Mr Joseph Maclise and the Epistemology of the Anatomical Closet

Abstract

This article takes up the case of Joseph Maclise (1815–1891), a talented and truculent surgeon, anatomist, and medical illustrator of mid-nineteenth-century Britain. Maclise left behind a corpus of brilliant, idiosyncratic anatomical images, and opinionated commentaries, but almost no evidence of his social interactions or affective relations. Homoerotic desire was heavily policed in Maclise’s time. Given the conditions under which the archive was created (or suppressed, or lost, or shamed into reticence), we can never know with certainty what he intended or felt, or what his readers received—but we do have a rich evidentiary base of visual materials. Using narrative history, close readings of images and texts, detailed comparisons with other illustrated anatomies, and open-ended theoretical and methodological approaches (a mash-up of queer theory, Foucault, gaze theory, genre analysis, and contextualization)—an argument is joined: a book can be a closet and a queer space. Maclise’s drawings, ostensibly designed to contribute to the improvement of medical knowledge, theory, and practice, show good-looking young men and cadaveric bodies in various states of dissection. Penises, testicles, anuses, faces, sensuous hands on skin are crisply rendered in illusionistic perspective, with a highly cultivated aestheticism—often without any relevance to the anatomical topic discussed—and little attention is paid to the female body. In historical context, and from our twenty-first-century vantage point, the hypothesis of homoerotic investment leads to productive interpretations. This article poses more questions than answers but comes to rest with this: it is plausible and meaningful to take Maclise’s anatomical illustrations, and the figures depicted therein, as queer objects of queer desire.