Falling into matter : problems of embodiment in English fiction from Defoe to Shelley

This book is concerned with problems of embodiment in six early works of English fiction. In each of these works, giving physical expression to ideas or desires, rendering materially the stuff of the mind or spirit, 'bodying forth' matters of the heart, unleashes a spate of difficulties that curtail individual freedom and dignity and obstruct the creation of beauty (aesthetic, spiritual, or personal). This problem, which is explicitly tied to the body and its ability to express substance of high moment, preoccupies fiction writers of the period from Defoe to Shelley. It is a recurring issue for the novel as a genre as it struggles to disengage itself, as in the case of Defoe, from a largely Puritan past, and it is also a subject to which writers such as Swift and, later, Richardson repeatedly revert, monitoring the body in its relationship to matters of the mind or spirit and measuring its capacity for moral action. My contention is that, though the novel becomes steadily more 'embodied' as the century proceeds (in that it achieves a more satisfying balance between the performative, or the dramatic, and the hortatory and the reflective), the genre returns persistently to the reservations of spiritual autobiographers such as Defoe and of satirists such as Swift, that the body has a disjunctive relationship to the realm of ideas. The body, in this sense, occupies a central and volatile position in the development of the novel in the period. Eighteenth-century novelists, in their manifest attention to corporeal matters, strive to understand the relationship of the body to their art, essaying an increasingly dramatic presentation of ideas while at the same time calling repeated attention to the limitations of such a project. Though the incarnation of things of the mind or spirit appears in hindsight one of the most distinctive markers of the novel, even (as Shelley appears to argue in Frankenstein) a prerequisite for the creation of viable art, the development of such a notion is neither uniform nor consistent in the period. The dislocation of focus of Robinson Crusoe and Victor Frankenstein (their failure L'imagination ... est la condition nécessaire de la liberté de l'homme empirique au milieu du monde. Jean-Paul Sartre, L'Imaginaire He lacked the poetic touch. Charles Mackay (?) on Defoe Midway through Robinson Crusoe, in one of the tale's most celebrated moments, Crusoe comes unexpectedly upon a solitary footprint in the sand. The scene -at once stark (in the austerity of its detail) and inflammatory (in the terrified speculation that it inspires on Crusoe's part) -epitomizes the power and the problem of the physical in Defoe's novel. As a single print (rather than one of two, or many), the mark disturbs the possibility of easy interpretation, encouraging reading on a number of mutually exclusive levels. It signifies, in Crusoe's mind, either a spiritual presence (the devil) or a physical being (a human: himself or a savage); to the reader, or to Defoe, it may suggest, more complexly, some conflation of these alternatives. Challenging the outlines of Crusoe's spatial and temporal world (for what it signifies lies in an unretrievable moment in time), its origin on this most real of islands is, presumably, self-evident, deriving from a perfectly natural cause, yet in its singleness it is somehow monitory, appearing to carry a message from a supernatural realm. Crusoe's response to this most paradoxical and paradigmatic of signs seems simultaneously to unleash and to defy verbal expression. He lavishes upon the footprint a wild overflow of fearful imaginings, 'innumerable fluttering Thoughts' (112), in which his 'affrighted Imagination' conjures up 'various Shapes,' 'wild Ideas,' and 'strange unaccountable Whimsies' (112), fears,

Falling into Matter examines the complex role of the body in the development of the English novel in the eighteenth century. Elizabeth R. Napier argues that despite an increasing emphasis on the need to present ideas in corporeal terms, early fiction writers continued to register spiritual and moral reservations about the centrality of the body to human and imaginative experience.

Drawing on six works of early English fiction — Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple Story, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein - Napier examines how authors grappled with technical and philosophical issues of the body, questioning its capacity for moral action, its relationship to individual freedom and dignity, and its role in the creation of art. Falling into Matter charts the course of the early novel as its authors engaged formally, stylistically, and thematically with the increasingly insistent role of the body in the new genre.

"Falling into Matter examines the complex role of the body in the development of the English novel in the eighteenth century. Elizabeth R. Napier argues that despite an increasing emphasis on the need to present ideas in corporeal terms, early fiction writers continued to register spiritual and moral reservations about the centrality of the body to human and imaginative experience. Drawing on six works of early English fiction--Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple Story, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein--Napier examines how authors grappled with technical and philosophical issues of the body, questioning its capacity for moral action, its relationship to individual freedom and dignity, and its role in the creation of art. Falling into Matter charts the course of the early novel as its authors engaged formally, stylistically, and thematically with the increasingly insistent role of the body in the new genre."--Jacket Falling into Matter examines the complex role of the body in the development of the English novel in the eighteenth century. Elizabeth R. Napier argues that despite an increasing emphasis on the need to present ideas in corporeal terms, early fiction writers continued to register spiritual and moral reservations about the centrality of the body to human and imaginative experience. Drawing on six works of early English fiction - Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple Story, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein - Napier examines how authors grappled with technical and philosophical issues of the body, questioning its capacity for moral action, its relationship to individual freedom and dignity, and its role in the creation of art. Falling into Matter charts the course of the early novel as its authors engaged formally, stylistically, and thematically with the increasingly insistent role of the body in the new genre Contents 7 Acknowledgments 9 Introduction 11 1 Robinson Crusoe: Discord 19 2 Gulliver’s Travels: Shock 45 3 Clarissa: Grace 80 4 Tom Jones: Cohesion 107 5 A Simple Story: Dissipation 143 6 Frankenstein: Dissociation 184 Epilogue 202 Notes 205 Works Cited 243 Index 265