Victorian Skin: Surface, Self, History by Pamela K. Gilbert

Abstract

Reviewed by: Victorian Skin: Surface, Self, History by Pamela K. Gilbert Iain Crawford (bio) Pamela K. Gilbert. Victorian Skin: Surface, Self, History. Cornell UP, 2019. Pp. xi + 434. $49.95. ISBN 978-1501731594 (hb). Pamela Gilbert's Victorian Skin: Surface, Self, History builds upon her four earlier books, each of which also considered Victorian bodies and issues of health, both individual and social. In this compelling new project, she examines the complex nature of the long nineteenth-century's understandings and representations of the human body's external layers. Building upon foundational studies of skin by Claudia Benthien and Steven Connor and responding in particular to the work of Nancy Armstrong, William Cohen, Fredric Jameson, and Rae Greiner, Gilbert explores one of the more intriguing dualities of the nineteenth century: the fact that while today "we often think of this period and its narratives as the great age of interiority, the era's philosophical and anatomical knowledge in fact insists on a materialist self, located on the surface of the body" (1). That duality, as she shows over the course of this substantial study, is bound up with the complex interactions of the materialist modes of narration associated with realism and the idealist "teleology of human becoming" (3) ushered in by Romanticism but resistant to the confines laid out by realism. With the legacy of the French Revolution as an enduring influence, British authors persistently "place the body within a narrative of historical progression, alternating between a faith in teleology and an oscillating, cyclical model of destruction and creation" (7). Only towards the end of the century, Gilbert suggests, do literature and psychology turn their attention away from the [End Page 334] surface and transfer their interest away from the skin and towards a vision of history "more concerned with evolutionary development from within" (352), towards the workings of the individual unconscious and the "deep, transpersonal structure of the self " expressed in myth (358). Notwithstanding the "History" in its title, Victorian Skin does not pursue its case within the framework of any chronological exoskeleton but, rather, is organized by its theoretical approach. While Gilbert defines the French Revolution and, above all, The Terror as the point of origin from which she builds her discussion, and concludes the book anticipating emerging new emphases that the twentieth century would develop more fully, a reader would look in vain for explicit moments of historical shift within her account. Instead, her case is organized around four major "patterns" or "thought categories," with two chapters devoted to each. Part 1, "The Sense as Surface," focuses upon the ways in which skin acts as a surface through which the self senses and expresses itself and examines, first, the dialog between Enlightenment materialist discoveries about the anatomical sources of feeling and Scottish Common Sense efforts to reconcile this new knowledge with a religious model of the world and, second, the history of blushing as a key example of the ways in which the skin served to mediate between the inner and the outer. Part 2, "Permeability," considers the porous nature of the skin itself, examining ways in which skin disease became an indicator of various forms of corruption in both British and French literature and then turns to consider the vulnerability of the self to agents able to penetrate the body from without. In Part 3, "Alienated and Alienating," Gilbert explores how skin becomes alienated from the body to which it had belonged, discussing flayed skins and their role in narrating the overwhelming history of the French Revolution and then examining in depth how retellings of the myth of Marsyas evolved over the course of the century and provided artists with a way of increasingly distancing themselves from the legacy of Enlightenment materialism. The final section, "Inscriptions," moves to a contrastive discussion of skin color as an inherent property, tattooing, and the role of skin marking as a means of conferring identity through inscription. Gilbert concludes with a discussion focused upon George Eliot, whom she sees as "the paradigmatic figure for Victorian realism" (350) and as marking "a shift away from the aesthetic and psychological concern with surface inaugurated in the period of the French Revolution, toward...