Identifying Marks: Race, Gender, and the Marked Body in Nineteenth-Century America (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Identifying Marks: Race, Gender, and the Marked Body in Nineteenth Century America Nancy Strow Sheley Identifying Marks: Race, Gender, and the Marked Body in Nineteenth Century America. By Jennifer Putzi. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2006. 195 pp. $36.95. In the twenty-first century, body marking by choice, through tattoos and piercing, is an active attempt to control the onlooker's gaze, to delight in the viewer's response, to be an exhibitionist, or to make one's body an active text. In the nineteenth century, however, the cultural positioning of marked bodies, especially those of color and of women, is much more complex. In Identifying Marks, Jennifer Putzi convincingly argues that body markings provide sites of contradiction where the onlooker's gaze, the cultural expectations of race and gender, the physical body, and the emotional self are reconfigured. In this study, Putzi focuses on two aspects of the marked body: how the marked individual responds to the mark itself and how the mark is viewed and interpreted by others. Key ideas filter through the book as a whole: that the marked body is both a sight and a site read through multiple, cultural lenses; that the mark itself is a manifestation of the grotesque, the spectacle, and often the sexual; and that no singular reading of the mark sufficiently represents all responses to its power. Grotesquely marked bodies, such as the circus's tattooed white women, the pitifully marked white women in captivity narratives, disfigured heroines, and the scarred, marked persons of color destabilize cultural dictates about gender and race. The cover of Identifying Marks displays the tattooed visage of Olive Oatman, kidnapped by the Yavapais in 1830 and marked by the Mohaves a year later. Her story, in The Captivity of the Oatman Girls, is a complex tale of subjugation and reclamation of self. To most, Oatman's tattooed chin was the object of horror; however, as Putzi notes, upon Oatman's return to civilization, her complicit participation in the ensuing spectacle of speeches, tours, and display was empowering. In the nineteenth century, romantic love interrupted the predictability of [End Page 338] 338 family-approved marriages and created intergenerational and social anxieties. Putzi argues that these fears, too, played out in texts through the marking of characters. She cites several texts in which the faces of female protagonists are scarred by acid. Both George Thompson's sensational novel Crimes of City Life and Maria Susanna Cummins's The Lamplighter use disfigured and mutilated female bodies to reveal the strength of the old patriarchy even in the wake of new representations of the sentimental family and constructions of romantic love. Harriet P. Spofford's heroine in "The Strathsays" is a strong, first-person narrator who rises above her disfigurement into a satisfying companionate marriage; and Cassandra, in Elizabeth Stoddard's The Morgesons, despite her scars, finds love. However, both women's lives are restrained in the end, their faces remain marked, and their power continues to be limited. Their scars are a subtle warning in a world that commodifies women's bodies and beauty. In other examples, Hawthorne's Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter and Georgiana in "The Birthmark" delineate the extremes of women's agency, or lack thereof, in choosing their own meanings for their marks. Hester embraces her letter "A" and gives it power to influence the community, but Georgiana succumbs to her doctor-husband's demands for perfection and willingly submits to his unsuccessful efforts to remove the mark on her face. By using familiar texts like Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Alcott's "My Contraband," another chapter focuses on how slaves' whiplash scars and amputations were used to further the abolitionists' cause and to confirm the white owners' complicity in torture. Yet, the freed slaves' marked bodies place them in a state of liminality between past abuse and present freedom. Women writers such as Lydia Maria Child, and later Frances Ellen Watkins Harper in Iola Leroy, use the marked Black body to extend a domesticated political discourse of unification and reconstruction of dispersed families. The bodies of Black women after Emancipation were still marked and viewed as publicly...