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."
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