Orectic Subjects and Sensuous Self-Making in Stoddard and Dickinson

Blumenthal:When Cassandra, the narrator of Elizabeth Stoddard’s 1862 bildungsroman, The Morgesons, asserts that she is “moved and governed by [her] sensations,” she describes a “self-government” rooted in... [ view full abstract ]

Blumenthal:

When Cassandra, the narrator of Elizabeth Stoddard’s 1862 bildungsroman, The Morgesons, asserts that she is “moved and governed by [her] sensations,” she describes a “self-government” rooted in physiological accounts of the passions and sensation in the early national period. Consulting not only contemporary nineteenth-century medical texts, but also earlier ones of the revolutionary period, such as work by Benjamin Rush, this paper rethinks the materialist boundaries of self (presentation) in The Morgesons. It argues that a new understanding of the materialist claim lodged in Cassandra’s link between affective self-government and civic self-government emerges from thinking about orexis as a rational faculty that collapses will and appetite, encompassing choice, desire, volition, and, most importantly, pleasure. Reading The Morgesons  alongside the poetry of Emily Dickinson suggests a concept of orexis that reorients theories of appetite and consumption—a de-pathologized mode of being for the world, both orectic and anorectic, that does not hinge on the nineteenth-century diagnosis of anorexia. Orexis imagines appetite, not as a virtue-laden choice amongst the sensorium, but as a crucial mode of sensation.