Natalia Cecire
University of Sussex
Natalia Cecire is a Lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Sussex. Her articles have appeared in Arizona Quarterly, ELH, WSQ, PMLA, and Jacket2. Her book in progress is titled Experimental: American Literature and the Aesthetics of Knowledge.
Natalia Cecire, University of Sussex"Quartz Contentment: Nineteenth-Century Cell Theory and the Poetics of Minimal Death"In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud elaborates his theory of the death drive in part through a... [ view full abstract ]
Natalia Cecire, University of Sussex
"Quartz Contentment: Nineteenth-Century Cell Theory and the Poetics of Minimal Death"
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud elaborates his theory of the death drive in part through a “vesicle,” a subcellular minimal life form whose exposure to stimuli creates an outer, deadened cortical layer and, at the same time, precipitates a longing for the organism’s earlier, unalive state. Freud’s strange microphysiology of the death drive stems from nineteenth-century debates about unicellular organisms and their relationship to the cells of multicellular organisms—namely, if a cell can live on its own (as a unicellular organism), might all cells have some fundamental independence, even—as the German morphologist Ernst Haeckel put it—“cell souls” [Zellseelen]? Drawing on Haeckel and American embryologists like Thomas Hunt Morgan and Edmund Beecher Wilson (credited, with Morgan’s graduate student Nettie Stevens, with discovering sex chromosomes in 1905), this paper considers the nineteenth-century currency of ideas of minimal life and, if I may, minimal death. Such an approach reframes nineteenth-century American gothic tropes, opening up for comparison scenarios in which the intimacy between alive and unalive states are not so much uncanny as comforting, and, like the vesicle’s deadened cortical layer, a source of protection that counterintuitively makes life possible. In a larger project, I reevaluate the ostensibly death-bound, nonconjugating sexualities visible in the kinds of “hardening” attributed to spinsters, celibates, and others engaged in sexual and racial passing in work by Emily Dickinson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Pauline Hopkins, and others, tracking a poetics of minimal death that sheds light on the investments bound up in the nineteenth-century microscopic biology of sex and generation. For this paper, I focus on Dickinson’s poems of minimal death—what Diana Fuss has called her “corpse poems”—as sites of survivability.
