Fluid performances: The circulation of milk in late-nineteenth century fiction and culture

Greenslade, William

Abstract

This chapter analyses how the social circulation of milk is performed in realist-naturalist writings of the late nineteenth century. Milk becomes an unalienable property of the nurturing body, a circulating property of instrumental modernity and, at the turn of the century, a property of the interventionist, eugenically-orientated State. In their positioning of the subject, texts by Zola, Maupassant, Gissing, Moore, Hardy, and others, offer innovative ways of understanding how a complex of forces - psychological, societal, economic - bear down on the symbolic and material relationship of animal and human milk to the individual, social and imperial body. Analysis of these texts illuminates significant tensions in late-nineteenth-century social and cultural life: between the inalienable and the instrumental; the 'natural' and the manufactured; the pure and adulterated; the private and the public.

• Online Publication Date: Jun 1, 2021
• Publication Date: Jun 1, 2021
• Deposit Date: Nov 14, 2023
• Pages: 211-226
• Book Title: Trangressive Appetites: Deviant Food Practices in Victorian Literature and Culture
• ISBN: 9788857568973
• Keywords: Circulation, Milk
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/11445116
• Publisher URL: https://www.mimesisedizioni.it/libro/9788857568973
• Additional Information: Volume Edited by Silvia Antosa, Mariaconcetta Costantini and Emanuela Ettorre.
• Contract Date: Sep 20, 2019