Abstract

Magnetic Attractions examines how conceptualizing the human body was central to specific discourses in nineteenth century Europe. I investigate the relationship between bodies and "bodies" of knowledge as a rhetorical, epistemological, and ideological articulation. I begin with Hegel's conceptualization of the maternal body, in the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, as having "animal magnetic" powers. The mother has power over the fetus, Hegel argues, but only to endow it with "non-philosophical" qualities. Yet I contend that postulating this maternal power actually enables Hegel in the Aesthetics to define artistic creativity, as well as to justify aesthetics as a philosophical science. I then examine the discourse of animal magnetism, investigating its attempt to reveal the body's hidden powers. These powers, I argue, were related to what Michel Foucault terms the "intensification of the body" within "bourgeois self-regulation." Paradoxically, magnetic states were believed to heighten the powers of the will while the patient was under the magnetizer's hypnotic control, a paradox with important implications for contemporary debates about sexuality and power. My third chapter turns to Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus as a dramatization of the way sexuality has come to organize erotic fantasy as a signifier of psychological truth. Walton's and Frankenstein's fantasies of an ideal male companion, linked with scientific knowledge and the pursuit of nature's "truths," are homoerotic fantasies which ultimately are judged according to the paradigm of a "natural" sexual reproductivity. By looking at the early nineteenth-century conceptualizations of erotic fantasy, I contend, we can better understand why the paradigm of sexual reproductivity renders homoerotic fantasy as the literal, "filthy" truth of homosexual identity that would only clearly emerge five decades later. In the last chapter I examine the relationship between Percy Shelley's corpse, his corpus, and the literary canon. I argue that the Victorian fascination with Shelley's allegedly feminine body was problematized by the link between male femininity and homosexuality. To overcome this link, the Victorian veneration for Shelley was sublimated into what I call his "textual fetishism," the normative and normalizing mechanisms of textual authority and canonical value