View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy PROVED UPON OUR PULSES: ROMANTICISM AND THE LIFE OF THINGS TODAY A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY THOMAS PATRICK CANNAVINO IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ADVISER: ROBERT L. BROWN, JR. MARCH 2017 © Thomas Patrick Cannavino 2017 i Acknowledgements Many friends, mentors, and colleagues have been most vital on the very long road to the completion of this dissertation and its defense. I would like to thank my advisor, Professor Robin Brown, who has been heroically generous with his time and knowledge and wit, who has met with me on an almost weekly basis for more than three years, reading endless outlines, drafts, and parts of drafts as I have tried to give shape to this project. This is not even to mention more free lunches than I can count. Without Robin’s crucial support, I would not have been able to write this dissertation. I thank the other members of my doctoral committee, Professors Cesare Casarino, Carl Elliott, Rembert Hüser, and Shaden Tageldin, whose stimulating and wide-ranging seminars over the years on topics as diverse as Spinoza and the Twentieth Century, Medical Consumerism, TATORT, the German police procedural, and critical debates in comparative literature have modeled for me sensitive and creative scholarship and teaching at its best. Their intellectual versatility has helped me learn how to make unexpected connections among vast bodies of knowledge and objects, and in addition to their guidance in coursework I have benefited from their advice at the other key moments of my graduate career. Professor Thomas Pepper worked closely with me in the earliest stages of this project, and I thank him for that. Professor Jochen Schulte-Sasse was a crucial mentor in my first years as a graduate student, and his death in 2012 was a terrible loss to our department, our university, and our discipline. Thanks to the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature and its staff, especially Claire Anderson and Barb Lehnhoff, whose administrative heroics have helped me out of more than one jam over the years. For supplemental research funding, I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Mark and Judy Yudof Fellowship in Science Policy and Ethics, FLAS funding from the U.S. Department of Education and the University of Minnesota’s Institute for Global Studies, and a Pforzheimer Grant from the Keats-Shelley Association of America. Finally, many other friends have made graduate school more exciting, dare I say more lively, than I could have imagined at the outset. The list is too long to provide here completely, but I would like to mention in particular Melissa Geppert, Meredith Gill, Andrea Gyenge, Christian Haines, Garnet Kindervater and Kate Hall Kindervater, Annemarie Lawless, Michelle Lekas, Aly Pennucci, Djordje Popovic, Tracy Rutler, Gabe Shapiro, Ben Stork, and Raysh Weiss. Thanks to my parents, Thomas F. and Diane T. Cannavino, and to my sister, Michelle. Mona and Rambo made excellent writing companions. Ricardo Rebolledo made every day, even the hard and desperate ones, worth living. ii Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to the memory of Anne Nicole—Annie—Shapiro (1982- 2016). iii Table of Contents Introduction ……………………………………………………………………. 1 Romantic Life as Resistance Chapter 1 ………………………………………………………………………. 16 Stirrings of Life: Romanticism, Agrarianism, and the New Criticism Chapter 2 ………………………………………………………………………. 67 Cold War Romanticism and the American “Culture of Life” Chapter 3 ………………………………………………………………………. 128 Sweet Bodies Fit for Life: A Brief Romantic Prehistory of Transsexuality and Trans* Discourse Chapter 4 ………………………………………………………………………. 181 Romantic Life-Gifts and the Meaning of Blood Bibliography …………………………………………………………………… 232 1 Introduction: Romantic Life as Resistance The actual heart of P.B. Shelley is a haunting emblem for a kind of Romantic resistance to reducing life to the mechanisms of its biology, to the law-based interactions of physicochemical matter, or the predictability of regular form and taxonomy that would be the focus of careful research in comparative anatomy throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century. The story of Shelley’s heart is well known, especially from the account given by Edward Trelawny in Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron: after he met an early death at the age of twenty-nine by drowning in the Gulf of La Spezia in 1822, Shelley’s friends, including Lord Byron and Leigh Hunt, quarantined his body by sprinkling it with lime and burying it on the beach, and then later exhumed it for cremation.1 Byron had actually asked Trelawny to preserve Shelley’s skull for him, but Trelawny recollected that Byron had formerly used another human skull as a drinking cup, and determined that Shelley’s “should not be so profaned” (136). So the head would be burned upon the funeral pyre with the rest of the corpse, with wine, oil, and salt making “the yellow flames glisten and quiver” (137). Trelawny’s description of the poet’s cremation proceeds with gruesome detail, as he reports the process of the body’s melting away, the skull cracking and exposing the brains that “literally seethed, bubbled, and boiled as in a cauldron, for a very long time” (137). At this point Byron withdraws, but the others remain to attend to the flames, and are finally surprised to see that the body had gone entirely to ash with the exception of some remaining bone fragments and the heart that would not burn and instead “remained entire” (137). Trelawny burned his hand 1 See E.J. Trelawny, Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1858. 2 and risked quarantine, himself, when he “snatch[ed] this relic” from the pyre. The heart was later given to Mary Shelley, who according to other accounts that may be apocryphal, kept it for the next thirty years wrapped in the pages of her husband’s Adonaïs, the elegy he had written for John Keats the year before. It is perhaps fitting that inquiry into an explanation for why the heart would not burn would come in the allegedly un-romantic 1950s, when Arthur Norman, writing in the Journal of the History of Medicine, suggests that Shelley’s heart probably had been progressively calcifying, a hypothesis that also neatly accounts for Shelley’s well-known apparent hypochondriac tendencies, which may have actually had a physical basis after all.2 Nevertheless, Norman takes the opportunity of this suggestion to make a pregnant observation that “Shelley’s heart, epitome of Romanticism, may well have been a heart of stone” (114). This story and its appeal, which after all amounts to a Romantic cliché, is nevertheless instructive for the ways it circles around the relationship of life itself to the body, and approaches the limit point of thinking life as a thing: Shelley’s calcified heart is interesting because its survival on the funeral pyre instantly transformed it into a fossil, a stone bearing an indexical relationship to a life that had been, and as a fossil and new kind of object, a stone that would have a life, and certainly a life-story, of its own. To the extent that canonical Romanticism, for my purposes about 1760-1830, can be said to be organized around a common set of problems—itself a suggestion that relies on a modern logic of periodization that was just coming into existence in the late eighteenth and early 2 Arthur Norman, “Shelley’s Heart.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 10.1 (1955): 114. 3 nineteenth centuries—life itself and its attendant theories, technologies, and texts organized the common obsessions of a large array of thinkers. Romantic-era poets, physicians, philosophers and physiologists would relentlessly pursue the relationships between life itself, a principle of life or the “living principle,” and its traces in bodily forms and expressions: the result is an unresolved and unresolvable crisis in not knowing how to think life in relation to things, be they “living,” “dead,” or otherwise. Romantic life considered as vital power has an uneasy relationship with organized biological forms, and the Romantic thinkers I read in this dissertation repeatedly find themselves at the edge of the abyss between power and form or organization, life and the body, and persons and things. This chasm remains necessarily unbridgeable, which Romantically guarantees the potential of the power of life to exceed the power over life that comes into being in a novel form in this period. In what follows, I bring this assortment of Romantic-era investigations of the problem of life, investigations that may be considered both scientific and aesthetic, into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and attempt to use them as a light by which to read more recent figures of biotechnological and biopolitical anxiety. If it is possible to translate Shelley’s heart’s “survival” and “afterlife” into twentieth-century terms, it might be that of a transplant patient’s new organ. The heart that continues to beat in a brain- dead corpse, and then goes on to live an afterlife in another body, often produces Romantic fantasies for both organ recipients and donor families alike. Along these lines, Ian Hacking describes the case of a sixty-year-old man who receives the heart of a 4 seventeen-year-old motorcycle accident victim.3 The heart recipient “feels that he bears some of the soul” of his young donor, including “not just his energy” but also some of his “quirks and fascinations” and the donor’s mother, twenty years his junior, “calls him son,” as both agree they have participated in a rebirth (94).