Populating the Novel

Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life

Emily Steinlight

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501710711
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

From the teeming streets of Dickens's London to the households of domestic fiction, nineteenth-century British writers constructed worlds crammed beyond capacity with human life. In Populating the Novel, Emily Steinlight contends that rather than simply reflecting demographic growth, such pervasive literary crowding contributed to a seismic shift in British political thought. She shows how the nineteenth-century novel in particular claimed a new cultural role as it took on the task of narrating human aggregation at a moment when the Malthusian specter of surplus population suddenly and quite unexpectedly became a central premise of modern politics.

In readings of novels by Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Mary Braddon, Thomas Hardy, and Joseph Conrad that link fiction and biopolitics, Steinlight brings the crowds that pervade nineteenth-century fiction into the foreground. In so doing, she transforms the subject and political stakes of the Victorian novel, dislodging the longstanding idea that its central category is the individual by demonstrating how fiction is altered by its emerging concern with population. By overpopulating narrative space and imagining the human species perpetually in excess of the existing social order, she shows, fiction made it necessary to radically reimagine life in the aggregate.

CHAPTER 1

Populating Solitude

Malthus, the Masses, and the Romantic Subject

O ye numberless,

Whom foul oppression’s ruffian gluttony

Drives from life’s plenteous feast! O thou poor wretch

Who nursed in darkness and made wild by want,

Roamest for prey, yea thy unnatural hand

Dost lift to deeds of blood!

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Religious Musings”

In the summer and fall of 1798, two anonymous publications caught the attention of English critics: William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which introduced what Wordsworth called a “new species of poetry” and charted a bold course for its future, and the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population, which advanced a troubling hypothesis about the future of the human species. Apart from the mixed reviews both initially received, there would seem to be little common ground between the experimental volume of poetry later credited as a foundational document of British Romanticism and the ominous pamphlet on political economy later acclaimed as a foundational work in population science. Understandably, it is customary to align these texts and their authors with antithetical worldviews: Wordsworth and Coleridge, idealistic young poets committed to human perfectibility and inspired by nature’s benevolence, and Malthus, an anti-utopian who projected the grim statistical inevitability of poverty, violence, and epidemic as natural checks to human population.1 The revised 1802 Preface to the third edition of Lyrical Ballads suggests this very antithesis when it places “the Poet” in opposition to “the Man of Science.” The poet, Wordsworth argues, “is the rock of defence of human nature; an upholder and preserver”—his polemical formulation implying that human nature is susceptible to violation and in need of reinforcement.

Heated responses to the Essay on Population from Coleridge, Robert Southey, William Hazlitt, Percy Shelley, William Cobbett, and William Godwin affirm an antagonism between Malthusian theory and the humanistic ideals of modern poetry. Hazlitt’s 1807 Reply to the Essay on Population actually attributes the text’s shortcomings to its author’s antipoetic sensibility: “If he had been a man of sanguine or poetical feelings,” Hazlitt speculates, Malthus might have felt that any increase in the world’s human population would be attended by a proportionate increase in human happiness. The sentiments one ought to feel about population evidently demand poetic expression, as suggested by the paraphrase of Wordsworth and quotation from Milton that follow: this prospect of so many new births should have “made his heart leap up with a lively joy—to see ‘fast by hanging in a golden chain this pendant world,’ &c.” (86–87). Poetry is repeatedly held up analogically as a gauge of the Essay’s faults. Hazlitt, remarking on Malthus’s attempt to reconcile his argument for “moral restraint” with an account of human nature that contradicts it, compares him to “a bad poet who to get rid of a false concord alters the ending of his first line, and forgets that he has spoiled his rhyme in the second” (74). Godwin, too, finds occasion to contrast the prose of such an “uninspired writer” unfavorably against the language of psalmists (Of Population 106). Poetry itself, accordingly, provides a privileged space for debate with Malthus. Wordsworth’s Prelude implicitly takes issue with his physiological determinism, disputing the premise that human advancement is impeded by mere “animal wants and the necessities / Which they impose” (12:94–95), and Shelley, Byron, and other second-generation Romantics spare no opportunity to vilify Malthus and parody his theorem as a non-satirical sequel to Swift’s Modest Proposal—at best an absurd delusion, at worst a genocidal plot against the poor.2

While Romantic poetry and the principle of population are less opposed than they appear, it is no coincidence that this clash with Malthus erupts at such a transformative moment in literary history. The first two decades of the nineteenth century, which witnessed the rise of the life sciences and of statistical social analysis (the start of that “avalanche of printed numbers” Ian Hacking describes), also saw literature emerge as keyword: a descriptor not just for a set of texts but also for a subjective orientation toward the world. It is around the time of the Essay on Population that literature began making universalizing claims for its own ethical value—often, as Maureen McLane has emphasized, in the language of philosophical anthropology.3 Shelley held that poetry, defined as the expression of the imaginative faculty, “is connate with the origin of man” (A Defence of Poetry 511). Godwin similarly identifies literature in its broadest sense as the ultimate evidence of human exceptionalism: “the grand line of demarcation between the human and the animal kingdoms” (The Enquirer 31). In making this assertion, Godwin does not just echo Aristotle’s claim that poetry arises out of an innate mimetic tendency in the species.4 He also joins Kant in equating artistic production with human autonomy, distinguishing creative activity from the natural world’s productive processes according to an opposition—elemental to Romanticism—between freedom and necessity.5 Such an account of poetic work offered a domain of experience free from physiological or mechanical compulsion and unbound to any systemic teleology. It helped shore up a particular version of humanism against the functional imperatives of natural history on the one hand and political economy on the other. Ironically, though, it hinged its claims for human creativity on the very term that risked compromising humanity’s uniqueness: “we want the poetry of life,” wrote Shelley in his impassioned Defence of Poetry : “our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can digest” (530).

The Romantic-era texts considered in this chapter all share this basic problematic. They aim to vindicate humanity against some force that threatens it, whether in the form of political violence, statistical abstraction, animalization, or biological and ecological risk. In so doing, their appeal to natural life reveals that “human” has become an ontologically unstable category, often with the result that it appears an empty or even suspect term. This is one of the less obvious outcomes of the Malthusian shift in British political thought (whose most direct policy consequences included the mandate for a decennial national census after the 1800 Census Act and, later, the dismantling of most nonpunitive forms of welfare under the New Poor Law of 1834), but it accounts for Malthus’s persistent presence in literature and his place alongside Wordsworth and Byron in Hazlitt’s Spirit of the Age. The dilemma is readable in Frankenstein’s project in life production, Thomas De Quincey’s opium visions of an overcrowded globe, and The Last Man’s romance of extinction. These narratives describe experiments—scientific, personal, and political—motivated by an interest in humanity yet haunted by an unforeseen terror of human life, which seems to yield monstrous bodies, mobs, and contagious diseases that violate distinctions among individuals. Such figures attest to a biopolitical drive in Romantic writing—a defining interest in animacy and population and the struggles both entail—but they are not just ideological symptoms or tragic images of bare life. They also embody a new conception of collectivity that relied on literary expression.

It found expression in what seems like the most individualizing of all genres: confession, broadly construed here as including poetic and fictional autobiography as well as nonfiction memoir in the tradition of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The confessional texts discussed here diverge from a version of Romanticism that privileges a solitary self, isolated from the banality of the social world by poetic consciousness. They describe limit experiences that confront the individual with heterogeneous global masses that threaten the very distinctions on which the self/society dualism is founded. At the level of form, they deploy a sort of impossible first person that strains the unity of its speaking subject by obliging it to witness and narrate global biological processes on a transhuman scale. In staging such encounters, they present not only alternative approaches to population but also experiments in redefining literature’s human subject as something other than the private individual.

The miscellaneous creature assembled in Frankenstein bodies forth all the aesthetic volatility, political conflict, and philosophical contradictions that arise from the effort to reconstitute power in the object of population. Here, it is worth revisiting McLane’s illuminating reading, which masterfully connects Frankenstein to the Godwin-Malthus controversy and to a discourse of species: for McLane, Shelley’s novel is ultimately “a critique of the anthropological and anthropomorphic foundations of all human knowing” (87), with Malthusian thought serving to displace the humanities, biologize the concept of humanity, and enable Victor Frankenstein to claim a monopoly on its application. My claim, by contrast, is that the biopolitical turn opens up a fissure within the category of the human such that anti-Malthusians who professed to speak on humanity’s behalf could rarely avoid provincializing the concept themselves, resisting the universality of biological species nature, or implying that human is precisely what they wish not to be. Further, even as it destabilizes the human in Victor’s attempts to champion that abstraction, Frankenstein’s overarching project is to mobilize and give flesh to a new conception of mass humanity poised to assert itself as a political subject. This walking, speaking aggregate appears monstrous less because of its essential otherness than because it overwhelms the existing political categories that rise to meet it: the private individual, the nuclear family, and the body politic. Victor’s confession gives form to the imagined nonequivalence of humanity with a social body it at once comprises and exceeds. To assess the political stakes of this nonequivalence—or, put differently, to assess how a distinctly new type of politics came to hinge on this nonequivalence—requires us to consider why, and to what effect, the task first fell to novelists and poets to demonstrate the peculiar excessiveness of human life.

The Passion of Thomas Malthus

For what purpose were the passions implanted? That man by struggling with them might attain a degree of knowledge denied to the brutes, whispers Experience.

—Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

In the decades-long debates the Essay sparked, there is one consistent refrain: Malthusian theory is an assault on humanity itself. Opponents across the political spectrum charged Malthus with a scandalous indifference to culture and a willingness to subordinate human intellect to the brute forces of instinct, the pressures of environment, and the undiscriminating laws of probability. Where Enlightenment philosophy dignified humans from animals in their capacity to exert mental control over bodily impulses, Malthus thought it likely that “the body has more effect upon the mind than the mind upon the body” (153). If neither individual self-interest nor agricultural development nor political reform could compensate for the “natural inequality of the two powers of population and of production in the earth” and no constitution could rewrite “the great law of our nature which must constantly keep their effects equal” (72), what claims could be made for the rights of man or the contractual protections of the state? If the “passion between the sexes” were merely an involuntary and statistically generalizable drive and the resulting propagation of human life ceased to be a good in itself, what then would distinguish love from the mating of other species?

The debate, in other words, centered on human exceptionalism. And critics were not altogether wrong to charge the Essay with a libel against humanity in its honorific sense. Malthus strongly implied that such exalted characteristics as reason, language, sentiment, and political capacity were superseded by basic physiological needs and creaturely instincts. “Elevated as man is above all other animals by his intellectual faculties,” he argues, “it is not to be supposed that the physical laws to which he is subjected should be essentially different from those which are observed to prevail in other parts of animated nature” (225). If the divide between humans and other animals already looked less categorical from the vantage point of natural history, Malthusian thought gave human biology its most bluntly formulated political consequences. His adversaries, in response, set out to refute his claims by defending the uniqueness of their species.

Yet what these debates also demonstrate is that humanity’s exceptional status is not really undone by the subsumption of the human within the category of creaturely life. On the contrary, it is substantially reinforced both by the elevation of the species to the level of a political object and by the subjective fear of human reducibility to the animal.6 In the eighteenth century in particular, natural history no less than metaphysics had contributed to shoring up a distinctly modern version of human difference paradoxically based on man’s unique concern that no such difference exists. Such a conception of humanity takes shape in the theoretical compromise between logical abstraction and biological materialism that Buffon named Homo duplex. Man, Buffon argues, consists of two equal and opposite principles, spiritual and animal, that are perpetually at war.7 This story of human nature’s war against itself—a war within the subject, per Buffon, but often recast as a struggle between population groups, races, or classes—provides a narrative framework for the conflicts through which biopolitics emerges. Romantic literature, as the following sections suggest, adapts this biopolitical narrative of the species’ war against its own nature in order to reveal its tortuous logic: notably, in Victor Frankenstein’s war with the body whose reproductive capacity he regards as a threat to humanity, in De Quincey’s visions of armies marching toward an epic battle for “human nature” against the swirling anarchy of planetary species life, and in the Last Man’s reckoning with an internal human enemy recast as contagious disease (85). To understand the preoccupations of their narrators (whose agitation contrasts sharply with the composure of Malthus, for whom humanity’s danger to itself was its own solution thanks to the perpetual feedback mechanism of checks to population), it is necessary to assess the altered situation of the human subject in whose tremulous voice they spoke. The principle of population made humanity exceptional in its demand for institutionalized protection from the very material facts that sustained its existence: the need for food and an inevitable—and inevitably procreative—sexual impulse.

Sexuality, more than almost any other element of the argument, was a sticking point in the anthropological controversy that greeted the Essay on Population. Notorious though Malthus became for his own modest proposal that the poor might be deterred from breeding or else allowed to starve to death to prevent general scarcity, critics seeking to defend humanity reserved their harshest criticism for the Malthusian account of desire and copulation as instinctive biological functions. Refuting this theory of sexual impulse was a goal that crossed political divides. Southey, though not wishing to align himself with Godwin (and lamenting in his 1803 review of the Essay that the debate concerning man’s future hopes had been left to two such thinkers), denounced as nothing less than sacrilege the proposition that human “lust and hunger are alike passions of physical necessity . . . independent of the reason and the will” (296).8 Hazlitt, writing from a liberal perspective, was less apt to argue in theological terms, yet his objection was much the same: “Mr. Malthus’s whole book,” he charged, “rests on a malicious supposition, that all mankind . . . are like so many animals in season” (127). The radical Godwin, pilloried in the Essay for suggesting that desire, marriage, and procreation might decline with the advancement of human reason, returned fire by accusing Malthus of subordinating the intellect to the sex drive.9 In his long-delayed 1820 response to the fifth edition, he takes exception to the idea that “we shall in practice always blindly obey our appetites, and that . . . no future generation of men will ever conduct themselves with more virtue and discretion than the past” (Godwin, Of Population 512).10 The Essay’s account of sexuality, as he read it, represented a backlash against Enlightenment and an insult to human understanding. This premise was well established in Enlightenment philosophy. As Kant’s lectures on ethics assert, the sexual impulse in and of itself is “a degradation of human nature” (“Duties towards the Body in Respect of Sexual Impulse” 163). Yet Kant, unlike Godwin, sees no choice but to acknowledge that “without it a man would be incomplete; he would rightly believe that he lacked the necessary organs, and this would make him imperfect as a human being” (164). Because desire’s object “is not human nature but sex,” entailing no distinction between human behavior and “animal nature,” he concludes, “[s]exuality, therefore, exposes man to the danger of equality with the beasts” (164).11 At once elemental to man as an animal species and incompatible with a human nature defined by the capacity for moral judgment, self-mastery, and political...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Biopolitical Imagination
• 1. Populating Solitude: Malthus, the Masses, and the Romantic Subject
• 2. Political Animals: The Victorian City, Demography, and the Politics of Creaturely Life
• 3. Dickens’s Supernumeraries
• 4. The Sensation Novel and the Redundant Woman Question
• 5. “Because We Are Too Menny”
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index