin literature is the fact that they are educated in the sciences. And, as will be shown, an education in the sciences is implicitly presented as being vital for an understanding of the arts and particularly of aesthetics. As already stated at the beginning of this paper, some female educationists put botany and astronomy on the list of appropriate subjects for girls. Radcliffe in her turn integrates these subjects into the curriculum of her female characters. Accordingly, Emily’s father St Aubert gives his daughter a general overview of the sciences with a particular emphasis on botany (see Radcliffe 1998: 3; 6). I will again refer to the education in botany when discussing the understanding of landscape aesthetics. In The Romance of the Forest, La Luc instructs Adeline together with his daughter Clara in astronomy : Clara and Adeline loved to pass the evenings in this hall, where they had acquired the first rudiments of astronomy, and from which they had a wide view of the heavens. La Luc pointed out to them the planets and the fixed stars, explained their laws, and from thence taking occasion to mingle moral with scientific instruction, would often ascend towards that great first cause, whose nature soars beyond the grasp of human comprehension (Radcliffe 1999: 275).

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This instruction in astronomy greatly contrasts the often superficial knowledge girls received in this subject, and which only enabled them to manipulate miniature models of the solar system for decorative usage and without any basic knowledge of physics (see Senders Pedersen 143 – 4). In tune with many women fighting for female education like Mary Wollstonecraft or Hannah More, in Radcliffe’s novels the education of girls is displayed as the basis of morality. The Mysteries of Udolpho even offers a direct statement with regard to the value of female education for a virtuous way of life, when Emily’s father ascertains: A well-informed mind … is the best security against the contagion of folly and of vice. The vacant mind is ever on the watch for relief, and ready to plunge into error, to escape from the languor of idleness. Store it with ideas, teach it the pleasure of thinking; and the temptations of the world without, will be counteracted by the gratifications derived from the world within (Radcliffe 1998: 6).

In the eighteenth century, morals were believed to be the most important pillar of a sound society. The connection between morals, education and society is also evident in Radcliffe’s novels. Emily, Clara and Adeline marry after having overcome their ordeals. Their marriages are, as it appears, not based on intrigues, superficial accomplishments and good looks but on love and reciprocal respect. By contrast, Emily’s aunt, who appears to have only been instructed in the so-called female accomplishments, is presented as a silly, vain woman whose marriage with the villain Montoni turns out to be a failure. In fact it ends with Madame Montoni’s death. Likewise Madam La Motte in The Romance of the Forest is not happy in her marriage and susceptible to petty jealousies. Having presented the education Radcliffe’s female characters receive, I will now examine the aspect of landscape aesthetics and the idea of the sublime and beautiful. In the eighteenth century, Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant are key figures in the re-conceptualization of an idea which originates in classic antiquity and which has been revived in several time periods. Burke’s concept of the sublime focuses on the idea of terror which he closely associates with it and which had a great influence on the genre of the gothic novel: Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling (36).

Burke names “magnificence” (71) and “infinity” (67) as qualities capable of evoking the sublime. He also sets the beautiful in opposition to the sublime and names the following qualities as its characteristics: “imperfection” (100), “gradual variation” (104) and “delicacy” (105). Similarly, Kant constructs a dichotomy between the two terms, and he likewise identifies the qualities Burke

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names capable of evoking the feeling of the sublime and beautiful. Yet, while Burke focuses on the realisation of the sublime in tangible objects, Kant emphasises in his interpretation the confrontation between the human subject and the sublime (see Berressem 152). Moreover, Kant particularly investigates the moral aspect of the sublime considering it as an idea which enables the onlooker of the corresponding landscapes to discover the transcendental in nature, and its power to instil morals and virtue. Natasha Duquette has pointed to the parallels between late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century texts written by women and Kant’s Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764) (see 4).1 The following quote from Kant’s Observations illustrates key features of his concept which we can also discover in Radcliffe’s novels: The sight of a mountain whose snow-covered peak rises above the clouds, the description of a raging storm, or Milton’s portrayal of the infernal kingdom, arouse enjoyment but with horror; on the other hand, the sight of flower-strewn meadows, valleys with winding brooks and covered with grazing flocks, the description of Elysium, or Homer’s portrayal of the girdle of Venus, also occasion a pleasant sensation but one that is joyous and smiling. In order that the former impression could occur to us in due strength, we must have a feeling of the sublime, and, in order to enjoy the latter well, a feeling of the beautiful. Tall oaks and lonely shadows in a sacred grove are sublime; flower beds, low hedges and trees trimmed in figures are beautiful. Night is sublime, day is beautiful. Temperament that possess a feeling for the sublime are drawn gradually, by the quiet stillness of a summer evening as the shimmering light of the stars breaks through the brown shadows of the night and the lonely moon rises into view, into high feelings of friendship, of disdain for the world, of eternity. The shining day stimulates busy fervor and a feeling of gaiety. The sublime moves (47).

Duquette explores the texts of Austen and Schimmelpenninck but she implicitly also points to Radcliffe when she indicates the parallels with Kant’s Observations and the writing of women (10). The passages in which Radcliffe’s protagonists are portrayed in nature not only recall the image of a Burkean but also of a Kantian landscape. This holds true for The Romance of the Forest but also for The Mysteries of Udolpho. The quote below is taken from the novel to showcase the similarities it exhibits with Kant. This is particularly valid for the connection between sublime and beautiful landscapes, the idea of the transcendental in nature, and the idea of poetry. Kant names Milton (47), whom Radcliffe frequently quotes in her novels. She does not particularly refer to this championed author of the Romantics in the quote below, yet when she speaks of poetry, Milton comes immediately to mind because of his prominent role in her novels:

1 Kant further explores the sublime in his Critique of Judgement which was first published in 1790.

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It was one of Emily’s earliest pleasures to ramble among the scenes of nature; nor was it in the soft and glowing landscape that she most delighted; she loved more the wild wood-walks, that skirted the mountain; and still more the mountain’s stupendous recesses, where the silence and grandeur of solitude impressed a sacred awe upon her heart, and lifted her thoughts to the God of heaven and earth. In scenes like these she would often linger alone, wrapt in a melancholy charm, till the last gleam of day faded from the west; till the lonely sound of a sheep-bell, or the distant bark of a watchdog, were all that broke on the stillness of the evening. Then, the gloom of the woods; the trembling of their leaves, at intervals, in the breeze; the bat, flitting on the twilight; the cottage-lights, now seen, and now lost–were circumstances that awakened her mind into effort, and led to enthusiasm and poetry (Radcliffe 1998: 6).

The link between landscape aesthetics, literature as a major field of arts and the sciences becomes again evident when considering the location of the library to which Emily has access. It offers a panoramic view of the Pyrenees which are described in the familiar terms of landscape aesthetics (see Radcliffe 1998: 3). Equally significant is the fact that “[a]djoining the library was a green-house, stored with scarce and beautiful plants” (Radcliffe 1998: 3). The science of botany is the key to experiencing landscapes in the way described. Accordingly, botany is the favourite pastime of St Aubert’s (see Radcliffe 1998: 3). However, the novel does not provide this information without implying an aesthetic as well as transcendental and moral dimension, “and among the neighbouring mountains, which afforded a luxurious feast to the mind of the naturalist, he often passed the day in the pursuits of his favourite science” (Radcliffe 1998: 3). What is important in the context of female education is that St. Aubert is often accompanied by his daughter Emily who is equipped “with a small osier basket to receive plants” (Radcliffe 1998: 3). So far the depiction of female education in Radcliffe’s novels remains fairly within the boundaries of maiden modesty. However, this boundary is clearly transgressed in The Romance of the Forest, and it is science which plays the crucial role. The sister of La Luc, who has lived with the family since the early death of her brother’s wife, received a scientific education going beyond that of a daughter instructed by a father or a father figure. Madame La Luc has her own laboratory, equipped with chemical apparatus. In it she prepares medicine for the entire village. When Radcliffe writes that behind the family parlour was “a room which belonged exclusively to Madame La Luc” (1999: 248), she appears to anticipate a demand later made by a famous early twentieth century writer and advocate of women’s rights, Virginia Woolf. Woolf ’s focus lay on the production of literature, but the central message of her essay, that every woman should have a room of her own (see 5), can well be extended to the sciences. In Radcliffe’s novels it is not only the mature Madame La Luc who has her own room. In The Mysteries of Udolpho, Emily is also granted this luxury. As she is a member of the

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aristocracy, this fact may be considered as standard for her class, but Emily’s room is no elaborately furnished dressing room. It rather resembles a study. Its location is of significance because it associates her scientific education on the level of the setting with botany : “Adjoining the eastern side of the green-house … was a room, which Emily called hers, and which contained her books, her drawings, her musical instruments with some of her favourite birds and plants” (Radcliffe 1998: 3). This paper set out to show that Ann Radcliffe’s two novels contain a subtle plea for female education not only in the arts but also in the sciences. The novels advocate that women are allowed a share in knowledge without any restriction. The two novels further suggest that female education is an essential necessity for a society on its way to discover the human in the life sciences. This is underpinned by juxtaposing Ann Radcliffe’s female scientist Madam La Luc with a male scientist from another novel belonging to the female Gothic. Madame La Luc uses the knowledge of science to produce medicine for the benefit of her community. In contrast, Victor Frankenstein employs science to rival God. His enterprise turns out to be a disaster, since the manlike being he creates turns against its creator and his next of kin. While Madam La Luc rightly prides herself in her scientific capacities, Victor Frankenstein is devastated after finishing his creation and he tells Robert Walton: “For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart” (Shelley 55). Although Ann Radcliffe never joined in the discussion of female education on an extra-literary level, her plea for female education is evident in her two novels. Taking into account that the author of The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Romance of the Forest was the best-selling, and most translated English novelist of the 1790s (see Miles 8), Ann Radcliffe’s voice was certainly heard in the debate about female education. Moreover, it could be argued that Radcliffe’s idea of discovering the human goes beyond the life sciences. It follows an integrated approach, because it includes women as well as men. It comprises the sciences as well as the arts and points to their interdependence. In compliance with the ongoing search for a national identity at the end of the eighteenth century, her plea for female education shows a nationalistic tinge since the characters with a positive connotation can be identified as English and these only occupy themselves with the sciences, the arts and aesthetics.

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References Primary Literature Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Ed. Adam Phillips. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Print. Kant, Immanuel. Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. Trans. by John T. Goldthwait. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: U of California P, 2003. Print. Radcliffe, Ann. The Mysteries of Udolpho. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Print. – The Romance of the Forest. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Print. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 2003. Print. Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Women. London: Penguin, 1992. Print. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1945. Print.

Secondary Literature Berressem, Hanjo. “Das Erhabene.” Metzler Lexikon Literatur- und Kulturtheorie. Ed. Ansgar Nünning. Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 2004. 152. Print. Britain, Ian. “Education.” Romanticism. An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age. British Culture 1776 – 1832. Ed. Iain McCalman. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. 161 – 70. Print. De Bellaigue, Christina. Educating Women: Schooling and Identity in England and France, 1800 – 1867. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Print. Duquette, Natasha. “Motionless Wonder: Contemplating Gothic Sublimity in Northanger Abbey.” Persuasions On-Line 30.2 (2010): 1 – 13. Web. 15 April 2010. Leranbaum, Miriam. “‘Mistresses of Orthodoxy’ Education in the Lives and Writings of Late Eighteenth-Century English Women Writers.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 121.4 (1977): 281 – 301. Print. McDermid, Jane. “Conservative Feminism and Female Education in the Eighteenth Century.” History of Education 18.4 (1989): 309 – 22. Print. Miles, Robert. Ann Radcliffe: The Great Enchantress. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995. Print. Moers, Ellen. Literary Women. The Great Writers. New York: Anchor P/Doubleday, 1977. Print. Rayner-Canham, Marelene and Geoffrey. Women in Chemistry: Their Changing Roles from Alchemical Times to the mid-Twentieth Century. Philadelphia: Chemical Heritage Foundation, 2001. Print. Schiebinger, Londa. The Mind has no Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1989. Print. Schmitt, Cannon. Alien Nation. Nineteenth Century Gothic Fiction and English Nationality. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP, 1997. Print. Senders Pedersen, Joyce. “Schoolmistresses and Headmistresses: Elites and Education in Nineteenth-Century England.” Journal of British Studies 15 (1975): 135 – 62. Print. Yeo, Richard. “Natural Philosophy (Science).” Romanticism. An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age. British Culture 1776 – 1832. Ed. Iain McCalman. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. 320 – 8. Print.

Felix C.H. Sprang

The Rise of the “Life Sciences” and the Dismissal of Plant Life in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries

While we certainly all agree that plants are living organisms we are less likely to agree that plants have lives. A life, that is, in the common use of the term that construes life as an animate existence centred upon agency.1 However, it only takes a moment’s reflection to unmask the underlying anthropocentric constraints of the term “life” as we use it (see Toepfer 170 – 1). Plants are agents, they interact productively with their environment. In fact, of all living organisms only some plants and fungi can justifiably claim to be productive in a strict material sense. As all other beings depend directly or indirectly on their productivity, it is surprising that plants have not as yet – or perhaps only very recently – been given the status of colonized subjects (see Valverde and Lafuente 139 – 42).2 In this paper I will focus on the still largely unlamented victim of the rise of the “Life Sciences” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the plant. My contention is that the changing conception of the term “life” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries resulted in the cementing of the division between plants and animals. My main point will come into focus if we consider two developments in the domain of cultural and intellectual history : first, the growing interest in systematic taxonomy in the latter half of the eighteenth century and, second, the rise of physiology in the empirical sciences in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As a consequence of these converging developments a new conception of what it means to be human evolved around 1800 – and it evolved at the expense of downgrading plant life. 1 This common use of the term “life” is brought to the fore by the colloquialism “Get a life!” – a colloquialism forged in the US to coerce someone to “stop being so boring, conventional, oldfashioned [and to] start living a fuller or more interesting existence”. OED s.v. “life”, Phrases 12k. Indicative of the bias are also the many derogatory phrases that discredit vegetable life like “couch potato” or “vegetable brain”. 2 There is certainly no vegetable rights movement, and with the foundation of the “Vegetarian Society” in 1847 the moral issues were settled along the lines of Jeremy Bentham’s contention that “the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” (Gregory 97).

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Language – so cognitive linguists keep reminding us – is revealing: the usage of the word plant is no exception. The OED lists three entries under the heading “plant” [Latin planta]. The primary meaning is divided into two variants: first, “senses relating to the living organism” – and, second, “various slang terms derived from the primary meaning” (e. g. plant as a spy or informer). The senses relating to the living organism are again divided into two groups: “senses that refer to a young tree, shrub, vegetable, or flower newly planted, or intended for planting” and: plant, n1 I 2.a. gen. and Biol. A living organism other than an animal, able to subsist wholly on inorganic substances, typically fixed to a substrate and moving chiefly by means of growth, and lacking specialized sensory and digestive organs; spec. (more fully green plant) such an organism belonging to a group (the kingdom Plantae) which comprises multicellular forms having cellulose cell walls and capable of photosynthesis by means of chlorophyll, including trees, shrubs, herbs, grasses, and ferns (the vascular or higher plants), and also mosses and liverworts (the bryophytes). Freq. spec.: a small (esp. herbaceous) organism of this kind, as distinguished from a tree or shrub; (in informal use) such an organism grown for or known by its foliage or fruit, as distinguished from a “flower”.

Certainly, the OED is not the authority for biological terms and their usage – but the entry unmasks fundamental conceptions.3 First, plants are defined ex negativo as something other than animals. Second, they are conceived of as closely related to matter as they can “subsist wholly on inorganic substances”. Third, they lack active movement as well as specialized sensory and digestive organs. The definition thus marks a clear boundary between animal and plant life by focussing on the plant’s metabolism and its apparent lack of interaction with the environment. While this entry suggests that the boundary between human and plant life can easily be drawn (a contention that interferes with the entry for “animal”4), the OED qualifies the definition of plant at length – a rare occasion:

3 Most textbooks today still divide the whole of living organisms into five distinct groups, a division that is informed by morphology, physiology, ecology as well as – more recently – genetics (see DeSalle, Egan and Siddall). There is an alternative model based on ribosomal RNA sequencing that favours three lines of descent (eubacteria, archaebacteria and urkaryotes) with urkaryotes comprising all prokaryotes and eukaryotes, i. e. animals, plants, fungi, etc. as one kingdom (see Woese and Fox). While this alternative model is accepted in the scientific community (see Margulis and Guerrero), the division of plants and animals is upheld in most textbooks. 4 animal: 1. a. A living being; a member of the higher of the two series of organized beings, of which the typical forms are endowed with life, sensation, and voluntary motion, but of which the lowest forms are hardly distinguishable from the lowest vegetable forms by any more certain marks than their evident relationship to other animal forms, and thus to the animal series as a whole rather than to the vegetable series.

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Bacteria, formerly classified in the kingdom Plantae, have now been removed to a separate kingdom, and would generally not be referred to as plants. However, in the broadest (non-technical) sense, the term still may include fungi (and lichens), which are now classified in a separate kingdom, but were formerly regarded as lower (nonvascular) plants, together with algae and bryophytes. The position of algae is also equivocal: many scientific writers exclude them from the kingdom Plantae (placing them in the kingdom Protista or Protoctista), but green algae are still sometimes treated as lower plants, and non-technical use of the word “plant” would often include multicellular algae (e. g. seaweeds).

While the boundary between animals and plants thus seems to be uncontroversial, the closeness of plants to bacteria, algae, lichens and fungi is stressed. It is noteworthy that the original entry in the first edition of Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) avoids juxtaposing plant, animal and bacteria life and lists the 27 “genders or kinds” of plants that John Ray proposed with respect to the different kinds of fruits. The definition of plants ex negativo that is common today is a result of eighteenth-century botany which established that plants lack the essential feature of an animal: plants are not animated, plants do not have souls. However, the folk etymology that supported the notion by amalgamating “animal” and “anima” is misleading. Aristotle in his De Anima explains at great length that plants do have a soul, they only lack the faculty to feel.5 The passage explaining the lack of sensation on the plant’s side (DA 424a32 – 424a32b3) was deemed obscure until Richard Sorabji in 1992 illuminated it by pointing to intra- and extratextual references (215 – 7). For Aristotle, plants are not able to feel because they mainly consist of the element earth (which is cold and dry) and thus lack the material quality necessary to receive sensory input (which relies on heat and moisture). However, it is impossible to discuss the changing attitude to plants from Aristotle to the Enlightenment comprehensively within the scope of this paper.6 The concept that instigated a new perspective on the animal-plant division in the eighteenth century was the idea of plant sexuality (see George, 105 – 12; see Schiebinger 201 – 4). As Linnaean taxonomy was based on this concept, “to be a Linnaean taxonomist was to believe in the sex life of flowers” (Browne 597). 5 For a fuller account of the notion that plants have souls see Ingensiep. 6 While changing attitudes to cultivated plants have been discussed recently (see Prance and Nesbitt; Murphy ; Pollan), a concise intellectual history of human interaction with wild plants, or plants in general, is still missing. Attempts to describe that relationship often revolve around a quasi-mythic connection between plant life and human existence along the lines of Charles Lewis’s contention that “plants signal the presence of an unremitting life energy that pulses throughout the universe” (3). While non-reductive approaches are always at risk of indulging in esoteric lore, attempting to write, as Bühler and Rieger have done, a “Wissensgeschichte der Pflanzen” (9) that will inform us as humans vis a vis plants is certainly a deserving task.

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Ascribing a sex life to plants then opened the playing field for comparing human and plant life on several accounts. At the same time, the discovery of the polyp by Abraham Trembley and John Tuberville Needham raised the interest in “plantanimals” (see Vartanian). La Mettrie’s L’Homme-Plante dating from 1748 is only one of the many treatises that pointed to the similarities and differences between plant and human life in the wake of this discovery : Il n’y auroit [sic] cependant rien de surpr¦nant dans cette id¦e [l’Homme est un Insecte qui pousse ses Racines dans la Matrice, comme le Germe second¦ des Plantes dans la leur], puisque N¦edham observe que les Polypes, les Bernacles & autres Animaux se multiplient par V¦getation. Ne taille t’on pas encore, pour ainsi dire, un Homme comme un Arbre? (26)7

While La Mettrie dismissed the idea of an affinity between plants and humans in the latter half of his treatise, he nevertheless “elaborate[d] a broad, fundamental analogy embracing all living types, from the vegetable to the human” (Vartanian 272). Throughout the last decades of the eighteenth century, animal-plants and homme-plantes inspired the imagination of artists and novelists, sometimes investigating Bacon’s aphorism “homo sit tanquam planta inversa” (404), sometimes establishing other creative comparisons. In Holberg’s Nicolaii Klimii iter subterraneum (1741), published in London in 1742 as A Journey to the World Under-Ground. By Nicholas Klimius, for example, the protagonist finds himself surrounded by trees that move and talk: Having opened my Eyes I beheld all about me a whole Grove of Trees, all in Motion, all animated … but I had no Time to examine these Machines, or to inquire into their Causes; for presently another Tree advancing to me, let down one of its Branches, which had at the Extremity of it six large Buds in the Manner of Fingers. With these the Tree took me up from the Ground, and carried me off (14).

Nicholas is taken to the subterranean city inhabited by trees and marvels at the complexity of arboreal life: I now plainly perceived, that the Inhabitants of this Globe were Trees and that they were endued with Reason; and I was lost in Wonder at that Variety in which Nature wantons in the Formation of her Creatures. … Words cannot express into what a Labyrinth of Thought these strange Appearances threw me … for altho’ these Trees seemed to me to be sociable Creatures, to enjoy the Benefit of Language, and to be endued with a certain Degree or Portion of Reason, insomuch that they had the Right to be inserted in the Class of rational Animals, yet I much doubted whether they could be compar’d to Men. (18) 7 “There would be nothing surprising about this idea [that the human embryo and the seedling are nurtured similarly], since Needham observes that polyps, barnacles, and other animals multiply by vegetation. Moreover, do we not prune men like trees?” (Transl. Watson and Rybalka; 83)

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The uneasiness expressed in this fictional text revolves around the status of the civis potuani conceived of as “Machines”, “all in Motion, all animated”, “endued with Reason” and “enjoy[ing] the Benefit of Language”. Evidently, as the dividing line between animals and humans became increasingly porous with the discovery of polyps and plant sex life, the division between plants and animals, including humans, became more urgent as Agamben, among others, has pointed out: “[t]he division of life into vegetal and relational, organic and animal, animal and human, therefore passes first of all as a mobile border within living man, and without this intimate caesura the very decision of what is human and what is not would probably not be possible” (15). To sustain my argument that plant life was downgraded with the rise of the “Life Sciences” it will suffice to discuss three crucial points that resulted in drawing the line between animal and plant life: metabolism, sensual perception and mobility.8 The focus on the plant’s metabolism is the result of a general rise of physiology in the empirical sciences (see Israel 478 – 80; see Eisnerova 219 – 20), with Stephen Hales’s Vegetable Staticks (1727) marking the beginning of a series of publications that documented “Experiments upon vegetables”. These experiments became increasingly popular from the 1770s onwards when Priestley conducted his experiments and published the results as Experiments and Observations on different kinds of Air, and other branches of Natural Philosophy, connected with the subject in 1775. Historians of science usually focus on the advancements made by Priestley in chemistry. With respect to our subject, his observation that plants were able to restore the “phlogisticated air” while the animals kept in his sealed glass jars suffocated and died (vol. 2, 247) was particularly decisive because it established a new principle for the division between plant and animal life. While Priestley still believed that the plants cleansed the “fixed air” and restored its phlogiston, Ingenhousz, Lavoisier and finally van Helmont argued that it was carbon dioxide that was absorbed by the plants and ultimately turned into plant matter (see Conant). With this new paradigm – biochemistry – the focus was now on metabolic cycles. It can be argued that as a result plants were perceived primarily as material objects. With these models, precursors to the photosynthesis-model, the plant became a machine processing inorganic matter into organic matter.9 The Aristotelian notion that plants have souls, however, never quite dis8 The aestheticization of plants in art and in science, which has reduced plants to visual objects and has thus decisively shaped our attitude to plants, will not be discussed in this paper. It has been extensively treated by Martin Kemp and, more recently, by Anne Secord. 9 This did not, of course, disqualify them from being seen as alive, or as comparable to animals, as the joint histories of materialism and vitalism show. Ren¦ Descartes, Erasmus Darwin and William Lawrence all pointed at similarities between animals and plants, arguing that irritability to stimulation is common to all. (see Levere 194 – 198; Packham 2012, 6 – 13)

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Fig. 1: Plate from the French translation Voyage de Nicolas Klimius dans le Monde Souterrain (1741)

appeared. Charles Webster has convincingly shown that “[t]he emergence of the idea of plant sensitivity was one aspect of the development of experimental science” (6) in the seventeenth century. Some of the experiments at the beginning of the nineteenth century, conducted by Johann Wilhelm Ritter and others, tested the plant’s reaction to electricity (see Wetzels; Henderson). Electricity was a la mode, of course, along with the interest in nerves. And the fact that plants

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showed some reaction to electricity despite not having nerves was a serious testing case in the emerging field of neurophysiology. Experiments designed to shed some light on this apparent paradox were conducted throughout the nineteenth century – but all to no avail. It remained somewhat of a mystery why plants reacted to electricity, and the question whether plants disposed of sensual perception could not be resolved.10 At the same time, there was little doubt that plants reacted to light and temperature. Investigating the circadian rhythm of plants, Johann Gottfried Zinn, John Hill and Charles Bonnet suspected that “the sleeping and the sensitive plants are naturally allied; that their motions, tho’ differently brought on, are dependent on the same principle” (Hill 7). At the end of the eighteenth century plants had thus actually climbed up the scala naturae: they did not only possess a soul, they were also thought to have the faculty to feel. The sunflower (Helianthus spec.) and the mimosa (Mimosa pudica) served as crucial test cases for a dividing line between sensitive and non-sensitive plants. As early as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries botanists were eager to understand the cause for the movement of the sunflower and the mimosa – a movement that was particularly mysterious because it seemed both voluntary and mechanical.11 The polymath Athanasius Kircher speculated on the movement of the sunflower and devised a sunflower clock (see Hankins and Silverman 14 – 17) but only in the eighteenth century did botanists begin to conduct physiological and histological experiments to find out what exactly caused the movement. The first laboratory experiments by Henry Power, Timothy Clarke, Robert Hooke and John Ray, who all investigated the movement of the mimosa, “served only to establish what they could not explain – that the Mimosa has a dramatic capacity for reaction to stimulus” (Ritterbush 237; see Webster 13 – 20). I think it is fair to say that in eighteenth-century Western thought Aristotle’s question whether plants can feel was increasingly reduced to the question whether they can move voluntarily and thus show a reaction to sensory stimuli that could be measured and investigated empirically. Johann Gottfried Zinn, who experimented with the absence of light, discovered that two types of movements had to be distinguished: movements that are governed by internal processes and follow a circadian rhythm regardless whether the plant is exposed to sunshine or not, and movements that are triggered directly by changes in the environment, foremost by the exposure to light. For a clear division between animals and plants, the latter seemed particularly relevant. While Hill was 10 The question of plant communication has only recently been re-addressed by botanists, most prominently by contributors to the textbook Communication in Plants. Neuronal Aspects of Plant Life (see Bakuska et al.; Trebacz; Trewavas; Gurovich). 11 For a brief historical sketch that outlines the investigation of plant movement see Whippo and Hangarter 2116 – 2119.

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Fig. 2: Kircher. Magnes sive, De arte magnetica opus tripartitum (1643). 508.

adamant that the presence and absence of light induced sleep and movement, Zinn and Bonnet were more reserved: “anbey aber bleiben noch immer viele Zweifel übrig, ob der Abwesenheit des Lichts auch der tägliche Schlaf derselben

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zuzuschreiben sey, wie H. D. Hill behauptet, und ob nicht in verschiedenen anderen Ursachen der Grund dieser Erscheinung zu suchen sey” (Zinn 47).12 The discovery of cells by Henry Dutrochet in 1822, a discovery that was published in 1824, decisively altered the approach in investigating plant movement (Wilson 15). Dutrochet had found that, in the case of Mimosa, the motion of the leaves triggered by light depended on cell clusters at the base of the leave’s main rib (see Schiller and Schiller). From now on plant physiology was intertwined with histology. Yet despite advances made in morphology and physiology, the question how exactly external stimuli initiated movement of the plant remained a conundrum. In order to shed some light on the apparently “voluntary” movement of plants, the medical school at the University of Tübingen offered a prize in 1826 for the study that could best explain the movements of twiners and creepers. The winner, Hugo von Mohl, Professor of botany at the University of Jena, naturally agreed with the committee that empirical research in this field was still lacking. Da noch nie ein Botaniker mit dem in dieser Schrift behandelten Gegenstande, so wichtig er auch für die Pflanzenphysiologie ist, sich ernsthaft beschäftigte, da bis jetzt die Kenntnis von den Erscheinungen, welche die Ranken und Schlingpflanzen zeigen, höchst unvollkommen war, indem ihr freiwilliges Winden, die Art, wie sie sich an eine Stütze anlegen, wie sie dieselbe umschlingen, der Einfluss, den die Aussenwelt auf die Bewegung dieser Pflanzen äussert, theils gänzlich unbekannt waren, theils abenteuerliche Vorstellungen darüber gehegt wurden, so wird man vielleicht eine nähere Auseinandersetzung der Lebensverhältnisse dieser Pflanzen, wie eine fleissige und unbefangene Beobachtung dieselben kennen lehrte, für keine überflüssige und undankbare Arbeit halten (1827: iv).13

Before we look at Mohl’s line of argument I should like to point out that there is a definite anthropomorphic ring to the text. Mohl’s prize-winning and widely acclaimed study includes a series of metaphors and allegories that make the plant’s movement appear human, e. g. when the plant’s movement is conceived of as a “freiwilliges Winden”, a voluntary winding. The text suggests that Mohl was full of empathy for the plants that are condemned to creep on the face of the 12 “Many doubts remain, however, whether the absence of light can account for sleep during the day of a plant as it is proposed by Doctor Hill, and we may have to investigate other possible causes for this phenomenon.” (my translation) 13 “So far no botanist has dealt with the subject of this treatise seriously despite the fact that it is central to plant physiology and that knowledge about the phenomena displayed by the climbers and creepers is imperfect and sketchy : the voluntary winding, the way that these plants lean against their support, how they entangle it, the influence that the environment exerts on the movement of these plants, all this is either completely unknown or immersed in bizarre ideas. Hence, a detailed discussion of the living conditions of these plants that is based on a diligent and unbiased inspection will certainly not be deemed a dispensable and misguided endeavour.” (my translation)

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Fig. 3: Hugo von Mohl. Über den Bau und das Winden der Ranken und Schlingpflanzen (1827). Tab. V.

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earth. He assumed that creeper plants have an inner longing to crawl up the carrier plant and that they are capable of enjoying the lofty heights. Mohl’s language is clearly at odds with his intention, expressed in the introduction, not to elevate the plants to the rank of “höherem Leben”: Wenige nur haben diesen Gewächsen ihre Aufmerksamkeit geschenkt, und diese wenigen haben leider nicht immer auf Beobachtung der Natur ihr Raisonnement gegründet, sondern zu rasch in ihren Folgerungen, haben sie auf unvollständige Beobactungen [sic] sich stützend, und ihrer Phantasie freien Spielraum lassend, in diesen Erscheinungen den Beweis eines höheren Lebens, als den Pflanzen je zukommt, gefunden. (1827: 2)14

Mohl’s explanation for the movement of creepers is simple. He explains that the plant’s movement results from an uneven growth of tissue: the tissue on the far side of the branch grows more quickly than the tissue resting against the carrier plant. “Die nächste Ursache dieser Bewegungen liegt in [der] Expansion des Zellgewebes der obern Seite und der Seitenfläche der Ranke (§. 45 – 46)” (139).15 By providing a morphological explanation, Mohl has shown that the movement is, in the end, a question of the plant’s metabolism. His careful study, supported by a thorough microscopic analysis of the tissue structure, does explain how plants grow around a carrier plant and thus cling to it but he does not explain what exactly triggers the irregular growth. It is surprising that neither Mohl nor the committee seem to have noticed the fact that the study is merely descriptive. Mohl’s insistence that the creeper only clings to the carrier plant when there is a contact zone between the two raises the old Aristotelean question: is it possible that the plant can feel the carrier plant? It should not go unnoticed that the focus on histology blurred the boundary between animal and plant life, at least for a short period as physiologists like Thomas Southwood Smith and Theodor Schwann “held that the simple constituent parts of animals and plants were the same and could, in certain circumstances, possess an independent vitality” (Jacyna 22). In the long term, however, the focus on histology codified the boundary between animals and plants and served as a definite marker to cluster diverse groups of eukaryotic cells. With the investigation of the vacuole in his Grundzüge der Anatomie und Physiologie der vegetabilischen Zelle (1851), published as Principles of the Anatomy and Physiology of the Vegetable Cell in 1852, Mohl contributed deci14 “Few have paid attention to these plants and the few who have unfortunately have not always based their line of reasoning on observing nature. Instead, they have, briskly in their inferences relying on inchoate observations, overindulged in their imagination and ascribed on account of these phenomena to these plants a higher level of existence than appropriate.” (my translation) 15 “The reason for this type of movement is found in the expansion of cell tissue on the upper side and the sides of the tendril.” (my translation)

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sively to the distinction between plants and animals based on histology (Wayne 2). It is also in his Grundzüge that Mohl returns to the issue of plant movement and revisits his own line of argument: Diese von mir (Ueber den Bau und das Winden der Ranken und Schlingpflanzen) aufgestellte Ansicht, daß das Umschlingen der Stütze die Folge einer durch Berührung erregbaren Reizbarkeit sei, hat sich gerade keines besonderen Beifalles zu rühmen gehabt, dennoch finde ich nicht, daß Besseres an ihre Stelle gesetzt worden ist (1851: 149).16

Three decades before Mohl published his seminal study, Erasmus Darwin was busy writing The Botanic Garden (1791) which consists of two distinct poems, the Economy of Vegetation [EV] dealing with the physiology of plants and the Loves of the Plants [LP] explaining the Linneaen classification of the plant kingdom. While Mohl was apparently largely unaware of the anthropocentric images and metaphors in his writing, Darwin addresses the reader with a reminder that scientific prose – unlike his poems that are imbued with anthropomorphic imagery – should abstain from imagination and “loose analogies”: The general design of the following sheets is to inlist Imagination under the banner of Science; and to lead her votaries from the looser analogies, which dress out the imagery of poetry, to the stricter ones, which form the ratiocination of philosophy (EV iii).

Throughout The Botanic Garden, and in particular in the interludes in which a poet and a bookseller discuss the advantages of rendering natural philosophy in poetic language, Darwin admits that scientific writing needs to resort to “more appropriated and abstracted terms” and should consequently “eradicat[e] the abundance of metaphor” (LP 182). His long poem, Darwin explains, is meant as a didactic poem, as an introduction that will “induce the ingenious reader to cultivate the knowledge of Botany” (EV iii). According to Darwin, this cultivation culminates in consulting the Systema Naturae, the Species Plantarum and the Philosophia Botanica by Linnaeus.17 However, Darwin’s work is not simply a laborious advertisement for the “Swedish sage” (LP 3), The Botanic Garden is not merely a poem of praise, nor is it a poem that deals predominantly with plant taxonomy. The Botanic Garden, according to Desmond King-Hele “the most popular poem of its day, which the literary world took as its guide to science” (19), is a multiplex poem that addresses many issues of natural philosophy and 16 “The view propounded by me (in Ueber den Bau und das Winden der Ranken und Schlingpflanzen) that the curling round the support results from an irritability excited by contact, was not met with approval, let alone acclamation, yet I do not find that anything better has been put in its place.” (1852: 156, my translation) 17 Darwin had spent six years translating Linnaeus’s A System of Vegetables, published in 1785, and The Families of Plants, published in 1787.

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links them to human life. Written in the late 1780s and published in 1791, it is no surprise that the movement of plants is discussed again and again. Instead of listing all the references to the movement of plants in The Botanic Garden, I should like to concentrate on Darwin’s comments on the movement of the mimosa and the sunflower in the first canto of The Loves of the Plants. Darwin vividly describes the sense of touch shown by the mimosa: Weak with nice sense the chaste MIMOSA stands, From each rude touch withdraws he timid hands; Oft as light clouds o’erpass the summer-glade, Alarm’d she trembles at the moving shade; And feels, alive through all her tender from, The whisper’d murmurs of the gathering storm; Shuts her sweet eye-lids to approaching night, And hails with freshen’d charms the rising light. Veil’d, with gay decency and modest pride, Slow to the mosque she moves, an eastern bride; There her soft vows unceasing love record, Queen of the bright seraglio of her lord. – So sinks or rises with the changeful hour The liquid silver in its glassy tower. So turns the needle to the poles it loves, With fine librations quivering, as it moves. (LP 39 – 41)

The image of the trembling mimosa shutting her “sweet eye-lids to approaching night” and moving “with gay decency and modest pride” is juxtaposed with the explanation that it is the ascent and descent of sap in the plant’s stem and stalks, the “liquid silver [of the mercury thermometer sinking and rising] in its glassy tower”, as well as magnetic attraction, “turn[ing] the needle to the poles it loves”, which cause the movement of the plant. The mechanistic explanation that the poem suggests appears to be rebutted by the lengthy annotation but it is ultimately supported by focussing on “the fluids of the plants”: Naturalists have not explained the immediate cause of the collapsing of the sensitive plant; … Now, as their situation after being exposed to external violence resembles their sleep, but with a greater degree of collapse, may it not be owing to the numbness or paralysis consequent to too violent irritation, like the fainting of animals from pain or fatigue? I kept a sensitive plant in a dark room till some hours after day-break; its leaves and leaf-stalks were collapsed as in its most profound sleep, and on exposing it to the light, above twenty minutes passed before the plant was thoroughly awake and had quite expanded itself. During the night the upper or smoother surface of the leaves are pressed together ; this would seem to shew that the office of this surface of the leaf was to expose the fluids of the plant to the light as well as to the air (LP 40).

The annotation replicates the poem’s line of argument: we are first asked to follow Darwin in his “personification or allegoric figure” (LP 65) of the plant but

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then our gaze is directed at the plant’s morphology and physiology that, in Darwin’s poem, resound with mechanistic explanations for the movement. As Molly Mahood has pointed out, “it was ‘vegetable spontaneity’, sudden movement, that struck him as sure proof of plant animality” (65) but in his explanation of that sudden movement Darwin remained poised between a mechanistic and animalistic view of plant movement. Darwin’s treatment of the sunflower is similar. The poem animates the plant: “GREAT HELIANTHUS guides o’er twilight plains / … And bows in homage to the rising dawn; / Imbibes with eagle eye the golden ray, / And watches, as it moves, the orb of day” (LP 30). The annotation, however, diverts any speculation that the sunflower is the agent of the movement: “The sun-flower follows the course of the sun by nutation, not by twisting its stem (Hales veg. stat.)” (29). Darwin resorts to the technical term “nutation”, the rotation of an axis, to describe the nature of the sunflower’s movement. The first entry in the OED listing the word “nutation” as a botanical term is taken, in fact, from this passage in Darwin’s poem and defined as “bending or directional movement of a plant stem or root, spec. when caused by variation in the rate of growth on different sides of the organ, a movement of this kind.” (OED s. v. “nutation”) However, the OED is mistaken here, both Nehemia Grew in his Anatomy of Plants (1682) and Stephen Hales in his Vegetable Staticks (1724) had resorted to the term “nutation” prior to Darwin (see Oliver 60, 74). Sketchy as the list in the OED may be, we can see that the term Darwin chose and firmly established in botany was highly productive. The movement of plants was increasingly construed as a mechanical process caused by differing rates of growth or the ascent and descent of sap and the resulting expansion and contraction of cells. Darwin’s choice to opt for the mechanistic term “nutation” is certainly surprising considering the programmatic theme of his poem: It was important for [Darwin] to show plants as an integral part of animate nature, as organisms with the same attributes as animals in a degree appropriate to their place in the scale of organization, and important to show them as sexual beings able to contribute to the variability and progress of the natural world. … This was to be carried out by a sustained application of the simple metaphorical device of seeing plants as people (Browne 604).

Darwin carefully chose metaphors and allegories to sensitise his readers to the closeness of plant and animal life but in his Botanic Garden he seems to have been reluctant to compare the movement of plants with the movements of animals. A few years later, in his medico-philosophical Zoonomia (1794), Darwin speculated more candidly about the movement of plants: That the vegetable world possesses some degree of voluntary powers, appears from their necessity to sleep […]. This voluntary power seems to be exerted in the circular

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movement of the tendrils of vines, and other climbing vegetables; or in the efforts to turn the upper surface of their leaves, or their flowers to the light. (1, 103 – 104)

Referring to the additional note XXXIX in The Botanic Garden, in which “[i]t is […] shewn, that the roots of vegetables resemble the lacteal system of animals […]; [and] that the leaves of land plants resemble lungs […],” Darwin lists a whole range of morphological and functional similarities between plants and animals. (104) And he finishes the paragraph with a remarkable proposition: And lastly, that the anthers and stigmas are real animals, attached indeed to their parent tree like a polypi or coral insects, but capable of spontaneous motion; that they are effected with the passion of love, and furnished with powers of reproducing their species, and are fed with honey like the moths and butterflies, which plunder their nectarines. (1, 105)

At first sight the passage seems to suggest that Darwin sees no essential difference between animals and plants. In fact, for him some of the plants’ organs are “real animals”. However, it is difficult to assess where Darwin’s analogies end and where his propositions begin. As pointed out by Devin S. Griffiths, Darwin himself “sounds a cautionary note, as analogy’s potent associative power can also corrupt scientific inquiry.” (647) Darwin knew that when analogy “links together objects, otherwise discordant, by some fanciful similitude; it may indeed collect ornaments for wit and poetry, but philosophy and truth recoil from its combinations” (Zoonomia 1, 1; quoted in Griffiths 647). And we know that his grandson, Charles, “criticized the strange brew offered in [Erasmus] Darwin’s writings.” (647) So we must be careful not to take the analogies offered here for a consistent argument. Darwin’s closing statement on the issue is in fact a poetic closure rather than a hypothesis: “[…] I think we may truly conclude that they [plants] are furnished with a common sensorium belonging to each bud, and that they must occasionally repeat those perceptions either in their dreams or waking hours, and consequently possess ideas of so many of the properties of the external world, and of their own existence. (107)

This suggestive passage ascribes a level of self-reflection to plants that goes well beyond what was acceptable among botanists at the time.18 And it must remain a matter of speculation whether Darwin would have seriously defended this conclusion. However, the whole line of argument exemplifies that Darwin and La

18 T.A. Knight, President of the London Horticultural Society, argued, for example, that the movement of plants was simply mechanical: “and therefore, in conformity with the conclusion I drew in my last memoir, respecting the growth of roots, I shall venture to infer, that they [i.e. the movements of tendrils] are the result of pure necessity only, uninfluenced by any degrees of sensation, or intellectual powers.” (320)

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Mettrie shared the notion that being able to move was the criterion most fitting to distinguish between organisms that have feelings and those that have none. Considering the poetic nature of Erasmus Darwin’s take on plant movement, it is perhaps not surprising that Charles Darwin ignored his grandfather’s remarks about plant movement in The Botanic Garden when he investigated the movement of plants. In a paper read at the Linnean Society of London on 2 February 1865 and published later that year as On the Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants he explains: I was led to this subject by an interesting, but short paper by Professor Asa Gray on the movements of the tendrils of some Cucurbitaceous plants. My observations were more than half completed before I learnt that the surprising phenomenon of the spontaneous revolutions of the stem and tendrils of climbing plants had been long ago observed by Palm and by Hugo von Mohl, and had subsequently been the subject of two memoirs by Dutrochet. Nevertheless, I believe that my observations founded on the examination of above a hundred widely distinct living species, contain sufficient novelty to justify me in publishing them. (1 – 2)

Charles Darwin’s perspective on plant movement was primarily diachronic: he wishes to understand how the power of movement was brought about – or perhaps lost – in the process of evolution. Explaining the concept “struggle for life” (in the full title) or “struggle for existence” (chapter heading) in his Origin of Species (1859) Darwin had argued that plants struggle for life just like animals: “Two canine animals in a time of dearth, may be truly said to struggle with each other which shall get food and live. But a plant on the edge of a desert is said to struggle for life against the drought, though more properly it should be said to be dependent on the moisture” (63) This comparison, often quoted to explain that Darwin had conceptualized the “struggle for life” as a default condition of all living beings rather than an aggressive behaviour, deprives the plants of agency : they are victims of their habitat because they cannot move. It is thus surprising that Charles Darwin turned to climbing plants only a few years after the publication of his Origin. Darwin certainly had a vested interest in showing that plants and animals are related as he was of the conviction that “all living things have much in common”. According to Darwin, all living organisms shared the life once “breathed [into] one primordial form”: I believe that animals have descended from at most only four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or lesser number. Analogy would lead me one step further, namely, to the belief that all animals and plants have descended from some one prototype. But analogy may be a deceitful guide. Nevertheless all living things have much in common, in their chemical composition, their germinal vesicles, their cellular structure, and their laws of growth and reproduction. … Therefore I should infer from analogy that

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probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed. (1859: 484)

Be that as it may, in his On the Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants Darwin had to acknowledge that, as a result of scientific debates pursued well over a century, the ability to move had become a generic feature of animals. Only if it could be proven, Darwin argued, that plants moved like animals would they be eligible to rise to the scale of organization that was typically associated with animals: It has often been vaguely asserted that plants are distinguished from animals by not having the power of movement. It should rather be said that plants acquire and display this power only when it is of some advantage to them; but that this is of comparatively rare occurrence, as they are affixed to the ground, and food is brought to them by the wind and rain. We see how high in the scale of organization a plant may rise, when we look at one of the more perfect tendril-bearers. (1865: 117 – 118)

The short description that follows which compares the climber plant to a “polypus plac[ing] its tentaculy” is reminiscent of the debate of the mid-eighteenth century and it is ripe with anthropomorphic imagery : the tendrils “spontaneously revolve” and “quickly curl round and firmly grasp” the support (118). Darwin’s sustained interest in plant movement resulted in his The Power of Movement in Plants (1880), with which he wished to show that “circumnutation is universal in land plants and how it conferred an adaptive benefit for the plant.” (Whippo and Hangarter 2120) Assisted by his son, Francis, Darwin conducted experiments to show that plant movement was restricted to the shoot or root tip. In Darwin’s view, that movement resembled a habit not unlike instincts in animals, and in his closing statement Darwin maintained: It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the tip of the radicle thus endowed, and having the power of directing the movements of the adjoining parts, acts like the brain of one of the lower animals; the brain being seated within the anterior end of the body, receiving impressions from the sense-organs, and directing the several movements. (573)

Darwin’s theory of evolution, first expressed in his Origin, “showing how plants and animals, most remote in the scale of nature, are bound together by a web of complex relations” (1859: 73), and applied specifically to plants in his Power of Movement undoubtedly shifted the focus. The ecological perspective construed movement of both plants and animals as instances of a continuum. However, it did not alter the scientific foundations for taxonomic approaches to nature as they had been established in the eighteenth century (see Scharf 75 – 9; Stern 173 – 5). Linnaeus’s system with its Aristotelean division into lapides (stones, minerals, fossils) vegetabilia (plants) and animalia (animals), reaffirming the

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generic dividing line between plants and animals still exerted an influence: Linnaean taxonomy, indeed all taxonomic systems, as Dan H. Nicolson has pointed out, include a complex “overlay of hierarchical […] specified ranks and associated endings” (9). The binomial system, which appeared to be objective in the sense that it was merely descriptive, was pervaded from the outset with a set of values along the lines of foundational metaphors but it was only “in the early nineteenth century [that] logical divisions based on the tree of Porphyry, became associated with the concepts of “higher” and “lower” organisms in animal classification, thus emphasising the conceptual connection of the tree and the scala naturae” (Panchen 19). While lower and higher states within a kingdom are conceived of as gradual, the boundary between the kingdom of plants and the kingdom of animals was drawn on qualitative grounds. The obsession to identify the order of nature and to establish boundaries between genera and ultimately kingdoms thus resulted in focussing on what separated living organisms rather than acknowledging what united them. By focussing on spontaneous or even voluntary movement of plants, eighteenth-century botanists set the agenda for finding proof that plants can feel. Developments in physiology and histology in the late eighteenth century then circumscribed this research project to the effect that attention was directed away from what caused the movement to how it was achieved. In the wake of botanists as dissimilar as Hugo von Mohl and Erasmus Darwin plants thus lost their decisive battle for recognition as organisms that have a life. And we as humans are the poorer for it.

References Primary Literature Bacon, Francis. Novum Organum – Neues Organon. Ed. Wolfgang Krohn. Vol. 2. Hamburg: Meiner, 1990. Print. Darwin, Erasmus. The Botanic Garden. Vol. 1. London: Johnson, 1799. Print. – Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life, Vol. 1. London: Johnson, 1794. Print Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London: John Murray, 1859. Print. – “On the Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants.” Journal of the Linnean Society 9 (1865): 1 – 118. Print. – The Power of Movement in Plants. London: Murray, 1880. Print. Grew, Nehemia. Anatomy of Plants With An Idea of A Philosophical History of Plants. London: William Rawlins, 1682. Print. Holberg, Ludvig. A Journey to the World Under-Ground. By Nicholas Klimius. London, T. Astley, 1742. Print. Hales, Stephen. Vegetable Staticks. London: W. and J. Innys and T. Woodward, 1727. Print.

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Hill, John. The Sleep of Plants, and Cause of Motion in the Sensitive Plant, Explain’d. [In a letter to C. Linnaeus] London: Robert Baldwin, 1757. Print. Johnson, Samuel. A Dictionary of the English Language: in Which the Words Are Deduced From Their Originals, and Illustrated in Their Different Significations by Examples From the Best Writers. Volume 2. London: W. Strahan, 1755. Print. Kircher, Athanasius. Magnes sive, De arte magnetica opus tripartitum. Cologne: Jost Kalckhoven, 1643. Print. Knight, T.A. “On the Motions of Tendrils of Plants.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 102 (1812): 314 – 320. Print. La Mettrie, Julien Offray de. L’Homme-Plante. Potsdam: Christian Friedrich Voß, 1748. [Man a Machine and Man a Plant. Transl. Richard A. Watson and Maya Rybalka. Indianaolis: Hackett, 1994. Print. Mohl, Hugo von. Über den Bau und das Winden der Ranken und Schlingpflanzen. Tübingen: n. p., 1827. Print. – Grundzüge der Anatomie und Physiologie der vegetabilischen Zelle. Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1851 [Anatomy and Physiology of the Vegetable Cell. Transl. Arthur Henfrey. London: John van Voorst, 1852] Print. Priestley, Joseph. Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air, and Other Branches of Natural Philosophy, Connected with the Subject. Birmingham, Thomas Pearson, 1790. Print. Ray, John. Historia plantarum. London: Samuel Smith and Benjamin Walford, 1724. Print. Zinn, Johann Gottfried. “Von dem Schlafe der Pflanzen.” Hamburgisches Magazin oder gesammelte Schriften aus der Naturforschung und den angenehmen Wissenschaften überhaupt 22 (1759): 40 – 50. Print.

Secondary Literature Oxford Dictionary of English. Ed. Catherine Soanes and Angus Stevens. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. DVD. Agamben, Giorgio. L’aperto. L’uomo e l’animale. Bollati Boringhieri, Torino 2002. [The Open: Man and Animal. Transl. Kevin Attell. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004.] Print. Baluska, Frantisek, Stefano Mancuso and Dieter Volkmann, eds. Communication in Plants. Neuronal Aspects of Plant Life. Berlin: Springer, 2006. Print. Browne, Janet. “Botany for Gentlemen: Erasmus Darwin and The Loves of the Plants.” Isis 80, 4 (1989): 593 – 621. Print. Conant, James Bryant. The Overthrow of the Phlogiston Theory : the Chemical Revolution of 1775 – 1789. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1967. Print. Bühler, Benjamin and Stefan Rieger. Das Wuchern der Pflanzen. Ein Florilegium des Wissens. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009. Print. DeSalle, Rob, Mary G. Egan and Mark Siddall. “The Unholy Trinity : Taxonomy, Species Delimitation and DNA Barcoding.” Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences 360, 1462 (2005): 1905 – 1916. Print. Eisnerova, Vera. “Herausbildung experimenteller Methoden in der Physiologie.” Ge-

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schichte der Biologie: Theorien, Methoden, Institutionen, Kurzbiografien. Ed. Ilse Jahn. Hamburg: Nikol, 32004. Print. George, Sam. Botany, Sexuality and Women’s Writing 1760 – 1830: From Modest Shoot to Forward Plant. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2007. Print. Gregory, James. Of Victorians and Vegetarians: The Vegetarian Movement in NineteenthCentury Britain. Tauris Academic Studies, 2007. Print. Griffiths, Devin S. “The Intuitions of Analogy in Erasmus Darwin’s Poetics.” Studies in English Literature 1500 – 1900 51, 3 (2011): 645 – 65. Print. Gurovich, Luis A. and Paulo Hermosilla. “Electric Signalling in Fruit Trees in Response to Water Applications and Light-Darkness Conditions.” Journal of Plant Physiology 166, 3 (2009): 290 – 300. Print. Hankins, Thomas L. and Robert J. Silverman. Instruments and the Imagination. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995. Print. Henderson, Fergus. “Novalis, Ritter and ‘Experiment’: ATradition of ‘Active Empiricism’.” The Third Culture: Literature and Science. Ed. Elinor Shaffer. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1998. 153 – 169. Print. Ingensiep. Hans Werner. Geschichte der Pflanzenseele. Philosophische und biologische Entwürfe von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. Stuttgart: Kröner, 2001. Print. Israel, Jonathan I. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650 – 1750. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. Print. Jacyna, L. Stephen. “The Romantic Programme and the Reception of Cell Theory in Britain.” Journal of the History of Biology 17 (1984): 13 – 48. Print. Kemp, Martin. “ ‘Implanted in Our Natures’: Humans, Plants, and the Stories of Art.” Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature. Ed. David Philip Miller and Peter Hans Reill. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. 197 – 229. Print. King-Hele, Desmond. Erasmus Darwin and the Romantic Poets. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986. Print. Levere, Trevor Harvey. Poetry realized in nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and early nineteenth-century science. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981. Print. Lewis, Charles A. Green Nature/Human Nature: the Meaning of Plants in Our Lives. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1996. Print. Mahood, Molly M. The Poet as Botanist. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008. Print. Margulis, Lynn and Ricardo Guerrero. “Kingdoms in Turmoil.” New Scientist 23, 1761 (1991): 46 – 50. Print. Murphy, Denis J. People, Plants, and Genes: the Story of Crops and Humanity. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Print. Nicolson, Dan H. “Stone, Plant, or Animal.” Taxon 51, 1 (2002): 7 – 10. Print. Oliver, Francis Wall. Makers of British Botany : a Collection of Biographies by Living Botanists. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1913. Print. Packham, Catherine. “The Science and Poetry of Animation: Personification, Analogy, and Erasmus Darwin’s Loves of the Plants.” Romanticism 10, 2 (2004): 191 – 207. Print. Packham, Catherine. Eighteenth-Century Vitalism. Bodies, Culture, Politics. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012. Print. Panchen, Alec C. Classification, Evolution, and the Nature of Biology. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992. Print.

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Pollan, Michael. The Botany of Desire: a Plant’s-Eye View of the World. London: Bloomsbury, 2002. Print. Porter, Dahlia. “Scientific Analogy and Literary Taxonomy in Erasmus Darwin’s Loves of the Plants.” ERR 18, 2 (2007): 213 – 21. Print. Prance, Ghillean Tolmie and Marc Nesbitt, eds. The Cultural History of Plants. New York: Routledge, 2005. Print. Ritterbush, Philip C. “John Lindsay and the Sensitive Plant.” Annals of Science 18, 4 (1962): 233 – 54. Print. Secord, Anne. “Botany on a Plate: Pleasure and the Power of Pictures in Promoting Early Nineteenth-Century Scientific Knowledge.” Isis 93, 1 (2002): 28 – 57. Print. Scharf, Sara T. “Identification Keys, the ‘Natural Method,’ and the Development of Plant Identification Manuals.” Journal of the History of Biology 42, 1 (2009): 73 – 117. Print. Schiebinger, Londa. “The Philosopher’s Beard: Women and Gender in Science. Eighteenth-Century Science. Ed. Roy Porter. Vol. 4. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 184 – 210. Print. Schiller, Joseph and Tetty Schiller. Henri Dutrochet: le mat¦rialisme m¦caniste et la physiologie g¦n¦rale. Paris: Blanchard, 1975. Print. Siegfried, Robert. From Elements to Atoms: a History of Chemical Composition. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 92, 4. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2002. Print. Sorabji, Richard. “Intentionality and Physiological Processes: Aristotle’s Theory of Sense Perception.” Aristotle’s De Anima. Eds. Martha Craven Nussbaum and Am¦lie Oksenberg Rorty. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992. 195 – 225. Print. Stern, William Louis. “The Uses of Botany, with Special Reference to the Eighteenth Century” Taxon 42, 4 (1993): 773 – 9. Print. Toepfer, Georg. “Der Begriff des Lebens.” Philosophie der Biologie. Ed. Ulrich Krohs and Georg Toepfer. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2005. 157 – 74. Print. Trebacz, Kazimierz, Halina Dziubinska and Elzbieta Krol. “Electric Signals in Long-Distance Communication in Plants.” Communication in Plants. Neuronal Aspects of Plant Life. Eds. Baluska, Frantisek, Stefano Mancuso and Dieter Volkmann. Berlin: Springer, 2006. 277 – 290. Print. Trewavas, Anthony. “The Green Plant as an Intelligent Organism.” Communication in Plants. Neuronal Aspects of Plant Life. Eds. Baluska, Frantisek, Stefano Mancuso and Dieter Volkmann. Berlin: Springer, 2006. 1 – 18. Print. Valverde, Antonio and Nuria Lafuente. “Linnaean Botany and Spanish Imperial Biopolitics.” Colonial Botany. Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World. Eds. Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2005. 134 – 147. Print. Vartanian, Aram. “Trembley’s Polyp, La Mettrie, and Eighteenth-Century French Materialism.” Journal of the History of Ideas 11, 3 (1950): 259 – 86. Print. Wayne, Randy. Plant Cell Biology: from Astronomy to Zoology. Amsterdam: Academic Press, 2009. Print. Weber, Andreas. “Cognition as Expression: on the Autopoetic Foundations of an Aesthetic Theory of Nature.” Sign Systems Studies 29 (2001): 153 – 67. Print. Webster, Charles. “The Recognition of Plant Sensitivity by English Botanists in the Seventeeth Century.” Isis 57, 1 (1966): 5 – 23. Print.

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Wetzels, Walter D. Johann Wilhelm Ritter: Physik im Wirkungsfeld der deutschen Romantik. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1973. Print. Whippo, Craig W. and Rodger P. Hangarter. “The ‘sensational’ power of pavement in plants: A Darwinian system for studying the evolution of behaviour.” American Journal of Botany 96.12 (2009): 2115 – 27. Print. Whittaker, R. H. “New Concepts of Kingdoms or Organisms.” Science 163 (1969): 150 – 60. Print. Wilson, J. Walter. “Dutrochet and the Cell Theory.” Isis 37, 1/2 (1947): 14 – 21. Print. Woese, Carl A. and George E. Fox. “Phylogenetic Structure of the Prokaryotic Domain: the Primary Kingdoms.” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 74, 11 (1977): 5088 – 90. Print. Vartanian, Aram. “Trembley’s Polyp, La Mettrie, and Eighteenth-Century French Materialism.” Journal of the History of Ideas 11, 3 (1950): 259 – 86. Print.

III. The Human and Media Change

Hania Siebenpfeiffer

(Imagining) First Contact – Literary Encounters of the Extraterrestrial Other in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Novels

This essay will focus on a literary genre that so far has received only minor attention by literary scholars despite its undeniable impact on other literary genres such as modern science fiction and discursive frameworks like concepts of the human in the classical age with its “¦pist¦mÀ de l’ordre, de l’identit¦ et de la diff¦rence” (Foucault 71 – 2 ). The genre in question is the Early Modern space novel. It arose in England at the turn of the seventeenth century, and within only a few years it became popular almost all over Western Europe. Among the many examples of space narrations or – as it is termed in French – “voyages imaginaires”1, three novels will be further analyzed in this article. They represent the genre’s beginning, peak and end as well as the different literary and discursive order of England, France and Germany during the early Enlightenment. The beginning is made by Francis Godwin’s novel The Man in the Moone or a Discourse of a Voyage Thither, published posthumously in 1638 under the pseudonym of Domingo Gonzales or the Speedy Messenger. Cyrano de Bergerac’s L’autre monde. Les ¦tats et empires de la lune, also published posthumously in 1657, exemplifies the beginning of the French conflation of space narrative and social satire in mid-seventeenth century. And finally, the German astronomer Eberhard Christian Kindermann includes theological and scientific topics in a prototypical Enlightenment way in his Die Reise mit dem Lufft-Schiff nach der obern Welt of 1744. By confronting the theological idea of the human with new concepts about the cosmic order, these novels reassess a pre-scientific discursive framework, opening up a new and enthralling debate on the essence of the human from the early seventeenth up to the mid-eighteenth century. Furthermore, they enable us 1 Whereas English speaking scholars prefer the terminus ‘literary space travels’ or even ‘(early modern) Science Fiction’, French and German literary criticism tend to draw a clear distinction between the early examples of space novels and the more technically influenced genre of Science Fiction as it emerged in late nineteenth century England with Jules Verne as its inventor, but H.G. Wells as its best known author. For further definitions see Roberts, esp. 38 – 42.

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to capture what the narrative of extraterrestrial others tells us about the eighteenth-century concept of the human.

1.

Transforming the Universe – the ‘pluralité des mondes’2 and the Question of Life in Outer Space

Since the groundbreaking studies of Thomas Kuhn, Alexandre Koyr¦ and Jerome Bernhard Cohen, the emergence of modern science from the interplay of technical inventions and astronomical observations has become one of the pet subjects in the history of science. But although the important role of literature as well as the arts in the genesis of new knowledge is widely recognized, literary criticism, if at all, still tends to subsume Early Modern space novels under the larger and supposedly more important genre of utopian or fictional travel writing (see for example Philmus; Versins; and Pleithner). This might possibly apply with respect to the sheer quantity of publications, if, for instance, one looks at the title collections of Winter, Grove and Bloch. But despite the popularity of those works, it cannot be denied that in the slipstream of technical innovations and groundbreaking observations made at the turn of the sixteenth century a new literary genre evolved that was immediately successful. It shared some traits with utopian or travel writing, while turning the sheer vastness of the new infinite outer space into a literary narrative, providing it with poetic expression and imaginative evidence so far unknown to literary or scientific descriptions. The ancient and mediaeval space narratives such as Seneca’s Somnium Scipionis (The Dream of Scipio, 42 – 52 B.C.), Plutarch’s De facie in Orbe lunae (On the Face in the Moon, c. 45 A.D.), Lukian de Samosata’s moon travel in his Vera Historia (A True History, 2nd cent. A.D.), Dante Alighieri’s Divina Commedia (c. 1307 – 21) and last but not least Ludovico Ariost’s Orlando furioso (The Frenzy of Orlando, 1516 – 32) still shared the concept of a harmonic correspondence of moon and earth, with the moon being at the threshold between mundus sublunaris and mundus supralunaris, incarnating the perfection of the outer spheres and reflecting it into the eyes of the sublunar human beings, who in turn could enter the realm of cosmic perfection only by means of dreams or dream-like visions.3 A resonance of this “cosmic analogy”4 can still be found in Johannes 2 Quotation taken from the title of Fontenelle’s famous treatise Entretiens sur la pluralit¦ des mondes, first published in 1686. 3 Further examples of ancient and medieval space narrations are provided by Weber. 4 The older, ancient or medieval narratives therefore follow the notion of Foucault that in the age preceding the classical episteme knowledge was structured by four notions of similitude: resemblance, aemulatio (emulation), analogy and sympathy. See Foucault 32 – 40.

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Kepler’s Somnium sive astronomia lunaris (The Dream, or on Lunar Astronomy, publ. 1634), which recently came into focus as the first truly ‘modern’ space narrative.5 Here the protagonist Duracotus still reaches the country of Levania, as the moon is called by Kepler, only by means of a drug induced hypnotic narration, whereas the much larger appendix of footnotes discusses the physical and technical conditions under which a human could probably fly to outer space. In contrast to these older texts, the space novels from the seventeenth century onward inaugurated the universe as a realm of experimental knowledge and technically enhanced observations, thus replacing the former dream-like quality by a close entanglement of fictional and factual elements deriving from the new, primarily mathematical understanding of the nova scientia. The optical gain of the new science was first and foremost provided by the telescope which gave visual evidence to the fact that the earth was not the only planet accompanied by a satellite body but only one amongst several others. Especially Galilee’s discovery of the four Jupiter moons, outlined to a broader academic public in his Sidereus Nuncius (viz. Starry Messenger) in 1610, became a warrantor of the Pluralit¦ des Mondes and strengthened the idea of a plenitude of stars most likely inhabited by extraterrestrial life-forms similar, or at least comparable, to humankind. This idea had been not been entirely new, as it had been first expressed by Nicholas de Cusa in his famous note on De docta ignorantia (Of Learned Ignorance) in 1438/40. Here, the clerical scholar first deduces the spatial infinitude (the nonexistence of a cosmic centre and periphery) and its temporal endlessness (the non-existence of a beginning and an end) from the infinitude of God’s own power and existence. He then concludes that a temporal and spatial universe necessarily has to be in constant motion; a motion that encompasses every single star including the earth: “There are no immobile and fixed poles in the sky” (Cusanus 117; my translation, HS). The discovery of the planetary movements triggered both the insight of the earth’s de-centred position within the universe as well as the idea that there must be more than one inhabited world. If the earth is no longer a singular and exclusive phenomenon, its qualities (such as being accompanied by a moon, inhabitation, etc.) cease to be exclusive as well, so that other planets necessarily also have to be inhabited: “We suppose that there is no star uninhabited” (Cusanus 123; my translation, HS).6 Nicholas de 5 See Christianson; Aldiss; and Bezzola. Kepler’s Somnium unmistakably is a janus-faced publication which increases its quality as an example for the epistemic shift towards the ‘nova scientia’. Whereas the draft of the story, going back to Kepler’s dissertation, was composed in 1593 and clearly bears the marks of the pre-telescopic astronomical era, the appendix of the footnotes, which is more than three times the size of the story, is post-telescopic as it was added no earlier than 1620. 6 For the above-mentioned discussion see esp. the second book: 85 – 127.

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Cusa closes his deduction by pointing out that even though other life forms are in sensu strictu incomparable to humankind,7 every inhabitant of the universe is part of the universal order of the scala naturae. For him, the scala naturae did not provided a teleological model – it will be shown that this semantic occurred only later – as it was part of the already mentioned analogy between macro- and microcosm that governed the essential relation between the qualities of the planets and their inhabitants. Consequently, the ‘solar people’ (species solaris) incorporate the qualities of the sun – they supposedly were of a shiny, bright, clear and sun-like appearance – whereas the ‘moon people’ were more ‘moonish’ (lunatici) and the humans finally more earthly, material and massive (grossi) (see Cusanus 123). Even though the epistemological framework changed drastically between the high Renaissance writing of Cusanus and the proto-scientific reasoning of Early Modern times on which this essay mainly focuses, the infinitude of the universe and its supposed multitude of inhabited stars and planets were to become the shibboleth of Copernican literary astronomy throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As a consequence, the notion of a universe filled with yet unknown worlds and populated by yet undiscovered species became part of a general diversification of the cosmic order as a whole. It started with the multiplication of the individual stars and planets, their number, their consistence as well as their qualities such as matter and motion. It continued with the multiplication of the celestial systems, its boundaries and the question of its internal structural order. This, in turn, led to a diversification of the cosmic space in general that changed from being the object to being the effect of its astronomical observation. From the moment of the discovery of its overall complexity, the visible appearance of the universe, its multitude or singularity, its harmonic or disharmonic order, its homogenous or heterogeneous composition essentially depended on preliminary decisions made beforehand by the observer: first and foremost his choice of instrument, the setting of his observational experiment and the methods guiding the observation. Furthermore, as soon as construction and inner composition of the universe no longer followed the predisposed law of geometrical perfection and celestial mathematical harmony, as Kepler still had thought, the multiplication of order itself would become a necessary consequence. The universe, up until then united at least in the beauty and evidence of the Euclidian geometrical bodies, ceased to follow one single order but split up in a composition of diverse movements and spatial relations that would no longer fall under the law of proportion. And finally, the decentring of the cosmic order destabilized the former celestial hierarchy with its clearly defined nuclei and peripheries, stating that the same planet could be the centre of a whole 7 Nicholas of Cusa uses the even stronger expression “improportionabilis sunt“ (122).

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system and at the same time located at the outmost outskirts of another : at the turn of the seventeenth century, the order of the universe was reduced to individual points of views. Along with the outlined multiplication of the cosmic space, the concept of temporal linearity was abandoned as well, not so much in the scholarly discourses and its publications, but in the early modern space novels whose plots are grounded in a visual experience that derives from scientific hypotheses. To render the idea of a (literary) space travel more reliable and to intensify the identification with the novel’s protagonist, the narration is based on the concept of eye-witness reports, and the stories often come under the guise of a travel memoir, with the main character simultaneously being the protagonist, the narrator, the author and sometimes even the supposed editor of the story told. The literary testimony usually is set against the traditional scholastic knowledge of Christianized Aristotelian teachings and clearly takes sides with the notions of modern astronomy. Due to this narrative, Early Modern space novels are characterized by a fundamental epistemological tension between fiction and facts, between poetic and empirical evidentia.8 But despite this tension and despite some minor cultural discrepancies – the English novels usually allude to academic societies whereas the French authors refer to courtly customs and manners, and the Germans, of course, to confessional differences –, they all share the same theoretical concept of a cosmic order that no longer conforms to a linear and single model. Instead, the novels inaugurate the idea that each world within the plurality of worlds owns its own temporal logic, so that the plenitude of worlds equates a plenitude of times. With regard to its most important reference – the human –, travelling through outer space meant to travel through one’s own past and future, so that in the encounter of the extraterrestrial other the human ‘race’ would either meet its own former or its future state of being.

2.

First Contact – Francis Godwin’s Voyage to the Moon

Taking into account that the first modern space novel, Francis Godwin’s Man in the Moone, was written and (though posthumously) published in England, one could state that what later would become science fiction owes its existence to the missing censorship in Early Modern Britain (see Janssen). In fact, in Cambridge, Oxford, London and obviously also in Llandaff (Wales), the founding texts of the 8 Evidentia is used here in its rhetorical sense referring to the textual strategies of energeia (stress on detail, specificity) and enargeia (liveliness) to create perspicuitas (transparency with regards to the content), the arguments and the semantics of the story told that would guarantee the aspired evidence and reliability.

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new astronomy, i. e. Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium dating from 1543, Kepler’s Astronomia Nova of 1609 and Galilee’s Sidereus Nuncius of 1610, were read and discussed, even though they were banned in most continental European countries such as France, Spain, Italy and Germany.9 Nevertheless, throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries approximately 150 publications appeared that more or less belong to the category of space travels as defined above. Amongst them, Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moon was not only the first but also the most important and most influential.10 Only two years after its first publication in 1638, the novel was translated into Dutch in 1640 and reprinted at least five times until the end of the century. A French translation appeared soon after in 1648, was reprinted in 1651, 1666 and 1671, and became the master narrative for Cyrano de Bergerac’s prominent twin-novel Les Etats et Empires de la lune et du soleil (published 1657 and 1662). Finally, a German version by Balthasar Venator appeared in 1659 and immediately became extremely popular with four reprints in the year 1660 alone. The Man in the Moon thus has to be considered the most successful and influential space narrative of the seventeenth century, defining the genre’s elements and structures. Godwin’s story takes place in the late sixteenth century and tells the adventurous travels of the Spanish nobleman Domingo Gonzales, who serves in the multiple roles of author, narrator and protagonist. Stranded first on St. Helena and later on the Canary Islands, he manages both times to escape with the help of a flying engine carried by domesticated geese. During his second escape, the birds are unexpectedly drawn towards the moon taking their passenger with them. After a twelve-day long journey through empty space, Domingo Gonzales finds himself involuntarily in the unknown land of the moon and, fascinated by its aesthetic appearance, he begins to examine his environment. When he meets the “Moon-People”, he learns their language and becomes familiar with their customs, before his homesickness drives him back to earth, where he lands in China, gets arrested and finally manages to smuggle his travel memoir to Europe with the help of a Jesuit priest. 9 The only exception were the Netherlands where the nova scientia, including the nova astronomia, were taught at the universities of Leiden and Franeker, often by the authors, like Ren¦ Descartes, themselves. Paradoxically, many of the modern astronomical writings were first published in the Protestant region of Sourthern Germany (Copernicus with Johannes Petreius in Nürnberg and Kepler with Gotthard Vögelin in Frankfurt). However, this did not prevent them from being censored in most German counties as well. 10 There are, of course, Ben Jonson’s Masque News From the New World Discovered in the Moon, presented in 1621, John Lyly’s Play Endimion, The Man in the Moon acted even earlier in 1588, or the anonymous piece The Man on the Moone, Telling Strange Fortunes, published in 1609, but like their continental counterparts published at that time, these texts have more in common with the older dream-like narrative than with the modern notion of a scientific observation in the guise of literary fiction.

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The novel brings four different spaces into delicate proportion and relates them to different stages of (human) existence: on the one hand, there are Europe and China, the latter in full process of being colonized by the former, both accordingly characterized by war, corruption, greed and misdemeanours, representing the present and deeply amoral state of the human. On the other hand, there is the island of St Helena, a place of earthly heaven, so far untouched by mankind and still in the state of natural perfection. Its ideal appearance recurs in the description of the moon. The moon’s landscape is characterized by flourishing plants and flowers providing the terrestrial visitor with delicious nourishment and exquisite refreshments. The beauty of the planet is mirrored in the outer appearance of its inhabitants, the “Moon-People”, and their exceedingly long life-span and height as they live more than 3000 times longer and are more than twice of human height (see Godwin 70 – 1). Their countenance is “most pleasing”, their habits are “beyond words” (71), and their clothes are made from an unknown fabric whose colour is incomparable to any colour known on earth: It was neither black, nor white, yellow, nor red, greene or blew, nor any colour composed of these. But if you ask me what it was then; I must tell you, it was a colour never seen in our earthly world … For as it were a hard matter to describe unto a man borne blind the difference betweene blew and Greene, so can I not bethink my selfe any meane how to decipher unto this Lunar colour having no affinitie with any other that ever I beheld with mine eyes. Onely this I can say of it, that it was the most glorious and delightful, that can possibly be imagined; neither in truth was there any one thing that more delighted me, during my abode in that new world, than the beholding of that most pleasing and resplendent colour. (71 – 2)

Gonzales learns their languages and inquires into their genealogical relationship with humankind only to learn that the inhabitants of the Moon were direct descendants from Adam, who left Earth before the fall of man. Therefore, they are by birth of superior Christian morals, representing the ideal future of mankind.11 To further intensify the comparison (and contrast) between humans and Lunarians, Godwin invents a second species of moon-people, who “seldom exceeds the life-span and height of ours,” and who in the eyes of the “genuine, naturall, and true Lunars” are scarcely believed to be more than a horde of “bare creatures, even but a degree before brute beasts”; consequently, they are termed “bastard-men, counterfeits, or Changelings” (78 – 9) – it is they who are in the present time of the narration the true alter ego and extraterrestrial double of the human. 11 They live in almost perfect harmony with nature, in a well-ordered society whose monarchical hierarchy is widely respected. Misdemeanours are rare and receive immediate punishment, only once in a while a child, that shows bad morals, is sent back to earth (see Godwin 104 – 5).

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Godwin’s invention of a double reflection of terrestrial and celestial life derives from a powerful extension and revaluation of the medieval scala naturae that was introduced into astronomical and natural philosophy, as I have shown, by Nicholas of Cusa. What distinguishes the scala naturae of Cusanus’s and Godwin’s Early Modern and proto-scientific re-narration is the fact that for Godwin the fictional inhabitants of the moon are bound to the human race by laws of temporal and spatial causality. They are of the same origin and may therefore be compared with one another.12 As Arthur Lovejoy has shown in his famous and still unrivalled study The Great Chain of Being, the scala naturae offered a perfect model to harmonize the new scientific knowledge of a diverse, complex and heterogeneous universe with still lingering Christian convictions. By combining the opposition of matter and spirit with the opposition of the lunar and sub-lunar world, the great chain of being offered a compellingly familiar system of continuous graduation that took new astronomical knowledge into account without risking to lose touch with Christian beliefs. Like its astronomical counterpart, Galilee’s Starry Messenger, Godwin’s Speedy Messenger follows this notion: in the face of the Moon-People, contemporary humans are no longer considered to be the creation’s crowning glory but a humble species at the lowest place in hierarchy, morally and physically inferior to almost every extraterrestrial other. In other words, in the face of the Lunars, mankind for the first time discovered itself and its future in other than biblical terms. The hierarchical order of humans and extramundane beings introduced to literature by Godwin with its prophetic promise of a moral evolution awaiting the still inferior mankind became the master narrative for all extraterrestrial ethnologies throughout Europe until the middle of the eighteenth century.

3.

Satirical Counterparts – Cyrano de Bergerac meets Domingo Gonzales

The second example of Early Modern space travel is the French novel L’autre monde. Les ¦tats et empires de la lune by Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac. Presumably written in 1648 and published posthumously in 1657, the novel owes its existence to the French translation of Godwin’s Speedy Messenger (see Campbell 172 – 3). As in Godwin’s novel, the identity of author, narrator and protagonist are superimposed. The main character is a young French nobleman with the anagrammatical name Dyrcona. To prove Copernican astronomy right, he travels to the moon with the help of morning dew collected in little flacons and 12 As I have pointed out before, Cusanus insisted on the absolute incomparability of humans and extraterrestrial species (see again Cusanus 122).

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tied around his waist. Due to the earth’s rotation, he first lands in “New-France” (viz. Canada), but is finally transported to the moon, where he lands in the Garden of Eden, rejuvenates and meets the prophet Elias, with whom he discusses options for travelling through space, before he is expelled (again) from Paradise after wrongly having eaten from the tree of knowledge (see Bergerac 59 – 73.). Outside the Garden of Eden is the dominion of the Lunars by whom he is considered a minor species. Only through wit, knowledge and eloquence he manages to be regarded as equal, and soon is mired in scholarly disputes on the advandtages and disadvantages of palingenesis, the use of telepathy as well as the Cartesian theory of matter corpuscles with regard to Lunar natural philosophy, before he is finally sent back to earth. Evidently, numerous elements of Bergerac’s slightly extravagant story derive directly from Godwin’s novel:13 the isolated situation of the protagonist, the initial terrestrial voyage, the integration of scientific, primarily physical and astronomical knowledge into a fictitious realm, the conflation of terrestrial and extraterrestrial otherness,14 the outer appearance of the Lunars, the anthropological curiosity of the protagonist up to the idea of a universal tonal language15 and at last a performance of Domingo Gonzales himself as courtly jester (see Bergerac 91).16 But there also are some important differences, especially with regard to the entanglement of time and space and its anthropological consequences for the Enlightenment’s epistemology of humankind. Whereas the temporal and spatial topography in Godwin’s Man in the Moone closely relates time and space so that the journey through space turns into a journey through time, the conflation of space and evolution, which transforms the universe into a realm of temporal simultaneity and spatial diversity, is almost completely abandoned in Bergerac’s L’autre monde. Instead, the lunar topography is characterized by a temporal and spatial friction: when the narrator-protagonist arrives on the moon, he does not land in the future, but re-enters the past of mankind and is forced to re-enact biblical human history. Due to the temporally different order, the symbolic functions of extraterrestrial space and its inhabitants differ considerably. Symbolically excluded from the past, Dyrcona does not encounter a prophetic future of humankind but finds himself in the satirical mirror image of his own present – the court of Louis XIV in the guise of a Lunarian monarchy. In contrast to Domingo Gonzales, Bergerac’s protagonist can only overcome the present by the means of his intellect, impressing the 13 For a more detailed comparison between Bergerac and Godwin see Campbell; Pioffet; and Carre. 14 China and the Chinese on the side of Godwin, Canada with its indigenous Indians on the side of Bergerac. 15 On Godwin’s lunatic language see Davies 1967 and 1968. 16 For the Picaresque quality Bergerac refers to in this scene see Copeland.

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supposedly superior Lunars with his scientific knowledge. By doing so, Bergerac’s novel reveals itself to be much more part of the prototypical Enlightenment philosophy of human knowledge than Godwin’s, whose protagonist still relies on Christian fate.

4.

Martian prophecies – Kindermann’s Exploration of the Future of Humankind

Not much is known about the author of the third book, the German astronomer Eberhard Christian Kindermann, who was presumably born in Thüringen in the 1720s and was employed as chief astronomer at the Court of Saxony in Dresden during the 1740s, where he bequeathed two larger astronomical treatises entitled Vollständige Astronomie and Reise in Gedancken durch die neueröffneten Himmelskugeln, as well as a handful of astrological prognoses for the Elector of Saxony. The Geschwinde Reise begins with an incomplete observation of a so far unknown moon of Mars. To finish the observation, a group of five people is sent out by one of the story’s main narrators, Fama17, to give evidence of the moon’s existence. Despite its brevity, the novel’s narrative is quite complex. The fictitious Fama, commuting between the expedition and the audience on earth, serves as a narrator both for the novel’s human public observing the space odyssey and for the implicit reader of the story. Significantly, the five travellers bear the names of the five senses – Auditus, Visus, Odor, Gustus, and Tactus (see Kindermann 13) – transforming the plot into a (plausible) description of an experimental astronomical observation in the guise of fiction with, first, the travellers representing human perception, second, the space-ship becoming the astronomical instrument and, third, the voyage itself being the process of observation. Ascending to the upper world, the travellers abandon the realm of secure knowledge and enter a zone of speculation and supposition, where, instead of mechanical questions, i. e. the construction of the flying machine they discussed while still on earth, the material nature of the universe comes into focus. Kindermann’s cosmic space is heavily influenced by the ancient notion of the elements: earth is separated from space by a dark thundery sphere, so that the ascent of the ship signifies a double rite de passage, not only from earth to the stars, but also from hell to heaven and from apocalypse to salvation: “Endlich brachte es ihr strenges Rudern dahin, dass sie den Pechschwartzen Himmel mit 17 A second narrator fills the gaps of Fama’s narration, and finally there is a foreword written by again another fictional character, explaining the motives for the space travel.

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seinen entsetzlichen Blitzen unter sich hatten, über sich aber einen mit lauter Sternen erleuchteten Himmel sahen.” (Kindermann 21 – 2)18 Combining the ancient notion of materiality with the Christian semantics of an idealized cosmic sphere, the rite de passage introduces theological elements to the story that would later become dominant in the description of the Lunar Martians. Still, contrary to Godwin’s novel, in which the cosmic space itself remains uninhabited, Kindermann’s protagonists encounter their first extraterrestrial being while travelling, when an extensile body in the shape of a putrefied human being gives first evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. He announces their arrival on the moon moments before the travellers detect the first Martian settlements and begin their descent. The arrival on the mars-moon is accompanied by a change of the discursive framework so far pursued. Even more explicitly than in Godwin’s Man in the Moone, entering the world of the Martians in Geschwinde Reise means entering the order of the scala naturae as the pivotal point of reference. The Lunar Martians are pars pro toto for the extraterrestrial other, and, naturally, the novel assigns them a place at the top end of the cosmic hierarchy : in contrast to human flesh, their bodily appearance is that of a fluid but crystalline substance which makes them shine “like many suns” (Kindermann 31)19 when illuminated. The overall perfection of the Lunar Martians is further enhanced by the perfection of the planet which appears as the epitome of Paradise. The forests are of “verwunderungswürdiger Pracht und Schönheit“ (Kindermann 27)20, covered with the royal colours of gold, green and white and populated by mythical creatures such a satyrs, centaurs and fauns who live in peaceful union with each other. The fragrance of the flowers is passed onto the five travellers who are exquisitely nourished by their scent as well as by the crystalline substance of the fruits. As ‘figures of light’ the Lunar Martians are untroubled by moral sins or misdemeanours. They live in perfect equality without any social hierarchy, and their legal framework is reduced to two commandments: to love each other as they love God with whom they speak directly. The only aspect that separates them from God’s closest creatures and brings them nearer to human existence is the fact that due to their extensile appearance they are still mortal and not yet in the state of complete perfection. Compared to luminaries, the five human expeditors are of far lower prove18 “Finally, their restless rowing brought them up and above the darkened sky with its thunderous storms and frightening lightening, seeing the sky illuminated by nothing than the stars” (all translations are mine, HS). 19 “… doch war dieser Cörper nicht so crud, wie [ihn] die Menschen auf der Unterwelt haben, sondern von einem fluiden und doch fest zusammen gesetzten crystallinen Wesen; wenn daher die Sonne unter solche Menschen scheint, sehen sie wie lauter Sonnen aus.“ 20 “…admirable magnificence and beauty”.

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nance as they represent the “ganz und gar, ja aufs tieffste gefallene[n] Menschen“ (Kindermann 40 – 1)21, who are condemned to exist in a status corruptionis: Allein, dieses wissen wir auch, fuhren die dasigen Creaturen fort, daß jenseits der Sonnen eine Welt seyn soll, (wir sehen sie bisweilen, sprachen sie, als ein kleines Sterngen) deren erste Creaturen sich sogleich nach ihrem Hervorkommen an ihrem Schöpffer selbst vergriffen haben, worüber sich GOtt dermaßen ereifert, dass er solche Majestäts=Schänder zugleich mit ihren Erden verflucht hat, und soll sich darauf nicht mehr haben sehen lassen, auch so gar nicht mehr mit ihnen geredet, darüber dann die dasigen Creaturen in ein erbarmungswürdiges Elend verfallen wären. (Kindermann 37 – 8)22

Transforming the question of the human past with the help of an extended scala naturae into a religious as well as rational dispute about the future of humanity, Kindermann’s novel changes from an ordinary space novel to a prospective Enlightenment vision that promises to regain the lost unity with God and the creation by the means of human reason. First evidence of the human potential to learn is the fact of the space travel itself, as it proves that mankind has begun to understand the true order of the universe. Accordingly, the prospect given to the five travellers by the Lunar Martians focuses on their cognitive abilities: Euer durch den Fall gantz verdunckelter Verstand wird, wie man siehet, wieder lichte; denn ihr begreifft und findet nun, daß die funckelnden Gestirne, jeder für sich, eine mit Creaturen besetzte Welt sey, da allemahl eine gewisse Zahl sich um einen Fix herum befindet, der ihnen Wesen, Wärme und Licht mittheilet. (Kindermann 40)23

The crucial point of this prospect is that the perfection of humanity is neither proclaimed to be an evolutionary fact nor an unachievable goal nor obtained by religion. Instead, Kindermann proves to be a true representative of the Enlightenment when he lets the Lunars proclaim that perfection can only be reached by reason. The strongest evidence for this is the scientific exploration of nature itself as, and this goes without saying, it is told in the Geschwinde Reise.

21 “…the truly deep-fallen human mankind”. 22 “Well, we are aware, the creatures continued, that beyond the sun there should be a world (occasionally we do see it like a little star) whose first creatures assaulted their creator as soon they saw the light of the day ; this lÀse-majesty made GOD so angry he cursed them together with their planet and never was seen there again or heard. This is why the creatures of that planet fell into a pitiable misery.” 23 “Since the fall of man your reason was darkened but is getting bright now, as one can see, because you begin to understand that each of the shiny stars, is a world of its own inhabited by creatures just as you, turning around a fix star that offers them light and warmth.”

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Discovering the Human in Outer Space

The peculiar ontological status of the visible, but unreachable worlds, whose scientific evidence only derived from dubious experimental observations, enabled, as this essay has shown, Early Modern literature to develop narratives that are literary and scientific at the same time. They are characterized by a comparatively strong claim of scientific reliability, a high awareness of its literary truth and a close entanglement of scholarly discourse and literary imagination. Focusing on the pluralit¦ des mondes, Early Modern space novels took hold of exactly that momentum avoided in scientific reasoning: the existence of other species. Even though space travels had not yet become a well-defined literary genre, a range of structural similarities between the novels of Godwin, Bergerac and Kindermann justifies speaking of a specific space travel narrative created at that time. It profits from the established genres of travel memoire and adventure story, sharing the topic of an unwanted isolation of the protagonist in an abandoned terrestrial region, thus focusing on the narration of alterity and otherness from the beginning. Starting point of the literary exploration of the cosmic unknown are visual and other sensual perceptions related to scientific hypotheses, further enhanced by a temporal order of the narratives that strictly remains in the protagonist’s presence, taking up his point of view and following him closely through his adventures. Superimposing the identities of author, narrator, protagonist and even publisher, the space narrative confirms the gesture of eyewitness bringing their stories into an epistemological tension between fictionality and pretended scientific reliability that is repeated by the storylines. All three novels in question are characterized by a juxtaposition creating a doublet of earth and another inhabited planet, space and outer space, humans and non-humans. Therefore, everything happens twice, once on earth and once in outer space: prior to the voyage to the moon a voyage to a remote region has to be undertaken, and prior to the encounter with extraterrestrial others terrestrial others have to be met. The juxtaposition strengthens the analogy between ‘us’ and ‘them’ but it also allows to unfold rational explanations for natural phenomena, thus implementing scientific knowledge such as gravitation and repulsion, the earth’s movement, magnetism, blood circulation, vacuum theories or theories on the composition of ether. At the same time, it offers a basis for the comparison of the incomparable, the confrontation of humans and non-humans. As I have shown, the Early Modern space novels not so much talk about alterity itself but about the possibilities and impossibility of inventing otherness: on the one hand, they are fictional ethnological explorations of fictitious extraterrestrial species giving factual evidence of their own, real existing (Western European) culture; on the other hand, they are fictitious travels

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through a real existing universe making factual statements on its composition and structure by the means of a fictitious experimental observation. All this is based on the conditio sine qua non of modern Copernican astronomy, the unquestionable analogy between all planets not necessarily considered the same but equal. It is the starting point of the literary explorations of the universe: “Et moi, dis-je [Dyrcona], qui souhaite mÞler mes enthousiasm aux vútres, je crois, sans m’amuser aux imaginations pointues dont vous chatoulliez le temps pour faire marcher plus vite, que la lune est un monde comme celui-la, — qui le nútre sert de lune.” La compagnie me r¦gala d’un grand ¦clat de rire. “Ainsi peut-Þtre, leur dis-je, se moque-ton maintenant dans la lune, de quelqu’autre qui soutient ce globe-ci est un monde.” (Bergerac 45)

Space is bound to physical laws of matter and motions just the way earth is, and therefore even its unknown regions and unpredictable events are subject to the rational logic of cause and effect. Unfamiliar proportions and unexpected colour impressions are explained by the law of optical refraction; new visual phenomena such as stars appearing in an empty space are interpreted as effects of interplanetary constellations; the undisturbed movement through space is justified by the help of theories of ether and vacuum, accidentally creating a model of zero gravity avant la lettre: [T]owards the end of time, mee thought I [Domingo Gonzales] might perceive them [the goose] to labour lesse and lesse; till at length, O incredible thing, they forbare moving any thing at all! and yet remained unmovable as steadfastly, as if they had been upon many perches; the lines flacked; neither I, nor the Engine moved at all, but abode still as having no mater of weight. I found then by this Experience that which no Philosopher ever dreamed of, to wit, that those things which wee called heavie, do not sink towards the center of the Earth. (Godwin 46 – 7)

This quotation from Godwin’s The Man in the Moone shows that literary fiction does not only quote natural sciences, but sometimes even anticipates scientific ideas that only much later would be considered true and become part of the scientific discourse. But what Godwin did in the guise of literary fiction was nothing else than a scientific extrapolation, deducing new laws of nature from given knowledge in order to explain so far inexplicable incidents. It reinforces the novel’s claim for scientific plausibility and consolidates the importance of visual evidence in the discussions on the plurality of the worlds: “Mine eyes have sufficiently informed me” (Godwin 66). The observer’s gaze that verifies the scientific knowledge repeats the power of the visual testimony over abstract mathematical calculations and hypotheses. It is this gaze that is at the same time imitated, exposed and reflected upon in literature. The novels imitate the scientific belief in visual testimony by letting gazes travel into outer space, they

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expose their own visual focus by letting their protagonists constantly reflect upon their function won as eyewitnesses for so far unseen phenomena, thus pointing out their own evidential function within the literary plot. Godwin might serve again as example here for he does not get tired of letting his traveller verify his astonishing observations such as the impact of centrifugal forces, the comparability of earth and moon or the earth’s rotation referring to the fact that he has experienced it with his own eyes: I found then by this Experience that which no Philosopher ever dreamed of, to wit, that those things which wee call heavie, do not sinke toward the Center of the Earth, as their naturall place, but [are] drawen by a secret property of the Globe of the Earth. … Again the Earth (which ever I held in mine eye) did as it were mask it selfe with a kind of brightnesse like another Moone; and even as in the Moone we discerned certain spots or Clouds, as it were, so did I then in the earth. But whereas the forme of those spots in the Moone continue constantly one and the same; these little and little did change every hour. The reason thereof I conceive to be this, whereas the Earth according to her naturall motion … turneth round uponher own Axe every 24. Howers from the West unto the East. … Philosophers and Mathematicians I would should now confesse the wilfullnesse of their won blindnesse. They have made the world beleeve hitherto, that the Earth hath no motion. … O n l y t h i s I s a y e , a l l o w t h e E a r t h h i s m o t i o n (which these eyes of mine can testifie to be his due) and these abs u r d i t i e s a r e q u i e t e t a ke n a w ay […].” (Godwin 56 – 60; my emphasis, HS)

To sum up, with regard to the extraterrestrial beings, the comparison of the three novels has shown that the literary extrapolation of the extraterrestrial in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries served a double purpose. First, it took hold of a topic inaugurated to the astronomical discourse by modern natural philosophy and its reorganization of the universe as a decentralized and multiplied space, thereby generating a new relation between literature and sciences, poetic and empirical evidence, fiction and facts. Second, the invention of the extraterrestrial other provided a fictitious foil that allows for sharpening the understanding of what is considered to be quintessentially human. The extraterrestrial other therefore owns a paradoxical alterity : on the one hand, it is presented as closely related to humankind by extrapolating the well-known order of the scala naturae to the new realm of the universe, thus signifying their supposed inhabitants as different but related. On the other hand, it remains radically unsignified and incomparable in order to fulfil its primary function as a superior being. In this respect, the Early Modern space novels have to be read as ethnographical explorations of a fictitious celestial culture that, despite its literary guise, claim to tell the truth about human nature and hereunto encountered the extraterrestrial other in order to discover the human.

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References Aldiss, Brian W. The Detached Retina. Some Aspects of SF and Fantasy. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1995. Print. Bergerac, Savinien Cyrano de. L’autre monde. Les ¦tats et empires de la lune (1657). Ed. Jacques Pr¦vot. Paris: Gallimard, 2004. Print. Bezzola, Lambert. Imagining the Unimaginable. The Poetics of Early Modern Astronomy. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002. Print. Bloch, Robert N. Bibliographie der Utopie und Phantastik 1650 – 1950 im deutschen Sprachraum. Hamburg: Achilla, 2002. Print. Galilei, Galileo. Sidereus Nuncius. Nachricht von neuen Sternen. Ed. Hans Blumenberg. Frankfurt/M.: Insel, 2002 Print. Campbell, Marie. Wonder & Science. Imagining worlds in early modern Europe. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999. Print. Carre, Rose-Marie. Cyrano de Bergerac. Voyages imaginaires a la recherche de la verite humaine. Paris: Lettres Modernes, 1977. Print. Carroll, William C. “Goodly Frames, spotty Globe. Earth and Moon in Renaissance Litzerature”. Earth, moon and planets. An international journal of solar system science 85/ 86 (2001), 5 – 23. Print. Christianson, Gale E. “Kepler’s Somnium: Science Fiction and the Renaissance Scientist”. Science Fiction Studies 3 (1976), 76 – 90. Online. Cohen, Jerome Bernard. Revolution in Science. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1985. Print. – The Birth of a New Physics. New York: Anchor, 1960. Print. Copeland, Thomas A. “Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone. A Picaresque Satire”. Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 16 (1975), 156 – 63. Print. Cusanus, Nicholaus. Philosophische und theologische Schriften. Ed. and transl. Eberhard Döring. Wiesbaden: Marixverlag, 2005. Print. Davies, H. Neville. “Bishop Godwin’s ‘Lunatique Language’ “. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 30 (1967), 296 – 316. Print. – “Symzonia and The Man in the Moon”. Notes and Queries 15 (1968), 342 – 5. Online. Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de. Entretiens sur la pluralit¦ des mondes (Conversations) (1686). Oeuvres complÀtes. Vol. 1. Ed. Alain Niderst. Paris: Fayard, 1990. Print. Foucault, Michel. Les mots et les choses. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. Print. Godwin, Francis. The Man in the Moone or A Discourse of a Voyage Thither. Domingo Gonzales. The Speedy Messenger. London: John Norton, 1638. Online. Gove, Philip Babcock. The Imaginary Voyage in Prose Fiction. A History of Its Criticism and a Guide for Its Study. London: Holland, 1961. Print. Janssen, Anke: “Wirkung eines Romans als Inspirationsquelle: Francis Godwins The Man in the Moone”. Arcadia 20 (1985), 20 – 46. Print. Kepler, Johannes: Somnium seu Astronomia Lunari/The Dream or Astronomie of the Moon (1634). Ed. Edward Rosen. New York: Dover, 2003. Print. Kindermann, Eberhard Christian. Die Geschwinde Reise auf dem Lufft-Schiff nach der obern Welt (1744). Ed. Hania Siebenpfeiffer. Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2010. Print. Koyr¦, Alexandre. La r¦volution astronomique. Copernic, Kepler, Borelli. Paris: Hermann, 1961. Print.

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Kuhn, Thomas S. The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard UP, 1985. Print. Lovejoy, Arthur O. The Great Chaine of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1936. Print. Philmus, Robert M. Into the Unknown. The Evolution of Science Fiction From Francis Godwin to H. G. Wells. Berkeley : U of California P, 1970. Print. Pioffet, Marie-Christine. “Godwin et Cyrano: Deux conceptions du voyage”. Dalhousie French Studies 39/40 (1997), 45 – 57. Print. Pleithner, Regina. “Zwei Mondreisen des 17. Jahrhunderts: Voyages imaginaires oder Reiseutopien?” Reisen des Barock. Selbst- und Fremderfahrung und ihre Darstellung. Ed. Regina Pleithner. Bonn: Romantischer Verlag, 1991. 75 – 87. Print. Roberts, Adam. Science Fiction. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Print. Versins, Pierre. Encyclop¦die de l’utopie des voyages extraordinaires et de la science fiction. Lausanne: Edition L’Age d’Hommes, 1972. Print. Weber, Alan S. “Changes in Celestial Journey Literature: 1400 – 1650”. Culture and Cosmos: A Journal of the History of Astrology and Cultural Astronomy 1 (1997), 34 – 50. Online. Winter, Michael. Compendium utopiarum: Typologie und Bibliographie literarischer Utopien. 2 vols. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1978. Print.

Helga Schwalm

Lives of the Physicians – Samuel Johnson, Medicine and Biography

A physician in a great city seems to be the mere plaything of Fortune; his degree of reputation is, for the most part, totally casual: they that employ him know not his excellence; they that reject him know not his deficience. By an acute observer, who had looked on the transactions of the medical world for half a century, a very curious book might be written on the Fortunes of Physicians. (Johnson 1968, vol. 3: 415)

Samuel Johnson, the author of these lines, never wrote a “very curious” book as he describes; a collective Lives of the Physicians was not realized until William Macmichael’s volume of 1846. In Victorian retrospect, however, “the united worship of Medicine and Poetry” was seen as “frequent in the English literature of the last age” (Shaw 367). Johnson composed a number of medical biographies, and his late work Lives of the English Poets constructs a subtext of medical lives, since a number of the poets included were also medical people: Cowley, Garth, Blackmore, Akenside. Earlier in his career, Johnson had written lives of Sydenham, Morin, Thomas Browne and, most importantly, Hermann Boerhaave (1668 – 1738). The extent of his subsequent contributions to Robert James’ Medicinal Dictionary continue to be the subject of critical controversy (see, e. g., Wiltshire, Schwartz, and Kaminski 173 – 4); next to the extended life of Boerhaave, Alexander is the only uncontested Johnsonian subject. In any case, Johnson told Boswell in 1776 that he “helped” Dr James with the composition of the “Proposal” for his dictionary, the dedication to Dr Mead, and “a little in the Dictionary itself” (Boswell, vol. 3: 22). Thus, Johnson’s authorship goes beyond individual biographical contributions to include the programmatic formula of the Dictionary itself. What, then, is behind Johnson’s particular engagement with the lives of physicians, what is its significance in the larger context of eighteenth-century cultural history? Johnson, the moralist, was very knowledgeable about medical matters, about the human body and mind and its pathologies; he “had studied medicine diligently in all its branches,” Mrs Piozzi (formerly Thrale) reported, “but had given particular attention to the diseases of the imagination” (qtd. in

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Gross 21). While he certainly had a vast knowledge of and took a great interest in many scientific and non-scientific fields and disciplines,1 his bond with medicine is extraordinary. Critics have suggested that Johnson’s frequent ill-health, his subjection to pain, and his mental instability all led to his meticulous study of medical and psychological matters, admired for its accuracy by contemporary physicians (Gross 21 – 2; Mulhallen and Wright). As a patient, Johnson has provoked intense academic scrutiny since his death, which immediately turned him into a subject of “what Michel Foucault has called ‘anatomo-clinical’ medicine” (Wiltshire 3). Modern critics have focused on the impact of Johnson’s ailments, his experience of pain on his philosophy (see Wiltshire; Gross; etc.). The medical profession also informed Johnson’s social and cultural life. He was friends with Edmund Hector, a Birmingham surgeon; Dr Samuel Swinfen was his godfather and the father of Mrs Desmoulins (a member of the strange household of Johnson’s latter years); Dr Robert James, the editor of the Medicinal Dictionary, was a Lichfield school fellow of sorts; Dr Thomas Lawrence, the President of the College of Physicians for many years, was Johnson’s own doctor (Wiltshire 2 – 3; Schwartz 36 – 41). Finally, there was Dr Robert Levet, the subject of Johnson’s famous elegy, a highly unconventionally trained doctor of the poor, an alcoholic, and also a member of Johnson’s notorious household. “In misery’s darkest caverns known, His useful care … ever nigh,” Johnson wrote in his verse tribute; Levet’s “virtues walk’d their narrow round, / Nor made a pause, nor left a void.” Levet was Johnson’s medical example of “The single talent wellemploy’d” (1984: 36). In no other “biographical” text are medical practice and the issue of virtue, of what makes a good life, conflated as strongly. Indeed, then, there is a medical resonance in Johnson’s voice of authority, articulating, as John Wiltshire has shown, his “attention to both physical and psychological suffering” (1). Unlike Wiltshire, I do not propose to look at the manifestations of Johnson’s psychological, physiological/medical knowledge and its congruence with his moral writing; rather, I shall investigate the intersection of Johnson’s writing about medical professionals, Boerhaave in particular, the physician as a special man of science and as a professional,2 and the profession of biography and of the writer. For not only did the “Great Cham of Literature” establish himself as the voice of authority on matters poetic, critical and moral, he also participated in the dissemination of medical knowledge, and, concomitantly, he also participated in the construction of the professional “physician as hero”, to adapt Michael McKeon’s phrase “the writer as hero”. In the mid-eighteenth century, the “writer as hero,” according to McKeon, “has yet 1 On Johnson’s interest in electricity see Schwartz 40 – 2, on scientific books in his library 46 – 7. 2 In his Dictionary, Johnson defines profession as “Calling; vocation; known employment … particularly used of divinity, physick, and law” (1994: 571).

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no social fulfilment, no actual existence,” (18) yet the professionalization of authorship was well on its way, as was the professionalization of the medical profession. Heroism, shifting McKeon’s semantics somewhat, would signify the (both old and new) textual figure of a prototypical professional pursuit in the face of unfavourable or hostile circumstances, implying an analogy between two precarious sociotypes: the physician, “one who professes the art of healing” (Johnson 1994: 540), and the writer, i. e. the modern author.3 I will argue that in his “Life of Boerhaave”, Johnson constructs a methodological analogy between medical science and the practice of biography itself, and between the physician and the writer. The larger context that Johnson’s contributions to dictionaries and magazines concerning medical matters feed back into is the generation and dissemination of knowledge through biography, which can be seen as part of the enlightenment project of polite education. They form part of a system of knowledge generated through documenting exemplary lives of eminence and virtue. Cultural dissemination of the sciences, and medicine in particular, operated through various channels, of course, among them the periodical publications of the scientific societies, which were specialized but not limited to any special discipline (McCleallan 95), but also magazines of a more general nature as well as dictionaries and (collective) biographies – all textual forums of the bourgeois public sphere and all crucial means of transmitting scientific knowledge to the general reader. Johnson contributed to all of them (or even composed them single-handedly). The subject range, purposes and politics of collection and classification of these media and textual modes would need to be studied specifically and cannot be addressed in this paper.4 Suffice it to say that next to the Biographia Britannica (1747 – 94) with its national agenda to construct a kind of “general monument to the most deserving of all ages” (xii),5 there were a substantial number of more specialized dictionaries devoted to particular sciences that provided an “assemblage of existing scholarship” (Brack and Kaminski 381). Among them is Robert James’ Medicinal Dictionary, which next to its systematic entries includes “An Account of the Lives, Writings, and Characters of the 3 Johnson’s notion of authorship is well researched. In particular, see his letter to the Earl of Chesterfield and his characterization of authorship by way of “Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail” in The Vanity of Human Wishes (1984: 16). On eighteenth-century authorship see, e. g., Rose 1993; on eighteenth-century authorship and science Hankins 2007. 4 Along with the specific methods of classifications and agendas, the politics of exclusion would need to be investigated in detail, as Marina Frasca-Spada (123 – 6) has done with regard to Charles Hutton’s Mathematical and Philosophical Dictionary of 1796. 5 Given its national agenda, the Biographia Britannia does not include Boerhaave but contains brief entries on key medical figures such as Sydenham, Cheyne, Akenside and others.

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principal Authors in Physic … as their Names occur in the Alphabet” (qtd. in Hazen 70). One of these lives is the enlarged “Life of Boerhaave” by Johnson. In periodical publications, biography also plays a part. The presence of lives varies: the Transactions of the Royal Academy manage without lives altogether, while the Gentleman’s Magazine, with its much wider range of subjects, genres, and readers, is a key proliferator of lives (as obituaries). In such periodicals, biography performs a significant function in the dissemination of knowledge, making it general “public knowledge” (Porter 3). As Thomas Söderqvist (2007) has demonstrated, this holds true also for scientific biography, which as a genre or discourse until today has received little critical attention. The General Magazine of Arts and Sciences, Philosophical, Philological, Mathematical, and Mechanical by Benjamin Martin (1755 – 65) is a particularly pertinent case regarding the structural incorporation of biography (although admittedly Johnson was not a contributor): the first issues of the immensely successful magazine, with its objective to “render the various Arts and Sciences as easy of Access, or the Pathway to Knowledge as direct and plain, as possible” (vol. 1: iii) and its focus on “observations” of reality (vol.1: vi), initially contained no lives. Then half a year into the production, the editor announced a new scheme to “add … a quarter of a sheet of the Lives of the Philosophers in a way proper for binding up by themselves at the conclusion.” (Vol. 9: 121) Biography was added to perform its share in the project of polite education on the arts and sciences.6 The bound annual volumes, cumulated from original monthly articles and essays, rearranged the contents of monthly numbers into topical parts.7 Significantly, in the course of this rearrangement, the biographical smatterings of the current issues were also gathered together into a separate volume, creating a collective biography in its own right and covering “philosophers” from antiquity to the present. Biography thus obtains a special position in the transmission of knowledge that can indeed be seen to “infiltrate” the wider “elite centres of social intercourse” (Porter 9) and to eventually extend the realm of or redefine the values of politeness (Shapin 175 – 77). What kind of knowledge is transmitted through such biographies? Johnson’s medical lives actually say fairly little on the kind of scientific or medical knowledge his subjects pursued (or represented); this is also the case with 6 Incidentally, the repetition of the same biography in another collection was nothing unusual. The lives of Newton, for instance, in the General Magazine and the British Plutarch (1776) are in large parts identical. 7 After the introductory volumes “The young gentleman and lady’s philosophy … by way of a dialogue” (2 vols., 1759 – 63), the subsequent volumes bear titles such as “Natural history of England Part,” “Philological arts and sciences,” “Institutes of arithmetic, algebra, fluxions, geometry, and mechanics”.

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Boerhaave, although the version in the Medicinal Dictionary included a little more on Boerhaave’s contribution to science (which today is debatable) (Brack and Kaminski 394 – 5; Kim, Lee, and Hwang 121 – 4). Johnson’s subject, rather, is the man of science and the practicing physician. Johnson’s “Life of Boerhaave” was first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1739, January to April numbers (Brack and Kaminski 394). The fact that the life appeared at least twice, followed by further lives by others, signals the public’s interest in Boerhaave, professor of both medicine and botany and later also of chemistry in Leyden, whose reputation as “praeceptor Europae” reputably extended to China (Bergdolt 200). The somewhat scarce scholarship on Johnson’s “Life” has stressed the fact that Johnson to a great extent follows one source only, the Latin eulogy by Albert Schultens, Boerhaave’s colleague and friend. Schultens, in turn, incorporated and marked out as such Boerhaave’s autobiographical notes, which all subsequent biographers have made use of except Matey (Reynolds 116). Johnson’s sole reliance on Schultens (and via Schultens on the autobiographical notes) has persuaded scholars to consider the early Johnson primarily as a translator, not a biographer (Kaminski 54). However, in his later Lives of English Poets, Johnson would also occasionally rely on very limited sources if it suited him (Turnbull 178; Schwalm 310 – 2), and in the “Life of Savage” of 1744 he was to use more than one source but again chose not to conduct any research of his own. Johnson’s translation is one that omits, paraphrases, flattens the high tone of oratory, rearranges and “enriches” the original source (Reynolds 118 – 120). An example of this practice of “enriching” pertains to a key passage, where Boerhaave’s awakening medical interest is attributed to his own experience of illness: “his own anguish taught him to compassionate that of others, and his experience of the inefficacy of the methods then in use incited him to attempt the discovery of others more certain” (Johnson 1984: 55). Johnson elaborates on the pre-text, turning it into what is “a brief description of the mind and heart of the young man” (Reynolds 120).8 The fact that he relies on this single source for his material “in no way invalidates the resulting works as mines of information concerning his own attitudes” (Schwartz 53). What, then, are Johnson’s themes that he pursues on the basis of and beyond Schultens’ pre-text? Johnson delineates Boerhaave’s life as that of a genius and man of science as vocation; a man who pursues the methodological principles of the new Newtonian science but never ventures towards any unorthodox view of religion. Piety is his supreme quality. Johnson sets Boerhaave’s professional achievements and high moral status against the backdrop of his great perse8 Boerhaave’s subsequent full biographer Burton in turn appropriates Johnson’s language, see Reynolds 122 – 23.

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verance in the face of physical suffering, economic hardship and public slander. In other words, he uses the means available within the mode of translation to construct his version of a biographical subject: a man of science as a stoic, professional, philosophical sceptic; finally and above all, as the epitome of piety. Regarding Boerhaave’s work as a scientist and physician, Johnson specifically praises three points: extensive reading, empirical observation plus sceptical judgement, and finally also systematising the teaching of medicine.9 Boerhaave, Johnson stresses, studied the “ancient physicians, in the order of time, pursuing his inquiries downwards, from Hippocrates through all the Greek and Latin writers,” focussing especially on Hippocrates as “the original source of all medicinal knowledge” (1984: 58). On the basis of his textual knowledge thus acquired, Boerhaave, as a Newtonian,10 would always observe and judge for himself “in favour of experimental knowledge,” reflecting with just severity upon those arrogant philosophers who are too easily disgusted with the slow methods of obtaining true notions by frequent experiments; and who, possessed with too high an opinion of their own abilities, rather choose to consult their own imaginations, than inquire into nature, and are better pleased with the delightful amusement of forming hypotheses, than the toilsome drudgery of making observations. The emptiness and uncertainty of all those systems, whether venerable for their antiquity, or agreeable for their novelty, he has evidently shown (Johnson 1984: 62).

It is precisely such an empirically and textually based scepticism that Johnson offers as Boerhaave’s legacy. It combines due reference to the ancients and modern principles. The physician-poet Richard Blackmore, in contrast to Boerhaave, is castigated in the Lives of the Poets for his “affected contempt of the Ancients, and a supercilious derision of transmitted knowledge,” leading Johnson to the verdict of “indecent arrogance” and political oppositionism that leaves Blackmore in almost total “disgrace” on this matter (Johnson 1968, vol. 2: 250 – 51). Contempt of ancient authority is also what, in his biographer’s eyes, eventually belittles Blackmore’s poetic writings: “His literature was, I think, but small. What he knew of antiquity I suspect him to have gathered from modern compilers” (253). As is so often the case in Johnson’s biographies, the political 9 On Boerhaave’s contribution to teaching Johnson says: “This he undertook not only to the great advantage of his pupils, but to the great improvement of the art itself, which had, hitherto, been treated only in a confused and irregular manner, and was little more than a history of particular experiments, not reduced to certain principles, nor connected one with another : this vast chaos he reduced to order, and made that clear and easy, which was before, to the last degree, difficult and obscure” (1984: 61). 10 According to Shirley A. Roe, the emphasis on experiment and on the fibre as the “basic building block of the animal body” was reflected in the new physiologists George Cheyne (1671 – 1743) and Richard Mead (1673 – 1754) and influenced Albrecht von Haller’s concept of “irritability” (Roe 401).

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undercurrent is still discernible – Blackmore’s defiance of established authority points back to his political satires. However, Blackmore is atoned by his “general principles,” which the biographer graciously acknowledges, concluding: “He left minute researches to those whom he considered as little minds” (253). Johnson’s insistence on the acquisition of knowledge through close textual study of the canon, measured against and improved by way of empirical observation and sceptical judgement, marks his own writing well beyond the subject of medicine and the sciences. In Boerhaave, he apparently finds a model for this preferred method, and he applies it to his own composition of the physician’s life. When it comes to reports about Boerhaave’s almost superhuman powers of diagnosis, for instance, Johnson dismisses them: Of his sagacity, and the wonderful penetration with which he often discovered and described, at the first sight of a patient, such distempers as betray themselves by no symptoms to common eyes, such wonderful relations have been spread over the world, as, though attested beyond doubt, can scarcely be credited. I mention none of them, because I have no opportunity of collecting testimonies, or distinguishing between those accounts which are well proved, and those which owe their rise to fiction and credulity. (1994: 65)

Johnson’s strategy at work here is indeed that of a “debunking sceptic, allowing nothing to pass that has not been established as fact and permitting no hypothetical reconstructions” (Schwartz 73). What Johnson praises in Boerhaave, then, corresponds to, or is replicated in his own practice of pious biographical scepticism, even more so in his later lives, where he tends to weigh probabilities on the basis of empirical data and general observation of human nature, wary of all too easy causal connections, cautiously suspending conclusions in the face of insufficient data or acknowledging their precarious basis: “We know somewhat, and we imagine the rest” (1968, vol. 1: 235). Probability plays a principal part in his judgement (see Maner 10 – 34; Patey 197; Schwalm 315 – 7), demonstrating the infiltration into everyday life and discourse of the “‘esprit g¦ometrique’ (‘calculating spirit’)” (Porter 4 – 5) of the Enlightenment. In his “Life of Boerhaave”, Johnson begins to practice this method within an intertextual framework. He thus underwrites, or even anticipates slightly what Peter-Hanns Reill has called the “wave of mid-century scepticism directed against the spirit of systems, against a one-sided reliance on abstract and hypothetical reasoning in constructing a coherent picture of reality,” ideally by way of historical narrative – of which biography is a key genre. Nature’s variety could not be accounted for by abstract philosophy on its own (Reill 29). In the wake of Hume, Buffon et al., mid to late eighteenth-century science “was to be a science of facts, observation, and controlled inference. Its ideal expository form was a historical narrative” (Reill 31). What used to be an

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established topic of the physician as sceptic and atheist11 is turned by Johnson into a methodological hallmark of the new science infiltrating all walks of discursive life. At the same time, there is a rhetorical/topological edge to Johnson’s “Life of Boerhaave” extending beyond a simple subscription to the same scepticism. Significantly, when it comes to the rumour of Boerhaave’s alleged atheism, the biographer dismisses the original incident responsible for this “detestable calumny” as one “from which no consequence of importance could be possibly apprehended” (1984: 59), turning the “injurious … report” into an exemplary proof that no merit, however exalted, is exempt from being not only attacked, but wounded, by the most contemptible whispers. Those who cannot strike with force can, however, poison their weapon, and, weak as they are, give mortal wounds, and bring a hero to the grave; so true is that observation, that many are able to do hurt, but few do good. (1984: 59)

Johnson’s rhetorical strategy of dismissing the accusations almost anticipates the strong rhetoric of defence in his “Life of Savage” where the biographical subject functions as a kind of Johnsonian alter ego.12 It has been suggested that Johnson also saw in Boerhaave a hero or that he identified with him;13 in fact, there are several notable biographical parallels: their talent and endurance (“a man formed by nature for great designs, and guided by religion in the exertion of his abilities” [1984: 67]) just as their suffering and pain, poverty, orthodox theology, and piety. Even in terms of their physique, they appear astonishingly similar : He was of a robust and athletic constitution of body … tall, and remarkable for extraordinary strength. There was, in his air and motion, something rough and artless, but so majestic and great. (1984: 67)

However, this parallel goes beyond a resemblance of personalities and circumstances, pointing not only to Johnson’s identification with the scepticist methodology of his subject which I have emphasized so far, but also to his identification with Boerhaave’s professional career, possibly signifying an underlying identification of two ‘sociotypes’ undergoing changes in the eighteenth century : 11 I am indebted to Verena Lobsien on this point. 12 On Johnson’s juridical rhetoric of defence and concomitant departure from the principals of probability in his biography of Savage see Schwalm 331 – 39. 13 Schwartz (141) follows Wimsatt who argued as early as 1941 that Johnson saw in Boerhaave a kind of hero, noting several parallels. Paul Fussell contends that Johnson finds himself and what he wants to be in Boerhaave (101 – 8); Richard R. Reynolds argues that what Fussell attributes as Johnsonian is in fact the work of Boerhaave’s eulogist. i. e. an effect of Johnson’s translation.

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the physician/natural philosopher and the author/poet. This is a conflation which the Lives of the Poets, particularly the “Life of Richard Blackmore”, naturally evoke, but a hint of it is discernible in “Boerhaave”, too. For Johnson sketches Boerhaave’s professional pursuit both as the vocation of a natural genius and as a choice of economic necessity in the face of poverty and outright public hostility : On the one hand, Boerhaave’s “propension to the study of physick grew too violent to be resisted; and, though he still intended to make divinity the great employment of his life, he could not deny himself the satisfaction of spending some time upon the medical writers” (1984: 57). On the other hand, “Boerhaave, finding this formidable opposition raised against his pretensions to ecclesiastical honours or preferments,” chose the profession he “was equally qualified for,” which was “not, indeed, of equal dignity or importance, but which must, undoubtedly, claim the second place among those which are of the greatest benefit to mankind” (1984: 60). Medicine is a noble choice, and yet one of necessity because divinity is closed to him. As is so often the case in Johnson’s lives, the choice of profession reflects personal inclination but is impaired by public neglect or hostility.14 In any case, it is ultimately determined by economic necessity – Johnson’s prime example Savage was “obliged to seek some other means of support; and, having no profession, became by necessity an author” (1968, vol. 2: 329). To some extent, such phrases may reflect Johnson’s ever present concern with pragmatic needs and conviction of the “vanity of human wishes”. Yet this precarious social and cultural status is where the fates of medical men and contemporary authors overlap specifically. As Johnson found himself “pushing on [his] work through difficulties of which it is useless to complain,” carrying out his work “without any act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favour,” thus his famous letter to the Earl of Chesterfield (782), careers in sciences and medicine often needed to be pursued against financial interest and/ or parental wishes (Shapin 166). As the writer needed to position himself somewhere on the scale between the Grub Street hack dedicated to trade and the poet dedicated to truth, the physician also had to balance professional virtue against trade and worldly success. Johnson displays his awareness of this in his “Life of Garth” (depicting a conflict between physicians and apothecaries) and others. Richard Blackmore, in contrast, is free from such external forces of Grub Street authorship, striving for fame only : “if he may tell his own motives, for a nobler purpose, to engage ‘poetry in the cause of virtue’” (1968, vol. 2: 237). This is a somewhat unusual figure of the medical poet, whose success went as far as

14 Wharton identifies the “perception of the hostile world that awaits the individual talent” as a recurrent theme in Johnson’s writings (153).

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knighthood, but Johnson does not fail to reintroduce the vicinity of Grub Street later on, and Blackmore was not exempt from the hardships of public hostility. In Boerhaave’s biography, economic constraint only enters the picture in the sense of hardship of circumstances. But in the context of the early eighteenth century the precariousness of social status remains (although it was actually rising then)15 (Bergdolt 200). As Shapin has argued, “Images of vocation, dedication, and detachment that testified to the virtue of the eighteenth-century man of science also constituted a potential handicap to his unconditional membership in polite society and to that society’s approval of his activities” (176).16 The fact that Boerhaave “did not neglect the arts of eloquence and poetry,” so as not to “disappoint his own intentions” (Johnson 1984: 69), perhaps testifies to this sense of social insecurity. In any case, Johnson subscribes to the old topic of the physician’s toil and poverty, which he shares with the poet, while refuting the equally traditional accusation of scepticism as atheism with his own brand of religiously sound biographical scepticism. He thus creates an image of the physician as both classical and modern epitome of the man of science: active and contemplative, sceptic yet pious, dedicated and modern professional. This reading would confirm Stephen Gaukroger’s claim that a shift occurred from the image of the ancient philosopher as “archetypal Sage,” indifferent “to calamity and misfortune” (40), to the natural philosopher as a “public figure in the service of the public good” (42), with a concomitant shift from contemplative to active life (43). It seems to me that Herman Boerhaave with his double or even triple professorship in Medicine, Botany and Chemistry, who was also an active, practicing physician, stoically enduring his ailments to glean knowledge from his own pained body, qualifies as the perfect exemplum of both the ancient and the modern ideal. In fact, an eighteenth-century doctor seems to perhaps come closer to this ideal than any other natural philosopher. On that alone, he would have made a highly endearing subject for Johnson who so often dovetailed ancient and modern principles. To conclude: In his translation-biography, Johnson beats the old topological charge of the physician’s scepticism and atheism with his own brand of “pos15 If Mrs. Thrale could state of Robert James, her family doctor and editor of the Medicinal Dictionary, that next to Johnson and Garrick he was one of the “three best known characters in London – perhaps in Europe”, his position in the polite world seems to have been prominent indeed (vol. 1: 495). 16 Also compare Johnson’s approval of Boerhaave’s combination of research and polite learning: “He knew the importance of his own writings to mankind; and lest he might, by a roughness and barbarity of style, too frequent among men of great learning, disappoint his own intentions, and make his labours less useful, he did not neglect the arts of eloquence and poetry. Thus was his learning, at once, various and exact, profound and agreeable” (1984: 69).

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itive”, new scepticism, which is reconcilable with piety. While he deals with the established topic of the medical man as atheist and sceptic, he re-contextualizes it within eighteenth-century empiricism and scepticism, which not only transformed the nature of science but also transformed the genre of life writing. Also, Johnson grafts his ‘Lives of the Physicians’ onto the context of eighteenth-century authorship. In his later biographies of medical poets, this semantic nexus is enhanced, while in the “Life of Boerhaave”, he evokes it by rhetorical implication only. Old social roles, implying norms and typifications (Shapin 159), are thus re-inscribed into a new socio-cultural and intertextual context. This double structure of an old topic re-contextualized is textually mirrored, or biographically staged, in the textual duality of biography as translation and intertext.

References Primary Literature Boswell, James. Life of Johnson. Ed. George Birkbeck Hill. Rev. ed. Lawrence F. Powell. 6 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934. Print. James, Robert, ed. A Medicinal Dictionary ; including physic, surgery, anatomy, chymistry, and botany … Together with a history of drugs … and an introductory preface, etc. 3 vols. London, 1743 – 45. Print. Johnson, Samuel. A Dictionary of the English Language. 1843. Ed. Alexander Chalmers. London: Studio Editions, 1994. Print. – “Letter to the Earl of Chesterfield.” Samuel Johnson (The Oxford Authors). Ed. Donald Greene. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984. 782 – 83. Print. – “Life of Boerhaave.” 1739. Samuel Johnson (The Oxford Authors). Ed. Donald Greene. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984. 54 – 70. Print. – Lives of the English Poets. Ed. George Birkbeck Hill. 3 vols. 1905. Hildesheim: Olms, 1968. Print. – “On the Death of Dr. Levet.” Samuel Johnson (The Oxford Authors). Ed. Donald Greene. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984. 35 – 36. Print. – “The Vanity of Human Wishes: The Tenth Satire of Juvenal, Imitated.” Samuel Johnson (The Oxford Authors). Ed. Donald Greene. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984. 12 – 20. Print. Kippis, Andrew, ed. Biographia Britannica, or, the Lives of the Most Eminent Persons Who have flourished in Great Britain and Ireland, From the Earliest Ages, down to the Present Times: Collected From the best Authorities, both Printed and Manuscript, And digested in the Manner of Mr BAYLE’s Historical and Critical Dictionary. 6 vols. London: Olms, 1747 – 66. Print. Martin, Benjamin, ed. The General Magazine of Arts and Sciences, Philosophical, Philological, Mathematical, and Mechanical. London, 1755 – 65. Print.

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Secondary Literature Bergdolt, Klaus. Das Gewissen der Medizin. Ärztliche Moral von der Antike bis heute. München: Beck, 2004. Print. Brack, O.M. “Samuel Johnson’s ‘Life of Boerhaave’: Texts New and Old.” The EighteenthCentury Intelligencer Sept. (2008): 1 – 10. Print. – and Thomas Kaminski. “Johnson, James, and the Medicinal Dictionary.” Modern Philology 81.4 (1984): 378 – 400. Print. Fleeman, J. D. Early Biographical Writings of Dr. Johnson. Westmead, Farnborough: Gregg International Publishers, 1973. Print. Fussell, Paul. Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing. New York: Harcourt, 1971. Print. Gaukroger, Stephen. “Biography as a Route to Understanding Early Modern Natural Philosophy.” The History and Poetics of Scientific Biography. Ed. Thomas Söderqvist. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. 37 – 50. Print. Gross, Gloria Sybil. The Invisible Riot of the Mind. Samuel Johnson’s Psychological Theory. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1992. Print. Hankins, Thomas L. “Biography and the Reward System in Science.” The History and Poetics of Scientific Biography. Ed. Thomas Söderqvist. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. 94 – 104. Print. Hazen, Allen T. Samuel Johnson’s Prefaces & Dedications. Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1937. Print. Kaminski, Thomas. The Early Career of Samuel Johnson. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987. Print. Kim, Ock-Joo, Myung Hyun Lee, and Sang-Ik Hwang. “Hermann Boerhaave: A Historiographical Survey.” Korean Journal of Medical History 6 (1997): 121 – 32. Print. MacMichael, W. The Gold-Headed Cane and Lives of the British Physicists. 1846. Print. McClellan III, James. “Scientific Institutions and the Organization of Science.” The Cambridge History of Science. Vol. 4. Eighteenth-Century Science. Ed. Roy Porter. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 87 – 106. Print. McHenry, Lawrence C., Jr. “Dr. Samuel Johnson’s Medical Biographies.” Journal of the History of Medicine July (1959): 298 – 310. Print. McKeon, Michael. “The Writer as Hero: Novelistic Prefigurations and the Emergence of Literary Biography.” Contesting the Subject: Essays in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography and Biographical Criticism. Ed. William H. Epstein. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 1991. 17 – 42. Print. Millburn, John R. “Martin’s Magazine: The General Magazine of Arts and Sciences, 1755 – 65.” The Library : The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society s5-XXVIII.3 (1973): 221 – 39. Web. 20 July 2009. Mulhallen, Jacqueline, and D.J. Wright. “Samuel Johnson: Amateur Physician.” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 76.3 (1983): 217 – 22. Print. Patey, Douglas Lane. Probability and Literary Form. Philosophic Theory and Literary Practice in the Augustan Age. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. Print. Piozzi, Hester Lynch [Thrale]. Thraliana. Ed. Katherine C. Balderstone. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951. Print. Porter, Roy. “Introduction.” The Cambridge History of Science. Vol. 4. Eighteenth-Century Science. Ed. Roy Porter. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 1 – 20. Print.

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Reill, Peter Hanns. “The Legacy of the ‘Scientific Revolution’. Science and the Enlightenment.” The Cambridge History of Science. Vol. 4. Eighteenth-Century Science. Ed. Roy Porter. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 23 – 43. Print. Reynolds, Richard R. “Johnson’s Life of Boerhaave in Perspective.” Yearbook of English Studies 5 (1975): 115 – 29. Print. Roe, Shirley A. “The Life Sciences.” The Cambridge History of Science. Vol. 4. EighteenthCentury Science. Ed. Roy Porter. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 397 – 416. Print. Rose, Mark. Authors and Owners. The Invention of Copyright. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993. Print. Schwalm, Helga. Das eigene und das fremde Leben. Biographische Identitätsentwürfe in der englischen Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007. Print. Schwartz, Richard B. Samuel Johnson and the New Science. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1971. Print. Shapin, Steven. “The Image of the Man of Science.” The Cambridge History of Science. Vol. 4. Eighteenth-Century Science. Ed. Roy Porter. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 159 – 83. Print. Shaw, Thomas B. A History of English Literature (The Student’s Mannual of English Literature). 1864. 7th ed. 1871. Print. Söderqvist, Thomas. “Introduction. A New Look at the Genre of Scientific Biography.” The History and Poetics of Scientific Biography. Ed. Thomas Söderqvist. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. 1 – 16. Print. Turnbull, Gordon. “Samuel Johnson.” Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 142. Detroit: Gale, 1994. 170 – 215. Print. Wharton, T. F. “Johnson, Authorship, and Hope.” Fresh Reflections on Samuel Johnson. Ed. Prem Nath. Troy, NY: Whitston, 1987. 150 – 166. Print. Wiltshire, John. Samuel Johnson in the Medical World. The Doctor and the Patient. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. Print.

Birgit Mara Kaiser

Electrified Humans – Of Inhuman Affects in Heinrich von Kleist

Affects are precisely these nonhuman becomings of man. … Kleist is no doubt the author who most wrote with affects, using them like stones or weapons, seizing them in becomings of sudden petrification or infinite acceleration. (Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?)

The emergence of the human as a specific epistemological figure at the threshold of the nineteenth century, as Michel Foucault sketches it in The Order of Things, goes along, as this paper argues, with the simultaneous emergence of the problem of the inhuman,1 or these “nonhuman becomings of man,” of which Gilles Deleuze and F¦lix Guattari speak in the above quote. Around 1800 – the epistemological threshold, where Foucault’s analyses locate the historical transformations that constitute our modernity – the figure of man emerged as a being endowed with history, interiority and reflexivity. When the postulates of transparency and taxonomic order of the classical age became eclipsed by “a profound historicity [that] penetrates into the heart of things” (Foucault 1994b: xxiii) – an eclipse that Foucault’s Archaeology of the Human Sciences (as the subtitle specifies the project of The Order of Things) studies in the three privileged fields of labour, life and language – man appeared as a form of knowledge, as a specific figure that in turn organized a whole field of knowledge: the human sciences. As things, Foucault notes, “become increasingly reflexive, seeking the principle of their intelligibility only in their own development, and abandoning the space of representation, man enters in his turn, and for the first time, the field of Western knowledge” (xxiii). In view of the discursive shifts that Foucault identifies between the Renaissance, the classical age and modernity, he notes that man “is probably no more than a kind of rift in the order of things, … a 1 It is in this sense of a limit, or a constitutive outside of the human that I use the term “inhuman” in this paper, loosely adapting Jean-FranÅois Lyotard’s development of it in The Inhuman. Reflections on Time. Well aware of the term’s implication of inhumane, Lyotard stresses its potential second dimension as that which constitutes the human, yet remains improper to it. The Inhuman ultimately pursues the question “what if what is ‘proper’ to humankind were to be inhabited by the inhuman?” (2)

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configuration whose outlines are determined by the new position he has so recently taken up in the field of knowledge” (xxiii). And eventually, “he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form” (xxiii) – or, as the famous final words of The Order of Things venture: given his emergence, one can wager that if “those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared … man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” (387). What Foucault’s study, and much of his work following The Order of Things, endeavoured was not only to trace “the history of the order imposed on things” (xxiv), but also – by uncovering the lines of formation of this order and by sketching the epistemological constellations that emerge with it – to “restore to our silent and apparently immobile soil its rifts, its instability, its flaws;” and he adds “it is the same ground that is once more stirring under our feet” (xxiv). With an eye on these instabilities and flaws – prerequisites for any shift in the discursive order – this paper traces the inhuman as a problem that emerged simultaneously with this figure of man, a problem that can be demonstrated, as best as the limited space permits, along the example of Heinrich von Kleist. In doing so, the paper’s argument rests on three basic suppositions that briefly need to be pointed out. First of all, the inhuman is approached here as a thoughtexperiment that was negotiated in (mostly literary) texts to probe the limits and excesses of the human, hence putting the figure of man into question from the moment of its emergence. In exchange with and delimitation from the emerging natural and life sciences, literary texts explored and exposed the discursive rifts and instabilities that were put aside or silenced in the constitution of the human. It follows, secondly, that the inhuman is understood as a phenomenon coextensive with the emergence and the imagination of the human as an epistemological category, and is therefore distinguished from the “posthuman”. The “posthuman” is commonly used for post-anthropological transformations of bodies, or assemblages of bodies and technologies, and implies a temporal succession of the figure of man that might come closer to the “new form” which Foucault said knowledge might discover.2 The interest of this paper lies rather with the exploration of the rifts of the figure of man than with the emergence of a new form. In line with Foucault’s asserted interest in the instabilities of our apparently immobile soil, such a focus might certainly quarry rifts that can be informative when thinking about the directions any such new ways of thinking “humanness” of might take. In fact, when (mostly philosophical) texts from the 1960s onwards challenged the idea of man as interior and reflexive, recourse was taken to forces that exceed or rupture the delimitation of the human as a self2 N. Katherine Hayles, for example, marks the posthuman as a successive mode of the human by explicitly asking how we became posthuman (Hayles 1999).

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sustained, autonomous bodily unit, bestowed with interior depths and reflective consciousness. Thirdly, then, I will argue – as explicit focus of the paper – that these exceeding forces are rendered with recourse to one privileged metaphor : electricity or electric energy. At the turn to the nineteenth century, a spectrum of literary texts challenged the emergent idea of man as conscious reflexivity, and stressed the non-reflective, affective, energetic dimensions of thinking and acting, visualizing those in terms of electric charges and discharges. Along with intervening into and challenging the inventions of the human, these texts thereby simultaneously entered the debates on “life,” one of the prominent “order-words” underlying the shifts around 1800. The vivid poetic interest in the phenomenon of electricity meant an entrance into these debates, yet one that offered a slightly different take on “life,” and consequentially on the figure of man. Although the most prominent examples here are taken from texts by Heinrich von Kleist, I will begin by briefly sketching this constellation around 1800.

The Striking Life of Humans, Between Electricity and Organisms Ever since Benjamin Franklin (most likely) flew his famous kite in 1752 and Luigi Galvani dissected a frog leg in 1789, the phenomenon of electricity was discussed with great interest by poets and scientists alike (see Roe 1 – 14).3 One of the particular attractions of the phenomenon, next to scientific curiosity, was, I suggest, that it answered to the then emergent epistemological problem of life. With George Cuvier (1769 – 1832), as Foucault demonstrated in The Order of Things, the conception of life and living beings changed. While for the Classical experience, the living being was a square … in the universal taxonomia of being … [f]rom Cuvier onward, the living being wraps itself in its own existence, breaks off its taxonomic links of adjacency, tears itself free from the vast, tyrannical plan of continuities, and constitutes itself as a new space: a double space, in fact – since it is both the interior one of anatomical coherences and physiological compatibilities, and the exterior one of the elements in which it resides and of which it forms its own body. (274)

3 Benjamin Franklin (1706 – 1790) argued that the “electrical fluid” was not of two different kinds, but only one exposed to different – positive and negative – pressures; for his scientific contributions cf. Schiffer. Luigi Galvani (1737 – 1798) observed that a frog leg contracted heavily when its nerves were touched by a scalpel, while simultaneously a spark was flying from a nearby electrostatic machine. After a series of experiments with so called Galvanic chains, he concluded that animal organisms contained an innate electrical fluid and developed the idea of animal electricity (see Daiber 99; and Richards 318 for a depiction of the chain).

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The conceptualization of living beings as the dynamic self-organization as and of bodies, its increasing materialization as “anatomical coherences and physiological compatibilities,” and its crucial differentiation from death by Xavier Bichat (1771 – 1802) in his Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort (1800) all came to be of great effect for the biological conception of life (see Foucault 1994a) and its biopolitical capture (see Foucault 2003). In the thick of these (re-) definitions and shifts, electricity offered a captivating possibility to envision the human body, by contrast, in its almost immaterial dimensions, while simultaneously accounting for the dynamic idea of nature with which scientific research increasingly contested the mechanistic worldview of Newtonian physics. Not only anatomical research proposed life as a dynamic and organic process, contesting mechanistic views of the body and the universe, but likewise, as Paul Gilmore notes, considerations of electricity in the eighteenth century as a force permeating the universe, as the life force itself, or as the nervous fluid … challenged a Newtonian worldview of the universe, the mind and social reality consisting of discrete particles in motion (2009: 23).

The different and contradictory conceptions of electricity that circulated between the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – it was “variously conceived of as a material fluid, as a spiritual medium, as a disembodied force” – all converged on the basis that they “supported considerations about the relationship between physical vitality and electricity, as it [electricity, B.M.K.] came to be seen as identical to or analogous with both the nervous fluid and life itself” (Gilmore 2009: 6). The appeal of electricity lay in its response to the same epistemological challenge – how to think “life” –, and like anatomical and biological research, it was concerned with the position of the human in relation to life. We do, however, find a slight friction between the biological, material vitality of “anatomic coherences” and the physical vitality of electricity. The precise quality of electricity had fascinated scientists and poets ever since Galvani’s experiments with animal electricity and, even earlier, since Franklin’s Letters on Electricity (1751), a founding text for experimental physics, the field that began to transform physics from its theoretical practice in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries into a modern experimental science, and of which the study of electricity formed an important part.4 One of Franklin’s readers – or better, of their German translation by J.C. Wilcke as Briefe von der Elektrizität – was Christian Ernst Wünsch, professor of physics and mathematics in Frankfurt an der Oder and one of Kleist’s teachers. In his Kosmologische Unterhaltungen 4 For the history of experimentation as a fundamental methodological shift in the sciences at the end of the eighteenth century, and its epistemological effects, see Pethes et. al.; Borgards.

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für die Jugend (1778), Wünsch noted that if asked in what the “true nature (innere Wesen) of electricity really consisted and in which ways it expressed its miraculous effects: then it is difficult to respond, or to say anything reliable about it” (qtd. in Borgards 87, my translation). In a transatlantic and European exchange, scientific debates and experiments were feverishly exploring this miraculous phenomenon during those decades. One crucial figure in the debates – Johann Wilhelm Ritter – had settled, in his Beweis, daß ein beständiger Galvanismus den Lebensproceß im Thierreiche begleite (1798), the Europe-wide quarrel between Galvani’s and Volta’s positions about the sources of electricity. While Galvani saw these in animal organisms, Volta argued that they are rather in the metals and conductors, and only discharge into the organism.5 Ritter’s findings mediated between the two positions, as his own experiments with Galvanic chains involving only metal demonstrated that Galvanism – or electricity – was an active principle of both organic and inorganic nature. According to Ritter, Galvanism was a phenomenon central to everything (on Ritter’s “Centralphänomen,” see Wetzels), given wherever life existed. Having moved to Jena in 1796, Ritter’s position was known to and enthusiastically debated among the Jena circle, including Novalis, August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, Schelling, Alexander von Humboldt, Achim von Arnim, but also Schiller and Goethe. Novalis, a mining engineer himself, was fascinated by Ritter and inspired to conduct his own experiments with Galvanic chains, somewhat idiosyncratically consisting of his sister Sidonie, his mother, a piece of silver and a little water (see Daiber 107, Wetzels 200). We find a similarly enthusiastic reception of experimental physics and chemistry among poets in Britain.6 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for example, was among the audience of the chemistry lectures of his friend Humphry Davy in 1802, which he visited not only to enlarge his “stock of metaphors” (qtd. in Roe 12), as he proclaimed, but also, as is evident from his 1816 essay Hints towards the Formation of a More Comprehensive Theory of Life, out of a more general interest in the vitality debate that was ardently lead among scientists and poets in Britain about the conception of life (see Coleridge 1995; Kaiser 2010). In his Theory of Life, Coleridge referred to Ritter as one of the “more truly philosophical naturalists” (524), and the same fascination with Ritter’s “Centralphänomen” that captured the Jena circles comes to the fore in Coleridge’s essay. If Galvanism is a force that drives both organic and inorganic nature, it can be seen as an Urkraft, a central principle (Wirkungsprinzip) that affects all of na5 For Alessandro Volta’s (1745 – 1827) contestation of Galvani’s idea of an innate electrical fluid, see Daiber 100 f. 6 For the British poetic reception, see Roe (Coleridge and M. Shelley); Gigante (Keats); Gilmore 2009 (P.B. Shelley and Byron, as well as for the American reception (Hawthorn, Melville, Whitman).

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ture. Hence, it is permitted to ask, as Ritter does: “Where then is the difference between the parts of an animal, of a plant, of a metal and of a stone? – Are they not all members of the cosmic-animal, of Nature?” (Qtd. in Wetzels 203) With Ritter’s universal Galvanism affecting both organic and inorganic nature, Coleridge argues in his Theory of Life, electricity – along with magnetism – must be seen as “the productive factors, and the body or phenomenon as the fact, product, or fixture“ (523). Life neither resides, nor can be located in the organic materiality of a body, but can only be thought as a productive force driving any corporeal manifestation. With Ritter’s “Centralphänomen,” it was possible to speak of a liveliness that exceeded the organic material. However, despite their fascination with Ritter, both Coleridge and Novalis, to remain with these two examples, disagreed with Ritter’s belief to be able to render this universal force visible, and materially substantiate it by means of increasingly refined instruments. Novalis held such “a verification of the romantic idea of unity by means of an experimentation that was purely guided by Enlightenment and empirical principles” (Daiber 113, my translation) to be impossible, and Coleridge criticized the “eagerness and almost epidemic enthusiasm” (1995: 499) with which his contemporaries thought to have located life in the newly discovered phenomenon of electricity. Although Coleridge agrees that “a new light was struck by the discovery of electricity, and … it may be affirmed to have electrified the whole frame of natural philosophy” (498 – 9), rightly debunking Newtonian physics, which had sought “the subtlest mysteries of life, organization, and even of the intellectual and moral being … within the magic circle of mathematical formulae” (498), his essay insists that the new hope for locating life is lamentable and erroneous. Back in 1802, connected by Davy to a Leyden Jar and receiving an electric shock, Coleridge noted: “he gave a very vivid spark with the Leyden Phial – & I distinctly felt the shock … more antidote against Atheism“ (1957: 1099 – 100). What it was an antidote to was the materialist assumption, as the Theory of Life later unravels, that “the powers of bodies … have been miraculously stuck into a prepared and pre-existing matter, as pins into a pin-cushion” (523), that life could be found and located in the material bodies. He even denies such a pinpointing of life if it is understood ex negativo, as in Bichat’s definition of life as “the sum of all the functions by which death is resisted’“ (489). What electricity allowed was precisely to render intelligible the invisible intensity of a liveliness or vivacity that does not coincide with the organic material of living bodies. At the historical-epistemological threshold, at which Foucault situates the transformation of sovereign power to bio-power, we thus find a doubling of the descriptions of life as living (biological) and lively (physical). Alongside the emerging and increasingly hegemonic concept of life as biological dynamic process and as organic materiality that lives insofar as it differs from death, we have a competing concept of life as lively and pervading all of nature, as a force

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that moves the organic as well as the inorganic, yet remains itself immaterial and invisible. The emerging experimental field of electricity lent itself best to express this force since, as Wolfgang Hagen notes in his genealogical studies of electric media, we still have of electricity “according to our state of knowledge … only simulacra (Scheinbilder)” (91, my translation). We always only see the effect, never the power itself.

Electrified Humans and Inhuman Affects in Kleist When turning to Kleist, we find that his texts are not only particularly interesting examples of a literary confrontation of these scientific debates, but also that the effect that the assumption of such a power has on our ideas of the human is negotiated in them. Kleist’s texts not only take explicit recourse to the basic hypotheses of experimental physics – as in Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden (1805/06), which illustrates the course of thoughts and speech by analogies to the laws of electricity, or in Allerneuester Erziehungsplan (1810), which satirizes theories of pedagogy and the calculability of education using the same analogy – but they are also populated with characters who are driven by unusually strong affects. Whether it is Penthesilea, who ends up eating her lover Achilles in an intense mixture of love and fury, or Michael Kohlhaas, who pillages in pursuit of the restitution of his horses in what seems blind rage, or Käthchen, who is struck as if by lightning at the sight of Count Wetter von Strahl (who bears the thunderbolt already as his name) and doggedly pursues him, or the strange sensations that announce to the Marquise of O… her unusual and inexplicable state – all of them are driven by strong affects and subjected to them in ways that evoke, as Yixu Lü and Anthony Stephens note, a “subjugation of the human being under a far stronger power” (218, all translations are my own). Lü and Stephens trace this for Die Familie Schroffenstein and Penthesilea as a subjugation that results in the characters’ tragic dazzlement, due to the violent and disastrous affective discharges they suffer.7 What interests me here are precisely these affects and the ways in which Kleist has their forcefulness correspond to the laws of electricity. Rather than a tragic dismantling of human control and a focus on the disastrousness of affects, however, his texts seem to affirm the exposure of all human action to a basic affectivity that, its affirmation notwithstanding, puts ideas of human interiority and reflexivity into question. Albeit not always explicitly, Kleist’s narrative and dramatic texts are full of references to the laws of electricity, which explains why L‚zlû Földenyi felt the 7 Affect is a prominent topic in Kleist-research (see Kleistjahrbuch 2009). What this present discussion wishes to highlight are its physical and non-anthropocentric dimensions in Kleist.

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need to devote a separate entry in his Kleist-dictionary to “electricity” as a crucial term in Kleist’s verbal universe (see 112 – 3). As early as 12 November 1799, when Kleist was studying at Frankfurt an der Oder and before he began writing, he makes explicit reference to experimental physics in a letter to his sister Ulrike. Inviting Ulrike to visit him in Frankfurt, he urges her to make haste if she wishes to participate, together with “the family Zengen and our family, along with many other ladies from Frankfurt …, in Wünsch’s Kollegium on experimental physics” (Kleist 2000b: 500).8 As a result of his studies with Wünsch, Kleist was well familiar with the principal laws and central questions of the field, and throughout his writings, from the early Familie Schroffenstein to Der Findling, one of his last texts, these studies remained of consequence (see Földenyi). In Allerneuester Erziehungsplan, a late text, this becomes explicit when we read at the beginning, after the editor’s brief ficticious presentation of the essay as submitted by a certain C.J. Levanus: Experimental physics, in the chapter on the qualities of electric bodies, teaches us that, if one brings into their vicinity, or to be terminologically more precise, into their atmosphere, an unelectric (neutral) body, this latter also instantly becomes electric, that is, it assumes the opposite electric charge. … If one brings an unelectric body into the clearance (Schlagraum) of an electrified one, a spark flies, be it now from this to that, or from that to this: the balance is restored and both bodies are absolutely equal again in electric potential. We find this highly remarkable law, in a way that to our knowledge has only rarely been noted, also in the moral world; in such a way that a person in a state of indifference not only instantly ceases to be so, as soon as he comes in contact with someone whose qualities – it does not matter in what way – are definite; but that his entire being (if I put it that way) plays itself over fully into the opposite pole: he assumes the condition + when the other is of the condition –, and the condition – when the other is of the condition +. (Kleist 2000b: 329 – 30)9

The passage is saturated with the theories of electricity that Kleist had been exposed to in Wünsch’s classes and which he adapts here explicitly – albeit satirically, if we follow the essay’s argument – for human interaction. Adapting the theory of polarity for human bodies, the passage argues that, given a strange parallelism of its validity in the physical and the moral, that is human, world, if an indifferent or uncharged human being comes in touch with a definite or charged one, his or her indifference immediately vanishes and the opposite charge is assumed. In order to prove this, several examples are given, where certain strong opinions cause the interlocutors to assume exactly the opposite 8 All translations of Kleist 2000b are my own. For reasons of brevity, all quotes are given in English. 9 For the text’s pedagogical intricacies and reception of Jean Paul’s Levana oder die Erziehungslehre, see Nobile 49 – 74; for Kleist’s creative adaptation of physical terminology, see Borgards 90.

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opinion. But, the essay continues, “the law of which we speak does not only apply to opinions and desires, but also, in a much more general fashion, to feelings, affects, attributes and characteristics” (331). Not only feelings and affects, but also even attributes and characteristics are not innate essential qualities, but called forth in particular circumstances, due to the fact that human beings are endowed with an affectivity that submits them to the strange laws of electricity mentioned at its beginning. Someone’s nature (Wesen) is hence no innate quality, but an effect of circumstantial affective charges resulting from having been in touch with other “definite” or “charged” human beings. To corroborate this, another example follows: “If one assembled once in one room all that a city has to offer in terms of philosophers, aesthetes, poets, and artists: some among them would in a flash become stupid” (332). Rather than being a stable attribute, the intelligence that this selection of characters is meant to vouchsafe snaps in some cases into stupidity, as a quasi-physical reaction to a charged social setting. This example echoes an earlier text, in which Kleist had already explicitly experimented with this idiosyncratic anthropology. Towards the end of Über die allmähliche Verfertigung, we read that one is most likely to shine in an exam if it is held publicly : Apart from the fact that it is repulsive, irritating and that it offends one’s finer feelings to be continually on the alert while one of those learned horse dealers [i.e. examiners, B.M.K.] probes our acquirements and, according to whether there are five or six of them, buys or dismisses us; … [t]here is one circumstance, … which in most cases gains such young people, even the most ignorant, a good report; it is that, if the examination takes place in public, the examiners themselves are too embarrassed to be able to judge freely. (Kleist 1951: 45 – 6; for the German original see Kleist 2000b: 324)

In line with the model of electric potential, a public examination irritates the student in such a productive manner that it boosts his or her level of energy, while at the same time depleting that of the examiners. Consequentially, the essay holds, knowledge – as much as intelligence, as we heard – is not something we have, “[f]or it is not we who know, but first of all it is a certain state of ours that knows” (Kleist 2000b: 323). To know means to activate such a state rather than having learned something merely by heart “and by tomorrow … forgotten it” (Kleist 1951: 45). Über die allmähliche Verfertigung, which closes with the example of a public exam, argues precisely for the difference between cerebral reflection and the ready availability of ideas, on the one hand, and such a state that follows from the affectability of human bodies by the electrical potential of others, on the other hand. In this vein, the narrator notes that it is beneficial for finding the answer to a problem if his sister intervenes – or merely moves “as if she were about to interrupt me; for my mind, already tense, becomes even more excited by this attempt to deprive it of the speech … and, like a great general in

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an awkward position, reaches an even higher tension and increases in capacity” (43). Speech and thought, two human activities that are usually considered to be controlled by the speaker’s mind, are here rather said to be rushing forth on a parallel course that is affectively induced and precipitated by external intervention. Evoking the desire not to have one’s speech snatched away by such intervention, the narrator becomes “decided,” like a great general, and pushed forward only to find “that, to my surprise, the end of the sentence coincides with the desired knowledge” (42). The essay’s most famous example of such a reaction is Mirabeau’s revolutionary – so-called “thunderbolt” – speech at the last King’s Session which Kleist explicitly phrases as the result of this strange law of electricity ; that is, as a result of Mirabeau’s increased charge when, perhaps, the narrator carefully inserts, he saw the Master of Ceremonies, the neutral transmitter of the King’s orders, fumble nervously with his cuff or twitch his lip. At this moment, Mirabeau’s potential increases, his speech supercharges, and [i]f one thinks of the Master of Ceremonies, it is impossible to imagine him during this scene other than in a state of utter mental bankruptcy ; according to a similar law, a body void of electricity, when placed in the atmosphere of a body electrically charged, suddenly acquires a corresponding charge. And just as, in the electrically active body, the inherent electric charge is renewed after the interaction, so our orator’s courage was heightened to the most reckless enthusiasm by the destruction of his opponent. In this way it is possible that in the end it was the twitching of an upper lip or ambiguous flicking of a cuff that caused the collapse of the whole social order in France. (Kleist 1951: 43 – 4; for the German original see Kleist 2000b: 321)

We find these charged exchanges in many character constellations of Kleist’s narrative universe. One example might suffice here, not only to see the narrative adaptation of this affective anthropology, but also to see that what becomes narrativized as “extreme” or “destructive” affects – what Lü and Stephens see as the “calamitous” (219) of “‘base’ affects” (230) resulting in “lethal affective action” (219) – might be such only in view of a moral (that is human) order. When looking at a character as raging as Michael Kohlhaas – whose moral assessment has troubled readers ever since the tale’s publication in 1808 – we find that what is displayed underneath these morally “base affects” are affective reactions to circumstances and situations, before any direct moral charge. The narrative very carefully elaborates this basic, quasi-physical affectivity, which is inhuman to the extent that it pertains to electric and living, human and nonhuman bodies alike. Being unable to do justice to the intricate and complex narrative, it might suffice for our context to look briefly at the moment that sparks Kohlhaas’s determination. The horse dealer Kohlhaas, forced to leave two of his horses as a pledge for a missing permit at Tronka Castle only to find them worn down upon his return, and the groom, left behind for their care, chased off,

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is, despite his fury at the damage done to his property, just about to grudgingly depart with the two nags when the warden engages him in an argument: Kohlhaas cursed this shameful, premeditated outrage, but suppressed his fury which he knew would be futile, and as he had no choice, was just preparing to leave this robbers’ den with his horses when the warden, hearing high words, came over and asked what was going on. “What’s going on?” retorted Kohlhaas. “Who gave Junker von Tronka and his men permission to take the horses I left behind here and use them for field work?” … Staring at him haughtily for a few moments, the warden exclaimed: “What a churlish fellow! A lout like you ought to thank his lucky stars that the animals are still alive!” He asked who was supposed to have looked after them when the groom had absconded, and whether it was not right that the horses should work for the fodder they had been given; and finally he said that Kohlhaas had better cause no trouble here or he would call the dogs and get peace restored in the yard that way. The horse-dealer’s heart pounded against his doublet. He felt a strong impulse to hurl this pot-bellied villain into the mud and stamp on his copper-coloured face. But his sense of justice, which was as fine as a gold-balance, still wavered; the judge within his own heart could not decide whether his opponent was guilty ; and as he walked over to the horses, stifling his imprecations, and combed out their manes, he asked in a subdued voice, silently weighing up the circumstances, what offence the groom had committed to be expelled from the castle. (Kleist 2004: 119 – 20; for the German original see Kleist 2000b: 14)

The warden, it seems, does not quite know at the beginning what he is getting at, but, being like Mirabeau “bold enough to pick the opening words at random” (Kleist 1951: 43), fabricates his point while speaking. Incited perhaps by a hint of powerlessness in Kohlhaas’s face, the warden musters the boldness necessary to overwhelm his opponent for the moment. And as he increases in presumptuousness, Kohlhaas is on the downswing and suffers mental bankruptcy. His inquiry after the groom’s offense, hesitatingly and in a subdued voice, is swept away by the warden’s succinct retort that the groom had been insubordinate and defiant, and Kohlhaas refrains from answering. Only after a page of bustling noise, with the warden hurling more insults, the Junker’s company galloping onto the courtyard, shouting and laughing at Kohlhaas’s indignation, and the dogs howling – a commotion during which Kohlhaas remains silent – he utters his refusal to recognize these nags as his horses: “Those are not my horses, my lord; those are not the horses that were worth thirty gold florins! I want my healthy, well-nourished horses back!” (Kleist 2004: 121) In analogy to the laws of electricity, we could say that the warden first depletes Kohlhaas’s powers, who then, only after a long silence, assumes a “definite” position, that is: a charge opposite to the warden’s. Once assumed, it will drive him across the next one hundred pages. However, Kohlhaas’s “charge” does not facilitate our moral judgment of his rage, but rather, as could be seen from the cited passage, demonstrates it as an effect of the situations and bodies to which he is exposed. Throughout the narrative, we find, alongside the law’s attempts to judge Kohl-

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haas – and the reader’s attempt to morally judge his reactions as “base affect” –, Kohlhaas’s continuous affective adjustment to circumstances and encounters, an adjustment that continuously negotiates relinquishment and rage. The narrative exposes first and foremost the basic affectivity that makes such reactions feasible, a basic affectivity that Kohlhaas maintains up until the end.10 Lü and Stephens are right in that there is no moment in Kleist which resolves or uplifts what they call “base affects”. Unlike Schiller, Kleist does not offer the redemption or resolution of a reflexive “coming to” of his characters after being afflicted by affects (see Lü and Stephens 220). His characters do not distance themselves at any point from their affective reactions. We can see this in Michael Kohlhaas, but also, in a much quieter way, in Das Käthchen von Heilbronn. Struck by Count Wetter vom Strahl at the beginning, she remains stuck on him and the marriage at the end neither resolves or explains her mysterious initial reaction, nor does it allow her to “come to” at the end. She merely faints once more when the Count asks her to marry him. If Käthchen and Penthesilea belong together, as Kleist noted in a letter to Heinrich von Collin on 8 December 1808, “as the algebraic + and –, and are one and the same being, only thought under opposite conditions” (Kleist 2000a: 934), we must note that is not only the strong, disastrous, or “base” affects that Kleist is interested in, but also the quiet, almost inaudible, imperceptible affectivity that underlies every response to circumstance and is simply a configuration of human bodies, at work in quiet Käthchen as much as fierce Penthesilea, and in Kohlhaas’s “subdued voice” as much as in his pillaging rage and “hellish torment of unsatisfied revenge” (Kleist 2004: 142). Kleist is, of course, well aware of the incongruence between such a basic quasi-physical, inhuman configuration of the human and its narrativization in a moral world as “inhumane” or monstrous, or at least as resistant to any clear classifications within moral categories. The narrative’s opening paradox of Kohlhaas as being one of the most righteous and yet at the same time one of the most terrible men of his time confirms this. But, and more importantly in view of our discussion of electricity and vitality, Kleist is also well aware that the laws of experimental physics, which might insinuate calculability and tempt us to believe to have found anew an explanation of “life,” do not hold in the human world. It is, despite the analogy to physical reaction, unpredictable how the charged encounters develop. Kleist’s texts only demonstrate the fact that they are charged and defy our attempts of anchoring their outcome in an idea of human rationality and reflexivity. It remains, however, incalculable if one proceeds with 10 For a detailed reading of Mirabeau’s thunderbolt speech in terms of experimental physics, its effects on the notions of thought and speech, as well as its implications for Michael Kohlhaas, see Kaiser 2011.

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prudence in a charged encounter – like Mirabeau, who “alighting from his reckless flight, re-admitted caution and fear of the Ch–telet” (Kleist 1951: 44) –, or, like Kohlhaas, with anger. When asserting the “curious parallel between the phenomena of the physical and the moral worlds” (Kleist 1951: 44), Kleist tempts us to assume calculability. But if we consider his essays and the rest of his oeuvre as a whole, we realize that the parallel only resides in the basic assumption of affective reactions, but also that this makes no human affair any more calculable. The essay Allerneuester Erziehungsplan is very clear about this. Ironically propagating that a school of vice (Lasterschule) is as likely to succeed as a school of virtue (Sittenschule), given that children are prone to react affectively to bad examples and become more virtuous by electric reaction to those than by imitation of good ones, it ends on an ironic, but decisive twist: of course “the child is not wax that allows itself to be kneaded by human hands into any arbitrary shape: it lives, it is free” (Kleist 2000b: 335). That is, given the many influences and circumstances of any education (or encounter), it remains impossible to say if prudence or anger, vice or virtue will gain the upper hand. However, the essay does propose – and in view of Kleist’s œuvre this is no irony on his part – a basic affectivity of human conduct, a quasi-physical inhuman dimension of the human, a dimension the human shares with organic as much as inorganic nature and that might entice us to perhaps call this Kleist’s non-anthropocentric anthropology. On the basis of this inhuman affectivity, a vivacity can arise that is incalculable and not locatable in the material bodies, despite the fact that it is predicated upon their basic affectivity. Kleist’s characters are subjected to immaterial forces, visualized as electric charges and discharges – a metaphoric recourse that is read here as insistence on a basic affectivity of humans, permitting to display their inhuman limits and border zones. His texts expose these zones, and insist at the same time on the incalculability of their effects in human affairs. Only on the basis of this affectivity are they “free” to a degree to bend these forces, without psychological depth or reflexivity as explanations for the outcome. It may be said then, by way of concluding, that the recourse to electricity allowed the texts considered here to portray the human in the registers of “life” – corresponding to the emerging epistemological matrix – yet phrased human life at the same time as a vivacity that was predicated upon, but not locatable in or reducible to a material body, thus contesting both Newtonian mechanical models and the biological suggestion of life as organic process and the deferral of death.

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References Primary Literature Arnim, Bettina von. “Clemens Brentanos Frühlingskranz.” Werke und Briefe. Ed. Walter Schmitz. Vol. 1. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1986. Print. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “Hints toward the Formations of a more comprehensive Theory of Life.” S.T. Coleridge. Shorter Works and Fragments. Eds. H.J. Jackson and J.R. de J. Jackson. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995. Print. – The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Vol 1. Ed. Kathleen Coburn. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957. Print Kleist, Heinrich von. “On the Gradual Construction of Thoughts during Speech.” Transl. Michael Hamburger. German Life and Letters 5/1 (1951): 42 – 6. Print. – Sämtliche Werke und Briefe. Ed. Helmut Sembdner. Vol. 1. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2000a. Print. – Sämtliche Werke und Briefe. Ed. Helmut Sembdner. Vol. 2. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2000b. Print. – The Marquise of O— and Other Stories. Transl. David Luke and Nigel Reeves. London: Penguin, 2004. Print.

Secondary Literature Borgards, Roland. “Allerneuster Erziehungsplan. Ein Beitrag Heinrich von Kleists zur Experimentalkultur um 1800 (Literatur, Physik).” Literarische Experimentalkulturen. Poetologien des Experiments im 19. Jahrhundert. Eds. Nicolas Pethes and Marcus Krause. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005. 75 – 102. Print. Daiber, Jürgen. Experimentalphysik des Geistes. Novalis und das romantische Experiment. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001. Print. Föld¦nyi, L‚szlû. Heinrich von Kleist. Im Netz der Wörter. München: Matthes & Seitz, 1999. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic. An Archaeology of Medical Perception. New York: Vintage, 1994a. Print. – The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1994b. Print. – “Society Must be Defended.” Lectures at the CollÀge de France, 1975 – 76. Ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana. New York: Picador, 2003. Print. Gigante, Denise. “The Monster in the Rainbow: Keats and the Science of Life.” PMLA 117/3 (2002): 433 – 48. Gilmore, Paul. “Romantic Electricity, or the Materiality of Aesthetics.” American Literature 76/3 (2004): 467 – 94. Print. – Aesthetic Materialism. Electricity and American Romanticism. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009. Print. Hagen, Wolfgang. “Funken und Scheinbilder. Skizzen zu einer Genealogie der Elektrizität.” Mehr Licht. Eds. VVS Saarbrücken. Berlin: Merve, 1999. 69 – 118. Print.

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Hayles, N. Katherine. How we became posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Print. Kaiser, Birgit M. Figures of Simplicity. Sensation and Thinking in Kleist and Melville. Albany : SUNY Press, 2011. Print. – “Literatur und Biopolitik. Rationalisierungen des Lebens in der Romantik.” Biopolitische Konstellationen. Eds. Maria Muhle and Kathrin Thiele. Berlin: August Verlag, 2010. Print. Lü, Yixu and Anthony Stephens. “Gewaltig die Natur im Menschen.’ Affekte und Reflexivität der Sprache in Kleists vollendeten Trauerspielen.” Kleistjahrbuch (2009): 214 – 31. Print. Lyotard, Jean-FranÅois. The Inhuman. Reflections on Time. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992. Print. Muhle, Maria. Eine Genealogie der Biopolitik. Zum Begriff des Lebens bei Foucault und Canguilhem. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2008. Print. Nobile, Nancy. The School of Days: Heinrich von Kleist and the Traumas of Education. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999. Print. Pethes, Nicolas, Birgit Griesecke, Marcus Krause and Katja Sabisch Eds. Menschenversuche. Eine Anthologie 1750 – 2000. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008. Print. Richards, Robert J. The Romantic Conception of Life. Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002. Print. Roe, Nicolas. “Introduction: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life. Ed. Nicolas Roe. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. 1 – 21. Print. Schiffer, Michael Brian. Draw the Lightning Down: Benjamin Franklin and Electrical Technology in the Age of Enlightenment. Berkeley : U of California P, 2003. Print. Wetzels, Walter. “J.W. Ritter and Romantic Physics.” Romanticism and the Sciences. Eds. Andrew Cunningham and Nicolas Jardine. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. 199 – 212. Print.

Ute Berns

Artificial Life, Science and Reflexivity in James Whale’s Frankenstein

1. Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818) has come to epitomize the discursive intersections of the concepts of the human, of science and of monstrosity : Shelley tells the story of a scientist who discovers a way of creating artificial life by animating a body made up of flesh and bones taken from dead human beings. Once brought to life, the creature turns into a force to be reckoned with. Considering the number and popularity of its adaptations on stage, in film and in other media (see Hitchcock), William St. Clair claims that “of all the literary works written during the Romantic period, Frankenstein is the one whose continuing presence is most obvious” (357). This counts especially true for the medium of film. Since the time when James Whale’s classic Frankenstein came out in 1931, the number of adaptations has moved into hundreds. The critical reception of these cinematic adaptations has been ambivalent at best. Film scripts tend to dispense with a large number of the novel’s characters. The monster, stunningly eloquent in Shelley’s novel, rarely speaks on film, and in some instances film narratives are even furnished with happy endings; examples range from the marriage between the protagonist and his bride in Whale’s Frankenstein up to Chris Carter’s episode The Post-Modern Prometheus (1997) in the television series X-Files that ends with the creature’s social integration in a contemporary American town. Most critics familiar with the novel close their discussion of the cinematic versions on a note of disenchantment; few scholars have sought to enquire as to how the film adaptations might modify our reading of the novel (Schor 65). A small number of critics have, however, argued that the true cinematic fascination with the Frankenstein material has to be sought elsewhere, namely in the story’s potential for providing a site where the medium of film can reflect on itself. James Heffernan makes this point succinctly when he comments, “film versions of Frankenstein implicitly remind us that filmmaking itself is a Frankensteinian exercise in artificial reproduction” (139).

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This notion of “film-making” as intrinsically Frankensteinian deserves closer inspection. William Nestrick points out that “life” in film is movement, and film itself is a form of mechanical animation (294 – 5), a creation of artificial life through exposing a rapid succession of photographic frames to light. For this reason, in the medium of film the bringing to life of the monster holds a particular selfreflexive potential: film life, like that of the monster, is artificially induced. Just as Shelley associates Prometheus, the fire-stealer and man-maker of classical antiquity, with the contemporary scientist experimenting with electricity in the sciences of life (Mellor 102 – 7), so twentieth-century film makers associate Shelley’s scientist and creator of artificial life with a film director, if not with the cinematographic process itself. Nestrick furthermore argues that the cinematic fascination with the Frankenstein material is related to the specific potential of film. Romantic fantasies of inanimate objects coming to life, as in E.T.A. Hoffman’s “Der Sandmann” (1816) or in Shelley’s Frankenstein, call for the cinematic art which, by technical means, can in fact perform these ‘magic’ acts and has been fascinated by such magical illusionism since the early cinema of M¦liÀs, the famous theatrical showman and magician turned pioneering film producer. Nestrick concedes, however, that despite the fact that film possesses the technical capacity for producing this magic illusionism, films about artificial life do not always exploit this illusionist power (295). It seems that some films draw attention to their Frankensteinian nature while others do not. Whereas critics concerned with the plot and narrative of the film adaptations of Frankenstein regularly remain in touch with the novel as source text, those who are interested in the potential for cinematic self-reflexivity inherent in the Frankenstein material can easily dispense with the novel. For anyone tracing this critical debate on the reflexivity of the Frankenstein material in films, it seems as if an early nineteenth-century novel inadvertently came up with a set of plotelements tailor-made for a medium that came into being only much later – namely film. And precisely because the potential for cinematic self-reflexivity inherent in the Frankenstein material so perfectly fits the medium of film – the artificial, mechanical mode of animation characterizing film and its nineteenthcentury forerunners – it seems as if this new medium and those familiar with it have discovered a previously non-existent dimension of the Frankenstein material. But is this an adequate account of the various films’ cinematic self-reflexivity – or, for that matter, of the novel that provided the story? Can we really treat this reflexivity as something that lay dormant in the novel, waiting to be discovered and realized on film? In the main part of this article, I will revisit in detail the issue of reflexivity in Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein. This motion picture displays a sensitivity to the relations of science, life and film that I consider unrivalled. I will argue that this

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reflexivity turns on two distinct but related scientific discourses presented on the story-level. And I will argue that the film’s reflexive or meta-cinematic ambitions are much more systematic, ‘self-aware’ and wider in scope than has previously been assumed. In fact, the film will be shown to possess an ambivalent modernist strain that engenders the contemporary political discourse on cinema as a mass medium. In the last part of this article, I shall attempt a brief archaeology of this reflexivity by retracing the film’s two central metaphors in Romantic discourse. Adopting Robert Stam’s broad definition of “reflexivity” as “the process by which texts, both literary or filmic, foreground their own production, their authorship, their intertextual influences, their reception or their enunciation” (xiii), I will distinguish the different forms of reflexivity as they become relevant to my argument.

2. When tackling the Frankenstein material, Whale seemed to be virtually inspired by its scientific discourse – the social taboos it invokes, the visual spectacle for which it allows, and its manifold reflexive possibilities. The only cinematic forerunners we know are Edison’s short Frankenstein from 1910 and an Italian adaptation from 1921. Edison presents an animation scene in which a skeleton is gradually fleshed out in a boiling cauldron – a scene evoking a magical and physio-chemical process. By contrast, Whale’s film relies on the conjunction of anatomy/surgery and electricity for its scene of animation. The literal slaughter and surgery of Wold War I had become part of the cultural memory at the time. And the electrical firework devised for the film by Kenneth Strickfaden drew on the experiments and discoveries of the inventor Nicolas Tesla (Goldman 74 – 83). Tesla had sold groundbreaking patents to Edison and Westinghouse Electric Company, a nationwide provider of electricity, and performed spectacular public experiments in his own laboratory and on lecture tours. Whale’s Frankenstein exploits the iconic and metaphorical potential of both the discourses of anatomy/surgery and of electricity. They are closely interwoven in the film, and both of them are deployed to draw attention to the materiality of the cinematic medium. The reflexive power of the discourse of anatomy/surgery pertains predominantly to the level of production, textuality and narrative style. The discourse of electricity produces reflexive gestures that link the level of production to the level of reception and circulation. I will address these two discourses one after the other. Nestrick comments that “[film] editing is a mechanical stitchwork, a piecing together that becomes another cinematic equivalent to the Frankenstein monster” (303). He does not, however, discuss Walter Benjamin who explores the

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theoretical possibilities of this metaphor in an even more thorough manner. In his now classic essay, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility, Benjamin deploys the metaphor of the anatomist or “surgeon” when explaining the characteristic features of cinema and the extraordinary position of the camera operator in particular – “camera operator” here seems to be shorthand not only for the camera itself, but also for the ensuing process of editing. Benjamin begins his discussion by describing the audience’s point of view in the theatre – the fixed point of view, familiar to the theatre audience, from which the presentation can be appreciated as a theatrical illusion. This point, Benjamin claims, is lost in film representation. The “illusory nature of film,” he argues, “is of the second degree: it is the result of editing” (35).1 He then juxtaposes the painter and the camera operator to elaborate on this point. Benjamin likens the camera operator to the surgeon. And to emphasise what is so special about the surgeon, Benjamin distinguishes the surgeon from the magician. Unlike the magician, who keeps his distance as he places his hand on someone else’s body, Benjamin argues, the surgeon minimizes this distance and moves between the other person’s organs. The magician and the painter both keep a natural distance to the object or event they observe. By contrast, the surgeon and the camera operator penetrate deeply into the given fabric. Thus the natural or unmarked face-to-face viewing position is lost, i. e. the position taken up in different ways by the theatre audience, the painter or the magician. And if this ‘natural position’ is re-created by the camera operator, the technical apparatus has to be negated to maintain the ‘naturalness’, while, in effect, the position thus becomes doubly artificial – first, it is not natural but technically produced; second, all signs pointing to this production are erased. Benjamin concludes this multi-layered comparison by emphasizing: “The images obtained by each [the painter and the camera operator, U.B.] differ enormously. The painter’s is a total image, whereas that of the cinematographer is piecemeal, its manifold parts being assembled according to a new law” (35). I argue that Whale’s film, from the very beginning, stages and explicitly foregrounds the affinity of Frankenstein, the anatomist and surgeon, to the cameraman and film editor. The bold and uncanny backdrop of the opening credits actually consists of a collage of graphically rendered eyes – eyes cut out and put together – revolving around a single skull (00.01.18 – 00.01.55). This backdrop alerts the spectator to the fact that film is the product of a montage of the visual; it shows a head or skull with two eyes actually ‘seeing’ through a great number of different eyes revolving around this skull. Moreover, the revolving 1 In German, the verb for ‘editing’ is ‘schneiden’ (cut); what surgeons do and what cameramen / film directors do, can thus be referred to through the same verb; in English, only the noun form of cut has made it into film business, e. g. in ‘director’s cut’.

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movement ties this montage of eyes to the technical apparatus of film – to the revolving movement of the film in the film camera that is replayed in the film projector. This metaphorical association of visual anatomy/surgery and the film apparatus finds its counterpart in another revolving movement that also draws attention to the film apparatus at what was, originally, the end of the film – to which I will return later. In other words, Whale’s Frankenstein is actually framed by self-reflexive gestures. As it progresses towards the animation scene, the film, like Benjamin, throws into relief the affinity of surgeon and cameraman by using the theatre as a backdrop. Whale evokes the theatre in the film as if to highlight the specificity of the cinematic medium: the creation scene in the film is turned into a spectacle with an audience. In Shelley’s novel, of course, this act is shrouded in total secrecy. The scientist is alone in his laboratory, and his secrecy heightens the sense that the deed he is about to commit amounts to an outrageous breach of taboo. By contrast the film flaunts an audience. On the night of the experiment, Frankenstein’s fianc¦, his friend and his former professor have finally taken it upon themselves to search the scientist out. He asks them in, leads them into his laboratory, places them on a bench and asks them to remain seated throughout (00.19.46 – 00.20.08). This remarkable alteration has a number of implications. To begin with, the bench with the seated audience marks, within the film, a ‘natural’ viewing position vis-—-vis the scene of the experiment. The three people watch the experiment as if seated in a theatre if not an anatomy theatre. Thus the presentation of the three spectators establishes a complex meta-cinematic dimension. On the one hand, we, too, like the spectators in the film, watch the experiment that takes place. On the other hand, our position vis-—-vis this experiment profoundly differs from theirs. When the experiment begins, the camera, though including reverse shots, stays on the level of the spectators on the bench and the objects they look at. So, at the opening of this scene, we are invited to think that we, as cinema audience, are positioned roughly where the ‘theatre audience’ within the film are seated. Yet this initial overlap between their viewing position and ours only dramatizes the momentous change, when the camera suddenly leaves its level position and thrusts our viewing position high up to the ceiling and into a state of radical mobility. From that moment onwards, in a famous montage sequence, our viewing position is no longer that of the spectators on the bench but that of the camera, moving back and forth, up to the ceiling and down, from close-ups of faces and apparatuses to long shots of the room (00.22.36 – 00.23.44). In the surgeon’s creation scene, the camera thus re-affirms its own powers of creation as it moves away from a static (theatre audience) perspective and comes into its own as film – a medium whose presentation relies on editing and montage as it

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multiplies dynamic viewing positions. This ostentatious visual dissociation from the theatre through the movement of the camera becomes the more poignant considering that the play Frankenstein had opened in a London theatre in 1927 and that the playwright Peggy Webling who wrote the stage-version, also contributed, together with John Balderston and Robert Florey, to the script for Whale’s Frankenstein film (Hitchcock 139 – 42, 145 – 6). It might be added that Whale himself had come from London to Broadway as a theatre director in 1929 (Curtis 1 – 34). The dialogue introducing the animation scene further sharpens the analogy between the body Frankenstein attempts to animate and the specific nature of film. Frankenstein’s former professor sceptically asks his pupil “And you really believe you can bring life to the dead?” to which Frankenstein replies triumphantly “This body is not dead. This body has never lived. I made it!” Again, this statement can be read programmatically. As Benjamin or Whale might have said, film does not “revive a scene”; it does not simply bring to life what was already there to be seen. On the contrary – film actually makes that which it presents out of pieces of the given, “cut up in manifold ways” and put together “according to a new law”. There are, moreover, clear indications that the stages of Frankenstein’s experiment are rendered as a detailed analogy to the birth and early history of cinema. And here I must broach the crucial discourse of electricity. The moment when the animating spark, i. e. the electricity of the thunderstorm, is infused into the body, is not presented by a camera shot of that body. Instead, the operating table lifted into the sky is filmed from below. What we actually see, at the height of the experiment, is the repeated flickering of strong light (the lightning of the thunderstorm), from behind, through a dark rectangular frame (00.22.55 – 00.23.20). And as an effect of this repeated projection of light onto or through the frame – this is what the sequence of images strongly suggests – the body begins to move i. e. comes to life. Frankenstein begins by cutting up bodies, just as in the history of early cinema, pioneers like the British-American photographer Eadweard Muybridge and the French scientist Êtienne-Jules Marey cut up movement in the attempt to record it. Fixing slices of movement into single isolated images, they attempted to make visible the individual stages of movement impossible to discern with the eye. Frankenstein takes the second and decisive step when he stitches his material together into the body of a creature – just as Marey then recorded a series of twelve images on the edge of a revolving disc. This further step, which then allowed Marey to produce the illusion of movement, is frequently referred to as the beginning of the history of cinema (Bordwell and Thompson 441; see Monaco 55, Fig. 1 – 13). Finally, the crucial factor that links the surgical practice

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of Frankenstein and the pioneers of early cinema is the spark of animation – electricity or light. It has been argued that the monster, once it has come to life, may be read as an allegorical representation of film and its history. Nestrick comments that its slow movements hark back to the hand-cranked camera in the infancy of film (296). And Robert Spadoni argues that its masks, movements and sound effects evoke the era of silent film and the transition to sound (93 – 120). Spadoni’s discussion is also interesting for my context, because he draws attention to the editing and especially to the jump cuts in Whale’s film (111) which emphasize the “manifestly built nature of [Whale’s] film and monster” (109), the cut-and-paste quality of the world on view. In Spadoni’s opinion, the film thus creates a state of “medium awareness” (106) in the viewer that inclines him or her “to project discursive aspects of this patched-together film onto the diegesis” (106 – 7). The deliberate crudity of the editing, Spadoni insists, enhances the morbid objects and atmosphere on the story level. In this enticing interpretation, the film’s foregrounded reflexivity actually heightens the illusionistic effectiveness of its uncanny diegesis. Without denying the “medium awareness” the film editing creates and the specific effect analyzed by Spadoni, I argue that the overall effect actually is much more complex. After all, the awareness of the medium here coincides with an awareness of narrative style, which Spadoni, despite the film’s conspicuous forays into expressionist stylization (Worland 163 – 4), calls a rough-hewn realism. The fact that contemporary viewers were aware of this roughness (Spadoni 104) indicates that in 1931 it was already felt to be at odds with the dominant narrative technique usually referred to as the Classical Hollywood Cinema style, a style that relies on continuity and ‘invisible’ storytelling (Bordwell et al. 155 – 240). This suggests that the reflexivity under investigation might actually pull in two different directions. The film’s deliberate crudity, when projected onto the diegesis, enhances its atmosphere and draws the viewer into the film. Yet this very crudity also highlights the medium and manner of narration interpolated between the diegesis and the viewer, thus producing an anti-illusionist or distancing effect. An even more complex effect of ‘self-consciousness’ is achieved in the sequence accompanied by Frankenstein’s notorious exclamation “It’s alive! It’s alive”. The life given to the monster’s body is captured here as ‘pure’ movement (00.23.45 – 00.23.57). We become aware of the upward movement of an arm, and it is the movement of this arm which here signals life. In its apparent purity the rendering of this movement is reminiscent of the studies of sheer movement by Marey and Muybridge or the movement later celebrated in early cinema. Together with the animation of the artificial body in the narrative, the film thus recreates what the first cinema-goers must have experienced as that moment

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suspended between science and magic, when a body was brought to artificial life on screen. Equipped with the technical possibilities and artistic expertise of the early 1930s, Whale thus recreates the sophisticated “aesthetics of astonishment” that characterized early cinematic spectacles of moving bodies or machines (Gunning 866 – 72; see also Woods 221 – 2). And even while it does recall this sense of astonishment, the film de-naturalizes or distances this experience on a meta-cinematic plane. On the one hand, yes, the audience perceive movement, apparently natural, and are astonished. On the other hand, what they perceive is a moving arm visibly stitched together. These stitches on the bodily tissue, thus thrust into the viewers eyes, remind them that movement in film is Frankensteinian, because technically mediated and hence impure. They may even become aware that this apparently ‘natural’ movement of the arm is an edited one; it is rendered by two shots from different angles and a close-up – hence ‘stitched together’. Accustomed to the Classical Hollywood Cinema and its narrative conventions, viewers would have overlooked the editing which produces this impression of purportedly natural movement. Yet on a reflexive level, the actual stitches conspicuously displayed on the moving arm ‘de-naturalize’ these very cinematic conventions and alert the viewer to the twofold artificiality of the rendering of this movement as described by Benjamin.

3. So far I have concentrated on levels and effects of reflexivity exploited in Whale’s film that thrive on the discourse of anatomy/surgery in relation to the monster’s body. In the following I will turn to the conjunction between the monster’s body and the discourse of electricity – a relation which adds a further dimension to the film’s reflexive power, but has not received much attention. The metaphorical and iconic power of electricity, encompassing light and fire, is firmly established in the animation scene where the life and energy infused in the monster stems from the flashes of lightning of the storm. As we have already seen, the light flickering through the dark frame – the operating table with the monster filmed from below against the sky lit by flashes of lightning – here creates a forceful analogy between the artificial life created by Frankenstein and the artificial life produced in film studios. Iconically, electricity continues to be associated, in the film’s later scenes, both with light and with fire. Light delights the creature when rays of the sun fall into the room; fire excites his terror when Frankenstein’s helpmate tortures the creature with a torch. Creating desire and fear, both light and fire stir the monster into movement – a movement or arousal beyond mere animation. In the course of the film, the iconic cluster of electricity/light/fire thus

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links the artificial body with different forms of response, ranging from ‘mere’ animation to uncontrolled passion. In order to pursue the reflexive reading of the monster as closely associated with the artificial life of film which is eventually released into the world, it is necessary to briefly characterize the monster and its relation to the other characters in the film. The creature in Whale’s film is neither an evil and bloodthirsty monster nor the self-educated and articulate character finally resorting to calculated vengeance in Shelley’s novel. In the film, the monster kills two people, yet in one case (Waldmann) the killing occurs in self-defense, in the other (the little girl) the killing can be construed as an accident. The actor Boris Karloff embodies a monster who comes across, above all, as ignorant, inarticulate and terrified – naively enchanted in playing, and raging when tortured. Against the odds of a script detailing its “degenerate brain”, this monster is best characterized as a loose bundle of passions that may take a violent turn. Traditionally, this bundle of passions is analysed as a force whose origin must be located elsewhere. Critics read the monster, variously, as Frankenstein’s darker alter ego (Nestrick 297), his monstrous feminine Other (Picart 384) or as an incarnation of his repressed (homo-)sexual drives erupting in the face of the always postponed and yet impending marriage (Worland 165 – 6). The film supports these readings of a split or doubled self in the animation scene where the life infused through lightning is metonymically supplemented by the frenzied energy and movements Frankenstein displays while supervising the event. The suggestion that Frankenstein and the monster should be perceived as doubles then recurs in their face-to-face encounter, perfectly balanced in a sequence of reverse shots of equal length, in the burning mill towards the end of the film (01.02.29 – 01.02.32). The building recalls the tower in which the monster was artificially conceived by its maker, and the huge flames leaping around the two characters recall the powerful flashes of electricity that linked them earlier during the animation scene. The doubling would have been enhanced in the two versions of the original ending, in which the film closes on Frankenstein and the monster in the flames. In the version that was eventually released, however, Frankenstein escapes and the film re-establishes what Robin Wood calls the genre’s “normality” – the heterosexual couple (79). The presentation of the fire is remarkable here, because for more than a minute the film presents images in which the flames seem to leap – intermittently – out of the story. This happens when the flames dominate everything and obliterate our view of the creature. The result is images which raise the question as to whether we see filmed fire, or whether we see a piece of film catching fire, a stretch of celluloid set on fire, e. g. by an overheated projector (01.04.06). The medium awareness produced in this field of electricity/fire/light augments the contradictory effects produced in the field of anatomy/surgery. When projected

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onto the diegesis, this mode of narration enhances the dramatic atmosphere of the scene – an all-consuming destruction and loss of control that draws the viewer into the story. This effect is heightened by the fact that electricity/fire has come to stand for the power to animate and affect – a power which here leaps out of the story and towards the viewer – animating/arousing his or her passions. Hence, to the extent that the monster stands in, reflexively, for the artificial life of film, Whale’s film and the horror film genre Frankenstein helped inaugurate, invite the individual spectator to become ‘animated’ and powerfully affected as he or she experiences, by proxy, an ‘artificial’ splitting of psychic life in a pattern of repression and momentary (destructive) release. At the same time, however, the suggestion of burning celluloid also creates an awareness of the materiality of the medium itself which recalls the black frames successively lighted by flickering electricity in the animation scene. And by thus foregrounding the medium-dependent production and materiality of the film, the reflexive presentation once more disrupts the film’s illusionist power and invites the viewer to reflect on the fabricated nature of the ‘moving’ experience. However, the monster, standing in for the artificial life of the (horror) film, does not only address the viewer as an individual – it also addresses him or her as a member of a crowd. The monster, once it has escaped into the outside world, does not interact only with Frankenstein, but also with the villagers, and it does so in a series of breathtaking crowd scenes. These scenes are highly sensitive considering that the film was released during the Great Depression. They call to mind the Motion Picture Production Code, the so-called Hays Code from 1930. This Code was based on the assumption that film represents a form of entertainment that may compromise audience morality in an unprecedented way, and it ruled that the way to take account of this power of the cinema was selfcensorship. As Michael Tratner points out, the Code envisions distribution networks that release copies of the same films, the same ideas and affects, into large crowds across the country. The Hays Code stipulates that “psychologically, the larger the audience, the lower the moral mass resistance to suggestion” (qtd. in Tratner 55), and to avoid inflaming large crowds in an undesirable manner, the Code cautioned against the representation of mass meetings, large action and spectacular features (Tratner 56). As Tratner emphasises, the issue of crowd control was complemented by the United States’ desire to protect themselves “against political systems based on representing masses rather than individuals – namely Communism and Fascism” (56) that offered themselves as alternatives to the American brand of individualism. While ministries of propaganda under Stalin or, later, under Hitler eulogized representations of mass gatherings, while film directors like Sergei Eisenstein und Fritz Lang had coined powerful cinematic representations of crowds in revolutionary and totalitarian settings, the Hays Code urged self-censorship.

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Considering that the Motion Picture Production Code formed a crucial strand in the contemporary discourse about US films, Whale’s presentation of the interaction between the monster, meta-cinematically standing in for the artificial life of film, and the villagers that turn into veritable crowds, becomes all the more interesting. When the peasant father carries the dead child in his arms, an ever-increasing train of people follow him – up to the Baron’s doorstep. This brings the preparations of Frankenstein’s wedding to a sudden halt. For a crucial moment, the villagers’ actions suggest social unrest. Will the villagers turn against him – the Baron’s son and scientist? The sheer size of the excited crowd indicates that this would put the aristocratic family into a highly uncomfortable position. Yet the crucial moment on the Baron’s doorstep passes: his son, Frankenstein, manly and responsible, seizes the leadership of the crowd. Frankenstein and the villagers, together, chase the monster into a mill, and the class opposition glaringly manifest in the earlier scene is obliterated as the crowd sets fire to the mill and watches in triumph as the fire destroys both the building and their enemy inside. As already mentioned, the film’s original ending was withheld. The released film’s last scene closes on a peaceful domestic setting: Frankenstein as hero recovers from small injuries with his bride at his side, while the old Baron enjoys a glass of wine. Just as in this version, Frankenstein, the creator, helps to destroy the creature he has made, so the film director finally channels and suffocates the passions the film has roused in a homely final tableau. Does he really? The peasants swarming through the village and into the countryside, seeking justice with torches and weapons, appear as a dangerous mob. Fighting an Otherness that unsettles them, their passions suggest a mood for lynching. These are passions running rampant and the monster – standing in for ‘film’ – here functions as a mere catalyst. The ambivalence of the scene is fully captured in the associations that have accumulated in the icon of fire. Electricity/light/fire – so strong a spark that the characters cannot even look at it – is the element dominating the scene of controlled animation that infuses life into the monstrous body. Yet control is no longer assured in these late scenes. When the villagers go on their hunt their torches do not only serve as search lights. The light of the torches also delineates the shape-shifting body of the energized crowd as it spreads and reassembles in the landscape in the dark (00.57.25 – 00.58.06). And the torches are finally deployed to set fire to the mill to which the creature has escaped. The sequence of the burning mill does not allay this ambivalence. We see the hunters in frenzied triumph, yet once Frankenstein has fled from the mill, the film also shows us the monster – shrieking, in agony and helpless on what appears as a huge stake. The monster has turned into a scapegoat, the killing of which purges and reunites the film’s feudal society. Set against the sanitized moral didacticism recommended in the Motion

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Picture Production Code, these almost final images in Universal’s Frankenstein suggest an alternative option. This option involves the full catalyzing of crowd passions through film and directing them in cathartic excess to unifying purgation and then back to individualized domesticity – even though this inevitably involves ‘playing with fire’. Yet as the film stages and apparently advocates this risky yet ultimately conservative path, it performs with a flourish a final reflexive gesture that renders this apparently straightforward option, once again, unexpectedly complex. When the mill is on fire, the camera finally moves back from the flames and the throng of bodies. We are shown the mill from afar : a huge piece of machinery whose burning wings rotate (01.06.37 – 01.06.53) – the self-reflexive aspect of this movement has been noted (Grant 117). The only other rotating movement to be seen in the film is the collage of eyes revolving around the head or skull in a movement clearly alluding to the movement in the film camera or projector, the one we see at the beginning of the film. This same revolving movement now invites us to blend the archaic mechanism of the mill, its shape resembling the tower which served as the setting for the animation scene, with that of a modern day camera or projector equipment. We are asked to see not just a burning mill, but a camera or projector on fire. This final gesture self-reflexively relates the spark that gives and destroys life on the level of the Frankenstein narrative to the technical apparatus that produces artificial life on screen. And the reflexive sequence of the opening credits finds its counterpart here. The very openness of this image of the burning mill is part of its fascination. Is this a warning that the life and raw emotions released in the unenlightened crowds through film can ultimately turn those crowds against the sophisticated technology that produced these emotions in the first place? This would recall images of the destruction of advanced technology by slave-workers in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis which Whale drew on also in the animation scene. Or does the image of the burning mill suggest a machine dripping with the fire it intends to spread? This would suggest that camera and film projector, blended with the mill, with rotating slings hurl the fire of their artificial life among large audiences, thus kindling their emotions and producing real and uncontrollable effects. As in the case of the large flames leaping beyond the story and at the spectator, the visual imagery of electricity/fire here would also address the spectator of the film, but it would stimulate him or her as part of a crowd. In my discussion of the previous instances of medium awareness, I have argued that they seem to pull into two directions at once: projected onto the diegesis, they strengthen its affective force, whereas referring to the interpolated medium, they distance the spectator. However, as the camera literally moves away from the mill the distancing effect is clearly paramount. Immediately following the emotional excess and right before the ideological containment

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engineered in the last scene, the viewers are brought face to face with the medium and animating apparatus that has moved them and shaped their participatory experience. If one considers the reflexive devices framing the film in its original version together with the substantial reflexive gestures referring to the materiality of the film medium, the film’s narrative form, and, last but not least, its functioning on a pragmatic plane, then it seems that Whale and his collaborators entertained a sophisticated conception of this film and the horror genre it helped to forge. On one level, their film aims to enhance the audience’s overall emotional experience by well-placed reflexive gestures that can be projected onto the diegesis where they galvanize an organic viewing experience. On this level, the reflexive devices facilitate the participatory submersion in an individual or collective experience of repression and release shaped by subtending ideological structures of gender and class. Yet on another level, the film also strives to deploy reflexivity in a manner that disrupts total absorption and invites the viewers to become aware of the very process in which their experience is being shaped. Through these reflexive gestures, the spectators are offered a position that allows them to reflect on the medium, the narrative strategies producing their intense viewing experience, and on the medium’s formative ideological power. Tracing the artistic and political heritage brought to Hollywood by New Yorkers and intellectual immigrants from Europe, Saverio Giovaccini has recently urged the necessity of “recasting the history of the Hollywood community and its cinema from the 1930s to the end of World War II within the cultural context of an increasingly politicized modernism” (Giavaccini 5). I hope to have shown that James Whale’s Frankenstein deserves to be reconsidered in this context.

4. Filmmaking is Frankensteinian because filmmaking, like Frankenstein, is engaged in producing artificial (human) life. Though not especially illuminating in itself, this idea holds enormous reflexive potential for films thematizing the Frankenstein narrative. Some Frankenstein films may disregard this challenge and some may pay a passing nod to it – Whale’s Frankenstein, I claim, is obsessed with it. In exploiting the visual and metaphorical power of the discourse of anatomy/surgery and electricity/light/fire in particular, Whale’s Frankenstein picks out motifs that hold self-reflexive force for the film medium. In addition, they also resonate with twentieth-century associations, from the Fordist assembly lines to the nationwide circulation and distribution of energy. On this account it may be understandable that the discussion of film as Frankensteinian claims the narrative’s reflexive potential as a discovery germane to this twen-

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tieth-century medium. This notwithstanding, the reflexivity of the Frankenstein narrative can be traced back to the late Romantic context that gave rise to the narrative in the first place. Seen from this perspective, the conspicuous cinematic self-reflexivity of Whale’s Frankenstein appears to negotiate and transform a Romantic legacy. Over the past ten years, scholars have firmly established the crucial significance of the life sciences and the search for the principle of ‘vitality’ in Romantic culture (De Almeida; Ruston; Roe). The life sciences were debated not only in the university, but also in journals, letters and public lectures at a time when disciplines like chemistry and biology were still in the making and disciplinary boundaries between the sciences were only beginning to emerge. At that stage, well-established disciplines like anatomy and surgery took a leading role in this discussion, and ‘vitality’, i. e. the principle purportedly responsible for animating living beings, was usually considered to be a form of electricity (Goodall; Jackson). The topicality, metaphorical scope and political valence of these issues were very wide indeed. Already in the revolutionary decade, radicals like John Thelwall talked of electricity as a force that was not confined to the individual body (117 – 9). Thus it could, in principle, mobilize a whole population. And in the years when Shelley was writing her novel, London saw the famous and controversial public debate about the life sciences by John Abernethy and William Lawrence, both of whom held professorships as Anatomist and Surgeon at the Royal College of Surgeons. As is well known, Abernethy insisted that the force of life had to come to the body through some electrical spark of divine origin, positing as necessary an external force to bring about and withdraw life. Lawrence countered that vitality or ‘life’ – whether conceived as electricity or not – was self-organizing, springing into life without external interference. In the course of this debate, the notion of the organic body shifted from the individual body to that of the body politic. Abernethy’s views sketch a body politic that needs the strong leadership of church and state to maintain life and order. Conversely, Lawrence’s views picture a political body capable of selforganization and hence a democratic concept of life – a vision its opponents associated with amorality and anarchy. The debate raged for several years, fuelled through public lectures, publications and media coverage; the controversy was repressed when Lawrence was temporarily suspended and forced to withdraw his book.2 In other words, in Shelley’s own time, the motifs of anatomy/ surgery and electricity/vitality were at the core of a contemporary debate about the nature of biological life; this debate continuously moved between con-

2 The exchange and friendship between William Lawrence and tIhe Shelleys is well established (see Butler).

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ceptions of the individual and the political body, and it was ideologically fraught (see Ruston 10 – 21). Many poets, among them Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Shelley or Thomas Lovell Beddoes, became deeply involved in the life sciences, whose concepts permeate and shape their work. And in their texts, the evocation of vitality does not only figure as a thematic concern but also as a reflexive device. For instance in the late 1820s, Beddoes, who studied medicine while writing his major work Death’s Jest-Book, drew on the language of anatomy and surgery to discuss his dramatic writing. In his letters he refers to his drama, unfinished at the time, as “scattered limbs” (620), to be “stitch[ed] together” (580), and forming “a strange conglomerate” (676). Here, the text itself is explicitly referred to not as an organic living body, but an assemblage of parts originally belonging to dead bodies. Percy Shelley, on the other hand, repeatedly explores the analogy between the principle of vitality and radical poetry in the context of reception and circulation. As Sharon Ruston points out, poetry, for Percy Shelley, possesses vitality not only in the sense that ever new audiences read and appropriate it, but also in the sense “that it can have a real and tangible effect on a society”; with a view to society as a whole, “the poem becomes substituted for the vital principle itself” (7). These examples demonstrate that at the beginning of the nineteenth century the discourse of anatomy and vitality yielded compelling metaphors for conceiving of the practice of writing, the reception and circulation of literary texts, and their impact on society. Mary Shelley’s novel must be situated in this context. Recent studies make us see the fascination with which her text, too, negotiates contemporary scientific developments, covering theories of evolution, vitality, materialism and electricity as well as spiritual and alchemical accounts of the relation of mind and matter (Butler ; McLarren Caldwell 25 – 44; Mellor 89 – 114, Knellwolf and Goodall). Hence it cannot come as a surprise that in Shelley’s novel the self-reflexive dimension of the scientist pursuing artificial life is also made explicit. Reflecting on his labours, Frankenstein compares himself to an artist – “But my enthusiasm was checked by my anxiety and I appeared rather like one doomed by slavery to toil in the mines … than an artist occupied by his favourite employment” (Shelley 33). And when Mary Shelley, in a new preface in 1831, recalls her “mental vision” of the animation scene that gave rise to the novel, she, too, identifies scientist and artist – “the success would terrify the artist, he would rush away from his odious handywork” (172). In other words, the reflexivity of Whale’s Frankenstein does not emerge only from the new medium of film, understood as ‘artificial life’, but negotiates a complex late Romantic legacy. The film bears traces of a cultural constellation in the early nineteenth century, in which the discourse of anatomy/surgery and electricity/vitality offered powerful metaphors to poets, dramatists and novelists

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for conceptualizing their own practice and the relation of their work to society. In these metaphorical and reflexive uses of the scientific metaphors we can already glimpse a fissure between an organicist aesthetic and a proto-modernist perception of art as bricolage, symbolized by a fragmented and patched-up body brought to artificial life. Whale’s Frankenstein redeploys the metaphors of anatomy/surgery and electricity/vitality to great effect in a different historical context and ideological constellation. More importantly, Whale seizes on the reflexive potential of these metaphors as he ingeniously adapts them to a new medium. In the course of this adaptation, this reflexivity acquires a modernist political valence. Counteracting the narrative conventions of the Classical Hollywood Cinema, the film foregrounds the materiality of the medium, the act of narration and the ideological structures guiding the viewing experience. The audience are invited both to be moved by, and to reflect on, the artificial life of the cinema and, more specifically, the early horror film.

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Grant, Michael. “James Whale’s Frankenstein: The Horror Film and the Symbolic Biology of the Cinematic Monster”. Frankenstein, Creation and Monstrosity. Ed. Stephen Bann. London: Reaction Books, 1994. 113 – 35. Print. Gunning, Tom. “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the Incredulous Spectator”. Film Theory and Criticsm. Ed. Leo Braudy. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. 862 – 76. Heffernan, James A.W. “Looking at the Monster : Frankenstein and Film”. Critical Inquiry 24, Autumn (1997): 133 – 58. Print. Hitchcock, Susan Tyler. Frankenstein: A Cultural History. New York and London: Norton. 2007. Print. Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus. ‘The Sandman’. The Golden Pot and Other Tales. Ed. and trans. Ritchie Robertson. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2008. 85 – 118. Print. Jackson, Ian. “Science as Spectacle: Electrical Showmanship in the English Enlightenment”. Frankenstein’s Science: Experimentation and Discovery in Romantic Culture, 1780 – 1830. Ed. Christa Knellwolf and Jane Goodall. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate. 151 – 66. Print. Knellwolf, Christa and Jane Goodall (eds.). Frankenstein’s Science: Experimentation and Discovery in Romantic Culture, 1780 – 1830. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate. Print. McLarren Caldwell, Janis. Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain: From Mary Shelley to George Eliot. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. Print. Mellor, Anne K. Mary Shelley : Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. New York: Methuen 1988. Print. Metropolis. Dir. Fritz Lang. UFA 1927. DVD. Monaco, James. How to Read a Film: Movies, Media and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Nestrick, William. “Coming to Life: Frankenstein and the Nature of Film Narrative”. The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel. Ed. George Levine and C. Knoepflmacher. Berkeley : U of California P, 1979. 290 – 315. Print. Picart, Caroline Joan. “Re-Birthing the Monstrous: James Whale’s (Mis)Reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein”. Critical Studies in Mass Communication 15 (1998). 382 – 404. Print. Roe, Nicholas (ed.). Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life. Oxford: Oxford UP 2001. Print. Ruston, Sharon. Shelley and Vitality. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2005. Print. Schor, Esther. “Frankenstein and Film”. The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley. Ed. Esther Schor. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 63 – 83. Print. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. The 1818 Text. Ed. J. Paul Hunter. [Includes introduction to 1831 edition]. New York and London: Norton, 1996. Print. Spadoni, Robert. Uncanny Bodies: The Coming of Sound Film and the Origins of the Horror Genre. Berkeley and London: U of California P. St. Clair, William. The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 357 – 73. Print. The X-Files: The Postmodern Prometheus. Dir. Chris Carter. Season 5, episode 5. Original airing date: 30 Nov. 1997. Fox. Amazon Video on Demand [streaming online video and digital download]. Thelwall, John. “Towards a Definition of Animal Vitality”. The Politics of Nature: William

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Wordsworth and Some Contemporaries. Ed. Nicholas Roe. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2002. 87 – 119. Print. Tratner, Michael. “Working the Crowd: Movies and Mass Politics”. Criticism 45,1 (2003). 53 – 73. Print. Wood, Michael. Modernism and Film. The Cambridge Companion to Modernism. Ed. Michael Levenson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 217 – 33. Print. Wood, Robin. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. New York: Columbia UP, 1986. 70 – 83. Print. Worland, Rick. The Horror Film: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. Print.