The Masses are Revolting: Victorian Culture and the Political Aesthetics of Disgust, by Zachary Samalin

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Masses are Revolting: Victorian Culture and the Political Aesthetics of Disgust by Zachary Samalin John Plotz (bio) The Masses are Revolting: Victorian Culture and the Political Aesthetics of Disgust, by Zachary Samalin; pp. xi + 325. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2021, $42.95, $27.99 ebook. The Masses are Revolting: Victorian Culture and the Political Aesthetics of Disgust pinpoints crucial moments when public sentiment and governmental action were shaped not by Enlightenment reason but by “the Victorian structure of unwanted feeling” (12). From its opening pages, Zachary Samalin makes sure that readers feel what they perhaps already knew from the pages of Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew: the streets that pulse with people like mud, the street refuse that takes on a putrefying loathsome liquidity, and even the turbid Thames itself, which during the Great Stink of 1858 no longer flowed but reeked, so clogged and fecal had it become. Crucial to his study is the sort of disgust such sights and smells engendered. The city that should have epitomized the greatest contrast to the peripheral and primitive world that Great Britain meant to rule instead incarnates all that is disgusting about the human body and its aftereffects: the empire’s heart is rotten. The book’s five complex and wide-ranging chapters cover aesthetic theory from Gotthold Ephraim Lessing to Jacques Rancière, biology, social sciences of the Durkheimian and Freudian variety, and the legal [End Page 724] history of obscenity; these chapters are accompanied by a wittily titled introduction, “Of Origins and Orifices,” and conclusion, “Horizons of Expectorations.” This stimulating and thought-provoking anatomy of nineteenth-century British thinking about disgust navigates the historical pathway that Samalin sees leading “from the Aesthetics of Disgust to the Psychoanalysis of Repulsion” (21). At its heart is a four-year period that Samalin sees as home to a crucial volta: 1857 to 1860. It was then that, “rather than seeing their disgust as an individuating and subjective experience, Victorians understood it to articulate something public and shared, a reflexive sense that a cultural or a civilizational threshold had been transgressed” (20). The Masses Are Revolting concludes with a far-ranging yet acute account of its aims: “This discourse of disgust was not merely a characteristic feature of Victorian society’s sense of its own civilization, but a productive force motivating social transformation; not merely an idiom for demanding or decrying change, but a medium of such changes in its own right.” Samalin notes that “describing this productivity has entailed tracking down the minute, counterintuitive ways that the regulation of an appeal to unwanted emotion were installed at the heart of the historical processes that have been more insistently described in terms of rationality and rationalization” (241). Samalin’s crucial question can be paraphrased: is disgust a marker of distinction (my revulsion proves my civility) or is it itself a contaminating stain (to be disgusted means to be immersed in a life that is innately disgusting)? Samalin’s discussion of the way notions of disgust were batted about and transformed in the Victorian era is expansive, ambitious, and delightfully erudite: I took masses of notes, underlined many wonderful phrases, and left feeling deeply informed about its chosen topics. Worth singling out for special praise is a chapter about disgust in Charles Darwin’s writings, delightfully unexpected in its revelations. Samalin acutely and persuasively analyzes the significance of Darwin’s insisting that involuntary vomiting in humans developed from an earlier capacity among other primates to vomit voluntarily. Samalin perceives in this Darwin’s commitment to an idea of biosemiosis (sign systems other than language) that confirms disgust as part of a communicative system among other animals even though it has now become an involuntary response to disgusting food among humans. Samalin makes two historical arguments about his anatomy of evolving theories of disgust. One is that the period between 1857 and 1860 is a signal turning-point in this history of the changed ideology of disgust—for reasons relating to the 1858 Great Stink, as well as to Darwin, Karl Marx, and other luminaries whose thoughts rapidly changed in just that short period. The other claim is more implicit...