In different contexts, we keep coming back to the species body’s muteness. In a period when the concept of species lost its basis in theology, identifying species nonetheless became a literary and cultural preoccupation, as though the concept could be shored up by proliferating examples. In Darwin’s work and before it, abandoning the search for “the undiscovered and undiscoverable essence of the term species” (Origin, 357), meant an ever more minute attention to arbitrary markers of species identity, affinity, and difference. This kind of attention was intrinsic to the scientific breeding of sheep and cattle in the eighteenth century and to the breeding of bird and other animal species by fanciers. From the 1790s, teaching such attention also became the task of field guides addressed to amateur naturalists and of children’s books on animals.

In Darwin, as we have seen, the most useful traits in identifying a species are automatic behaviours and rudimentary or de-functioned anatomical parts. While blushing had prior to Darwin been studied by Thomas Burgess as a divinely ordained means of making character and feeling legible on the face, for Darwin, considering the blush as a trait – the only one – distinguishing the human species from all others entailed viewing it as a reflex action without any communicative effect. When field guides began to use bird calls as species markers, they adapted the poetic technique of onomatopoeia to represent them, throwing the mantle of science over animals’ exclusion from language by the poets and philosophers.

In this final part of the book, my argument will again have Darwin’s chapter on blushing as one of its points of reference, but the focus will broaden to encompass a general consideration of blood as a token of identity. Shared blood is an ancient figure of kinship; in the nineteenth century, it becomes closely associated with race and species identity. Moreover, in medicine, literature, and anthropology, the idea that members of animal species were of one blood is disturbingly literalized. We will begin in this chapter with a discussion of medical blood transfusion, a therapy that was first attempted in the seventeenth century using animal blood. Only in the nineteenth century did the transfusion of blood between members of the same species become the norm, though, since blood types were not discovered until 1900, this marked only a very qualified improvement in practice. Blood transfusion remained an experimental therapy until the 1880s and was then largely abandoned until the First World War. As transfusion’s appearances in in Victorian Gothic fiction show, however, it exercised a powerful imaginative appeal.

Also during the first half of the nineteenth century, large-scale bloodletting underwent a spectacular and still largely unexplained boom and bust in acceptance. By 1820, “heroic” bloodletting was a recommended therapy for almost every kind of ailment, especially in men. Particularly in rural areas, periodic bloodletting was practiced prophylactically. Thirty years later, however, as we will see, medical practice had undergone a radical change. Writers on medicine noted the change, and, strangely, could not agree on the reason for it. The decline of therapeutic bloodletting is difficult to present in the form of a narrative, and in consequence remains an understudied topic in the history of medicine. In this chapter, I view it as an episode in the emergence of an hystericized species body that cannot tell its own story.

In what follows, I will document in literature and medicine an organizing fantasy of a species body that economizes blood. This fantasy emerges during the nineteenth century, and it does so as the species body becomes the principal target of biopower, even while the species concept itself grows less determinate. This fantasy is a knot that ties biopolitics to political economy: as Catherine Gallagher argued in The Body Economic, nineteenth-century political economy became a biopolitics once Ricardo, working on the basis of Malthus’s analysis of labour as the activity of a biological population, defined it as the basis of economic value.¹ Blood is a pervasive figure for value in the nineteenth century. We will discuss literary examples later in this chapter; it also appears in writing on political economy by Marx, who figures capital’s appropriation of labour as vampirism, and John Ruskin, whose major work on political economy, Unto This Last (1860), has a chapter organized by an analogy between the social circulation of value and the circulation of blood in the body. In what follows, however, I will not be concerned with the economy of blood as such, but with blood’s significance as a figure for kinship, and with the way Victorian literature and medicine literalize this figure in representations of blood as shared between members of a collective social body. This chapter documents the emergent conception of blood as social property in the Victorian era; the next discusses the idea that persons who share blood by consumption or by transfusion become biological kin. We will turn to the theory of totemism as it emerged in anthropology after Darwin, and discuss it as a discourse on species.

In considering Victorian writing on kinship, it should be recalled that the biological basis of inheritance was not known in the Victorian era; Gregor Mendel carried out his path-breaking work on variation and inheritance in peas in Moravia between 1856 and 1863, but his results were little known before 1900. Recognizing the lack at the heart of his theory of natural selection, depending as it does on inheritance and variability, Darwin proposed his own theory of biological inheritance in Variation of Plants and Animals under Domestication (1868). He termed this theory “pangenesis”; it accounted for shared traits among biological kin, and for such facts as reversion, as well as for the observed rules governing variation. It also allowed for the inheritance of acquired traits and for telegony.² The theory of pangenesis proposed that all of the body’s cells throw off during the whole period of their existence tiny particles Darwin termed “gemmules.” These aggregated in the reproductive organs and were transmitted to future generations. The theory found some acceptance, especially among neo-Lamarckians.³ The most decisive evidence against it came from an experiment that, like the theory itself, illustrates the preoccupations of late Victorian science. Darwin’s cousin and follower Francis Galton, hoping to prove the existence of gemmules, transfused blood between different strains of rabbits, expecting that inherited traits from the donor strains would appear in the offspring of the recipients, owing to the passing from one to the other of gemmules along with the transfused blood. In his results, published in 1871, he was obliged to report, according to Janet Browne, that “not a single incidence of induced variation occurred in a total of eighty-eight offspring of transfused rabbits.”⁴

***

The idea that sharing blood might be a kind of sex nonetheless pervades Victorian literature and medicine. It’s an idea that is at once raised and closed off by an aphorism with which Foucault in The History of Sexuality distinguishes the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie from Europe’s hereditary aristocracies: “the bourgeoisie’s ‘blood’ was its sex.”⁵ This observation introduces the central motif of his book’s last part, the claim that in the Western world of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a society of “blood” was superseded by a society of “sex.”⁶ In this transformation, the bourgeoisie was the leading class: it was for the bourgeoisie in the first instance that power came to address itself to the body above all by speaking of sexuality and to sexuality. The class body of the bourgeoisie is thus the first to be defined by sex and sexuality; in this respect, Foucault contrasts it to an earlier aristocratic body, embedded in an older technology of power, that was constituted as bearing blood – that is to say by the thematics of kinship, consanguinity, and filiation.

Foucault affirms that the aphorism I have just quoted, identifying sex as the blood of the bourgeoisie, is not merely a play on words. Indeed, he goes on:

Foucault’s proposition is thus not a play on words, but rather a metaphor founded on a classically formed proportional analogy, which asserts in full that sex is to the bourgeoisie as blood was to the nobility.

I stress the operation of metaphor at this point in The History of Sexuality in order to underscore that “blood” is not here a term that has a literal referent. It becomes so, however, when Foucault considers a different aspect of the society of blood. The History of Sexuality is nearly as interested in violence as it is in sex; the last part in particular begins with a consideration of the sovereign’s power in the classical age to inflict death. Foucault writes that in “a society of blood – I was tempted to say, of ‘sanguinity’ – … power spoke through blood: the horror of war, the fear of famine, the triumph of death, the sovereign with his sword, executioners, and torturers; blood was a reality with a symbolic function.”⁸ The executioner sheds real blood; it stands here by metonymy for the life that the absolute sovereign was uniquely entitled to take. Foucault thus describes the society of blood in language that has a realistic dimension as well as a metaphoric one.

In this chapter, I will ask what becomes of this real blood, the blood through which sovereignty speaks, as the sovereign’s power to shed blood and take life diminishes in importance and new forms of power organized around life take its place as part of the long historical emergence of what Foucault termed biopower. My initial focus will be on medicine and biology, rather than on jurisprudence, as I argue that the second quarter of the nineteenth century saw the transformation of a society that spent blood into one that saved it, while blood itself, initially an object whose spectacular display was an everyday part of medical practice, became one that circulated invisibly. I will argue that in this period, Foucault’s symbolics of blood are replaced by an economics. The context for this chapter is the emergence in the nineteenth century of a social circulation of blood. For the first time – and well in advance of the technologies of transfer, storage, and blood typing that today organize the concept of a “blood supply” – blood became a social property, capable of circulating throughout the human species body, that required protection from contamination and safeguarding against waste.

As blood became identified with species, I will argue, its social circulation in humans became one of the forms in which power embodied itself, implanting in the bodies through which it passed new taxonomies of sex and race. To study this process, I will turn to an archive that includes fiction, notably Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and also make a return to Darwin’s chapter on blushing. In both texts, shared blood marks the difference between the human animal and its non-human others. Otherwise, however, the literary focus of this chapter will be on poems in which human beings play the leading roles. Unlike the poems considered earlier in this book, these do not endow species with voice. I will view them rather as making blood and bleeding symptoms of species and racial identity, in an argument developing my claim in Chapter 5 that Darwin understands species identity symptomatically. I will conclude by discussing links between his thought and late Victorian thinking on hysteria, including that of Freud. Here, as throughout this book, I treat poetry as the nineteenth-century literary genre in which the embodiment of power and systems of knowledge is most legible.

***

Without being too arbitrary, we can assign a date to the beginning of blood’s social circulation: September 26, 1818. On this day, Dr. James Blundell performed the first therapeutic blood transfusion between human beings.⁹ The previous history of medical transfusion goes back to the seventeenth century: the first transfusion experiments involving human subjects were carried out almost simultaneously in France and England in 1667. The salient fact about these experiments is that they in every case involved transfusions between species. In England on November 23, a twenty-two-year-old bachelor of arts student was transfused with the blood of a sheep in order to moderate what was considered the excessive heat of his brain. The recipient survived the operation, and Samuel Pepys records in his diary that after six days, he gave a report to the Royal Society, in Latin, in which he pronounced himself better. In the same year in France, a series of similar experiments were made by Jean-Baptiste Denis, physician to Louis XIV. In the fourth and most celebrated of his cases, he on two occasions transfused calf’s blood into the veins of a certain Antoine Mauroy in order to endow him with docility. When Mauroy died shortly after, Denis was tried for manslaughter; though he was acquitted, transfusion was made illegal in France and abandoned throughout Europe for more than a century.¹⁰

When transfusion experiments resumed in the early nineteenth century, it was on a new principle. No longer a treatment directed to curing the quality of the patient’s blood, transfusion was now used to supply blood lost to haemorrhage, particularly in women during and after childbirth. As we will see in a moment, the new transfusion science was part of a developing tendency in mid-nineteenth-century medicine to pathologize bleeding in general. Its earliest proponent was Blundell, who taught midwifery at Guy’s Hospital; his uses of the therapy in the early 1820s showed enough success to attract others to the field. Though it remained controversial, transfusion continued in therapeutic use until the late 1880s, after which it largely gave way to infusion with saline solution.¹¹

From its beginnings with Blundell, nineteenth-century transfusion remained typically a therapy given to women, normally to combat uterine haemorrhaging. The majority of its practitioners were obstetricians, and from its founding in 1858, their leading professional association, the Obstetrical Society of London, provided a major venue for transfusion research. The therapy was thus developed largely for use on women by trained physicians and surgeons, who at the time were exclusively male. Transfusion was therefore, as Ann Kibbie writes, an “instantiation of the now familiar, highly gendered scene of Victorian medicine,” as one of the technologies that enabled male professionals in the first half of the nineteenth century to claim childbirth as a scene of medical practice and to displace the traditional women’s practice of midwifery.¹²

Nineteenth-century transfusion science thus emerges in an institutional setting where the production and redefinition of gender difference was an ongoing endeavour. Illustrations of transfusion from articles in the Lancet and the Transactions of the Obstetrical Society of 1828 and 1864 (Figures 9 and 10) respectively show that practitioners of transfusion imagined in gendered terms not only the relation of doctor and patient, but also that of blood donor and recipient.¹³ The recipients of transfused blood were typically women, and the blood they received often came from their husbands or from medical men in attendance. The gender differences produced by transfusion are, however, mediated by the flow of what was now understood as undifferentiated blood. Whereas the transfusions of the seventeenth century had the mixing of different kinds of blood as their motive, in those of the nineteenth century, it was precluded from the outset. Blundell very early on ruled out using animal blood for transfusion into humans, and the majority of his British and French successors followed his lead.¹⁴ And not until 1900 was Karl Landsteiner to discover that human blood itself is differentiated into types and so make possible all subsequent developments in transfusion technology.

Figure 9 From James Blundell, “Observations on the Transfusion of Blood, with a Description of his Gravitator,” Lancet (1828–9), part 2, 321.

Courtesy D. B. Weldon Library, Western University

Figure 10 From J. H. Aveling, “On Immediate Transfusion,” Transactions of the Obstetrical Society of London, 6 (1864): 134.

Courtesy Medical Historical Library, Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, Yale University

Transfusion was never a central or uncontroversial part of nineteenth-century medical practice. Taken together with other contemporaneous developments, however, the transfusion experiments of the period suggest that in the first half of the nineteenth century, therapeutics involving blood became a social practice charged with political and cultural meaning. The first transfusion experiments coincided with the rise and fall of a “heroic” mode of medical treatment centered on bloodletting. Though phlebotomy dated back to classical medicine, its use greatly increased in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Pioneered by Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, the new practice of bloodletting called for the evacuation of blood in far greater quantities than previously. Massive bloodletting became the norm in Europe as battlefield medicine during the wars and was introduced into civilian practice by medical men returning from the field. In his 1819 Practical Treatise on the Efficacy of Blood-Letting in Epidemic Fever, Benjamin Welsh wrote:

In his 1835 textbook, James Wardrop wrote of an army and a navy surgeon who treated excessive vascular activity in wounds by letting fifty ounces of blood at a time to a total of two hundred. Like Welsh, Wardrop describes the practice of treating fevers by letting blood as introduced by military surgeons who had seen the supposed benefits during wartime.¹⁶ In the post-war years, all fields of medical practice underwent a rapid process of professionalization. The training and licensing of apothecaries and surgeons became more rigorous, and both trades rose in social status. Male physicians replaced midwives as attendants on childbirth, at least in households wealthy enough to be attended by a physician. And the practice of bloodletting was central to the identity of the newly professionalized cadres of medical men. For this reason, when one among their number, Thomas Wakley, in 1823 founded a new journal dedicated to putting medical practice on a scientific basis, the name he chose was that of the instrument most identified with the practice: The Lancet.

Large-scale bloodletting during this period became virtually a universal remedy; K. Codell Carter writes that one “four-volume medical encyclopedia, which included articles by fifty of England’s most celebrated physicians and which went through several editions beginning in 1830, recommended the antiphlogistic regime, and bloodletting in particular, for about two-thirds of the diseases identified in the index.”¹⁷ William Stokes, who later became the president of the British Medical Association, recalled in a widely quoted lecture from 1854 that during his training in the 1820s, “there was hardly a morning that some twenty or thirty unfortunate creatures were not phlebotomized largely. The floor was running with blood; it was difficult to cross the prescribing hall for fear of slipping. Patients were seen wallowing in their own blood, like leeches after a salt emetic.”¹⁸

The theory underlying the new practice of bloodletting was governed by the concept of heat. Fever, local infection, and inflammation were all understood as different aspects of the same phenomenon, and the treatment in every case was either local or general bloodletting to carry away the excess heat. This theory coexisted with other rationales for bloodletting that long predated it. In ancient medicine, bleeding was viewed as a natural curative, and bloodletting as a form of assistance to nature. Galen thus describes nature as “healing diseases by evacuation of blood,” and asserts on the authority of Hippocrates that “a woman vomiting blood was cured by the menses breaking out,” that “haemorrhoids protect against black bile,” and that “copious haemorrhages from the nostrils are for the most part curative.”¹⁹ A millennium and a half later, Thomas Watson in his medical lectures of 1836–7 at King’s College asserted an analogy between “habitual haemorrhage” and the “monthly discharge which is peculiar to the female.”²⁰ A standard household manual of 1834 held that “if [an excessive supply] is not worked off by active exertion, or diminished by a moderate and temperate diet, the blood becomes too rich and copious, and nature attempts often to relieve herself by discharging a portion of it. These discharges … commonly take place from the nose, or from the extremity of the intestinal canal, under the form of bleeding piles.”²¹ Belief in the value of periodic bleeding was widely held; in his 1845 lectures on surgery, Robert Liston, the senior surgeon at University College Hospital, recalled that “[f]ormerly, it was the practice to bleed every spring, and people did not think themselves safe unless recourse was had to it.”²² Medical writers worried that bloodletting might become habit-forming for patients who underwent it too often.²³

The medical establishment abandoned large-scale bloodletting in the second quarter of the nineteenth century as it were without noticing what it was doing.²⁴ William O. Markham dated the change in practice in retrospect to “about 1830.”²⁵ By 1865, Stokes could state in an address to other physicians that “[w]e can hardly conceive of a revolution in practice more complete. Venesection is now, from being the most frequent, the rarest of operations.”²⁶ But, as it was happening, the “revolution” took place largely without comment in the establishment medical press. Debate on the matter occurred in retrospect, and initially took the peculiar form of furious disagreement, not on the therapeutic value of bloodletting, but on the reasons for its abandonment. What came to be known as the Edinburgh Bloodletting Controversy was set off in 1850 by William P. Alison, professor of the practice of physic at the University of Edinburgh, who speculated in a lecture that “there has been a gradual change in the usual form and character of those inflammations [pleurisy and pneumonia], as occurring in the inhabitants of this country – and that … they do not in general present the same intensity of local symptoms, nor the same amount of febrile reaction, as used to attend similar diseased actions … and therefore that they do not furnish the same indications for bloodletting.”²⁷ The theory that heroic bloodletting had been correct in its time but was now counter-indicated by a change in the type of disease had an obvious appeal; as Stokes, who supported the theory, said in 1865, medical men found it “hard to believe that the fathers of British medicine were always in error, and that they were bad observers and mistaken practitioners.”²⁸

Alison’s view was widely accepted in the profession in Edinburgh and throughout Britain. It was left to his main opponent, John H. Bennett, to note the anomaly that discussion of the merits of bloodletting “instead of preceding, has followed the change, inasmuch as those who are now contending for the advantage of bloodletting and antiphlogistics in inflammation, are the very parties who acknowledge that they no longer employ them.”²⁹ Bennett held simply that bloodletting had always been an error, especially in cases of pneumonia, and asserted that mortality from pneumonia had diminished since the abandonment of large bleedings.³⁰ The controversy moved outside Edinburgh in 1857 with the entry of Markham, a prominent London physician, who began his “Remarks on the Inflammation and Bloodletting Controversy” with the summary claim that “both parties are tolerably agreed upon this, – viz. that bleeding, as once practiced, is now an affair of the past, and that the trade of the lancet-maker should at the present time be only an indifferently good one. The question at issue is not so much: Ought we, or ought we not, to bleed – but: How is it that we do not bleed, as our heroic progenitors bled – in inflammatory diseases?”³¹ Markham rejected the change of type hypothesis, but also argued against Bennett that bleeding had in fact come to be underused in medical practice. The dispute continued on into the 1860s and then, as K. Codell Carter writes, it faded away without either side conceding defeat.³²

But inside the profession and outside it, discourse around bloodletting had changed. The 1840s saw the rise of alternative therapies such as homeopathy and hydropathy. The latter was widely popular among writers and intellectuals: Dickens, Tennyson, and Darwin all took the water cure. In an 1868 retrospect, Thomas Laycock generalized: “Persons of highly cultivated minds, and much engaged in occupations involving the imagination or intellect, are most intolerant of blood-letting,” he writes, and continues to assert that as the middle and higher classes have lately “become more imaginative, mystical, and aesthetic in arts, science, religion, and ecclesiasticism, they have for the same reason become more intolerant of blood-letting [and] heroic doses.”³³ Outside establishment medical circles, distrust of bloodletting became widespread. Samuel Dickson’s scathing Fallacies of the Faculty, based on a series of lectures, went to a second edition in 1841; Dickson describes the death of Byron as caused by bloodletting and characterizes the therapy as “murderous.”³⁴ The term became current – by 1846 an anonymous reviewer in British and Foreign Medical Review could refer to “that mode of treating diseases which has been absurdly enough termed heroic, but which more properly should be termed murderous.”³⁵ In 1849, a surgeon named John Langley wrote in The Lancet advocating bleeding to “full depletion” in “fever and inflammatory diseases”; he asserts his awareness that he is arguing against “the present fashion in medical practice.”³⁶ When in the following year Robert Peel was thrown from his horse in 1850, suffering injuries that killed him from internal bleeding, he underwent bloodletting, but only by the application of twenty leeches. Langley returned to the fray in a furious denunciation of his physicians, demanding, “Why, even if precautionarily only, the most vigorous and copious depletion was not immediately resorted to?” Of the twenty leeches, he goes on to ask, “What essential benefit can possibly have been anticipated from so effete a measure, I am at a loss to imagine.”³⁷

Under earlier medical paradigms, bleeding was natural to bodies of all sorts. But in the course of the nineteenth century, this long consensus was overturned and bleeding became a pathology. One consequence of this change was a new articulation of sexual difference around blood. As we have seen, until the beginning of the century, bleeding was common to men and women; surgical intervention was required to prompt it in any case where nature’s purging or expenditure of blood was interrupted.³⁸ By the century’s close, however, as Elaine Showalter and Caroll Smith-Rosenberg showed, the periodic loss of blood in menstruation had become a pathological trait specific to women.³⁹ On this supposed trait doctors like Edward Clarke and Henry Maudsley were able to found an entire misogynist sexual science.

In the 1820s, transfusion science also identified bleeding as a pathology endemic to women. As germane, though, to its role in the new sexual science was its postulate of blood as an undifferentiated fluid that could in principle circulate between bodies as well as within them. Blood thus acquired a social circulation, in which male and female bodies were characterized by their different propensities to expend a single scarce resource. Well after the actual practice of blood transfusion had gone out of fashion – and before the discovery of blood types – the idea that blood has a social circulation received a florid literary embodiment in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in 1897. As in the seventeenth century political economists had developed a new understanding of flows of goods and money in the social body by analogy with the newly discovered circulation of blood in the individual, so by the time of Dracula blood itself has been refigured on an analogy with money.⁴⁰ No longer understood either as a humour that must be kept in balance with other humours, requiring purging in the event of a surfeit, or as a nutrient that must be vacated in the event of an oversupply, human blood becomes in this period a sublime and undifferentiated fluid that cannot be shed without loss. In Dracula, blood circulates from men’s bodies into women’s, from women’s bodies into the vampire’s body, and then back again. The society the vampire threatens is thus imagined as a closed social circulation of blood with women as the weak point at which blood can cross into and out of the system.

From the moment the principle of transfusion is to replace lost blood with new blood of the same kind, there attaches to blood an entire thematics of sameness and difference. Dracula himself, as a creature sustained only by blood, virtually embodies its undifferentiated character: his aim is to replicate himself indefinitely by infusing blood into the bodies of his victims.⁴¹ On the other hand, as much recent criticism has noted, the novel is obsessed by taxonomy and differences in type. Its characters are classified by gender, ethnicity, nationality, class, generation, and predisposition to criminality, among other traits. And more basic than any of these classifications is the distinction between the human species of the main characters, who share blood by transfusion, and the monstrosity of Dracula. Dracula has no blood of his own in a novel where blood is the determining trait of humanity; he is nonetheless sustained by human blood: hence his relation to the full humanity of the main characters as parasite, simulacrum, and mimic.

Unlike sovereign power, biopower after the mid-nineteenth century no longer speaks through blood. It rather accumulates it in silence. Any individual body that bleeds, or even makes its blood visible, threatens the ideally closed circulation that power works to sustain. As the example of Dracula suggests, in crises when the social circulation of blood is threatened or exposed, blood continues to play a role as a reality that supports the new symbolic function of sex.

***

I will return to Dracula and the idea of kinship as consanguinity in Chapter 7; to show how power is embodied in the social circulation of blood in the second half of the nineteenth century, I will first turn back to a group of texts from the quarter century beginning in 1850. As we have seen, these were the decades when the British medical establishment abandoned large-scale therapeutic bloodletting – or, more accurately, the decades when the establishment became aware that it was for the most part no longer letting blood. The very paradigm shift that transformed the healthy body from one that sheds blood into one where blood circulates unseen itself took place without being seen, to be observed only in a puzzled retrospect.

In the decades I am considering, bleeding becomes a pathology or a scandal; in either case, blood’s appearance becomes a point where power attaches itself to the body or bodies affected. Precisely because bleeding becomes an anomaly in the period, I have not confined myself to texts that directly represent it, but will also discuss literary and scientific treatments of blushing. The close connection of blushing and bleeding in these texts will become clear as the discussion unfolds.⁴²

To begin with, a passage from Dickens on a power that requires “everything in the universe to be filed down and fitted to it.” This power, personified in Mr Podsnap from Our Mutual Friend (1864–5), is embodied in his daughter’s blushes:

Podsnappery as Dickens describes it purports to seek a universe where no one would ever need to blush. But the blush is also the form in which Podsnappery is embodied: its power requires the very thing it aims to suppress. Moreover, like Foucault, Dickens recognizes that power does not merely require the thing it regulates, but is in fact identical to it: In Foucault’s formulation, power is actually, positively perverse; in Dickens’s, there is “no line of demarcation between the young person’s excessive innocence, and another person’s guiltiest knowledge.” ⁴⁴

The inter-implication of sex, power, and a blush whose meaning has become radically indeterminate is as we will see a recurrent topic in writing about blushes in the years immediately before and after Our Mutual Friend.⁴⁵ The earliest work in the sequence to which I now turn is Tennyson’s long poem “Maud” (1855), and we will see both how its representations of blushing and bleeding define a general problematic and how they specifically influence poems written after.

The social circulation of blood and the indeterminate meaning of a woman’s blush are indeed two of the central preoccupations in “Maud.” As Pamela Gilbert writes, “‘Maud’ is an … entire poem about the movement of blood.”⁴⁶ Like Dracula later in the century, “Maud” has the identification of blood with money as one of its organizing figures. Though in its modern form this identification originates in the seventeenth century, following upon the discovery of the circulation of blood in the human body, not until the mid-nineteenth does the transfer of money between persons come to be figured as blood-eating, a figure that develops into the representation of capitalists and swindlers as vampires or leeches, engorged with blood drawn from others. Tennyson’s “Maud,” published more than a decade before the first volume of Marx’s Capital, is a key text in this development. It consists of a series of dramatic lyrics, all uttered by a single speaker; they are framed by a narrative of dispossession and suicide, in which the speaker’s father lost his fortune to a business partner and then died by falling or jumping into the “dreadful hollow” that the poem opens by describing: “I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood, / Its lips in the field above are spattered with blood-red heath, / The red-ribbed ledges drip with a silent horror of blood, / And Echo there, whatever is asked her, answers ‘Death’” (1. 1–4). The cause of this wound in the land appears later in the poem’s first section as the speaker rails against his father’s old business partner, “now lord of the broad estate and the Hall,” who “Dropt off gorged from a scheme that had left us flaccid and drained” (1. 19–20).

There is a gendered economy of bleeding at work in these lines: to bleed is to be emasculated. In accordance with this reading, the wound in the poem’s opening lines may be seen as castrative. But gender is not the main principle governing the representation of blood in “Maud.” Like the blush in Our Mutual Friend and the other texts to be discussed here, the trace of blood migrates from body to body irrespective of gender, bearing with it a generalized guilt.

This migration occurs in a Gothic narrative characterized by events that are repeated across generations and by doubled characters. The story turns around the setting of the hollow, and is thus haunted by Echo as a figure for repetition. Its first section concerns the speaker and Maud’s courtship; she is the daughter of the old man of the Hall, whom the speaker blames for his father’s ruin. The central interpretative problem this story poses is whether the speaker’s love of Maud cancels or continues the bloody feud between the families. The poem makes the question undecideable; its uncanny figure for desire is an undead heart beating beneath the earth, longing to fulfill itself in an eroticized outpouring of blood:

Here at the close of the poem’s first section, the flowers-as-gush-of-blood trope with which the speaker figures his arousal by Maud repeats the image of flowers as blood in the opening lines – where it appeared as the trace of his father’s death. No single set of symbolic associations can account for the meanings of blood in “Maud”; the poem itself beats on, out of control, a machine for generating images of bloodshed.

In the second section, it reverts to a narrative of male violence. The speaker and Maud meet in her garden; her brother finds them and the two men quarrel; in the hollow behind the wood a duel ensues, in which the brother is killed. Tennyson’s representation of these events emphasizes at every turn the doubling of the two male antagonists and the way the death of Maud’s brother echoes that of the speaker’s father in a potentially open-ended cycle of violence: “front to front in an hour we stood, / And a million horrible bellowing echoes broke / From the red-ribbed hollow behind the wood / And thundered up into Heaven the Christless code / That must have life for a blow” (2. 23–7). The narration of the duel opens with a quotation, repeated: “The fault was mine, the fault was mine” (2. 1); thirty lines later, we learn that the quoted words were uttered by Maud’s brother as he died, taking responsibility for the duel and for his own death. But the unassigned quotation at the opening, echoing itself, suggests that no unequivocal assignment of guilt is possible in this story. Indeed, by the very act of trying to take fault on himself with his dying breath, Maud’s brother lays it more heavily on the speaker, at whose hand he dies.⁴⁷

Since it tells a story in which bloodshed repeatedly gives rise to further bloodshed, “Maud” is as might be anticipated a text with problems of closure. In the poem’s body, the deadly quarrel between its two families stands by synecdoche for a general state of civil war; both the general war and the killing of Maud’s brother by her lover are compared to Cain’s murder of Abel – whose blood in Genesis 4:10 is said to cry aloud from the from the ground, in a figure for violence between kin that haunts the whole of Tennyson’s poem. “Maud” closes with a panegyric on Britain’s declaration of war and mobilization against Russia in the Crimea and the Baltic in 1854, the year before the poem was published. The coming of war, the speaker says, will end the “hysterical mock-disease” from which he and his society have suffered (3. 34). Recovering, he wakes with his countrymen

This close – these were the last lines of the poem as originally published – was widely derided by contemporary critics and remains an embarrassment today. Ending with the same hallucination of a death-uttering mouth and of blood-red flowers that appeared at its opening, the poem undermines its apparent claim that war is a cure for the individual and social pathologies diagnosed earlier on, and suggests that it only projects them outwards.

This hallucinatory figure is massively overdetermined; at the outset, it represents the violence of nascent finance capitalism, and at the close, it represents war. It is therefore the poem’s major point of attachment to mid-Victorian history. My interest in it here is a reductive one: the poem is horrified by male bloodshed, but powerless to stop imagining it. These facts too are historical, and correspond to medical writers’ failure in the same period to imagine the end of therapeutic bloodletting.

Scandalous bleeding in this poem is masculine. I have already noted, however, that blushing in this period also becomes caught up in a similarly structured set of conflicting imperatives. Typically, though by no means invariably, blushing is feminine; but its structural affinity with male bleeding emerges as a topic in “Maud” as well as elsewhere. In “Maud,” the switch word between blushing and bleeding is “fault.” As we have seen, in the poem’s narrative, the fault for its acts of violence is not fully assigned, but shifts from person to person. The poem allegorizes this indeterminacy of fault by setting its scenes of violence in a rocky hollow, or fault, haunted by Echo.⁴⁸

Fault, then, like property, in this poem circulates among men. In another sense, though, it pertains to Maud herself. She belongs too to the cluster of geological images in the poem, since she is repeatedly figured as a diamond or other jewel. She is the sublime form of coal, whose extraction from the “hollow,” “gutted” earth makes it one of the many seeming commodities the poem represents as toxic. The speaker spends much of the first part of the poem asking himself whether Maud escapes the taint of her father’s money. Here is his first description of her:

Faulty in having no fault, Maud’s jewel-like face thus becomes another example of the irremediable fault haunting the poem.

Besides the question of whether her very faultlessness may be a fault, the other trait of Maud’s appearance that preoccupies the speaker is her blush. On their second encounter he makes her a bow, which she acknowledges only with a blush:

Maud’s blush appears again at a subsequent meeting, and determining its meaning becomes a major focus in the speaker’s obsessive scrutiny of her:

As the speaker falls in love with Maud, he enters a hermeneutic abyss. Even when she herself doesn’t blush to meet him, the landscape around them does instead. The speaker meets Maud in the aftermath of his unacknowledged bow:

A drive to fix the meaning of Maud’s blush is a leitmotif of the poem’s first section; it attains its fullest expression in a deeply strange lyric of anticipation that comes after the speaker resolves to tell her of his love:

As Herbert Tucker points out, this section identifies the red of sunset and of the blush with the red that on Victorian maps marked the British Empire.⁴⁹ We re-encounter from Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions the conjunction of a universalist view of blushing (Tennyson’s poem imagines everyone as “red”) with a racializing typology (there is nonetheless a distinct type of “red man”). The blush becomes a kind of telegraph, bearing the anticipated news of Maud’s “yes” across a globe united under British rule. East and West become one; Wordsworth’s Cumbrian pastoral (the source of the leaping babe in line 590) is superimposed on North America; and the “red man” is affectively hard-wired into the speaker’s imagination of his erotic fulfillment. As at its close, the poem imagines a cure for the wound or fault that haunts it by projecting it outwards, so here the hermeneutic panic induced by blushing is alleviated by making the blush universal.

***

Three years after “Maud,” the youthful William Morris published The Defence of Guinevere and Other Poems (1858). It was his first volume and consists of highly compressed dramatic lyrics and short narratives, largely on topics drawn from medieval literature and history. The entire volume is to the point here: its recurring theme is the relation between juridical or military violence and sex. In spite of the poems’ medieval source material, they were strongly influenced by Tennyson, especially “Maud,” and by the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning. Morris’s title poem in particular shares with “Maud” its preoccupation with the twin motifs of bleeding and blushing. In this poem, as in “Maud,” power no longer speaks through blood. Blood stammers and repeats itself, and its failure to tell a story motivates the poem.

The most striking thing about “The Defence of Guinevere” is that it could just as well have been called “Guinevere’s Confession.” Its source is an episode from Book 20 of Morte d’Arthur. In Malory’s story, Guinevere and Lancelot are trapped alone in her room in a trap set by Mordred, who wants to prove the queen’s adultery. Though they are surrounded by armed knights, Lancelot escapes, killing thirteen. Guinevere remains, to be found guilty of treason against her husband the king and sentenced to death by burning; at the very moment when she is brought to the stake, however, Lancelot reappears and rescues her, with the slaughter of another catalogue of knights. Morris’s poem begins with Guinevere at the stake; most of the poem is taken up by a speech in which she relates the circumstances that have brought her there. She makes it clear that she loves Lancelot, while in marrying Arthur, she was “bought” by his “great name and his little love” (82–3).⁵⁰ In her wedding, she says, her vow was “a little word, / Scarce ever meant at all” (86–7). Guinevere speaks after her sentence has been passed and at the behest of her judges; she tells them nothing that they do not already know: “O knights and lords,” she begins, “it seems but little skill / To talk of well-known things past now and dead” (11–12). This apparently posthumous utterance termed her defense might as well be a rehearsal of her indictment: as she closes by telling the story of her capture, she observes that the one thing that would differentiate her story from that of her accusers continues to elude her:

The difference between the defense and the indictment of Guinevere is nonetheless marked, though in a purely formal way, by lines she repeats with slight variation three times during her speech: “Nevertheless you, O Sir Gauwaine, lie, / Whatever may have happn’d these long years, / God knows I speak truth, saying that you lie!” (46–8, 142–4, 283–5). With this near-refrain, the poem distinguishes Guinevere’s discourse from that of her accuser; but it does so only by folding the two discourses into one another, so that the truth of one becomes the falsehood of the other. Guinevere’s discourse contains within itself, in a fold larger than the discourse itself, the accusation which is or should be its context. The point is peculiarly clear because either her modesty or Morris’s prevents her from specifying Gawain’s accusation. Without such a specification, we have no way of knowing what the truth is that Guinevere repeatedly swears to. The crucial term missing from her defense would be a citation of her indictment.

This citation is nowhere to be found. Reference to the broader context of Malory’s poem does nothing to stabilize the relation between the law and Guinevere’s defense. Though Morris follows Malory closely in most of the details of his poem, his poem bizarrely departs from his source by making Gawain into Guinevere’s principal accuser. In Malory, Gawain is at this point her only supporter, and he remains so until after her rescue by Lancelot, the event with which Morris’s poem closes. In the course of the rescue, Malory has Lancelot kill Gawain’s brother Gareth and thus bring upon himself and Guinevere Gawain’s implacable hate. The events of Morris’s poem are therefore caused by an accusation of which in Malory they are themselves the cause. The “lie” with which Guinevere repeatedly charges her accuser is no more to be found in Morris’s source than it is in “The Defence of Guinevere” itself.

Generically Morris’s poem is the dilation of an episode from an epic.⁵¹ A few sentences from Morte d’Arthur give rise to 295 lines, most of which are spoken by Guinevere. This formal datum identifies the poem’s critical point with respect to its epic source. There the question of Guinevere’s guilt is discussed only by men, she herself giving no testimony at all. The poem thus belongs to a tradition that begins with Ovid’s Heroides, which takes the erotic matter and women’s voices at the margin of epic and makes them the central concern of dramatic lyrics. Poems in this genre perform a critique of their epic sources; they do so, however, using material epic itself supplies. They dramatize a woman’s reply that must seem already implicit in the epic source, which is why Guinevere’s discourse only reiterates a narrative already to be found in Malory.

As Morris’s poem is to Malory, so Guinevere’s utterance is to the law. She speaks after she has been condemned, and only because her judges have demanded that she do so. In this respect her speech is no more than the rehearsal of her subjection and, as such, it seems a pure and inconsequential formality. But it is the central theme of the poem that the speech does have a consequence, not by virtue of anything that it communicates, but because it takes up the time that’s needed before Guinevere can be rescued. Dilation, or dilatoriness, itself opens a place in Malory’s epic for Guinevere’s agency. In relation to the law, the poem argues that its need to spectacularize the subjection it has already compelled sets in motion a machinery of citation and deferral that finishes by subverting it. This formal machinery renders illegible every utterance that is drawn into it.

My interest in these formal and generic traits of Morris’s poem is that they allegorize an historical argument that can be engaged with Foucault’s narrative of the replacement of a society of blood by a society of sex. In The Defence of Guinevere, a new illegibility of blood emerges at the limit of sovereign power. The poem dramatizes the subversion of juridical utterance by a formal mechanism of citation and expansion. Its organizing figure for this process is a reiterated display of blood. In his mid-Victorian representation of the legendary Middle Ages, Morris’s main object of critique is what he represents as the ancient notion that the law can read blood or speak through it.

Consider Guinevere’s blush at the poem’s opening:

These lines dramatize the law’s need to double its own utterance that provides the poem’s motive. Once they have spoken, Guinevere’s judges require her to speak; as we’ve seen, she begins by protesting the futility of this demand. In this opening description, the law’s purchase on Guinevere is visibly embodied in a blush. Guinevere touches her cheek as though she had felt “a shameful blow,” which suggests that this blush has the nature of a stigma shamefully given her by her accusers. But it is shameful to be treated shamefully – the shame of the stigma given her prompts Guinevere to cover it with her hand. Shame thus redoubles itself from the context to as it were the text of Guinevere’s body. But if Guinevere’s blush shows that she feels a redoubled shame, her own and her accusers’, it also shows the reverse: Morris’s paradoxical formulation is that she feels ashamed of feeling something else besides shame. That something else remains unspecified. Her blush is at once the mark of her shamefaced subjection to a shameful law and of an illegible resistance to it.

This opening treatment of Guinevere’s blush establishes that the poem will throughout treat blood as a mark that reiterates itself and in so doing cancels its meaning. The pure citationality of the blush in Morris’s poem anticipates the recursivity that empties it of meaning in Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions. In Morris, this unreadability characterizes blood as such. Later in her defense, Guinevere recalls the first time she had been accused of adultery, on the evidence – oddly, given that she is a married woman – of blood on her bedclothes:

The bloodstain on the bedclothes redoubles itself in the hypothetical blush that prevents Guinevere from explaining it. Unlike Malory, who does provide a convoluted explanation of the blood and why it gave grounds to suspect the queen (it came from Lancelot’s wounds), Morris gives none at all. Guinevere’s question “whose blood then pray you?” remains unanswered; as the trace of blood reiterates itself, it becomes clear that it is actually never unequivocally proper to any body. To defend Guinevere against Mellyagraunce’s charge, Lancelot challenges him to a trial by combat, which ends, in Guinevere’s words, when “My knight / Sudden threw up his sword to his left hand, / Caught it, and swung it; that was all the fight, / Except a spout of blood on the hot land” (212–14). Is Mellyagraunce’s blood properly forfeit to Lancelot? It seems not, for his death does not close the book on Guinevere’s guilt, which is why she stands at the stake under sentence of death in the scene that frames Morris’s poem. Is her blood now properly forfeit to her judges? The impossibility of an answer only projects into the future the cycle of bloodletting whose beginning the poem has already described.

Another round begins in the last stanza, with another blush from Guinevere, when Lancelot arrives to rescue her. This event shows the success of her defense, which now turns out to have consisted in stalling for time. But it is also the confirmation and reiteration of the transgression for which Guinevere was condemned in the first place.

To close this discussion of Morris’s poem, let’s return to the spots of blood on Guinevere’s bed that make the initial term in this open-ended series of reiterations. As I have said, the poem gives no explanation of these spots, which in Malory were left by Lancelot. Absent this explanation, there is no reason to read them as signs of the queen’s guilt: what if they were simply menstrual blood? In that case, all of the poem’s subsequent effusions of blood would be instances of hysterical bleeding, each of which would cite or mimic an original whose source was the womb (hystera). In this poem, as in Dracula, the female body would be imagined as the original site of a loss of blood that rapidly becomes so general as to imperil an entire society. And in the interim before Dracula’s 1897 publication, as we will see, the link between blushing and hysterical bleeding is also made by Darwin.

All of the literary texts under discussion here have the passing of Foucault’s symbolics of blood as a precondition. The sovereign and the family no longer speak through blood. In its silence, though, blood circulates between bodies bearing an hysterical sexuality that both transgresses and affirms violent taxonomies of race and sex. This cultural history links a form of biopower’s embodiment in the nineteenth century to the history of hysteria, since as we will see, Freud’s understanding of the hysterical symptom itself began with Darwin’s work on blushing.⁵²

***

Besides the influence of Tennyson and Robert Browning, “The Defence of Guinevere” was also written in dialogue with Morris’s slightly older contemporaries in the Pre-Raphaelite movement. The years immediately after Morris’s volume was published saw Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s second period of intensive work on “Jenny,” his poem on the Victorian sex trade. In its final form, the poem became a dramatic monologue, whose male speaker meets Jenny at a dance hall and goes home with her. Instead of having sex with him, she falls asleep – or pretends to – and the poem consists of his thoughts about her. Shame circulates from character to character in this poem as it does in Morris’s: “Do not let me think of you,” thinks the speaker, “lest shame of yours suffice for two” (91–2).⁵³ At the poem’s close, the speaker blames himself for mocking Jenny, attributing what he has said to being “ashamed of my own shame” (384) – a formulation that, like Morris’s seemingly opposite representation of Guinevere as ashamed of feeling anything but shame, has the effect of making shame a symptom characterized by its transmissibility and reflexivity, rather than by any specific affective content.

Predictably in this period, one of the figures Rossetti adopts to represent the contagion of shame is that of the blush. Rossetti’s use of the figure, like Morris’s, captures the way shame is at once an affect and a stigma, as well as the form of its social circulation. The poem’s speaker wonders how to deliver Jenny from what he imagines as her “lifelong hell” (245), and wishes “a woman’s heart might see” her “erring heart unerringly / For once” (250–2). He goes on, though, to explain why that would be impossible – because a woman who understood Jenny would become like her. To make this claim, he uses the Gothic figure of the fatal book that has the power to trap readers within its pages; Jenny is “Like a rose shut in a book / In which pure women may not look, / For its base pages claim control / To crush the flower within the soul” (253–6). The flowers in this figure are flow-ers – they bleed: “The life-blood of this rose, / Puddled with shameful knowledge, flows / Through leaves no chaste hand may unclose” (264–6). And the book is closed to chaste readers lest the blood puddled in it communicate itself to them in the form of a blush: in its text “are traced such things / As might make lady’s cheek indeed / More than a living rose to read” (259–61).

When blood and blushes circulate between characters in Rossetti’s poem, they don’t speak; indeed, like the young person’s blush in Our Mutual Friend, they function as embodied tools of censorship. The title poem of the first published volume by Rossetti’s sister Christina, “Goblin Market,” answers and critiques “Jenny” (though it was published first) by embracing the possibility of redemptive communication between women. Though it has nothing directly to say about blood, “Goblin Market” belongs to the sequence of texts under examination here because of the way it represents a communion formed by the circulation of body fluids: “Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices” (468). In this respect, and in its narrative of a threat to women posed by supernatural creatures, half human and half animal, “Goblin Market” provided a model for Dracula. But Christina Rossetti’s fullest treatment of blood and bleeding comes in the same volume’s “The Convent Threshold.” The poem indeed seems to inhabit a symbolics of blood: “My lily feet are soiled with mud, / With scarlet mud which tells a tale / Of hope that was, of guilt that was, / Of love that shall not yet avail” (7–10). But the “tale” blood tells does not appear in Rossetti’s poem, which represents an utterance enigmatically set on a series of thresholds marked by blood. The lines I have quoted seem to imply a narrative of sexual guilt; the poem’s opening, however, suggests a narrative of male rivalry: “There’s blood between us, love, my love, / There’s father’s blood, there’s brother’s blood; / And blood’s a bar I cannot pass” (1–3). In these lines, as in “Maud,” sexual guilt and the guilt of murder are obscurely confused: the context these opening lines require is a narrative like that of “Maud,” where conflict between the lovers’ families leads to bloodshed. Indeed, it is possible that Rossetti’s speaker is Maud herself (who never speaks in Tennyson’s poem), referring to the deaths of her lover’s father and of her brother.

Like the other texts we have discussed, “The Convent Threshold” represents an economics rather than a symbolics of blood. Blood circulates in the patrilineal family; however it is shed, it belongs to fathers and brothers. It appears at the sill or threshold of the family dwelling (oikos):

In this poem preoccupied with thresholds, the speaker repeatedly positions herself ambiguously on both sides of them. She addresses her lover while – the title implies – on the verge of entering a convent. But she also imagines herself as already in paradise, where she “tarries” for him, “veiled” not as a nun but as a bride (140). In the dream, the frozen blood to which the speaker awakens seems to be her own – but, as Rossetti’s editor Rebecca Crump points out, the scene echoes chapter 3 of Wuthering Heights, where Lockwood cuts the ghost Cathy’s wrist on a broken window pane to keep her out of her home. Does blood on the sill come from someone trapped outside or inside the house? Even the poem’s opening, which I have read as motivated by conflict between the speaker’s family and her lover’s – a narrative of difference in blood – could also be read as rejecting him because they belong to the same family – a narrative of consanguinity: “There’s blood between us, love, my love, / … / And blood’s a bar I cannot pass” (1–3). Blood circulates in this text, as in the others we have seen, as a social property. It’s in the nature of such circulations to constitute taxonomic classes we can – to adapt Foucault’s phrase – term societies of blood. As we see in this poem, these taxonomies are unstable; here as in all the other texts we have read, Guinevere’s rhetorical question “whose blood then pray you?” locates an interpretative crux. At the borders between circulations, blood appears; whether in blushes or violent effusions, these appearances attach sex to the bodies they affect.

***

As we have seen, Darwin’s 1872 On the Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals argues that the capacity for emotion is widely shared among human and non-human animals, and that the principal physical expressions of emotion are transmitted by inheritance. Grief, envy, fear, rage, and other emotions are, the work shows, to be found in many different animal species, and their characteristic expressions, such as smiling, weeping, and the erection of hair or fur, are also shared between human beings and their non-human relatives.

There is only one emotional expression that Darwin will allow to be uniquely human, and that is the blush: “Blushing is the most peculiar and most human of expressions. Monkeys redden from passion, but it would require an overwhelming amount of evidence to make us believe that any animal could blush” (310). So opens the last substantive chapter of On the Expression of the Emotions, devoted to blushing and its affective significance. Here as elsewhere in the book, Darwin identifies inherited expressions as involuntary and views them in contrast to behaviours that can be learned or voluntarily modified, as for the most part not useful to the animals in which they occur, either for the purposes of survival or for those of reproduction. While this late work of Darwin’s has lately undergone something of a rediscovery, presaging as it does today’s emerging consensus regarding the cognitive and affective similarities between human and non-human animals, on this point Darwin’s claims have not only failed to find followers, but have actually provoked something close to bafflement. As we saw in Chapter 5, in his modern critical edition of On the Expression of the Emotions, the psychologist Paul Ekman repeatedly expresses surprise at Darwin’s refusal to consider the expressive behaviours that Darwin discusses as forms of communication, which would presumably confer an evolutionary advantage on the species possessing them (Expressions, xxxiii, 53, 63).

The reason for Darwin’s refusal to view emotional expression as communication emerges most clearly in the chapter on blushing. Here Darwin offers an explicit critique of earlier writers in the tradition of natural theology, for whom the blush was a key piece of evidence of providential design in the human body. Darwin quotes Sir Charles Bell, in his unofficial eleventh Bridgewater Treatise, writing that the blush “is a provision for expression” (335) and Thomas Burgess, whose book on blushing argues that it was designed by God in “order that the soul might have sovereign power of displaying in the cheeks the various internal emotions of moral feelings” (335). Darwin’s chapter systematically rejects these claims. He denies that the blush has any necessary relation to a moral sense:

The blush then in Darwin’s view is far from communicating the moral sense of the blusher; on the contrary, it can fail to express guilt at an undiscovered fault, but can also appear and lead to misunderstanding of blushers who know themselves to be innocent. As in Our Mutual Friend and the other works discussed in this chapter, the blush in Darwin’s theory does not distinguish between guilt and innocence.

Darwin not only rejects the idea that the blush has any determinate relation to guilt or innocence; his account actually denies that blushing has any determinate affective meaning whatsoever. Rather, he identifies it as the expression of a thought with a specific recursive and citational form: “the thought that others are thinking of us” (335; see also 333, 324). The blush is thus a token of identification. A blusher is someone who thinks about the thought that someone else is having about them, regardless of that thought’s particular content.

Darwin’s interest in the blush as a token of identification rather than a form of communication is of a piece with the central concerns of his book, where, as we have seen, he at no point considers physical expressions of emotion as a form of communication. Rather, his argument focuses above all on their status as evidence for species identity and for kinship among different species of human and non-human animal. His argument concerning blushing is no different: although it is presented as a form of expressive behaviour that humans do not share with any other species, the main thrust of his chapter is to assert that it is shared by all human beings, regardless of race.

Notwithstanding its universalizing argument, as we saw in Chapter 5, Darwin’s chapter on blushing is traversed by minutely recorded differentials of power. These receive no explicit commentary, in spite of the fact that they form the matrix within which the blush is constituted as an object of knowledge. The sources for Darwin’s knowledge of blushing in non-whites are found in the cultural, scientific and governmental apparatus of empire. Travel literature is a rich source of Orientalist anecdotes: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters are the ultimate source for the claim that Circassian women “who are capable of blushing, invariably fetch a higher price in the seraglio of the Sultan than less susceptible women” (335). Lady Duff Gordon’s Letters from Egypt provide the information that “a young Arab” blushed on coming into the author’s presence (315). The examples discussed in Chapter 5 from Darwin’s correspondents around the world and from the scientific literature show more direct emotional violence, even sadism, in the scrutiny to which they subject non-white bodies.

The scopophilic aggression that tinges observations of the blush in Expressions of the Emotions is not limited to the book’s representation of racialized bodies; we saw that Darwin also calls on testimony from colleagues and from other scientists regarding the extent and the heritability of blushing caused by differences of power extending along axes of gender and class rather than of race. Throughout the chapter, abjected subjects blush to find themselves under observation by persons embodying scientific, governmental, or cultural power. As I argued earlier, the blush is repeatedly produced by the very apparatus set up to observe it, a fact that endows this chapter with a symptomatic character in relation to The Expression of the Emotions as a whole, where the relation between observing behaviour and producing it is a recurrent problem. Power differentials in Darwin’s text, though, do not always unambiguously favour the blush’s observer, as an anecdote shows that he relates from an unnamed physician. He describes how “a young man, a wealthy duke, with whom he had travelled as a medical attendant, blushed like a girl, when he paid him his fee; yet the young man probably would not have blushed and been shy, had he been paying a bill to a tradesman” (328). The example suggests how blushing in Darwin’s theory circulates as an embodiment of identification. The theory claims that blushing is the physical expression of “the thought that others are thinking of us” (335), and the citational and iterative character of Darwin’s formulation suggests how blushing can cross between subject positions, as we have seen it do in the literary texts discussed in this chapter. Darwin’s writing here as elsewhere characteristically excludes the observing subject from representation; in the case of the blush, though, Darwin’s examples largely represent people who blush because they are under observation – thus unavoidably if indirectly folding the process of observation into the material under analysis. Moreover, Darwin’s theory would predict that observers of blushing will themselves be subject to it, since the nesting of thought within thought that the theory describes could in principle be repeated to any extent: if I blush when I think of an observer thinking of me, the observer is surely likely to blush too, as she thinks of me thinking of her thinking of me.⁵⁴

Like other texts we have read, such as Dante Rossetti’s “Jenny,” Darwin’s work aims to shut down the communication of the blush, while nonetheless theorizing this communication as in principle unlimited. I return to the chapter on blushing here because it points forward: in the 1895 Studies on Hysteria, Freud cites it as a major source for his understanding of the hysterical symptom.⁵⁵ As I have argued in this chapter, Freud’s use of Darwin develops an implication in his work already present in the cultural context from which the work emerged. Indeed, the topic of hysteria makes a fleeting appearance in the chapter on blushing itself. In the course of his argument, Darwin takes up the question of how attention to a part of the body and the flow of “nerve-force” that accompanies it affect the circulation (336). In giving evidence to show that “mental attention [has] power to affect the capillary circulation” (336), Darwin has recourse to research on mesmerism, as well as on epilepsy and hysteria, and refers to work by the major psychologists of the period, including Henry Maudsley and James Crichton-Browne. From the latter he gleans an anecdote which – though relegated to a footnote – indicates how tightly knotted in this period hysteria was to the topics of blushing and scandalous bleeding:

***

Among the central concerns of Foucault’s late work was a transformation in the modality of power that he termed the birth of biopolitics. This transformation took place between the seventeenth century and the nineteenth, and saw power’s characteristic form change from sovereign rule to governmental management. Sovereignty, Foucault argued, bears on the collective body of a people; as sovereignty is transformed into government, power’s object is transformed from a collective body into a statistical aggregate: the population. The biopolitical turn was the main explanation Foucault gave for the emergence of sexuality as the dominant mode by which power implants itself in individual bodies during the eighteenth and especially the nineteenth centuries. Sexuality, he wrote “exists at the point where body and population meet. And so it is a matter for discipline [and] regularization.”⁵⁶

Though reasonable, this argument surely requires supplementation. It depends in the first instance on the basic fact that sex is the means by which a population reproduces itself. But in Foucault’s own History of Sexuality, much of what is covered has nothing to do with the birth rate. Even the broader field of sexuality that since the 1830’s power has brought under its aegis in the name of public health does not include the entire terrain. It seems likely that Foucault himself was well aware of this; in his insistence in The History of Sexuality that power does not only produce perversions in order to regulate them, but is itself directly, actually, perverse, he seems to suggest some surplus of pleasure that accrues to power beyond biopolitics.

Such a surplus, however, is not my concern here. I am rather interested in attaching Foucault’s theory of sexuality to another central pillar of his account of the biopolitical turn: the claim that biopower is necessarily racist:

These lines could have been written as commentary on some of the texts we have been discussing, notably Dracula and “Maud.” What our texts add to Foucault’s account of the biopolitical basis of race is an erotics. Desire in all of these texts is organized by shared blood, whose trace repeatedly constitutes the point where sex and power are attached to the body. In a Freudian paradigm, these traces would be symbols of a family relation and of desire’s basis in incest. Such a symbolic reading however has remarkably little purchase on the texts we have discussed here, where the crucial concerns are not with relations across or within different bloodlines, but with an undifferentiated blood that can pass between bodies, and with the uncontrollable reduplication and transmission of the blush and other blood traces.

In both contexts, the genealogical question of the relation between different bloods is displaced by the antinomies of surfeit and lack, and of visibility and invisibility, organized around an undifferentiated social circulation. At the limits of that circulation, with a certain eroticized violence, these texts mark the borders between the human species and its various others: non-human animals, parasites, spectres, and vampires. It remains a question why these borders are sexualized. Why are the prototypical participants in the scene of transfusion a married couple – charged not only with the imperative of sexual reproduction, but also with that of sharing their blood with the minimum possible of spillage or waste? Why is the vampire’s attack a kind of seduction? Why does Darwin make the blush, with all its erotic connotations, the singular affective mark distinguishing human beings from all the other animals?

In the next chapter, we will consider the human–animal distinction in Freud’s theories of sexuality and kinship and in their precursors in Victorian anthropology and discuss more broadly the relations between desire and taxonomy in the nineteenth century. In general, sexual reproduction requires a desire that chooses an object not only of the right sex but also, more primordially, of the correct species. The evidence of Victorian anthropology and legal history; of children’s literature; and, later, the evidence of Freud’s case histories – in so many of which his analysands show cross-species desire and identification – suggest that this cannot be taken for granted. And while Foucault insists that the nineteenth-century specification of individuals by sexual taxa was a stratagem of power, it seems completely in the spirit of his work to view it also as a sexual menu. Nineteenth-century sexuality would itself have involved a drive to classify, and would have been the first to imagine the erotic quest as a search for a partner of the right type.⁵⁸

At the end of 1869 and the beginning of 1870, a two-part essay appeared in the Fortnightly Review that established the problem of the totem as an object of study in anthropology and, I will argue, had a decisive influence on the new discipline itself. John Ferguson McLennan’s “The Worship of Animals and Plants” used current ethnographic literature, principally on western Australia, describing totem worship “among the existing tribes of man” as evidence for a general claim that “ancient nations came, in prehistoric times, through the totem stage, having animals and plants, and the heavenly bodies conceived as animals, for gods before the anthropomorphic gods appeared.”¹ McLennan’s argument made a crucial contribution to establishing the founding paradigm for comparative anthropology in the post-Darwinian era – for what Robert Alun Jones terms “evolutionary anthropology.”² This was the premise that all human societies pass through the same stages of cultural development, with the result that so-called primitive societies “could be viewed as evidence in reconstructing the history” of the modern societies of the West.³ McLennan’s ideas shaped an entire subsequent discourse on totemism, whose acceptance was such that Sigmund Freud would open his 1913 Totem and Taboo with the assertion that it had by then become “incontestable” that “totemism constitutes a regular phase in all cultures” (13:108).

In fact, Freud’s work on totemism came late to the game. The critique of evolutionary anthropology began in 1896 with Franz Boas’s essay on “The Limitations of the Comparative Method of Anthropology.”⁴ Its implications for the study of totemism were made explicit in 1910 by Boas’s student Alexander A. Goldenweiser, whose “Totemism: An Analytical Study” argued both that human societies have different histories, and therefore need not all pass through a totemic phase, and also, more radically, that the very concept of “totemism” was an artifact of anthropology’s disciplinary assumptions. Only by bringing together evidence from societies in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East, and contemporary Australia, Polynesia, and North America, had anthropologists been able to assemble a composite idea of totemism as both a religious system and a form of social organization. Absent the assumption that all societies develop in the same way, and that evidence drawn from different places and times can therefore be aggregated to draw conclusions about the general concept of totemism as a phase of universal history, the concept itself dissolves into a diverse array of ritual practices, dietary prescriptions, plant and animal taxonomies, and clan systems.⁵

In a 1962 retrospective on the late nineteenth-century emergence of the discourse on totemism and on its twentieth-century decline, Claude Levi-Strauss proposed a suggestive analogy. “Totemism,” he wrote, “is like hysteria, in that once we are persuaded to doubt that it is possible arbitrarily to isolate certain phenomena and to group them together as signs of illness, or of an objective institution, the symptoms themselves vanish or appear refractory to any unifying interpretation.” As Levi-Strauss goes on to note, the comparison of totemism and hysteria “suggests a relation between scientific theories and culture … in which the mind of the scholar … plays as large a part as the minds of the people being studied.”⁶ For Levi-Strauss, the “particle of truth” in the “illusion” of totemism is indeed the unsuspected resemblance between Victorian anthropologists and the peoples they studied;⁷ for Robert Alun Jones, the “secret” of totemism is that the concept was determined by the disciplinary history of anthropology and the historically specific questions that drove anthropological research.⁸

In this chapter, I won’t undertake either a structural analysis of totem discourse or an intellectual history. But I will begin with a type of structuralist bracketing of the referent, to identify two leading traits of the discourse, which I will argue are determined less by the Australian, South Pacific, American, and Near Eastern peoples it ostensibly concerns than by a crisis in species relations, and in the concept of species, in the late nineteenth-century West. The first of these traits is the centrality of species to totem discourse, which always understands its topic as a practice of classification: of plants and animals, of foods, and ultimately of persons into permitted and forbidden sexual partners. The second trait that will concern us here, notwithstanding the anthropologists’ eventual theorizing of totemism as regulating sex, will be its mystification of sex’s role in sustaining and constituting populations.

Totemism was from the outset theorized as a practice of taxonomy, grounded in the concept of species. In 1870, the same year as McLennan’s foundational paper on the worship of animals and plants, John Lubbock made a crucial distinction between totemism and fetishism: “The negro who has, let us say, an ear of maize as a Fetich, values that particular ear … but has no feeling for maize as a species. On the contrary, the Redskin who regards the bear, or the wolf, as his totem, feels that he is associated with the entire species.”⁹ James George Frazer, in his survey of the field in 1887, makes Lubbock’s distinction his point of departure: “As distinguished from a fetich, a totem is never an isolated individual, but always a class of objects, generally a species of animals or plants.”¹⁰ The distinction between the fetish and the totem is foundational for the discourse of totemism. More broadly, it marks the foundation of anthropology in a conceptual break with the enlightenment critique of religion, which relied on the concept of fetishism as a paradigmatic type of error. Its replacement as a major theoretical paradigm by the totem establishes a new disciplinary orientation towards the study of religion as historically valid within a complete social system.

In connection with accounts of rituals where totems are sacrificed and brought back to life, Frazer speculates that “the idea of the immortality of the individual totem, which is brought out in these ceremonies, appears to be an extension of the idea of the immortality of the species, which is, perhaps, of the essence of totemism.”¹¹ This passage typifies one aspect of totem discourse, in that it shows the instability of the border between the ontological position of the totem worshipper and that of the anthropologist: “The idea of the immortality of the individual totem” is apparently held by the Zunni people whose turtle worship Frazer has been discussing. “The idea of the immortality of the species,” of which he interprets the Zunni ritual as an “extension,” is less clear. Is this idea Frazer’s? What indeed is Frazer’s relation to the concept of species in general, recalling that this concept, and that of species immortality, were both under extreme pressure as he wrote? Species had gradually ceased to be sure of immortality in the early nineteenth century, with the great French taxonomist Georges Cuvier treating the evidence of species extinction as settled science. In 1859, Darwin’s Origin of Species had made extinction more than an occasional accident, drawing it into universal history and making species no less mortal than individuals.

To argue in the last third of the nineteenth century that immortal species provide the basis of social organization in all human cultures at an early stage of their history is thus to endow a contingent idea with implausible universality. The plasticity of species demonstrated by Darwin was moreover not only a conceptual problem in the late Victorian period. It pervaded culture and politics. Foucault’s late work gives the long history of how between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, the category denoted by the term “human” changed from a metaphysical to a biological one. In the nineteenth century, Foucault wrote, “Western man” learned “what it meant to be a living species in a living world, to have a body, conditions of existence, possibilities of life, an individual and collective welfare, forces that could be modified, and a space in which they could be distributed in an optimal manner. For the first time in history … biological existence was reflected in political existence.”¹² By the late nineteenth century, perceived risks to humankind’s biological existence as a species had become the occasion for a general politicizing of sexuality and marriage, of the organization of the family, and of the sale and consumption of food and drugs. In each of these fields, law and medicine marked certain bodies, spaces, and habits as threats to the species’ survival. A central argument of Foucault’s lectures from 1975 to 1976 at the Collège de France is that modern racism, culminating in the scientific racism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is motivated by the biopolitical project of killing or quarantining that which threatens the species.

The discourse of totemism emerged in anthropology contemporaneously with the pseudoscience of race in ethnography and medicine. Its project was to show the universality in human societies of dietary taboos and of marriage customs structured by the systematic distinction of permitted and forbidden sexual partners. As we have seen, the lynchpin that bound these structures together as parts of a complete social system was the concept of species.

This concept’s operation in totem discourse, however, was profoundly incoherent. The totem, we recall, is by definition a species rather than an individual; totemism is the division of society into groups defined by their affinity with distinct totem species. As well as a religion, totemism was also from McLennan’s foundational articles of 1869–70 onwards always theorized as a kinship system. McLennan had previously published a book, Primitive Marriage, on bride capture as the basis of exogamy – a term he was responsible for introducing into the study of human societies.¹³ In his articles on “The Worship of Animals and Plants,” he argues that totem-worshipping societies are organized into exogamic clans, each taking its name from a different totem. The data supporting this claim came from Sir George Grey’s 1841 account of the clan system prevailing among the indigenous people of western Australia, in which clans took their names from animal or vegetable species, and in which marriage between members of the same clan was prohibited. McLennan linked this system to the clan system found in some North American First Nations, and gave the resultant general concept the name “totem,” which had been brought into English from the Ojibwe language by American travel writers.¹⁴ Further, McLennan asserted that, in societies where totemism prevails, it is more than a mere naming system, but rather has as its basis a belief in the literal kinship of clan members and their totems: “American Indians, like the aborigines of Australia, regarded themselves, we have every reason to believe, as being of the breed of the totem.” For the people of the Caribbean and of the South West, he cites sources in ethnographic literature; for the remainder of the continent, “regular authorities being silent,” his source is James Fenimore Cooper’s 1826 novel The Last of the Mohicans, which relates how “a party of warriors, comprising a Beaver, happening to pass a colony of real beavers, the Beaver refused to pass without addressing his kinfolk. ‘There would have been a species of profanity in the omission,’ says Mr. Cooper. … ‘Accordingly, he paused and spoke. … He called the animals his cousins.’”¹⁵

Though the focus of McLennan’s work is on the place of totemism in the history of religion, his claim that worshippers of a totem “in every case” believe themselves “to be, nominally at least, of its breed or species” was the basis of all the work that followed on totemism as a complete social system.¹⁶ Since clan membership was based on shared kinship with the totem, the prohibition of marriage between members of the same clan appeared in the light of his work as a taboo on incest. And the prohibition on killing and eating the totem appeared homologous with a taboo on shedding the blood of one’s kin.

I have argued that late Victorian theorists of totemism were preoccupied with species and with the regulation of sex and diet because they projected onto other societies the biopolitical concerns of their own. In an aside that suggests the logic of this projection, Frazer saw a resemblance between the structure of a complex totem society, with totem groups superposed on groups so that any given individual would have several totems, and the hierarchical classification of organic life into “genera, species &c.”¹⁷

Theorists of totemism thus understood it at once as a system that classifies things – animals, plants, persons, foods – and as a system that scandalizes classification. The concept of the totem is as we have seen inseparable from that of the species; at the same time, however, for every theorist writing after McLennan, totemism is understood as a system of cross-species kinship. The major consequence of this contradiction in totemism discourse is the emergence of symptomatically disturbed theories of kinship itself.

Although totemism was understood to have at its center the social regulation of sexual activity, its theorists actually have remarkably little to say about sex. Far more space is devoted to rituals and regulations concerning the consumption of plants and animals as food, and the power imputed to dietary practice in establishing kinship and constituting populations makes the second striking trait I want to discuss in totem discourse.

The most influential British work on totemism in the whole history of its study was William Robertson Smith’s Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, published in 1889. Robertson Smith was a scholar of the Old Testament who knew both McLennan and Frazer; McLennan was his senior and a strong influence; Frazer was a contemporary and a continuing interlocutor. Unlike the work of McLennan and Frazer, Robertson Smith’s focuses on the ancient Near East, not on putatively primitive societies in his own time. Rather than anthropology, he writes religious history from the standpoint of Christianity, to which he sees all other forms of worship as pointing the way. His work belongs to the discourse of totemism, though, because he adopts from McLennan and Frazer the hypothesis that all societies pass through a phase of totem worship during their religious development. Robertson Smith’s work argues that the traces of this phase are legible in the Hebrew Bible and in other records of the ancient Near East, as well as in Greek and Roman myths associating the Olympian gods with animals. Above all Robertson Smith doubles down on the idea that totem worship entails belief in the kinship of worshippers and their totem. Among the Semites, he writes, “the original type of religion, out of which all other types grew,” was one “in which the deity and his worshippers make up a society united by the bond of blood.”¹⁸

My topic in this chapter is the work late nineteenth-century writers do by using blood as a symbol for social bonds. In the first instance, blood retains its ancient significance as a figure of inheritance, though an inheritance that is no longer primarily based in law, and that no longer has the family as its principal field of operation. Inheritance now binds populations into societies defined by race or species. This view of inheritance defines Robertson Smith’s understanding of social bonds and determines the object of his argument:

This passage opens a lengthy consideration of the criteria by which the Semites can be considered an “ethnographical group”:

Blood here stands as a figure for racial inheritance understood as the property of a collectivity, of whose biological history Robertson Smith interprets the cultural inheritance of language as a token.

Notwithstanding this passage’s identification of blood with a “natural classification” of peoples, in the Lectures as a whole, Robertson Smith assumes throughout that kinship in the societies he studies is made, rather than naturally given, and that the means by which it is made is the literalization of this self-same figure. In these societies, he asserts, blood stands for kinship, as it does in his own text. “Blood,” he writes, “is the primitive symbol of kinship.”²¹ Without further explanation, Robertson Smith assumes that in the societies he studies, this symbol is always confused with what it represents, so that his work abounds with accounts of blood-brotherhood rituals, in which participants “become brothers by opening a vein and sucking one another’s blood,”²² and of ritual incisions in the course of initiation or mourning rituals.²³

The assumption that the literal sharing of blood forms the basis of kinship is built into the main argument of Robertson Smith’s Lectures, which was the basis for its influence on Freud. Like his precursors in the study of totem worship, Robertson Smith held that totemism was at the root of dietary taboos, which he viewed as affording special protection to the totem animal on the grounds of kinship. He extends the interpretation of dietary taboos, however, in a theory intended to account for the practice of animal sacrifice, widely attested in the Hebrew Bible, in classical texts, and in other ancient sources. He argues that the sacrifices these sources describe are the survivals in ancient cultures of a prehistoric totemic phase.²⁴ In this phase, sacrificial animals were of the totem species, chosen for their special holiness: “in a religion based on kinship, where the god and the worshipper are of one stock, the principle of sanctity and the principle of kinship are identical.”²⁵ Under these circumstances, the sacrifice of a sacred animal can supersede the usual taboo on its consumption on condition that the sacrifice be the act of the entire tribe or clan:

Robertson Smith’s hypothetical sacrifice thus affirms the kinship of the sacrificial animal and the clan members who join together to take its life. Moreover, he proposes, not only does the clan affirm its kinship with the animal by participating in its death, but also and above all by sharing it as food. Though the animal’s

As readers in Robertson Smith’s own time noted, his claim that animal sacrifices in the ancient world were survivals of prehistoric totem worship had little but conjecture to support it. The one text he adduces that describes a group of kindred feasting on a sacrificial animal dates from the fourth century, and is thus of dubious relevance to the analysis of prehistoric societies.²⁸ Written, as I have said, from a Christian standpoint, the work is strongly motivated by a wish to establish that Judaism contained in its origins a prefiguration of the Christian sacrament.

Nonetheless, the work had broad cultural impact. I will argue that it influenced Bram Stoker, whose Dracula (1897) follows Robertson Smith in recalling from Deuteronomy the phrase “the blood is the life,” and in reading it to mean “that the race has a life of its own, of which individual lives are only parts.”²⁹ Robertson Smith’s ideas were of course central to Freud’s work on totemism. Most broadly, he gave expression to a general hystericizing of blood in the late nineteenth century that resulted from the emergence into politics of populations and their aggregated life as a field of concern. In Robertson Smith’s terms, “The only thing that is sacred is the common tribal life, or the common blood that is identified with that life.”³⁰ The figure of “common blood,” far from being primitive, is absolutely characteristic of late Victorian biopolitics, both in its emphasis on the collective biological existence of the population, and in its profound mystification of how the population, or “tribe,” is constituted.

*****

Though totemism was an artifact of nineteenth-century intellectual history, that is not all it was.³¹ Just as the discourse of hysteria produced hysterics, the discourse of totemism made totem worshippers: If the evidence of Freud’s case histories can be accepted, they were to be found in the schools and nurseries of Europe, not in Western Australia. How could it be otherwise for children raised on Carroll’s Alice books (1865, 1871), Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877), Christina Rossetti’s Sing Song (1872), Kipling’s Jungle Books (1894, 1895) and Just So Stories (1902), Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit (1901), and Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908)? The Jungle Books, with their narrative of Mowgli’s adoption by wolves, even provided the model for Robert Baden-Powell’s organization of young Boy Scouts into “packs” of “wolf cubs.”³²

In Kipling’s jungle, the “Master Words” that Mowgli has to learn are an assertion of species identity figured as blood: “We be of one blood, ye and I.” Animals claim kinship with others of their kind by speaking the words in their own language. In the story “Kaa’s Hunting,”³³ Mowgli, the human child protagonist who is adopted by wolves, learns that to survive among the animals, he must speak all of their languages, so that he can in case of need claim kinship with any of them.³⁴ The story that follows his lesson shows him saving himself by claiming blood kinship first with the carrion-kites and later with the snakes, enacting in its use of the figure of blood the same contradiction we saw in totem discourse, where blood is at once the fundamental figure of species identity and a basis for cross-species identification. For Kipling, the human boy belongs to a universal species, whose ability to mimic the attributes of all the other animals makes him their master.³⁵

A more anxious, literalizing use of blood to figure the collective life of a population is the organizing principle of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. There is no evidence to say whether Stoker read Robertson Smith’s Lectures, though it seems likely that he would have at least known of them. In any case, his novel’s preoccupations with race and species identity, with cross-species affinity, and with dietary practices, and its mediation of all of these themes through the figure of a social circulation of blood, locates the two texts in a shared cultural moment. Along with other late Victorian vampire narratives like Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla (1872) and Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire (1897), moreover, Dracula shares with Robertson Smith’s Lectures an unexamined assumption that blood relationship obeys a sacramental logic – that is, that by consuming the blood of another person or of an animal, one becomes their kin.

***

Late Victorian Gothic fictions share with their Romantic-era models such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and James Hogg’s Confessions and Memoirs of a Justified Sinner (1824) the use of character doubling as an organizing principle. In response to the late Victorian crisis in the concept of species, though, as Mario Ortiz-Robles notes, in the fiction of this era, the monstrous double is animalized.³⁶ In texts like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), The Beetle (1897), and Dracula, Gothic now puts in question the species identity of its protagonists. At the same time, the fundamental Gothic theme of the remainder from an otherwise dead past – a literary topos which we saw in Chapter 4 itself influenced Darwin’s understanding of living bodies as containing organic remainders of their own histories – is transformed into a preoccupation with biological atavism.

As we saw in Chapter 6, Dracula is the literary culmination of the nineteenth-century emergence of a social circulation of blood, functioning both as a basis for identification – of bodies sharing “the same” blood – and for multiple kinds of differentiation: 1) between speciated or racialized bodies having different bloods; 2) between bodies bearing diseased or tainted blood and healthy bodies; and 3) between bodies on the basis of their propensity to bleed. As we have seen, all of these modes of differentiation are at work in Dracula, as is the concept of a society defined as sharing a common blood supply. But the single most striking thing about the novel is that, notwithstanding its massive investment in taxonomies of species, race, and gender, in its version of the vampire narrative all of these taxonomic boundaries can be crossed by the act of sharing or consuming blood. In this respect, the novel resembles Robertson Smith’s Lectures and totem discourse more generally.

The theme of male doubling in Dracula develops along two narrative paths, both well trodden by earlier Gothic texts. One of these paths dominates the novel’s first sections: Jonathan Harker is invited to Castle Dracula on the pretext of completing legal work for Dracula’s purchase of a property in England; it emerges, however, that the real reason Harker has been brought to the castle – where he shortly finds that he is a captive, rather than a guest – is to enable the Count, following his planned move to England, to pass for a native. Harker finds in Dracula’s library that he has been studying books “relating to English life and customs and manners,” as well as dictionaries, almanacs, and maps. Dracula allows that through these books he has come to “know” and “love” England (50), but laments that “alas! as yet I only know your tongue through books. To you, my friend,” he says to Harker, “I look that I know it to speak,” so that on his projected move to London, “no man stops if he see me, or pause in his speaking if he hear my words, to say ‘Ha, ha! a stranger!” (51). Dracula thus aims to model his speech and appearance on Harker’s so as to appear “like all the rest” (51) in England. His self-fashioning on Harker’s model extends later in the opening chapter to stealing and wearing his clothes so as to impersonate him. Most strikingly, because in Stoker’s version of vampire lore the vampire does not cast a reflection, when Harker looks into a mirror while the Count is standing behind him, he is startled to see that “the room behind me was displayed; but there was no sign of a man in it, except myself” (56). When Harker looks for Dracula in the mirror, the image he sees is his own.

In doubling narrative number one, then, Dracula appropriates Harker’s identity; Stoker’s novel allegorizes this appropriation as a desire to drink his blood. I will expand on this claim after outlining a second way in which male doubling structures relations between Stoker’s “crew of light” (to adopt Christopher Craft’s term) and their monstrous adversary.³⁷ Since Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis, a weirdly eroticized and ambivalent anti-Catholicism has been a staple feature of Gothic fiction – it remains so to this day. Dracula fully embraces this Gothic motif. With respect to his English and American antagonists, Dracula embodies an un-dead piece of history. This fact above all reflects the novel’s political plot, which stages a confrontation between the bourgeois, imperialist states that for Stoker embodied modernity and the feudalist, ethnic social order of which Dracula, alone in his ruined castle, is a remnant. But Dracula’s religion, as well as his politics, makes him an anachronism in nineteenth-century England. Stoker’s vampire mythology makes Dracula vulnerable to artifacts of Roman Catholic worship, notably the transubstantiated host and the crucifix. If there were any doubt of the specifically Catholic provenance of these holy objects, the vampire hunter Van Helsing explains, as he commits an apparent sacrilege by rolling up the host and stuffing it around the door of Lucy Westenra’s tomb, that “I have an Indulgence” (248) – at once showing that he is himself Catholic and hinting that, like other Gothic protagonists in years to come, he is well connected in the Church hierarchy.

Another axis along which Dracula’s plot doubles the vampire and his antagonists, then, is that of Catholicism. The English and American characters in the crew of light carry out Van Helsing’s plans and use the sacred objects he supplies, but do not share his religion; Harker, for instance, identifies himself as an “English Churchman” and notes that he has been taught to view the crucifix as “in some measure idolatrous” (35). Van Helsing, a Catholic stranger in London who speaks accented English, is thus the most obvious of Dracula’s doubles, and indeed his leadership of the vampire hunt follows the logic of Wagner’s Parsifal: “The spear that made the wound must heal it” – or that of schoolyard homophobia: “It takes one to know one.” As Talia Schaffer observes, Van Helsing’s crucifix is “a vaccine against vampirism – but like a vaccine, it initiates the disease against which it protects.”³⁸

The man whose identity he wants to assume and the man who can see him for what he really is are by no means Dracula’s only doubles in the novel. Indeed, thinking about Dracula as organized by relations between doubles risks treating its characters too much as individuals and neglecting the extent to which they are types – representatives of populations or segments of populations. The novel’s fundamental subject is the war of populations – and its organizing figure for the vampire’s war on the “swarming millions” of England’s population is his appropriation of its blood, which as we have seen, the novel imagines as an undifferentiated fluid circulating at large through the social body. The theme of the double, the secret affinity between Dracula and the characters who oppose him, at bottom stages the extreme porousness of the envelope enclosing this body, the population that the vampire threatens.

The novel is explicit on these points. The vampire has provoked an autoimmune response at home, where a population alert to the threat he poses shuns him and reduces him to short rations – apparently to feeding only on small children. Van Helsing figures him as leaving a land that has become “barren – barren of peoples – and coming to a new land where life of man teems till they are like the multitude of standing corn” (360). There he plans to become the “father or furtherer of a new order of beings” (343) like himself. The equivocation in Van Helsing’s formulation underscores how in this text sexual reproduction as the driver of population is mystified, replaced with the literalized figure of blood kinship, as it is in totem discourse.

Dracula then stages a war between population groups constituted by shared blood. Four of the male members of the crew of light give their blood by transfusion to Lucy Westenra in a doomed attempt to save her from the vampire’s depredations. Dracula vampirizes and establishes a telepathic bond with Mina Harker by forcing her to drink his blood. Each of the warring populations from the standpoint of the other appears animalized. Dracula in his one encounter with the crew of light memorably compares them to sheep and jackals: “You think to baffle me, you – with your pale faces all in a row, like sheep in a butcher’s. You shall be sorry yet, each one of you! … Your girls that you all love are mine already; and through them you and others shall yet be mine – my creatures, to do my bidding, and to be my jackals when I want to feed” (347). To his human antagonists, Dracula is “brute, and more than brute” (276); or, to Mina Harker, a Thing “not human – not even beast” (267). In these passages, the novel suggests that the biopolitical threat posed by Dracula is that of unclassified “bare life”; when the boxes of soil in which he rests are made inaccessible to him with pieces of the host, they are repeatedly characterized as “sterilized.”

Stoker’s conception of the vampire has animal models, notably the vampire bat. To become a vampire is to be gradually animalized, beginning with the development of canine fangs. And of course the vampire can appear in animal form – above all, as a bat – and summon at will the aid of non-human animals with whom he has an affinity, such as the wolf and the rat.

Notably, Dracula’s affinities tend to be with animals that appear in a pack or swarm; in his encounter with his adversaries too, when he compares them to sheep and jackals, he turns for his analogies to a herd animal and one that roams in packs. The foundational antagonism in Stoker’s novel is between population groups, not individuals.

To understand the animality of Stoker’s vampires, it is useful to contrast the novel with earlier Victorian representations of struggle against animality represented as a form of atavism. Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850) propounds a pre-Darwinian idea of progressive evolution in which the human species develops by losing traits supposedly characteristic of non-human animals: “Move upwards, working out the beast, / And let the ape and tiger die” (118. 27–8). Charles Kingsley’s post-Darwinian The Water Babies (1863) includes a devolutionary fable in which a tribe he calls the “Doasyoulikes” quickly devolve into apes, losing the ability to raise food, to walk upright, and to speak. In both cases, the animal allegorizes human traits that the writers deplore: violence, imitativeness, lust, dirt, laziness, and so forth. In both, the animal also represents what the writers view as the primitivism of suppositious racial groups – Irish, in Kingsley’s case, and in Tennyson’s, African and South Asian.

Stoker’s Dracula does not allegorize any specific character traits; nor, though the novel is fully invested in late Victorian racial ideology, does the vampire typify any particular “race.”³⁹ He embodies not a particular population, but the concept of population; it is not his individual life but the life that he bears that threatens his adversaries, inasmuch as this life requires their death. Like the totem, Dracula embodies the collective life of his race or species, including the idea of species immortality. Immortal as he is, his memories and the racial memory of his people appear as one. The novel’s crusade against him seeks to exterminate an entire species or genre of life: Dracula is in this sense a genocidal text.

***

By embodying the concept of population in the vampire, Dracula establishes that the late eighteenth-century genre of Gothic retains a critical edge with respect to late Victorian biopolitical and eugenic ideas. Our reading of the novel opened by establishing that the novel doubles the vampire with his principal antagonists and that it symbolizes this doubling by the transfer of blood between them. Thus Dracula’s plan to adopt Jonathan Harker’s identity is symbolized as a wish to drink his blood. In a broader view, we can now see that the vampire stands at once for the population and for the biological agent that threatens it, or more abstractly, for the doubling of biopolitics and thanatopolitics. Besides the threat of blood loss that the vampire poses to the collective in Stoker’s novel, then, it also renders visible the symbolic work that blood does in affirming kinship between the different individuals and groups that it comprises. I have already argued that Dracula embodies the concept of population; we can now add that he represents not only a biopolitical threat to the teeming millions of Britons, but also by a dialectical necessity the body in which the biopolitical concept of population actually becomes visible.⁴⁰ In his body mingles the blood of men and women, of Catholics and Protestants, and of white inhabitants of both the Old World and the New.⁴¹ In the novel’s plot, Dracula is the antagonist who brings the disparate members of the Crew of Light together and forges their identity as a collective; in its symbolic argument, the figuration of the collective as constituted by the mingling of its members’ blood shows its biopolitical character. The novel’s Gothic narrative represents the population as an artificial body whose ability to assimilate many lives into one is fundamentally morbid. Its accumulation of life – allegorized as blood – is figured as excessive, wasteful, and uncanny, and its self-reproduction entails violent death.

The Crew of Light themselves, though joined in the course of the novel by the tie of blood, are compared to the vampire strikingly uninterested in reproducing. The Crew’s male members are linked by professional ties as doctors and lawyers and by friendships formed while hunting big game, and Dracula follows the conventions of the adventure story in setting its heroes a task that calls on each of their talents to complete. The social ties that join the vampire hunters are thus emphatically homosocial, and the novel indeed bears a relation to other late Victorian genres that require an all-male team to renounce women for the duration of the narrative.

The exception that proves the rule in Stoker’s novel is the inclusion of Mina Harker as a vital member of the Crew. During the course of the novel, Mina marries Jonathan Harker, an event for which she prepares by studying typing and stenography. Her skills, like those of the men, prove indispensable in the campaign against the vampire, and late in the novel Van Helsing credits her with “a great brain … trained like [a] man’s brain” (481). It is true that unlike her friend Lucy, Mina does not put the men of the Crew at risk by her sexual allure; to this extent she is represented as unfeminine. But the secretarial work Mina does was in fact fully characteristic of the generation of women who in the 1880s and 1890s entered office work in Britain and the United States along with the new technology of the typewriter, displacing the male clerks of an earlier era, represented in the fiction of Dickens and Trollope, who wrote by hand.⁴² The novel’s point is thus that a woman’s work is as vital to the Crew’s success as that of the men: Mina not only contributes the technical ability to transcribe records in different media, including Jonathan’s stenographic diary and Seward’s dictaphone recordings, and reduce them to a single text legible to all; she also serves as an affective medium. Only to her are the novel’s male characters able to reveal the incredible or shameful secrets of their encounters with vampires, so only she is able to assemble the entire narrative of Dracula’s invasion. Mina’s work as a mediator culminates in the telepathic connection she is able to make with Dracula as he seeks to escape at the novel’s end.

Mina is thus an essential member of the Crew and cements the homosocial bonds that constitute it. And though the novel thus incorporates in its representation of the struggle against Dracula an argument about the complementarity of men’s and women’s talents, it remains resolute in keeping the serious business of adventure sex-free. Mina and Jonathan’s wedding – and their wedding night – take place while the latter is confined to a hospital bed in a convent. The room they share in Seward’s asylum is the scene of Dracula’s attack on Mina, to which she responds by declaring herself “unclean! unclean!”, echoing the menstrual taboo of Leviticus 19:15–33.

Only with Dracula’s death is the taboo seemingly lifted. In the “Note” with which the novel ends, dated seven years after its main action ends with the vampire’s killing, Jonathan reveals that he and Mina now have a son, born on one of the anniversaries. They have given the boy a “bundle of names” that “links all our little band of men together” (419) – making him the last of Dracula’s doubles, a final figure of the collective body.⁴³ Like a vampire, the baby boy is nourished by sucking; and, though as an individual he is the result of sexual reproduction, symbolically his appearance at the novel’s close reiterates its concern with how the collective body reproduces and perpetuates itself.⁴⁴ While Mina and Jonathan’s baby does not literally mingle the blood of an entire population, his life is nonetheless founded on death: of all his names, the one his parents actually call him by is Quincy, to commemorate the American killed by Dracula’s attendants in the final moments of the novel’s action. Dracula’s exiguous romance plot cannot conceal the novel’s concern with the constitution of the biological population by killing, a concern that it shares with Robertson Smith’s Lectures and with the broader literature in totemism.

***

In at least two respects, the subject theorized by psychoanalysis belongs to the historical period treated in this book, in which from the late eighteenth century politics becomes concerned with life as such. The first of these arises from the centrality to psychoanalytic theory of a specifically sexual unconscious, which, as Emily Steinlight writes, is “the site of political collectivity and of species-being.”⁴⁵ Freud’s postulate of an unconscious formed of rejected libidinal positions, of sexual attachments from the past that remain active in the mind of a subject who can no longer acknowledge them, was the result of clinical experience. It was the most controversial of Freud’s claims, giving scandal to his contemporaries, and precipitated divisions among the first generation of psychoanalysts when leading figures including Alfred Adler and Carl Jung split with him to embrace broader concepts of the unconscious based on cultural archetypes or on aggression. The idea that some kinds of mental activity could be carried on without being admitted to consciousness was by no means new when Freud advanced it and indeed provided a key paradigm for Victorian theories of mental illness and aberrant behaviour. These included, on the one hand, well-developed theories of compulsive action and automatism, and, on the other, theories of alienated or divided consciousness owing to external agencies such as mesmerism or shock. Psychoanalysis, with its early use of hypnosis and its analysis of symptomatic acts as a means of access to unconscious material, has long been recognized as building on these existing areas of research.

Freud’s account of an unconscious constituted by the repression of sexual desire, however, made a decisive break with nineteenth-century psychiatry. It also broke with the long history of Western writing about sex, where it has rather been associated with an excess of consciousness than the reverse. To find a precursor for Freud’s sexual unconscious, we need to leave the field of individual psychology and look elsewhere, to demographics and natural history.⁴⁶ We have already discussed ideas of unconscious agency in Darwin’s work, culminating in the idea of sexual selection as a mechanism by which a population unconsciously shapes its own phenotype. Beginning in The Origin of Species, Darwin presents unconscious selection as an inevitable result of the cultivation of other species by human beings. In The Descent of Man, he theorizes sexual selection as a species’ self-cultivation, by which the aggregated aesthetic preferences of a population’s individual members confer a reproductive advantage on possessors of body types and other traits deemed beautiful. These traits in time propagate and intensify, becoming embodied as distinctive to the population in question. Darwin held that the visible markers of racial difference in human beings – for instance in body type, skin pigmentation, distribution and quantity of body hair – were for the most part produced in this way.

In this view of the unconscious agency of sex in constituting populations, Darwin develops a way of theorizing about sex and population that Thomas Malthus had pioneered in his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). The well-known premise of Malthus’s Essay is that “the passion between the sexes” is an unvarying part of human nature, appearing “to exist in as much force at present as it did two thousand, or four thousand years ago” (16). The result of what Malthus calls a fixed law of nature is that populations tend to expand until they are checked by shortage of food or other resources (15). Like Darwin’s The Origin of Species, Malthus’s Essay relies heavily on analogy. Neither the exponential growth nor the collapse of human populations are in fact to be observed as such; Malthus deduces what he characterizes as the tendency of human populations to increase at an exponential rate by analogy with animals and plants, which “are all impelled by a powerful instinct to the increase of the species. … [W]henever … there is liberty, the power of increase is exerted; and the superabundant effects are repressed afterwards by want of room and nourishment, which is common to animals and plants; and among animals, by being the prey of others” (21). But the power of increase in human populations is almost never observable: in Malthus’s time, as he discusses, it was even a matter of dispute whether the European population had increased at all since the Roman Empire. In human beings, the sexual instinct is repressed by what he terms the “preventative check” caused by individuals’ rational decisions not to have children whom they cannot support (32–8). Only among the poor does the “positive check” (39) to population appear, in the forms of malnutrition or disease – and there, the supposed checks can be read, and of course were read by Malthus’s critics, as the effects of poverty rather than of overpopulation – of a failure to distribute the available resources, rather than of an absolute shortage.

The supposed instinct to increase the human species in Malthus’s work thus never appears as such. Malthus hypothesizes that its operation produces what he terms an “oscillation” or alternation of “progressive and retrograde movements” in economic conditions, by which rises or falls in the price of labour serve as a signal triggering cyclical growth and retrenchment in the population. Even in this form, however, the population’s tendency to increase “has been less obvious, and less demonstrably confirmed by experience, than might naturally be expected” (23). The reasons Malthus adduces for the non-obviousness of the oscillating predominance of sex and death include historians’ attention only to “the higher class” and the difficulty of determining the real price of labour (23).

In Malthus’s account of the human sexual instinct from the point of view of population, then, it is not only invisible as such, but it manifests itself in the oscillating predominance of population growth and of checks to that growth. These checks include not only deaths caused by overpopulation itself, but also the vaguely specified “vice” that Malthus represents as the form sex takes under overcrowding. This Malthusian view of sex as the hidden regulator of population, bringer of both life and death, containing within itself both its own check and its own perversion, shapes the pervasive linkage of sex and death in post-Darwinian European culture – with Dracula only one of innumerable examples. Our reading of the vampire as personifying a collective body in which the conjunction of biopolitics and thanatopolitics is made manifest, would thus need to be extended, such that this personification could be seen at work in the male protagonists of Baudelaire, Wagner, Swinburne, and Hardy, to name only a few.

It is in the milieu defined by these writers, of course, that Freud formulated his theory of sexuality and the unconscious. The sexual basis of the unconscious was a key premise of psychoanalysis from the Studies on Hysteria on; in what Freud considered his purely psychoanalytic works, beginning with The Interpretation of Dreams, however, sex has the peculiarity – as in Malthus – of always appearing divided against itself, as precipitating its own check. In the first iteration of libido theory, the psychic apparatus’ tendency to satisfy itself by immediately discharging any accumulation of energy through fantasy is checked by the development of the reality principle. This latter Freud theorizes not as opposing satisfaction, but as deferring it; as he put it later, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, it enjoins “the temporary toleration of unpleasure as a step on the long indirect road to pleasure” (18:10). In Freud’s early work, the checking of the pleasure principle by the reality principle is the basic form of psychic conflict, and the motive that eventually leads the developing subject to repress portions of the libido whose satisfaction is incompatible with reality. In Freud’s late work, with the introduction of the so-called second topographic model of the mind, he develops another theory of the sexual instinct as self-checking when he proposes that the ego itself is libidinally invested, and thus develops a theory of psychic conflict based on the demands the ego makes with respect to the subject’s choice of external sexual objects.⁴⁷ Repression in this view derives from a check that sex imposes on itself.

Freud’s final model of psychic conflict does not quite postulate, as his earlier work did, a division of the sexual instinct against itself. Beyond the Pleasure Principle is nonetheless his most Malthusian work, both because it resembles Malthus’ Essay in having the conflict of life and death as its structuring principle and because the work takes as its topic not only the individual psyche but more broadly the claim that psychic conflict is ultimately only an instance of a conflict immanent to life in general. In Freud’s work from this period on, the paradigm for psychic conflict is the conflict between the sex drive and the death drive, psychic agencies that Freud now understands as working through the individual body while joining it to the long history of its species and indeed of living matter as such, on whose behalf they are ultimately viewed as acting. The sex drives are therefore those which “watch over” the germ-cells and “bring about their meeting with other germ-cells”; “they are the true life-instincts [Lebenstriebe]” (18:40), since they aim at a kind of immortality – that of the population, or of the species. These drives “operate against the purpose” of the others, whose aim is death. Because all life is affected by the conflict between these two countervailing forces, Freud writes,

There is no evidence that Freud read Malthus.⁴⁸ The figure of the vacillating rhythm in this passage reappears in the other figures of oscillating movements and halting steps that pervade Beyond the Pleasure Principle, but I do not mean to suggest that they allude directly to the oscillating movement of the population in which instinct is manifest for Malthus. Rather, I have tried to show in this section that Freud’s concept of sex as an agency that works through individuals who remain largely unconscious of it, and that becomes visible in moments of conflict when it turns against or checks itself – that Freud’s entire concept of sex presumes a post-Malthusian biopolitical framing, which by his time had become so pervasive that it received virtually no explicit notice in his writing.

The other respect in which the Freudian subject is a biopolitical subject has only an indirect relation to his Malthusian affinities; it is the pervasive identification of the subjects in Freud’s case histories with non-human animals. In four of Freud’s six extended case histories, the subject’s ambivalent relations with a species of animal play a major role. In two of these, the cases of Little Hans and of the Rat Man, a full-blown animal phobia precipitates the analysis; in the other two – the cases of the Wolf Man and Dr Schreber – material related to the wolf and to the eagle emerges in the course of the analysis.

These case histories were published between 1909 and 1918, and, making allowances for the many differences between them, they have in common Freud’s interpretation of his subjects’ relations with animals as figures for their ambivalent relations, at once rivalrous and identificatory, with their fathers. Though he only explicitly cites the history of Little Hans and his horse phobia, Freud’s experience in this whole group of cases shaped his argument in Totem and Taboo – the first of his anthropological writings, published in 1913 – as did contemporary work by other analysts on boys with animal fixations, like Little Arpad, whose obsession with roosters was the subject of a case history by Sandor Ferenczi, also published in 1913.

To formulate a general theory to account for his repeated observations of animal phobias and animal identifications in children (and in childhood memories of adult patients), Freud in Totem and Taboo turns to the late Victorian discourse on totemism, especially the works of McLennan, Frazer, and Robertson Smith.⁴⁹ For speculations on the social organization of early human society, he also turns to Darwin, whose The Descent of Man argues on the analogy of present-day great apes, that early humans lived in polygamous groups dominated by a single male.

In fact, while in Freud’s work and in psychoanalysis more generally the topic of species identity appears under theorized, his work nonetheless attributes a preoccupation with the concept of species to his subjects, just as earlier writers on the totem did to the “primitive” cultures they studied. In this final section, I will argue that totem theory in Freud, as in its nineteenth-century originators, works as a theory of species and population that does not know itself as such.⁵⁰

Without explicit acknowledgement of the fact, Freud’s case histories show how children come to understand sex, death, and birth by observing animals. Freud is explicit on the kinship children feel with animals, writing in Totem and Taboo that they

In the slightly later “A Difficulty in Psychoanalysis,” Freud likens the kinship children and totem societies feel with non-human animals to the kinship between species theorized by Darwin:

Freud’s writings on totemism and on children’s relations with animals thus obey a double logic. On the one hand, in discussing the kinship that totem worshippers and children feel with non-human animals, Freud views them as grasping a truth that the “arrogance” of civilized adults conceals, and from which it was given to Darwin in making his discovery to lift the veil of repression. And as we will see, Freud views animals as the legitimate teachers to children of facts that adults keep from them. On the other hand, Freud also views children’s identifications with non-human animals and sense of kinship with them, as well as totem societies’ claims of kinship to animals, as wholly symbolic – that is, as disguised representations of real relations of kinship within the human nuclear family.

The fullest account in Freud’s work of a child’s relations with animals occurs in his case history of “Little Hans,” published in 1909. Freud met the boy Hans only once, and most of the case material comes from notes taken by his father, who was a follower of Freud’s. The events of the case history begin when Hans is four, and they show that he carefully observes and has strong affective relations with many animals around him. Most notable is his interest in the carriage horses and cart horses he sees outside his home in Vienna and encounters on his walks; zoo animals, including lions and giraffes, also preoccupy him, as do farm animals he encounters during trips to the country. Hans identifies with the horses he sees and plays at being a horse (10:52, 58). The critical event of his life in the period narrated in the case history is the birth of a sister when Hans is three and a half. As a result of his observation of his new sister, as well of his mother, and also in consequence of his mother’s threat to have his penis cut off if he played with it, the boy becomes deeply preoccupied by the difference between beings with penises and beings without, seeking out animals with penises, notably horses, and the lion and the giraffe at the zoo. As Freud observes, his investigations enable him “to come at genuine abstract knowledge” (10:9), though it at this point only concerns the difference “between animate and inanimate objects,” inasmuch as “a dog and a horse have widdlers [wiwimacher]; a table and a chair haven’t” (10:9). In the course of the events narrated in the case history, however, the boy is brought by repeated assurances from his father to accept that his mother and sister do not in fact have penises, and to recognize the penis’s significance as a marker of sexual difference.

In the wake of his sister’s birth, Hans’s fascination with horses and their genitals is supplanted by a horse phobia, which confines him to the house owing to fear that a horse will bite him (10:22). The analysis leads to the quite plausible conclusion that that the boy’s at once phobic and identificatory relation with horses symbolizes his ambivalence towards his father. Perhaps predictably, we learn much less about Hans’s attitude to his mother; nonetheless, his researches do not only concern his father’s role in his sister’s birth, but also hers. He treats his parents’ story that she was brought by the stork with derision; he seems to identify the sounds he heard during the birth (he was in the house at the time) with the sounds made by a horse falling down in the street (10:66, 135); he imagines her birth on the analogy of a chicken laying an egg (10:85).

Freud interprets little Hans’s researches as motivated solely by curiosity about the relations between his parents and about his sister’s birth. At the close of the case history, notwithstanding his researches, the boy remains effectively ignorant about the facts of sex and childbirth. His phobia has receded, though, and – for Freud these events are causally linked – he has “got on to familiar terms” with his father (10:144); there is no suggestion that he any longer identifies with horses, or that he is any longer obliged to displace onto them the fear and aggression he felt towards his father. For little Hans, in Freud’s view, the resolution of his neurosis brings about the end of any need to symbolize his relations with actual kin through his relations with animals.

So too in Freud’s essay on totemism, the supposed totem stage of human beings’ development as a species is a mere means of symbolizing a general cultural ambivalence towards the memory of the primal father, whose murder Freud postulates as the founding event of human history. Totem and Taboo’s narrative of the development of the species is more open-ended than the individual case of little Hans; in Totem and Taboo, there is no implication that the cultural transitions from totem worship to polytheism to the monotheistic religions, and thence to Christianity are progressive, or curative – Freud does not view the history of religion as affording a gain in knowledge or a lifting of repression. There can be, in Lacan’s term, no Real father, but only a series of symbolic substitutions for the dead primal father, in which the role played by animals in totemism is later played by different kinds of anthropomorphic deity and by other cultural heroes.

Our question is, does the relation with non-human animals have any particular privilege, or ontological independence, that would distinguish it in Freud’s view from, say, religion as a mere illusion, having no reality independent of the paternal relation of which it is a disguised representation? To answer the question, we recall that Freud takes from Victorian totem discourse the central claim that totemism is a system of kinship as well as a religion. Unlike most succeeding religions (with Christianity being the exception and – to Freud’s mind – in this respect a regression) it answers the question, “who are my kin and what do we share in common?” On the answer to this question totem societies were supposed to have based a law of exogamy that elaborated the single law of the primal father into a social system and established the historical progenitor of every subsequent system of human kinship. In taking over this claim from his Victorian sources, Freud reproduces the fundamental incoherence of their idea of kinship. Totemism requires the idea of species: the totem itself is defined as a species of animal (or, less often, of plant), but it also defines an idea of kinship that is constituted by the crossing of species lines.

In Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am, the central topic is the constitution in philosophy of the human in a relation to animals that remains unacknowledged. Derrida argues that the human comes into existence as a follower of animals (the French je suis signifies both “I am” and “I follow”). Conjoined with this general claim is a specific argument that the trace – a key motif in Derrida’s work since Of Grammatology – is proper to the animal: it is animals who leave traces and it is given to the animal to follow the trace.⁵¹ For Derrida, speaking at a conference on “The Autobiographical Animal,” the autobiographer who writes “I am” is necessarily an animal in pursuit of an animal, an animal whose own animality eludes it.

A final thematic in this work, that of nudity, also at issue in autobiography where it is the task of the autobiographer to present himself or herself stripped bare, will concern us less. Here too, for Derrida, the problematic of the human relation to the animal is made manifest, since it is when naked that the human being assumes the condition of an animal – and yet, as Derrida writes, we do not say of non-human animals that they are naked.

I give these theoretical points of reference because psychoanalysis, as Freud’s case histories show, is very much a practice of autobiography. In The Animal That Therefore I Am, the critique of psychoanalysis is a major part of Derrida’s argument, but he says little about the case histories or about Totem and Taboo – though he does refer in passing to the animality of the absolute father, collapsing the distinction between the totem as symbol and the murdered primal father whom Freud supposes to be the person symbolized.⁵² Much of what follows expands on this throwaway suggestion of Derrida’s.

There is certainly every reason to extend Derrida’s claims about the structuring presence of the animal/human divide in autobiography to the practice of psychoanalysis. In his first psychoanalytic case history, Freud begins by stating that inability to tell their own stories is characteristic of neurotic patients:

Freud goes on to assert that the theoretical significance of neurotics’ inability to tell their stories is that it shows the operation of repression; the lifting of repression in the course of analysis that alleviates the patients’ symptoms therefore also fill in the gaps in their memory.

Analysis then consists in uncovering and following a path. The figure of the path in this sentence is ambiguous in its meaning, referring at once to the psychoanalytic method followed by the therapy and to the narrative of the patient’s life that it uncovers.

There is a similar ambiguity in Freud’s assertion that an “unbroken case history” emerges “towards the end of treatment” – what is the relation between the history that emerges in analysis, presumably as a product of the patient’s memory, and the case history we are reading, the history of the analysis, in which it is narrated from a position of retrospect outside it?

Throughout Freud’s work, his own discourse can be observed to double that of his patients, and to be subject to pressure and deformation by some of the same mechanisms of symptom formation. Freud himself observed this, and the topic is a staple in commentary on his work.⁵³ I raise it here to preface the claim that Freud’s own stories, like his patients’, leave “gaps unfilled and riddles unanswered” (7: 16), i.e., leave the path – especially when they deal with the relations between human and non-human animals.

Before concluding with a return to Totem and Taboo, I want to consider another of Freud’s case histories in which the analyzand’s relation to animals plays a key role. Freud published the case history of the “Wolf Man” in 1918, five years after Totem and Taboo – though the analysis it narrates took place from 1910 to 1914 and included the period of Totem and Taboo’s composition and publication in 1913; in spite of the delay in publication, the Wolf Man case history was written in 1914. Like that of little Hans, the Wolf Man case history has an animal phobia at its center, though in this case, the phobia is directed against animals that the patient had very probably never encountered in real life, and stem from an anxiety dream he experienced at the age of four.

In this anxiety dream, the patient recalled,

The way this dream is narrated makes it a dream within a dream, since it begins with the child in his bed, dreaming that he is in bed, then seeing the window opening – the only action in this dream where otherwise all the actors are motionless – as a kind of raising of the curtain to the main dream. The dream is in a sense already a dream of a dream – a point underscored by Freud’s report that “in the course of the treatment the first dream reappeared in innumerable variations and new editions” (18:36).

Also extant in many variations and editions is the Wolf Man’s visual rendering of his dream, the first version of which he made for Freud during the course of the analysis. Later in his life – having lost his inherited fortune during the Russian Revolution – the Wolf Man sold paintings to make money, including multiple versions of the original drawing rendered in oil. Each of these renderings might be described as a Wolf Man “original.”⁵⁴

The relation between representation and original in the context of the Wolf Man’s dream is thus far from straightforward. Freud’s interpretation – perhaps the most controversial and brilliant of his dream interpretations – nonetheless focuses on the task of discovering the original event that the dream represents. As I have noted, there is no reason to think that the almost five-year-old Wolf Man had ever seen a wolf; the immediate sources for his dream, it rapidly emerges, were fairy tales. The patient right away produces a reference to a story told him by his grandfather, of a tailor who caught a wolf by the tail and pulled it off, whereupon the whole pack chased him up a tree, led by the maimed one (17:30–1). The patient also recalled a picture of a wolf in a book of fairy tales of which he was “terribly afraid” at the period of the dream (17:29). But the most important originals of the wolves in this dream belong to other species altogether. As the text of the dream notes, the wolves are white and have bushy tails. The analysis links these traits to animals that the patient has actually met with – sheep, as the putative source of the wolves’ whiteness (though this will turn out to be overdetermined), and sheepdogs, as the source of their bushy tails.

From Freud’s interpretation of this dream, I wish to refer only to one strand, certainly the most important, and also the most equivocal in its conclusions. Recalling that one source for the dream material was the story of a tailor chased into a tree by a pack of wolves, Freud observes that this image appears in the dream in inverted form – in the patient’s dream, the wolves are in the tree, not below it. Treating the dream, as he characteristically does, as an aesthetic object with its own immanent principles of formal unity, he proposes that the transposition of key terms is in this dream a general rule. Thus, a scene in which “the wolves sat there motionless; they looked at him but did not move” would symbolize

The ensuing analysis shows that the dream (occurring on Christmas Eve – which was also the eve of the patient’s birthday) had as one of its determinants the child’s anticipation of the gifts he was to receive the next day, some of them hanging from the Christmas tree. The gifts turn to wolves because the boy in a homosexual phase of the Oedipus complex associates receiving gifts from his father with receiving sexual satisfaction from him. Freud thus reads the picture in the dream as a distorted version of a sexual scene; in the course of the analysis, on the basis of the patient’s associations but without any direct corroboration from his memory, he constructs the scene that is represented in his patient’s dream: “What sprang into activity that night out of the chaos of the patient’s unconscious memory-traces was the picture of copulation between his parents, copulation in circumstances which were not entirely usual and were especially favourable for observation” (17:30). In fact, Freud proposes, at the age of one and a half, the child woke from a nap in his parents’ bedroom to witness their “coitus a tergo [from behind], three times repeated; he was able to see his mother’s genitals as well as his father’s organ; and he understood the process as well as its significance” (17:37).⁵⁵

This so-called primal scene [Urszene] originates the Wolf Man’s neurosis – and, from a formal point of view, much of the remainder of Freud’s discussion consists of attempts to prevent it from being enfolded into the narrative at whose beginning it supposedly stands. The passage I have just quoted seems to close with the assertion that the one-and-a-half-year-old observer of his parents’ intercourse “understood” what he observed; to this assertion, though, there is a note: “I mean that he understood it at the time of the dream when he was four years old, not at the time of the observation. He received the impressions when he was one-and-a-half; his understanding them was deferred” (17:38–9).

The principle of deferred action [nachtraglichkeit] arises in all of Freud’s case histories; in that of the Wolf Man, it operates across the distinction between the human and the animal: the anxiety dream of the wolf is the form in which the boy’s deferred understanding of his parents’ sex appears to him. But even this equivocal claim that the sex of human beings is the origin of the boy’s knowledge and of the neurosis that follows is qualified as the case history develops. In addressing what he anticipates will be his readers’ scepticism about the highly particularized scene that he constructs on the basis of his patient’s symptoms and associations, Freud suggests an alternative: that the dream of the wolves staring at the boy is an inverted representation of his observation, not of his parents, but of other animals.

Subsequently, Freud admits that every time he has been able in analysis to bring out a scene in which the subject observed his parents having sex, it had the “peculiarity” (17:59) that the parents perform what he discreetly names in Latin as “coitus a tergo, more ferarum [coitus from behind, in the manner of beasts]” (17:57).⁵⁶ This fact suggests, as Freud allows, that the primal scene “is only a phantasy, which is invariably aroused, perhaps, by an observation of the sexual intercourse of animals” (17:59). Invariably … perhaps. Here Freud pauses the argument, returning to it at the analysis’ close, where further material – to which the patient is led by dreaming of a butterfly – gives him evidence enough to reassert the reality of the primal scene and to affirm once and for all that in the patient’s animal phobia, the wolf is a substitute for the father (17:112).

Perhaps. In making this claim Freud also takes the opportunity to link his findings in the Wolf Man’s case to anthropological argument of Totem and Taboo. There too Freud interprets non-human animals – the animals putatively worshipped as totems at an early stage in the history of every human society – as symbols of the father, and the taboo on killing the totem as atonement for the supposed primal murder. The work of Freud’s text consists in uncovering the traces of the father-animal’s murder: “An event such as the elimination of the primal father by the company of his sons must inevitably have left ineradicable traces [unvertilgbare Spuren] in the history of humanity; and the less it itself was recollected, the more numerous must have been the substitutes to which it gave rise” (13:155). In Freud’s rendering of historical memory in this work, totemism, like all of the other religious and cultural institutions he discusses, institutes both the repetition of the primal murder and the act of atonement for it. It is not too much to say that in Freud’s work the human as such comes into being with the radical ambiguity of the trace – an ambiguity that this text does not fail to reproduce as it uncovers and recovers the singular event of the primal murder. In referring to the event, Freud’s writing makes a radical shift in diegetic mode, from argument to narration, as if stumbling onto a track. Thus having asked in the mode of argument how totem societies “composed of members with equal rights … subject to the restrictions of the totem-system” (13:141) could have emerged from the “primal horde [Urhorde]” theorized by Darwin⁵⁷ – in which a single male keeps all the females for himself, driving away his sons as they grow up – Freud answers with a story: “One day the brothers who had been driven out came together, killed and devoured the father and so made an end of the patriarchal horde” (13:141). To the words “one day,” though, Freud appends a note: “To avoid possible misunderstanding, I must ask the reader to take into account the final sentences of the following footnote as a corrective to this description” (13:141n1). These sentences, in turn, attribute a “lack of precision” and “abbreviation of the time factor” in the body of the text to “reserve necessitated by the nature of the topic.” The note concludes that “it would be as foolish to aim at exactitude in such questions as it would be unfair to insist on certainty” (13:142n.1).

In its halting gait, its recourse to unspecified grounds for “reserve,” and its equivocation about the eventuality of the event it describes – about whether or not it happened and whether or not it was repeated – this passage resembles nothing so much as the end of a vampire story. It is no weakness in psychoanalysis that its theory of human culture centers on a traumatic kernel, whose unnarratability the theory is doomed to enact as well as to describe. Quite the contrary. My intent in this chapter has only been to notice how consistently this traumatic kernel is associated with the concept of species and with species difference. Freud has no account of why for little Hans and the Wolf Man the traumatic encounter with the parents’ sex should be symbolized by an entire species of animal, nor of why a species of animal is the form of the primal father’s return. Other than the breezy assertion that the brothers of the primal horde were “cannibal savages” (13:142) Freud offers no explanation of why the concepts of kinship and species should be so insistently linked to eating in his account of totemism, as in totem discourse more generally dating back to Robertson Smith. If, as I’ve argued here, totem discourse is a way of thinking about species, its preoccupation with diet should be related to the evidence we have seen from writers for children like Christina Rossetti and Lewis Carroll, that in the bourgeois societies of the nineteenth century – as, perhaps, in our own – there was a close connection between learning to classify animals and learning to recognize foods. For a child, the species chicken, pig, or lobster may first appear as something to eat, just as a child’s first models of sexual behaviour are likely to be animals. The point here is not the banal one that for the Victorians all forms of appetite were beastly, but rather that if in the nineteenth century, as Foucault proposed, human beings for the first time discovered themselves to be a biological species, this discovery required an identification with their animal counterparts. Besides the central role that non-human animals can play in children’s sexual histories, as evidenced in the cases of little Hans and the Wolf Man, Freud’s myth of the primal father and indeed the whole of totem discourse suggest that identification with something like meat, or something undead, forms an unacknowledged basis of human species-being.