Introduction

Abstract

Writing in 1922, D. H. Lawrence rails that “science is wretched in its treatment of the human body as a sort of complex mechanism made up of numerous little machines working automatically in a rather unsatisfactory relation to one another” (F, 95). “Our science,” he insists, “is a science of the dead world. Even biology never considers life, but only mechanistic functioning and apparatus of life” (F, 62). Eight years later, Virginia Woolf claims that “with a few exceptions…literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear” (CE, 4:193). Despite this literary occlusion of the somatic, she argues, “All day, all night the body intervenes.…The creature within…cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant; it must go through the whole unending procession of changes, heat and cold, comfort and discomfort, hunger and satisfaction, health and illness” (193). As a con consequence, she calls not only for “a new language … more primitive, more sensual, more obscene,” but also for “a new hierarchy of the passions.”