The unity of thought and thing: collapsing mind-matter boundaries in the poetry and prose of Constance Naden

ABSTRACT

Hylo-idealism, the militantly atheist philosophical persuasion of Victorian poet and philosopher Constance Naden, attempted to combine what had long been thought irreconcilable: materialism with idealism, mind and matter, thought and thing. It did so radically by denying the difference between these dualistic terms. This paper explores the implications of this theory as it was developed in Naden’s poetry and prose, arguing that Naden’s insistence on the interrelationality of humanity and nature turns her into an unsuspected predecessor of latter-day new materialisms.

KEYWORDS:

• Constance Naden(1858‒1889)
• hylo-idealism
• Victorian poetry
• poetry and science
• (new) materialism
• John Tyndall (1820‒1893)

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For comprehensive overviews of the existent criticism on Naden, I would like to refer the reader to Stainthorp (2017, 2019, 23‒26).

2. “That clear, perpetual outline of face and limb is but an image of ours, under which we group them [the physical elements] – a design in a web, the actual threads of which pass out beyond it. This at least of flamelike our life has, that it is but the concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their ways” (Pater 1998, 150).

3. See also Ariane de Waal and Ursula Kluwick’s introduction to this special issue for a discussion of nineteenth-century controversies revolving around materialist positions.

4. Stainthorp (2019, 261‒262) provides a full English translation of the poem in the appendix of her monograph on Naden, but this is not always true to the original and sometimes distorts the text’s meaning. All subsequent quotations from the poem are therefore my own translations.

5. For a discussion of Romantic influences on Naden’s poetry, in particular on her concept of the nature of poetic genius and the role of poetry in society, see Stainthorp (2019, 195‒247).

6. Barad has been challenged for her reliance on Niels Bohr’s interpretation of quantum physics; see Keller (2019, 153‒154).

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Notes on contributors

Irmtraud Huber

Irmtraud Huber is a senior lecturer at the English department of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and an Associated Postdoctoral Fellow of the Walter Benjamin Kolleg, Universität Bern. She has published two monographs on contemporary fiction, Literature after Postmodernism (Palgrave 2014) and Present-tense Narration in Contemporary Fiction (Palgrave 2016) and has guest-edited a special edition of EJES on “Poetry, Science and Technology,” together with Wolfgang Funk. Her current research focuses on reconceptualisations of time in Victorian poetry.