| Popis: |
This chapter explores habit and character through Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone and the work of William Benjamin Carpenter. Beginning with an analysis of the mechanism/vitalism debates between Carpenter and Huxley, the chapter establishes the idea of character as central to mid-century Associationism. It then explores reading and writing surfaces in The Moonstone as sites where Carpenter’s “acquired habitudes of thought” play out – particularly in the passages around Ezra Jennings. In the novel, those who believe that they can accurately read bodies tend to inflict violence on those bodies. Characters like Gabriel Betteredge, who treats Robinson Crusoe as a divine text, ignore lived suffering because they believe that they have the right to interpret bodies and texts as they see fit. At the same time, marginalised bodies are harmed in order that the middle-class, male bodies can learn to improve their reading – and thereby their character. |
