Organizing the Nervous Body, Regulating the Self: The Psychological Production of National Community in Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves

This second part of the book will turn from the discursive nexus articulated by the interanimation of Lawrence’s writing and the medical science organized around the tubercular body in order to examine a different, if closely related, confrontation between modernist literary production and the bioscience of the period. Specifically, I will focus in what follows on the relationship between the writing of Virginia Woolf and the bioscientific discourses—neurophysiology, neurology, psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis—that, to be slightly imprecise, take the nervous body as their object. This imprecision is due partially to the fact that the bodies approached by these disciplines are at least slightly different in kind. These disciplines share an interest in the body insofar as it is traversed by a system of nerves, but they differ in their specific approaches to the enervated body: some are firmly founded in the study of the nervous system, some seek largely to discount the nervous system in the study of psychic phenomena, and still others occupy a middle ground between the two.