The anatomy of the Early Republic

Abstract

The essay explores the cultural functions of the many dismembered bodies that haunt the visual culture of late eighteenth‐ and early nineteenth‐century America. Body parts routinely appeared on signs for taverns, guildhalls and shops, in delicate painted miniatures depicting isolated eyes and mouths, in political prints illustrating the dismembered bodies of women and animals as stand‐ins for states and colonies, and in large‐scale history paintings by John Singleton Copley and John Vanderlyn in which protagonists are threatened with the loss of a leg or a scalp. Complementing the work of historians of US art and culture, who have consistently read representations of whole bodies as iconographic signs of healthy institutions and nations and dismembered bodies as signs of loss and decay, I posit that in eras of cataclysmic change such normal orders are inverted, with body parts standing as affirmative signs of identity. The power and ubiquity of bodily wholeness as a sign of political or social health compelled Americans to see dismembered bodies as the logical signs for emergent political and social orders; given visual rhetoric that consistently imagined changes in the status quo as a dismemberment of the body politic, nascent political and social orders were necessarily equated with body parts. During the tumult of the Revolutionary and Early Republic periods, Americans from across the political spectrum understood dismembered bodies as signs of a new order. Before the effective social and political stabilization of the country in the early nineteenth century allowed whole bodies to stand for the integrity and coherence of a nation that was now assured, representations of dismembered bodies spoke to Americans as a symbol of their nation. In an effort to illustrate the prevalence and power of dismemberment as an affirmative trope of nationalism, I focus my analysis on the most overtly apolitical of body parts – anatomical models created by William Rush for the anatomy lectures of Dr. Caspar Wistar. By situating the models within ongoing medical and political debates, I illustrate the degree to which a fractured and heterogeneous nation looked to ‘parts’ as reassuring signs that the American body politic would endure.