Cosmopolitan bodies and dissected sexualities: Anatomical mis‐stories in Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho

Abstract

This article recontextualizes Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho within larger discourses of Enlightenment science by demonstrating the author's resistance to the masculine appropriation of female sexuality—especially through the obstetric takeover of the art of midwifery. By showing how Radcliffe takes issue with the eighteenth‐century fetishization of the dead female body, this article reinterprets the male wax figure at the conclusion of the novel as a refusal to reproduce images of lifeless female sexuality. Radcliffe thus evokes anatomy's deeply ingrained connections to criminality, necrophilia, sadism, voyeurism, and pornography to slice through the seizure of maternity and female eroticism, and questions the violence of a pornographic gaze implicit in dissection and anatomical wax casting.