Passing Forms: Decay and the Making of Victorian Culture

From sociological studies of urban squalor and sanitary reform, to critiques of the politics of prostitution, pathology, poverty, and criminology, criticism has tended to read nineteenth-century “decay” as an ideological apparatus keyed to the discursive policing of wayward, diseased, and abnormal body. Read through the Victorian theories of degeneration and decadence, on the one hand, and the contemporary discourses of defilement and abjection, on the other, criticism has tended to cast decay has a symbolic register for the period’s ideological investment in normative progressive development, such that backwardness, depravity, and devolution are reified and read as symptomatic fears of taxonomic transgression. As my project demonstrates, however, in their minute and sustained attentions to the periodic pattern of dissolution and re-formation, the Victorians came to view decay as the conditional possibility for form’s continual emergence. Decay was not “matter out of place.” It was matter ceaselessly reforming itself on the stream of time. This conception of decay, in turn, reconfigures our critical interpretation of the Victorian ideologies of life, growth, progress, and reform. Decay does not pathologically mark the failure of progressive ideology; instead, it expresses the plasticity necessary for ceaseless growth./nRecuperating the temporal dynamics of formation-in-decay, this project rethinks the categorical coordinates of abjection and defilement. In a world where everything—the pulsations of electromagnetic waves, the geomorphic crust of the earth, the mineralogical components of crystals, and, of course, the cellular tissues of biological bodies—was constantly dissolving and recombining, it does not make sense to speak of the singular, delimited subject’s confrontation with the contaminating, liminal object. Rather, we must speak of the multiple, heterogeneous, and simultaneous “interabsorption” of subjects and objects. In their investigations of this horizontal relationality, the Victorian theorists of decay emphasized the rhythms of doing and undoing and, thus, folded the abject processes of expulsion and rejection into the experience of growth and development. Accordingly, this project focuses on the self-formation of the porous individual in relationship to the ever-dissolving and ever-renewing world. I argue that these manifold entities mutually emerged through the shared rhythms of decay – eddies and rests, drifts and advances – revealing the possibilities that linger in formlessness. Decay’s negations, thus, allowed for radical conceptions of receptivity, as the individual pocketed and secreted temporal absences that allowed for potent possibilities – ethical rebirth, transhistorical connectivity, exquisite moments of ecstasy. Turning to the tremulous self-formations of Esther Summerson and Richard Carstone in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House (1852-53), the nubile girls of Winnington Hall in John Ruskin’s The Ethics of the Dust (1865), the budding aesthete in Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), and the doomed Lucian Taylor in Arthur Machen’s The Hill of Dreams (1907), this project reframes critical debates about abject materiality to address the environmental affordances of formlessness.

Advisor: Duncan, Ian