Rhizomatic Subjects

Abstract

Abstract By examining Thomas Carlyle's scientific writings (often buried in his “literary” texts) and placing them in relation to Charles Kingsley's work on marine biology, this essay explores how these writers posit a transcendent, eternal origin in order to stabilize a normative hierarchy of subjectivity in the present. Their concept of the eternal origin was internally subverted, however, through the metaphorical irruption of organisms from natural history, especially the roots of plants and coral. These nonhierarchical, rhizomatic organisms express, as Carlyle puts it, so many “rhizophagous” threats to a stable English society. Due to the ontological and epistemological instability of the biological referent, these metaphors also continually subvert Carlyle's language and political message, from his early essays on Goethe to the Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850). Kingsley presents an analogous case. In the dream sequence in Alton Locke (1850), for example, he paradoxically portrays the transcendent origin of male subjectivity as materialist and matriarchal: the “madrepore” (or “mother-passage,” a type of coral) that forms the basis of Alton's identity is described in terms of its femininity, temporal flux, and biological indeterminacy (only later is this origin subsumed in the telos of the divine “All-Father”). Ultimately, both Carlyle and Kingsley reveal the extent to which concepts of temporality and biology formed and deformed Victorian subjectivity in the pre-Darwinian period.