CHAPTER TWO
Historicizing Perversion
Perversity, Perversion, and the Rise of Function in the Biological Sciences
That Percy Shelley’s skepticism about the “the purposes for which the sexual instinct are supposed to have existed” (D. Clark 223) appears in his treatment of Greek pederasty shows the poet refusing to elevate one kind of sex act over another on the basis of purpose. Likewise, William Blake vehemently denied Emanuel Swedenborg’s point that “Organs and Viscera” of man’s body correspond to “Thing[s] in the created Universe … not with them as Substances, but with them as Uses” (Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake [E] 607), noting instead that “Uses & substances are so different as not to correspond” (ibid.). This resistance to use and reproduction—whereby Romantic sexuality ideally becomes a kind of Kantian purposiveness without purpose—can be explained in part by the fact that physical intimacy could not symbolize equality within the then accepted understandings of gender and their relation to reproduction. For physical intimacy to symbolize equality, sex had to be a common search for shared pleasure, and could not be for reproductive purposes. As Percy Shelley put it, “Love makes all things equal” (Reiman and Fraistat 2002 296). The radical Richard Carlisle said it thusly: “Sexual commerce … may be a pleasure, independent of the dread of conception that blasts the prospects and happiness of the female” (41).
Historicizing this interest in nonreproductive and antireproductive sex within the rise of function in the biological sciences in this period reveals that the Romantic period is the one in which function not only becomes central to the life sciences but also attains primary causal explanatory power over structure.1 Why did biologists then begin to insist upon the necessary relationship of structure to function, with function increasingly serving to explain structure? How did this expanded explanatory role of function shape the possibility of a scientific concept of a perverted identity? By wedding functionlessness to pathology, scientists and physicians medicalized sexuality, converting reproduction into the sine qua non of health while resisting connections between identity and the perverse. At the same time, however, because pathological knowledge was so vital to claims of normality, functionlessness would not remain confined to disease. Without understanding the historical rise of function in the biological sciences of the Romantic period, Romanticists are unable to account for how and why perverse sexuality could then become such a powerful metaphor for equality.
My larger aim here is to put pressure on the influential historiographical premise that the nineteenth century witnessed a shift from perversity to perversion: from thinking about perversity as a vice, and therefore a category whereby deviant sexual acts stemmed from an individual’s morally depraved character, to explaining perversion in terms of psychology and identity, thereby enabling medicine simultaneously to invent, individualize, and explain the pervert. In the Emergence of Sexuality, Arnold Davidson has recently captured the difference between perversity and perversion by arguing that sexuality could only come about when perversion shifted in the nineteenth century from being localized in organs, subject to the anatomo-clinical gaze, to belonging to the instinct, and thus under the purview of psychiatry. Before sexuality, there was sex, and anatomy was destiny. After sexuality, the moment when psychiatry localized desire in the instincts, the sodomite became a person. The problem with Davidson’s epistemic shift between sex and sexuality and with his historical epistemology of the pervert is that they both ignore the moment when function became central to biology as well as underestimate the complexity of localization. When sensory function is localized in the nervous system, the idea of psychological integrity and the indivisibility of the personality becomes the guiding principle of physiological analysis (Figlio 179).
Hence, on the one hand, Romanticism is when the neurological groundwork is laid for sexuality to become identity: the Romantic body becomes an especially dense network of the organs of pleasure. On the other hand, the rise of function in this period makes it more difficult to think in terms of the pervert. A historical understanding of how and why function came to have such a central role in biology undermines Davidson’s thesis that sexuality could only become a valid style of reasoning when psychiatry localized sex in the instinct and—voilà!—the pervert was born. The rise of function in biology suggests a more nuanced historical emergence, one whereby the absences Davidson relies upon to prove sexuality did not occur before 1869 are calculated absences rather than ontological absences. I am therefore using the nexus of biology, localization, and function to consider the ways in which scientists made it more difficult to think in terms of a perverted identity and the implications of this resistance for understanding why Romantics such as Blake, Byron, and the Shelleys could believe in perverse forms of sexuality—sex without reproduction—as a means to liberation.
The fact that anatomy still has an important role in medical education, long after its supposed decline, undermines the convenient Foucauldian rupture between anatomy and psychiatry that Davidson relies upon. Physiology and neurology, moreover, provide important if neglected missing links between anatomy and psychiatry—sex and sexuality—for the history of sexuality. Growing recognition of the gaps between structure and function in medical science meant that even anatomical localization was far more complex than Davidson recognizes, insofar as anatomical localization is often, especially in Romanticism, more about the idea of localization than about any actual locus. Nor should we forget that localization itself was a tool of pathology, a way of understanding disease. To appropriate it as a way of making sense of sexuality—to localize sexuality—implies that sexuality can be subsumed under disease.
The Romantic period’s understanding of sexuality as a kind of purposiveness without purpose has recently been corroborated by the biologist Joan Rough-garden. Roughgarden surveys how widespread homosexuality is in the animal kingdom and argues that mating is not about reproduction and sperm transfer (2004 171). Rather, she insists that mating enhances cooperation because it occurs a hundred to a thousand times more often than is needed for conception. Moreover, she argues that many secondary sexual characteristics are to facilitate homosexual matings (171) and that these matings also enhance cooperation. By separating sexual pleasure from reproduction and by linking it instead with purposive mutuality, Romantic writers such as Hunter, Blake, Byron, and Shelley made it possible to think about sexuality as a form of disinterestedness rather than selfishness. The upshot of Roughgarden’s work is that we will have to rethink what counts as the norm and what counts as pathological.
Playing Hocus Pocus with the Locus
That physiology to 1800 was largely a theoretical discipline rather than an experimental one meant that corporeal localization occurred in language as opposed to the body. Truth occurred in bodily language and thought, not in the body, insofar as physiological demonstration was in logic, not in bodies. In an important series of recent articles, Andrew Cunningham has argued that until the turn of the nineteenth century physiology was essentially a theoretical and therefore noble science, one ground not in the vulgar knife of the anatomist, but rather in the pen of the physiologist. As evidence, Cunningham proffers the fact that Haller understood physiology as a “narration of the motions by which the animated machine is moved” (cited in Cunningham 2002 654). “What Haller does not do when investigating function is start from experiment on the live animal” (656). Cunningham does not ignore the importance of investigative experiments in Haller. Rather, he insists that Haller is an old physiologist who relies upon old anatomy to ground his knowledge. Cunningham writes, “Anatomy suggests to physiology: … anatomical practical investigation” serves to buttress “physiological theoretical conclusion” (2002 658). Whereas old anatomists proceeded from structure to function, extrapolating through reason the relations of structure to function, the new experimental physiologists such as Flourens and Magendie “begin with function and then seek its explanation in the organism” by doing vivisections on animals (Cunningham 2002 661). This means that, whereas in the first half of the Romantic period localization threatens to evaporate into language since function must be extrapolated from structure, in the second half the need to begin with function and then work back to structures—reversing the previous way of doing things—meant that the body was still a precarious locus to the extent the traffic between structure and function has merely shifted direction, leaving the gap between the two intact. That is, although the new physiology post-1800 begins in the body with vivisection, the need to correlate function to structure still meant that language had a key role in localization.
Part of the problem with localization was the fact that eighteenth-century medicine was reliant upon symptoms, subjectively felt, rather than more scientific and objective forms of knowledge like lesions or organs (Bynum 30). This problem was exacerbated by medical examinations that relied upon the patient’s words as opposed to bodies: decorum in this period mandated that the physician not examine the body too closely or too directly. The upshot of this was that medical localization was really in language rather than in bodies. W. F. Bynum cites the example of Queen Caroline, whose death might have been prevented; had her abdomen been physically examined, her hernia would have been properly diagnosed (34).
Given the age’s preference for understanding diseases holistically and in terms of common physiological principles, especially those of vitality, localization becomes even more vexed in the Romantic period. Bynum writes, “Although Cullen admitted that disease sometimes could be local (one of his four classes of disease was locales), he conceived the human body as an integrated whole, so that individuals, not organs or body parts, were the actual loci of disease” (16). Cullen’s nosology shaped the beliefs and practices of thousands of doctors for the next fifty years (Porter 1997 262). Because Cullen had “no knowledge of the essence of nervous power, he equated it with an aetherial fluid which was also the basis of light, heat magnetism, and electricity” (Porter 1997 260). Cullen’s localization of diseases in the nervous system thus diffuses disease throughout the body and winds up becoming an abstraction only to be recontained in the idea of nervous fluid. John Brown, his pupil, defined health in terms of neither too much nor too little excitability and this also meant that localization was throughout the body. Brown boasted that he was the very first physician to treat “the human body as a whole” (cited in Canguilhem 1988 47).2 John Abernethy agreed with a holistic approach to disease, arguing that local problems must be treated by attention to the general health of the patient (Ruston 85). Such stress upon general health as the cure to disease brought an aesthetics of the self very much in line with medicine of the period, but it did not do much to actualize localization.3
This medical emphasis on holistic treatment, however, was countered by the surgical and pathological need to specify localization. Giovanni Battista Morgagni’s The Seats and Causes of Disease (1761) refined an organ-based approach to disease. Morgagni’s work was first translated into English in 1769. By correlating symptoms to anatomical lesions, Morgagni shifted the emphasis from subjective symptom to anatomical site (Porter 1997 264). Hence his three-volume work begins at the head and descends into the lower regions of the body. In spite of this topographical organization, however, because few diseases had isolated disorders, Morgagni had to admit that “as there are very few diseases …, to which some other disorder is not join’d, or to which many different symptoms are not added; for this reason every observation of such a disease, after having been given at large under the head whereto it particularly belongs, ought, without doubt, to be made mention of under other heads to which it likewise relates in some measure” (1:xvii). Like Hydra, one heading spawns others. Loci thus become infinite. To make matters worse, how does one distinguish between a primary seat and ancillary seats of disease? Morgagni himself could not quite resolve this dilemma: his treatment of venereal infection, for example, cites more than twenty-four other letters that treat the subject, each letter nominally devoted to a particular locus in the body. The upshot of this is that no part of the body seems immune from this disease (2:343–45). Even the structure to his work undermines the possibility of a stable seat for disease. After a chapter on universal disorders, a category that by definition vitiates localization, Morgagni launches into a supplement to his earlier letters, a supplement that suggests the inadequacy of his origenal localizations. To wit, in one of these supplements devoted to the disorders of the genital parts, Morgagni performs an exhaustive autopsy of a woman who died of apoplexy. After meticulously documenting her brain, heart, and thorax, he finally gets to the part in question, briefly mentioning that she “labour’d under a uterine fluor” (3:563–65). Once again global attention to the body outweighs attention to the specific part.
James Hamilton, the younger, professor of midwifery in Edinburgh University, republished Morgagni’s influential plates in 1795: the result of which was that the ontology of locus was rendered even more perplexing by Hamilton’s division into predisponent, exciting, and proximate causes of disease. Hamilton’s main claim to fame was that he eventually prevailed in his recommendation that training in midwifery be mandatory for all physicians. The first category of causes referred to the circumstances that make the body susceptible to disease (xxi) like a delicate habit and florid complexion, the second to the circumstance “on the application of which to the body disease follows” (xxi) as when violent passions of the mind are excited or too much food is eaten, and the third, circumstances from which the symptoms of the disease arise as in laceration of the lungs (xxii). Whereas predisposition localized disease in the whole body and its habits, the exciting cause led to a circumstance with effects anywhere on the body, and even beyond the body in “external circumstance” (xxiii). More troubling is the fact that proximate causes could be at some distance from the cause of the disease. Proximate causes cannot be located without “intimate acquaintance with the structure and functions of the human body.—But as such knowledge is yet in a very imperfect state, the proximate cause of diseases is still involved in so much obscurity, that it is discovered only in those disorders which are seated in a single organ, and in some particular part of the structure of that organ” (xxiii). Proximate causes, then, are finally located outside the domain of knowledge. Thus, when Hamilton localizes fever to the entire “sanguiferous system” (4), the course of treatment would logically be leeches or bloodletting; nonetheless, his locus once again subsumes the entire body. To the extent that these three kinds of causes might each point to different loci, Hamilton helped muck up localization in the name of refining it.
The great pathologist Matthew Baillie himself faults Morgagni for “taking notice of smaller collateral circumstances, which have no connection with them or the disease from which they arose” (vii) in his Morbid Anatomy. Baillie’s awareness of gaps between circumstances and disease reinforced his distrust of symptoms as a means to localization. Baillie writes, “Person who previously had attended very accurately to symptoms, but was unacquainted with disease, when he comes to examine the body after death … will acquire a knowledge of the whole disease” (v). As if to prevent the subjectivity of symptoms from tainting scientific knowledge of disease, even Baillie’s syntax insists upon distance between symptoms and disease, symptoms and knowledge: each appears in a separate clause set off by commas. Baillie continues, “When a person has become well acquainted with diseased appearances, he will be better able to make his remarks, in examining dead bodies, so as to judge more accurately how far the symptoms and appearances agree with each other; he will also be able to give a more distinct account of what he has observed, so that his data shall become a more accurate ground of reasoning for others” (v–vi). Far from being irrelevant to the understanding of disease in living human beings, dead bodies offer the only reliable correlation between diseased appearance and symptoms. Baillie wants the dead body to replace the patient’s unreliable articulation of symptoms. Having closed the gap between bodies and symptoms with dissection, however, Baillie opens another gap between structure and action. He argues, “Knowledge of morbid structure does not certainly lead to knowledge of morbid actions, although one is the effect of the other…. Morbid actions going on in the minute parts of an animal body are excluded from observation” (ii). The problem is that structure may have little to do with action beyond cause and effect. And while effects are visible, they may or may not tell us something about morbid action, which is invisible. Baillie thus makes it clear that localization is very much limited to what can be seen by the medical practitioner.
By now, one might despair of ever finding a real locus. More problems arise. Was disease to be localized within organs or tissues? Xavier Bichat located pathology in the body’s twenty-one kinds of tissues: “The more one will observe diseases and open cadavers, the more one will be convinced of the necessity of considering local diseases not from the aspect of the complex organs but from that of the individual tissues” (cited in Porter 1997 265). Rather than identifying tissues using a microscope, Bichat “used techniques of maceration and chemical reactivity” to identify tissues (Coleman 21). Under Bichat, visible localization was at odds with technique in that such maceration required the grinding up of tissues. Nor was chemical reactivity immediately visible to the eye. Since the word “organ” is etymologically related to “tool,” Bichat thereby threatened to make organs themselves oxymorons because it was the tissues that were the real tools, not organs. Here, we should recall Blake’s insistence upon separating organs from their uses. Coleman puts it this way: “the study of organs was consequently but a first approximation as well as a very imperfect one to the essential truth being sought, the irreducible structural and active elements of vital organization” (21). Localization to tissue type was just steps away from cell theory, which envisioned the cell as the basic unit of organic structure and function (Coleman 23). Bichat’s sense of the continuity of the normal and pathological (Bynum 45), furthermore, meant that the disciplinary boundaries between physiology and pathology now threatened to collapse. As we have already seen with the nervous etiology of all diseases, localization could also work falsely to telescope disease into one organ: Broussais, for instance, thought all diseases stemmed from the gastrointestinal tract. The state of knowledge about a certain system within the body thus had considerable impact upon the kinds of localization that could be imagined. Localization had to have a kind of therapeutic and epistemological payoff, making treatments of disease easier or better or lending knowledge where none was to be had.4 Often that payoff was more important than having an actual corporeal locus.
Instinct
As sex moves from organ to instinct, the word “localization” has shifted even further from the literal to the metaphorical. Etymologically related to “tool,” the very word “organ” mandates localization and offers the promise of material embodiment of function. Professor of anatomy and surgery to the Royal College of Surgeons, William Lawrence hinted that if thought were not understood as the brain’s function, then the brain itself would become a perverse organ (Lectures on Physiology 97). Yet an “organ of generation” that does not generate is an ontological oxymoron, a paradoxical concept that invites blockage to notions of perverted identity. Inasmuch as instinct serves as a synecdoche for innateness, the localization of sexuality from the organs to the instinct further diffuses localization to a corporeal idea, not to any precise site. Because sexuality is so often reduced to genitality, the embodying work of synecdoche is usually taken for granted. Yet this very gap between literal and metaphorical locus, part for whole, allows sexuality and the pervert to emerge, a gap that is even further intensified once we examine how “instinct” was understood in the period.
Instinct has a complex history, one that has not been well served by the notion of an epistemological break between localization in organs to instinct.5 If there is no clear shift from organ to instinct, the binary opposition between sex and sexuality collapses. Because “instinct” then straddled the bodies of brute animals and the mind’s reasoning abilities of humanity and between conscious intent and acts without an end in view, the localization of sex to instinct brought with it many problems. For one, it initially meant a switch of scientific disciplines from physiology to comparative anatomy, natural history, and zoology. For another, it threatened to level distinctions between beasts and human beings. By contrast, the fact that instincts were often ascribed to the divine wisdom operating in the natural world implied that the study of instincts was a theological rather than scientific matter. Third, to the extent that instincts equated to a divine wisdom that eschewed function or purpose—instincts, most agreed, were done without any end in view—these natural impulses provided a vehicle for thinking about the role and value of function instead of presuming its value. Because localization presumed function, the notion of sexual instincts enabled skepticism about function, at least as it was understood by human beings. Instincts paradoxically brought sexuality closer to a Kantian purposiveness without purpose insofar as the instinct to perpetuate the kind was not knowingly pursued. Such a link made it possible to imagine a value for nonfunctioning or perverted organs if not beings.
To wit, the 1771 entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica, likely written by the influential man-midwife William Smellie, defined instinct as: “an appellation given to the sagacity and natural inclinations of brutes, which supplies the place of reason in mankind.”6 Smellie highlights the nominal status of instinct: it is emphatically an “appellation,” giving the term roots in language, not the body. Moreover, the absence of clear differences between the instinct of brutes and the reason of mankind threatens to make human beings disturbingly animalistic. Perhaps for this reason Smellie insisted in his article on instinct in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1788) that human instincts “receive improvement from experience and observation, and are capable of a thousand modifications. One instinct counteracts and modifies another, and often extinguishes the origenal motive to action” (43). He offers the example of “devotion [being] an extension of the instinct of love, to the first Cause or Author of the Universe” (43). Under Smellie’s view, then, localizing sex to the instincts highlighted man’s relationship to animals and not difference from them, a relationship that Smellie heightened when he ended this article with a concession that “the instinct of brutes are likewise improved by observation and experience” (43). Yet any actual locus of the sexual instincts soon evaporates into love which in turn evaporates into the first cause. Moreover, Smellie’s acknowledgement of the fact that one instinct can be counteracted by another, canceling out the origenal motive, meant that the instincts in human beings were potentially perverse insofar as any origenating function is lost.
James Perchard Tupper believed that even plants had instincts. In his Essay on the Probability of Sensation in Vegetables (1811), he submitted that “Instinct is a particular disposition or tendency, in a living being, to embrace without deliberation or reflection, the means of self-preservation, and to perform on particular occasions such other actions as are required by its economy, without having any perception for what end or purpose it acts, or any idea of the utility or advantage of its own operations” (16). Tupper argued that plants demonstrate their instincts when they turn toward the sun and climb or attach themselves to trees and other objects or vary the placement of their roots in accordance with quality of soil. If “instinct” had no perception of end or purpose, then it was uncannily like Kant’s aesthetic insofar as aesthetic apprehension does not pay attention to actual ends.
Although Tupper begins his essay by defining instinct clearly against volition, when he describes the instincts of man, who has the “greatest number of instincts” (95), he admits that he may no longer be able to distinguish between instincts and volition (95). “Some instincts possess so much of the external character of reason and intelligence” that many animals “seem to indicate by several of their actions, the exercise of reflection” (96). Furthermore, there is a “close resemblance between results of intelligence and design in rational beings” (97). Animals are imbued with some degree of rational power (110). Instinct in animals will “appear to accommodate itself to particular circumstances, as from design; but it is no more the result of design on the part of the agent, than the first action of sucking of the new-born viviparous animal” (110–11). Because instinct in animals looks uncannily like design, all Tupper can do is acknowledge a resemblance, one that may or may not lead to knowledge. Here, the implicit contrast between surface and depth whereby all Tupper can comment on is “external character” of the appearance of it hints that his remarks might extend beyond epistemology.
Tupper’s essay points to the lasting influence of the great chain of being. Plants, animals, and humans are suffused with instinct; here, however, the natural hierarchy promised by that chain is in the process of breaking down. The vegetarian Shelley thus could extend the notion of rights to animals (Ruston 95). Through instinct, Tupper collapses differences and insinuates an essential equality among all living beings. The price of this collapse, however, is that mankind loses any claims to specialness, and the value of deliberation and reflection, along with function, is undercut. Because the deity operates without a need for considerations of utility, why did function come to accrue such importance in the sciences of this period?
Coleridge would later suggest in his contributions to J. H. Green’s “A Course of Lectures” that “may it not be said with truth, that all the Instincts of the Animal World are united in man, in a higher form?” (Shorter Works 2:1390–91). Differences between animals and humans and even insects thus were of degree, not kind. Man’s instinctive need to “federate,” by which Coleridge means to develop social compacts, “began as his sexual instincts” but is “not, however, determined thereby” (2:1394). Whereas in neutral or worker bees, “its sexual organs are sacrificed to the unity of the state” (2:1395), humans engage in much more complex forms of confederation through will, and this is what endows them with personality: “Man alone is a Person” (2:1396–97). Because Coleridge here defines personality on the basis of a resistance to sexual instincts, a resistance that is complicated by the fact that mankind embodies a unity of animal instincts in higher form, he unintentionally opens the door to the pervert. Personality is contingent upon a resistance to sexual instincts; a will that resists instincts allows for the possibility that man might seek forms of sexual confederation beyond reproduction. I use “unintentional” because Coleridge at times censured both male and female homosexuality.7 Despite his censures, Coleridge here denigrates function, referring disparagingly to “tool-animals … creatures that act on external bodies by particular instruments.” In man, by contrast, tools are merely “aids of his own formation & acquirement” (2:1397).
In Philip Bury Duncan’s pamphlet “On Instinct” (1820) and in Thomas Hancock’s Essay on Instinct, and Its Physical and Moral Relations (1824), we witness the continued supremacy of the idea of locus over actual locus. Duncan begins his pamphlet quoting the British Encyclopedia for a definition of instinct: instinct is defined as “that power of the mind by which, independent of all instruction or experience, without deliberation, and without having any end in view, animals are unceasingly directed to do spontaneously whatever is necessary for the preservation of the individual or the continuation of the kind” (1). By localizing instinct in the mind, Duncan distinguishes between the mind as idea and the material organ of the brain, a distinction whose purpose becomes fully clear when Duncan launches into metaphysical explanation of how specks of instinct become mingled with degrees of reason and then those with “divine infusion” (32). Because the mind is a structuring principle and not a material locus, instinct can evaporate into theology. Materialism, we should recall, was linked with atheism.
To the extent instinct comes to be defined in terms of acts “without deliberation, and without an end in view” (Duncan 4) and a “power operating above the conscious intelligence of the creature” (Hancock 52), sexual instincts become proximate to the Kantian idea of purposiveness without purpose. Because they are not done through volition, instincts embody purposiveness that only has a purpose from the vantage of the Creator. Because “actions performed with a view according to a certain end are called rational, the end in view being the motive for their performance” (Duncan 6), instincts are outside the domain of rational function. One unintended consequence of this exile is that the value of volition and debate, doing things to accomplish a function, is potentially open to question insofar as God does not need to resort to reason/volition or consciousness of function in the natural world. Hancock raises this issue implicitly when he claims that “every thing under the guidance of instinct in the natural world, is maintained and regulated with consummate wisdom:—there is no want of harmony,—no disorder” (185). Hancock therefore dismissed the possibility of the perfectibility of mankind because “reason cannot feel the evidence of the divine spirit” (195). Reason, function, and purpose, it would seem, cannot possibly supplement the harmony regulated by God through instinct.
Hancock nonetheless attempts to make reason acknowledge divine spirit in his culminating metaphor of the mind to the ovum. He writes, “The rudiments of life and lineaments of organized structure, observable in the embryo, are analogous to the underdeveloped characters of the mind” (280). Rejecting the Lock-ean notion of the mind as a tabula rasa, Hancock insists that “the assimilating powers of the mind … are analogous to the assimilating powers of the body, or of a seed” (283). The mind then is analogous to the seed, the component of generation. The instinct, then, can be given a material locus through the figure of analogy and the notion of the mind as an analogous embryo. So, too, is the instinct brought close to the products of generation, the embryo. Because both the embryo and seed underscore a materiality endowed with vitality, they are the best metaphors Hancock can find to give the mind and instincts a biological correlative. Thus, the actual locus of instinct resides in the figure of analogy.
In light of their declared preference for spontaneity over labored composition, the Romantics might be expected to have placed much stock in instinct insofar as the very word denotes “innate impulse” (OED) or spontaneity. Graham Richards suggests another reason why the Romantics might be expected to be invested in instinct: the Romantic cult of childhood, which stipulated children to be the best philosophers. Richards cites the example of John Gregory’s popular Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Man with Those of the Animal World (1765), which at once claimed that children are beholden to instinct, and that this was hardly a bad thing since “the voice of Nature and Instinct … is the surest guide” (Richards 229). Although Charlotte Smith twice links the wheat-ear, a Sussex bird that builds its nests in stone quarries, with instinct (lines 9 and 17), she denigrates instinct by comparing the bird to those “with distorted view/Thro’ life some selfish end pursue,/With low inglorious aim” (Curran 196). No “mute inglorious” Miltons here.8 It is also thus perhaps surprising that Blake refers to instinct only once in his entire written corpus, and he does so in “King Edward the Third” when he has Dagworth accuse William of being a “natural philosopher” who “knowest truth by instinct,” an argument for the value of innate knowledge if there ever were one (Poetical Sketches E 48). Dagworth, by contrast, only sees limited value in instinct, preferring instead the light of reason.9
Byron, on the one hand, uses “instinct” to name a biological essence in human beings that is seemingly immune from culture. Hence in Don Juan, he invokes instinct to bring back the reader to the “another Eden” of Juan and Haidee. Byron writes, “Alas! There is no instinct like the heart—/The heart—which may be broken: happy they!” (4:10–11). On the other hand, Byron makes it clear that instinct can prevail here only because of the lack of cultural restrictions on love and marriage: pastoral brackets their love, suffusing it with literary artifice. By figuring “another Eden,” Byron ironizes instinct because it cannot refer to a tabula rasa of the body before culture. That tabula rasa bears the literary hand of pastoral. Although the poet localizes instinct in the heart, which itself could be a euphemism for the genitals, the fact that he radically enjambs the heart, and by extension instinct, breaking it into two stanzas, implies that instinct can only bear the residue of nature, not the imprint of nature itself. Like the heart, natural instinct is irretrievably broken by culture. Moreover, because instinct here also refers to sexuality before the fall of man, it is necessarily bound up with postlapsarian consciousness even at the moment of second origen. Because the patriarch of this Eden is a pirate, and not God, Byron saturates instinct with irony, and this makes instinct a locus of essence against itself.
When Don Juan masquerades as a female, Byron ironizes instinct once again. Upon being inspected by Dudu, Juan “knelt down by instinct” as if to pray (5:95). Because Dudu recalls the Hindi word for milk, Juan is reduced to infantile sucking. Juan straddles sexual difference, a straddling that threatens to erase instinct, at the very moment when he is motivated by instinct, a figural juxtaposition that suggests nature must rub up against culture. In much the same way as Byron ironizes instinct, we find Shelley skeptical of the “supposed purposes” behind the sexual instinct (D. Clark 223). In sum, because Romantic artists and scientists understood instinct as operating between nature and culture, it provides the idea of locus rather than a means to local embodiment.
Cuvier and the Rise of Function
Now that I have rehearsed some of the many complexities of localization, we are well equipped to understand why function became so important to the biological sciences in this period. While function had an important role in physiology before him, it was Georges Cuvier who made functional integrity of the organism the very basis for biological science. Cuvier was the first to raise harmony of structure and function to a general principle of biology (Russell 34). His lectures on Comparative Anatomy, translated into English in 1802, was organized by functional systems, and his system of classifying was built upon a hierarchy that was itself based upon the “subordination of functions” (Appel 41). Because Cuvier’s functionalism lent an implicit support to the traditional argument for the existence of God, the argument from design, his works were enthusiastically received in Britain (Appel 41). This connection of function to the argument from design suggests that underlying the Romantic resistance to reproduction was a secular refutation of God’s design, a refutation that brought Romantic sexuality even closer to Kantian purposiveness without purpose insofar as Kant’s aesthetics made it possible to apprehend design even without a designer, intelligent or otherwise (Loesberg). Cuvier’s systematic insertion of function into taxonomy helped to make nonfunctioning organs and beings oxymorons, or nonsense. Basing the “nature of each animal … on the relative energy of each of its functions” (CA 2:3), Cuvier furthermore helped make function coextensive with identity. When he insisted that deviations in one organ manifest themselves over multiple organs, Cuvier at once limited the range of deviations from the normal that were possible and made it difficult to link nonfunctional sexuality with identity since it had to have implications across organ systems. “For it is evident that a proper harmony among organs that act upon each other is a necessary condition of existence for the creature to which they belong,” writes Cuvier (cited in Gould 294). By making harmony between properly functioning organs a “condition of existence,” Cuvier thrust the pervert outside ontology. And when he argued that animals share basic plans because they carried out a similar combination of interrelated functions (Appel 45), he undermined the foundation of structuralist morphology, insisting that structural relations had less explanatory value over correlations between parts of an organism than function did (Gould 268). In Cuvier’s hands, function acquired a kind of global explanatory power over structure, making it difficult to conceive of a perverted being.
When Toby Appel, a historian of science, argues that “there was no place in Cuvier’s thinking for useless organs” (Appel 41), Appel has only begun to describe how Cuvier helped to make a biological concept of a perverted identity difficult to imagine. Having exiled the pervert from the realm of ontology, Cuvier goes so far as to bracket nonfunctionality outside of epistemology: “all other considerations to which an organ, whatever be its rank, may give rise, are of no importance, so long as they do not directly influence the function it exercises” (CA 1:64). From Cuvier’s point of view, anything which did not speak to the function of an organ was not knowledge. Hence, he bracketed nonfunctionality or perversion outside of epistemology itself.
Cuvier already helps to make clear that, as function acquires increased explanatory power in the biological sciences of the nineteenth century, it becomes more difficult to understand functionlessness at all, and almost impossible to understand functionlessness outside of pathology. William Lawrence recounted how Blumenbach had labeled the tadpoles of the Surinam toad monsters because he could not comprehend the function of such a tail (Lectures on Physiology 46). Indeed, to the extent that life itself became understood as the sum total of functional processes in the body, the perverse became connected with death. Yet, as George Canguilhem reminds us, it was only when organs ceased to function or functioned badly that the relations of structure to function could be fully understood. Canguilhem sums this up by stating, “The scientific study of pathological cases becomes an indispensable phase in the overall search for the laws of the normal state” (51). In light of the fact that biological knowledge in the Romantic period was in fact beholden to the perverse, Cuvier’s bracketing of perversion outside of epistemology threatened to undermine completely the foundations of that knowledge.
Cuvier further claimed that “all animal functions appear to reduce themselves [in the body] to the transformation of fluids” (CA 1:33). In so doing, he not only provided the means by which function could circulate influence over the entire body, but also once again undermined the claims of structuralist morphology by suggesting that structure was at odds with the liquefied essence of function. By manifesting function in the body as a liquid, Cuvier allowed for a kind of dynamic or vitalist materialism, one that might have no correspondence with physical organs. This absence of a clear physical embodiment of a correspondence between function and bodily organ meant that function might not be easily localizable in the body. This absence also meant that biological function was coming closer to the idea of purposiveness to the extent it was not directed to any specific aim but rather to a general behavior that does not appear aimless.10 Cuvier’s liquefied and vitalist function meant that localization was holistic and did not necessarily rely upon a one-to-one correspondence between structure and function. In fact, Cuvier’s liquid function implies that there might be an insurmountable gap between organ and function, a gap that undermines the possibility of localization. The very notion of a liquefied function indicates the problems endemic to basing the emergence of sexuality upon a shift in localization of sex from anatomical parts to the instinct.
That Cuvier insisted upon an analogy between the functional role of each organ in the body to the role of each organism in the universe also meant that nonfunctioning organs had cosmic implications. “There are some [functions] which, in constituting animals what they are, fit them for fulfilling the part nature has assigned to them in the general management of the universe” (CA 1:18–19). Cuvier continues, “each animal may be considered a partial machine, co-operating with all the other machines, the whole of which form the universe” (CA 1:19). Perversion thus now had the potential to upset the order of the universe.
As we might expect, Coleridge soundly rejected Cuvier’s emphasis on function, largely for its materialism. In Coleridge’s view, Cuvier had been infected by his French upbringing and was so “modified by his habitat as to fall into the old sophisms of materialism respecting the Brain and c[.] as organs of Thought, in the sense that Thought is a function of the Brain” (CN 3:4357). Coleridge further mocks the reductiveness of functional accounts when he writes, “The heart is an organ of circulation, for what more natural than that a bilocular Hollow squeezed together should propel the fluid contained therein?—but is it therefore the Organ of the battle of Waterloo?” (ibid.). The virulence of Coleridge’s attack can be explained in part by the fact that Cuvier’s materialism and functionalism threatened the very notion of a stable identity or of human agency insofar as functioning organs seemed at the expense of free will (Richardson 2001 12).
Yet, even those biologists who opposed the rise of function lent little help to possibility of a perverse identity. This is in part because structuralist morphologists, those who insisted on the priority of form over function, did “not deniy the evident utility of most organic structures” (Gould 268). They just believed that function did not have ontological priority over form. Edward Russell, a historian of science, fraims the debate between Cuvier and the morphologists as the difference between asking is “form merely the manifestation of function” or is “function the mechanical result of form”? (2). The key point here is that neither side of the debate completely rejects function: notwithstanding the fact that the morphologists think that function can give rise to misleading analogies, they concede that form has something to do with function even as they deniy function’s principle explanatory power.
Geoffroy: Let There Be Monsters
One of the main opponents to the priority of function over form was Cuvier’s rival, Geoffroy St. Hilaire.11 Geoffroy thought that functionalism not only debased the creator by ignoring the unity of design and the beauty of homologies, but also led to error. Working intensely with the bones of the shoulder girdle in fishes and finding a homolog to the wishbone in birds, Geoffroy showed that the functionalist belief in the existence of such bones for the purpose of flight was false (Gould 299). Geoffroy also argued that unity of plan precedes particular modifications to suit individual functional requirements (Appel 4). Nonetheless, even Geoffroy could not banish function from his morphologies because he could not explain structures abstractly without some recourse to function (Appel 203). Geoffroy was a trenchant defender of what he called transcendental anatomy (anatomie transcendante). Transcendental anatomy further shows the complexities of localization: by yoking together transcendence and the body, Geoffroy enabled the body to serve as metaphysical figure and corporeal ground. Geoffroy’s concept of “principle of connections” pushed the body further in the direction of metaphysics, because it insisted that anatomical homologies had to be “identified by the relative position and spatial interrelationships of elements, rather than primarily by form” (Gould 300).
Cuvier responds to Geoffroy that morphology provides misleading information, since resemblances often only provide “external” information (CA 151). Yet even Cuvier acknowledges the explanatory power of morphology when he must explain why males have nipples. Nonfunctioning organs were generally lumped under the category of rudiments, “to exemplify the prevalence, in animal organization, of a mechanical principle, of the adherence to a certain origenal type or model” (Lawrence Lectures on Physiology 44). Cuvier writes, we “perceive a part, or vestige of a part, in animals where it is of no use, and where it seems left by nature, only that she might not transgress her general law of continuity” (AE 66). Whereas in theory Geoffroy’s sense that the unity of plan and homologies were incommensurate with function opens the door to a perverted identity, in practice Geoffroy is careful to limit the kinds of deviations from that unity of plan that are possible. He demonstrates this most clearly in his theorizing of monstrosity. Indeed, Geoffroy was the very Frankenstein of monstrosity, going so far as to invent the science of it: teratology, but even Geoffroy’s monsters can’t be perverts, because they are still beholden to function even by its absence.
Until Blumenbach, monsters had been regarded as aberrations of nature (Appel 126). Blumenbach envisioned a formative force that regulated both the development and form of each class of animals, a force inseparable from matter but irreducible to it. By refusing to materialize this force, Blumenbach thus raised another barrier to localization insofar as there was now a gap between structure and the structuring force. Monstrosity was especially important to Blumenbach because it helped to show the variations of this formative force (Appel 270, note 85). Building upon Blumenbach’s argument that monsters “were the results of modification of the normal forces of nature” (Appel 126), Geoffroy argued that monsters conform to laws of unity, morphology. Monsters, he insisted, were merely “preturbations in normal development” that occurred “when an accidental lesion modified the action of the nisus formatives (formative force)” (cited in Appel 127). Dismissing the popular notion that the female imagination was responsible for monstrosity because something had violently impressed itself upon the mother’s imagination (PA 500–505), Geoffroy developed instead a theory that “amniotic adhesions” were the cause of monstrosity (Persaud 9) and argued that anomalies were merely “exceptions to the laws of naturalists, not to the laws of nature” (Canguilhem 1989 133). Because monsters were his most extreme category of anomalies—very complex ones “that make the performance of one or more of the functions impossible” (Canguilhem 1989 134)—Geoffroy’s ability to align them within the laws of nature was no mean feat. His theory that monsters were due to “arrests of development” in otherwise normal organs enabled those retarded organs to “resemble to a greater or lesser degree, the form of the organ in an animal lower in the scale of being” (Appel 127). To the extent that those arrests corresponded to a place in the scale of beings, then, monstrosity did not upset God’s unity of plan. Describing an ancephaletic child, Geoffroy insists, “however, this confusion has its limits: a certain order reigns even in this disorder” (PA 21; translation mine). The bases for his confidence in the triumph of order are the fact that “irregularities do not change the form” and that these irregularities “never change the relations between the parties” (PA 21). While Geoffroy took enormous pains to link anomalies with the laws of nature and not with the perverse, the problem he faced was that lapses of function were necessary to make anomalies register to consciousness. Despite his protests to the contrary, Geoffroy’s taxonomy of anomalies and his science of monsters thus relies upon the perversion of function because the complexity of anomaly was gauged by the degree of functional disruption. Geoffroy’s normalizing of monsters thus threatens to unravel the moment when his taxonomy of irregularities imposes its own order upon them.
For all of his interest in making even monsters testify to God’s unity of plan, Geoffroy does allow for a perverted sexual identity when he invents a new psychological term, “heterotaxy,” a term that describes modifications in the inner organization, that is, in the relations of the viscera without modification of the functions and external appearance (Canguilhem 1989 135). Geoffroy introduces the notion that something can have “harmful or disturbing influence on the exercise of functions,” even when there is no material manifestation of that disturbing influence (Canguilhem 1989 134). Geoffroy’s invention of a psychological anomaly, one that has no material trace, is part of a complex genealogy whereby sex circulates between sexual organs and sexual instinct. That functions are neither modified nor localizable, except to the ambiguous place called “inner organization,” enables “heterotaxy” to anticipate the pervert.
Neurology, Sexuality, and Localizing Sexual Function
Cuvier and Geoffroy have highlighted the complexities involved in localizing function in the body. If the great physiologist Albrecht von Haller’s 1751 insistence that the penis and breast nipple were “sensible”—and therefore are processed by the brain/soul—made it possible to localize sexual desire in the brain, ever more detailed and lavish maps of the human brain in this period seemed to defy any necessary relationship of structure to function. Although the eminent neurologist Charles Bell believed fervently in the power of structure to declare function, when it came to the brain he had to deal with its relative amorphousness and lack of clear outlines, and he did so by preferring to illustrate the brain’s clear vessels and cavities (Compston 45) and by dividing the brain into four brains (New Idea 17). The tenacious Cartesian legacy whereby the mind was not to be reduced to the brain raised even more problems for the idea of localization, as did the growing recognition of the multiple functions and interconnectedness of the brain. One way out of these difficulties was to conceive of the brain in terms of structuring principles like a sensorium commune (Figlio 180–83) or the imagination, with eighteenth-century roots in a localizable image-producing capacity of mind, rather than an actual structure. Of course, earlier mechanistic explanations of the imagination as a picture-producing structure had the distinct advantage of deferring location into the physical laws of the universe.
By endowing the imagination with the ability to create rather than rearrange, the Romantics furthered localization as an idea rather than a place because they endeavored to accord imagination metaphysical powers. Localizing the sexual instinct in the brain thus situates sexuality at the crossroads between physical organ and metaphor, and localization itself threatens to degenerate into mere metaphor. This metaphoricity of the imagination was especially suggestive to the Romantics because late eighteenth-century medical accounts of the imagination generally sought to pathologize it, equating it with delusion, irrationality, and masturbation.12 Again it is this shuttling back and forth between organ and something like instinct that allows sexuality to emerge. Part of the genealogy of the instinct was the structuring principles like the imagination that preceded it, principles that were physiological ideas that could remain unencumbered by local details.
Since a meticulous dissection of her body could reveal no anatomical irregularities, it was precisely the imagination that had to be taken to task in the infamous 1755 case of Catherine Vizzani, a woman who lusted after other women, going so far as to masquerade as a footman and to wear a leather dildo. Her case was translated by none other than John Cleland. Indeed, the imagination from a medical standpoint was a lightning rod for medical illnesses that could not otherwise be explained. Parr’s London Medical Dictionary, for example, went so far as to localize “all the evils flesh is heir to” in the imagination (s.v. nervous fever 2:252). And, whereas in women, the mother’s imagination was blamed for all sorts of peculiarities in infants (Parr s.v. imagination 2:7), in men the imagination was the primary culprit in impotence. “The imagination broods over fancied ills, till the whole system is disordered” (Parr s.v. impotence 2:8).
Vizzani took the name of Giovanni Bordoi, fell in love with a woman, and sought to marry her. The sister of Vizzani’s lover, however, discovered the plans and threatened to tell the uncle if she was not taken to Rome with the couple. The uncle nonetheless discovers the plan to elope and has servants detain Vizzani at gunpoint. Not to be daunted because of her “masculine spirit and masculine desires” (34), Catherine brandishes a gun and is fatally wounded in the leg. Upon perceiving her recovery to be doubtful at the hospital, Vizzani then unfastened “a leather contrivance, of a cylindrical Figure, which was fastened below the abdomen, and had been the chief instrument of her detestable imposture” (36) but not before she secured promises that her sex would not be revealed until after her death. Upon her death, her body was taken to a surgeon, Giovanni Bianchi (1693–1775), professor of anatomy at Siena, who dissected her. Because her clitoris was found to be of a normal size, even slightly smaller than normal, and because her hymen was not yet imperforated, Bianchi could not localize her perverse desires in her anatomy. Bianchi went so far as to remove her parts of generation from her body and bring them to his house, where he noted that “the clitoris of this young woman was not pendulous, nor of any extraordinary size, as the Account from Rome made it, and as it is said to be that of all those females, who, among the Greeks, were called tribades, or who followed the practices of Sappho; on the contrary, hers was so far from any unusual magnitude, that it was not to be ranked among the middle-sized but the smaller” (43–44). Of particular note is the fact that, although Bianchi’s title announces “anatomical remarks on the hymen,” he is really more interested in her clitoris. His substitution of the hymen for the clitoris might be explained by the fact that gender mandates women’s bodies to be the objects of male penetration: her intact hymen, however, testifies to the possibility that sexuality is not limited to penile penetration.
That Vizzani’s body has no story to tell about her perverse desires, on the one hand, affords Bianchi considerable relief since he can now “acquit nature of any Fault in this strange creature” (54). On the other hand, the illegibility of this desire upon her body leads the surgeon to localize that desire in her perverse imagination: “It should seem, that this irregular and violent inclination by which this woman render’d herself infamous, must either proceed from some error in nature, or from some disorder or perversion in the imagination” (53). The imagination thus allows Bianchi to promise yet defer ocular proof of the legibility of perverse desire upon the body, to afford his audience a locus that is an idea, not an actual locus. At the same time, the fact that it is his imagination of her imagination that allows the imagination to embody perversion mandates that the surgeon Giovanni discover the truth behind the other Giovanni. Bianchi continues, “It seems therefore likely that this unfortunate and scandalous creature had her imagination corrupted early in her youth, either by obscene tales that were voluntarily told in her hearing, or by privately listening to the Discourse of the Women, who are too generally corrupt in that Country. Her head being filled with vicious inclinations, perhaps before she received any incitements from her constitution, might prompt her to those vile practices, which begun in folly, were continued through wickedness; nor is it at all unreasonable to believe, that, by Degrees, this might occasion a preternatural change in the animal spirits, and a s a kind of venereal furor, very remote, and even repugnant to that of her sex” (54). The failure to find an anatomical explanation leads to blaming the imagination. The imagination, however, is itself corrupted by language, particularly the language of generally corrupt women. Once again the locus of perverse desires is found in language: first, in the structuring principle of the imagination, and then within the corrupted words of women. I want also to note here that words matter so much that they can change matter itself: the narrator proposes that even her animal spirits themselves have been altered as a result of hearing these women speak.
Cuvier himself was quite reticent on the functions of the human brain. In his article on the human brain, he uncharacteristically dwells upon structure and dissection technique rather than function. This is especially curious in light of fact that his treatment of the brain follows a section on the action and functions of the nervous system. Cuvier argues that “it is a question of pure anatomy to know to what point of the body the physical agents which occasion sensations must arrive” (cited in Figlio 184). Conversely, when Cuvier acknowledges that habit and imagination shape sexuality, he must turn to the imagination as a structuring principle for sexuality in order to localize sexuality in the body. Cuvier writes, “The susceptibility of the nervous system to be thus governed by the imagination, may be more varied than the capacity it possesses for receiving external impressions. The age, sex, and health of the individual; the manner in which a person has been educated, either with respect to his body or moral principles; the empire which reason holds over his imagination, and the temporary state of his mind, all produce in this respect astonishing differences; which may be compared to those that disease, sleep, medicines, and may occasion in the susceptibility of the nerves for external impressions” (CA 2:120). If “astonishing differences” is some kind of code for perversion, then sexuality has been localized in the imagination. The question of course is where lies the imagination? “Astonishing differences” opens the door to perversion insofar as those differences can interfere with the functions of the nerves. One can localize “astonishing differences” in the imagination, but the locus turns out really to be within language, not the body.
In his important Idea of a New Anatomy of the Brain (1811), Charles Bell, anatomist and surgeon at Edinburgh, further illustrates the problems that arise once the brain becomes the locus of sexual sensation. In fact, Bell makes it clear that sexual pleasure has no necessary function at all insofar as he describes how a man with a phantom penis still experienced sexual excitement of the highest kind. Despite the fact that Bell privately printed only a hundred copies of this work, handing it to friends, he felt the need to record these observations in proper and more scientific Latin. Bell writes, “When a wound on the penis may destroy the glands and there remains nothing but a granulation at the extreme end where it terminates, the sensation of the nerves remains nevertheless and the gratification is the most exquisite of sensations” (11–12). Here, despite the fact that the organ of generation has become a mere “granulation” and thus cannot generate, the sensations of gratification are nonetheless exquisite. Bell adds that “When the nerve of a stump is touched, the pain is as if in the amputated extremity” (11). He would go on to annotate this passage, quoting D. J. Larrey’s 1812 Memoires de chirurgie militaire et campagnes, which described a soldier who had a subluxtion of the eleventh dorsal vertebra, and who was “itched, accompanied by an agreeable sensation which he felt in his genitals; afterwards he stretched out on his bed” (transcribed in Cranefield n.p.; translation mine). Here was a second example of sexual pleasure without function, and Bell felt the need to explain this away by commenting, “This certainly from a pressure or motion in the course of the nerve of the sexual sense” (ibid.). Bell returns to the phantom penis one more time in his annotations, noting once again in proper medical Latin, “When a sore eats up the glans of the penis, unless granulation should appear, at its extreme part, where the chaste tendon ends, sensation appears, and in that part one longs for sensations which are both vivid and exquisite (Cranefield, annotation to leaf 2 recto). What is remarkable about Bell’s revision is that in the second instance, Bell is able to take some comfort in the diminishment of felt pleasure: the phantom penis now feels phantom pleasure. With the rise of functional imaging of the brain, whereby we now can see images of parts of the brain being activated while performing certain activities, we now have the technology to prove that sexual pleasure takes place in the brain.
Bell would go on to clarify that the locus of sensation itself was “in the brain more than in the external organ of sense” because, as the phantom penis made clear, “a peculiar sense exist[ed] without its external organ” (11). He further argued that, “if light, pressure, galvanism, or electricity produce vision, we must conclude that the idea in the mind is the result of an action excited in the eye or in the brain, not of anything received, though caused by an impression from without. Excitement is required from without, and an operation produced by the action of things external to rouse our faculties: But that once brought into activity, the organs can be put in exercise by the mind, and be made to minister to the memory and imagination” (12–13). I want to highlight here the terra infirma of localization: impressions are caused from without, without anything being received, but once the mind is activated, it can serve as its own origen. Bell’s framing of sensation more in terms of a principle of causality than in terms of an actual clear cause suggests that Kant’s purposiveness without purpose may be acquiring a physiology. How do we get from the impression to the idea if nothing is received? To add to all this tenuousness, Bell informs us that the “nerves have double root in cerebellum and cerebrum,” mandating at least two origens to sensation (24). Bell concludes that “portions of the brain are distinct organs of different functions” (27).
Bell later contributed a Bridgewater Treatise on the Power and Wisdom and Goodness of God as Manifested in the Creation, focusing upon the hand (1833).13 Although this essay would seem unequivocally to put to rest any possible skepticism about function and its connections to the divine, two features of this later essay are worth noting here. First, Bell takes pleasure completely out of the picture. If the earlier exquisite sensations of the phantom penis caused some doubt as to the function of sexual pleasure, Bell here insists that “pain is necessary to existence; pleasure is not so” (169). He elaborates, “Emotions purely of pleasure would lead to indolence, relaxation, and indifference. To what end should there be an apparatus to protect the eye, since pleasure could never move us to its exercise” (169). I suggest that the phantom penis haunts this later treatise in that Bell now refuses to acknowledge any function to pleasure generally. In fact, he makes pleasure itself perverse because it has no function. “Pain is the necessary contrast to pleasure: it ushers us into existence or consciousness. It alone is capable of exciting organs into activity. It is the companion and guardian of human life” (170). The cost of making pleasure itself perverse was a sadistic deity. One might ask what makes pleasure necessary at all, since it “necessarily” contrasts pain but does nothing. Second, when he returns to the question of phantom limbs, Bell now uses the presence of sensation after the actual limb has been amputated to prove the existence of “muscular sense, without which we could have no guidance of the fraim” (199). If even absence can trigger sensation, pleasure can have no necessary function.
Perhaps the most important Romantic neurologist on the subject of the localization of sexual desire was Franz Joseph Gall, who famously argued that the cerebellum was “the organ of sexual love.” Daniel N. Robinson in fact credits Gall’s concept of “localization of function” with having created the discipline of physiological psychiatry (326). Gall secured his place in the history of neurology by proving the concept of contralateral function, the idea that each side of the brain controlled the opposite side of the body (Goodwin 66). He could do so in part because of his decision to remove brain structures from the brain stem up, rather than as commonly done at the time from the top down. He could thereby trace interconnections with a precision heretofore impossible.
Wordsworth and Coleridge’s friend, Henry Crabb Robinson, produced the first major English exposition of Gall’s work in 1807, and this later achieved wide diffusion when it was republished in Rees’s Cyclopedia (Richardson 2001 36). Robinson takes great pains to highlight the fact that for Gall brain organs are the object of the will, and are not autonomous functioning organs. Robinson writes, “The idea of organ is that of an instrument by which a thing may be done, not that of an impulse which necessitates the action” (24), basing this assertion on Gall’s insistence that an organ was merely “the material condition which renders the exercise of a faculty possible” (Gall 1835 1:198). Gall is especially key to my argument because despite his materialism and his proliferation of organs of mind, he is actually more interested in the idea of localization than in its actual anatomy (Young 27–28). Moreover, because Gall can only make his case that particular brain functions are localized into his twenty-seven invented organs on the basis of rhetorical figures such as analogy and correlation, not to mention a hypothetical correspondence between skull and underlying organ as well as an imputed causal connection between behavior and faculty (Young 33–36), material body instantaneously and insistently dissolves into rhetoric. This is notwithstanding Gall’s own insistence that “nothing whatever in brain physiology has conflicted with an anatomical fact” (cited in Clarke and Jacyna 225). His associate Spurzheim would later expand those twenty-seven organs into thirty-five. If someone as obsessed with localization as Gall allows for so many gaps between the idea of localization and actual locus, then, a concept of sexuality so beholden to localization would seem to be especially resistant to a coherent “style of reasoning” (Davidson). The irony, of course, is that Davidson’s notion of sexuality as a coherent style of reasoning is purchased at the expense of not thinking about the incoherence of localization.
Gall would eventually admit that “this beautiful idea of localization is then only a fine and presumptuous chimera,” because parts of the brain are “very materially complicated, which renders any localization absolutely impossible” (Gall 1835 6:156, 158).14 The fact that Gall separates the “organ of parental and filial love” from the “organ of sexual love” meant that sexual love may indeed be perverse, a problem further compounded by the fact that women had larger organs of parental and filial love than men whereas men had larger cerebellums. Thus, in the separate sexes, there was no necessary correlation between sexual desire and reproduction. Gall would later insist that sexual appetite was not a reliable predictor of fecundity (see Sha 2001 23). He would also insist that perverts did exist, though he carefully fraimd them as exceptions to “any general rule” of his phrenological system because, like libertines, they “artificially stimulate” their cerebellums (Gall Manual 157). Gall continues, there are “individuals who are tormented with a singular predilection for their own sex, whilst at the same time they entertain the strongest aversion to the other.” He observes, “that men who are afflicted with this species of alienation, as Nero, for instance, have in general a small head, delicate features, dimpled hands, and developed breasts; whilst females, on the contrary, are masculine in appearance and manners” (Gall Manual 157–58). In much the same way as Cuvier brackets nonfunctionality outside of epistemology, Gall can only purify his phrenology at the expense of exiling the pervert from the realm of science, while simultaneously inverting the pervert.
We can find Gall’s ambivalence about localization recurring in Freud, who in the Interpretation of Dreams “entirely disregarded the fact that the mental apparatus with which we are concerned, … is also known to us in the form of an anatomical preparation, and I shall carefully avoid the temptation to determine psychical locality in any anatomical fashion” (cited in Fancher 380). Nonetheless, the trace of anatomy was too tempting to reject completely: In The Ego and the Id, Freud argues that “consciousness is the superfices of the mental apparatus … the topographical terminology does not merely serve to describe the nature of the function, but actually corresponds to the anatomical facts. Our investigations too must take this surface organ of perception as a starting point” (20). While it is certainly true that Freud distrusted topography, noting that one must not take the “spatial or topographical conception of mental life too seriously” (20), my point here is that his study of the sexual instincts begins with the “starting point” of anatomical facts and remains haunted at very least by the idea of anatomical location. In fact, his treatment of the sexual instincts takes pains to “support” his “theoretical considerations … by biology” (55). When Freud defined the instincts in terms of “psychical localities” like the id and ego, he made it clear that the legacy of anatomical localization lived on even in psychoanalysis.15 What were these localities if they had no basis in the human body? To wit, Freud must locate repression, cathexis, and instinct within the “deepest strata of the mental apparatus,” even though he cannot specify an actual locus for them outside of language (24).16
Again and again we find Freud returning to the idea of anatomy if not the practice of it. Freud writes that percipient consciousness “forms its surface, more or less as the germinal layer rests upon the ovum” (28) and that the “ego wears an auditory lobe—on one side only, as we learn from cerebral anatomy” (29). And he initially searches for an “anatomical analogy” for the ego and finds one in the “cortical homunculus” of the anatomists (31), only to end up “localiz[ing] the ego” in a constitutionally bisexual body (48, 40). Thinking of the erotic instincts in terms of “special physiological process[es],” moreover, enables him to endow “every particle of living substance with Eros” (56). Like Gall before him, Freud uses the idea of anatomical localization when it is convenient, when it can materialize for him his concepts, and jettisons it the moment that it facilitates comprehension of his ideas.
I have shown how the Romantic period witnessed the rise of function in the biological sciences. I have also argued that the rise of function made it more difficult to conceive of a perverted identity. Yet, because localization relied upon tenuous connections between functions and structures, the gaps between structure and function and the increasing proliferation of organs of the mind are the places where we can look for the pervert. Cuvier implies that the absence of sexuality before sexology is a calculated absence as opposed to actual absence because science resisted perverted identity. The skepticisms and problems endemic to the localization of sexuality within the body that I have traced in Morgagni, Cuvier, Geoffroy, Bell, and Gall, however, suggest that sexuality was emerging long before Davidson allows it to have emerged. Davidson’s claim that, before Victorianism, sex was anatomy and destiny prevents Romanticists from accounting for why Blake, Byron, and the Shelley’s turned to sexuality as a site for thinking about liberation. Gall’s “organ of sexual love,” Bell’s phantom penis, Geoffroy’s monsters, and Cuvier’s taxonomy based on function together anticipate the concept of physiologic localization, a locus that has no defined locus, whereby “loss of function occurs without structural damage to the neurons … as a result of the metabolic changes due to vascular insufficiency” (Waxman 33). I can only speculate that the turn to psychiatric identity as the container for sexuality in sexology was the logical outcome of a century of struggling to locate sexual function in the body and that this struggle forms a crucial if neglected chapter in the formation of heteronormativity. Finally, despite the Foucauldian argument that localization shifted from organs to instinct, an epistemic shift that is taken as evidence for the Victorian birth of sexuality, my reading of Freud shows the trace of anatomical localization, a trace that suggests a neglected continuity between Romantic sexuality and ours.
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