"Looking About Me With All My Eyes": Censored Viewing, Carnival, and Louisa May Alcott's Hospital Sketches

Abstract

MARY CAPPELLO "Looking About Me With All My Eyes": Censored Viewing, Carnival, and Louisa May Alcott's Hospital Sketches I. IN THE EXAMINING ROOM t least since Foucault, the scene of institutionalized medi- „cine has served as an obvious locale for studying looking relations and the reproduction, management, and censorship of bodies. In contemporary Western medical practice increasingly sophisticated imaging apparati fetishize the technologized reproduction of a body's inner landscape (which, in turn, remains eminently un-readable by the "body" being imaged), and have profound effects on what actions are taken on people's lives.1 The precedent for the primacy of the specular, the confluence ofphotography with diagnostic discourse and the amphitheatrical space of medical pedagogy, is already apparent in the United States in the nineteenth century. The Civil War as both the real and fantasmatic catalyst for the professionalization of medicine created the need for nurses and hospitals, and fed the fascination for photographic record of the body mutilated beyond repair. Louisa May Alcott, better known today for her wildly successful sentimental narratives and more recently discovered Gothic thrillers, began her writing career with a series of sketches loosely based on her experiences as a nurse during the Civil War. Hospital Sketches is a ready site for examining gender and race in the realm of censored viewing.2 Arizona Quarterly Volume 50, Number 3, Autumn 1994 Copyright © 1994 by Arizona Board ofRegents ISSN 0004-161o 6oMary Cappella Alcott was a tireless writer, driven, it seems, by both artistic desire and practical necessity. Her father, the famous but failed transcendentalist Bronson Alcott, epitomized that "-ism'"s aversion to utility and the "material world" by forcing Louisa May Alcott to become, luckily for us, the primary financial support of the Alcott family. Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern have made invaluable contributions to Alcott studies by unearthing the diversity ofmaterials to which her circumstances gave rise, but critics still, by and large, tend to use their findings to chart a double-voiced-ness in Alcott's work: they find an Alcott who, on the one hand, panders to public demand and on the other exposes qualities of her world in ways that could only be considered radical. Well-intentioned as critics might be in their desire to acknowledge Alcott's own critical powers, they risk reducing the multidimensional weave ofAlcott's or any writer's design when they describe Litde Women and its serialized kin as conformist, and Alcott's pseudonymous productions, for example, as her truly subversive texts.3 Even if Elaine Showalter notes Alcott's "resistance to the narrative conventions of domestic fiction" within her "generally formulaic and sentimental " texts, the decision to call a collection ofAlcott's lesser-known work Alternative Alcott may produce a simplistic bifurcation.4 As theorists of the camivaksque demonstrate, processes of transgression and convention cannot be so readily dissevered. Alcott's Hospital Sketches, as I will show, negotiates poles oftransgression and convention in complicated ways. It is a book (un)expectedly about amusement, masquerade, dirt, and pigs—carnival debris or figurations of the carnivalesque. In "Pigs and Pierrots: The Politics ofTransgression in Modern Fiction," Allon White describes the transformation of a European world punctuated regularly by festivals, holidays, and communal revelry into a world ofabstinence and denial exerted by a rising middle class. But for White, the suppression of carnival is not reducible to its demise. Rather, White finds "carnival debris"—everything from the once-gaping festive pig ambivalently endowed to the harlequin—still lurking in but now displaced into bourgeois cultural forms such as the Gothic and the novel. Once removed from their original setting, pigs and pierrots, in White's view, fail to serve the liberating purpose, the lifting of taboos on mind and body that they once did—"they are privatized, cut off from social protest and pleasure and assimilated to the subjective unconscious. Less Louisa May Akott61 and less the figures of social celebration and communal pleasure, they are the emblems of alienated desire, paranoid fantasy, and the individual will-to-power" (55). White's central point is that the literary author's deliberate or unconscious inversions are not always already transgressive but rather seem to serve the...