Romantic Circles Reviews

Reviewed by
Debbie Lee
Washington State University

It seems appropriate that Gunter von Hagens held his London exhibition Bodyworlds in the same neighborhood where Jack the Ripper took his victims. When I attended the 2002 exhibition at the Atlantis Gallery on Brick Lane, I was both fascinated and freaked out. It progressed from body parts to full corpses, in postures that mocked their lifelessness. One was a horseman, one held what looked to be a cape but turned out to be his entire skin, while others mimicked athletes: a runner, a basketball player, a swimmer, and a pole-vaulter lodged half-way between floors. Then there was a room dedicated to the development of the baby in embryo.

Not surprisingly, the media has taken to calling von Hagens a Doctor Frankenstein, saying his techniques recall a “pre-Victorian past,”[1] but that “in the end it is a freak show.”[2] However, marriages of science, art, and monstrosity are not all that rare. Much has been made, for instance, of Diana Arbus’s photographs of the deformed body. Arbus has photographed Russian midgets, Siamese twins, transvestites, and a Jewish giant, among many others who stood out because their bodies were not seen as conforming to a proper norm. Talking about monstrosity, Arbus famously said, “there’s a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle.”[3]

It struck me when I was reading Paul Youngquist’s exciting book, Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism, that von Hagens’s science is the absurd end-point of the late eighteenth-century surgeon John Hunter, while Arbus’s photographs find an echo in early nineteenth-century tabloid descriptions of figures like the Irish Giant. In Monstrosities, Youngquist takes readers on a tour of various forms of nineteenth-century fleshly disfigurement—from obesity to amputation—and introduces them to the ghoulish doctors, writers, and artists who pickled, dissected, and fetishized the monstrous, Hunter foremost among them.

Clearly, Youngquist has spent much time in the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons in Lincoln’s Inns Fields, which he describes in the book’s opening chapter, highlighting some of the displays—from whale skeletons to human body parts—among the 13,000 specimens. Youngquist also uses some of the period’s quirky print sources, such as Kirby’s Wonderful and Scientific Museum; or Magazine of Remarkable and Eccentric Characters, which ran from 1802 to 1920. Kirby was a London printer who specialized in profiles of the strange and deformed. He ran stories about an enormous hog, a trout of remarkable size, a gigantic rat, and human giants such as James Toller and Patrick O’Brien. There were accounts of monsters, mermaids, some people born without limbs, and others born with horns.

In fact, within the book’s overall argument, Youngquist digs up a lot of historical detail, some of it quite fascinating, such as the stories of Daniel Lambert, who was extraordinarily obese, and Sarah Biffin, who had no hands or arms, as well as the strange narratives behind Mary Wollstonecraft’s placenta and Lord Byron’s club foot. Youngquist bolsters this historical detail with reference to a range of theoretical works, from contemporary Romantic sources such as Emmanuel Kant, to later thinkers such as Frederick Nietzsche, and contemporary theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Gilles Deleuze, Julia Kristeva, and Michel Foucault, all of whom help him push the idea of monstrosity in fascinating directions.

For Youngquist, monstrosity is metaphorical as well as literal, and it has applications to Romantic writers: Wordsworth’s poetry and Coleridge’s addictions, to take two examples. Through his many illustrations, Youngquist implicitly shows how monstrosity was an integral part of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century visual culture as well.
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Reviewed by
Paul Youngquist
Penn State University, University Park

Before there was Wordsworth, before the bright and dying Keats, before even Blake came pugnaciously along, for me there was De Quincey. I learned of him early from a guy who was some years my senior. He was a diabetic and had an easy way with needles, poking himself with enviable nonchalance. He looked gnarled and limber—like a stick that just won’t snap, no matter how hard you bend it. He gave me two tips that made college a little more interesting than it would have been otherwise. First, drink the best wine you can afford. That usually kept me from the party crowd, the Thunderbird, and a fair amount of foolishness. Second, read De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater. He even lent me his own old copy (the first one’s always free). To say it made an impression would be putting it mildly. I read it night after night, a little at a time, not knowing exactly what I was reading, but transfixed. Here was a very strange way of writing: clear and oblique, concrete and complicated, logical and florid. It was a trip. And it got me to thinking that there might be more to literature than Truth and Beauty, then the apparent prerequisites of Great Writing. De Quincey bothered me, put a little glitch into the literature system that my major was wiring up. I’d like to believe that thanks to him, and to that old hipster who first tipped me off, I acquired a feel for other literary oddballs: Blake, Carroll, Burroughs, Dick, to name a few. At any rate, De Quincey remains for me something other than literature, perhaps other to it, at least as it’s institutionally construed.

My experience of De Quincey differs from the one Margaret Russett describes in De Quincey’s Romanticism: Cultural Minority and the Forms of Transmission. For her De Quincey is the creature—and the creator—of a literary canon that reproduces a constitutive difference between majors and minors. He’s a triple-A essayist to Wordsworth’s big-league lyricism, a self-styled second-stringer whose claim to literary fame results directly from his “minority.” As Russett understands it, that status reveals much about the production and cultural function of canonical Romantic writing. Unlike the wholly marginal writer, whose recovery proves that she didn’t see much play in the production of that canon, the minor writer remains part of the show, “never ‘forgotten’ and in no danger of becoming so” (6). He occupies the “negative pole” of a dialectic of production that scripts Romantic writing as either “major” or “minor” and evaluates accordingly. So to be minor, as in De Quincey’s case, is at least to be not major; minority arises in the image of a greatness it negatively defines.

Such is the force of this dialectic of production that it comes to characterize the whole cultural project of canon formation. Russett’s real interest is less in De Quincey per se than in “the production of signature Romantic themes, motifs, and rhetorical effects at the contested and undecidably distorting site of transmission” (8). Minority is thus not so much a literary fact as a cultural function—Russett’s “transmission”—that authorizes certain themes, motifs, and effects over others. As such it arises out of neither reading nor interpretation but rather the material conditions of its “institutional locus” (9). Drawing extensively upon the work of Pierre Bourdieu and John Guillory, Russett shows how such conditions make the Romantic canon possible. Its members owe their authority to “the transformed materiality of the institutional habitus: that is, the rarefied literacy, or ‘sociolect,’ that registers the traces of social stratification” (9). Literary reputation mimics material interest, which is why Russett directs attention away from the ostensible achievement of canonical Romantic writing and toward its circulation as cultural capital. The minor writer best exemplifies this effect precisely because his reputation remains qualified. He’s in the canon, but only just, betraying the ideological force of the dialectic that produces it. Hence the urgency of what Russett calls her “largest abstract claim: that the Romantic cult of solitary genius misrecognizes what is in fact a corporate mode of production that the minor’s ‘genius for instrumentality’ both underwrites and unveils” (10). Thanks to his closer proximity to the material conditions of Romantic writing, the minor writer proves its cultural capital to consist mostly of bad bills. A major leaguer like Wordsworth may get the bigger signing bonus, but it falls to De Quincey to cash it in.

And by Russett’s account he frequently finds himself short-changed. The bulk of De Quincey’s Romanticism examines the various ways that De Quincey’s minority supplements and troubles the idealism that colors much Romantic writing, even his own. Russett’s “method” is appropriately varied. She approaches De Quincey’s writing by multiple paths, some of them little traveled, living up to her claim that the “book is about reading Wordsworth, repeating Coleridge, writing for magazines, and competing for popularity at least as much as it is about interpreting De Quincey” (8). And it’s a good thing too; interpreting De Quincey has become something of a growth industry lately. Russett’s is the fifth book-length monograph on the Opium Eater to appear since John Barrell’s psychopathology of empire, The Infection of Thomas De Quincey (Yale University Press, 1991). What sets Russett’s study apart from those others is its concentrated attention to what I’d call the economic unconscious of Romantic writing. While in some cases that unconscious is material and in others affective, Russett shows consistently how it configures De Quincey’s minority to troubling ends.

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