Romanticism, Materialism, and the Origins of Modern Pornography

Consider that well-known passage in Middlemarch (1871) where Eliot describes Lydgate's intellectual epiphany: Beating close to the thematic heart of the novel, this passage presents a series of artfully managed oppositions: high and low, open and shut, light and dark, seen and unseen, new and old, and—most importantly—known and unknown. The issue is transformation: as the rational mind contemplates the mysteries of its material body, innocence is lost, experience gained, and "intellectual passion" displaces the "wordy ignorance" of "liberal education." The passage is remarkable for that authorial vigor, which, like the organ in question, pumps word after word with daunting precision and purpose. Of particular interest is Eliot's choice of the word "obscene." Again: "A liberal education had of course left him free to read the indecent passages in the school classics, but beyond a general sense of secrecy and obscenity in connection with his internal structure, had left his imagination quite unbiassed, so that for anything he knew his brains lay in small bags at his temples, and he had no more thought of representing to himself how his blood circulated than how paper served instead of gold." From the Greek meaning "off or behind the stage," "obscenity" suggests that which is visually prohibited—because of its violent, coarse, or sexual nature—but that which is indispensable to, if not the cause of, the staged events. In Eliot's rendering, "obscenity" moves outward from the "indecent passages" of classical authors and into human subjectivity. "Obscenity" is then internalized as the unseen but unavoidable physicality of the body, the material precondition of the rational mind. At the moment of epiphany, Lydgate's "unbiassed" imagination dispels the obscene and reconceptualizes the material reality of the body as a series of mysterious but ultimately knowable biological processes. It matters greatly, of course, that Eliot will correct Lydgate's scientific presumption. When Rosamond's lip trembles and Lydgate succumbs, we are to be aware that he who seeks to know the human heart has just profoundly misread his own. Like his counterpart, Bulstrode, or Casaubon—that poster child of academic dysfunction—Lydgate will repeatedly overestimate his own intellectual power and underestimate the power of the social, political, and economic networks in which he is situated. It matters even more, however, that Middlemarch is most emphatically set in the years immediately preceding the Reform Bill of 1832 and that the novel is itself very much concerned with the cultural transformation that Britain underwent during that period. Eliot carefully provides a detailed and inclusive record of the emergence of a new British social and political identity—a new state "character" if you will. Thus, it is no accident that Lydgate's intellectual epiphany coincides historically with the emergence of modern scientific discourse. As Marilyn Gaull points out in her useful history, English Romanticism, 1831 saw the formation of The British Association for the Advancement of Science and thus serves as a convenient date from which to mark the end of the old scientific "populism" and the beginning—institutionally, discursively, and ideologically—of a new scientific "professionalism." That professionalism, much like Lydgate himself, presumptuously challenged traditional pieties as it established new standards against which to measure the production and consumption of scientific knowledge. Coincidentally or not—and I believe not—the late 1820s and early 1830s also witnessed the emergence of another discourse of paramount interest to the modern state: pornography. Unlike obscenity, its larger and more inclusive discursive parent, "pornography" is a nineteenth-century neologism, and it refers specifically to graphic images or narratives that have been mass-produced for the sexual use of their consumers. Art historians and bibliographers might be quick to object to my chronology—with the …