The rise of the invisible: Microscopes, keyholes, and novels. 1665-1765

Abstract

The argument of this thesis is that the invisible, as it appeared to writers and readers of post-Restoration England, was an entity that required various forms of assistance in order to come to light. Understood not as an inaccessible dead end that put reason to a halt, but rather as an incentive to search for knowledge, the invisible could stand as an apt metaphor for the entire idea of Enlightenment. Chronologically, the thesis spans between 1665, the year when early-modern English microscopy came to maturity with the publication of Robert Hooke's Micrographia, and 1765, the year when Laurence Sterne got out of print the eighth book of Tristram Shandy, where, for the first time, the figure of the keyhole is formulated in a critical way. These chronological landmarks are fixed to cover an entire century, although references are made throughout the thesis to authors, works, and times that exceed the limits of this period. Hooke (as well as other early practitioners of the discipline of microscopy) will offer the starting point of the whole thesis, by suggesting that the new optical instrument used in early-modern scientific experiments came about with an indication that everything in the world must contain something invisible, which justifies the use of prosthetic vision. Containing, thus, the invisible within a discourse of intrusion and inquisitiveness, microscopical observations consolidated the ground for what became a concern with justifying intrusion for juridical purposes. This is the subject matter of the second section of the thesis, where the trope of the keyhole will be analysed from the perspective of justice's ability to act in a selftransgressive way (by allowing and even encouraging law infringements) in order to permit its discourse to be materialized. The last component of the thesis is dedicated to a discussion about the strength and significance of purposefully created gaps in the narratives of eighteenth-century novels. Technologies of penetration into the texture of texts, such gaps materialized in four different aspects, each regarded in conjunction with a characteristic novel: Pamela and the fainting heroine, The Female Quixote and the intrusive narrator, Fanny Hill and the impediments of explicit description, and Tristram Shandy and the 'typographical trick' of the blank page.