A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America

Abstract

A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America. Edited by Janet Moore Lindman and Michele Lise Tarter. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. Pp. vii, 283. Illustrations. Cloth, $49.95; paper, $19.95.) A Centre of Wonders looks at the human body from the perspective of several overlapping disciplinary fields: literary studies, feminist theory, religious studies, and history. The book's fifteen provocative essays focus on various aspects of the early modem body, ranging widely from symbolic to material interpretations of corporeality. The book is organized around four themes: correspondence (between bodies and the outside world); fixity (the regulation of bodies and the categorization of difference); fluidity (culturally mediated views of the body); and metaphor (how bodies can represent something else). Individual authors have read each other's essays and refer frequently to them; thus readers can almost hear a conversation emerging among early American scholars. All of the essays in A Centre of Wonders stimulate us to think about the human body in novel and original ways, and by so doing, to gain deeper insight into the early modern mind. Robert Blair St. George examines the relationship between witchcraft, the body, and domestic space by focusing on the seventeenth-century analogy between the dwelling and the human body. Accompanied by St. George's beautifully precise pen and ink drawings, this opening essay challenges us to think of the body expansively and metaphorically as a building and, vice versa, to consider houses as representations of bodies. Houses, like bodies, were supposed to protect their interiors, but during witchcraft outbreaks, their inner sanctums were susceptible to attack. Women's spaces, like women's bodies, were particularly vulnerable. Mentally mapping the body onto a structure allowed seventeenth-century people to consider the relationship between their own lives and their social world and its politics. Many of the essays examine the ways in which ideas about the body and its functions served to explain the broader world. Trudy Eden shows, for example, how one of the body's simplest necessities was imbued with cultural meaning. English colonists believed that eating English foods kept them English, while those who accepted American (Indian) food, such as corn, risked losing their Englishness and degenerating into something other, less refined. Martha Finch's essay also examines the relationship between the civilized body of the colonists and the landscape they inhabited, which threatened to turn their human bodies into those of savage beasts if nature's wildness was allowed to seep in. We get the sense that colonists envisioned the body as porous and borderless, with the capacity to melt into its environment or to be invaded by it. Several authors, especially those dealing with race, examine the process by which ideas about bodily mutability became fixed when it came to determining racial identities. Nancy Shoemaker focuses on skin color as the marker of difference between Native Americans and Europeans in the seventeenth century. While other parts of the body seemed similar among all peoples, the skin struck colonists and Indians as unalterably different and laden with meaning. Jennifer Spear and Joanne Pope Melish focus on the escalating distress about the definition and fixity of racial categories in eighteenth-century Spanish Louisiana and Revolutionary and early national New England. Spear argues that certain characteristics-honor, faith, and respectability-became racialized as the categories of mestizo, mulatto, and white became formalized and codified. Raced bodies became linked to inheritable personality traits as well as to notions of blood purity. Melish traces the anxieties felt by whites, afraid that bodies lacked such fixity. Unease grew as stories circulated of blacks becoming white, and whites worried that under certain circumstances they could become black, compromising their independence, perhaps even their freedom. …