City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 5-2015 Touching Time: Forms of Romantic Temporality Leila Walker Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1175 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] TOUCHING TIME: FORMS OF ROMANTIC TEMPORALITY by LEILA WALKER A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2015 © 2015 LEILA WALKER All Rights Reserved ii This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in English in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Nancy Yousef___________________________________ _________________________ _______________________________________________ Date Chair of Examining Committee Mario di Gangi___________________________________ _________________________ _______________________________________________ Date Executive Officer Alan Vardy ___________________________________ Alexander Schlutz ______________________________ Supervisory Committee iii Abstract TOUCHING TIME: FORMS OF ROMANTIC TEMPORALITY by Leila Walker Adviser: Professor Nancy Yousef The sense of touch has largely been neglected in the study of Romantic literature. While recent histories of the senses hold that sight and touch became disarticulated toward the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, these studies tend to emphasize the elevation of sight as a more advanced mode of perception, suitable for observing experiments or appreciating art, over the more base sense of touch. Questions of tactility tend to be absorbed into histories of materiality or the body, and this terminological slippage becomes particularly apparent as these histories enter the Romantic period. However, when we attend to the sense of touch, an alternative aesthetic history emerges that emphasizes engagement rather than, or in iv tension with, observation. Touching Time argues that British Romantic literature develops a new approach to tactility, a way of engaging with the world physically in the present in order to introduce new possibilities for the future. While the field of vision is experienced linearly as we attach narrative structure to the organization of visible objects within that field, the sense of touch resists such linearity. Rather, the touch exists in the fleeting moment that opens up the possibility of both past and future for a totality beyond the human capacity for narrative. Through my readings of William Godwin, George Colman the Younger, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas De Quincey, and Mary Shelley, I uncover a radical Romantic aesthetic that critiques the politics of witness and privileges the politics of social implication. We are accustomed to thinking of Romantic literature as representing a new way of seeing, and it does. But by focusing on touch rather than sight, I am able to emphasize the more social and interactive aspects of this literature. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am incredibly grateful to Nancy Yousef, Alan Vardy, and Alexander Schlutz, who challenged and encouraged me throughout this project. Beginning in my first semester, the three professors who later became my committee helped me to identify and take hold of the elusive ideas swimming just under the surface of my writing, ideas that developed through fragments and false starts into my final project. Carrie Hintz helped guide an earlier version of this project, and while my research ultimately led in a different direction, I continue to rely on the theoretical foundations in utopian studies that Carrie helped me to build. I am also grateful to my committee for attending to my human needs as well as my scholarly needs. At times when this process threatened to overwhelm me, I could always count on my committee to work through the difficulty with me, and at times when I was overflowing with ideas about this project, my committee was there to join my excitement. I hope one day I am able to offer my own students the rigorous guidance tempered by compassionate kindness that you have shown to me. vi I never would have begun graduate school, not to mention this particular project, without the support and guidance of Rick Ballard, Lydia Barnett, Sarah Colvario, Stephen Duncombe, Christian Niles, and Nick Valvo, to whom I am eternally grateful. The CUNY Graduate Center has a particularly robust Romanticist community, and I am grateful for the thriving network of professional support and academic rigor I have found with Sharmaine Browne, Amelia Greene, Gaby Kappes, Matt Rowney, Richard Tayson, Rose Tomassi, Elly Weybright, and the rest of the CUNY Romanticist Group. Thanks are especially due to Anne McCarthy and Emily Stanback, who introduced me to the study of British Romanticism, and Alison Powell, whose insights on life, poetry, and scholarship I always value. I am also grateful to the early readers and conversationalists in the broader Romanticist community who worked through murky ideas with me, especially Elisa Beshero Bondar, Michael Demson, Kelli Towers Jasper, Josh Lambier, Jonathan Mulrooney, Anahid Nersessian, Emily Rohrbach, Charles Rzepka, Jonathan Sachs, and the New York Romanticist Friendly Society. Two years ago I was fortunate to join the Shelley and His Circle publication project in the Pforzheimer Collection at the New York Public Library, privately funded by the Pforzheimer Foundation. I continue to be astounded by the warmth, intelligence, and intellectual generosity of my friends and colleagues there, who have taught me how to be the researcher I want to become. Thank you Charlie Carter, Liz Denlinger, Daniel Dibbern, and Doucet Devin Fischer. This project would not have been possible without an interdisciplinary approach, and I am particularly grateful to my friends and colleagues in other fields who patiently shared their knowledge: Nandi Cohen; Marisa Lerer; Dito Morales; Jay Oles; Andrea Ortuño; Marcus Burke and the Hispanic Society; Steve Brier, Matt Gold, and the JITP Editorial Collective; and Arden vii Decker, who inspired cryptic but fruitful notes about hypothetical temporality and affect theory, datelined Mexico City, Christmas Eve, over mezcal. And to the friends, neighbors, feminists, and agitators who kept me sane along the way, thank you: Cathy Borck (#boom #smashthepatriarchy); Mia Chen; Kery Chez; Caroline Conoly; John Gergely; Marisa Glass; Karen Gregory; Natalie Havlin; Geoff Johnson; Kiran Mascarenhas; Rachel Meyer; Linda Neiberg; Daniel Newman and Ann Boger; Nancy Silverman; Sava Saheli Singh; Teresa Theophano; Randi Alegre, Bill Baer, Chris Lukos, Cliff Simanski, and the Cliffs LIC climbing community; Kristi Andre, David Sheridan, David Silva, Danielle Toro, and vegan pizza at Wheated; Christian Cooley, Marco Gil, John Hagan, Andy Zimmerman, and Sycamore; and Pete Gray, Kelli Nairn, and Chris and Anekka Scott-Gray, my Connecticut family. Most importantly, thank you to Renee McGarry. Your intelligence, passion, kindness, strength, and sense of social justice inspire me daily. I could never have completed this project without your loving support and insight. And thank you to our beasts—Emmett, Hamilton, and Vicky—who made sure I never stared too long at the lightbox. This project is dedicated to the memory of Beatrice, who would have had so much to say about it. I love you always. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Introduction. ………………………………………………………………………1 Touching and Time 2. Silence and Stillness………………………………………………………………33 Astonishment as an Alternative to Narrative in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams 3. Waiting……………………………………………………………………………61 The Isolation of the Perpetual Present in George Colman the Younger’s The Iron Chest 4. Transformation………………………………………………………………….. 87 Hair and Ekphrasis in the Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley 5. Preservation………………………………………………………………………128 Palimpsests, Children, and the Present in the Works of Thomas De Quincey 6. A Pause……………………………………………………………………………168 Bodily Contact and the Consenting Dead in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man Works Cited………………………………………………………………………204 ix INTRODUCTION TOUCHING AND TIME The sense of touch has largely been neglected in the study of British Romantic literature. While recent histories of the senses hold that sight and touch became disarticulated toward the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, these studies tend to emphasize the elevation of sight as a more advanced mode of perception, suitable for observing experiments or appreciating art, over the more base sense of touch.1 Questions of tactility tend to be absorbed into histories of materiality or the body, and this terminological slippage becomes particularly 1 Constance Classen, for example, takes it almost as a given that by the nineteenth century “the notion that ‘high’ culture requires the suppression of the ‘lower’ senses was formalized. Touch was typed by the scholars of the day as a crude and uncivilized mode of perception” (xii). Jonathan Crary was perhaps the first scholar to suggest that the change in the way we see, which was formerly attributed to the development of the camera at the end of the nineteenth century, in fact dated