ABSTRACT
The item of bric-a-brac to be discussed in this essay is the Philosopher's Stone, and, specifically, its re-visioning in two works by Victorian women writers: Mary Anne South's A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery and George Eliot's Middlemarch, in which the Stone takes the form of Edward Casaubon's Key to all Mythologies. For by the mid-nineteenth century, the Philosopher's Stone and the alchemical worldview of which it was a central component was like Edward Casaubon himself a piece of bric-a-brac: miscellaneous, out of place and out of time, it was a historical remnant from a bygone age with no clear purpose in the modern world. Focusing on South's analysis of the Philosopher's Stone as what Jay Ramsay has termed her 'physical mysticism', and Eliot's very ambivalent treatment of the Key to all Mythologies, the chapter argue that both women re-imagine alchemical principles and hermeneutics as bric-a-brac in order to critique mid-Victorian conceptions and structures of knowledge.
