Werewolf Wollstonecraft

The judicial bestiary at the heart of eighteenth-century politics has long been evident in Enlightenment social contract debates, as Michel Foucault’s and Giorgio Agamben’s theories of biopolitics show. In this essay, I argue that Wollstonecraft is nonetheless the first thinker of ‘true’ werewolf out-lawry in her final novel, Maria, Or the Wrongs of Woman and in her letters to Godwin. In the novel, Wollstonecraft leverages what we now call new materialism as a feminist critique of heteropatriarchal society. Wollstonecraft’s new materialist thinking also scrambles gender across even human and nonhuman distinctions. To counter microcosmic familial and macrocosmic state heteropatriarchy, Wollstonecraft theorizes what I am calling, following the example of wolves and werewolves, not a family but a ‘pack’. The pack manifests as new spacetimes through what Karen Barad terms “quantum entanglements” that produce love between subjects and subjects but that never strives to reproduce binaristic pairings that reproduce the sovereign family. A pack, as Wollstonecraft’s texts demonstrate, emerges from processes of co-creation that iterate new subjects and objects without dynamic power structures structured around stable gender identities or human and nonhuman power relations.

Affect in the Margins

The marks left by readers in their personal copies of Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets provide traces of how manuscript engages print, and readers materially engage writers, in the Romantic period. Surveying 152 copies of Elegiac Sonnets and other contemporary sonnet collections by Bowles, Robinson, and Seward, this essay considers how marginalia challenges us to reconsider how readers used books—and how books might use their readers—in soliciting and forging affective relationships through print. We chronicle Smith’s careful recollecting and reframing of her own poetry in printed editions, a practice which seems to have licensed readers in turn to change how they responded to her verse. Why did Smith’s readers mark, interleave, or otherwise thicken their copies more often and with greater urgency than the readers of other late eighteenth-century sonneteers, particularly as the Elegiac Sonnets grew? Tracing these various annotations, from the most conventional to the most transgressive, heightens our historical sense of the dynamism of Smith’s publishing practice and illuminates the sentimental and aesthetic bonds she formed with readers. It also, we argue, exposes something more radical: a blurring of lines between persona and poet, author and reader, and between book-writer and book-owner.

Vibrant Art on the Grand Tour in Anna Jameson’s Diary of an Ennuyée

Anna Jameson’s Diary of an Ennuyée, first published in 1826, follows an unnamed narrator, a dispirited female traveller, who moves through the locales of France and Italy, surveying the objects of the Grand Tour. In the reflective space of her diary, the ennuyée begins to synthesize this material world she moves in, to understand herself as part of that world of objects, and to challenge the art viewers and artists who instead perceive materiality from a distance. Following Jane Bennett’s proposition of the ‘active, earthy, not-quite-human capaciousness’ of matter, this essay argues that the diarist recognizes and contemplates the unexpected vibrancy of the materials that she encounters. The narrator demonstrates that art writing should be more than an absolute formal assessment of quality; instead, she shows how artifacts reveal their capacity to unsettle human viewers in unexpected ways and to shape networks composed of things from diverse spaces and times.

Phantasmion, or the Confessions of a Female Opium Eater

This chapter analyzes the female opium narrative through a comparison of Sara Coleridge’s children’s novel Phantasmion and the texts of De Quincey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Phantasmion, the first fairy tale novel in English, explores the fluidity of the physical body through the travails of its hero, Prince Phantasmion. He metamorphoses into insects, falls into vision states, and finally comes into his own in a climactic scene in which he carries the dead body of his mother out of a sand trap. Part insect narrative, part opium text, and part guilt-ridden maternal autobiography, Phantasmion exemplifies Teresa Brennan’s concepts of entrainment and the transmission of affect. This essay begins with a discussion of the maternal body and opium use, with a focus on Coleridge’s breastfeeding diaries and her verse for children. The second section links the novel’s use of insect poetics and physical metamorphoses to Jane Bennett’s ideas about the vibrancy of matter. The concluding section explores the autobiographical elements of Phantasmion as well as its use of a particular opium involute that was inspired by Martin Dobrizhoffer’s account of his time among the Guarani people of Paraguay. As Coleridge repeats this involute throughout her text, the hero Phantasmion gradually comes to understand his own human frailty.

Dancing with Ghosts in ‘Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil’

This essay reads the intimacy between persons and things dramatized in Keats’s poem as a haunting that at once enacts and acts against normative states of being or orders of experience. Drawing on Hazlitt’s invocation of the past as “alive and stirring with objects” in conjunction with the political resonance of the ghost dance Gayatri Spivak summons in her response to Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, this reading aims to depathologize Isabella’s intense attachment to the pot of basil by reflecting on the potential for resistance or transformation within the practices of everyday life, including within the repetitions and returns that constitute our own everyday practices as readers of Keats’s poem.

Voices against the Universe

In William Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion, when Oothoon finds her voice and re/fuses to function as the mirror of male desire, her heroics are undertaken against the backdrop of the baleful and jaundiced eye of patriarchal ideology. She thereafter moves into a free-flowing form of lamentation that articulates a transgressive poetics of self-assertion and self-determination. Oothoon’s voice goes unheeded (except by the daughters of Albion), yet her determination to arise daily and articulate the lamentative argument anew manifests the quiet heroism of everyday life. Oothoon’s act of assertion establishes, at the beginning of the prophecies, a model emulated by other female characters, with the female voice of semiosis providing a counter expression to the relentless monological language of the symbolic and all that it bears/bares. In Visions, the activity that Britta Timm Knudson and Carsten Stage term “affective textuality” is evident in its entangled force fields of semiosis, with the title plate and the frontispiece registering the split operations of what Lacan termed “The eye and the gaze.” The under analyzed visual field of Visions provides insight into the Blakean attempt through textual experimentation to render affect itself into a material condition of his textuality.

Hester Stanhope, ‘Un être à part’

Hester Stanhope rethought tenets of Enlightenment and Sensibility that defined women at the mercy of biologically sexed bodies. Expected to marry for money and status, she left England to live independently in the Middle East, assuming agency in Syria as a warrior, tourist attraction, politician, and anchorite sibyl. She cross-dressed as a Turk and a Bedouin man, influenced Ottoman and tribal politics, took lovers, ruled the Syrians in her territory, accessed both male and female worlds, and enjoyed a liberty forbidden to women on British and Syrian grounds. Stanhope’s fluidity is apparent in multiple sources: accounts of travelers who visited her, her own letters, and the Memoirs of her physician Charles Meryon, wherein he quotes her correspondence (censored) and her conversations with him and others. Each genre—the letter, the memoir, and the travel account—creates a heroic persona for her. Two other phenomena add to these metafictional complexities: first, the competition between Stanhope’s and Meryon’s stories, and second, the filters of gender and class prejudice through which he views Stanhope. Such indeterminacy invites the question of how she both is and is not a speaking subject and of how these representations limit our interpretations of her and her actions.

Introduction

Building on Romantic scholarship that has opened the door to more capacious understandings of materiality that rethink the subject-object opposition of cultural materialism, the introduction makes the case that Romantic-era writers were, like us, material creatures living in an emphatically material world. In the perfect storm of historical and cultural changes in gender and sexuality, print culture, and science, Romantic writers sought alternative ways to explain materiality as fluid, unstable, and affective in order to challenge cultural narratives that insisted on notions of discrete sexed bodies, embodied subjectivities, isolated things, or stable texts. The introduction establishes a literary, critical, historical, and theoretical context for reading texts, bodies, things, and language as transgressive materialities that entangle with and alter the matters of the world, as they move across prescribed limits and braid together mobile forms of affect, embodiment, and discursivity. To help uncover this dynamic materiality in Romantic-era texts, the introduction provides a primer on new materialism and offers it as theoretical model and praxis. The collection, the editors conclude, not only reveals a new materialist imaginary for Romanticism but also unveils material transgressions that alter new materialism’s often strictly ontological approach.

Revolutionary Objects in Elizabeth Inchbald’s Nature and Art

Following a feminist/materialist concept of “choratic reading,” this chapter argues that Elizabeth Inchbald's English Jacobin novel Nature and Art highlights environmental agency in the context of political and social injustice. Inchbald’s use of chiasmic irony further reveals how the disavowal of non-human agency acts as the very condition for exploitation of both non-human and human actors, particularly the unpaid menial, reproductive and nutritive work of women in late-eighteenth-century England. In this sense, there is nothing more “environmental” than the laboring, gendered, and exploited female body. This chapter suggests that future study of Inchbald focus on the networks of human and non-human agents in her work and how these networks gesture towards a radical political ecology.

John Barnet and the Materiality of Desire in James Hogg’s Justified Sinner

This chapter examines a neglected scene in James Hogg’s novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, in which the church groundskeeper John Barnet is fired for insubordination. Barnet, like an earlier version of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” makes innuendoes about his employer’s sexual history and refuses to deny spreading rumors about the paternity of the boss’s son. The ensuing confrontation becomes an allegory of labour relations and a parable about the materiality of desire. The chapter analyzes Barnet’s innuendo through the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan, who similarly saw desire as having a certain materiality.