Reviewed by: Fetal Positions: Individualism, Science, Visuality Katharine Park Karen Newman. Fetal Positions: Individualism, Science, Visuality. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. xi + 157 pp. Ill. $39.50 (cloth); $16.95 (paperbound). This compact and highly illustrated book is a useful and provocative study of the history of visual representations of fetuses (mostly in utero) in Europe and the United States. Although Newman frames her account with a discussion of fetal imagery as used by late-twentieth-century pro-life activists, she focuses principally on works of obstetrical and anatomical pedagogy and practice in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—woodcuts and engravings in printed books, on the one hand, and anatomical and obstetrical waxes and models, on the other. She explains this choice by noting that this period produced the discourse of individual rights that structures the modern abortion debate. [End Page 366] Newman argues that all of these representations share a unified set of visual conventions: the fetus is shown as an intact, active, autonomous being, virtually always male and often depicted as several months, or even several years, old; in contrast, the woman’s body (often reduced to an open or schematic uterus) appears as breached, fragmentary, and inert. The effect, according to Newman, is that the observer is encouraged to identify with the fetus rather than the woman who carries it—accepting the former as an autonomous and rights-bearing individual, while denying the latter any subjectivity, sympathy, and individuality, and hence any plausible claim to rights of her own. Thus, Newman argues, “the woman’s body is sacrificed to fetal subjectivity” (p. 88). Newman’s point is not complicated or original: feminist critics and historians of early modern science have made these same points before. But she argues it clearly and convincingly, with illustrations that are in themselves a fascinating overview of the medical imagery of the period. In this sense, the book is an excellent introduction not only to the subject matter, but also to the burgeoning field of the cultural history and criticism of visual representation. It is accessible to undergraduates and will serve as an excellent teaching resource for historians of science and medicine, introducing students to important theoretical issues—the relationship of the representation and the “real,” the contingency and constructedness of the human body, visualization and regimes of visibility—as well as to the specialized vocabulary they need in order to enter into these debates. Yet this study is marked by a significant lacuna: while Newman pleads eloquently for the strength of tradition in medical representations, and the importance of studying modern imagery in the context of its historical origins, she never in fact considers the origins of the visual tradition she is describing. Although she reproduces several manuscript pages, which show the tradition to be fully constituted by at least the ninth century, she discusses it only in the context of the embryological theory of preformationism and the political discourse of human rights, both of which come from a much later period. These later developments may have given additional resonance to the tradition of fetal representation, and received additional resonance from it, but they in no way explain it. In fact, the existence of these earlier representations raises a number of questions that complicate and challenge some aspects of Newman’s approach, most notably her decision not to engage the text that accompanies many of her medieval and early modern images. This move, peculiar on the part of a literary historian, limits the complexity of the points she can make and reduces her central discussion concerning human rights to a set of plausible associations rather than a rigorous argument. It also precludes her addressing the origins of the visual tradition, which clearly predates human dissection; like all anatomical images from before 1300 (and many thereafter), the manuscript illustrations of fetuses in utero represent not any seen physical reality—however mediated by visual and mental structures—but the text they accompany. If anything, this fact only strengthens Newman’s main and incontestable point: the constructedness [End Page 367] of fetal imagery, and its lack of a direct relation to any kind of anatomical “reality.” But to engage the relations between text...
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Aug 20, 2008
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