Victorian Waters Flashcards
- What is Trans-corporeality? (Alaimo)
- intrinsic enmeshment between humans and the more-than-human world.
- “reveals the interchanges and interconnections between various bodily natures” and highlights the “movement across bodies”
- “bodies and places are continuous”
→ a new approach to bodies, and a new understanding of space. Trans-corporeal space is a continuum “in which the human body can never be disentangled from the material world”
2 Trans-corporeality (Stacy Alaimo)
- Trans-corporeality “opens up a mobile space that acknowledges the often unpredictable and unwanted actions of human bodies”
→ brings into view the circulation of human matter in the more-than-human world-
1 Bodies of Water (Astrida Neimanis)
- What does it mean to embody water?
- (How) Can this help us understand the “planetary mess of the
Anthropocene”?
Anthropocene = the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment.
2 Bodies of Water (Astrida Neimanis)
- Where is my body? When is it? Why is it?
- Where and how do these membranes break down?
- Constant liquid exchange between body and environment
- water cycles and recycles through the world
- molecules of water take on history
Who wrote “Far from the Madding Crowd” (1874)?
Thomas Hardy
Victorian Water Pollution: The River Thames
- Urbanisation
- 1801, Greater London population = 1 million
- 1901, Greater London population = 6,5 million
→ new filth consciousness - Sanitary reform: theory of disease aetiology: miasma - Water as cleansing-agent
What’s the miasma theory?
- Miasma was considered to be a poisonous vapor or mist filled with particles from decomposed matter (miasmata) that caused illnesses. The miasmatic position was that diseases were the product of environmental factors such as contaminated water, foul air, and poor hygienic conditions. Such infection was not passed between individuals but would affect individuals within the locale that gave rise to such vapors. It was identifiable by its foul smell. It was also initially believed that miasmas were propagated through worms from ulcers within those affected by a plague.
- theory gives water agency
Sanitary Reform – 2 views of aquatic agency
- Dangerous – miasma theory: water and moisture produce disease.
- Beneficial – waterborne waste disposal: water as cleansing agent
–> discourse around Thames lead to other discourses about water and its polution
Victorian Water Pollution: The River Thames
1815 – legal to flush domestic waste into rivers
1848 – Metropolitan Commission of Sewers: close cesspits, connect houses to public sewers (and hence to the river)
→ drain and purify houses → the streets → the river
1858 – The Great Stink: collapse of the Tames
Dickens “Bleak House”
read summary
Who wrote “The Bridge of Sighs”?
Thomas Hobbs
read summary –> female suicide
Water and Women
VIctorian Londoners were inundated with images of drowned women …. Women’s suicidal leaps were captured in illustrated newspapers, sold in one shilling books, presented in theaters, displayed at the Royal Academy of Art, and narrated in literature. Early in the era, the iconography became well-established and ahistoric: a composition framed by an arch; a moonlit setting; a beautiful, unscathed corpse; and a fall from Blackfriars or Waterloo Bridge, allowing St. Paul’s Cathedral to be moralistically included in the background.
–> Women use water to drown themselves, meaning their sins have washed away, they’re back to being pure and innocent. It’s also proof a sexual transgression has happened
Who wrote Adam Bede?
George Eliot (1859)
read summary
Conclusion Victorian Waters
- Circulation of matter; connection between bodies
- Technology; question of regulation
- River Thames – health concern, national disgrace & shame
- Social meaning – new urban centres
- Symbolic connection – female drowning
