The Social Life of Fluids - by Jules David Law (Hardcover)

About the Book

Analyzing the expression of scientific understanding and the technological manipulation of fluids--blood, breast milk, and water--in Victorian novels, Law traces the culture's growing anxiety about fluids from the 1830s through the 1890s.

Book Synopsis

British Victorians were obsessed with fluids--with their scarcity and with their omnipresence. By the mid-nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of citizens regularly petitioned the government to provide running water and adequate sewerage, while scientists and journalists fretted over the circulation of bodily fluids. In The Social Life of Fluids Jules Law traces the fantasies of power and anxieties of identity precipitated by these developments as they found their way into the plotting and rhetoric of the Victorian novel.

Analyzing the expression of scientific understanding and the technological manipulation of fluids--blood, breast milk, and water--in six Victorian novels (by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, George Moore, and Bram Stoker), Law traces the growing anxiety about fluids in Victorian culture from the beginning of the sanitarian movement in the 1830s through the 1890s. Fluids, he finds, came to be regarded as the most alienable aspect of an otherwise inalienable human body, and, paradoxically, as the least rational element of an increasingly rationalized environment. Drawing on literary and feminist theory, social history, and the history of science and medicine, Law shows how fluids came to be represented as prosthetic extensions of identity, exposing them to contested claims of kinship and community and linking them inextricably to public spaces and public debates.

Review Quotes

"The Social Life of Fluids explores a wealth of material ranging from Victorian attitudes toward breastfeeding and blood transfusions to the embankment of the Thames, all in the course of providing sensitive readings of individual novels. In the process Jules Law redefines the relationship between the individual and the social body in terms of fluidity, of porous boundaries, of bodies that leak milk or blood, and of waters that flow over or out of bounds."

"In The Social Life of Fluids, Jules Law elegantly and persuasively traces how circulation becomes a central imaginative channel for Victorian anxieties about subjectivity and the social body. Offering consistently rigorous and readable analysis of the Victorian novel in the context of scientific, economic and political discourses, this fascinating study situates the dialectical flow of power between individual bodies and Victorian social technologies in the circulation of breast milk, water, and blood."

"Jules Law's illuminating analysis of historical practices and literary tropes reveals what is at stake in defining individual subjectivity through the integrity of the body. He probes how the possession and exchange of bodily fluids--their potential for manipulation, substitution, and dissolution in the larger social and economic field--came to signify the vulnerability of the private self. Law's study of this intricate exchange between bodily fluids and the social environment makes it impossible to look at milk, blood, or water in the same way again."

About the Author

Jules Law is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Charles Deering McCormick is Professor of Teaching Excellence at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Rhetoric of Empiricism: Language and Perception from Locke to I. A. Richards.