@article{THESIS,
      recid = {1889},
      author = {Womble, David Avari Patrick},
      title = {The Physiology of the Multitude: Mass Bodies and the  Novel, 1748-1907},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2019-06},
      number = {THESIS},
      pages = {204},
      abstract = {The Physiology of the Multitude addresses a paradox that  played out over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries  around the British novel. During precisely the years when  rational-choice economics and democratic liberalism both  began to insist that individual free will would decide the  political future, scientific vocabularies equally  forcefully attributed action and decision to involuntary  biological and social-systemic processes, rather than  conscious choice. Over the course of the eighteenth and  nineteenth centuries, natural sciences of the individuated  body and social sciences of collectivity redefined the  standards for what counted as realistic representations of  human experience. As a result, fiction emerged as the field  in which an increasingly mechanistic material body and  deterministic forms of mass behavior could contest  political, racial, and gendered fictions of why individuals  behave as they do. 

Focusing on fiction's unique formal  ability to move between dramatically different scales, I  show how novels in the years 1748-1907 combined the  insights of scientific disciplines that were not otherwise  in conversation with one another. Across a broad range of  fiction, action and emotion get usurped from the conscious  mind and are re-attributed either to the involuntary  impulses of the nervous system, or to crowds and masses  that seem to move, think, and feel as one. These novels  introduce a model of non-volitional action that draws a  connection between the body's unconscious biological  processes and the mindless behavior of large-scale masses.  The seemingly alien and often threatening features of the  masses come to be lodged beneath the skin of the  individual. At different points during these years,  novelists seized on new ways of aligning evolving  conceptions of the physical body with historically-specific  kinds of masses. 

Each of my chapters explains the  conceptual tools novelists used to superimpose the category  of involuntary behavior at the scale of the mass onto the  category of involuntary behavior in the body. In the first  chapter, Montesquieu's 1748 climate theory and Mary  Shelley's 1818 Frankenstein explore the way a body whose  biology contains the features of a population unsettled  conventions of political theory and literary form. The  second chapter reads Emily Brontë's 1847 Wuthering Heights  alongside the emergent concept of the species to ask what  new kinds of relations form among individuals when their  bodies are understood to be composed of the same kind of  flesh. The third chapter uses the physiological psychology  popularized by George Eliot's life-partner, G.H. Lewes, to  put Eliot's strange short work The Lifted Veil (1859) into  conversation with Daniel Deronda (1876), arguing that Eliot  points to the preconscious modes of thought that arise from  the body as a way of navigating the chaos of crowd behavior  and transforming anonymous encounters into meaningful  relationships. The final chapter addresses globalism in  late-century adventure and spy fiction; the "deep time" of  Victorian geology in H. Rider Haggard's 1885 King Solomon's  Mines and standardized Greenwich time in Joseph Conrad's  1907 The Secret Agent both work to embed individual bodies  within planetary configurations of human life.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/1889},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.1889},
}