Bodies In Nineteenth-Century America Research Articles

From the Elephant Man to Barbie Girl: Dissecting the Freak from the Margins to the Mainstream

From the Elephant Man to Barbie Girl: Dissecting the Freak from the Margins to the Mainstream

A Question of Time: American Literature from Colonial Encounter to Contemporary Fiction ed. by Cindy Weinstein

Reviewed by: A Question of Time: American Literature from Colonial Encounter to Contemporary Fiction ed. by Cindy Weinstein Kelly Ross WEINSTEIN, CINDY, ed. A Question of Time: American Literature from Colonial Encounter to Contemporary Fiction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 360 pp. $105.00 hardcover; $84.00 e-book. A decade after the publication of such field-defining works as Wai Chee Dimock’s Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (2006), Thomas Allen’s A Republic in Time: Temporality and Social Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America (2008), Dana Luciano’s Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America (2007), and Lloyd Pratt’s Archives of American Time: Literature and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (2010), temporality studies has become a crowded field, leaving one to wonder whether its time is up. The fifteen essays in A Question of Time emphatically prove that there is still much to explore, offering innovative approaches to representations of time in a wide array of literary genres from lyric poetry to serial sketches to the novel. The volume is divided into four sections that highlight the “processual aspects that go into understanding time” (7): Materializing Time, Performing Time, Timing Time, and Theorizing Time. The three essays in Materializing Time examine the relationship between the temporalities depicted in a text and the publication history of that text. Performing Time’s four essays analyze the “theatricalization of time” (8) in specific cultural spaces such as courtrooms and dance halls, while the four essays in Timing Time focus on formal aspects of the texts they consider, from a specific word (“and”) to the narrative equivalent of cinematic slow motion. Finally, Theorizing Time’s four essays foreground a variety of theoretical frameworks, including narratology, cognitive psychology, and postcolonial theory, to make broader claims about literary time. Three of the volume’s key strengths, which I discuss below, are chronological breadth, transnational approaches, and an attention to narratology. Cindy Weinstein notes that the collection offers a corrective to “the heretofore scholarly focus on nineteenth-century America, especially the antebellum period, which has been fertile ground for the temporal turn” (5). The chronological breadth of these essays—covering texts from the late-seventeenth to the twenty-first century—is indeed salutary. Nan Goodman investigates the problems that arose for the justices of the Salem witch trials when accusers claimed in court that “the harm inflicted by the accused and the experience of affliction of the accusers occurred simultaneously” (77). Although accusers were claiming to present empirical evidence of witchcraft, their emphasis on the simultaneity of cause (witchcraft) and effect (affliction) undermined the court’s assignation of blame, since the law required that the cause precede the effect. Stefanie Sobelle’s analysis of Richard McGuire’s 2014 graphic novel Here provides the collection with a chronological bookend to Goodman’s essay. Sobelle also explores simultaneity in Here, which depicts the same circumscribed location (the corner of a living room in the twentieth century) at multiple points in time from [End Page 467] 80,000,000 BCE to 2213 CE. By juxtaposing the familiar sense of time as linear and progressive (what Sobelle calls “human or anthropocentric time”) against “a vaster sense of deep time,” McGuire historicizes progressive time and reveals its destructive potential as it “emerges through colonialism, capitalism, and ultimately neoliberalism” (208). Both Sobelle and Goodman denaturalize “human” time: Goodman by identifying the moment at which causation became crucial to legal proceedings and Sobelle by demonstrating how McGuire uses the graphic novel form to elucidate “cross-temporal intimacy” (212). A Question of Time is all the more valuable for the unexpected connections that emerge from treating such a wide swath of literature in the same volume. There is a productive tension between the volume’s project as Weinstein describes it in her introduction and as Robert S. Levine reflects on it in his afterword. Although Weinstein proposes that “American literature, from its beginnings to the present, might provide a particularly rich set of texts to examine” in regard to temporality (1), Levine commends several of the essays for thinking comparatively rather than focusing exclusively on the US nation-state. Angela Calcaterra’s essay on the...

Unusual Frontal Developments: Negotiating the Pregnant Body in Nineteenth-Century America

This article explores women’s writings about their pregnant bodies in nineteenth-century America. In an attempt to move beyond the simplistic models of “pregnancy as illness” and “pregnancy as fetal containment,” this study explores how women discussed displaying their visibly pregnant bodies in public, kept track of their weights, and described what was growing inside of their expanding bodies. As legal restrictions upon fertility control increased and women’s roles narrowed to an intense focus on mothering, women’s descriptions of their bodies and what was residing inside them reveal a remarkable variety and fluidity in interpretations of pregnancy. Analyzing the corporeal experience of pregnancy in the nineteenth century alters our understanding of the history of body quantification, the complex process of fetal personification, and the policing of pregnant bodies, while it also forces us to confront our modern view of pregnancy and its connections to bodily control and reproductive ability.

The Dead Belong to the Living: Disinterment and Custody of Dead Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America

The Dead Belong to the Living: Disinterment and Custody of Dead Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America

The State of the Union: Toward a Biopolitics of Marriage

The State of the Union: Toward a Biopolitics of Marriage

The New American Temporality Studies: Narrative and National Times in the Nineteenth Century

The New American Temporality Studies:Narrative and National Times in the Nineteenth Century Holly Jackson (bio) Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America by Dana Luciano. New York: New York University Press, 2007. pp. 368. $75.00 cloth; $25.00 paper. Archives of American Time: Literature and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century by Lloyd Pratt. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. pp. 248, 6 illust. $55.00 cloth. In recent years, American literary studies has reevaluated the cultural politics of time in nineteenth-century texts. A spate of critical works have called for renewed attention to the role of print culture, long held to be instrumental to the consolidation of American identity through the cultivation of a shared national time characterized by both linear progress and synchronicity, in both disrupting and abetting the formation of national consciousness. A landmark intersection of this temporal turn and affect studies, Dana Luciano's Arranging Grief, winner of the Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book, mines a prodigious archive to analyze the development in the nineteenth century of an "affective chronometry: the deployment of the feeling body as the index of a temporality apart from the linear paradigm of 'progress'"; that is, uses of the body as a "timepiece" (1). She argues that emotional embodiment provided a slower, nonlinear time in contrast to national time: "As a newly rational and predominantly linear understanding of time came to dominate the West, the time of feeling, deliberately aligned with the authority of the spiritual and natural worlds, was embraced as a mode of compensation for, and, to some extent, of resistance to, the perceived mechanization of society" (6). Central to this study is Luciano's theorization of chronobiopolitics, [End Page 323] "the sexual arrangement of the time of life" (9). Historicizing the new embrace of grief in the nineteenth century, as opposed to the previous perception of excessive mourning as disobedience to divine will, she makes the surprising claim that grief was central to the deployment of sexuality. Examining the chronobiopolitics of domesticity, especially the mother-child relationship that reproduces subjects and connects the past to the future, she identifies a "reproductive/generational orientation at the heart of" a "sexual politics of time in the nineteenth century" (62). Taking "the dream-time of the maternal-filial connection" as an example, she indicates how alternate times can ultimately reinforce rather than challenge progressive national time (126). She writes, "[T]he mother's corporealized time takes form . . . against the linear time of history, naturalizing the economy from which it projects itself as a refuge" (127). Transporting readers into nineteenth-century grief culture, the first chapter analyzes consolation literature such as mourner's handbooks and printed sermons, which performed, according to Luciano, "the dual task of soliciting the feelings 'naturally' associated with loss and of shaping and regulating their social productivity" (32). Despite these attempts to control the disruptive potential of mourning, Luciano's reading of the poem "The Little Shroud" (1822) by Letitia Landon indicates that departures from productive time may not be so easily allayed. With characteristic expressivity, she observes, the story's "dilation on the painful pleasure of longing intimates that the sticky textures of attachment might tug against authoritative arrangements of time, pointing toward the buried traces of resistance that consolation worked to cover over" (63). Examining the bridge between personal mourning and national memorialization, Luciano describes the pedagogical task of monuments, "not to teach history but to instruct people how to feel about it . . . [T]he monument imposes closure on historical events by declaring for all time what they mean" (174). Expertly close reading texts ranging from Herman Melville's novella "Benito Cereno" (1855) to Horst Hoheisel's 1995 proposal to blow up Brandenburg Gate in Berlin to memorialize the Holocaust, Luciano theorizes countermonumentalism: both "the countermonumental vision—the assurance that past, present, and future are linked not in a single linear narrative but in an ever-evolving array—and the countermonumental impulse—the demand for historical memory to work through this linkage without relying on amnesia or subscribing to a redemptionist teleology" (171). In the address we know as "What to the Slave Is the 4th of...

Lost Bodies: Inhabiting the Borders of Life and Death; Identifying Marks: Race, Gender, and the Marked Body in Nineteenth-Century America

Book Review| June 01 2010 Lost Bodies: Inhabiting the Borders of Life and Death; Identifying Marks: Race, Gender, and the Marked Body in Nineteenth-Century America Kwakiutl L. Dreher Kwakiutl L. Dreher Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2010) 82 (2): 425–427. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2010-009 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Kwakiutl L. Dreher; Lost Bodies: Inhabiting the Borders of Life and Death; Identifying Marks: Race, Gender, and the Marked Body in Nineteenth-Century America. American Literature 1 June 2010; 82 (2): 425–427. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2010-009 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2010 by Duke University Press2010 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

National Melancholy: Mourning and Opportunity in Classic American Literature; Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America; Mourning Modernity: Literary Modernism and the Injuries of American Capitalism; Kindred Specters: Death, Mourning, and American Affinity

National Melancholy: Mourning and Opportunity in Classic American Literature; Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America; Mourning Modernity: Literary Modernism and the Injuries of American Capitalism; Kindred Specters: Death, Mourning, and American Affinity

Arranging grief: sacred time and the body in nineteenth-century America

Acknowledgments Introduction: Tracking the Tear 1 Moments More Concentrated than Hours: Grief and the Textures of Time 2 Evocations: The Romance of Indian Lament 3 Securing Time: Maternal Melancholia and Sentimental Domesticity 4 Slavery's Ruins and the Countermonumental Impulse 5 Representative Mournfulness: Nation and Race in the Time of Lincoln Coda: Everyday Grief Notes Selected Bibliography Index About the Author

Book Review: Out in Public: Configurations of Women's Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America. By Alison Piepmeier. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004, 272 pp., $55.00 (cloth), $21.95 (paper)

Book Review: Out in Public: Configurations of Women's Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America. By Alison Piepmeier. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004, 272 pp., $55.00 (cloth), $21.95 (paper)

Identifying marks: race, gender, and the marked body in nineteenth-century America

What we know of the marked body in nineteenth-century American literature and culture often begins with The Scarlet Letter's Hester Prynne and ends with Moby Dick's Queequeg. This study looks at the presence of marked men and women in a more challenging array of canonical and lesser-known works, including exploration narratives, romances, and frontier novels. Jennifer Putzi shows how tattoos, scars, and brands can function both as stigma and as emblem of healing and survival, thus blurring the borderline between the biological and social, the corporeal and spiritual. Examining such texts as Typee, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Captivity of the Oatman Girls, The Morgesons, Iola Leroy , and Contending Forces , Putzi relates the representation of the marked body to significant events, beliefs, or cultural shifts, including tattooing and captivity, romantic love, the patriarchal family, and abolition and slavery. Her particular focus is on both men and women of colour, as well as white women-in other words, bodies that did not signify person hood in the nineteenth century and thus by their very nature were grotesque. Complicating the discourse on agency, power, and identity, these texts reveal a surprisingly complex array of representations of and responses to the marked body -- some that are a product of essentialist thinking about race and gender identities and some that complicate, critique, or even rebel against conventional thought.

Identifying Marks: Race, Gender, and the Marked Body in Nineteenth-Century America (review)

Reviewed by: Identifying Marks: Race, Gender, and the Marked Body in Nineteenth Century America Nancy Strow Sheley Identifying Marks: Race, Gender, and the Marked Body in Nineteenth Century America. By Jennifer Putzi. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2006. 195 pp. $36.95. In the twenty-first century, body marking by choice, through tattoos and piercing, is an active attempt to control the onlooker's gaze, to delight in the viewer's response, to be an exhibitionist, or to make one's body an active text. In the nineteenth century, however, the cultural positioning of marked bodies, especially those of color and of women, is much more complex. In Identifying Marks, Jennifer Putzi convincingly argues that body markings provide sites of contradiction where the onlooker's gaze, the cultural expectations of race and gender, the physical body, and the emotional self are reconfigured. In this study, Putzi focuses on two aspects of the marked body: how the marked individual responds to the mark itself and how the mark is viewed and interpreted by others. Key ideas filter through the book as a whole: that the marked body is both a sight and a site read through multiple, cultural lenses; that the mark itself is a manifestation of the grotesque, the spectacle, and often the sexual; and that no singular reading of the mark sufficiently represents all responses to its power. Grotesquely marked bodies, such as the circus's tattooed white women, the pitifully marked white women in captivity narratives, disfigured heroines, and the scarred, marked persons of color destabilize cultural dictates about gender and race. The cover of Identifying Marks displays the tattooed visage of Olive Oatman, kidnapped by the Yavapais in 1830 and marked by the Mohaves a year later. Her story, in The Captivity of the Oatman Girls, is a complex tale of subjugation and reclamation of self. To most, Oatman's tattooed chin was the object of horror; however, as Putzi notes, upon Oatman's return to civilization, her complicit participation in the ensuing spectacle of speeches, tours, and display was empowering. In the nineteenth century, romantic love interrupted the predictability of [End Page 338] 338 family-approved marriages and created intergenerational and social anxieties. Putzi argues that these fears, too, played out in texts through the marking of characters. She cites several texts in which the faces of female protagonists are scarred by acid. Both George Thompson's sensational novel Crimes of City Life and Maria Susanna Cummins's The Lamplighter use disfigured and mutilated female bodies to reveal the strength of the old patriarchy even in the wake of new representations of the sentimental family and constructions of romantic love. Harriet P. Spofford's heroine in "The Strathsays" is a strong, first-person narrator who rises above her disfigurement into a satisfying companionate marriage; and Cassandra, in Elizabeth Stoddard's The Morgesons, despite her scars, finds love. However, both women's lives are restrained in the end, their faces remain marked, and their power continues to be limited. Their scars are a subtle warning in a world that commodifies women's bodies and beauty. In other examples, Hawthorne's Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter and Georgiana in "The Birthmark" delineate the extremes of women's agency, or lack thereof, in choosing their own meanings for their marks. Hester embraces her letter "A" and gives it power to influence the community, but Georgiana succumbs to her doctor-husband's demands for perfection and willingly submits to his unsuccessful efforts to remove the mark on her face. By using familiar texts like Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Alcott's "My Contraband," another chapter focuses on how slaves' whiplash scars and amputations were used to further the abolitionists' cause and to confirm the white owners' complicity in torture. Yet, the freed slaves' marked bodies place them in a state of liminality between past abuse and present freedom. Women writers such as Lydia Maria Child, and later Frances Ellen Watkins Harper in Iola Leroy, use the marked Black body to extend a domesticated political discourse of unification and reconstruction of dispersed families. The bodies of Black women after Emancipation were still marked and viewed as publicly...

Bodies Beyond Boundaries: Mapping New Territory in Embodiment Studies

Bodies Beyond Boundaries:Mapping New Territory inEmbodiment Studies Marlis Schweitzer (bio) R. Marie Griffith . Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. xiv + 323 pp. ISBN 0-520-21753-5 (cl); 0-520-24240-8 (pb). Beth Newman . Subjects on Display: Psychoanalysis, Social Expectation and Victorian Femininity. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004. x + 192 pp. ISBN 0-8214-1548-4 (cl). Alison Piepmeier . Out in Public: Configurations of Women's Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004. xi + 278 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8078-2904-8 (cl); 0-8078-5569-3 (pb). Three weeks before reading the books reviewed here I gave birth to a son through an unplanned C-section. My evolving relationship with my recently "delivered" body thus informed my initial reading of and subsequent reflection on these books. I read and thought about the bodies that appear in these texts while keenly attuned to the changes taking place in my own; while nursing my son, one hand cradling his head while the other gripped the page; while watching my body, now emptied of the child it had carried for nine months, begin to resume its "normal" shape; while adjusting to the awkward absurdity of breast pumps and the embarrassment of leaking breasts; while trying to find discreet ways to nurse my child in public; while struggling with the sense of loss and guilt that occasionally swept over me as I reflected on the experience of labor and birth and my inability to deliver my son "naturally"; while reading and writing my body as the body of a mother. And while I have no desire to descend into therapeutic self-reflection, I nevertheless wish to observe that each of these books, in its own way, has influenced the way I view and live in my postpartum body. Over the last decade the publishing world has witnessed a virtual explosion in books on and about the body.1 Scholars working in diverse fields ranging from sociology and medical science to religious studies and geography have taken up the call raised in the 1990s by poststructuralist philosophers Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz, Susan Bordo, Rosemarie Garland [End Page 137] Thomson, and others to counter Western somataphobia and engage more critically in an examination of how bodies are made, understood, and discussed.2 The three books reviewed here offer a vivid demonstration of the exciting work that is now emerging within body/embodiment studies and testify to the richness and breadth of this interdisciplinary subfield. Although their methodologies vary, each author attempts to at once complicate and advance our knowledge of historical bodies by challenging previous interpretations and approaches. Indeed, what these books have most in common is not so much an analysis of a specific period or gender (although two focus on nineteenth-century women) but rather a shared dedication to pushing old disciplinary boundaries, definitions, and theoretical frameworks. In Out in Public: Configurations of Women's Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America, Alison Piepmeier moves beyond traditional readings of female bodies as either active agents or passive victims by demonstrating that nineteenth-century women managed to occupy a multitude of subject positions simultaneously. This elegant, persuasive, and thoroughly engaging book is in line with recent scholarship that reinvestigates assumptions about nineteenth-century domesticity and identifies previously overlooked sites of collision between the public and private realms. Aligning herself with such poststructuralist scholars as Lora Romero, Carla Peterson, and Cathy Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher, Piepmeier argues that a rejection of stale binary categories (public/private, agent/victim) is necessary to identify the numerous and often contradictory ways that women built subjectivities within an intricate web of power relations. Those who continue to rely on binary categories for interpreting the past, she explains, "foreclose many possible readings of nineteenth century womanhood" (4). For example, previous interpretations of the domestic realm as a site of entrapment and misery for women have prevented historians from not only considering the range of women's experiences within the home but, perhaps more importantly, from identifying the ways that domesticated women also participated in the public sphere. In these histories, women are neatly pigeonholed...

Out in Public: Configurations of Women's Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America; Executing Race: Early American Women's Narratives of Race, Society, and the Law.

Out in Public: Configurations of Women's Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America; Executing Race: Early American Women's Narratives of Race, Society, and the Law.

Out in Public: Configurations of Women's Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America

Alison Piepmeier's Out in Public describes the “outing” of women's bodies…[that] carried a range of possible meanings, the deployment of which depended on a network of factors including race, class, the particular historical moment, the context within print culture, and the framing narratives. (pp. 1–2) Piepmeier addresses limitations in interpretation of twentieth-century scholarship of women's history of this era that has spoken less of a range or spectrum of possible meanings of women's public embodiment and has, instead, tended to view nineteenth-century social, political, and gender organization through interlocking sets of binary lenses: the public and private spheres, and agency and victimization. (p. 2) Applying twenty-first-century scholarship and utilizing contemporary feminist thought, she argues that some women eluded confinement in the designated domestic sphere and negotiated development of a public identity that defied the limitations of these lenses while avoiding censure for direct challenge of contemporary gender roles. Her study employs literary critical analysis of selected primary sources by Anna Cora Mowatt (1819–1871), Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910), Sojourner Truth (c. 1797–1883), Ida B. Wells (1861–1931), and Sarah Hale (1788–1879) as representations of the experience and contribution of white and black women; a detailed reading of the documents informs Piepmeier's interpretation of “the modalities of embodiment…[that] are multiple, transitional, strategic, playful, contested” (p. 2). Spanning the nineteenth century, the lives and careers of these five women provide the historical perspective necessary to understand how the selected texts “present the publicly enacted female body as a critical component of nineteenth-century culture” (p. 213). A cogent biographical sketch illustrates how each woman developed a “public enactment of the female body” (p. 17). As an able practitioner of third-wave feminist methodology, Piepmeier provides summaries of the scholarship that informs the focus of her text in detailed text notes (pp. 219–54); the inclusive bibliography lists the works of the old and new scholarship as well as fundamental biographical works for each of the five women.

Discursive Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America

Alison Piepmeier. Out in Public: Configurations of Women's Bodies in Nineteenth- Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. 278 pp. Appendix, notes, bibliography, and index. $49.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). In recent years the boundaries between history and tangential disciplines have become increasingly permeable. As a historian who holds a joint appointment in both a history department and a women's and gender studies department, and who publishes in both disciplines, I, as a great number of my colleagues, generally welcome this destabilization of rigid restrictions. There are, however, pitfalls into which scholars can stumble. At times a work of scholarship cannot meet the exacting standards of every discipline to which she, or her publisher, might wish to market her publication. What may well be a satisfactory study in one discipline can fall short in another. Unfortunately, this is just the case with Alison Piepmeier's Out in Public: Configurations of Women's Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America. Peipmeier's work, while a worthy addition to the growing body of scholarship examining the writings of nineteenth-century American women, does not successfully stand as a historical inquiry. Out in Public may be a good example of critical literary scholarship, but is not as successful as historical scholarship. Piepmeir provides a textual analysis of the works of five figures in the nineteenth century: actress Anna Cora Mowatt; Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy; abolitionist Sojourner Truth, civil rights and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells; and Godey's Lady's Book editor Sarah Josepha Hale. Piepmeier contends that the writings of these women created a discursive body, or "corporeal identity" that existed beyond the alleged private sphere of middle-class womanhood and domesticity. These "outings" illustrate how women, particularly the ones mentioned, "gained access to the power and authority of the public world without becoming transgressive figures" (p. 9). In this way, Piepmeier uses her findings to argue for the deconstruction of the binaries of the private and public spheres historians and literary critics use to research and interpret the experiences of women, especially nineteenth-century women. Piepmeier argues that she "utilizes a careful poststructuralist [End Page 372] approach" to illustrate how an examination of women's bodies—physically and linguistically, culturally and legally constructed, can lead to the breakdown of these simplistic binaries (p.10; emphasis in original). Analytically, this issue allows us to see the more complex spaces between these binaries in which nineteenth-century women lived and made sense of their worlds. Piepmeier contends that "Out in Public is less a straightforward literary history of nineteenth-century women's public embodiment" than one of a "theoretically informed exploration of particular strategies for women's public embodiment" (pp. 14–5). She acknowledges that her study is not one concerned with historical facts, but one that questions facts, and how we construct meaning from those facts. It is just this assertion that makes this book of limited value to historians. Peipmeier's extensive use of jargon and poststructuralist linguistics is much better suited to literary scholars than historians. Peipmeier's work lacks the finesse that is present in other poststructuralist historical analyses in which historians craft narratives that are informed by the theoretical, yet do not lose sight of the empirical; Joan Scott's body of scholarship comes to mind. Historians with a background in feminist theories will have an easier time than those unfamiliar with the theories of Jacques Lacan, Julie Kristeva, Elizabeth Grosz, or Carol Gilligan. Indeed, Kristeva's discussion of the abject is a reoccurring theme throughout the book. For all of her subjects, Piepmeier posits how each carefully negotiated the public space they discursively inhabited to avoid being a "freak," a label she identifies as a point of no return. Because they did not physically abandon their proper gender roles, only discursively, they avoided the negative repercussions of public display that would brand them as such. In addition, Peipmeier's argument for the deconstruction...

Book Review: Out in Public: Configurations of Women's Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America

Book Review: Out in Public: Configurations of Women's Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America

Out in Public: Configurations of Women's Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America, and: Victoria Woodhull's Sexual Revolution: Political Theater and the Popular Press in Nineteenth-Century America (review)

Reviewed by: Out in Public: Configurations of Women's Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America, and: Victoria Woodhull's Sexual Revolution: Political Theater and the Popular Press in Nineteenth-Century America Patricia Okker Out in Public: Configurations of Women's Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America. By Alison Piepmeier. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. 288 pp. $49.95/$19.95 paper. Victoria Woodhull's Sexual Revolution: Political Theater and the Popular Press in Nineteenth-Century America. By Amanda Frisken. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. 208 pp. $37.50. Organized as a series of case studies, Piepmeier's Out in Public focuses on the female body with specific explorations of five women: Anna Cora Mowatt, Mary Baker Eddy, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, and Sarah Josepha Hale. In addition to her material and discursive analysis of the body, Piepmeier offers a wide range of visual images of women in public, particularly of women's athleticism. Together, the analyses of these texts provide an "alternative iconography" to the familiar images both of men in public and of women in private, domestic settings (19). One of the many strengths of this book is its rich interdisciplinarity. Piepmeier reads Mowatt's Autobiography of an Actress, for example, in the context of nineteenth-century representations of acting, travel narratives, freak shows, and sentimental portrayals of female invalidism. Mary Baker Eddy's Science and Health is situated within discourses of science, including medicine and astronomy. Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman?" speech is likewise read within models of nineteenth-century oratory and the tradition of tall tales. This emphasis on cultural contexts and polyvocalism undergirds Piepmeier's boldest accomplishment—the dismantling of the still popular nineteenth-century binaries of public and private, agent and victim. Rather than completely abandoning these dichotomies, Piepmeier instead targets their instabilities, the "fluid interactions between public and private and the simultaneity of victimization and agency" (5). As Piepmeier makes clear, the body is an ideal site for such investigations: The female body is the defining feature of the private sphere and of the victim paradigm, often coming synechdochally to stand for domesticity and victimization. However, the body is also a site which is mobile and malleable, able to change in response to changing circumstances and able to be configured in terms of various spaces, from the home to the podium. (9) Testament to this malleability is the impressively diverse configurations of embodiment that Piepmeier uncovers. For example, while Ida B. Wells rejects any association of black female embodiment with victimization and instead uses the image of fully embodied black women to challenge discourses both of lynching and of racialized nationalism, Anna Mowatt uses her own experiences with illness as a "sentimental mask" that "conceals her sensational body" (45). Piepmeier's nuanced reading of Sarah Hale's identification of her corporeality with Godey's Lady's Book similarly shows how print culture "allowed her to exceed the boundaries of that binary and call it into question" (174). The collective result of these five case studies is an often surprising view of nineteenth-century womanhood, one that avoids the stereotypes of domesticated woman and defiant rebel. Most important, Piepmeier's work demonstrates the extent to which nineteenth-century women responded strategically to the varying and often competing discourses surrounding them. Like Out in Public, Amanda Frisken's Victoria Woodhull's Sexual Revolution explores public womanhood in nineteenth-century America, [End Page 211] in this case by focusing on one unconventional woman. The subject of three recent biographies—Lois Beachy Underhill's The Woman Who Ran for President (1995), Mary Gabriel's Notorious Victoria (1998), and Barbara Goldsmith's Other Powers (1998)—Victoria Woodhull is certainly a woman deserving of our attention. She was a vocal advocate for radical sexual politics, owned the first women's brokering firm on Wall Street, and in 1872 she served as the Equal Rights Party's nominee for President of the United States. Although much of Woodhull's life remains a mystery—the authorship of many of her speeches is uncertain, for example, and her own accounts of her life are often unreliable—Frisken's new book offers a compelling addition to these recent...