Materializing Feeling and the Limits of Metaphor

Abstract:The affective turn has prompted literary scholars to take interest in neuroscientific and philosophical approaches to the materiality of bodyminds, even while often insisting on the immaterial qualitativeness of feeling. This paper examines the prehistory of this divided investment, which reinscribes affect into the atom, the cell, the fiber, and the molecule. The Victorian fascination with newly imaginable physical worlds creates unsettling scales of existence that were understood as formative of human identity, emotion, and moral capacities, but were seemingly fungible, nonindividual, and depthless. Examining George Eliot’s treatment of the material basis of feeling in Middlemarch (1871–72), I argue that Victorian science insisted on the metaphorical bearing of materialist concepts, presenting materiality itself as affectively charged to avoid grappling with the threat of a noninteriorized reality.