Victorian Body Research Articles

Fat

The nineteenth century was pivotal in shaping contemporary Western attitudes toward fat. Victorian representations of fatness participated in the construction of knowledge about bodies in general, intersecting with economic, medical, gendered, and racial discourses. Fatness was thought to make manifest those hidden consumer appetites lurking within all bodies. It thus provided a visual grounding for the impetus toward bourgeois self-management. At the same time, representations of fatness were complicated by intersecting discourses of class, gender, and race. This essay argues for the adoption of new directions for research that foreground the role played by perceptions of body size in the construction of Victorian bodies. Fattening Victorian studies requires an interrogation of the ways in which the normative ideologies and practices associated with bourgeois body management have structured a society that was, and remains, hostile to fat bodies.

Victorian Skin: Surface, Self, History

Victorian Skin: Surface, Self, History

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

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...

Faded Ink: The Material Trace of Handwriting in Neo-Victorian Fiction

Neo-Victorian novelists reimagine handwritten documents to feed contemporary nostalgia for the materiality of handwriting. Handwriting signifies the personal and the private in ways that seem threatened in a digital age. Writers like Andrea Barrett, A. S. Byatt, and Peter Carey map material pathways to the nineteenth century with fictional characters who strive to possess the written past. Archival fantasies are simulated by novelists depicting writing processes and subsequent discovery and rereading of the handwritten trace by later generations. Imagined scenes of reading and writing describe tactile traces of handwriting that stage possession of the Victorian body in fragmented and partially recoverable states. Resurrection of the desired Victorian body through a metonymical relationship of hand/handwriting evokes a sense of a partial past recovered and experienced. Part of the aestheticism of the past relies on the aura of documents worn to a trace to evidence time and decay. Discovering the handwritten trace in this way becomes a sensory experience for readers and descriptions of decayed materiality emphasise survival for imagined fragments. Contemporary writing thus reveals a dual purpose to aestheticise the material past whilst demonstrating a postmodern drive to refute closure and ultimately celebrate the indeterminate facets of the handwritten trace.

Reading the Body in Dickens’s Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend

This article examines the ways in which the Victorian body and identity were being transformed in the mid-nineteenth century and identifies three distinctive ways the biological and normative boundaries of the body were violated as represented in Dickens’s fiction: the grotesque body, the vulnerable body and the dead body. In this sense, Dickens’s Bleak House (1851-53) and Our Mutual Friend (1864-65) present creative and challenging literary responses to the Victorian body abjected through deprivation, physical vulnerability and death. In the novels, the grotesque body challenges the abject via a tragicomic and hybrid representation of the body and of character. Regarding the vulnerable body, the study elaborates on a body “out-of-control”, threatening the boundaries between the object and the subject, inside and outside, by holding a liminal state through ill-health, excessive labour, starvation and physical degradation. Finally, it is argued that there was an intimate and abject relationship between the living and the dead bodies in the capital, beside prevalent infant deaths, high mortality rates, diseased bodies and overflowing graveyards in the city.

Comforting Creatures: Changing Visions of Animal Otherness in the Victorian Period

The first meaning of the expression ‘creature comforts’ which informs the title of this collection is that of bodily comfort. It is difficult not to associate the desire for physical well-being with the Victorians who valued plump upholstery, good plumbing, rich cuisine and soft furnishings. The Victorian body, as the novels and advertisements that catered to it show us, needed objects, services, materials, victuals, many of which were animal in origin; mammals, birds, insects, fish and crust...

The Representation of Time, Modernity and Its Prehistory in Dracula

ABSTRACTThe essay deals with the bifurcated representation of time in Dracula that is split into a modern and pre-modern time. In Stoker’s novel, the time of Western modernity and the modern nation depends on the repression of the past and of the past-becoming of the present. While modern technologies purportedly create an imaginary sense of control over the wayward mythologies of the past, supplementing and stabilizing the modern present, they cannot fully obstruct the haunting of the prehistory of modernity represented by the vampire and Transylvania. The predominant fears of the novel derive from the powerful eruption of this prehistory in the form of a Gothic romance that spawns unspeakable sexual perversions, adulterating both the modern time and the Victorian body. This essay performs a close reading of the passages primarily belonging to the first part of the novel that depict the perils and pleasures of being haunted by the distant past and shows how the oft-sexualized eruption of the past in the novel forces modernity to regress to the romance genre.

Peter J. Capuano, Changing Hands: Industry, Evolution, and the Reconfiguration of the Victorian Body

Peter J. Capuano, <i>Changing Hands: Industry, Evolution, and the Reconfiguration of the Victorian Body</i>

Changing Hands: Industry, Evolution, and the Reconfiguration of the Victorian Body by Peter J. Capuano

Changing Hands: Industry, Evolution, and the Reconfiguration of the Victorian Body by Peter J. Capuano

Changing Hands: Industry, Evolution, and the Reconfiguration of the Victorian Body

Changing Hands: Industry, Evolution, and the Reconfiguration of the Victorian Body

Changing Hands: Industry, Evolution, and the Reconfiguration of the Victorian Body

Changing Hands: Industry, Evolution, and the Reconfiguration of the Victorian Body

Changing Hands: Industry, Evolution, and the Reconfiguration of the Victorian Body by Peter J. Capuano

Reviewed by: Changing Hands: Industry, Evolution, and the Reconfiguration of the Victorian Body by Peter J. Capuano John Hay (bio) Peter J. Capuano, Changing Hands: Industry, Evolution, and the Reconfiguration of the Victorian Body. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015, 340 pp. $80.00 cloth, $39.95 paper or ebook. Peter Capuano begins Changing Hands with a simple question: “Why are hands the most described body part in the nineteenth-century novel?” (p. 12). The question stems from an empirical investigation conducted using databases of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction. By employing newly available digital humanities techniques, Capuano traces a perceptible shift in textual preoccupation: while eighteenth-century novels are filled with descriptions of facial features (especially eyes, but also hair, noses, mouths, etc.), their Victorian successors display a decided preference for hands. This macro-textual observation in turn allows him to see that Mary Shelley devoted more attention to the clutches than to the glares of Frankenstein’s creature and that William Thackeray focused more on Becky Sharp’s flirtatious fingers than on her coquettish glances. But why? Capuano argues that the chief factors contributing to this authorial move “from gaze to grasp” were industrial mechanization and the development of evolutionary theory (p. 19). These twin forces, he maintains, created a host of anxieties about the relevance of the human body—and in particular of the human hand. Manual labor was increasingly displaced by machine technology, and the exceptional nature of a divinely modeled human form was challenged by a shared history with the anatomy of other apes. Whereas faces, and especially eyes, were important gateways to the soul for earlier writers, Victorians tended to view the proof of divine inspiration in wrists, palms, and fingers. The hand thus became “the most generative but also the most heavily contested site in the British cultural imaginary” (p. 42). Capuano examines this widespread concern through the popular fiction of the time and contends that novelists were better able to convey such cultural anxieties than were other writers. One of the strengths of Changing Hands is its careful articulation of its position relative to a host of extant criticism on Victorian literature. Capuano enters the fray via a broad scholarly conversation regarding the new materialism and the corporeal turn. For too long, he insists, modern literary critics have been reading allusions to hands as metaphors or metonyms—as mere indicators for labor or socioeconomic status—and [End Page 558] have thus overlooked the significance of actual hands.2 He corrects this tendency by embracing new practices of “surface reading” in order to appreciate Victorian hands as material appendages.3 By doing so, he both reveals the “manual crisis” of the nineteenth century and returns to a model of what he calls “our embodied handedness” (p. 3). The Victorian period is a crucial literary era in which so many common related terms (maneuver, manners, manuscripts) and phrases (gaining the upper hand) were transitioning from literal references to metaphorical expressions; from our own twenty-first-century perspective, it can be difficult to perceive the explicit gestures to physical hands. In fact, one could characterize Capuano’s primary move as an exploration of the process by which handmade and manufactured transform from etymological equivalences to obvious opposites. Changing Hands begins with a data-driven observation culled from digital humanities methodologies, but its eight chapters are structured by close readings of canonical novels, spanning from Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). The examinations of these novels are often accompanied by excerpts from contemporary guidebooks and pamphlets on topics such as handshake etiquette and handwriting analysis. Capuano’s recovered trove of manuals on all things manual includes texts such as Richard Beamish’s Psychonomy of the Hand (1843), which explained how the qualities of a subject’s hands could reveal personality traits. While his individual chapters each focus on hand-related themes, Capuano also addresses a wide variety of critical topics regarding race, class, and gender. He is generally interested in both “embodied handedness” and “manual discourse” (p. 107); he primarily attends to the materiality of hands, but he does not ignore the metaphorical and metonymical implications...

Changing Hands: Industry, Evolution, and the Reconfiguration of the Victorian Body by Peter J. Capuano

Changing Hands: Industry, Evolution, and the Reconfiguration of the Victorian Body by Peter J. Capuano

Aggression or Regression: a Comparative Study of Heroines in the Mill on the Floss and Pride and Prejudice

The basic formula in the English Victorian novel seems to be an individual standing against the world (of the Victorian society). George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1833) are two excellent examples of intellectual heroines standing against social expectations. This paper, as a comparative study, shows that in the former written by a romantic and modern novelist, the heroine drowns which signifies her self-renunciation and submission to the expectations of the society as well as her revenge of a body being shaped by Victorian ideologies. In the latter written by a conservative and realist writer, the heroine begins a process of education and transformation just to resolve her conflict in marriage. The paper concludes that in such novels the intellectual woman has to either submit to survive, or is wiped out which implies both the heroine’s self-destruction of a Victorian body (aggression) or her drowning in the waters of ideology (regression).

Victorian bodies in heat

Victorian bodies in heat

Paralytic Animation: The Anthropomorphic Taxidermy of Walter Potter

This essay examines taxidermist Walter Potter's tableaux of preserved animals in anthropomorphic poses. While easily dismissed as kitsch, these works collapse the distance between the corporeal and figurative, illuminating our understanding of Victorian bodies and the techniques used to represent them. This essay reads two of Potter's tableaux as simultaneously a tribute to nature and a violation of it: they are limit cases of an ekphrastic compulsion to bring the object of narration before the reader. The bodies they contain are, borrowing Dickens's phrase, paralytically animated, a state they share with the bodies preserved by Mr. Venus, Our Mutual Friend 's taxidermist. Examining Venus's and Potter's overlapping features helps us to better understand the novel's worrying of the boundaries between literal and figurative, living and dead.

Sexual Violence, Marital Guidance, and Victorian Bodies: An Aesthesiology

This essay examines some of the emotional rules, encoded in grammars of representation and framed within law and prescriptive marital advice literature, regarding the expression of male sexual aggressivity within the bedroom. Despite the general Victorian idealization of marriage, many wives suffered physical and sexual abuse at the hands of their husbands, marital rape drawing particular attention from early feminists, psychologists, physicians, and evolutionary physiologists. In the 1870s, a belief that unrestrained sexual license was a symptom of degeneration led these commentators to consider marital rape particularly harmful to husbands. By the turn of the century, however, the focus of this harm had nominally shifted to women, who might become frigid if forced to submit to sex--a problem for wives but for husbands as well. As sexology and psychology gained greater influence, couples came to rely on the emotion-talk of commentators to negotiate mutually agreeable bedroom activity.

Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853-1907 (review)

Reviewed by: Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853–1907 Martin Fichman (bio) Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853–1907, by Nadja Durbach; pp. xiii + 276. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005, $22.95, £14.95. The anti-vaccination movement in England during the latter half of the nineteenth century, despite its medical, political, and cultural significance, has scarcely been [End Page 532] noticed—much less analyzed—by historians of the Victorian period. Nadja Durbach's Bodily Matters is one of the very few recent works to redress this historiographical oversight. Drawing on a variety of published as well as unpublished documents—including Parliamentary papers, newspapers and periodicals, and the archives of a wide variety of English libraries and public records offices—Durbach provides a lively and informed account of this fascinating episode in Victorian history. Durbach focuses on the period from the enactment of the Compulsory Vaccination Act in 1853 until 1907, when magistrates were authorized to grant numerous exemptions to parents who "conscientiously objected" to compulsory vaccination of their children. In one sense, the 1907 decision marked a major victory for popular protest against growing state intervention in the late Victorian period. But anti-vaccination, as Durbach demonstrates, was far more complex an issue than merely one of ever-increasing state control. The strength of Bodily Matters is its nuanced account of the multiple factors at play in late-Victorian vaccination debates. Durbach is at her surest when she details the "events of the resistance campaign and the richness of its rhetorical strategies" (11). She accomplishes this by locating the anti-vaccination movement within a broad range of dissenting movements that formed the "vibrant culture of political protest and social reform that was characteristic of the second half of the nineteenth century" (11). Anti-vaccinationism grew, in part, "out of well-established traditions of medical dissent that pitted [certain segments] of the people against the alliance of orthodox medicine and a bureaucratic state" (36). Durbach shows how the anti-vaccinationists found allies within other movements by "tapping into concerns over working-class exploitation," such as those at the heart of the cooperative and trade unionist agitation. Other allies were to be found among the ranks of Noncomformists and relatively new alternatives such as spiritualism, theosophy, and Swedenborgianism. These particular movements were tied together by similar theories of the relationship between physical and spiritual health. Vaccination was considered an invasion of both the bodies and minds of those vaccinated. Equally crucial was the perception of enthusiastic groups of progressive and humanitarian activists who added the anti-vaccination cause to their social and political agendas. Rounding out this "community of dissent," female "social reformers began to absorb anti-vaccinationism into their feminist platform[s]" (46). Anti-vaccinationism was, thus, a movement that cut across both class and gender lines. The populist rhetoric of anti-vaccinationism appealed to middle, lower middle, and working classes, as well as to certain members of the gentry. This flexible rhetoric "found its clearest expression in the language of citizenship that emphasized the rights of the freeborn" English men and women (71). Durbach also shows how anti-vaccinationism forced a clarification of certain elements of Victorian liberalism. She is careful to emphasize, however, that this cross-class campaign was not without considerable tension: "The classed nature of the implementation of vaccination policy meant that the values and goals of [anti-vaccination] campaigners were sometimes in conflict" (92). Members of the middle and upper classes had financial and political resources to resist the lancet of vaccination that most working-class agitators simply did not possess. As its title implies, Durbach's study focuses on changing concepts of the body in late-nineteenth-century England. Chapter 5, "Vampire, Vivisectors, and the Victorian Body," is, arguably, the most provocative section of the book. "By scarifying the flesh and introducing disease into the system," as its opponents maintained, "vaccination threatened [End Page 533] strongly held beliefs regarding bodily integrity and blood purity. It also wielded the power . . . to transform the individual into something 'other,' a monstrous version of the self" (113). The language of violation, contamination, and degeneration was central to the anti-vaccination...

Bodily matters: the anti-vaccination movement in England, 1853-1907

Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. The Parliamentary Lancet 13 2. Fighting the Babies' Battle 37 3. Populism, Citizenship, and the Politics of Victorian Liberalism 69 4. The Body Politics of Class Formation 91 5. Vampires, Vivisectors, and the Victorian Body 113 6. Germs, Dirt, and the Constitution 150 7. Class, Gender, and the Conscientious Objector 171 Conclusion 199 Notes 209 Bibliography 243 Index 269

The traffic in Victorian bodies: Medicine, literature, and history.

Have we lost the connections between literary studies of Victorian bodies, studies of medicine and literature, and historical studies of medical ideas and practices? The boundary police of academic disciplines might be pardoned for thinking so; indeed, for believing that these projects have always been on different continents drifting in different directions. Certainly, the "body languages" of the former and the latter are often wide apart—the heavily theorized "pathology poetics" of the one being a far cry from the empirical realist narratives of the other. Much recent literary scholarship has gone into rewriting the Victorians in terms of the body's discursive fabrications, the body being taken as the culturally embedded text (often the text) for imaginative and contested readings of the self and others. As testified through the work of Mary Poovey, Catherine Gallagher, Helena [End Page 513] Michie, and Linda Shires among others, a major part of the literary turn in cultural studies has been its somatic turn. While accounts of the medical epistemology of the modern social body remain relatively obscure (and contested), 1 few historians, and even fewer cultural analysts, now doubt that the history of the body forms an important part of the conceptual history of modernity. Whether as a means of contemplating the human condition, or merely pursuing language practices and literary strategies, corporeality and pathology have become obligatory points of passage in the study of Victorian society and culture.