ANATOMY, VITALITY, AND THE ROMANTIC BODY

194 Pages·2014·2.56 MB·English

by  Dr. Adair Rispoli

ANATOMY, VITALITY, AND THE ROMANTIC BODY:
BLAKE, COLERIDGE, AND THE HUNTER CIRCLE, 1750-1840

Stephanie Adair Rispoli

A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in
partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the
Department of English and Comparative Literature.

Chapel Hill
2013

Approved by:

Reid Barbour

Paul Youngquist

Jessica Wolfe

Mary Floyd-Wilson

Inger S. B. Brodey
© 2014
Stephanie Adair Rispoli
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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ABSTRACT

STEPHANIE ADAIR RISPOLI: Anatomy, Vitality, and the Romantic Body: Blake,
Coleridge, and the Hunter Circle, 1750-1840
(Under the direction of Reid Barbour and Paul Youngquist)

The Romantic Body brings together the works of Dr. William Hunter (1718-1783), his
brother John Hunter, and his wife Anne Home Hunter (1742-1821) to provide a more
sophisticated and socially situated understanding of the impact of the Hunters and their
‘circle’ both within and outside of the field of medicine. By attending to the emphasis in the
Hunters’ corpus on the phases of life (including embryology and developmental biology),
sickness and decay, and death, I identify just how influential William was in his role as an
anatomy professor in the fine arts. I also explore the ramifications of John’s sustained interest
in producing a universal theory to explain the interplay of organs, consciousness, and bodily
development. Anne, a linchpin between science and poetry within the Hunter Circle, whose
own poetry was not a private, domestic practice but rather a series of reflections both
responding to and differing from John’s questions about the boundaries between life and
death.
John’s theories not only shaped and provoked William Blake’s (1757-1827)
conception of the human body and his principles of life and cognition, but also influenced
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s (1772-1834) philosophy of life and death. In framing the human
body as the center of a concentric schema, Coleridge’s Theory of Life informs my analysis of
his earlier poetical works. Coleridge’s poems were experimental inquiries that might provide
answers to some of the questions about our psychosomatic selves.

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This dissertation explores how a diverse cast of major figures in the long eighteenth
century and in early nineteenth-century England participated in a series of conversations
revolving around a coherent yet varied interest in the physiological and psychological aspects
of bodies. At times these authors struggle with uncertainty and anxiety as they advocate
different theories of life and death as a means to explain the human body in a way that might
accommodate the exponential growth of anatomical knowledge during the period. They
provoke and respond to one another in active, inventive, and also disputatious ways. The
Romantic Body places metaphysics, fine arts, and science in dialogue with one another to
produce a revisionary interpretation of the poetry and art of the pre-Romantic and Romantic
periods. From this vantage, contemporary medical thought vigorously interacts with the
social, gendered, metaphysical, visual, and rhetorical constituents of London in the age of
Blake and Coleridge.

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For Lyila, the Akita of my life

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In all the hours I spent dusting off forgotten folios, I found two esteemed scholars,
also marvelous human beings, Reid Barbour and Jessica Wolfe who have instilled in me the
love for archival hunts. They also taught me how to follow archival leads that are more than
two hundred years old, and how to reshape their historical legacy into a meaningful and more
rightful contemporary understanding of the past. My achievements stem from their
unwavering support that I could never claim as all my own. Mary Floyd-Wilson and Inger S.
B. Brodey provided illuminating readings of my work as it evolved to fit into a larger
kaleidoscopic community of interdisciplinary researchers. My deep appreciation goes to Paul
Youngquist for taking seriously an undergraduate querying about the overwhelming quantity
of blood in the history of British Romanticism and scientific treatises discussing the elusive
anatomical evidence of consciousness; and especially for encouraging me to continue to
“travel the spaceways” to achieve my doctoral degree.
The generosity of two pre-dissertation fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation and UNC’s Global Initiatives afforded me the opportunity to traverse the special
collections throughout the United Kingdom to piece together evidence for this dissertation’s
arguments. Above all, my formative years as a graduate student are chock-full of people who
came into my life (and some who exited just as unexpectedly); but not without imbuing an
idea about the blurry gradients of our deaths and lives. To those uncut gems, let us never
forget that: quod incepimus conficiemus.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction…………………………………………………………………………….…1
Part I: Bloody Brothers: Pursuing the Definition of Life……………………………......17
Death: An Anatomical Origin…………………………………………………...18
Monsters: The Liminality between Death and Life……………………………..34
Life: Before Death of an Organism……………………………………………..44
Part II: Building the Corporeal Human Body with Blake’s Somatic Imagination….…..69
A Neurohumanities Apparatus………………………………………………….70

  Ordering Urizen’s Corporealization in a Hunterian Method…………………..106

  Vala, or The Four Zoas: Building a Communal Anatomical Body……………112

  Corporeal Multiplicity: A Blakean Mode in Milton…………………………....129
Part
 III:
 ‘Life itself is not a thing’:
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Philosophy of Medicine………………………......136

The Living Energies as Life’s Essence………………………………………...149

  Reframing Theory of Life………………………………………………………163

Figures……………………………………………………………………………….....176

Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………...180

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Dr. William Hunter lecturing at Royal Academy of Arts

Figure 2: Dr. Brown’s chart “Table of Excitement and Excitability”

Figure 3: Dr. Brown’s frontispiece from Elements of Medicine

Figure 4: John Hunter’s illustration of chick embryos

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INTRODUCTION

In recent criticism, there have been encouraging signs of life in the scholarly
endeavor to dissolve the two cultures model separating the scientific from the artistic
dimensions of Romantic culture. One can see these signs in a wide range of recent
monographs, including Tristanne Connolly’s William Blake and the Body (2002), Noel
Jackson’s Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (2008), Maureen McLane’s
Romanticism and the Human Sciences (2000), and Martin Wallen’s City of Health, Fields of
Disease (2004). Nonetheless, medical and literary historians alike still struggle to take
seriously the Romantic interest in the body as something other than an allegory or a
metaphor. For instance, in his Flesh in the Age of Reason (2003), Roy Porter described
William Blake’s (1757-1827) treatment of the body as “the body mystical”. And he is partly
right, especially in reminding us that Blake “hated the preachings of Churches which spied
only evil in the flesh, were obsessed with discipline, and made ‘thou shalt not’ their credo”
(438). However, Porter suggests that Blake is in battle only with orthodox Christianity. Any
progressive interpretation of Blake, for Porter, becomes reduced to a Blakean cliché insofar
as Locke, Bacon and Newton are Blake’s enemy. Again, Blake is conceived as a “wayward,
willful genius, entering into an ambiguous dance with the power or poison of the irrational”
(445). The Four Zoas (c. 1796) is briefly mentioned but Porter relies heavily on Blake’s
visions of his predecessors such as Voltaire and Paracelsus as evidence of Blake’s tendency
towards the antinomian tradition. He also attempts to make the mysticism of Blake an
argument for suggesting that Blake’s ultimate project in relation to the human body was to
“combat all such reductionist tendencies and espouse a primitive faith which gave pride of
place to imagination as the emanation of the divine” (445). I believe this version of Blake
captures only part of the poet’s thought, and even forces him back into obscurity. I do not
want to downplay Blake’s religious philosophies but rather to figure out how his anatomical
knowledge might enhance our understanding of those philosophies without defaulting to a
purely allegorical perspective of him.
In a broader context, there is some recent criticism suggesting that, perhaps, late
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and anatomy are not so different but that their
mutual interest in the human body was fueled by a dark fantasy for omnipotent knowledge of
ourselves. Various versions of this theme have been repeated in an abundant amount of
secondary material, such as The Body in Parts (1997): “It could be argued that what lay[s] at
the heart of both poetic and anatomical practices of dissection was the poet’s or scientist’s
virtuoso display of a fundamentally scandalous art: it is in the masterful publishing of secrets
of the body by means of a masterful wielding of an instrument that the medical dissector’s art
meets that of the poet-rhetorician” (Vickers 7). The image of anatomy conjured by Vickers is
one of dark, taboo shame. While eighteenth-century dissections would hardly qualify as a
walk in St. James Park during full-bloom, even so, anatomy was rarely a covert operation.1
Descriptions used by Vickers and others have neglected to discuss the mutual fascination
between anatomists and artists and fail to realize that neither understood themselves as
practicing a “scandalous art”; rather they conceived their work as a part of a collaborative
project aiming to contribute to and rectify knowledge pertaining to what Samuel Taylor

1 How certain bodies ended up on their dissection table would be a more accurate discussion for dark secrecies
of anatomical studies. It is interesting to note that during the Hunters’ tenure in the medical community no
doctors have criminal records for being arrested for practicing dissection.

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