Abstract
This introductory article explores the myriad ways in which bodily replication was practised and imagined in the long nineteenth century, from efforts to artificially replicate human and animal bodies through anatomical models and taxidermy to psychological theories of mimicry and its place in human consciousness and evolution. It is contended that representations of bodies as objects and subjects of replication in literature, the arts, and popular culture interacted with wider concerns about authenticity, epistemology, identity, and animal/human, nature/culture binaries. Models, images, and stuffed specimens problematized the dichotomy between original and copy by seeking not only to replicate particular bodies but also to embody imagined ideal types. Such artificial bodily replications could sometimes be characterized by their strange unlikeness to the organic bodies that they referred to on account of their stasis, permanence, and recontextualization in the museum or cabinet. Artificial efforts to mimic organic bodies thus raised broader questions about the nature of representation. At the same time, the human body’s capacity for mimicry complicated notions of personality, suggesting that identities were relational and changeable rather than fixed and essential. Imitation could be seen as, at once, primitive and animal, and a crucial factor of mental development. Mimicry might both prop up the dichotomy between savagery and civilization, and undermine it.
Highlights
Replicating Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Science and Culture Will AbberleyThe articles in this issue of 19 all respond to the contention that, in nineteenth-century science and culture, to read a body was to replicate it
Zoology as a body of knowledge became increasingly associated with replicating the likenesses of living animals through taxidermy
The period witnessed new efforts to capture and replicate bodies’ varying attitudes and motions through visual technologies. This effect would be most fully achieved in cinematography, it was pursued much earlier through collections and sequences of static images
Summary
The articles in this issue of 19 all respond to the contention that, in nineteenth-century science and culture, to read a body was to replicate it. Nineteenth century, the entomologist William Sharp Macleay argued that such ‘analogies’ between unrelated insects occurred in interlinking patterns, reflecting the exquisite symmetry of the creation.[11] Later, Henry Walter Bates and Alfred Russel Wallace posited the concept of ‘protective mimicry’, by which animals evolved to resemble other species which were unpalatable or otherwise defended against predators.[12] Bodies seemed naturally formed to replicate each other. This issue explores how nineteenth-century representations of bodies as objects and subjects of replication interacted with wider concerns about authenticity, epistemology, identity, and animal/human, nature/culture binaries. Mimicry might both reinforce distinctions between savagery and c ivilization, and collapse them
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