Doubles and Desire: anatomies of masculinity in the later nineteenth century

Abstract

This article explores duality and splitting in representations of the male body, stressing as a crucial factor the issue of social class. Focusing on the ‘golden age’ of doubles in the 1880s and 1890s, my study crosses the boundaries between France and Britain, art and medicine, visual images and literature, to analyse François Sallé's monumental painting of male homosociality, The Anatomy Class at the Ecole des Beaux‐Arts (1888); I suggest parallels with the male doubling identified in R.L. Stevenson's novella The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). Addressing representations of medical professionals, I position my material within nineteenth‐century clinical discourse (Foucault), and propose readings that develop the medical gaze as an alternative visual economy to that of the modern Parisian flâneur. Linking anatomy and dissection to the performance of striptease, I argue that Sallé's painting represents a scene in which unsuppressed homoerotic pleasure allows the visibility of homosexual desire, and permeability of sexual categories.