Chapter 8: “[T]o Feel Powers at Work in the Common Air Unfelt by Others”: Receptivity and the Vanishing Body in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

This chapter explores the significance of consumptive-like vanishing bodies in Victorian literature and culture by placing these bodies in the context of the period’s fascination with some mental phenomena involving expanded receptivity. Supported by medical paradigms focused on sensibility and, after mid-century, on physiological psychology and aesthetics, the cultural representations of consumption encourage a powerful association between the gradual loss of the bodily frame and the thinning out of the barriers that separate the inside from the outside, thus expanding the sufferer’s receptivity but also exposing the self to a precarious state. As testified by the complex afterlives of John Keats as well as by works by George Eliot and Walter Pater, the interest in the vanishing body appears inseparable from the potentialities that this body holds for Victorian theories of artistic and poetic creation.