The Male Body in Medicine and Literature (Liverpool English Texts and Studies): 72 1786940523, 9781786940520

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t h e m a l e body i n m e dic i n e a n d l i t e r at u r e

li v er pool english te x ts a nd st udie s 72

The Male Body in Medicine and Literature

Edited by Andrew Mangham and Daniel Lea the male body in medicine and literature

LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS

First published 2018 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2018 Liverpool University Press The right of Andrew Mangham and Daniel Lea to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available print ISBN 978-1-78694-052-0 epdf ISBN 978-1-78694-870-0 Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster

Contents contents Acknowledgements vii Notes on Contributors viii Introduction 1 Andrew Mangham and Daniel Lea Part One: Enquiry and Experimentation 1.  The Poetics of Anatomy: John Donne’s Dissection of the Male Body Jamie McKinstry

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2.  The Black Male Body in Early African American Science Fiction: The Experimental Case of Sutton Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio 34 Marlene D. Allen 3.  Miserrimus Dexter: Monstrous Forms of the Fin de Siècle 48 Katherine Angell 4.  ‘Intellectual suicides’: The Man of Letters in Middlemarch 64 Christine Crockett Sharp Part Two: Wounded and Psychopathologised Bodies 5.  The Male Wound in Fin de Siècle Poetry Sarah Parker

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6.  The Cacophony of Disaster: The Metaphorical Body of Sound in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man 103 Inbar Kaminsky

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7.  ‘Human Nature is Remorseless’: Masculinity, Medical Science and Nervous Conditions in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway 120 Avishek Parui 8.  ‘A man must make himself’: Hypochondria in Maria Edgeworth’s Ennui 137 Robin Runia Part Three: Fear, Confusion and Contagion 9.  ‘Sons of Belial’: Contaminated/Contaminating Victorian Male Bodies Lesley A. Hall

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10. Syphilis and Sociability: The Impolite Bodies of Two Gentlemen, James Boswell (1740–1795) and Sylas Neville (1741–1840) 177 Leigh Wetherall-Dickson 11.  ‘’Tis My Father’s Fault’: Tristram Shandy and Paternal Imagination 194 Jenifer Buckley 12. Southern Gothic and the Queer Male Body Thomas Lawrence Long

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Index

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Acknowledgements acknowledgements The editors would like to thank the contributors to this volume for their patience and hard work. We would also like to express our gratitude to Greta Depledge for her involvement in the project in the early stages, and to Anthony Cond, at Liverpool University Press, for his forbearance and good humour. We would also like to thank Anthony for his initial idea that we follow up The Female Body in Medicine and Literature with a sequel. Approaching the male body with the same kind of methodology we employed in the earlier book has highlighted a different, yet equally fascinating, set of questions. Accordingly, we have approached this collection as one would a new subject, exploring the topic afresh, in its own right, and we have not sought to carry over questions or concerns from the first volume. We hope, nevertheless, that the collections speak to each other, if only to highlight telling differences in the ways we think about male and female bodies. To our friends and family, we owe infinite debts of appreciation for the love and support they have given us over the years. Special thanks go to Sami Salim from Andrew, and to Liz and James Lea from Daniel. Another version of Jenifer Buckley’s chapter, ‘“’Tis My Father’s Fault”: Tristram Shandy and Paternal Imagination’, appeared in her book Gender, Pregnancy and Power in Eighteenth-Century Literature (2017). Many thanks to Palgrave Macmillan for permission to reprint the text here.

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Notes on Contributors Notes on Contributors

Marlene D. Allen is an assistant professor of English Literature at United Arab Emirates University. Her areas of research and teaching interests include African American fantasy and science fiction, multicultural American literature and the writings of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. She is the co-editor of Afterimages of Slavery: Essays on Appearances in Recent American Films, Literature, Television, and Other Media (2012). She has also published essays and presented papers on the writings of Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, Pauline Hopkins, Walter Mosley, Steven Barnes and Ralph Ellison at various international literature conferences. Katherine Angell is Associate Professor of Humanities on The Writing Program at the Hult International Business School. Her research interests include representations of monstrosity, disability, men of science and curious collections and collectors in nineteenth-century science, medicine, art and literature; the role of the imagination(s) in the development of nineteenth-century scientific investigations; and the relationship between teratological objects and the organising imagination in the novels of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. Her published work includes a history of the science of teratology, teratology and its influence on Victorian writers and illustrators, and the monstrous body as part of Victorian visual culture. Jenifer Buckley was awarded her PhD from the University of Southampton in 2014. In 2015 she was the first recipient of a Hester Davenport/Burney Society Fellowship at Chawton House Library. Her monograph, Gender, Power and Pregnancy in Eighteenth-Century Literature (2017) reveals the cultural significance of the pregnant woman and the discourse of maternal imagination by examining major eighteenth-century debates. viii

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As an independent scholar, her research interests focus on the interconnections between imagination, medicine, politics, and the economy in eighteenth-century literature. She is also the author of an article on speculative economics and Eliza Haywood, which appears in a special issue of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies (2014). Christine Crockett Sharp is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Literature and the Interim Director of the Center for Writing and Public Discourse at Claremont McKenna College. Her research interests include eighteenthcentury British literature and culture, Gothic literature and medical history. Her publications include ‘Medical Gothic: Genre and Gender Bending in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya’, in a special edition of NineteenthCentury Gender Studies, and ‘“The Monster Vice”’, an examination of disability and Frankenstein in Body and Mind: Essays on Disability in Gothic Literature. She is currently working on a book project titled Medical Gothic, an exploration of the discursive exchange between medical literature and the Gothic novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Lesley A. Hall, FRHistS, PhD, DipAA, was formerly Senior Archivist at the Wellcome Library and is now Wellcome Library Research Fellow and Honorary Senior Lecturer, Department of Science and Technology Studies, University College London. She has published several books and numerous articles and chapters on various aspects of gender and sexuality in the UK from the Victorian era to the present, including Hidden Anxieties: Male Sexuality, 1900–1950 (1991) and Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain since 1880 (2nd edn 2012), and co-edited the volume Sex, Sin and Suffering: Venereal Diseases in European Social Context since 1870 (2001, with Roger Davidson). Inbar Kaminsky holds a PhD in English Literature from Tel Aviv University. Her research interests are narrative theory, Jewish studies, American studies, body theory, urban studies, speculative fiction and film adaptation. Her publication record includes essays published in Philip Roth Studies about Operation Shylock and Nemesis and two articles published in the following academic essay collections – Michael Chabon’s America (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014) and Critical Reflections on Audience and Narrativity (Ibidem-Verlag, 2014). Two additional essays are forthcoming in 2016 in the following edited volumes – New Women’s Writing: Contexting Fiction, Poetry and Philosophy (Cambridge Scholars) and Cityscapes of the Future (Rodopi). ix

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Thomas Lawrence Long, PhD is Associate Professor-in-Residence in the School of Nursing at the University of Connecticut. His research interests include the cultural representation of health, illness and health professions and the representation of genders and sexualities in popular culture and science. His publications include AIDS and American Apocalypticism: The Cultural Semiotics of an Epidemic (2005) and articles in Medical Humanities, Journal of Medical Humanities and Literature and Medicine. Daniel Lea is Professor of Contemporary Literature at Oxford Brookes University and researches primarily in the field of post-1980 British fiction. He has published widely on the literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and is the author of George Orwell: Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four (2001), Graham Swift (2005) and Twenty-First Century Fiction: Contemporary British Voices (2016), and is co-editor of the collection Posting the Male: Masculinities in Post-war and Contemporary British Literature (2003). He has written on the literary representation of cancer’s effects on the male body and on the autopathographies of cancer subjects. Andrew Mangham is Associate Professor and director of Health Humanities research at the University of Reading (www.reading.ac.uk/ healthhums). He is interested in the intersections between literature and medicine in the nineteenth century and is the author of Violent Women and Sensation Fiction (2007) and Dickens’s Forensic Realism (2016). He has also edited a number of essay collections, including The Female Body in Medicine and Literature (2011) and The Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction (2013). Jamie McKinstry teaches in the Department of English Studies at Durham University, where he is also a member of the Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies and the Centre for Medical Humanities. He has published articles, essays and book chapters on a wide range of medieval and early modern topics, including memory studies, medieval romances, medieval Scottish literature, literature and medicine and disability studies. His monograph, Middle English Romance and the Craft of Memory, was published by Boydell and Brewer in 2015 as part of their series ‘Studies in Medieval Romance’. He is guest editing a special issue of postmedieval on ‘Medievalism and the Medical Humanities’, which will be published in 2017. x

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Sarah Parker is a Lecturer in English at Loughborough University. Her research specialises in women’s writing 1880–1930, with a focus on decadence, aestheticism and modernism. Her first monograph is The Lesbian Muse and Poetic Identity, 1889–1930 (2013). Her other publications include articles on Michael Field, Olive Custance and Lord Alfred Douglas, and Amy Levy and Djuna Barnes (in Economies of Desire at the Victorian Fin de Siècle, 2016). She is currently working on her second monograph, provisionally entitled Picturing the Poetess: Women Poets and Photography, 1880–1930. A recent article entitled ‘Publicity, Celebrity, Fashion: Photographing Edna St. Vincent Millay’ is published in Women’s Studies (45.4, 2016). Avishek Parui is Assistant Professor in English at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and Associate Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy, having done his PhD in English Studies at Durham University. His research interests include modernism, masculinity studies and memory studies. His works have appeared in South Asian Review, Peer English, Katherine Mansfield Studies, Short Fiction in Theory & Practice, Economic & Political Weekly, and the Routledge Encyclopaedia of Modernism, as well as in edited essay collections from Roman & Littlefield and Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. He has a monograph entitled Postmodern Literature forthcoming with Orient Blackswan. Robin Runia is Associate Professor of English at Xavier University of Louisiana. Her research explores issues of race and gender in women’s writing of the long eighteenth century, and she has published on the work of Aphra Behn, Sarah Fielding, Jane Collier, Sarah Scott, Charlotte Lennox, Maria Edgeworth and Mary Shelley. She is currently at work on a monograph project entitled Displaced Britons: Africans and Creoles in the Works of Maria Edgeworth. Leigh Wetherall-Dickson is Senior Lecturer in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature at Northumbria University. She has participated in two major research projects, both funded by the Leverhulme Trust: Before Depression 1660–1800 (www.beforedepression.com) and Fashionable Diseases: Medicine, Literature and Culture, 1660–1832 (www. fashionablediseases.info). Her current research is on the relationship between fashion, fame and illness and the fashioning of death in the long eighteenth century. Recent publications examine the relationship between sickness and the social sphere and the experience of mental and xi

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physical dis-ease, including the four-volume Depression and Melancholy 1660–1800 (Pickering and Chatto, 2012), for which she was general and contributing editor.

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Introduction Andrew Mangham and Daniel Lea Introduction The essays in this volume explore the male body as the locus of intersecting social, political, cultural and bio-medical discourses. Sometimes that body is sited within, and acts from, the position of patriarchal privilege, but more often these essays investigate how it works counter to any such cohesive location. It emerges as a damaged figure: diseased, deconstructed and often failing to perform. The resulting friction between what is and what is expected produces readings that interrogate male embodiment across private and public spheres in which the body is rarely the actant determining its own reading; rather, it is acted upon by a series of epistemological and disciplinary practices that variously reorientate its identity within and against versions of medical knowledge. What is often surprising about the male bodies we find in medicine and literature is that they rarely enjoy what Simone de Beauvoir called the status of the ‘first sex’. The focus of her feminist study The Second Sex (1949) was, of course, the position of women as defined not in terms of themselves but as relative to man. Yet her view suggests something of men’s bodies that is very difficult to substantiate: Woman has ovaries, a uterus: these peculiarities imprison her in her subjectivity, circumscribe her within the limits of her own nature. It is often said that she thinks with her glands. Man superbly ignores the fact that his anatomy also includes glands, such as the testicles, and that they secrete hormones. He thinks of his body as a direct and normal connection with the world, which he believes he apprehends objectively, whereas he regards the body of a woman as a hindrance, a prison, weighed down by everything peculiar to it. ‘The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities,’

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t h e m a l e body i n m e dici n e a n d l i t e r at u r e said Aristotle; ‘we should regard the female nature as afflicted with natural defectiveness’.1

As will be demonstrated in the essays that follow, there is plenty of historical evidence that men’s anatomies have been considered as no less of a ‘hindrance’ than women’s. At no point in history, indeed, has man been allowed to forget his glands: they have been celebrated by the Ancient Greeks, lamented by early Christians, studied by the Victorians and subjected to various enhancement practices in the twenty-first century. Still, we would not wish to argue that ways of looking at male and female bodies have been the same throughout history. Where the latter have indeed been viewed as inherently flawed and periodically unwell, the former has been elevated to a position of efficiency that has been no less problematic. In The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private (1999) Susan Bordo writes that the larger phallus has come to stand for a ‘generic male superiority’ over women, other men and other species.2 As such, the desire for larger penises has been disguised, through advertising, pornography, television and books, as a need to ‘measure up’ – to fall in with certain expectations of modernity’s scopic fetishism. In the past, Angus McLaren adds, ‘patriarchal power’ depended upon a man’s ability to produce male heirs;3 the fate of an entire dynasty would thus rest on the ‘normal functioning’, or even the bare existence, of a penis. Such pressure explains why, according to McLaren, impotence has been a focus of anxiety and resultant medical attention since ancient times. It also explains why erectile dysfunction treatments, along with penis enhancement products, have become multi-billion-pound industries: the need to maintain dynasties might not be as pressing in the West as it once was, but the pressure to perform, to live up to the standard of male virility and power in the post-Fordist era of reproductive efficiency, is just as coercive. Another interesting thing about representations of the male body in Western cultures is the way in which this myth of a God-given power 1 Simone de Beauvoir, Le Deuxieme Sexe (1949), trans. as The Second Sex by H. M. Parshley (London: Picador, 1988), pp. 15–16. 2 Susan Bordo, The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), p. 89. 3 Angus McLaren, Impotence: A Cultural History (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2007), p. xii. For other histories of the penis or disorders of the male genitalia see David M. Friedman, A Mind of its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis (New York, NY: The Free Press, 2001) and Mels van Driel, Manhood: The Rise and Fall of the Penis (2008; London: Reaktion Books, 2009).

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and privilege has been brought into conflict with the empirical method. With the advent of Renaissance humanism there arose the desire to see with what Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have called ‘blind sight’, seeing ‘without interference, interpretation or intelligence’.4 Benjamin A. Rifkin, Michael J. Ackerman and Judith Folkenberg note that, with regards to human anatomy, it was Leonardo da Vinci who led the way to a new standard of accurate perception. He understood that to be useful, an anatomical drawing need[ed] to be as objectively literal as possible […]. Leonardo the scientist seems to have found an artistic solution for medical illustration […]. Stripped of the flourishes of an improvising pen, the anatomies are spare outlines with dry, mechanical hatching, form without atmospheric context.5

One of da Vinci’s notebooks features a cross-sectional drawing of a couple in coition (Fig. 1). It focuses mainly on the male body and uses the spare outlines and mechanical hatchings identified by Rifkin et al. It also commits a number of errors that are only partly explained by the fact that most of da Vinci’s dissections were performed on bovine subjects; indeed, da Vinci’s most revealing mistakes are likely to be the result of the way his drawings represented the coming together of two conflicting ways of looking at the male body. On the one hand, we have the aim to be objective identified by Rifkin et al., yet, on the other hand, we have assumptions that biology must represent, in some form or other, man’s link with God and his superiority over other forms of life. Da Vinci shows the penis as having two urethras – a result, according to David M. Friedman, of ‘how Church dogma was still trumping science’: it was necessary to separate urine (‘thought by the Church to be entirely polluting’) and semen (‘the source of a new human soul’).6 Da Vinci also drew an artery between the testicles and the heart, thus confirming what he saw to be the connections between the operations of a man’s 4 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (2007; New York, NY: Zone Books, 2010), p. 17. See also Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, Realism and Consensus in the English Novel (1983; Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998). On the development of the ‘objective’ scientific method following the Renaissance see also Roger Smith, The Fontana History of the Human Sciences (London: Fontana, 1997) and Kenan Malik, Man, Beast, and Zombie: What Science Can and Cannot Tell Us about Human Nature (2000; London: Phoenix, 2001). 5 Benjamin A. Rifkin, Michael J. Ackerman and Judith Folkenberg, Human Anatomy: Depicting the Body from the Renaissance to Today (London: Thames and Hudson, 2006), pp. 8–9. 6 Friedman, A Mind of its Own, p. 58.

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Figure 1: Leonardo’s drawing of man and woman in coition, incorrectly depicting two urethras and linking the penis to the aorta (Royal Collection Trust)

reproductive organs and the seat of his moral and spiritual strength. The drawing demonstrates how, at the dawn of modern medicine, the desire for objectivity with regards to the male body was brought into conflict with traditional beliefs about man’s divine privilege. One hundred years later Andreas Vesalius’s painstaking dissections, combined with the naturalistic style of his illustrator Jan Stefan van Kalkar, produced what was, up until then, the most accurate atlas of the 4

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Figure 2: Andreas Vesalius’ De Corporis Humani Fabrica (Cole Library, University of Reading)

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human anatomy: De Fabrica Corporis Humanis (1543). ‘By deflating the religious rhetoric’, Friedman observes, ‘by focusing on form not function – Vesalius’s Fabrica took the giant step forward that Leonardo da Vinci planned to take but never completed.’7 The woodcuts produced by van Kalkar ‘greatly advanced the capacity of printed images to provide identical information that could be reviewed simultaneously anywhere, a founding tenet of modern scientific method’.8 And yet, in spite of its extraordinary realism, Vesalius’s work also fell short of the standards of objectivity towards which that future anatomists would aim. One illustration from the atlas (Fig. 2) demonstrates how Vesalius insisted upon reproducing the Christian view that the body was a connection between man and God. Here a flayed male body, looking and pointing upwards, experiences some spiritual rapture while displaying the handiwork of his deity. It is a depiction that has more in common with Michelangelo’s decoration of the Sistine Chapel than it does with modern anatomical textbooks. The bodies in De Fabrica Corporis Humanis are ‘all too sentient’, according to Rifkin et al.; ‘their mortality seems all too real, too accurately drawn, to be other than human’.9 Later anatomists believed, however, that being human required more in the way of flesh and bone than transcendent fervour. When he produced his Anatomia Humani Corporis (1685) French anatomist Govard Bidloo sought to correct Vesalius’s mistakes by drawing attention to the material, often disgusting, qualities of the human body. He tried to ‘erase the ideal preconceptions […] he drew his specimens […] nailed to the dissecting table, the spikes clearly visible. In one illustration, the reader’s attention was drawn to the penis by a housefly walking on the corpse.’ Writing just about the penis, but in a way that might be applied to the whole anatomical structure, Friedman adds, ‘it was drawn not as the flawless work of the master sculptor – God – but as it is in real life: mutable and asymmetrical; not as spirit, as flesh’.10 The Renaissance anatomists’ attempts to create an objective rationalisation of the male body inaugurated a conflict that all subsequent medical authors with which have been forced to engage, some more directly than others: how does the wish to study, enhance and treat the body collide with an ingrained cultural view of man as superior? 7 Ibid., p. 68. 8 Rifkin, et al., Human Anatomy, p. 16. 9 Ibid., p. 16. 10 Friedman, A Mind of its Own, p. 71.

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How do moments when he is wounded, inactive, infectious or dead interact with the myth that, of all living organisms, he is strongest? And, if the belief in the ‘divine right of man’ is no longer viable in our post-Darwinian world, how has the male body sought to retain its superiority in other ways, not least with the aid of medical science? The essays presented in this volume suggest that the links between literature and medicine are crucial to tackling questions such as these. As the narratives of science have become increasingly closed off to the uninitiated, the literary and historical work involved in looking at how medicine interacts with the various cultures to which it has belonged will help us identify and explore the implications of medical research and health practice. In what follows we have shaped the contributors’ work into three dominant strands, though we would not wish to reduce any chapter to the sum of a simplistic organisational logic. The three main focal points are: the male body as the site of enquiry or experimentation; the wounded or psychopathologised body; and the male body as transmitter of fear, confusion or contagion. In each of these areas the male body emerges through and against literary traditions in order to justify, unsettle or repudiate the mythology of the superior male. Across a wide range of authors, time periods and genres, literary texts are shown to be in search for ways of developing meanings around bodies, and in so doing expose the complex ways in which medicine has shaped, and been shaped by, cultural ideas of masculinity. Moreover, literature becomes a crucial arbiter between the epistemology of medicine and the experiential lives of men. Jamie McKinstry’s essay ‘The Poetics of Anatomy: John Donne’s Dissection of the Male Body’ might be seen to most specifically address the notion of the body as a site of detailed and conflicted enquiry. In it he examines the early modern history of anatomical dissection as an exploratory process of formalising knowledge and of encountering the unexpected within. The sixteenth-century journey inside the body has parallels, McKinstry argues, with the contemporaneous exploration of the New World, and in Donne’s poetry he sees reflected a linked throwing-off of ignorance and an embracing of new physical metaphors. Donne’s work demonstrates clear knowledge of the interior workings of the body, alongside a desire to claim ownership of this new territory. But if dissection allowed Donne a powerful metaphorical licence for colonising the body’s interiority, it does not fully satisfy the spirit of investigative empiricism, for the viscera do not account for the immaterial drives for love and against death. Nor can they position the 7

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soul with any accuracy. Ultimately this dialectic between the physical and the metaphysical prompts deeper questions than science is able to answer, but it initiates, for McKinstry, modernity’s epistemological challenge. The search for blind sight, or seeing without prejudice, is exposed as a fantasy nowhere more striking than in the intersections between ideas of race and science. As Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth have observed: Racial theory in nineteenth-century ethnography and anthropology adapted and reinterpreted the debate between contrasting eighteenth-century explanations of physical and cultural difference and human origin. […] The growing obsession with measuring and classifying physical characteristics played a key part in the re-emergence of the polygenist preoccupation with difference and type, reframed within evolutionary theories of descent, turning, and crucially, on the concept of hybridity.11

Despite all its weighing and measuring, the science of racial difference, hybridity and cross-fertilisation was distorted by traditional prejudices every bit as persuasive as da Vinci’s links between the body and religion. In her essay ‘The Black Male Body in Early African American Science Fiction: The Experimental Case of Sutton Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio’, Marlene D. Allen explores the bodies of Belton Piedmont and Bernard Belgrave through the focus of late nineteenth-century debates about race determinism. Imperium in Imperio extrapolates the nature and nurture dichotomy into a fantastical counter-history of race war in America to refute pseudo-scientific discourses of black intellectual inferiority. Griggs displays a hardening white prurience over the black body born of increasingly divisive essentialist doctrines of the taintedness of black blood. At the same time he details a fascination with the difference of the black body, a fascination that turns towards appropriation in striking scenes where Belton, dressed as a woman, is sexually assaulted by a group of white men, and where, after being lynched and assumed dead, his body is handed to a white doctor for dissection. Such violations reflect for Allen a satirical attack on a scientific partiality that seeks in the passive black body the justification for its own racist presumptions. Experimentation and empirical enquiry 11 Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth (eds), Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts, 1830–1890 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 290–91.

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is not free from the cultural biases that legitimise it, and, for Griggs, this can lead only to the misreading of the black body. Where for McKinstry and Allen the male body acts as a locus for interpretation through experimentation, in Katherine Angell’s ‘Miserrimus Dexter: Monstrous Forms of the Fin de Siècle’, it is characterised by impenetrability. Her essay focuses on the ‘monstrous’ deformities of Miserrimus Dexter in Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady (1875) and their framing within the Victorian interest in teratology – the study of genital birth defects. Born without legs, Dexter is a taxonomical conundrum, positioned somewhere between subject and object and between madness and knowledge. His deformity is, as Angell makes clear, the object of scientific investigation, but it must also be interpreted in order to resolve the mystery at the heart of the novel’s plot. For the truth to be unearthed, Dexter must be read and analysed, to the extent that he becomes one of the specimens on which the light of classification is directed. His hybridity, his indeterminacy, too threatening to medical – not to mention social – discourse, must ultimately be framed within and through the teratological monstrosities with which he is associated. The dangerous knowledge that he possesses, which as much concerns his deformed body as the key to the novel’s mystery, threatens to exceed the symbolic order and thereby render questionable the ordering principles of science and medicine. Christine Crockett Sharp’s ‘“Intellectual Suicides”: The Man of Letters in Middlemarch’ addresses the body as afflicted by the search for knowledge, and more particularly afflicted by a kind of debilitating investment in the uncovering of truth that runs against the healthful doctrine of Victorian muscular masculinity, which demands the externalisation and profitable utilisation of libidinal energies. As Hall, Wetherall-Dickson and Long will do later in this volume, Sharp establishes the sexualised male body as a focus of economic rather than personal concern, part of a system of normalising physical interrelations that corresponds to the salubrious circulation of capital in the wider economy. The introverted, narcissistic self-fulfilment that characterises Casaubon’s quest for mythological confluence repudiates this wholesome logic of exchange and attracts the kind of opprobrious condemnation that the Victorians reserved for autoerotic ‘self-pollution’. Masturbation, Sharp demonstrates, provoked horror in the nineteenth-century mind because of its association with a deliberate self-incapacitation. The weakness and impotence that it was believed to induce, allied to its suspiciousness as a solitary pursuit, runs counter to the imperatives 9

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underpinning imperial and commercial vigour. Casaubon is an etiolated husk of a man not primarily because of the impossibility of his intellectual task but because of his self-inflicted moral wound. If the male body is an intriguing site of investigative attention in these essays, such might be due in part to the openness, malleability and brittleness that our contributors read into it. Against medical attempts to read the body are literary representations of bodies exposed to interpretation as examples of wounded masculinity, divested of any trappings of authority or self- or externally imposed coherence. For Kaminsky, Parui and Runia, this wounding bridges mental and corporeal functions, but, for Sarah Parker, the damage is a literal and ecstatic manifestation of openness. ‘The Male Wound in Fin de Siècle Poetry’ fixes on the figure of Saint Sebastian as the ‘icon for the literally and metaphorically penetrable male body in the late nineteenth century’ (p. 10). Parker regards him as a focus for the aesthetic and decadent impulses of the fin de siècle, particularly appealing to non-heteronormative sexualities, but also as a contrasting exemplum for degeneration discourse. Sebastian’s prevalence in the literature of the late nineteenth century, Parker argues, codifies a nascent aesthetics of homosexual suffering while at the same time offering a provocative metaphorisation of sodomitic activity. It further articulates same-sex relationships with the religious tradition of suffering, producing strikingly eroticised poetry that fantasises about penetrating the wounds not only of Sebastian but also of Christ. The wound in this sense is transformational and ecstatic, creating a purifying effect, but, for the next three essays in the collection, wounding is far from purgative. In ‘The Cacophony of Disaster: The Metaphorical Body of Sound in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man’, Inbar Kaminsky examines the physical dislocations that followed the emotional trauma of 9/11. Robbed of his ability to process the monumental collapse of meaning represented by the attack, DeLillo’s protagonist is projected into what Kaminsky terms a ‘metaphorical body of sound’ – a dissonant and omnipresent soundscape of memories whose refractions prevent him from accommodating his trauma both physically and mentally. Here the body becomes consumed by the sensorium, dispersed and fractured by the disconnect created by the possibility of survivorship in the midst of mass death. The vaporisation of so many bodies in the ruins of the Twin Towers correlates with the spectral corporeality of the survivors thrown into a world of livingafter, but with nothing but the overwhelmed senses to try to embody their experiences. Structurally as well as thematically, DeLillo creates a text trapped by its inability to incorporate the trauma of 9/11 within 10

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the narrative of American exceptionalism, suggesting that the nation, as much as its citizens, has become disembodied and is still searching for ways to reconnect to the physical weight of history. Post-traumatic stress is also the subject of Avishek Parui’s essay ‘“Human Nature is Remorseless”: Masculinity, Medical Science and Nervous Conditions in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway’. For Parui the male body emerges in Woolf’s novel as ‘the site where the biopolitical gaze enacts its corrective measures and its heavy-handed censorship of deviance’ (p. 125), and the broken spirit and destroyed mind of Septimus Warren Smith are marginalised by clear social and medical discourses of ‘proper’ masculinity as defined by a militarised culture. Where DeLillo’s protagonist has few way-markers to guide him away from his abyss of meaning, Smith is subject to a very clear disciplinary regime that reminds him of his duty to be a man. His responsibility is not to fall into the kind of pathological self-absorption that is inimical to the efficient machinery of modernity – making Smith a more pitiful cousin of the Causabon presented in Sharp’s essay – but rather to suppress emotion in the interests of productive agency. Parui suggests that this brings about not just suppression but erasure of the emotional life, making Smith less, not more, of a man. Ultimately the essay suggests that Woolf’s treatment of this coerced manliness represents an epistemic shift towards the more conscious engagement with the dual functions of interior and exterior selfhood that characterised the twentieth century. Less dramatic, but equally disabling, is the ennui that afflicts Lord Glenthorn in Maria Edgeworth’s Ennui (1809). As detailed by Robin Runia in ‘“A Man Must Make Himself”: Hypochondria in Maria Edgeworth’s Ennui’, Glenthorn suffers with a debilitating apathy and indifference unless continuously stimulated by external factors. Where travel, sport and study have a vitalising impact on his spirits, their effects are only temporary and culminate in ‘an insatiable longing for something new’ (p. 140). Runia reads this symptomatology within the frame of late eighteenth-century definitions of hypochondriasis, which firmly associated the condition not just with the indolence of the wealthy but also with a foreign decadence. Trying to rid himself of his ennui, Glenthorn trials numerous fashionable activities of the wealthy but finds consolation only in the domestic sphere and the peaceable routines of his servants. Ennui is Edgeworth’s critique of the ‘rampant moral plague of luxury’ (p. 154), but, more importantly in offering a domestic remedy based on duty and the importance of home, it associates the health of the male body with the knowledge and culture of women. 11

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Another thread that emerges from these essays is the male body as a transmitter of physical, psychic or moral weakness. This can take the form – as in Buckley and Long’s essays – of class or sexual degeneracy, or of the literal threat of contamination, as discussed by WetherallDickson and Hall. In her essay ‘“Sons of Belial”: Contaminated/ Contaminating Victorian Male Bodies’, Lesley A. Hall examines the fear of the sexualised male body as a vector for diseases capable of disrupting both familial and social dynamics. While academic research has tended to focus on the potential for damage caused by the sexually diseased female body, Hall redresses the balance by considering the pariah status attributed to those, such as soldiers and sailors, considered to be over-sexed or lacking in self-control. But the prejudice was extended to those men in general society either afflicted by syphilis or gonorrhoea or regarded as threatening through their moral laxity the reproductive healthiness of family life. Hall shows how this threat became increasingly public in wider culture during the last decades of the nineteenth century, bringing about both general condemnation and legislative amendment. Reinforcing such anxieties about wayward male concupiscence was an equally virulent condemnation of masturbation as consciously self-harming. Of particular importance is Hall’s assertion that masturbation was considered more than a personal vice, being viewed as potentially contaminative – seminal loss producing not just a range of frightful pathologies for the individual but a transmission of harmful agents to others. The widespread campaigns against male sexual incontinence were not wholly driven, then, by the ‘problem’ of desire, but by very real anxieties of literal as well as moral pollution. Leigh Wetherall-Dickson detects the emergence of similar anxieties about the division between public and private life a century earlier. In ‘Syphilis and Sociability: The Impolite Bodies of Two Gentlemen, James Boswell (1740–1795) and Sylas Neville (1741–1840)’, she considers the stain on one’s position within civil society represented by venereal disease. Drawing on the diaries of Boswell – for whom regular doses of syphilis seem to have been regarded as an amatory hazard – and Neville, the essay explores the increasing prominence and importance of the sphere of sociable intercourse in the eighteenth century, which necessitates, for Boswell at least, a clear division between his private selfhood and conduct and his public demeanour. His self-construction as a man of society appears strikingly modern, but is hampered by the periodic effects of infection that require him to closet himself away from others. During these periods, Wetherall-Dickson argues, his journal 12

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became the public audience through which he communicated as a ‘spectator of the self’ (p. 180). In contrast, Neville’s episodes of the pox seem to have exacerbated his incipient paranoia and annoyance with a world around him that refuses to acknowledge his gentlemanly qualities. After contracting an infection from sex with his housekeeper, he does not separate himself from society as Boswell does, but regards the passing on of his infection as a just reward for the lack of regard in which he seems to be held. Both men’s reaction to their condition as related through their diaries reveals for Wetherall-Dickson a shifting notion of private identity formed in response to the relatively new phenomenon of sociable intercourse. In a different register, transmission is also the focus of Jenifer Buckley in ‘“’Tis My Father’s Fault”: Tristram Shandy and Paternal Imagination’. Here it is the inter-generational communication of character that concerns us, and in particular the intersection of literature with eighteenth-century medical rationalisations of genetic inheritance. Buckley commences her analysis of Sterne from the notion, influenced by the findings of Leeuwenhoek, that the thoughts of a father at the point of ejaculation could positively affect the child that was produced. In contrast to the imaginative transit of the mother, which, it was believed, if negative or destructive during the period of pregnancy could result in birth defects, the male imagination bore the responsibility for producing hale and hearty offspring. Sterne’s satirical dismissal of such ‘imaginationist’ theories of reproduction proceeds through Tristram’s father, who bemoans his distraction at the moment of his son’s conception, which, he believes, was responsible for all his child’s failings. Walter’s attempts to correct the damage he believes he has done his son only bring about more serious afflictions, including a broken nose and accidental circumcision, while his insistence on a man-midwife to deliver his son reveals an obstinate determination to privilege a male influence as a way of trying to redeem his waywardness. The comic calamities of this bullishness belies, for Buckley, a more serious debate about the relative male and female contributions to the domestic sphere, and about the workings of imaginative causation that would soon be more rigorously interrogated by the Romantic movement. The homosexual male body as a threatening transmitter of social and libidinal disquiet is addressed by Thomas Long in relation to writing of the American South. ‘Southern Gothic and the Queer Male Body’ argues that in the post-1945 period, and particularly prior to the Stonewall riots of 1969, the gay male body has increasingly replaced the black body in 13

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Southern culture as the abject Other, drawing down on it homophobic violence as a consequence. Working with Eve Sedgwick’s premise that, as a genre, the gothic codifies a form of ‘homophobic thematics’ (p. 225), Long considers how the specific religious, geographical and political intensities of Southern culture are grafted onto that base. The tensions between normative moralities and reactive deviancies that characterise the gothic tradition are heightened by the historical fact of slavery in the American South, which creates a tradition of scapegoating the black body as symbolic of social fears. Underlying that, and more evident in the integrationist period of Civil Rights protest, is a deeply confused struggle between homosocial and homosexual relations. In a range of texts that straddle Stonewall, Long detects a quarrel between what he calls a ‘blazoning’ attitude towards self-expression and the repressive demonisation of the queer body through homophobic discourse. In the post-AIDS era, Long further detects an increased pathologisation of homosexuality in Southern gothic, producing ‘the homosexual as the guilty perpetrator in a world divided into infected homosexuals and an uninfected […] “general population”’ (p. 238). Emerging from these essays are bodies that are open to scrutiny not as coherent entities but as dissonant collections of moral, physical abjection; the men on display here seep fluid, they creep unnervingly across constructed backdrops and they disrupt the lines of social symbolism. If any dominant vision of the male body can be drawn from this collection it is a wounded body containing a deeply troubled consciousness that has retrenched to a form of immobile self-incertitude. As such, it might be said to reflect our present culture of reading and viewing the body, which influences our critical as much as our creative thinking. Shaping these essays into a volume has therefore allowed us to explore potential threads of pathology, all of which are, of course, tentatively offered up, but which allow for a sounding of modern ways of reading the male body in medicine and literature.

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pa rt one

Enquiry and Experimentation

ch a p ter one

The Poetics of Anatomy John Donne’s Dissection of the Male Body1 Jamie McKinstry Dissection of the Male Body No matter how great our minds, or how ambitious our plans, human endeavours are still defined by the capabilities, and limitations, of the physical body. Even in today’s age of artificial intelligence, the technology itself cannot be developed or manufactured without the necessary input from a living, breathing physical visionary. The human body, at least for the moment, establishes how far we can reach into the unknown, even how far we can go to improve our own physical existence. There is nothing modern about this paradox. In the early modern period, the desire for discovery ranged from the explicitly physical (the exploration of new worlds) to the more cerebral, philosophical conversations that were equally reliant on the fleshy vessel which contained the thoughts, despite the hypotheses of Cartesian dualism. Renaissance Man was a discoverer who boldly entered literal, philosophical, scientific and theological territories to collect any knowledge that would benefit current and future generations. Given these ambitions, one area of exploration was of particular interest to such men – their own, male bodies. If they could perhaps reveal just 1 A version of this paper was first presented at the 6th Society for Renaissance Studies Biennial Conference at Southampton University in July 2014, at the ‘Beyond Leeches and Lepers Conference’ at the University of Edinburgh in May 2015 and at the History of Education Society Annual Conference at Liverpool Hope University in November 2015. I thank the participants in the sessions during which this paper was read for their comments and suggestions.

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how they were functioning while on earth, they may be able to expand their horizons even further. Their task, however, was a daunting one. An exploration of the male body was not an expedition to a country far away from home, but a journey inside their own physicality – a world that they thought they knew so well. There was understandable trepidation which sat somewhat uneasily alongside the excitement that accompanied any Renaissance discovery. In the work of the enigmatic poet John Donne we join such pioneering men as they discover the secrets of the male body and correct details that had, up to this point, seemed certainties. Donne emphasises that to know the male body is to increase man’s power and authority over the earthly world; however, his verses also highlight the tensions when the familiar is made unfamiliar and the property that men thought they knew and owned is revised on the anatomy table before them. The Philosophy and History of Dissection In the late sixteenth century the art of dissection had been made public and, as a result, popular interest in anatomy was growing. The performance of cutting, eviscerating and explaining the structures inside human bodies created a combination of shock, excitement and wonder the like of which we in the twenty-first century have perhaps experienced through the televised dissections of Gunther von Hagens and his Body Worlds exhibitions.2 Indeed, it is interesting to note that, even today, despite our extensive knowledge of what lies inside the body, seeing our own forms cut up and explored is both a fascinating and uncomfortable spectacle. Such responses were all the more acute in the early modern period, however, as the human body, in a post-mortem state, was now giving up its secrets and unsettling previous understanding. There were dissections of male and female cadavers, although the dissection of women was strongly connected to men’s desire to discover the ‘mysteries’ that were specific to the female body, such as reproduction.3 This is understandable – the female body was a realm over which men, despite 2 Gunther von Hagens’ programme Anatomy for Beginners was broadcast in the UK by Channel 4 in 2005. His Body Worlds exhibitions, in which he uses his plastination technique of preservation, are estimated to have been seen by over 26 million people worldwide. 3 For female dissection in the medieval and early modern period see Katherine Park, Secrets of Women, Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (New York: Zone Books, 2006).

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their claims (and Donne should be included here), had no ownership. To dissect, label and explain was to gain authority over this territory. The dissection of male cadavers is more complex, as these bodies were already well known and actual ownership was without question, or so it was thought. When the dissection began, however, as soon as the first layer of skin was peeled away an unexpected world was revealed. New journeys needed to begin, and quickly, as such explorations ‘taught men more about their bodies than they could learn from medieval diagrams’.4 The male body was a new discovery in itself, but any achievements at this point would govern the success of future discoveries, in any sphere. For example, dissection questioned the physical existence of the soul and the expected union of the complete body and soul in heaven – the relatively new study of medicine, it is to be remembered, was still part of ‘Natural Philosophy’, and remained subordinated to theological doctrines. Just as men were finding out new things about how they functioned physically, the male body also raised the issue of the impossibility of a post-mortem heavenly unification between the body and soul, or any concurrence between medicine and theology. The anatomists were to discover far more inside the male body than they perhaps expected. Donne captured men’s distrust and worry along with the excitement of discovering new features inside the male body. The poet’s highly personal tone, used alongside anatomy’s terminology and metaphors, defines the male body as a place of fascination and promise, underscored by a certain unease at looking inside his own physical form and at the ways in which such endeavours might change spiritual beliefs regarding the body and soul.5 In one of Donne’s sermons the ability of dissection to aid man’s knowledge is praised unambiguously: ‘we understand the frame of man’s body better by seeing him cut up, than by seeing him do any exercise alive; one dissection, one anatomy teaches more of that, than the marching, or drilling of a whole army of living men.’6 4 Don Cameron Allen, ‘John Donne’s Knowledge of Renaissance Medicine’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 42.3 (1943), pp. 322–42 (p. 328). 5 For a summary of those who have discussed the use of anatomical metaphors in Donne see David A. Hedrich Hirsch, ‘Donne’s Anatomies: Deconstructed Bodies and the Resurrection of Atomic Theory’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 31.1 (1991), pp. 69–94 (p. 92 n. 23). 6 John Donne, The Complete Sermons of John Donne, eds George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, 10 vols (Berkeley and Los Angeles: California University Press, 1953–62), I, p. 273.

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Donne’s preoccupation with the body has frequently been interpreted as an example of the poet’s self-absorption, but his view is actually more generous and gestures towards the future knowledge of Mankind, which may, or may not, corrupt his own belief about the soul and body in life and death.7 When Donne refers to male anatomy in his poetry and looks inside the male body (usually his own) he seeks something permanent. Paradoxically, cutting and disintegration could make life emerge from death and, during his meditations, learning and discovery merge with attempts to reconcile anatomical progress with a continued belief in the immortal soul and its heavenly union with the body. Eternal existence forms an unusual partnership with dissection and Donne asserts that the male body will emerge stronger and more perfectly formed in terms of empirical knowledge, which is equalled by his confidence that each body will also be reunited, complete, with the soul in heaven. Donne is a keen, if often self-questioning, dissector of male bodies.8 The dissection of male bodies had indeed taken place before the early modern period, however, and Katherine Park has discussed dissections as part of funereal practices in Italy in the thirteenth century, as well as the use of primitive autopsies in order to discern the cause of death. From these activities, more definitive anatomies were constructed that allowed the inspection of bodies during a medical education.9 Taddeo Alderotti had introduced dissection at Bologna, while a treatise of Mondino de Liuzzi was clearly based on the knowledge of a human cadaver.10 The following passage expounds the value of dissection when teaching medieval medicine: And yf thow wyll serge this besely [search assiduously] in the anathomie, as yt ys wretyne her after of membrys, thow schalt know lyghtlyar [more

7 The possibility of Donne’s corporeal self-absorption is argued persuasively in Elaine Scarry, ‘Donne: “But yet the body is his booke”’, in Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons, ed. Elaine Scarry (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), pp. 70–105. See also John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind, and Art (London and Boston: Faber, 1990), p. 82. 8 For the most prominent anatomical influences on Donne see Thomas Willard, ‘Donne’s Anatomy Lesson: Vesalian or Paracelsian?’, John Donne Journal, 1 (1984), pp. 35–61. 9 Katherine Park, ‘The Criminal and the Saintly Body: Autopsy and Dissection in Renaissance Italy’, Renaissance Quarterly, 47.1 (1994), pp. 1–33 (pp. 4–8). 10 Faith Wallis (ed.), Medieval Medicine: A Reader, Readings in Medieval Civilizations and Cultures XV (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), p. 231.

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The benefits of using an actual human form were recognised, especially as a teaching aid for students, as Carol Rawcliffe has summarised: ‘the exercise [of dissection was] largely as a means of tuition rather than discovery’.12 Indeed, although the early modern period is often credited with introducing illustrated anatomies, there were also pictorial respresentations in the Middle Ages, as Faith Wallis explains: ‘many students of anatomy in the scholastic period found images to be a valuable adjunct to the experience of dissection’.13 Such was their influence that the pictures became the primary anatomical reference for late medieval medicine. This did have its problems, in essence distancing practitioners from the actual experience of dissection. Knowledge was instead based on copying illustrations from existing manuscripts. Similarly, although part of medical teaching, dissection, if performed at all, was limited to corroborating what had been observed before rather than to ‘extend[ing] the frontiers of knowledge’.14 Interestingly, when references to male anatomies find their way into non-medical medieval literature it is usually only to emphasise great gravity of injury or the life that is now complete. For example, when Gawain is fighting in the Alliterative Morte Arthure (c.1400) he strikes at another knight, splitting his shield, at which point the challenger then ‘lookes to the left side, when his horse launches, / With the light of the sun men might see his liver.’ A few lines later Gawain is also injured: ‘With the venomous sword a vein has he touched / That voides so violently that all his wit changed.’15 Likewise, in the Siege of Jersusalem (c.1370–80) a fatal brain injury is caused by the new siege engines as ‘A burne with a balwe ston was the brayn clove, / The gretter pese of the panne the pyble forth striketh, / That hit flow into the feld, a forlong or more.’16 The 11 London, British Library, MS Harley 1736, fol. 9v. Extracted in Carole Rawcliffe, Sources for the History of Medicine in Late Medieval England, TEAMS (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995), p. 50. 12 Carole Rawcliffe, Medicine and Society in Later Medieval England (Frome: Sutton, 1995), p. 129. 13 Wallis, Medieval Medicine, p. 237. 14 Rawcliffe, Sources for the History, p. 46. 15 Alliterative Morte Arthure, King Arthur’s Death, eds Larry D. Benson and Edward E. Foster (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1994), p. 209, ll. 2560–61; 2570–71. 16 Michael Livingston (ed.), Siege of Jerusalem, TEAMS (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval

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anatomies here confirm death or being close to death: the organs and vessels are named (liver, veins, brain) with the implication that, because on view, a life has ended and the knight has fought bravely. Donne’s literary treatments of anatomy are very different and informed by the possibilities inherent in the bold, masculine act of dissection. Donne’s interiors acknowledge the past (the life now lost, or the world of previous anatomical learning) and also gaze excitedly towards the future, such as what lies inside each body and how that might change man’s knowledge of the male body in life and, to a certain extent for Donne, in death. Early Modern Dissection: Men and their Discoveries The turning point in visual anatomy was the publication of Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body) in 1543.17 As Richard Sugg explains, the desire was not only to look and record but also to question what had gone before in order to aid future understanding: ‘[Vesalius’] attempt to demonstrate past errors by re-examination of present and actual bodies was a surprisingly controversial, if not outright bizarre notion.’18 The possibility of looking inside a male body and discovering something that had either been misunderstood or simply not observed at all was played out quite literally as Vesalius, assisting Matthaeus Curtius at the first public dissection in Bologna in 1540, dissected a male cadaver while Curtius read from old textbooks. Discrepancies emerged and were recorded by a German student, Baldasar Heseler, who was present in the audience.19 The interior world that men thought they knew so well was being rediscovered, or redefined, and the male body was becoming potentially less familiar. Sugg notes that until this point ‘intellectual endeavour was largely a matter of Institute Publications, 2004), ll. 826–28. . 17 See Park, ‘Criminal and Saintly’, pp. 11–33; Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995); K. B. Roberts and J. D. W. Tomlinson, The Fabric of the Body: European Traditions of Anatomical Illustration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). A study of the impact of anatomy on a variety of literature, including Donne, is Richard Sugg, Murder after Death: Literature and Anatomy in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007). 18 Richard Sugg, Critical Issues: John Donne (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), p. 124. 19 Andreas Vesalius’ First Public Anatomy at Bologna: An Eyewitness Account by Baldasar Heseler, trans. and ed. Ruben Eriksson (Uppsala and Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksells, 1959).

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preserving and interpreting what had been written very long ago’.20 The male body had been discovered, explained and in some respect owned by the older wisdom of Galen, biblical writings, Aristotle and Pliny the Elder.21 Now, men were revealing more of their own bodies and consequently their earthly existence. The early modern period was still enmeshed in the medieval Christian world of the immortal soul, but if Vesalius and Curtius disproved the existence of an anatomical soul what would that reveal about man’s life on this earth? Something needed to be rescued for those such as Donne, who was ‘secretly afraid that such rigorous analyses would too relentlessly hollow out the spiritual density of the human body’.22 Imaginatively, Donne aligned his worries with the methods of the anatomists themselves, those men who (like him) were also questioning existence, and discovered viable spiritual reassurances gleaned from the very practices that were causing him such concern. The early modern ‘culture of dissection’, as Jonathon Sawday describes it, has been compared with similar endeavours of the explorers of the New World.23 The discovery of new countries was one of the defining achievements of the Renaissance and one that redefined man’s technological and physical capabilities. It was man’s bodily powers that allowed new places to be reached, often involving some struggle or peril, as in Sir Walter Raleigh’s account The Discovery of The Empire of Guiana (1595), where, despite bodily difficulties, the explorer is urged to continue by his men: For mine own part, I was well persuaded from thence to have returned, being a very ill footman, but the rest were all so desirous to go near the said strange thunder of waters as they drew me on by little and little till we came into the next valley, where we might better discern the same.24

His body’s inner reserves are found and Raleigh is able to reach the beautiful sight of hills, valleys, rivers, plains, sand, deer and birds. In other words, he overcomes his body’s limitations and so is able to continue to advance, discover and learn, a sentiment captured in Thomas 20 Sugg, Donne, p. 25. 21 Other notable influences in medieval dissection were Avicenna and Gilbertus Anglicus. See Rawcliffe, Sources for the History, pp. 45–47. 22 Sugg, Donne, p. 127. 23 Sawday, Body, p. ix. 24 Sir Walter Raleigh, The Discovery of the Empire of Guiana, The Norton Anthology of English Literature Volume One, 7th ed., eds M. H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt (New York: Norton, 2000), p. 885.

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Nashe’s ‘A Litany in Time of Plague’, taken from his A Pleasant Comedy Called Summer’s Last Will and Testament (first acted in 1592). In this work man’s achievements are overpowered as ‘Beauty is but a flower / Which wrinkles will devour’, ‘Wit with his wantonness / Tasteth death’s bitterness’, and even ‘Physic himself must fade.’ All are susceptible to the power of plague, just as each stanza ends with the assurance ‘I am sick, I must die. / Lord, have mercy on us!’25 It is not a medieval elegy (the ubi sunt topos in the manner of Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘The Former Age’, for example); instead, it underlines the importance of fit, able bodies to support the advancements and achievements of the Renaissance.26 The discoveries of anatomy, made possible by dissection, not only provided evidence of learning but were essential for future discoveries to continue. Man’s body governed the extent of his work on this earth and Donne recognised the possibilities of anatomy and dissection in this respect, which he expressed in ‘Of the Progress of the Soul’: ‘A province packed up in two yards of skin, / And that usurped or threatened with the rage / Of sicknesses, or their true mother, age.’27 The concerns are similar to those of Nashe, but through his choice of register we see Donne hinting that anatomy could help him in his search for certainty – all answers, it seems, lurk under the ‘skin’.28 Elsewhere in the same poem the speaker laments his ignorance of life and juxtaposes it with the certain knowledge of life after death. However, during his interrogation of the soul, the questions asked also relate to the corporeal vessel itself: ‘Poor soul, in this thy flesh what dost thou know?’29 One absolute certainty is the continued existence of the soul after death, and the speaker wishes to know how this is achieved: ‘By what way thou art made immortal.’30 After raising the question, he enquires about the more mortal aspects of man’s body, with the implication that the soul may be able to offer 25 Thomas Nashe, ‘A Litany in Time of Plague’, The Norton Anthology of English Literature Volume One, 7th ed., eds M. H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt (New York: Norton, 2000), p. 1201, ll. 15–16; 29–30; 10. 26 Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Former Age’, The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., ed. Larry D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 650–52. 27 John Donne, ‘Of the Progress of the Soul’, The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (London: Penguin, 1971), p. 292, ll. 177–79. 28 For Donne’s view of physicians and disease see Patrick J. Creevy, ‘John Donne’s Meditations upon the Magnitude of Disease’, Soundings, 72.1 (1989), pp. 61–73 (pp. 62–63). 29 Donne, ‘Progress’, l. 254. 30 Donne, ‘Progress’, l. 260.

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dependable answers concerning the physical form serving as its temporary host. The questions reveal a familiarity with anatomical structures: Have not all souls thought For many ages, that our body is wrought Of air, and fire, and other elements? And now they think of new ingredients, And one soul thinks one, and another way Another thinks, and ’tis an even lay. Know’st thou but how the stone doth enter in The bladder’s cave, and never break the skin? Know’st thou how blood, which to the heart doth flow, Doth from one ventricle to th’ other go? And for the putrid stuff, which thou dost spit, Know’st thou how thy lungs have attracted it? There are no passages, so that there is (For aught thou know’st) piercing of substances. And of those many opinions which men raise Of nails and hairs, dost thou know which to praise? What hope have we to know our selves, when we Know not the least things, which for our use be?31

These final two lines crystallise Donne’s belief regarding man’s knowledge of his own body and, when taken with the preceding lines, all certainty of knowledge is allocated to the soul. However, the questions themselves actually provide the desired answers. The soul is inside the body and therefore, we might assume, it would be familiar with its inner workings; yet, so, too, is Donne. The poet gives an accurate impression of the workings of the heart with its dual-pump system of ventricles and, likewise, the lungs are associated with phlegm and coughing. The problem of stones is localised to the bladder, with the observation that they have somehow been produced by the body and not introduced through ‘the skin’. Moreover, ‘and never break the skin’ directly references a dissection while also punning on what is taking place at that moment – we are, in fact, inside the body and can see very clearly what we need to know. Donne was aware that dissection could use man’s body to answer many questions about itself (‘the things, which for our use be?’), and here he is suggesting that it may be due to the discovery of a soul that might possess such privileged knowledge, having been granted immortality in contrast to the mortal, physical form. However, any understanding 31 Donne, ‘Progress’, ll. 263–80.

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that the soul might possess is replaced by the learning that has come from dissection itself: man has answered his own questions about his own body. The debates between anatomists, such as those of Vesalius and his discrepancies with Galen, are captured in ‘one soul thinks one, and another way / Another thinks’ as they examine their discoveries and correct earlier knowledge with ‘new ingredients’. Donne’s emphasis on learning and discovery is striking despite this speaker’s initial belief that ‘Thou art too narrow, wretch, to comprehend / Even thyself; yea though thou wouldst but bend / To know thy body.’32 There is ownership here, but it is frustrated – the man is still distanced from his own body. Donne describes the body as ‘this our living tomb / Oppressed with ignorance’,33 but the body has revealed its own secrets during the dissection and through Donne’s verse. The poet emphasises how men need to use the new world of the male body; although the internal structures that have been found are different, they have at least been found by men who now understand them and, crucially, have strengthened their ownership of the body. Donne as Cadaver and Anatomist Of course, for a man to learn more about his own body through dissection, another man must first die and the anatomist must try to learn about a living form through looking at a body in its deceased state. Metaphorically, during a dissection, the dead male body is made to live again and, in the process, the cadaver becomes symbolic of man’s anatomical ambitions. In ‘The Damp’ Donne forsees his own death and questions the aims of dissection in this respect: When I am dead, and doctors know not why, And my friends’ curiosity Will have me cut up to survey each part, When they shall find your picture in my heart, You think a sudden damp of love Will through all their senses move, And work on them as me, and so prefer Your murder, to the name of massacre.34 32 Donne, ‘Progress’, ll. 261–63. 33 Donne, ‘Progress’, ll. 252–53. 34 Donne, ‘The Damp’, The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (London: Penguin, 1971), p. 51, ll. 1–8.

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The initial scene is grisly, but it does not employ the particularities of anatomy from ‘Of the Progress of the Soul’. Instead, the deceased is speaking as if watching his own evisceration. Although inside his flesh, the form is also ‘in extremity […] the body as it has been penetrated and altered from without’.35 Although he asserts ‘I am dead’, it is not only the friends and doctors who ‘survey each part’ but the dead man himself. Sharing a desire for exploration expressed by Raleigh, the world to be discovered is shown here as being inside all men. However, he must die and give his body to others before the dissection can begin. Authority over his body is lost – they ‘Will have me cut up’ – and this might explain Donne’s emotive reference to ‘murder’ and ‘massacre’ in the stanza. Nevertheless, a discovery is made: from the ignorance of the doctors who ‘know not why’, the dissection reveals ‘your picture in my heart’. In the manner of many of Donne’s poems, the situation of the picture emphasises his deep love, which has been preserved at the centre of his mortal existence while of this earth and in close proximity, we might expect, to the soul. However, this is also the discovery of something that others can see and we have now found a permanent structure from which other men can learn. With the discovery of the picture we see that dissection does not disprove certainties for Donne, but reveals additional aspects of permanence and legacy that he relates to beliefs about the immortality of the soul. In ‘The Legacy’ Donne again dissects himself before teaching others about what he has discovered. With its repeated references to ‘dying’, the poem clearly also refers to the sexuality of the couple, but the main focus throughout is the conceit of an exchange of hearts which appear strikingly anatomical, rather than spiritual. Each lover is in possession of the other’s heart and, after ‘dying’, the speaker wishes to leave the legacy of his heart for his love. Employing the techniques of an anatomist he searches for his heart inside his own chest: ‘But I alas could there find none, / When I had ripped me, and searched where hearts should lie.’36 This is not a description of a controlled dissection, yet it is carefully localised – the speaker knows exactly where the organ should be found. It is not present, as she (if we adhere to the conceit) is already in possession of his heart, but the speaker does find another 35 Nancy Selleck, ‘Donne’s Body’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 41.1 (2001), pp. 149–74 (p. 164). 36 Donne, ‘The Legacy’, The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (London: Penguin, 1971), p. 63, ll. 13–14.

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organ in its place: ‘Yet I found something like a heart, / But colours it, and corners had, / It was not good, it was not bad, / It was entire to none, and few had part.’37 In the manner of early modern anatomists questioning the work of Galen et al., and their struggle to relate what was on the table before them with their classical textbooks, the speaker works hard to fully appreciate the organ he has found. As an anatomist he studies its structure, including its shape and colour, looking for what he expects to find. In this respect, like the anatomists, man is looking at himself which, here, has been exaggerated into the speaker looking inside exactly the same body – his own. Nevertheless, pulling back to the personal situation of the lovers, the conceit is that this is her heart (since it has been given to him) but it is less faithful than his own and no man can have possession of it. It is unfamiliar to him; however, he still makes some attempt to record its features. When the dissection began he had expectations and these have been disappointed – therefore he must adapt earlier ‘certainties’ in line with the new discoveries. Although what Donne discovered ‘was not good, it was not bad’ it still did not compare to his own perfectly formed heart, which would have been easily identifiable. The notion of perfection and beauty in anatomy appeals to Donne and, although in ‘Of the Progress of the Soul’ reference was made to bladder stones and phlegm, Donne recognises that to truly understand the male form dissections must be performed upon healthy male bodies. There is something here of Leonardo da Vinci’s celebration of the beauteous perfection of anatomy and Donne seems keen to emphasise that many aesthetic delights can be revealed by dissection. Imperfect male bodies are not pleasing to behold and, as such, are useless to other men, a belief which is alluded to in ‘Love’s Exchange’, where Love is angry with the speaker for forcing him to show its face. Love therefore tortures him: ‘For this Love is enraged with me, / Yet kills not.’38 The speaker is not killed, but he is harmed by Love’s treatment, which now, he explains, will not permit other men to learn from his error: ‘If I must example be / To future rebels; if th’ unborn / Must learn, by my being cut up, and torn: / Kill, and dissect me, Love; for this / Torture against thine own end is, / Racked carcases make ill anatomies.’39 The male body is again a place from which other, later, 37 Donne, ‘The Legacy’, ll. 17–20. 38 Donne, ‘Love’s Exchange’, The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (London: Penguin, 1971), pp. 67–68, ll. 36–37. 39 Donne, ‘Love’s Exchange’, ll. 37–42.

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men can learn, as long as its integrity is maintained. The aim to ‘learn’ is followed by the violent actions of ‘cutting up’ and ‘tearing’, the necessary initial steps of the educational process, as is the requirement of death (‘kill’). Eventually ‘dissect’ comes to justify the activity as the respected terminology of corporeal discovery. The ‘racked carcases’, maimed by torture, imply emptiness: there is no value to be discovered in their internal structures and they have nothing to teach others. In other words, this male body has been wasted and men’s knowledge will suffer. Disintegration or Permanence? In ‘Love’s Exchange’ the body that was so valuable to man during his life was also vital to others after his death, and Donne is always keen to rescue the moment of death, whether literal or as a sexual euphemism. Helpfully, dissection provides a complementary and contemporary early modern metaphor for a post-mortem legacy as, during the transmission between man and cadaver, men’s learning can commence and the death is given meaning. To interrogate the sense of a legacy, Donne makes the male body and its perfect anatomical details central to the conceit of ‘The Funeral’, a complex poem where the speaker contemplates what will happen following his own death. His corpse is stretched before us with a ‘subtle wreath of hair’ from his loved one’s head encircling the arm.40 This wreath is identified with the speaker’s ‘outward soul’ and he believes that when his ‘inward soul’ has gone to heaven it will keep his body from decay: ‘And keep these limbs, her provinces, from dissolution’.41 He wishes to ‘keep’ the body intact, and the wreath of hair is given great spiritual power, which it requires to combat the forces of degeneration. At the close of the first stanza we might conclude that this poem is decidedly anti-dissection, advocating completeness rather than division. However, a comparison that emphasises the strength of the wreath, or outward soul, is strikingly anatomical: ‘For if the sinewy thread my brain lets fall / Through every part, / Can tie those parts, and make me one of all; / These hairs which upward grew, and strength and art / Have from a better brain, / Can better do it.’42 The preserving quality of the wreath is compared to the structures that held his body 40 Donne, ‘The Funeral’, The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (London: Penguin, 1971), pp. 59–60, l. 3. 41 Donne, ‘The Funeral’, l. 8. 42 Donne, ‘The Funeral’, ll. 9–14.

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together in life, specifically the ‘sinewy thread’ of nerves that cascades from the brain. Great emphasis is placed on the disparate ‘parts’ of the body, which are numerous and widely spaced ‘Through every part’ and yet can be united by the delicate filaments to ‘make me one of all’. Using this comparison, including anatomical knowledge, Donne performs a dissection. The process also overcomes any initial concern about the lack of a physical soul inside the body after death – it has already journeyed to heaven (‘which then to heaven being gone, / Will leave this [the wreath or outward soul] to control’).43 David Hirsch notes that Donne was troubled by the logic of bodily resurrection, and here we see dissection, imaginatively, used to create the reassurance of eventual and eternal corporeal completion.44 The power of the exterior soul is somehow equated with the strength of his central nervous system to unite his body while alive, and the wreath takes over the task post-mortem. By cutting open the body and dividing it into ‘every part’, Donne shows that, while alive, the workings of the nervous system are just as miraculous as the soul. Given that this is only an imagined state of death, the poem’s conceit allows the speaker to also recognise the wonder of his own anatomy before he passes. Here we approach the crux of a dissection: one man’s death allows others to celebrate and acknowledge the wonder of life. The anatomists need to separate the man’s body and divide him into his constituent parts, the ‘atoms’, in order to see exactly how he functions when alive.45 From this they can share the wonder of that delicate ‘sinewy thread’ and its power to unite man’s body in life. The paradox of dissection, of cutting and dividing in order to reveal a greater whole, is taken beyond that of the individual body whose nerves, vessels and organs can be mapped out as one single entity. Once reassembled as an anatomical model, what we have is a more complete picture of a man, but also Mankind as a species has greater authority over his own existence. The juxtaposition of cutting and destruction with permanence is explored in Donne’s ‘A Valediction: Of My Name in the Window’. He takes steps to preserve some semblance of his existence for the benefit of his love (and to ensure that he remains foremost in 43 Donne, ‘The Funeral’, ll. 6–7. 44 Hirsch ‘Donne’s Anatomies’, pp. 82–83. 45 Hirsch discusses the etymology of anatomy in this respect and the attempt to reach something permanent and indestructible. Hirsch, ‘Donne’s Anatomies’, p. 74.

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her mind after his death) and in doing so wishes to create something permanent – a legacy. This is achieved through an act of destruction: he cuts. As he engraves his name in a window each movement destroys the surface but at the same time reveals something deeper and creates a more solid, permanent mark: ‘My name engraved herein, / Doth contribute my firmness to this glass, / Which, ever since that charm, hath been / As hard, as that which graved it, was.’46 Cutting is not actually an act of destruction but a necessary step towards permanence which will last, he hopes, for eternity: no ‘showers and tempests can outwash, / So shall all times find me the same.’47 Likewise, the speaker’s love will remain constant, reinforced each time she looks at the name,48 or perhaps the name itself can become his body, a conceit that was implicitly suggested at the initial point of carving but which is later expressed more obviously: ‘Or if too hard and deep / This learning be, for a scratched name to teach, / It, as a given death’s head keep / Lovers’ mortality to preach, / Or think this ragged bony name to be / My ruinous anatomy.’49 Dissection is again linked with what it can ‘teach’ his love. Soon the scratched name becomes highly magnified, ‘ragged’, and ‘bony’. We are looking deep inside the carved letters and, at the same time, into a dissected body. It is the aftermath of a dissection; the tattered layers have been cut and peeled away, while the corpse obviously still resembles its original shape because the skeleton supports the eviscerated skin. We peer within, examining the very definition of the spaces gouged out of the glass, which have now become ‘my ruinous anatomy’. In the same way that the body will journey to the soul in heaven, the anatomical features of his body will return to his love as she gazes at the name in the window. While we are still looking inside the letters, they are then filled by physical features of anatomy: ‘The rafters of my body, bone / Being still with you, the muscle, sinew, and vein, / Which tile this house, will come again.’50 The initial engraving, or dissection, allows his anatomy to be reconstituted as a complete whole through various structures of unification (the muscles, sinews and veins). However, this reconstitution is possible only after the initial cutting and, also, after 46 Donne, ‘A Valediction: of my Name in the Window’, The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (London: Penguin, 1971), pp. 87–89, ll. 1–4. 47 Donne, ‘A Valediction’, ll. 15–16. 48 Donne, ‘A Valediction’, ll. 17–18. 49 Donne, ‘A Valediction’, ll. 19–24. 50 Donne, ‘A Valediction’, ll. 28–30.

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the point of death. The resulting anatomy is one that is immortal, preserved in the ragged bones of the letters just as it might be reunited as a complete form in heaven. The poem has a very personal tone (the later stanzas warn his love of not forgetting the name in place of another, expressed through a metaphor of opening the window), but one that also captures the new science of cutting and looking inside the male body to discover something permanent and some immortal knowledge about Man’s physical mortality. Conclusion: The New Male Template Donne was fascinated not only by the new science of dissection but also by how this new knowledge interacted with his own beliefs, specifically about the body and soul. He was also intrigued by the many paradoxes of dissection, especially the notion that cutting and apparent destruction could reveal something complete, beautiful and permanent, allaying any fear of ‘decaying and disintegrating into nothingness’.51 Thirdly, the fact that these discoveries could only be made by men after another man’s death offered the poet a powerful frame for many of his poems, where he frequently becomes both the cadaver and the anatomist. The conceit allows him to emphasise the necessity of looking inside one man in order to reach a greater understanding of how all other men live. Indeed, it is important to note the dominance of the male body in Donne’s poetry. This is not only on account of his interest in the physical and emotional relationships between men and women; the male body is essential to his use of the dissection imagery and metaphors. These poems have all explored the anatomy of the male body and, when the female heart does appear (in ‘The Damp’), it can only be understood in terms of its differences with the equivalent male organ. In fact, the female bodies remain more or less intact in these poems – in other words, they are still alive. We might even go so far as to say that there was nothing for Donne to use inside the female form – his poems give us a male voice, with a powerful, masculine authority, that needs a male body in order to be effective. It would be misleading to claim that Donne is reflecting a lack of interest in female anatomy in the early modern period (this was certainly not the case), but his concentration on the male anatomy for his verses is noteworthy. Whereas female bodies would reveal secrets of the ‘other’, the dissection of male cadavers would teach men about 51 Hirsch, ‘Donne’s Anatomies’, p. 80.

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themselves. Given the Renaissance spirit of greater knowledge about the self and existence, perhaps the male body needed to be discovered first. Of course, Donne voiced the concerns about dissection, such as the deliberate evisceration of male bodies, but he also understood that the process of dissection could reveal a new form of coherence – man as a united, anatomical being – and that the knowledge gleaned would be a permanent model of the living male to be preserved, recorded and published for men in the future. As Hirsch observes, Donne was exploring a conceptual and philosophical ‘gap’ in which he found the atom ‘which is both the end of destruction and the beginning of regeneration’.52 It was a disconcerting time for male bodies: not only were they being explored in ways never before attempted but certainties (both physiological and spiritual) were being questioned. The interiority of the male body was now on display for all to see and Donne’s work captures the atmosphere of unease that surrounded public dissection and the publication of new, visual anatomies. Although dissections revealed fragility they also confirmed a notion of male corporeal strength, completeness and beauty. The dissected and atomised male body in the sixteenth century became a template not only for a developing area of medicine but for man’s revised ownership over his own mortal existence. Male bodies and men would never be viewed in the same way again.

52 Hirsch, ‘Donne’s Anatomies’, p. 89.

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ch a p ter t wo

The Black Male Body in Early African American Science Fiction The Experimental Case of Sutton Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio1 Marlene D. Allen The Black Male Body After the end of the Civil War, the first ‘renaissance’ in African American writing occurred as the United States struggled with what to do about the so-called ‘Negro Problem’: that is, how to integrate the newly freed African Americans into the social landscape of the postbellum United States. Some African American leaders emphasised the ideology of assimilationism, a philosophy that encouraged African Americans to rid themselves of overt racial characteristics and focus instead upon maintaining a middle-class aesthetic that promoted their proximity to whiteness as a method of gaining acceptance by white Americans. However, there were others, such as Martin Delany, who promoted what has been named the philosophy of ‘Black Nationalism’, an ideology that espoused unity of the black races and called for African Americans to separate themselves from white American society as the best solution to the problems of black America during the time. One such advocate of the ideological stance of Black Nationalism 1 I would like to acknowledge the support of the Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL) at Emory University for granting me a short-term fellowship in July 2010. This fellowship helped me gain access to materials written by Sutton E. Griggs that assisted with the creation of this essay.

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was the writer Sutton E. Griggs. The son of minister Allen Griggs, Sutton Griggs was born in Chatfield, Texas, and was educated at both Bishop College and Richmond Theological Seminary before becoming pastor at Baptist churches in Virginia and Tennessee. In contrast to his more well-known contemporaries Charles Chesnutt and Paul Laurence Dunbar, Griggs issued his writings through his own company, the Orion Publishing Company. While Chesnutt often found that his race was not mentioned in advertisements for his writings, and Paul Laurence Dunbar was figuratively trapped in a literary cage so coloured by his racial background that only his stereotypical African American dialect poems found an audience, Griggs’s decision to publish his own writings freed him from censorship by the white press and from the tastes of white audiences. Selling his books door-to-door and at events sponsored by black churches, Griggs’s writings were better distributed among an African American reading public than Chesnutt’s and Dunbar’s. Because he was writing to a primarily African American audience, his writings were also more radical than those of Chesnutt and Dunbar. This is especially reflected in his first novel, Imperium in Imperio, published in 1899, just three years after the monumental Supreme Court decision in the Plessy v Ferguson case (1896), which legalised the already socially accepted practice of racial segregation. Imperium in Imperio is a bold and imaginative response to the virulent racism and sexism that plagued postbellum United States. Anticipating Marcus Garvey’s early twentieth-century ‘Back to Africa’ movement, the novel serves as a literary response to Plessy v Ferguson and speculates that the ultimate consequence of racial segregation might be the launching of a race war and physical separation of African Americans from the United States. In the process of this storytelling, Griggs creates two African American male characters that he uses to illustrate why African Americans need to create their own imperial utopian space. Feelings about African American bodies, particularly the black male body, held by whites during the time are depicted as directly responsible for racism and for why blacks would want to leave the folds of the United States government. Griggs devotes a major portion of the novel to building up his case for why his black male characters are forced to consider separation from the United States and the creation of an empire where they would be in control of their collective racial destiny without the interference of white influence. Depicting the novel’s two African American male characters, Belton Piedmont and Bernard Belgrave, as foils, he uses the protagonists’ lives as case studies through which to speak against 35

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racism. The characters’ male bodies are foregrounded in this debate as Griggs underscores the ways in which white racism effectively robbed postbellum African American males of healthy relationships with women and even affected their abilities to sire children and serve as good fathers to them. Belton’s and Bernard’s lives, then, become symbols of the racialised anxieties and fears about black male bodies and the mixing of blood lines that were held by both African Americans and white Americans at the time. Griggs begins this debate through the depiction of the two men’s early lives. Belton is described at the beginning of the novel as the son of a ‘poor ignorant negro woman’,2 Hannah, and a father who later abandons the family. In contrast, Bernard is the son of a mulatto mother whose own father was a governor; Bernard’s white father is an American senator. By blood, then, Bernard is more white than black, and as the child and grandchild of white politicians he is part of the powerful elite in the United States. Griggs casts the two characters as socioeconomic opposites as a method of arguing against theories espoused by scientists such as Josiah Nott, who hypothesised from his scientific experiments of the superiority of white blood to black blood. According to Nott’s theories, as expressed in his text Types of Mankind (1854), because of the high percentage of white blood in his biological makeup the mixed-race male, Bernard, should be intellectually, physically and even morally superior to the fully black Belton, for, as Nott writes, ‘the infusion of even a minute proportion of the blood of one race into another produces a most decided modification of moral and physical character. A small trace of white blood in the negro improves him in intelligence and morality.’3 Similarly, the social Darwinist Herbert Spencer promoted what he called the ‘rules of inheritance’, which held that ‘all people inherit their parents’ genetic material, but they also inherit from them such things as culture, religion, education (or lack thereof), and general social status’.4 If these theories were true, Bernard, because of the high proportion of 2 Sutton E. Griggs, Imperium in Imperio (Miami: Mnemosyne Pub., 1969), p. 3. 3 Josiah Clark Nott and George R. Gliddon, Types of Mankind, or Ethnological Researches: Based Upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races, and Upon Their Natural, Geographical, Philological and Biblical History, Illustrated by Selections from the Unedited Papers of Samuel George Morton And by Additional Contributions from L. Agassiz; W. Usher; and H. S. Patterson (Philadelphia, PA: J. B. Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1854), p. 68. 4 J. L. Graves, The Emperor’s New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2001), p. 83.

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white blood in his veins, would naturally be more intelligent and hold greater moral values than Belton, who would inherit the ‘ignorance’ of Hannah, as if life experiences, economics and social status played no role in African Americans’ intellectual and moral characteristics. Through his portrayal of Belton and Bernard’s early lives and backgrounds, Griggs, however, builds an important case to show that it is racist ill-treatment by whites combined with poverty that make Belton’s life difficult, not any innate biological inferiorities. Griggs illustrates this point in his description of Belton’s and Bernard’s school days in Winchester, Virginia, where they first meet. Bernard is constantly given preferential treatment by the boys’ white teacher, Mr Leonard. Leonard in fact both fears and hates the presence of Belton’s dark-skinned male body, a fear that Toni Morrison describes in her work Playing in the Dark (1993) as white Americans’ fear of the ‘dark, abiding, signing Africanist presence’.5 By this, Morrison means that it is not just the physical black male body of Belton that is a source of fear but also what that body represents, or signifies, to the white imagination. The black male body at the time was identified with wildness, savagery and a threatening, almost monstrous sexuality that motivated acts of violence, such as lynching, perpetrated by whites against black men (although black women were lynched as well). Despite the preferential treatment Bernard receives from Mr Leonard, Belton proves to be Bernard’s intellectual equal during the boys’ school days, paradoxically spurred on to academic greatness by Leonard’s mistreatment. Leonard saw that the way to wound and humble Belton was to make Bernard excel him. Thus he bent all of his energies to improve Bernard’s mind. […] Belton became accustomed to the closest scrutiny, and prepared himself accordingly. The result was that Bernard did not gain an inch on him.6

To counter scientific claims about black intellectual inferiority, Griggs shows the effect of white racism on African American educational achievement. He thus anticipates sociologist Kenneth Clark’s experiments and subsequent conclusions, which formed the basis for outlawing segregated schools as a result of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision of 1954, as Clark, through his own scientific experiments, 5 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 5. 6 Griggs, Imperium in Imperio, p. 28.

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proved that segregation combined with racism produced a feeling of inferiority in African American children that negatively affected their academic achievement from a young age. Only the most determined students, such as Belton, are able to succeed in an educational system that subverts their accomplishments from the very start. Griggs again exemplifies this point as the boys are about to begin their adult lives, during their commencement exercises, a moment that figuratively represents the maturation of the two boy’s bodies from childhood to adulthood. Bernard and Belton are chosen by Leonard to participate in an oratorical contest at the graduation ceremony. At the commencement exercises, which are attended by numerous important white citizens from the town, the two ‘oratorical gladiators’ deliver their speeches. Belton’s lecture, entitled ‘The Contribution of the Anglo-Saxon to the Cause of Human Liberty’, extols the merits of the Anglo-Saxon race and its achievements, entrancing his white audience: His words made their hearts burn, and time and again he made them burst forth in applause. The white people who sat and listened to his speech looked at it as a very revelation to them, they themselves not having had as clear a conception of the glory of their race as this Negro now revealed.7

Belton’s Booker T. Washingtonian speech echoes the scientifically reinforced sentiment that Anglo-Saxons, the ‘parent race’ of white America, possessed innate biological characteristics, such as the love of liberty, a pioneering spirit and an inclination to create democratic governments, that made them superior to even other Caucasian races. Significantly, his speech also has a great impact on his white male audience because it is delivered by the black male body of Belton, for, as Toni Morrison argues, the Africanist character in American literature served historically as a ‘surrogate and enabler’, for ‘Africanism is the vehicle by which the American self knows itself as not enslaved, but free; not repulsive, but desirable; not helpless, but licensed and powerful; not history-less, but historical; not damned, but innocent; not a blind accident of evolution, but a progressive fulfillment of destiny’.8 Thus, it is the differences between their white male bodies and Belton’s black male body that allows these white men to revel in their superiority. This moment illustrates the psychological costs some African Americans like Belton paid in late nineteenth-century America, as Belton’s early 7 Griggs, Imperium in Imperio, pp. 32–33. 8 Morrison, Playing in the Dark, pp. 51–52.

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education has affected him so much that he innately buys into the idea of the superiority of white male bodies. Later in the text Griggs further illustrates how ideas about African American male bodies held by white Americans affect the two characters. After graduating from high school and earning his degree from Harvard University, Bernard becomes involved in a relationship with Viola Martin, a beautiful, dark-skinned political activist. When Bernard proposes marriage to her after two years of courtship, Viola, shockingly, commits suicide. Bernard learns that her violent act was precipitated by her reading of a real-life work called White Supremacy and Negro Subordination, published in 1853 by pro-slavery advocate and physician J. H. Van Evrie. The main purpose of Van Evrie’s text is to refute what he calls the ‘abolitionist’s notion’ that the ‘negro is a black-white man […] a creature like ourselves in everything except color’9 and his work is especially virulent on the issue of miscegenation. He writes that ‘mongrelism is a diseased condition’10 and that people of mixed race were ‘mercifully doomed to final extinction’, with their descendants doomed to become infertile after the fourth generation. In contrast to Van Evrie’s racist intentions, in reading the text Viola comes to the conclusion that marrying Bernard and having children with him would introduce the impure white blood of Bernard into her family line, thus leading to its eventual extinction. In the suicide note she writes to him, she states that the intermingling of the races in sexual relationship was sapping the vitality of the Negro race and, in fact, was slowly but surely exterminating the race. […] Every half-breed, or for that, every person having a tinge of Negro blood, the white people cast off. We receive the cast offs with open arms and he comes to us with his devitalising power. Thus, the white man was slowly exterminating us and our total extinction was but a short period of time distant. […] I had to choose between you and my race.11

Thus in her mind, the white blood in Bernard’s veins makes him diseased, a potential polluter of the African blood of their would-be children.12 As Adenike Davidson aptly observes, ‘Viola’s actions 9 J. H. Van Evrie, White Supremacy and Negro Subordination; or, Negroes a Subordinate Race, and (So-Called) Slavery Its Normal Condition (New York: Van Evrie, Horton, & Co., 1868), p. 196. 10 Van Evrie, White Supremacy, p. 167. 11 Griggs, Imperium in Imperio, pp. 173–75. 12 Graves, Emperor’s New Clothes, p. 90.

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question the stereotypical idea that the mulatto is preferable to the pure African and that blacks aspire to ‘whiten’ their race. […] Viola sees blackness as a source of strength and whiteness as the deficiency.’13 She views Bernard’s mixed race male body as inferior and the potential cause of the extinction of the African American race. In the face of these notions about the supposed inferiority of black bodies, Griggs displays a sense of pride in blackness in an era when light skin was prized as the marker of biological superiority. Simultaneously, however, Griggs also shows the dangers of this preoccupation with maintaining biological purity for the African American race; this type of thought, he suggests, causes real physical and psychological harm to Viola. Ironically, Viola’s rejection of Bernard serves as his induction into ‘social blackness’. For the first time he begins to understand what it means to possess an African American male body, even one of mixed race, in postbellum America. Belton similarly learns lessons about the ramifications of possessing a black male body in the postbellum United States after reaching adulthood. After he is fired from a teaching position and is unable to find other employment he conceives of the idea of conducting a ‘science experiment’ on race relations. Leaving behind his wife Antoinette in Richmond, Virginia, he moves to New York ‘to find out just what view the white people were taking of the Negro’.14 He makes the interesting decision to essentially switch bodies, disguising himself as ‘a healthy, handsome, robust colored girl, with features rather large for a woman but attractive just the same’.15 This moment places Griggs’s novel in a recurring African American literary tradition in which characters, both real-life and fictional, use the stratagem of passing for various purposes, whether it is to pass for white in order to achieve a higher socioeconomic status or to pass for a different gender in order to escape to freedom, a trick Harriet Jacobs used when she dressed as a sailor to escape the clutches of her master Dr Flint. Ironically, Belton decides to pass for an African American woman because he believes his feminised body will be invisible and non-threatening, allowing him access to the innermost sanctums of white households that he would be unable to gain entry 13 Adenike Marie Davidson, ‘Sweet Land of Liberty: The Black Nation Novel in Early African American Literature’, PhD Dissertation (U of Maryland, 2000), pp. 138–39. 14 Griggs, Imperium in Imperio, p. 132. 15 Griggs, Imperium in Imperio, p. 132.

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to with his more menacing black male body. However, in taking on a female body, he unknowingly enters into another kind of danger. Successfully attaining a position as a nurse in the home of a ‘leading white man’, Belton intends to use his place in this household as a space from which he might spy upon the white world. However, his newly feminised body places Belton in another kind of danger: he is continually sexually harassed by the young white men he encounters. He loses his first job because he finds that ‘[t]he young white men in the families in which Belton worked seemed to have a poor opinion of the virtue of colored women. Time and again they tried to kiss Belton, and he sometimes has to exert his full strength to keep them at a distance.’16 The men deem the cross-dressing Belton a ‘virtuous prude’ whom they ‘decide to corrupt […] at all hazards’, and when they are unsuccessful, they ‘beg[i]n to doubt his sex’.17 They then plot to gang-rape him. Significantly, Griggs does not dramatise the scene of Belton’s near-rape, only writing that ‘After that eventful night, Belton did no more nursing.’18 This moment is illustrative of what Marjorie Gerber calls a ‘moment of crisis’, one that cross-dressing provokes in literary works because the act ‘put[s] into question the categories of “female” and “male”, whether they are considered essential or constructed, biological or cultural’.19 Griggs does not reveal how Belton escapes from his white would-be rapists because he cannot even speak about the implications of this homoerotic moment in the text, one which reveals that black male bodies are just as vulnerable to sexual assault as black female bodies were. The reader is left to surmise that it is only Belton’s physical strength, provided by his male body and one not available to real black women, that allows him to escape. This moment of crisis in the text calls into question the binary oppositions of black male and black female in postbellum United States, revealing that these distinctions are illusory in a society in which all power is held by white men. Belton’s cross-dressing ‘experiment’ has severe consequences for both him and his family; later events in the novel reveal his feelings of emasculation and trauma that result from his near-sexual assault. 16 Griggs, Imperium in Imperio, p. 134. 17 Griggs, Imperium in Imperio, p. 134. 18 Griggs, Imperium in Imperio, p. 134. 19 Marjorie Gerber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 9–11.

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Sometime after he returns home, his wife Antoinette gives birth to a child. Called by the nurse to view the child for the first time after the delivery, ‘Belton bent forward to look at his infant son. A terrible shriek broke from his lips. He dropped the lamp upon the floor and fled out of the house and rushed madly through the city. The color of Antoinette was brown. The color of Belton was dark. But the child was white!’20 Belton mistakenly believes that he has been cuckolded and abandons his family in the mistaken belief that Antoinette had become involved in a sexual relationship with a white man, the fate he himself had to use his physical strength to avoid during his time as a ‘female’ nurse. While this situation serves the novel structurally as a method for putting Belton on the journey that will lead him to his discovery of the Imperium, this moment also illustrates the ways in which black male writers figure the emasculating nature of racism as its worse aspects, in effect ignoring the duelling traumas of racism and sexism that black women experience. David Ikard argues that there is a longstanding oversight in African American literature (and scholarship) over how black male writers often utilise black women’s suffering only as a ‘cipher’ to prove how white racism emasculates black men. Ikard’s analysis of Frederick Douglass’s infamous account of the beating of his aunt Hester can be applied to how Griggs portrays the psychological trauma Belton undergoes during his brief time inhabiting the body of a black female. In a moment that one might read as similarly fraught with homoeroticism as Belton’s near-rape by the gang of white men, Douglass casts the beating of his aunt Hester as a figurative rape; yet, the primary emotions that Douglass concentrates on in this scene are not associated with his aunt’s trauma, but rather his own terror at witnessing this scene. Ikard writes: Douglass’s fear of being next in line to receive a beating can be read as his anxiety as a black man about being symbolically raped and feminized by his white masters. The fear of rape and feminization is prevalent throughout the narrative and explains why, for Douglass, acquiring freedom is bound up inextricably with acquiring manhood.

He further notes that the narrative ‘[fosters] the idea that black liberation is dependent upon black men acquiring manhood’.21 Belton’s decision to 20 Griggs, Imperium in Imperio, p. 136. 21 David Ikard, Breaking the Silence: Toward a Black Male Feminist Criticism (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2007), p. 6.

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join the all-male Imperium, whose ultimate goal is to liberate African Americans from the subjugation of Jim-Crow America, stems from his sense of being emasculated both by the white men who attempted to rape him and the phantom white male whom he thinks has usurped his place in Antoinette’s bed.22 After leaving his family, continuing a cycle of abandonment started by his own father, Belton finds himself part of yet another scientific experiment, though not one of his own making. In the chapter ominously titled ‘On the Dissecting Board’, Griggs again depicts scientific fascination with the black male body. When Belton commits the ‘crime’ of entering a white church in the town of Cadeville, Louisiana, he is attacked by a white supremacist group called the ‘Nigger Rulers’, who attempt, unsuccessfully, to lynch him. After hanging him, the group gives Belton’s unconscious body to Dr Zackland, a white doctor, for dissection.23 The narrator relates that ‘Belton was a fine specimen of physical manhood. His limbs were well formed, well proportioned and seemed as strong as oak. His manly appearance always excited interest wherever he was seen.’ The doctor is excited at the prospect of acquiring Belton’s body, for ‘[t]o have such a robust, well-formed, handsome nigger to dissect and examine he regarded as one of the greatest boons of his medical career’.24 Before Zackland can proceed with his dissection, however, Belton wakes up and kills the doctor to prevent his mutilation. Belton’s near-lynching and mutilation under the auspices of scientific experiment was, unfortunately, a real danger that black men have faced throughout American history. It was customary for white lynch mobs not only to hang or burn the bodies of their black male victims but also to dismember them as well. Castration of the bodies of lynched black males was commonplace, for, as Harvey Young maintains, ‘Through the murder and castration of the black male body, the men within the crowd 22 Later in the novel, Belton discovers that his conclusions about Antoinette’s infidelity are in fact unfounded, making his abandonment of his family even more distasteful. In fact, the child becomes another double for Belton in the text, for he grows to look exactly like his father. The narrator relates, ‘As the child grew, its mother noticed that its hair began to change. She also thought she discovered his skin growing darker by degrees. As his features developed he was seen to be the very image of Belton. […] At length the child became Antoinette’s color, retaining Belton’s features’. Griggs, Imperium in Imperio, p. 256. 23 The doctor is also called ‘Zakeland’ in the novel. I have used ‘Zackland’ for his name because it appears that way more often in the novel. 24 Griggs, Imperium in Imperio, p. 156.

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sought to reaffirm their privilege and status in society.’25 Particularly prized by white male lynchers were the genitalia of black men. In her book Exorcising Blackness, Trudier Harris calls the act of collecting these objects a form of ‘penis envy’. Harvey Young further expresses that the ‘body parts themselves as souvenirs and fetish objects signal the removal of the sexual threat [of black men] and the crowd’s desire for the power contained within such threats’.26 Castration removed the threat of what whites viewed as the ‘animalistic’ sexuality of the black man [i.e., his penis], an idea that was supported by claims, supported by science, that black people more closely resembled apes than whites. Just as hunters often keep animal parts as trophies of successful hunts, participants in lynch mobs kept body parts as souvenirs to reinforce their feelings of power as the ‘owners’ and controllers of black male bodies. Additionally, by depicting Dr Zackland’s avaricious desires for Belton’s body for dissection, Griggs evokes the history of scientific experimentation on black bodies to provide rationalisation that African Americans were physically and intellectually inferior to whites.27 For instance, Samuel Morton, a nineteenth-century doctor who was a leader of the ‘polygenesis’ school of racial theory, based his theories about the intellectual inferiority of people of African descent upon measurements 25 Harvey Young, ‘The Black Body as Souvenir in American Lynching’, Theatre Journal, 57.4 (2005), pp. 639–57 (p. 650). 26 Young, ‘The Black Body’, pp. 650–51. 27 A particularly emblematic experiment that occurred over 30 years after Griggs’s novel was written is the Tuskegee syphilis study, which lasted, astonishingly, for 40 years (from 1932 to 1972). The subject group for the study was comprised of 600 black men, almost 400 of whom actually had syphilis. The men who had syphilis were never told they had the disease and were instead told they were being treated for ‘bad blood’. The doctors who performed the study never gave the men medicine for their disease, even when penicillin was found to be an effective treatment for syphilis. Many of the men who were infected passed the disease on to their wives and even their children, who developed congenital syphilis. The men received only free meals, medical exams and burial insurance to compensate them for their participation. The study was conducted to see if syphilis affected blacks differently from whites, highlighting again the racism of scientific theories that posited that there were real physiological differences between black bodies and white bodies. It is highly ironic that this experiment was conducted under the auspices of Tuskegee Institute, one of the US’s premier historically black colleges. See ‘Remembering Tuskegee’ , accessed 14 March 2017, and the CDC’s page ‘U.S. Public Health Service Study at Tuskegee’ , accessed 23 November 2017.

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of skulls he had collected from bodies of different races with the intention of supporting his view that cranial size signifies intelligence.28 From his studies, Morton deduced that the skulls he collected from blacks had a smaller cranial capacity, leading to the conclusion, in Crania America (1839), that blacks ‘have little invention, but strong powers of imitation, so that they readily acquire mechanic arts’.29 His deduction thus provided scientific justification for black enslavement; it appeared to support the idea that black people were better suited to the manual labour they performed as slaves rather than other types of non-physical work. The faultiness of Morton’s experiments was later outlined by science historian Steven Jay Gould in his 1977 work The Mismeasure of Man. Gould relates many inconsistencies and errors in Morton’s racialised experiments, the most obvious of which was the fact that Morton did not separate his skull samples by sex or stature. Thus, the experiments did not take into account the fact that human skull sizes vary based on physical characteristics such as a person’s body type, size and sex. Soon after Belton’s narrow escape from Zackland’s planned dissection, Griggs gives readers a first glimpse into the inner workings of the Imperium. After successfully defending Belton, who is put on trial for killing Dr Zackland, Bernard is invited by the members of the Imperium, including Belton, to become its first president. After passing a series of loyalty tests, the members then explain the history and purpose of the Imperium, which, heavily influenced by the writings of Thomas Jefferson, operates in secret to educate African Americans according to Jefferson’s principles of equality and democracy. In creating the fictionalised Imperium, Griggs suggests how African Americans can use science, and indeed the genre of science fiction, to their advantage. Notably, the Imperium was founded by a black male, a scientist Griggs models upon Benjamin Banneker, popularly known in the eighteenth century as the ‘first Negro man of science’ and the ‘Sable Astronomer’. Like Banneker, Griggs’s fictional scientist published ‘a book of science which outranked any other book of the day that treated of the same 28 The nineteenth-century polygenesis school of racial science in the United States, which included Josiah Nott, Louis Agassiz and George Gliddon, theorised that, in contrast to the Biblical story of Genesis, the races did not have a common origin to support their contentions that blacks and other people of color were subhuman. 29 Samuel Morton, Crania Americana; or a Comparative View of the Skulls of Various Aboriginal Nations of North and South America. To Which is Prefixed an Essay on the Varieties of Human Species (Philadelphia: J. Dodson, London, Simpkin, Marshall, 1839), p. 81.

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subject’.30 Vowing to use the wealth he gained from his scientific work, the black scientist secretly gathered other free negroes together and organised a society that had a two-fold object. The first object was to endeavor to secure for the free negroes all the rights and privileges of men, according to the teachings of Thomas Jefferson. Its other object was to secure the freedom of the enslaved negroes the world over.31

In modeling the wealthy scientist upon Banneker, Griggs suggests that there is a cogent black political presence in scientific history, exploring how African Americans such as Banneker used the scientific arena as a locus from which to fight against claims of black intellectual inferiority. Furthermore, he rebukes implicitly the United States for not living up to Jefferson’s principles of democracy and equality in its treatment of African Americans. Initially, the Imperium intends to remain underground, but soon after Bernard’s inauguration they hold a debate on whether to reveal their presence to the outside world after one of their members is killed by a white mob. As president of the Imperium, Bernard urges the group to form a militant response by seizing the states of Texas and Louisiana and forming an alliance with foreign powers, thereby in effect starting a race war with the United States. In compensation for their aid, the Imperium would cede Louisiana to the foreign countries, nominating Texas as the site for the Imperium’s new African American empire. Significantly, then, the Imperium intends to use the masculine means of warfare as a method of liberation for the African American race. Bernard’s plan for a race war with the United States and the creation of a utopian empire in Texas fails at the end of the novel because of dissension in the group, as Belton opposes Bernard’s radical separatist plan. Though he has been nearly raped and almost had his body mutilated and dismembered by white men, Belton still believes that the US should be given a chance to come to a compromise with African Americans. Though Belton’s body is not physically destroyed by his violent encounters with white Americans, his mind is altered such that he believes in the supremacy of white men and of Anglo-Saxon culture. It is this viewpoint that finally leads to the destruction of his body, for, ironically, it is the black male members of the Imperium who successfully 30 Griggs, Imperium in Imperio, p. 191. 31 Griggs, Imperium in Imperio, p. 191.

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lynch him as a traitor for refusing to go along with their plans to form an African American-controlled empire. Yet the Imperium itself is also annihilated later when another group member, Berl Trout, reveals the group’s secessionist plans, presumably to white American authorities, leading to the overall destruction of the Imperium. In the final estimation, though the dreams of the African American men of the Imperium are shattered, Griggs’s novel is a groundbreaking speculation on one possible solution to America’s racial ills. In his black nationalist fantasy, Griggs contemplates a free space where black men would not be confined and emasculated by racist ideas about their bodies, a place where they would truly be free of the power of white men. While some might view Griggs’s black nationalist aesthetic in the text as racist because of its emphasis on creating a world completely absent of whites, examining the last words of Berl Trout at the end of the novel reveals the overall humanistic ideals that Griggs is espousing: that African Americans desire to be good, patriotic citizens, but they also wish to be relieved of the socio-economic shackles that were being reinstituted with the passing of Jim Crow laws made legal by Plessy v. Ferguson. The Imperium as an imaginary radical organisation and Imperium in Imperio as a work of fiction are intended to offer a warning against what the full consequences of the principle of ‘separate but equal’ might be if white America does not live up to its ideas of equality for all citizens, regardless of race. Thus, Griggs places the need for the Imperium’s radicalism upon white America’s, or more precisely, the US government’s, shoulders.

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Miserrimus Dexter Monstrous Forms of the Fin de Siècle Katherine Angell Monstrous Forms The odd thing about a specimen is that it is a kind of cipher when considered in isolation. Specimens are a lot like words: they don’t mean anything unless they are in the context of a sentence or a system.1

The Law and the Lady (1875) by Wilkie Collins is a detective story drawn around the character of the female sleuth. The heroine, Valeria Woodville, is one of the most resourceful woman characters in British fiction, determined to discover the truth about her husband’s past. The novel also introduces the eccentric character of Miserrimus Dexter, in whom Valeria believes she has an ally in her quest to clear her husband of the Scotch verdict ‘not proven’ for the murder of his first wife, Sara. Dexter is both mentally disturbed and physically deformed, being born without legs. He navigates the world either using a wheelchair or by hopping on his hands. His mood changes violently from melancholy to explosive rage, and he is cared for in his home by his simple-minded cousin Ariel. After sending Valeria to chase a number of dead ends and teasing her with red herrings, she eventually tricks him into confessing the truth about Sara’s death – that she committed suicide. After the mystery is solved, Valeria’s faith in the law is restored and Dexter is 1 Stephen T. Asma, Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. xiii.

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confined to an asylum, accompanied by Ariel, who stays with him until his death. Published in 1875, The Law and the Lady provides a chronological and thematic bridge between the realist nineteenth-century novels and the literature of the fin de siècle. The novel continues in the Dickensian tradition of giving importance to ordinary objects while introducing a decadent character, in this case, the phocomeliac monster Miserrimus Dexter: The bright intelligent face and the large clear blue eyes, the lustrous waving hair of a light chestnut colour, the long delicate white hands, and the magnificent throat and chest which I have elsewhere described. The deformity which degraded and destroyed the manly beauty of his head and breast was hidden from view by an Oriental robe of many colours, thrown over the chair like a coverlid.2

Dexter is a prototype aesthete drawn 20 years before such heroes as Dorian Gray, Des Esseintes and Richard Calmady. In presenting a combination of monstrosity and beauty in his representation of decadence, Wilkie Collins foreshadows the later literary movement by embodying their key themes in Dexter. Much like that of the later protagonists, Dexter’s decadence is represented as distinctly pathological: he is not only physically deformed but also mentally unstable, and the artefacts, paintings, objects, music and delicacies he surrounds himself with function to stimulate his hysteria and accentuate his monstrosity. Collins’s pathological portrayal of the early decadence movement closely aligns it with the medicalisation of monstrosity, providing a link between the mid-century novel and those of the fin de siècle through teratology. Teratology is the scientific study of congenital birth defects. The science became popular in Britain during the late eighteenth century only to be eclipsed by the potential of embryology in the early twentieth century. Despite a wide range of investigations undertaken, British teratology had a distinct set of practices and principles that can be seen through the representation of Dexter. Dexter’s pathology is so distinctly framed within the methodology of teratology because his monstrosity is heightened by a private collection of grotesque objects. Teratology was 2 Wilkie Collins, The Law and the Lady (1875; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 213. Subsequent references to this edition will be given in the text. Phocomelia was a term coined by Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in 1836 meaning a congenital deformity of the limbs. Dexter is born without legs or feet and as a result is confined to his wheelchair for the majority of the novel.

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defined by the vast numbers of human and animal specimens collected by enthusiastic men of science for the purpose of detailed examination and comparison. They aimed to trace the biological connections between specimens to uncover a history of the natural world and help to explain the presence, and possibly the purpose, of monstrosity. Dexter’s collection positions him in the dual role of monstrous specimen and curator of a monstrous collection, affirming his place within the teratological framework as both a specimen and a teratologist. The inclusion of his collection of curiosities also places the reader in the position of a teratologist, encouraged to read his monstrous body and its associated objects as texts in which we may discover his pathology and its role within the narrative. Collins produces a teratological worldview by presenting the monstrous body and certain ‘objects’ in a way that offers the reader an opportunity to find associations between them in order to understand Dexter. As this chapter will demonstrate, the concepts of monstrosity determined by teratology define Dexter, his collection, and reading practices. In teratological collections the boundary between the human body and ‘objects’ becomes blurred as specimens are mounted using a process that introduces glass, spirit and metal rods to the preserved body part. The body is made hybrid through the inclusion of other materials, transforming it into a teratological display. This particular way of presenting the body determines the language used to describe it, a language distinct from existing discourses about the body. Taxonomic descriptors were developed for use in teratological museums to accurately classify and describe the different specimens: first, as an object of medical interest; and, second, as a body with a human history. Teratology was distinctive in its inclusion of both taxonomy and causation in its classificatory system. Rather than separating the medical classification and the lived history of the patient, it provided a systematic attempt to provide both. This resulted in a language that described each individual specimen as distinctive while organising the collective under one theoretical argument. In his novel, Collins draws heavily on the language of the teratological catalogue in order to explore the blurred boundaries between monstrous bodies and ‘objects’, while successfully articulating the scientific concept of monstrosity in the late nineteenth century. This chapter supports the line of argument made by Sally Shuttleworth that the ‘transpositions between medical and fictional texts are not subtle in their effects but quite blatant and aggressive’ by showing how teratology is present in 50

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the language, content and form of The Law and the Lady.3 It aims to do two things: first, it acknowledges how characters are represented as both monstrous specimens and as teratologists through the inclusion of teratological techniques and the language used to articulate them; and, second, it shows how Collins includes teratological references to help support his theoretical approach to worldly relations, which are defined by a tension between dominant and counter-cultural discourses. Counter to the dominant readings of Dexter that explain him as a grotesque indulgence or a symptom of Collins’s personal infatuation with his own physical disability, I offer a new analysis contextualising him in the collections of teratology.4 In Fictions of Affliction (2004), Martha Stoddard-Holmes questions the importance of Collins’s own chronic ill health when asking the question: ‘wouldn’t anyone with a body be interested in writing about bodies that go out of the bounds of the “normal”, as our bodies all do in small and large ways throughout our lives?’5 By positioning Collins’s own disability as unimportant, StoddardHolmes argues that The Law and the Lady needs to be articulated within a new context and that is what this chapter attempts to do.6 I begin with a summary of Collins’s early life, offering an explanation of how he became aware of teratological collections and their classification systems and proposing that this early interest in the science can be seen in his later descriptions of monstrosity: first, through the importance he places on objects within collections; and, second, in the representation of Dexter’s physical and psychological deformity. I show how Dexter and his objects function together to reveal a teratological view of the world that supports Collins’s distinctive reading of worldly relations.

3 Sally Shuttleworth, ‘Preaching to the Nerves: Psychological Disorder in Sensation Fiction’, in Question of Identity: Women, Science and Literature, ed. Marina Benjamin (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1993), pp. 192–222 (p. 193). 4 See Susan Lonoff, Wilkie Collins and his Victorian Readers: A Study in the Rhetoric of Authorship (New York: AMS Press, 1982), p. 116. 5 Martha Stoddard-Holmes, Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2004), p. 93. 6 Recent publications include Mary Rosner’s ‘Deviance in The Law and the Lady: The Uneasy Positioning of Mr Dexter’, The Victorian Newsletter, 106 (2004), pp. 9–14 and Teresa Mangum’s ‘Wilkie Collins, Detection and Deformity’, Dickens Studies Annual, 26 (1998), pp. 285–310. Both follow Stoddard-Holmes’s lead in identifying teratology’s ability to disturb the boundaries of the human body as Collins’s possible inspiration for Dexter.

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Collins and Teratology From his youth Collins displayed an interest in morbid pathology. When he studied law at Lincoln’s Inn, he commented that his most memorable times were spent walking the corridors of Sir John Soane’s museum. Collins’s biographer Catherine Peters remarked that ‘he referred to it affectionately in a late novel [Heart and Science (1883)] as a nice little easy museum in a private house, and all sorts of pretty things to see’.7 During this time, Soane’s museum included many paintings, books, obscure objects and medical curiosities that would not have looked out of place on the shelves of Hunter’s museum at the Royal College of Surgeons (which is worth noting because it was situated across the same square). The London historian John Timbs recollected a visit to Soane’s museum in 1850: ‘The collection consisted of a library of 50,000 volumes; MSS. upon natural history, voyages and travels, and the arts, especially medicine; 23,000 medals and coins; anatomical preparations; natural history specimens; and a herbarium of 336 volumes.’8 Soane collected many specimens of human and animal pathology, a subject he regularly came into contact with through his membership of the Royal Society. As Richard Altick wrote in Shows of London (1978), ‘few of the freaks, human and subhuman, exhibited in London […] go unmentioned in the Royal Society’s “Philosophical Transactions”’.9 As Collins spent much of his time in the museum and wrote of it with such affection, one cannot disregard the possibility that he gained an understanding and developed an interest in teratology when there, especially as its methodology placed so much importance on the act of reading and interpretation. Indeed, a museal influence can be seen in the form of The Law and the Lady, which divides its content into a collection of individual fragments of letters, diary entries, court records, telegrams and legal and religious contracts. It is typical of Collins’s method of mirroring the techniques of display found in the museum: each fragment is presented individually before being reinterpreted against the other fragments by Valeria, who forges new connections between them through the repeated interrogation of the evidence. The fragments of evidence are 7 Catherine Peters, The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins (London: Secker and Warburg, 1991), p. 69. 8 John Timbs, Curiosities of London (London: J. S. Virtue, 1885), pp. 601–02. 9 Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (London: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 37.

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continually reorganised and placed in a constantly changing hierarchy of importance, depending on which theory of Sara Macallan’s death is being put forward. The novel functions much like a collection of parts whose many connections present different truths to Valeria, who recreates the experience of reading her way around a museum. The truth explaining the role of each part is discovered only when each has been interrogated and all associations have been investigated. The importance of Valeria’s creative interpretation in the search for the truth defines the novel’s form as distinctly museal and, arguably, teratological. The exploration of networks of object communication proved to be fundamental to the advancement of teratology and the form of the novel. This is demonstrated in Collins’s address to the reader (published with the first instalment of The Law and the Lady in the London Graphic), where he reveals how important object relations are to the novel’s concerns. In his address, Collins requests that his audience keep an open mind to the persistence of certain human frailties that cause his characters to defy common-sense behaviour. One of the personality traits he lists is ‘that we are by no means always in the habit (especially when we happen to be women) of bestowing our love on the objects which are the most deserving of it, in the opinions of our friends’ (p. 3). This instruction first appears to be Collins’s apology for depicting such an inappropriate love match between the feisty and independent heroine Valeria and her weak and cowardly husband Eustace Macallan. However, such a reading does not explain why he uses the term ‘objects’ to describe Eustace and other weak-willed men. The word ‘objects’ can be explained only by looking at how Collins interprets objects more widely in the novel. For example, if Collins’s address is read alongside Valeria’s first encounter with Dexter, a different interpretation of its meaning can be made. After witnessing Dexter’s theatricality and energy in his first interview with Valeria, Mrs Macallan, Eustace’s mother, turns to Valeria, declaring, ‘I never, in all my experience, saw him more completely crazy than he was tonight. What do you say?’ Valeria answers, ‘I don’t presume to dispute your opinion’, but ‘speaking for myself, I’m not quite sure that he is mad’ (p. 221). During conversation Valeria senses that Dexter knows more than he is telling and becomes convinced that the proof of her husband’s innocence resides in his convoluted stories, confessing to ‘have reason to hope that Miserrimus Dexter can help me to clear my husband’s character of the stain which the Scotch verdict has left on it’ (p. 192). After their first meeting, Valeria embarks on a plan to visit Dexter repeatedly until she discovers the truth about her husband. 53

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Mrs Macallan questions Valeria’s sanity for reading anything more than madness into Dexter’s evidence and is horrified to discover that Valeria intends to visit him again. It seems that Collins expected Valeria’s actions to confuse his readership and prepared for this by requesting in his address that the reader doubt their initial responses to the unusual attention Valeria pays to undeserving objects. The use of the word ‘objects’ instead of ‘men’ in the address becomes important because Dexter is not described as a human being but as a ‘thing’, an object, repeatedly referred to as an ‘idol’ and a ‘dog’ (pp. 292, 208). Indeed, in a conversation with Valeria about Dexter, her husband’s close friend, Major Fitz-David, asks her: ‘what can be your object?’ She replies, ‘I can tell you what my object is in two words […] I want you to give me an introduction to Miserrimus Dexter’ (p. 191). Dexter is described as non-human and set apart from other characters, especially by Valeria, who treats him like an object, describing her meetings with him as ‘experiments’, thus suggesting that he is a monstrous specimen that must be studied closely in order to extract the truth (pp. 183, 236). Collins’s address to the reader thus functions as a defence of Valeria’s visits to Dexter, which originally seem strange, but in the end successfully lead to Eustace’s exoneration. Throughout the novel, objects are repeatedly shown to provide more truthful accounts of Sara Macallan’s death than do characters. Whereas Mrs Macallan cannot see any possibility in Dexter’s theatricality, Valeria has already been initiated into the importance of reading objects in her search for the truth. Valeria has been trained to hold objects in the utmost importance in an earlier scene with the Major. In chapter ten the Major (who is described as ‘slippery as an eel’) refuses to tell Valeria the reason for her husband’s change of name but leaves her in his drawing room, informing her that one of the objects in his cabinet will provide her with the answer if she can correctly identify it and decipher its meaning before the afternoon is out (p. 200). Immediately, every object is of vital importance to Valeria as each one potentially holds the truth about her husband’s deception. Valeria conducts her search by closely studying each object, attempting to read it for any information about Eustace’s history. The training she undergoes in the Major’s house helps her to identify Dexter as another object with secrets to reveal. Dexter’s function as a teratological specimen helps to explain much of what was known about teratology in the 1870s. Dexter’s name, which Collins takes time to explain, is reminiscent of a medical classification: doubly Latinate, it describes him as both a medical object and 54

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a patient with a personal history, explaining his physical limitations and his artistic character. ‘Miserrimus’ is taken from the Latin for the most wretched and miserable of men, helping to explain how his hysteria and bouts of depression, that have him regularly reduced to tears, are symptoms of how he understands his physical deformity to be a monstrosity. His forename helps to describe the relationship he has with his deformed body and how it has impacted on his psychological wellbeing. His surname refers to his dexterity, a word often used to describe the right hand or right-hand side of the body. The name ‘Dexter’ reveals his athleticism as well as his intellectual and artistic abilities. The choice of name thus encourages a reading that he is pure imagination, without the logic and analytical skills needed to balance his personality. His Latin name functions as a classification to describe the physical and psychological aspects that make up the morbid and creative aspects of his character. Dexter’s position as a teratological specimen is intensified during his ‘experiments’ with Valeria. Each time he presents himself as an outlandish case study to be observed and read in teratological terms. For example, when Valeria first reads Dexter’s evidence from the pamphlet of Eustace’s trial he is described as being wheeled into the centre of a packed courtroom and being displayed much like an exhibit in an operating room. The teratological associations continue in her first interview with Dexter, when he is described as a hybrid creature of horse and man, a ‘new Centaur’ (p. 206). But any mythical connotations have been removed from this descriptor as old traditions are unable to explain such a ‘modern’ monster. Dexter rejects any traditional explanations for his deformity when he screams that he is ‘man and machinery blended in one – the new Centaur, half man, half chair’ (p. 206). Dexter is a new being, a specimen from the future that produces shock and wonder in those that meet him. Although Theresa Mangum suggests that one could ‘substitute new-cyborg’ for ‘new-centaur’, by doing so she ignores the distinctly Victorian aspects of his depiction.10 Dexter believes he is further evolved than others because he is working in conjunction with a machine: the replacement of his legs with the technology of the wheelchair represents an ideal body of the industrial era – a body that works like a machine. Resonating with technological debates that Mark Seltzer later calls ‘machine culture’, Dexter’s technological body is an improvement on the human body because he is stronger, faster 10 Mangum, ‘Detection and Deformity’, p. 294.

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and compatible with modern machines.11 Through a relationship with technology, Dexter finds associations between machine culture, which explore the possibilities of the mechanised body, and Victorian thoughts on evolution, in particular the more pessimistic dimensions of atavism and degeneration. Tamara S. Wagner argues that Dexter is equally ‘technological as well as […] linked to decay and discourses of degeneration, to the atavistic invocations of primordial birds, half-formed apes, and missing links’.12 He is not only technologically advanced but biologically superior to others. His degenerate body makes him more adaptable to changes in the industrial world and, as a biological hybrid, situated between man and ape, he is unconstrained by social conventions and able to incorporate material objects into his body to increase his abilities. With an emphasis on Dexter as a ‘new’ monster, traditional explanations of his birth are refuted and any potential cause must be contextualised within the century. Throughout the novel Dexter is framed as a teratological specimen, compliant with medical discourse. Indeed, Jenny Bourne Taylor has argued that ‘the resolution of the mystery depends not only on evacuating Dexter’s consciousness but reducing him to one meaning as a specimen framed within contemporary medical discourse’, arguing that he becomes increasingly isolated by public reactions to his body until he finds his only companion in his strange cousin, Ariel.13 Taylor sees Dexter’s positioning as a teratological specimen at the end of the novel as bringing limitations to his possibilities through the curtailing of his communicative network. However, I would argue that Dexter continues to be an active player in antagonising dominant scientific and literary discourses (despite his isolation and premature death) because he is also a teratologist. Dexter’s collection shows him to be more than a specimen; it shows him to be a collector too. His dual role as a specimen and a man of science encourages a reading of him as representative of teratology itself. Indeed, comparisons can be found between Dexter’s collection and Soane’s museum because both are mysterious and winding, with the historian Jonah Siegel describing the museum as a ‘strange collection’ 11 Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 4. 12 Tamara S. Wagner, ‘Ominous Signs or False Clues? Difference and Deformity in Wilkie Collins’s Sensation Novels’, in Demons of the Body and Mind: Essays on Disability in Gothic Literature, ed. Ruth Bienstock Anolik (London: McFarland, 2010), pp. 47–60 (p. 51). 13 Jenny Bourne Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative and Nineteenth Century Psychology (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 226.

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that may be compared to a ‘mine with numerous veins, in which instead of metallic ore, you find works of art’.14 It was an uncanny place, claustrophobic with objects which Siegel claims ‘heighten the feeling of the subterranean and mysterious’.15 His description could similarly describe Dexter’s house, which contains artworks and objects that line its dark and dusty corridors. Dexter’s collection shares a similarly haphazard display model with Soane’s. However, Dexter’s collection differs from Soane’s in offering insight into the collector’s decadent nature. His collection of curious objects is grounded in a literary tradition of representing degeneracy. Paul Goetsch acknowledges: ‘In the late-Victorian period, collectors in literature were often seen as selfish adventurers, unscrupulous scientists or capitalists, criminals, amoral aesthetes and decadents. Concomitantly, collecting is frequently associated with exploitation, violence, and crime.’16 As a character in popular literature, Dexter is defined negatively by his collection. His representation as a decadent, criminal monster is inspired by the dual heritage of the Victorian obsession with collecting and the literary tradition of collecting as a degenerate pastime. Teratology also shared a dual heritage of experimental science and popular fiction, much like Dexter’s own origins, which underwrite his monstrosity as a form of pathology and place him within a distinctly teratological framework. Born of both science and literature, Dexter becomes significant as a metaphor for the new science. The result of his dual heritage is that he is often unbelievable and obtuse, inconsistent and contradictory, seen most clearly in his role as teratologist and specimen. Dexter performs the role of teratology so well because he is constructed of oppositions and contradictions that produce a myriad of creative responses to those around him. For example, he is a merger of impressive beauty and extreme deformity: he is a handsome well-built man with only a torso and arms, having no bottom half. At once fascinating and diabolical, he occupies the contradictory position of teratological monstrosity. Taylor argues that Dexter’s contradictory character is essential to the progress of the plot while at the same time distinctly 14 Jonah Siegel, The Haunted Museum (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 32. 15 Ibid. 16 Paul Goetsch, ‘Uncanny Collectors and Collections in Late-Fictorian Fiction’, in Magical Objects: Things and Beyond, eds Elmar Schenkel and Stefan Welz (Berlin: Galda and Wilch, 2007), pp. 67–90 (p. 68).

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pathological, arguing that it gives him ‘a range of competing roles to play as agent in the narrative’.17 Indeed, he is described as ‘a mixture of the strangest and opposite qualities; at one time perfectly clear and reasonable […] at another breaking out into rhapsodies of the most outrageous kind, like a man in a state of delirium’ (pp. 199–200). Dexter’s pathology propels the narrative forward because it produces conflicting information that provides new leads and extends Valeria’s search for the truth beyond her limited comprehension. He becomes different characters in different psychological states, which determines Valeria’s progress and eventual success in finding the truth. Dexter’s contradictory nature can be seen most clearly in his personal interests. His tastes are mismatched, being described as both antiquated and new: in one scene he sits in his old and decrepit house enjoying modern delicacies, such as the truffle. Life and death are the novel’s main themes and the coexistence of old and new, life and decay are mirrored in Dexter’s house, which is surrounded by the foundations of brand new homes sprouting up along its dilapidated sides. Contradictions and oppositions extend into his character, which is continually defined anew, revealing the extent to which the reading techniques of teratology have influenced his depiction. During his first meeting with Valeria Dexter leaves the room for a moment and the latter remarks, upon his return, that he ‘appeared to have undergone a complete transformation’ from their introduction (p. 208). During the interview Dexter plays with the notion of a stable identity, representing the possibility of surrendering to the imagination and reinterpreting oneself using the people and objects around one. Valeria has already expressed an interest in such role-play when she dresses up as a society beauty to help her charm the truth out of Major Fitz-David. On approaching his house she reflects, ‘I seemed in some strange way to have lost my ordinary identity – to have stepped out of my own character’ (pp. 57–58). Such actions liberate Valeria, who learns to play the parts of the doting wife, the cynical detective and the society beauty at different stages in the novel. She is attracted to Dexter’s ability to reinvent and reinterpret himself, and during the investigation she mirrors his behaviour by adopting different roles in an attempt to discover the truth. Dexter also resides in borderlands between medical classifications, and this is demonstrated by a doctor’s report that is submitted to the judge in support of Dexter’s evidence. He writes that Dexter is mentally positioned somewhere between self-awareness and 17 Taylor, Secret Theatre, p. 221.

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madness: ‘it as my opinion that there is undoubtedly latent insanity in this case, but that no active symptoms of madness have presented themselves as yet’ (p. 281). He then clarifies his diagnosis: That he will end in madness (if he lives), I entertain little or no doubt. The question of when the madness will show itself depends entirely on the state of his health. His nervous system is highly sensitive, and there are signs that his way of life has already damaged it. […] If he persists in his present way of life – or, in other words, if further mischief occur to that sensitive nervous system – his lapse into insanity must infallibly take place when the mischief has reached its culminating point. Without warning to himself or to others, the whole mental structure will give way; and, at a moment’s notice, while he is acting as quietly or speaking as intelligently as at his best time, the man will drop (if I may use the expression) into madness or idiocy. (pp. 281–82)

The diagnosis of ‘latent insanity’ refuses to confirm whether Dexter is sane or insane by positioning him somewhere in between. His insanity is present but it lies dormant, hidden in sanity until circumstances are suitable in which it can fully manifest itself, encouraging Taylor to argue that Dexter’s madness ‘both deconstructs and reinforces competing perceptions and definitions of insanity’.18 The unpredictability of his descent into madness places Dexter in a realm between health and illness with the power to choose his fate depending on his lifestyle. Dexter is given agency over his mental and physical health, being able to decide whether he is eventually classified as sane or insane. His time spent in the borderland between sane and insane is, by definition, indeterminate and shifting, with the potential of being either one of two conflicting states. His position on the borders of illness and his ability to manipulate his own diagnosis shows how he is capable of deconstructing medical terminologies and reconfiguring them on his own terms. Dexter is a monster, a phenomenon whose function it is to transgress boundaries and confuse certain modes of thought. He is an interrogator of false ideologies and a site for multiple and disturbing responses. Indeed, Dexter delights in transgressing the boundaries of social and scientific conventions. As Mary Rosner argues, he raises ‘questions about the ability of any labels to adequately describe life’.19 He operates like a teratological specimen by simultaneously identifying the possibilities and the contradictions of medical definitions, drawing attention to the weaknesses of scientific discourses that attempt to define him. 18 Taylor, Secret Theatre, p. 224. 19 Rosner, ‘Deviance’, p. 13.

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Dexter’s continual shifting between identities is reinforced by his role as a storyteller, and he introduces the reader to many different worlds and narratives through his collection of strange objects. As Karin Jacobson argues, ‘he believes everything is a story; that all representations are subject to revision’, and as such, he continually reinterprets the world depending on the context he finds himself in.20 Dexter’s imaginings of the world are hysterical and potentially violent, so much so that he writes a note to Mrs Macallan and Valeria warning them not to enter his rooms because his imagination is so powerful that he could not guarantee their safety: ‘NOTICE. – My immense imagination is at work. Visions of heroes unroll themselves before me. I reanimate in myself the spirits of the departed great. My brains are boiling in my head. Any persons who disturb me, under existing circumstances, will do it at the peril of their lives. – DEXTER’ (p. 204). Dexter’s letter offers an insight into his experience of his own imagination, believing his daydreams and role-play to be so powerful that they are capable of causing him to murder or injure those who witness them. His body becomes enslaved to his powers of interpretation as they dominate his entire being and control his actions. His interpretive episodes prove to be at once terrible and enthralling to both Valeria and Mrs Macallan as they ignore his warning and enter his rooms to witness his new version of events for themselves. They stand transfixed as his whole being is dominated by the intensity of his interpretation of the world, watching him ‘zoom’ and ‘whizz’ across his rooms in his wheelchair. Dexter’s ability to lose any sense of self in his imaginings extends to those around him, as he proves capable of captivating others with his imaginative interpretations of life, confessing to Valeria: The dormant intelligence of my curious cousin is like the dormant sound in a musical instrument. I play upon it – and it answers to my touch. She likes being played upon. But her great delight is to hear me tell a story. I puzzle her to the verge of distraction; and the more I confuse her the better she likes the story. (pp. 212–13)

Dexter tells of his ability to manipulate the minds of others through storytelling and describes how his cousin invests in his readings to such an extent that she acts out his retellings for his amusement. Dexter 20 Karin Jacobson, ‘Plain Faces, Weird Cases: Domesticating the Law in Collins’s The Law and The Lady and the Trial of Madeleine Smith’, in Reality’s Dark Light: The Sensational Wilkie Collins, eds Maria K. Bachman and Don Richard Cox (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2003), pp. 283–312 (pp. 303–04).

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attempts to manipulate Valeria’s mind the same way by distracting her with convoluted theories and wild accusations of others, but, unlike Ariel, she does not just want to listen to his story; she wants to interpret it as well, admitting ‘little by little I found myself trying to fathom what was darkly passing in this strange man’s mind’ (p. 214). Interrogating Dexter’s truths by applying knowledge about his personal history and investigating his theories, Valeria manages to resist his manipulation through counter interpretation of his version of events. In the scenes following her first interview, Valeria begins to shift the power relationship by playing the role of the teratologist and reading Dexter like a specimen. The importance placed on reading the monstrous body in teratological investigations emphasises Dexter’s position as a storyteller and helps us to understand the role his collection plays in his characterisation. The process of continual interpretation was integral to the methodology of teratology, but similar approaches could also be seen in wider Victorian culture. Paul Goetsch has observed that the late Victorians turned their attention from the objects themselves to the relationship between the collector and his objects to help explain aspects of character. Dexter’s personality traits are accentuated and defined by the objects in his collection. His rare and obscure objects amplify his decadent nature: he acts, paints and writes poetry, he plays the harp and does needlework, cooks with only the finest and rare ingredients, and wears the most decadent and beautiful clothes and jewellery; he combs perfume through his beard, sings and decorates his house with exotic and curious objects. He is surrounded by all manner of things, the most rare and decadent of the age, accentuating his position as a rare and decadent individual, distinctive in body and mind. Dexter is presented as a text, a monster to be read, with his meaning continually redefined by the objects associated with him. Dexter cannot be read alone, but is partly constructed by the objects that surround him and the other discourses they introduce, which contextualise him in further ways. Aware of his role as a continually interpreted text, he rolls his chair about his rooms screaming, ‘I am Napoleon, at the sunrise of Austerlitz! […] I am Nelson! […] I am Shakespeare!’21 Valeria witnesses how different personalities combine to create a constantly rearticulated character and she realises the possibility that in the right situation Dexter could transform into a reliable witness and reveal the truth about Eustace. 21 Jacobson, ‘Plain Faces’, p. 304.

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Interestingly, complex scientific networks of communication, including teratology, were of such interest to Collins that Taylor describes them as a typical novelistic trait of his: Collins’s dissension from dominant contemporary psychological, biological and social theory becomes, in a curious way, an appropriation of, and adaptation to it […;] this took place in an ideological context that increasingly drew on biological and organicist ideas less as a conceptual metaphor or analogue, more as a direct model wherein the social became collapsed into the biological.22

His pursuit of tensions between dominant and alternative biological theories that helped shape alternative identities are likely to have led Collins to teratology, a discourse which appealed to his interests in antagonising dominant modes of thought. However, instead of using teratology to challenge established medical doctrines, it was embodied in the degenerate Dexter. Rather than offering a hopeful teratological world view, Dexter is unable to escape his pathology. Collins’s exploration into less dominant cultures and discourses to interrogate social systems encouraged U. C. Knoepflmacher to claim that ‘Collins never disguised his fascination with the amorality of the counterworld’, the counterworld being alternative discourses that provoked hostility from the dominant moral commentators of the age.23 Indeed, Collins’s insistence of the amorality of counterworlds helped define a style which later became decadence, directly connecting Dexter with later depictions of monstrosity by Oscar Wilde and J. K. Huysmans. Dexter is a convoluted character who undergoes repeated interpretations and has his story continually revised throughout the novel. Despite his inconsistency, he proves himself the most knowledgeable of all the characters, holding the secret of Sara’s suicide after having hidden the evidence in a dust heap until it is recovered by Valeria. At the end of the novel it is Dexter’s revelation (that Sara found him repulsive) that finally clears Eustace of the Scotch verdict and causes his own mental collapse and premature death; without Dexter’s sacrificial confession all other characters would have remained in ignorance of the truth. Dexter proves that the monster holds the truth of its own creation and repeated scrutiny will reveal it to the world. 22 Taylor, Secret Theatre, pp. 211–12. 23 U. C. Knoepflmacher, ‘The Counterworld of Victorian Fiction and The Woman in White’, in The Worlds of Victorian Fiction, ed. Jerome Hamilton Buckley (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 351–70 (p. 360).

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As a storyteller, Dexter shows himself to be more than just a specimen and he struggles under Valeria’s ‘experiments’, causing him to eventually enter into a battle over the truth by providing alternative theories. Dexter is also a curator of his own collection and is therefore able to surround himself with objects that amplify his interpretative power. He is able to control those close to him by creating new worlds through the strength of his interpretation of the evidence, mirroring the techniques of reading used in teratology. Even after his death, his story continues to haunt Valeria as Dexter shows himself to be part of a wider network of teratological materiality that evolves and changes but does not die.

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‘Intellectual suicides’ The Man of Letters in Middlemarch Christine Crockett Sharp The Man of Letters ‘No sonneteer had insisted on Mr. Casaubon’s leaving a copy of himself; moreover, he had not yet succeeded in issuing copies of his mythological key, but he had always intended to acquit himself by marriage’.1 ‘A learned author has said that one must choose between leaving to posterity works of genius or children’.2

While the purposes and modes of George Eliot’s medically minded novel Middlemarch and Francis Cooke’s diatribe against non-normative sexualities, quoted above, are otherwise diametrically opposed, they do intersect at an intriguing juncture; namely, their interest in the properly functioning, reproductively oriented male body and what that body bequeaths to its community. In sonnet four, Shakespeare – the ‘sonneteer’ referenced above – attempts to persuade the reader that a male’s obligation to himself as to nature is to reproduce: ‘Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend/ Upon thy self thy beauty’s legacy?’ (lines 1–2), asks the narrator of his young male reader.3 Although 1 George Eliot, Middlemarch (New York: Penguin, 1981). Subsequent references to this edition will be given in the text. 2 Francis Cooke, Satan in Society (Chicago: Goodman & Co., 1873). 3 In her Middlemarch notebooks, George Eliot describes these sonnets as a ‘wearisome series about leaving posterity’. See George Eliot’s Middlemarch

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the Oxford English Dictionary cites Samuel Pepys’ diary of 1662 as the earliest reference to the term ‘spend’, used as a verb meaning to orgasm or ejaculate, there nonetheless seems to be an undercurrent of erotic implication present in Shakespeare’s reference to the young man’s self-directed ‘spending’ in this sonnet.4 The autoerotic implications of the lines are heightened by subsequent euphemistic references to selfish sexual practices as ‘having traffic with thy self alone’, a habit which has the bad effect, the narrator chides, of misleading the young man: ‘Thou of thy self thy sweet self dost deceive’ (lines 10–11) declares the narrator, whose aim throughout is to encourage his reader to procreate rather than engage in the deceitful and temporary pleasures of selfish spending. As both authors’ gestures towards Shakespeare’s procreation sonnets suggest,5 what is at stake here is the (re)productive male body, one that should remain healthy in order to generate offspring. Of course, it is one’s will – the intellectual capacity of an individual to choose a course of action – that can dictate whether one has a healthy body to begin with and how that body is, ultimately, employed. What one ‘leave[s]’ behind, in other words, depends upon the successful exertion of one’s will to effectively produce children, those ‘cop[ies] of [one]self’ that the narrator of the sonnets so prizes. Victorian medical literature and novels are littered with references to males as progenitors and keepers of the future. Their bodies, it follows, should be kept in the best of health for, as the well-known physician William Acton declared in 1871, the same year that Eliot first begins publishing Middlemarch, ‘the power of reproduction or of generation constitutes the very essence of life … . This is the most important function of the whole vital economy of every living form.’6 Several hundred years after the publication of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the reading public is still being told by physicians such as Acton that it is nothing less than the individual’s God-given task Notebooks, a Transcription, eds John Clark Pratt and Victor A. Neufeldt (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1979), p. 212. 4 The OED cites Pepys’ diary entry of 7 September 1662 as follows: ‘I went up to her and played and talked with her and, God forgive me, did feel her; which I am much ashamed of, but I did no more, though I had so much a mind to it that I spent in my breeches.’ 5 A term used by Garrett Sullivan in ‘Voicing the Young Man: Memory, Forgetting, and Subjectivity in the Procreation Sonnets,’ in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Michael Schoenfeldt (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 331–42. 6 William Acton, The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs (Philadelphia, PA: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1871), p. 34.

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‘to live and impart life’.7 It is the young man’s health in particular that concerns this physician who, like the narrator of the sonnets, depends upon economic metaphor to illustrate the ultimate purpose of the (male) body. According to contemporary medical texts, the healthy male should avoid engagement in transgressive activities, including non-normative sexual practices such as autoeroticism – an act to which Acton devotes much of his attention and which I shall explore shortly – or he would diminish his sexual abilities and, by extension, endanger his overall physical health and the health of potential offspring. As such, the proper husbandry of a male’s reproductive fluids and energies becomes an especially prominent target for medical interest and intervention from the eighteenth century onwards.8 Part of this history involved greater attention to the practice – or, in contemporary terms, the vice – of masturbation. The significance of autoerotic discourse to Western constructions of the idealised male body cannot be underestimated, and the phenomenon has been examined by cultural historians such as G. J. Barker-Benfield and Thomas Laqueur, among others, who, following Michel Foucault, have contextualised the history of the body as it relates to the ‘four great strategic unities’ proposed in The History of Sexuality (1976).9 Their early excavations into medical studies have paved the way for recent explorations of male health and the discourse of nationhood.10 Barker-Benefield forwards a reading of anti-masturbation texts that privileges what he calls a 7 Acton, Functions and Disorders, p. 34. As I explain later in the essay, Eliot was familiar with many medical texts, owing to the medical practice and library of her long-time partner, George Henry Lewes. See William Baker, The George Eliot–George Henry Lewes Library: An Annotated Catalogue of Their Books at Dr William’s Library (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1977). 8 See, for instance, Robert Darby’s A Surgical Temptation: The Demonization of the Foreskin and the Rise of Circumcision in Britain (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005) as well as Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason: The Modern Foundations of Body and Soul (2003; London: Penguin, 2005), Thomas Laqueur, Solitary Sex (New York, NY: Zone Books, 2003), and Donald Hall, Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 9 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), p. 103. 10 For a particularly illuminating reading of male masturbation’s threat to unmake the healthy male body, consider Michael Strolberg’s ‘An Unmanly Vice: Self-Pollution, Anxiety, and the Body in the Eighteenth Century’, The Social History of Medicine, 13.1 (2000), pp. 1–21.

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‘spermatic economy’ of scarcity. ‘The deeper anxiety’, for western culture of the nineteenth century, according to Barker-Benefield, ‘was spermatic loss, together with its concomitant losses of will and of order’ (p. 49, italics added). As with Shakespeare’s extended metaphors of economic exchange in the sonnets, the notion of economic plenty and scarcity is a central metaphor used to understand and discuss masculinity during the Victorian age. Barker-Benefield believes that anti-masturbation texts such as Samuel Auguste Tissot’s groundbreaking Onanism (1766), which condemned autoerotic behaviour and advocated the eradication of the practice through careful readings of terrifying passages detailing the afflictions suffered by masturbators, speak to a larger cultural anxiety regarding a male’s finite (sexual) resources, which would be exhausted in the repetition of non (re)productive sexual acts such as masturbation.11 Laqueur counters that the so-called concern with a male’s limited generative resources instead reflects a deep concern with a seeming infinitude of male sexual energy: ‘The extreme nervousness about masturbation in this period’, he explains, ‘is precisely that it seemed to escape an economy of scarcity, because supply seemed endless and limited only by the imagination.’12 More than anything, it was the imagination that most captivated and concerned medical writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Whether or not his sexual energies were infinite, the opportunity for imaginative excess was a reality that, according to contemporary accounts of health and disease, threatened to destroy a normally hale and healthy body. Medical writers soon began to consider the masturbator and the so-called ‘man of letters’ in much the same light: the masturbator, like the man of letters, had a propensity to indulge in imaginative excess, an excess that was identified as the root cause for a wide range of male maladies. In this paper, I contend that representations of male bodies in Victorian novels are shaped by the cultural pressure exerted by the masturbator figure, whose exploits and maladies were dissected and detailed by medical writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. My examination of George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch complicates critical accounts of masculine debility and physical illness in the Victorian era by considering the ways in which the sexual act of masturbation came 11 G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Horrors of the Half-Known Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1976). 12 Thomas Laqueur, ‘Masturbation, Credit, and the Novel During the Long Eighteenth Century’, Qui Parle, 8.2 (Spring/Summer 1995), pp. 1–19 (p. 6).

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to be understood as the product of a diseased will, which, in turn, was cited as the culprit behind masculine maladies, especially those related to reproductive health. Representations of masculinity in both medical literature and the novel suggest that one’s disordered will would, if indulged, disable a once healthy male body. I suggest that Eliot’s character Casaubon is a solitary scholar who disables himself through the willful pursuit of autoerotic activities. Ultimately, the representation of Casaubon’s wasting illness and eventual death reinforces medical narratives that held men responsible for their own maladies. ‘[F]ilthy Commerce with ones self’:13 The Masturbating Miser The townsfolk of Eliot’s novel keep a morbid watch over Casaubon’s progress. On several occasions Mr Brooke, Sir James, Mrs Caldwaller and even the town rector observe his failing health. The town gossips also closely monitor yet another character whom the townsfolk breathlessly expect to die: the wealthy, stubborn and miserly Peter Featherstone. The bitter and bedridden old man physically and verbally abuses not only Mary Garth, his young nurse, but anyone who dares to enter his darksome bedchamber. In his zeal to confound family members, whom he believes care only for his wealth, Featherstone had created two wills and, in one final bid to outwit his avaricious relations, attempts on his deathbed to have the wills switched in favour of Fred Vincy, Mary’s suitor. Featherstone’s wishes are thwarted by Mary’s canny understanding of his projected plot and he ends his life much like he lived it, ‘with his right hand clasping the keys and his left hand lying on the heap of notes and gold’ (p. 312). Tellingly, his futile and selfish attempt, even in death, to retain possession of his precious ‘keys’ is analogous to Casaubon’s single-minded pursuit of his life’s study, what he calls the Key to All Mythologies. Indeed, Featherstone himself serves as a medical case study in miserly disability; his solipsistic pursuit of wealth and revenge is the key to unlocking Casaubon’s character. Featherstone is marked by his grasping, miserly and misanthropic nature, and his broken body, ravaged by the effects of dropsy, serves as a physical manifestation of his misdirected desires. Importantly, 13 Henry Maudsley, Body and Mind: An Inquiry into the Connection and Mutual Influence, Specially in Reference to Mental Disorders (New York: Appleton, 1871), p. 78.

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Featherstone the miser, as is the case with this type generally, represents a wasted and fruitless life. Both his pathetic life and his meaningless death are a comment upon self-centredness in general, an egoism that manifests itself when Featherstone fondles his lucre. When Featherstone is not tormenting his relatives by alternately pledging and then retracting his inheritance, he is fingering either his gold-topped walking stick, the keys to an iron chest or the coins stored therein. Before he is temporarily incapacitated by a ‘severe fit of coughing’, for instance, he suggestively ‘rub[s] the gold knob of his stick’ in a metaphorical reference to the habit of self-abuse (pp. 107, 105).14 Later, while on his deathbed, he pleads with Mary to unlock the chest that holds his second will, a request that she repeatedly refuses to accommodate. Throughout the ordeal, Featherstone remains fixated on the physical representation of his hoarded wealth: ‘Mary hears him rattling his bunch of keys against the tin box’ and, after selecting the appropriate key, Featherstone ‘unlocked the box, and drawing from it another key, looked straight at her’ (p. 308). The self-centred nature of his desires, combined with the physical rubbing and touching of the phallic keys, the signifiers of his wealth, suggest that Featherstone’s miserly nature is analogous to autoerotic behaviour. His obsession with wealth can be read as a metaphorical reference to the kinds of obsessive behaviour attributed to masturbators by medical texts of the Victorian age. For the Victorians, money itself, as Anne McClintock elucidates in Imperial Leather (1995), becomes increasingly associated with dirt and with non-heteronormative sexual practices and, by extension, such sexual behaviour is determined to lack value. Indeed, according to McClintock, Dirty sex – masturbation, prostitution, lesbian and gay sexuality, the host of Victorian ‘perversions’ – transgressed the libidinal economy of male-controlled, heterosexual reproduction within monogamous marital relations (clean sex that has value). Likewise, ‘dirty’ money – associated with prostitutes, Jews, gamblers, thieves – transgressed the fiscal economy of the male-dominated, market exchange (clean money that has value).15 14 Featherstone’s behaviour is an example of what William Cohen calls ‘signifying practices’, or techniques including ‘periphrasis, euphemism, and indirection’ that novelists employed in order to covertly represent eroticism in their texts. See Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 32. 15 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 154. In Onanism, for instance, Tissot refers to masturbation as ‘filthy meditations’ (p. 75), blaming ‘unclean thoughts’

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By hoarding his money rather than engaging in ‘market exchange’, and by refusing to enter the ‘libidinal economy of male-controlled, heterosexual reproduction within monogamous marital relations’ that McClintock identifies above, Featherstone’s behaviour and ultimate lack of progeny is doubly masturbatory and absolutely filthy. Indeed, nearly 150 years before Eliot published Middlemarch, autoeroticism is described in Onania (c.1712) – the first English-language text to claim that masturbation is a vice – as ‘that filthy Commerce with ones self [sic]’.16 In 1871, the same year that Eliot publishes the first instalments of the novel, physician William Acton, whose influential medical texts could be found on George Henry Lewes’ bookshelves, warns his readers of the dangers masturbation poses to individuals and to society.17 What he describes as a ‘degrading practice’18 and a ‘debasing habit’19 so weakens the male reproductive system that ‘the violated body becomes unable to contain its treasure’.20 We see in both medical texts that a male’s value could be determined, in part, by his ability to successfully reproduce viable offspring, a cultural conceit that had gained in strength with the rising popularity of medical discourse.21 (p. 76) as the culprit behind autoerotic behaviour, and, in one case study, a young man laments that masturbation has given him a ‘filthy soul’ (p. 79). Onania, the precursor to Tissot’s treatise, describes masturbation using similar rhetoric; it is often described as a ‘filthy practice’, and in one hyperbolic instance a ‘filthy and abominable practice’ (p. 39). In 1835 and again when it is republished in 1840 and in 1856, physician S. B. Woodward, the author of Hints to the Young in Relation to the Health of Body and Mind, remarks that masturbation is a vice that ‘transforms its victim to a filthy and disgusting reptile’ (p. 7). See Samuel Auguste David Tissot, Onanism: or, a Treatise upon the Disorders produced by Masturbation: or, the Dangerous Effects of Secret and Excessive Venery, trans. A. Hume (1766; New York: Garland Publishing, 1985); Onania; or the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution and A Supplement to the Onania (c.1712; New York: Garland Publishing, 1986); S. B. Woodward, Hints to the Young in Relation to the Health of Body and Mind (Boston, MA: Jewett, Proctor, & Worthington, 1856). 16 Onania, A Supplement to the Onania, title page. Thomas Laqueur explains, in Solitary Sex, that, given the absence of an actual first edition, we can estimate the date of first publication as in or around 1712. 17 See Baker, The George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Library. 18 Acton, Functions and Disorders, p. 35. 19 Acton, Functions and Disorders, p. 37. 20 Acton, Functions and Disorders, p. 35. 21 Thomas Laqueur explores eighteenth-century representations of ‘spermatic economy’ in his excellent piece ‘Masturbation, Credit, and the Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century.’ Laqueur posits that medical texts of the eighteenth

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If dirty money and dirty sex are dirty because they are not part of the economic exchange of empire, then perhaps Featherstone’s greatest failing is that he has taken himself out of circulation by refusing to take part in the heterosexually oriented ‘libidinal economy’, which, as McClintock reminds her readers, is associated with clean or valuable (reproductive) sex. Featherstone is characterised by his desire to accumulate rather than circulate. His parasitical relatives are familiar with, and would like to benefit from, Featherstone’s driving ‘maxim … that money was a good egg and should be laid in a warm nest’ (p. 296). However, this particular nest-egg was never meant to produce viable offspring. In keeping with his surname, Featherstone produces nothing more than a lifeless rock, with the possible underlying suggestion that his ‘stones’ – or reproductive organs – are dysfunctional. He merely feathers his nest, remaining unwilling – or unable – to fill it with offspring. On his deathbed, Featherstone attempts to enlist Mary’s help to undertake his final act: he tells Mary that he has created two official wills and he implies that he wants to switch them in order to leave his entire estate not to a family member but to Fred Vincy, Mary’s suitor. Mary refuses to cooperate, fearing that her own future will be tainted by legal disputes were she to take part in Featherstone’s rash scheme to outwit his family one last time. Featherstone’s own will – both his last will and testament and his ability to actively choose what happens to his accumulated wealth – has become impotent. ‘Shan’t I do as I like at the last?’ he exclaims, when Mary first refuses to assist him, ‘I made two wills on purpose’ (p. 309). ‘I shall do as I like’, he weakly insists, as all the while Mary resists the old man’s desire to thwart the wills of others even while he desperately attempts to assert his own. In one final attempt to force Mary to reveal his preferred last will and testament, ‘[h]e lifted the stick … and threw it with a hard effort which was but impotence’ (p. 311). His final defining act in life confirms him physically impotent: his persistent and destructive greed, as manifested by his habitual fingering of his gold, has been his undoing, and he dies in his habitual pose: clutching the key to his safe and the pile of gold he had hoarded century ‘belie a fundamental tension inherent in trying to construe onanism [autoeroticism] within an economy of scarcity – of semen, of nervous energy, of money – when the danger lay in an economy of surfeit’ (p. 8). By Eliot’s time, medical texts appear to have adopted a more complex theory regarding spermatic (dis)functions: it is not entirely whether spermatic fluids are hoarded so much as how they are ‘spent’ and whether the product of such expenditure is valuable that appears to concern nineteenth-century medical writers.

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within it. Acton reasons that ‘[i]t is a solemn truth that the sovereignty of the will, or in other words, the command of the man over himself and his outward circumstances, is a matter of habit’.22 In this case, Featherstone’s habits have disabled him, divesting him of his will – both his last will and testament and, more importantly, his capacity to make what he desires happen, even when opposed by a mere young, female servant. The only sovereign that has mattered to him has been the coin he has obsessively collected, and his impulse to withdraw himself from social intercourse in favour of the solipsistic activity of collecting speaks not to a strong will but, instead, conforms to contemporary medical theory: such behaviour leads to the very worst end imaginable, especially for men – the very undoing of his ability to exert his will. ‘Filthy Meditations’:23 The Diseased Man of Letters In 1768 the respected physician Samuel August Tissot published a study into the diseases that afflict male scholars. In An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Literary and Sedentary Persons Tissot directs the reader to consider those scholars ‘who dwell too long upon one and the same thought’ and who thereby are more susceptible to disease.24 Their illnesses result from ‘one part of the sensorium being longer stretch’d than the rest, without being ever reliev’d by the others in their turn’, and consequently their bodies and minds are ‘the sooner broke’.25 What such ‘abstracted students’ dwell upon for obscene amounts of time are ‘books, manuscripts, coins, monuments’ (italics added), objects that ‘stretch’ only one part of their minds without allowing for the relief other topics would offer. Such physiological descriptors used to catalogue psychic debility echo extensive references in the history of medical texts that sought to combat the so-called ‘solitary vice’ by terrifying readers with dramatic accounts of masturbators who had wasted away by indulging in solitary sex.26 The ‘sensorium’ referred to by Tissot represents the combined concepts of the brain as an organ of sensory input. The health of this 22 Acton, Functions and Disorders, p. 68. 23 Samuel Auguste David Tissot, An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Literary and Sedentary Persons (London, 1768), p. 75. 24 Tissot, Diseases, p. 30. 25 Tissot, Diseases, p. 30. 26 The anonymous author of Onania declares masturbation to be a form of suicide, for instance.

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important organ depended upon the sanitary exertion of an individual’s will. Central to Tissot’s understanding was the ability of an individual to use his or her will to make reasonable and moral decisions. Thus, Tissot’s extended metaphor of excessive and single-minded study was meant to depict the mental ravages one would experience by indulging in such solitary pursuits. Throughout his examination of the dangers of sedentary literary endeavours, Tissot explicitly links mental exhaustion and eventual debility to the physical health of the body. According to Tissot, the scholar faces the additional complication that his pursuits demand extensive mental exercise at the expense of his physical well-being. ‘[B]y inaction, and the want of bodily exercise’, Tissot elaborates, this ‘species of men … emaciate and inflict austerities upon themselves.’27 The kind of study that precludes the healthful exercise of the body, in other words, is a form of self-abuse; such scholars, a ‘species’ unto themselves, ‘inflict austerities upon themselves’ and thereby disable themselves by perversely and wilfully pursuing their scholarly interests. Tissot had first explored the ‘man of letters’ in Onanism (1766), the medical treatise which, according to historians Jean Stengers and Anne Van Neck, incited the masturbation panic that was to grip much of Europe throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.28 Both masturbators and men of letters, Tissot argues, mentally and physically abuse themselves by focusing too intently upon one subject. To allow reason to be overtaken by flights of imaginative fancy is problematic, for, as Tissot explains: The masturbator, entirely devoted to his filthy meditations, is subject to the same disorders as the man of letters, who fixes his attention upon a single question … the consequences of which are such a continued motion in the part as cannot be stopt, or such a fixed attention, that the idea cannot be changed: this is the case with masturbators; or else an incapacity to act at all. Although exhausted by perpetual fatigue, they are seized with all the disorders incident to the brain, melancholy, catalepsy, epilepsy, imbecility, the loss of sensation, weakness of the nervous system, and a variety of similar disorders.29

Notice the insistent attention Tissot devotes to the intimate connection between mental exhaustion and physical debility. The ‘part’ that is 27 Tissot, Diseases, p. 36. 28 Jean Stengers and Anne Van Neck, Masturbation: The History of a Great Terror, trans. Kathryn A. Hoffmann (New York: Palgrave, 2001). 29 Tissot, Diseases, p. 75.

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abused could refer either to the subject’s genitals or to a portion of his mind – indeed, it seems not to matter which ‘part’ is involved here. According to Tissot, the brain itself, like a muscle, can experience virtual atrophy from excessive (ab)use. He is especially concerned with the decay of the mind, which he figures as a catalyst for diseases of will – ‘catalepsy’, ‘epilepsy’ and ‘imbecility’ can disable bodies and minds that lack direction and control – maladies that lead to an absolute ‘incapacity to act at all’. The incapacitation he fears most is both physical and psychic in nature, the one tied to the other. Ultimately, to be without will is perhaps the most horrific result of these self-absorbed practices. For the male patient, such incapacity was ultimately linked to gendered expectations regarding propagation and the success of eventual offspring.30 If medical texts are any indication of the cultural fascination with male reproductive capacities, then for a man to lose control of his reproductive functions was (and perhaps remains) the most horrifying of fates. Generative diseases, as John Robertson’s 1817 treatise on the reproductive illnesses of men and women suggests, had been on the minds of physicians and their patients for some time. The generative abilities of men concern him, in particular, for, there is no disease … which preys so much on the mind, as the protracted disappointment of one laboring under such complaints. The care-worn and chagrined countenance, and the haggard and emaciated body, proclaim, in language which cannot be misunderstood, the dreadful feelings of those who bear with them a consciousness of inability to propagate their species.31

In Robertson’s account, what appears to be the most problematic issue for such men is the fact that, like a visible infirmity or disability, their inability to function sexually is a ‘language’ that is expressed by their 30 While there is not room here to elaborate upon nationalist claims embedded in medical texts, it is worth noting that Acton argued not only for the emasculating properties of masturbation but also for the continental origins of the practice. Citing the infamous ‘dangerous substitute’ passage in Rousseau’s Confessions, where the author euphemistically refers to the repeated instances of masturbation which marked his adolescence, Acton claims that Rousseau’s ‘unmanliness, the pettish feminine temper and conceit … would make a hearty English lad shudder with disgust’ (Acton, Functions and Disorders, p. 100). 31 John Robertson, On the Generative System; Being an Anotomical and Physiological Sketch of the Parts of Generation and a Treatise on Their Disease (London: n.p., 1817), p. xxv.

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bodies, legible by any bystander and, therefore, a signifier of their ultimate failure as a male. Given such dramatic ramifications of generative illnesses, it is no surprise that medical writers sought to place blame for the failure of male reproductive systems upon habits which their patients had the responsibility to control. Often, sexual incontinence, or ‘spermatorrhoea’, was deemed the most horrific of ailments a male might experience. Worst still, a male might actually be responsible for his inability to control his reproductive functions: ‘The disease [spermatohorea] is most frequently caused by habits altogether contrary to the laws of nature’, laments Robertson; ‘to habituate ourselves to such practices, by working up the imagination, and creating artificial desires, is always injurious’. The practice of masturbation would ‘work up the imagination’ and was therefore often cited as the culprit behind a wide variety of physical and mental maladies. ‘[F]rom the commencement of the unfortunate habit of self-pollution, which is the most frequent cause of the disease, there is seldom any desire for sexual intercourse’ Robertson claims.32 Using the common euphemism ‘self-pollution’ to refer to autoeroticism, Robertson reinforces what his colleagues in the medical profession believed about maintaining health: that individuals were responsible for exerting their wills – in other words, controlling their bodies and minds in ways that would improve their well-being as well as their capacity to produce viable offspring. By the same token, indulging in self-destructive habits was figured as reprehensible behaviour; a kind of dirtying of the self for which only the individual was to blame. Ultimately, for a male patient, indulging in ‘self-pollution’ threatened his gender identity: ‘a repetition of these unmanly habits is preferred to natural connection’.33 By using the umbrella term ‘unmanly habits’ to describe such practices, Robertson leaves the door open to those who might consider any activity which ‘works up the imagination’ as self-destructive. Fifty years after Robertson’s ominous warnings, M. Lallemand, an anti-masturbation crusader best known for his Practical Treatise on the Causes, Symptoms and Treatment of Spermatorrhoea (1861), warns that a man’s sexual continence depended upon avoiding excess study: ‘literary men, artists, savans [sic], &c., by giving themselves up too ardently to the study which interests them are exposed to involuntary discharges’.34 32 Robertson, On the Generative System, p. 65. 33 Robertson, On the Generative System, p. 65. 34 M. Lallemand, A Practical Treatise on the Causes, Symptoms and Treatment of

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Likewise, when Acton attempts to trace the cause of spermatorrhoea, which he defines as the ‘state of enervation produced … by the loss of semen’, he identifies ‘[h]ard study … as predisposing to this condition’.35 The ‘enervation’ of his patients reminds us of the fearful loss of nerve often associated with emasculated bodies. His predecessor, Tissot, had likewise identified the scholar as a subject of medical inquiry. Given the high risks run by men who pursued scholarly activities, Tissot posited that only those whose studies clearly benefited mankind should labour exclusively at their work. He cites as examples the works of Descartes, Newton and Montesquieu, philosophers whose devoted study had, in the medical doctor’s opinion, improved mankind’s lot. Those who, instead, waste their time are treated with derision by Tissot: ‘one makes a collection of common-place topicks, another embellishes such as are thread-bare, a third anxiously investigates matters of no utility, equally unmindful of the unprofitableness [sic] and danger of their pursuits’.36 Once again, this passage elucidates the metaphorical connection between economic production and bodily function: those whose pursuits are of ‘no utility’ or ‘unprofitable’ are in danger of destroying their own health and, by implication, the health of the nation. ‘[G]roping after his mouldy futilities’: Casaubon’s Solitary Scholarship The epigrammatic preface of Eliot’s fifth chapter includes a passage taken from Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) depicting the fate that awaits the student who cares more for his study than his health: ‘Hard students are commonly troubled with growts [sic], catarrhs, rheums, cachexia, bradypepsia, bad eyes, stone, and collick, crudities, oppilations, vertigo, winds, consumptions, and all such diseases as come by over-much sitting: they are most part lean, dray, ill-coloured … and all through immoderate pains and extraordinary studies’ (p. 43). As evidenced by the work of Tissot, Lallemand and Acton, published over a century after Burton’s work, the ailments of a scholar’s body are significant enough to remain a viable avenue for medical inquiry for generations. The epigraph reminds us of Casaubon’s bleak future, as charted by centuries of medical theory. The Burton selection also serves Spermatorrhoea (Philadelphia, PA: Blanchard & Lea, 1861), p. 291. 35 Acton, Functions and Disorders, p. 272. 36 Tissot, Diseases, p. 62.

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to cue us in to Dorothea’s delusion regarding her husband-to-be, who is initially described with ‘the spare form and the pale complexion which became a student’, an appearance which would be troubling for anyone familiar with medical texts (p. 18). His appearance disgusts Dorothea’s sister Celia and Dorothea’s would-be suitor Sir James, yet we learn that our idealistic heroine is, in fact, attracted to Casaubon precisely because he is the physical manifestation of the scholar type: ‘Here was something beyond the shallows of ladies’-school literature’, explains our narrator, whose subtle employment of intrusive narrative technique has the effect of mildly mocking Dorothea’s naiveté: ‘here was an modern Augustine who united the glories of doctor and saint’ (p. 26). Here, one might add, was a scholar who was bound to waste away in the manner thoroughly explored by medical writers, who might immediately diagnose Casaubon as an ailing ‘man of letters’. Given his scholarly identity, Casaubon is widely regarded as having wasted his young wife’s reproductive potential. The hot-blooded Sir James, who is repeatedly outraged that the youthful and (to him) vivacious Dorothea has allied herself to an older, less able man, is the embodiment of sexual energy and masculine vigour, whereas Casaubon appears to be less a man than he is the embodiment of studiousness. His blood itself seems, according to Mrs Cadwalader’s imagination, to be made up entirely of his work: ‘Somebody put a drop [of his blood] under a magnifying-glass’, she scoffs, ‘and it was all semicolons and parentheses … he dreams footnotes, and they run away with all his brains’ (p. 71). Interestingly, Mrs Cadwalader takes on the role of pseudo-physician here, seeing in Casaubon’s blood that he is not simply a sickly scholar whose every thought centres on his work: Casaubon is what he writes. Casaubon’s ability to reproduce is directly connected to the quality of his blood. A male’s reproductive fluids, by the medical standards of the time, were considered a highly refined form of a male’s blood, and thus Casaubon’s obsessive pursuit of scholarship ensures that he remains an outsider to an otherwise procreative – and, it follows, healthy – populace. Casaubon’s cousin Will Ladislaw – whose very name is a reminder that a properly oriented will is a healthful attribute for males – understands this to be the case. Will’s mental image of his single-minded cousin as a ‘dried-up pedant, [and] elaborator of small explanations’ reinforces the petty nature of Casaubon’s scholarship even as it marks him as physically enfeebled, or ‘dried-up’ by his pursuit. Will quite accurately envisions Casaubon ‘passing his honeymoon away from [Dorothea], groping after his mouldy futilities’. It is worth remembering that Eliot herself, the 77

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partner of medical scholar and philosopher George Henry Lewes, would have been familiar with medical literature that treated scholars as case studies in self-absorption with shades of autoeroticism.37 The suggestive ‘groping’ Casaubon engages in ‘stir[s Will] with a sort of comic disgust’ (p. 202). Those ‘mouldy futilities’ refer, of course, to the useless – ‘futile’ – ideas that Casaubon doggedly pursues, but they could well serve, given the models proposed by medical writers, as euphemisms for his useless reproductive organs. Like those masturbators who had sapped their vital energies and fluids, Casaubon is ‘dried-up’ as he engages in his impotent and plodding scholarship. In discussing Casaubon’s ‘intellectual labours’, the narrator uses language that approximates medical diagnosis to suggest that he is both physically and, to some extent, mentally incapacitated by his studies: [The] most characteristic result [of Casaubon’s labours] was not the Key to All Mythologies, but a morbid consciousness that others did not give him the place which he had not demonstrably merited – a perpetual suspicious conjecture that the views entertained of him were not to his advantage – a melancholy absence of passion in his efforts at achievement, and a passionate resistance to the confession that he had achieved nothing. (p. 406)

Casaubon’s scholarly directed ‘labours’ – the antithesis of the (re)productive labours expected of a newly married man – are reminiscent of medical texts’ depictions of masturbation as a purposeless sexual act; Casaubon has ‘achieved nothing’ here. His ‘morbid consciousness’, moreover, is a symptom of his underlying scholarly vanity, the morbidity of which saps him of energy. Importantly, the repetition of the term ‘consciousness’ emphasises Casaubon’s overdeveloped self-absorption, serving as a reminder of the self-directed autoerotic energies he expends upon his ‘Key’ and upon himself. The abuse he inflicts upon his psyche is owing to his paranoia regarding his own importance in a world of commerce that values reproductive generation over comparatively ‘futile’ and redundant academic production. Casaubon suffers from a debilitating 37 Eliot’s contribution to Lewes’s medical research, which he eventually published, and Eliot’s familiarity with Lewes’s medical library has been explored by literary historians such as William Baker, in his Catalogue of the Eliot–Lewes Library, and Diane Mason’s article ‘Latimer’s Complaint: Masturbation and Monomania in George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil’, Women’s Writing, 5.3 (1998), pp. 393–403. Mason claims, following Baker, that the Eliot–Lewes library included works related to autoeroticism and that the character Lattimer is an example of a monomaniacal masturbator figure.

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‘melancholy absence of passion’ interspersed with moments of ‘resistance’ to the reproductive economy that surrounds him. Featherstone’s slow demise, owing to his self-directed passions and grasping nature, is the key to understanding the bodily deterioration of Casaubon, whose scholarly endeavours culminate in a ‘fit’ suffered, fittingly, in the library. What the two men share is an inherent egoism, allegorised by their chosen pastimes: one collects gold, the other collects fragments of useless knowledge. Casaubon’s ‘Key’ is ultimately a virtual succubus, draining him of vital moisture and energy that would otherwise generate offspring and health. Acton, whose works could be found on the shelves of Eliot and Lewes’s library, had called masturbating scholars ‘intellectual suicides’,38 and his pithy expression nicely summarises the medical script that had been written for the (autoerotic) scholar. ‘[M]iserable wrecks at the last’:39 The Man of Letter’s Demise According to one critic, the Eliot–Lewes library included works by Tissot and Henry Maudsley, whose Body and Mind (1871) was published the same year that Eliot released the first instalments of Middlemarch. Maudsley’s text charts the purported progress of mental disorders that afflicted those who masturbated, yet medical narratives tracing masturbation to madness, disability and eventual death had captivated medical writers for over a century. Indeed, the concerns iterated by Tissot in the mid eighteenth century are repeated nearly verbatim by Maudsley, who insists that the form of mental derangement directly traceable to self-abuse has certainly characteristic features … . The patient becomes offensively egotistic and impracticable; he is full of self-feeling and self-conceit; insensible to the claims of others upon him, and of his duties to them; interested only in hypochondriacally watching his morbid sensations, and attending to his morbid feelings. His mental energy is sapped [… and he] spends his days in indolent and suspicious self-brooding … delusions spring up [… that] are the objective explanation, by wrong imagination, of the perverted feelings …. A later and worse stage is one of moody or vacant self-absorption, and of extreme loss of mental power … . They die miserable wrecks at the last.40 38 Acton, Functions and Disorders, p. 30. 39 Maudsley, Body and Mind, p. 78. 40 Maudsley, Body and Mind, pp. 77–78.

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Maudsley’s depiction of the self-abuser emphasises the solipsistic nature of the men who sap their precious energy by thinking of themselves alone; their excessive egoism is a symptom of their otherwise self-directed habits. Such a patient is, in Maudsley’s colourful depiction, ‘offensively egotistic’ and full of ‘self-conceit’ and ‘self-feeling’, a suggestive and thinly veiled reference to autoerotic practices. This patient is concerned only with his own body and desires, and ‘insensible’ to anything that would draw his attention from himself. Maudsley’s description of the masturbator is uncannily similar to the representation of Casaubon in the pages of Middlemarch. The narrator explains that Casaubon experiences little of the expansive emotions that are so integral to Dorothea’s makeup: ‘Mr Casaubon had never had a strong bodily frame, and his soul was … too languid to thrill out of self-consciousness into passionate delight’, we are told. His sentiments are described as permanently inward-looking: ‘that proud narrow sensitiveness which has not mass enough to spare for transformation into sympathy and quivers threadlike in small currents of self-preoccupation or at best of an egoistic scrupulosity’ (p. 273). Casaubon lacks the capacity to look outside of himself, and his mental drive is completely self-directed. What little bodily and mental strength Casaubon might harbour, in other words, is directed towards himself. His behaviour is true to Maudsley’s descriptions and thus Casaubon is dealt the apparently inevitable fate of dying a ‘miserable wreck’. The narrative of the sickly scholar who wastes away is so deeply ingrained in the popular imagination that, before the village doctor Lydgate diagnoses Casaubon, the questionably educated Mr Brooke associates Casaubon’s illness with scholarship: ‘Casaubon is a little pale, I tell him – a little pale, you know. Studying hard in his holidays is carrying it rather too far […] You may go any length in that sort of thing, and nothing may come of it, you know’ (p. 269). Each and every eye now evaluates the scholar’s progressive bodily decay, mimicking the searching eye of the physician. Brooke’s observation also prefigures Lydgate’s explanation to Casaubon himself: ‘the source of the illness’ Lydgate explains to Casaubon, after a fit of fainting, ‘was the common error of intellectual men – a too eager and monotonous application’ (p. 279). Notice, first, that this illness afflicts only ‘intellectual men’: that is, men whose lives are bound to, if not defined by, their intellect. Only these men indulge in the ‘monotonous’, single-minded pursuits that would consequently waste their bodies even as their minds (and writings) expand. Lydgate’s cursory glance at his patient walking in the garden, in this way, seems an almost self-fulfilling prophecy: ‘[Casaubon] showed 80

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more markedly than ever the signs of premature age – the student’s bent shoulders, the emaciated limbs, and the melancholy lines of the mouth’ (p. 410). It is not time that has bent Casaubon’s shoulders, or wasted his limbs, or brought sadness to his expression; rather, such symptoms belong to the fact that Casaubon is a ‘student’. He has brought about his own end through excessive study. Naturally, this narrative is not generated by only one source; medical texts, the popular imagination and fictional accounts are complicit in the creation of this storyline, and the sedimentation of such medical depictions explains the scholar’s bodily decay as well as his inevitable end. The narrator seems to stand firmly on the side of medical authorities, as demonstrated by the critical tone of much of the commentary regarding Casaubon. In one oft-cited passage, the grand scope of this critique is couched in sympathetic, but critical, terms: ‘For my part I am very sorry for him’, the narrator condescendingly laments. ‘It is an uneasy lot at best to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy; to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small, hungry, shivering self … always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dimsighted’ (pp. 273–74). Interestingly, the tell-tale inclusion of the term ‘dimsighted’ could quite well be a reference to the long history of medical texts that associated diminishing vision with autoerotic behaviour. Tissot claimed, for instance: A young man … having given way to masturbation [was …] seized with such a weakness in his head and eyes that the latter were frequently afflicted with violent spasms at the time of his seminal emissions. When he wanted to read any thing [sic], he was taken with such a kind of stupor, as intoxication creates: the pupil was very much dilated, and he suffered exquisite pains in his eyes: the lids were very heavy, and shut themselves at night: he was constantly shedding tears; and a great quantity of whitish matter gathered in the two corners of which were very painful.41

Like the scholar and masturbator depicted in Tissot’s work and countless other medical texts, Casaubon loses his ability to see, both literally – as his sight fails him – and figuratively, as he is blinded to the insignificance of his scholarship and the reason for his deteriorating marriage.42 Mr 41 Tissot, Onanism, p. 9. Italics added. 42 Tissot includes an explanation of the masturbator’s apocryphal failing eyesight in Onanism. Drawing upon earlier medical accounts, he proposes that the waste of seminal fluids experienced via the act of masturbation is to blame for failed vision. See Onanism, p. 8.

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Brooke, who claims to be up to speed with medical writings, worries, ‘[b]ut Casaubon’s eyes, now. I think he has hurt them a little with too much reading’ (p. 42), and Casaubon himself admits, in a characteristically hypochondriacal moment, ‘I find it necessary to use the utmost caution about my eyesight’ (p. 19). That ‘small, hungry, shivering self’ is the increasingly disabled body that fascinates Dorothea, the townspeople and doctors alike – a wasting body that manifests the popular fiction of the scholar’s demise. As with the countless case histories of ailing males featuring evidently predetermined outcomes, Casaubon’s declining health adheres to what appears to be an inevitable narrative pull. When Dorothea innocently muses, regarding scholars, that ‘it seems as if people were worn out on the way to great thoughts and can never enjoy them because they are too tired’ (p. 353), she gives voice to the paradox of the scholar’s position: to exist he must study and write; however, this wears upon his body and mind, which, in turn, makes him unfit for anything but studying and writing. He is trapped within a narrative he is powerless to alter; indeed, it is a narrative that gains strength even as his own wanes, a trajectory generated by the very energy which he expends upon his endless and useless scholarship. In his last moments, Casaubon remains devoted to the successful completion of his work. When Lydgate expresses his concern for Casaubon’s health, his patient can respond only with the language he understands – that which privileges his work over his own body: ‘I have long had on hand a work which I would fain leave behind me in such a state, at least, that it might be committed to the press by – others.’ He frets, intimating with the pause before ‘others’ that this unnamed person will, in fact, be his wife, whom he plans to burden (in her mind) with his endless (‘fruitless’) project. Casaubon has chosen, in other words, to leave behind him, in Cooke’s terms, ‘works of genius’ rather than living, healthy progeny. ‘Here Mr Casaubon paused, removed one hand from his back and thrust it between the buttons of his single-breasted coat’ (p. 411). As with Featherstone’s death early in the novel, Casaubon’s behaviour is eroticised in this scene: his mind is focused on his own ‘key’ and what Casaubon does with his hands matters. The suggestive ‘thrust’ of his hand towards his own body while he contemplates the ‘work’ he has ‘long had on hand’ is a physical reminder of his autoerotic malady. His scholarship is, in an important sense, a kind of self-love – or, rather, self-abuse – that kills. Casaubon represents a mode of masculinity that time seems to have passed by. By the time that Eliot wrote and published Middlemarch the 82

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man of letters has been successfully pathologised by medical literature and, therefore, no longer exists as a viable form of masculinity. During the mid-to-late nineteenth century, in other words, there is room only for men who are willing to actively pursue personal, social and economic projects of personal, and hence national, improvement. Will Ladislaw, a man caught between the ages, is virtual human driftwood for most of the novel and comes perilously close to becoming a wasted (dis-abled and therefore, by contemporary standards, useless) male body like his cousin Casaubon. However, his heteronormatively directed desire for Dorothea and his subsequent determination to divest himself of his cousin’s oppressive and forced benevolence seems to save him from Casaubon’s fate and instead propel him towards family life and a political career. Ultimately, the trajectory of Casaubon’s illness and death seems to reinforce the ideas presented in medical narratives – those case histories interspersed with medical commentary that charted the progression of diseases of all kinds. That Casaubon’s tale sticks closely to those charted by medical authorities, for both scholar and masturbator (who were often one and the same person), suggests an inherent believability in medical discourses regarding the diagnoses of ailing bodies and psyches, a reassuring repetition of a larger theory that readers may have wanted to believe: that one’s thoughts, feelings, symptoms and habits coalesced into a narrative that a doctor’s keen eyes could read and thus diagnose and treat. It would mean, in turn, that society increasingly needed, or perhaps even desired, medical authorities to lend meaning to the stories of the body. By the nineteenth century, medical texts had become a key conduit for tales of the male body and its health or disease, and this body comes to matter more urgently as it is increasingly depicted in medical texts as dysfunctional, broken, disabled or dying. The repeated focus paid to male reproductive health, in particular, as it determines the health of the nation, reasserts the importance of the male (white and middleclass) body to the culture of the nineteenth century. Thus the language of medical analysis becomes central to any discussion of manhood from the Enlightenment onward. In this way, Casaubon is part of a growing tradition of narratives that must play themselves out in order to solidify popular imaginings of masculinity otherwise plagued by instability and littered with impaired and broken male bodies.

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Wounded and Psychopathologised Bodies

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The Male Wound in Fin-de-Siècle Poetry Sarah Parker The Male Wound Few religious figures evoke as many decadent and homoerotic connotations as Saint Sebastian, the beautiful male martyr shot full of arrows by Roman soldiers for confessing his Christian faith. Depicted in countless Renaissance paintings – most notably by Guido Reni, who painted the subject seven times – he is generally portrayed as a swooning yet defiant youth, his lithe and muscular body pierced by arrows. Sebastian continues to have significance as a contemporary gay icon. From Derek Jarman’s film Sebastiane (1976) to male model Sebastien Moura on the cover of gay lifestyle magazine reFRESH (June/July 2007), Sebastian endures as the go-to saint for the homoerotic imaginary: ‘Refusing to take his place with the obsolete icons of earlier epochs, he has enhanced his position as the single most successfully deployed image of modern male gay identity.’1 To a lesser extent, Jesus Christ himself is also recognised as a ‘gay icon’. Gregory Woods notes that there is a ‘great body of devotional poetry, most of it written by men, which is identical in its conventions to secular love poetry, and differs from it only in the name of the beloved: Jesus Christ’.2 Ruth Vanita associates Christ with ‘perpetual virginity’ and ‘same-sex community’, arguing that this made him an inspiring ‘imaginary ancestor’ for homoerotically inclined Victorians of both sexes.3 1 Richard A. Kaye, ‘Losing his religion: Saint Sebastian as contemporary gay martyr’, Outlooks: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities and Visual Cultures, eds Peter Horne and Reina Lewis (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 86–108 (p. 87). 2 Gregory Woods, Articulate Flesh: Male Homoeroticism and Modern Poetry (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 43. 3 Ruth Vanita, Sappho and the Virgin Mary: Same-Sex Love and the English Literary Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 7.

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Admiration for both of these figures grew in intensity during the latter half of the nineteenth century as a significant body of writers drew on Biblical imagery in their decadent poems. Saint Sebastian and Christ appear frequently in the work of ‘Uranian’ writers such as Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde, John Gray, André Raffalovich and Baron Corvo (Frederick Rolfe).4 In this essay, I aim to examine why these figures appealed to late nineteenth-century writers by focusing on the male body and the symbolism of the wound. The wound – whether Jesus’ stigmata or Sebastian’s punctured flesh – becomes the locus for a number of oscillating desires expressed in fin-de-siècle writing, including male and female homoerotic desire and identification with the figure of the martyr. In fin-de-siècle poetry in particular, the wound is fetishised, symbolising an orifice into which the poet inserts their own desires. Before embarking on these readings, however, it is necessary to outline fin-de-siècle anxieties surrounding the male body – anxieties that were epitomised in the iconography of the male wound. In the last decade of the nineteenth century the male body became ripe for display, dissection and penetration by medical science. Max Nordau claimed degeneracy was located in man’s very flesh and could be detected by ‘stigmata’ such as harelips, webbed fingers and certain physiognomic traits.5 In addition to the ‘stigmata’ of the degenerate, the marks of syphilis haunted the late nineteenth-century imagination. As Elaine Showalter notes, the Victorian ‘iconography’ of syphilis relied on shocking images of the male body ‘inscribed’ with hideous skin disorders: ‘macules, papules, tubercules, pustules, blebs, tumors […] fissures, and scars’.6 The figure of Saint Sebastian is covertly linked to such anxieties. Before becoming better known as a homosexual icon, Sebastian was considered the patron saint of plague victims owing to 4 ‘Uranian’ was one term of many scientific terms used for male ‘sexual inversion’ (homosexuality) in the late nineteenth century. It was adapted from the word ‘urning’, used by the sexologist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. For more information, see the ‘Science’ section of Chris White’s Nineteenth-Century Writings on Homosexuality: A Sourcebook (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), particularly John Addington Symonds’s ‘A Problem in Modern Ethics’ (pp. 71–90 in White), which explains Ulrichs’s terms. 5 Max Nordau, Degeneration (London: William Heinemann, 1898), pp. 16–17. 6 Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (London: Virago, 1992), p. 193. See also Andrew Smith’s chapter on syphilis in Victorian Demons: Medicine, Masculinity, and the Gothic at the Fin-de-siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 95–117.

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‘the identification of puncturing arrows with the plague, which often did appear first as spots on the body’.7 Sebastian was associated with victims of ‘leprosy and syphilis […] because of his bleeding wounds’ and sufferers also identified with ‘the pocked sores of Christ’s dead body’.8 Ironically, syphilis was even linked to religious devotion itself: Victorians were warned that ‘kissing the crucifix in church held dangers’ as the disease could be passed on via oral contact.9 Syphilis was also connected to male homosexuality via tell-tale marks upon the body: ‘Lesions on mouth or anus were taken as evidence of “unnatural acts”.’10 In 1885 the Labouchère Amendment criminalised acts of ‘gross indecency’ between men without proof of sodomy. Meanwhile, sexological theories sought to classify the male invert or ‘Uranist’.11 Such studies often entailed the display and analysis of the body – for example, Magnus Hirschfeld’s photographs of naked members of the ‘intermediate’ sex were published in the Yearbook of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee.12 Saint Sebastian is therefore an appropriate icon for the literally and metaphorically penetrable male body in the late nineteenth century: ‘Like the nineteenth-century representation of the hystericized female, who provided a dramatically visualized conception of medical illness for physicians such as Jean-Martin Charcot, the body 7 Richard A. Kaye, ‘“A Splendid Readiness for Death”: T. S. Eliot, the Homosexual Cult of St. Sebastian, and World War I’, Modernism/Modernity, 6.2 (1999), pp. 107–34, n. 31. 8 Robert G. Calkins, Monuments of Medieval Art (New York: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 181. 9 Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, p. 193. 10 Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, p. 195. Examinations for sodomy also centred on the anus or mouth. For example, when, in 1870, Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park, the cross-dressing theatre performers known as ‘Stella’ and ‘Fanny’, were arrested on suspicion of sodomy, they were subjected to an anal examination. The police surgeon found that ‘their anuses were dilated to a considerable degree: “I have never seen anything like it before”, the shocked police surgeon, Mr James Paul, told the court’ (Neil McKenna, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde [London: Arrow Books, 2004], p. 107). 11 Such as Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), Marc-André Raffalovich, Uranisme et unisexualité (1896), Havelock Ellis, Sexual Inversion (1897). For more on sexology, see Lucy Bland and Laura Doan (eds), Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 12 For more on Hirschfeld’s photographs, see White, Nineteenth-Century Writings, p. 4.

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of St. Sebastian furnished a series of imagistically dynamic associations for the scientific conceptualization of the male homosexual’.13 Such religious icons also, of course, provided inspiration for homoerotically inclined Victorians themselves. Though, as Frederick Roden observes, the ‘general critical tendency [has been] to separate religious studies from sexuality’, in recent scholarship nineteenth-century religious discourses have been reassessed as facilitating the expression of desire for both men and women.14 Roman Catholicism in particular provided an enabling discourse for homoerotically inclined individuals at the end of the nineteenth century. The figures of Jesus Christ, John the Baptist and David and Jonathan became icons of male homoerotic desire, proving that the ‘argument that secular, classical historiography somehow supplanted Christianity in the articulation of homosexuality is a partial truth’.15 But the significant relationship between religion and homosexuality at the fin-de-siècle is most frequently embodied by Saint Sebastian: the quintessential symbol of decadence and homoeroticism, the ultimate religious muse. Along with Ancient Greek ‘boy lovers’ such as Antinous and Hyacinthus, Sebastian represents yet another manifestation of the adolescent boy, the figure whom Martha Vicinus designates the ‘fin-de-siècle femme fatale’: ‘this handsome liminal creature could absorb and reflect a variety of sexual desires and emotional needs […] his presence in fin-de-siècle literature signified the coming of age of the modern gay and lesbian sensibility: his protean nature displayed a double desire – to love a boy and to be a boy’.16 13 Richard A. Kaye, ‘“Determined Raptures”: St. Sebastian and the Victorian Discourse of Decadence’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 27.1 (1999), pp. 269–303 (p. 273). 14 Frederick Roden, Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 7. See, for example, Thaïs E. Morgan (ed.), Victorian Sages and Cultural Discourse: Renegotiating Gender and Power (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1990); Andrew Bradstock and Anne Hogan (eds), Women of Faith in Victorian Culture: Reassessing the Angel in the House (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998); Lowell Gallagher, Frederick S. Roden and Patricia Juliana Smith (eds), Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), and John Maynard, Victorian Discourses of Sexuality and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 15 Roden, Same-Sex Desire, p. 3. 16 Martha Vicinus, ‘The Adolescent Boy: Fin-de-Siècle Femme Fatale?’, in Victorian Sexual Dissidence, ed. Richard Dellamora (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 83–108 (pp. 83–84).

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Saint Sebastian’s frequent appearance in fin-de-siècle literature suggests that he was a particularly appealing figure for a nascent homosexual identity. Walter Pater named one of his Imaginary Portraits (1886) ‘Sebastian van Stork’ after the saint. The writer and aspiring priest Frederick Rolfe (Baron Corvo) celebrated Sebastian in two sonnets inspired by Guido Reni’s paintings (published in The Artist, June 1891), and also made reference to him in The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole (written 1909, published 1934). John Addington Symonds praised ‘the adolescent beauty of Sebastian’.17 Marc-André Raffalovich wrote of the Uranian’s devotion to his ‘young God, naked and bleeding […] wounding and wounded’.18 In Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1911), the writer Gustav Aschenbach favours heroes who exhibit an ‘ephebe-like masculinity that stands silent in proud shame, clenching its teeth while it is pierced with swords and spears […] the figure of St. Sebastian is its best symbol’.19 For such late nineteenth-century writers, looking at Sebastian was a multi-layered act: of desire for his beautiful, aesthetically perfect male body, and of identification with his sufferings, his outsider status and his religious conflict. Sebastian’s story combines a number of connotations that appealed to nascent homosexual identity during the late nineteenth century. He was said to been a favourite of the Emperor Diocletian, placing this relationship within the tradition of Platonic devotion between man and boy. Sebastian’s confession of his Christian faith also anticipates ‘modern sexual self-revelation’.20 Finally, the contradictory relationship between the pleasure of looking at Sebastian’s body and the evidence of pain, suffering and martyrdom it evokes also connects the saint to constructions of homoerotic desire in the late nineteenth century: the ‘love that dare not speak its name’ was at this time experienced as a painful suffering and, if discovered, was ruthlessly punished. For evidence of this punishment, we need only turn to Oscar Wilde. Wilde was a vocal admirer of Sebastian and identified with his martyrdom. In 1877 he holidayed in Greece and Italy and viewed Reni’s paintings of Sebastian in the Palazzo Rosso in Genoa. Shortly 17 John Addington Symonds, Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece (London: John Murray, 1914), p. 154. 18 Andre Rafflovich, Uranisme etc Unisexualite (1896), qtd. in Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 323. 19 Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Stories (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 205. 20 Kaye, ‘“A Splendid Readiness for Death”’, p. 114.

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after, he visited John Keats’s grave in Rome. This visit later inspired a sonnet which began: ‘The youngest of the martyrs here is lain, / Fair as Sebastian, and as early slain.’21 In a note accompanying this poem, Wilde explained that: As I stood beside the mean grave of this divine boy, I thought of him as a Priest of Beauty slain before his time; and the vision of Guido’s Saint Sebastian came before my eyes as I saw him at Genoa, a lovely brown boy, with crisp, clustering hair and red lips, bound by his evil enemies to a tree and, though pierced by arrows, raising his eyes with divine, impassioned gaze towards the Eternal Beauty of the opening heavens.22

Wilde, of course, was later to undergo his own martyrdom. In 1895 he was famously imprisoned on charges of gross indecency as a result of his love affair with Lord Alfred Douglas. In 1897, on being released from prison, where he had undertaken two years’ hard labour, Wilde adopted the name ‘Sebastian Melmoth’ – an amalgamation of his favourite saint with the protagonist of the gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer (1820).23 Through his sufferings, Wilde also came to identify with Jesus Christ, writing in De Profundis that ‘Christ’s place indeed is with the poets.’24 Wilde’s appreciation had its precursor in an earlier poet and priest: Gerard Manley Hopkins. Throughout his life, Hopkins struggled to resolve his homoerotic desires and poetic vocation with his ascetic religious beliefs. In 1868 he entered the Jesuit order and burnt his poems. He gave up poetry for seven years, before being moved to write The Wreck of the Deutschland (1875). But, while Hopkins’s conversion may be interpreted as an attempt to suppress his homoerotic desires, Richard Dellamora argues his religious vocation in fact ‘valorize[d] masculine desire by focusing it on Christ whilst folding Hopkins into a range of “safe”, male homosocial relations’.25 However, focusing on Christ did not 21 Oscar Wilde, ‘The Grave of Keats’ (1881), in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Volume One: Poems and Poems in Prose, eds Bobby Fong and Karl Beckson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 36. 22 Wilde, ‘Commentary on “The Grave of Keats”’, Complete Works: Volume One, p. 236. 23 The author Charles Maturin was, incidentally, Wilde’s great-uncle by marriage. 24 Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Volume Two: De Profundis and ‘Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis’, ed. Ian Small (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 174. 25 Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill, NC, and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), p. 47.

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subdue Hopkins’s physical desires. Writing of Hopkins’s ‘little bk. for sins’ kept between 1863–1865, Maureen Moran notes that: ‘the devout Hopkins associates perverse desire with the contemplation of bodies tortured for a religious cause: “Evil thought slightly in drawing made worse by drawing a crucified arm on same page,” or, even more directly blasphemous, “The evil thought in writing on our Lord’s passion”’.26 Hopkins’ religious convictions, embodied in the crucified Christ, did not offer an escape from his desires, but instead brought him closer to the tempting male body: ‘Christ’s crucifixion […] represented the most affective reproof to his sinful condition but simultaneously provoked in him the sin which he most insistently attempted to subdue.’27 The Decadent poet John Gray underwent a strikingly similar transformation to Hopkins’. Born in a working-class family, Gray worked as a librarian in the Foreign Office. He formed an influential circle of friends who were members of the Decadent movement, including the poet Ernest Dowson, the artist Aubrey Beardsley and, most famously, Wilde. Wilde and Gray enjoyed a brief, passionate relationship, and Wilde was rumoured to have based the character of ‘Dorian Gray’ on this extraordinarily beautiful young man. Gray rose to become one of the most celebrated and notorious poets of his generation owing to the publication of his first volume, Silverpoints (1893). This tall, thin volume – an iconic example of the fin-de-siècle ‘beautiful book’ – contained 13 translations from French Symbolist poets including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire, and 15 original lyrics. As Joseph Bristow observes: ‘hardly any other collection of poetry from the fin de siècle rivals the preciosity of Silverpoints’.28 Around the time of Wilde’s trial in 1895 Gray experienced a spiritual crisis that led to his re-entering the Catholic Church (he had been baptised in 1890, but had subsequently lapsed). In 1901, he was ordained and served as a priest in Edinburgh for the rest of his life. His religious convictions were expressed in his second volume, Spiritual Poems, chiefly done out of several languages (1896). But, despite his new-found religious beliefs and denunciation of his Decadent past, the content of these new 26 Maureen Moran, ‘The Art of Looking Dangerously: Victorian Images of Martyrdom’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 32.1 (2004), pp. 475–93 (p. 475). 27 David Alderson, Mansex Fine: Religion, Manliness and Imperialism in NineteenthCentury British Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 145. 28 Joseph Bristow, ‘Introduction’, in The Fin-de-Siècle Poem: English Literary Culture and the 1890s, ed. Joseph Bristow (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2005), pp. 1–46 (p. 19).

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poems did not alter significantly; in fact, if anything, the celebration of the erotic male body became even more prominent in this volume. Though Spiritual Poems contains a poem entitled ‘Saint Sebastian. On A Picture’, for Gray’s most visceral and homoerotic poems we must instead turn to his religious dedications to Christ’s five Holy Wounds (the pierced hands and feet and the wound in Jesus’ side). The poem beginning ‘My patron came to Heaven; he touched the door’ dramatises an encounter between Saint John of the Cross and the Holy Wounds: Saint John was folded in the hands of Christ. He lay upon their wounds, and wept the whole Of longing that was in his holy soul. […] ‘Pass on; his Passion cannot be denied.’ And John was locked within the riven Side. The Wound said: ‘Sleep, beloved, and be calm; ‘I, in thy flesh, made wounds upon thee balm. ‘My torrent poured for thee; thou art my son; ‘I ached for this dear hour, my darling one. ‘Thou wert a proper vessel for the Wine ‘I gave thee to dispense, thou son of mine. ‘Now would my love for ever close upon ‘Thee; but thy house is greater; pass thou on.’ And John was cradled in the Sacred Heart, Than which no mansion is more glorious. O friar of sweet counsel, where thou art, John of the Cross, my patron, pray for us.29

Gray particularly identified with Saint John of the Cross, considering him his personal patron saint, writing to his friend and fellow poet Katharine Bradley that the ‘invincible love of S: John of the Cross […] made a hole in the covering which I had woven about myself to hide me from God’. 30As Ellis Hanson observes, this ‘image of the hole in Gray’s covering, rendering him vulnerable to God, is especially suggestive’.31 29 John Gray, ‘My patron came to Heaven’, in Spiritual Poems, chiefly done out of several languages (1896), reprinted with Silverpoints (1893) (Oxford and New York: Woodstock Books, 1994), pp. xxiii–xxiv. 30 Quoted in Marion Thain, ‘“Damnable Aestheticism” and the Turn to Rome: John Gray, Michael Field and a Poetics of Conversion’, in The Fin-de-Siècle Poem, Bristow, pp. 311–36 (p. 327). Saint John of the Cross was a sixteenth-century Spanish mystic who had a vision of the crucified Christ while praying in the Monastery of the Incarnation in Ávila. 31 Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism, p. 325.

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This suggestiveness is borne out in ‘My patron came to Heaven’, in which the meeting between Saint John of the Cross and the Holy Wounds is depicted as a passionate lovers’ tryst. The wound addresses Saint John directly with the endearments of a lover (‘beloved’, ‘my darling one’), and is represented through images of fecundity (‘torrent’), refuge (‘mansion’) and healing (‘balm’) for the weary speaker, who longs to stay ‘locked within the riven Side’ forever. Thus, we can read this encounter with the wound as a kind of return to the womb, the original home where one can seek succour, refreshment and (if only temporarily) unity with God. This maternal aspect is emphasised by the milk-like nourishment pouring from the wound, and the reference to Saint John being ‘cradled’ within the Sacred Heart. While reading this as a feminine image of maternity, we can also, however, read the encounter as one of homoerotic desire, culminating in a highly suggestive penetration of the wound. Saint John approaches the wounds with ‘Passion’ and weeps with ‘longing’. When locked within the wound, he experiences an ecstasy that comes close to erotic fulfilment. A similar representation of the wound is found in Gray’s translation of ‘Saint Bernard to the Stabbed Side of Jesus’. This poem, originally in Latin, was translated by the seventeenth-century German hymn writer Paul Gerhardt before being translated into English by Gray. Hanson points out that Gray’s art is ‘in the selection’; in other words, his translated poems reveal his preoccupations just as much as his original verses.32 ‘Saint Bernard to the Stabbed Side of Jesus’ is another ‘unflinching fetishization of the wound’.33 Saint Bernard addresses the wound like a devoted lover: Open thy gates, thou darling Wound, And let my heart, too bold, Be swept away, and wholly drowned, As in a flood which breaks its bound: So shall I be consoled.34

As in ‘My patron came to Heaven’, the blood gushing from Jesus’ wound is represented as a fertile force; a cleansing ‘flood’ that will wash away the worshipper’s sins. However, the emotions conveyed in this poem move 32 Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism, p. 314. 33 Thain, ‘“Damnable Aestheticism”’, p. 322. 34 John Gray, ‘Saint Bernard. To the Stabbed Side of Jesus’, in Spiritual Poems, pp. xl–xli (p. xli).

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beyond desire for spiritual absolution; the speaker also expresses extreme thirst for the fecund wound: Craving to touch the sacred flood, My mouth looks up with yearning; Through marrow, sinew, bone and blood, Ah, sweet and sweeter art thou yet, Lord Jesus, to my heart.35

The graphic imagery here describes a penetration by both the eye (looking into and through the wound in Jesus’ side) and the mouth (the desired consumption of the wound’s ‘sacred flood’). This double hunger results in a strangely mixed metaphor: ‘My mouth looks up with yearning.’ The speaker imagines the nourishment that the wound can offer him: ‘My heart refreshed is like to burst, / Filled from thy savourous flagon.’36 This desperate thirst can be also be read as lust: Saint Bernard addresses the wound as if it were a mistress he wishes to seduce, chastising his ‘heart, too bold’ for its impatience. The poem concludes with Saint Bernard’s wish to be closeted within the wound, away from the dangers of the world: Conceal me, Wound; within thy cave Locked fast, no thing shall harm me; There let me nestle close and safe, There sooth my soul and warm me.37

Once again, the wound represents cleansing, refreshment and womb-like protection, as well as covert erotic desire. The poem’s perverse eroticism is multi-layered: Saint Bernard expresses a desire for visual penetration (looking through the wound), a vampiric oral eroticism (a wish to drink the blood from the wound) and finally a wish to penetrate the wound’s ‘cave’. Thus, the wound in Gray’s poems comes to represent a polymorphously perverse orifice, combining characteristics associated with both sexes: it is open mouth to be filled, a breast offering sustenance, a womb for protection and an anus and/or vagina inviting penetration. Aleister Crowley makes this latter connection explicitly in his poem ‘La Juive’, imagining his lover’s body transforming into that of the crucified Christ: ‘Her lips, his dripping hands and feet!’ and culminating in penetration of the wound: 35 Gray, ‘Saint Bernard’, Spiritual Poems, p. xli. 36 Gray, ‘Saint Bernard’, Spiritual Poems, p. xl. 37 Gray, ‘Saint Bernard’, Spiritual Poems, p. xli.

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t h e m a l e wou n d Such frightful fancies dim my eyes – I can remember how his side Lay open for a lover’s prize – I violate the Crucified!38

The polymorphous quality of the wound means that it can function to symbolise a variety of desires and identifications beyond male homoeroticism. I now turn to women poets’ responses to the male wound, which feminise the body of Christ and use the wound to express female homoerotic desire. While the work of male nineteenth-century poets has attracted scholarly attention with regard to religious homoeroticism, women poets have been comparatively neglected. However, fin-de-siècle women poets often shared their inspirational materials with their male counterparts, making it possible to trace a shared homoerotic tradition. The poets Michael Field (the collaborative pseudonym of aunt and niece Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper) were intimately connected with male homoerotic literary circles. Bradley and Cooper were close friends with John Gray, with Gray acting as Bradley’s personal priest following the pair’s conversion to Catholicism in 1907. The poets had also met Wilde and formed an intimate friendship with the artists Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, themselves a homosexual couple. Bradley and Cooper were therefore conversant with the homoerotic religious symbolism used by their male associates, and adapted this imagery to express their own desires and identifications. As Thain argues, their ‘female erotic religious discourse needs to be situated, at least partly, within – as well as growing out of – a more established and more visible male homosexual theological language’.39 Female identification with the figure of Christ was common in the nineteenth century. According to Julie Melnyk, ‘One of the dominant images of Christ […] that permeated Victorian Christianity, was distinctly feminized, emphasizing virtues and roles allotted to women according to “separate spheres” gender ideology and often focussing on his passivity and suffering.’40 Christ’s wounds in particular can be read 38 Aleister Crowley, ‘La Juive’, in White Stains (Amsterdam: Leonard Smithers, 1898), n.p. Crowley’s poem eroticises a Jewish woman and, in the process, utilises the anti-Semitic ideology that portrays the Jewish people as ‘Christ-killers’. 39 Thain, ‘“Damnable Aestheticism”’, p. 316. 40 Julie Melnyk, ‘“Mighty Victims”: Women Writers and the Feminization of Christ’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 31.1 (2003), pp. 131–57 (p. 131).

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as ‘the mark of femininity, and a specifically female suffering’.41 These links between femininity and martyrdom are further enforced by the Victorian ideal of the self-sacrificing ‘angel in the house’, as enshrined in Coventry Patmore’s poem: Man must be pleased; but him to please Is woman’s pleasure; down the gulf Of his condoled necessities She casts her best, she flings herself.42

The association of femininity with wounding and victimhood is also found in psychoanalytic theory, where women are considered inherently ‘wounded’ by their lack of a penis. Thus, the damaged bodies of Saint Sebastian and Christ may be considered an apt symbol for the female body as defined by nineteenth-century ideology and, later, by Freudian psychoanalysis. Finally, as we have seen, the wound can also represent the spaces and openings of the female body – the vagina and the womb – meaning that the penetrable male bodies of Christ and Sebastian can be readily feminised and eroticised as specifically female objects of desire. These associations are borne out in Michael Field’s Catholic poetry, published in two volumes, Poems of Adoration (1912) and Mystic Trees (1913). In these poems, Christ’s body becomes a feminised object of sensual contemplation. For example, in ‘A Crucifix’, Christ is compared to delicate and fertile natural imagery including ‘a welcoming open fruit’, ‘a precious coral wreath’ and flowers: ‘Thee such loveliness adorns / On Thy Cross, O my Desire – / As a lily Thou art among thorns, / As a rose lies back against his briar.’43 This last image derives from the ‘Song of Songs’, in which the male speaker describes his female beloved as a lily among thorns. Another poem from Mystic Trees, ‘They took Jesus’, combines floral symbolism from ‘Song of Songs’ – the female beloved describes herself as a ‘Rose of Sharon’ – with Pagan imagery of Venus, Roman goddess of love: ‘A Rose of Sharon He, / Uplifted from the tree. / Oh, fair of Spirit He! As Venus from the Sea’ – bringing to mind Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus.44 In this poem, Christ is therefore 41 Thain, ‘“Damnable Aestheticism”’, p. 322. 42 Coventry Patmore, The Angel in the House: Part I (London: Macmillan and Co, 1863), p. 109. 43 Michael Field, ‘A Crucifix’, in Mystic Trees (London: Everleigh Nash, 1913), p. 35. 44 Michael Field, ‘They took Jesus’, in Mystic Trees, p. 25. Bradley and Cooper published an ekphrastic poem inspired by Botticelli’s painting in Sight and Song (London, 1892).

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doubly feminised, drawing on past literary and artistic traditions of the beautiful female muse. The feminisation is made explicit in ‘The Witness of John’. Christ’s beloved disciple describes his messiah as ‘Flushed as a rose, / […] How maiden in humility his brow!’45 Elsewhere, in a poem describing Jesus’ stigmata, Christ’s hands are feminised: O Venerable Hands, O our delight! We need them both. O lovely in our sight, O Amor meus, to be crucified! O Hands, clear as a woman’s in their light!46

Several of Michael Field’s poems focus intensely upon the wounds. For example, in ‘The Captain Jewel’, Bradley and Cooper are jointworshippers of Christ’s precious wounds, depicting them as jewels, stars and pouting lips: We love Thy ruddy Wounds, We love them pout by pout It is when the stars come out  One after one – We are As watchers for the Morning Star. The jewels of Thy Feet The jewels of Thy Hands! … Lo, a Centurion stands, Openeth thy Side: Water and blood there beat  In fountain sweet: Our Master-jewel now we dote upon!47

The ‘pouting’ image is perhaps the most sensuous, suggesting the temptation to kiss the bloody wounds. The desire to feed on the wounds is made explicit in the poem ‘Imple Superna Gratia’ (‘Fill up with divine grace’). In this poem, the speaker expresses a wish to penetrate and feed on Christ’s wounds as the bee pollinates a rose: We may enter far into a rose, Parting it, but the bee deeper still: With our eyes we may even penetrate To a ruby and our vision fill; […] Give me finer potency of gift! 45 Michael Field, ‘The Witness of John’, in Mystic Trees, pp. 20–21 (p. 21). 46 Michael Field, ‘The Five Sacred Wounds’, in Mystic Trees, pp. 33–34 (p. 33). 47 Michael Field, ‘The Captain Jewel’, in Mystic Trees, p. 27.

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t h e m a l e body i n m e dici n e a n d l i t e r at u r e For Thy Holy Wounds I would attain, As a bee the feeding loveliness Of the sanguine roses. I would lift Flashes of such faith that I may drain From each Gem the wells of Blood that press!48

As Thain notes, the strikingly vampiric imagery of this poem transforms transubstantiation into ‘a sexualised feeding on Christ’.49 I propose this ‘sexualised feeding’ encodes a specifically female homoeroticism. The speaker imagines gently ‘parting’ the leaves of the whorled rose to reach its deepest centre, bringing to mind the labia of the vulva. As Paula Bennett notes, images of flowers, gems, jewels and even bees – all of which found in this poem – can function as clitoral symbols in nineteenth-century women’s poetry.50 Oral eroticism permeates the poem; the speaker wishes to drink and ‘drain’ the flower of its ‘ruby’ nectar, evoking menstrual imagery. Therefore, the adoration of the wound in this poem is, I would argue, quite distinct from the desire to enter physically the wound expressed in Gray’s poems; the ‘penetration’ in this poem is primarily a visual and oral act. Thus, in an inversion of the process by which poets such as Algernon Charles Swinburne, Charles Baudelaire and others constructed ‘male lesbian bodies’ (to use Thaïs E. Morgan’s term) in order to express male homoerotic desire, Bradley and Cooper use male homoerotic iconography in their Catholic poetry in order to represent and express female homoerotic desire.51 Through the work of Wilde, Hopkins, Gray and Michael Field, Saint Sebastian’s and Christ’s bodies thus come to represent male homoerotic bodies and lesbianised bodies, via their bleeding wounds, their sexualised penetration and their status as beautiful objects of the gaze, bringing about a radical disruption of gender binaries. The image of the wound is crucial to this construction: the polymorphous nature of this orifice and its multiply gendered 48 Michael Field, ‘Imple Superna Gratia’, in Poems of Adoration (London: Sands and Co, 1912), p. 92. 49 Marion Thain, Michael Field: Poetry, Aestheticism and the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 177. 50 Paula Bennett, ‘Critical Clitoridectomy: Female Sexual Imagery and Feminist Psychoanalytic Theory’, Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 18.2 (1993), pp. 235–59 (p. 236). 51 See Thaïs E. Morgan, ‘Male Lesbian Bodies: The Construction of Alternative Masculinities in Courbet, Baudelaire, and Swinburne’, Genders, 15 (Winter 1992), pp. 37–57.

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symbolism make it a metaphor flexible enough to express and embody a variety of desires and gendered positionings at the fin de siècle. Saint Sebastian continues as a potent icon in the twentieth century, undergoing further symbolic transformations. In 1914 the symbolism of the male wound became devastatingly literal, reflecting the physical and psychological fracturing of the male body brought about by the Great War. The young martyr became ‘an increasingly fitting visual metaphor for the many willing martyrdoms […] sought by the thousands of young men headed for trench combat’.52 Later in the twentieth century Sebastian’s significance was revised yet again. The AIDS crisis returned him to his original role as a plague saint, and yet his image also carried the connotations of homosexual identity formed during the nineteenth century. Late twentieth-century performance artists used Sebastian to reflect on pain, suffering and homoerotic sadomasochism. Ron Athey, the HIV-positive performance artist and Pentecostal minister, has repeatedly used his own body to represent the martyr in Martyrs and Saints (1992), Sebastian Suspended (2000) and St/Sebastian/50 (2011).53 For Athey, Saint Sebastian represents both the plague victim and the deathin-life experience of the survivor. In The Swimming Pool Library (1988), Alan Hollinghurst rather uncannily anticipates Athey’s performances when the fictional photographer Ronald Staines launches his Martyrs exhibition, which features sadomasochistic and semi-pornographic images of young men posed as saints, including Saint Sebastian and John the Baptist. Through Staines (who may also be a fictional version of the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, famed for his male nudes), Hollinghurst subtly pokes fun at the now-clichéd status of Sebastian as a homoerotic icon. When asked why his Saint Sebastian is not struck with arrows, Staines replies: ‘Oh, no arrows dear; it’s before the martyrdom. He’s quite unpierced. But he looks ready for it, somehow, the way I’ve done it.’54 Here, Hollinghurst knowingly mocks Sebastian’s ubiquity as an icon of homoerotic desire – according to Staines, he no longer needs his arrows, symbols of his martyrdom, as long as he looks ripe for penetration of a different kind. However, The Swimming Pool Library also demonstrates Hollinghurst’s awareness of the rich fin-de-siècle tradition underlying Sebastian’s 52 Kaye, ‘“A Splendid Readiness for Death”’, p. 110. 53 See Matilda Battersby, ‘Ron Athey: The masochist who puts writers under his spell’, The Independent, 4 April 2012, p. 14. 54 Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming Pool Library (London: Penguin, 1988), p. 43.

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popularity as a homoerotic icon. As the protagonist Will moves downstairs at the Martyrs exhibition he comes across ‘a set of plates made to illustrate a limited edition of John Gray’s Tombeau d’Oscar Wilde along with Stephen Devlin’s setting of the poem for tenor, string quartet and oboe d’a-more – a martyrdom with a whole teeming afterlife’.55 Though the poem by Gray is actually a fabrication and the composer is fictional, the final phrase in this sentence is indeed an appropriate one. The ‘teeming afterlife’ of Saint Sebastian and Christ’s martyrdom is most clearly expressed in the devotion to the male wound running through the work of several homoerotically inclined poets writing in the late nineteenth century.

55 Hollinghurst, The Swimming Pool Library, p. 231.

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ch a p ter si x

The Cacophony of Disaster The Metaphorical Body of Sound in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man Inbar Kaminsky The Metaphorical Body of Sound The physical and emotional trauma that Keith Neudecker, the protagonist of Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007), sustains as a victim of the 9/11 terror attack on the World Trade Center essentially propels the emergence of a metaphorical body where repetitive patterns of various sounds – the noises of the attack as well as key phrases reverberating in internal and external speech – prove to be his sole anchor after conventional medicine only triggers his anxiety. While undergoing a medical procedure following the attack, Keith conjures up a morbid association that emphasises both his detachment from his body and his struggle with the saturation of sound, but also his disillusion or disbelief in the medical establishment: The noise was unbearable, alternating between the banging-shattering sound and an electronic pulse of varied pitch. He listened to the music and thought of what the radiologist had said, that once it’s over, in her Russian accent, you forget instantly the whole experience so how bad can it be, she said, and he thought this sounded like a description of dying.1

In fact, Keith’s initial struggle to reconcile his status as a survivor of the 9/11 attack is depicted through his physical injury within the context of an alienating hospital setting – ‘There were people on gurneys and there 1 Don DeLillo, Falling Man (London: Picador, 2007), p. 19.

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were others, a few, in wheelchairs, and he had trouble writing his name and more trouble fastening the hospital gown behind him.’2 The medical procedures are also described in neutral terms from Keith’s shell-shocked perspective, as if he were a ghost-focaliser, observing his physical body rather than existing within it: Doctors in scrubs and paper masks checked his airway and took bloodpressure readings … . They studied the contusions on his body and peered into his eyes and ears. Someone gave him an EKG. Through the open door, he saw IV racks go floating past. They tested his hand grip and took X-rays. They told him things he could not absorb about a ligament or a cartilage, a tear or a sprain.3

The metaphorical body of sound emerges in reaction to Keith’s corporeal estrangement and ongoing state of sensory overload; both of these phenomena are triggered by the attack as well as by the medical treatments Keith endures following his survival. Subsequently, Keith’s inability to fully metabolise the noises of the attack and his repetitive speech and thought patterns all morph into a metaphorical body of sound. This metaphorical body of sound is set apart from other represented objects or sensory input in the novel due to its sheer volume; the countless references to Keith’s auditory consumption and the chorus-like repetitions of his internal monologues collide and become the alternative to Keith’s corporeality. While other characters in the novel certainly respond to the overwhelming presence of sound (in the form of ethnic music, the televised collapse of the Twin Towers and various urban noises), Keith internalises and strongly identifies with the sounds that accompanied his escape from the World Trade Center. At the same time, Keith withdraws from an emotional connection to his injured physical body only to find solace in the engulfing sounds of 9/11. The novel begins by depicting post-9/11 New York as ‘a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night’.4 This poetic depiction already unveils one of the novel’s themes: the sensory overload experienced by the characters, as both Keith and Lianne Neudecker – a book editor and his estranged wife, with whom he soon reconciles – are continually overwhelmed by the sensory attacks of post-9/11 New 2 DeLillo, Falling Man, p. 15. 3 DeLillo, Falling Man, p. 15. 4 DeLillo, Falling Man, p. 3.

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York. Confronted with the television images of the 9/11 attack, the Neudeckers struggle, both separately and together, to come to terms with the actual event while being constantly bombarded with visual and auditory re-enactments of that event. Since 9/11 was primarily perceived in visual terms, it is only fitting that the aftermath of 9/11 will engage in a sensory attack, as seen from the perspective of Lianne: ‘The second plane coming out of that ice blue sky, this was the footage that entered the body, that seemed to run beneath her skin.’5 Or, as Paul Virilio points out in Ground Zero: ‘the actions undertaken would be perceived, like any natural catastrophe, as “manifestation of divine anger”’.6 Both Lianne’s focalisation and Virilio’s use of religious attributes are inherently visual, but, more importantly, they both quite easily lend themselves to the contemporary cinematic imagination, in which epic catastrophes come to life. However, in spite of the dominance of the visual sense in the novel, a clear tension emerges between the visual and auditory senses from the very beginning of Falling Man. The auditory sense essentially takes over the entire narrative and the various post-9/11 noises transgress into a state of sensory overload in the lives of both Keith and Lianne, which then evolves into a metaphorical body in terms of Keith’s level of identification. The saturation of sound is so overwhelming for Keith that he essentially drowns in it, becoming an entity devoid of a body, moving across time and space, carried by the vibrations of repetitive sentences, trauma-inducing sounds, urban noises of traffic, human conversations and snippets of television programmes that make up New York City before, during and after 9/11. The metaphorical body of sound is also achieved on the structural level; the circular structure of the novel can be construed as repetitive, an auditory phenomenon that stresses the obsessive nature of certain sounds in Keith’s life. In the absence of any other signifying anchor, Keith recreates the sounds of human panic and crowdedness that characterised the immediate aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center. Re-enacting the sounds of distress enables Keith to assemble both a body of meaning he can identify with and an auditory experience he can control.

5 DeLillo, Falling Man, p. 134. 6 Paul Virilio, Ground Zero, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2002), p. 44.

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Sounds Like Sensory overload has long been a recurring theme in DeLillo’s novels, specifically targeting the auditory sense in such novels as White Noise (1985): In White Noise, however, the task is further complicated by the way in which figures are disarmed by the flood of data, cultural debris, and otherwise indigestible stimuli that contribute to the condition that titles the novel … white noise thwarts distinction, for the proliferation of language, typically through such vulgarized forms as advertisements, tabloid headlines, and bureaucratic euphemisms, [it] submerges difference into the usual cultural murmur. There is always more, but always more of the same. The danger, as it is defined in Great Jones Street, is ‘sensory overload’.7

The thematic significance of sensory overload inevitably evokes the perils of capitalism. After all, the endless consumption of products begins with sensory input. Thus, this saturation of sound can be construed as a criticism of the American consumer culture and the capitalist system it is founded upon. In fact, capitalism is evoked throughout the novel as a form of hubris and the World Trade Center as its epitome. The concept of the metaphorical body is particularly pertinent to Falling Man as the novel openly engages with themes such as disembodiment and emotional detachment. The metaphorical body of sound is created by the ongoing process of sensory overload, which is presented as a character’s failure or refusal to absorb a certain object or a certain event via one or several senses. The outcome of both processes is the morphing of the said object into a material presence in the eyes of the character. As a result, this object becomes the alternative to the character’s own corporeality. Keith’s absorption within sound is marked by a traumatised repetitiveness not only because the narrative revisits Keith during the 9/11 attacks at the end of the novel but also because Keith is forever trying to recreate and master the noises that accompanied that attack. Three years after 9/11, Keith goes to the horse track purely in order to hear men shouting in a crowded room: He never bet on these events. It was the effect on the senses that drew him there … . He liked listening to the visceral burst, men on their feet, calling

7 Arthur Michael Saltzman, ‘The Figure in the Static: White Noise’, MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, 40.4 (1994), pp. 807–26 (p. 808).

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t h e m e ta phor ic a l body of sou n d out, a rough salvo of voices that brought heat and open emotion to the soft pall of the room. Then it was over in seconds, and he liked it too.8

The recreation of distress sounds in small doses seems to be Keith’s way of holding on to the physical substance of sound; he is clearly suffering from some type of post-traumatic disorder, of which sensory overload is its main manifestation, but it is paradoxically this overload of sound that grants him a body, a unifying system of meaning he can identify with, since Keith no longer relates to his physical presence as his own. At one point, Keith sees himself as a hybrid of sensory data and impulses, devoid of either human emotions or human corporeality: ‘He wondered if he was becoming a self operating mechanism, like a humanoid robot that understands two hundred voice commands, far-seeing, touch-sensitive but totally, rigidly controllable.’9 The formation of Keith’s metaphorical body of sound can be traced back to the very beginning of the novel. Keith, who is presented only as ‘he’ during the initial descriptions of the attack, seems to experience the attack only on the auditory level. Moreover, his sensations during the attack are depicted as an out-of-body experience: ‘He heard the sound of the second fall, or felt it in the trembling air, the north tower coming down, a soft awe of voices in the distance.’10 But, at the same time, Keith is part of the fall, as the depictions of the attack are intentionally ambiguous in terms of pronoun – ‘That was him coming down, the north tower.’11 When Keith is examined for his injuries, he tries to ‘listen to the music’.12 While trying to discern the music of the machinery, in an attempt to detect a sense of harmony, he soon finds himself immersed in the trauma of 9/11: ‘The noise was a violent staccato knocking, a metallic clamor that made him feel he was deep inside the core of a science-fiction city about to come undone.’13 Keith’s emotional detachment from his own corporeality is always there, looming in the background of his post-9/11 existence: He was a hovering presence now … . He was not quite returned to his body yet. Even the program of exercises he did for his postsurgical wrist seemed a little detached, four times a day, odd extensions and flexions that resembled 8 DeLillo, 9 DeLillo, 10 DeLillo, 11 DeLillo, 12 DeLillo, 13 DeLillo,

Falling Falling Falling Falling Falling Falling

Man, Man, Man, Man, Man, Man,

p. 211. p. 226. p. 5. p. 5. p. 18. p. 18.

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Lianne also finds herself in the thralls of sensory overload, yet in her case it does not evolve to the extent of a metaphorical body, perhaps drawing a thematic distinction between the primary survivors of 9/11 and their circle of friends, family and fellow television viewers. For Lianne, it is another sound altogether that triggers her sensory overload; one of her neighbours continually plays a CD of ethnic music, possibly Arabic, even though it is never explicitly referred to as such. The description is rather ambiguous, but allows the reader to discern Lianne’s associations: They lived on the top floor of a redbrick building, four-storied, and often now, these past days, she walked down the stairs and heard a certain kind of music, wailing music, lutes and tambourines and chanting voices sometimes, coming from the apartment on the second floor, the same CD, she thought, over and over, and it was beginning to make her angry.15

It is obvious that the post-traumatic Lianne re-enacts the televised atrocities of 9/11 whenever she hears these sounds: ‘The music included moments of what sounded like forced breathing.’16 When the music becomes an obsession, Lianne decides to fulfill her fantasy of confrontation while conjuring up repetitive phrases: ‘Do this. Knock on the door. Adopt a posture. Mention the noise as noise. Knock on the door, mention the noise … . But mention the noise as noise. Knock on the door. Adopt a posture.’17 When Lianne finally confronts her neighbour, her accusations are composed of fragmented sentences, disharmonious snippets of conversation: ‘The music. All the time, day and night. And load.’18 This form of disharmony is Lianne’s way of resisting the sounds of 9/11 both structurally and thematically; she is fracturing the conventional syntax and thus creating a new sound and the content of this new sound has to do with the removal of music that Lianne associate with the atrocities of 9/11. When together, Keith and Lianne seem to abide by an unspoken code of silence; one clear example of such silence is when they are ‘watching 14 DeLillo, 15 DeLillo, 16 DeLillo, 17 DeLillo, 18 DeLillo,

Falling Falling Falling Falling Falling

Man, Man, Man, Man, Man,

p. 59. p. 67. p. 70. p. 69. p. 119.

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TV without the sound’.19 Their son Justin is equally preoccupied with sound, to the extent of inventing a new language: The kid was trying to speak in monosyllables only, for extended stretches. This was something his class was doing, a serious game designed to teach the children something about the structure of words and the discipline required to frame clear thoughts. Lianne said, half seriously, that it sounded totalitarian.20

By remaining in the realm of monosyllables, Justin is in fact reversing his mistaken identification of Bin Laden as Bill Lawton; he will never make that mistake again if he sticks to monosyllables. However, if we consider Justin’s mistake as symbolic, the fact that the word Law is enclosed within the children’s Americanised version of Bin Laden’s name, Bill Lawton, is indicative of both the failure of the authorities to prevent 9/11 and perhaps even the CIA’s initial funding of Bin Laden in the war in Afghanistan. This is yet another example of how DeLillo places culturally provocative truths in the mouths of marginal characters. In the same way that Martin, whose allegations about 9/11 can be dismissed by the fact that he is not an American, Justin’s subtle display of national mistakes can be dismissed by the fact that he is only a child. During the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and three years later, both Lianne’s and Keith’s experiences are shaped by the overwhelming presences of sound. However, in Keith’s case, the sensory overload of sound evolves into a metaphorical body as Keith readily forsakes his corporeality and completely identifies with and is animated by sound. Near the conclusion of the novel, Keith utterly abandons his identification with his physical body while immersing himself in the noises the surround him – ‘He was becoming the air he breathed. He moved in a tide of noise and talk made to his shape.’21 In his refusal or inability to distinguish the sounds of 9/11 from the sounds he experiences from the moment he escapes the burning towers, Keith is essentially trapped in a state of sensory overload and finds himself increasingly detached from his own sense of body; having being so profoundly shaken, his corporeal wholeness is understandably cast into doubt after its fragility has been so brutally displayed.

19 DeLillo, Falling Man, p. 130. 20 DeLillo, Falling Man, p. 66. 21 DeLillo, Falling Man, p. 230.

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Falling into the Image In ‘World Trauma Center’, Linda Kauffman conveys the sentiments of many critical thinkers in relation to the familiarity of western culture with the apocalyptic imagery of 9/11, a familiarity that is so intense to the extent of provoking the sensation of déjà vu: despite the government’s repeated claims that no one could have imagined such an attack, it had in fact already been anticipated in numerous Hollywood disaster movies. One had the uncanny sensation of déjà vu. Numerous theorists (including Baudrillard and Žižek) comment on this sensation.22

9/11 was quickly conceptualised as first and foremost a visual image; an event of such epic proportions can be perceived only via the mitigating power of technology rather than the naked eye – streamed as a live show, transmitted to its audience via television screens. This issue is addressed by Baudrillard in his famous quote about the cinematic nature of 9/11: ‘In this singular event, in this Manhattan disaster movie, the twentieth century’s two elements of mass fascination are combined: the white magic of the cinema and the black magic of terrorism; the white light of the image and the black light of terrorism.’23 Baudrillard essentially maintains that 9/11 was the site upon which the fascination with violence and the cinematic visual imagination conflate. Aaron Mauro maintains that DeLillo’s novel is ‘influenced by the profoundly visual record of the attacks’.24 This is also evident when one examines DeLillo’s choice of novel’s title, named after the provocative image taken by Richard Drew of a man jumping to his death from one of the burning towers. This image has been the object of both public disdain and interest – or, as Mauro bluntly phrases it, ‘In the midst of the absolute glut of imagery produced that day, the falling man image was deemed taboo by the mainstream media.’25 This is yet another example of how the produced images of 9/11 became more tangible than the actual event; the act of suicide upon an encounter 22 Linda S. Kauffman, ‘World Trauma Center’, American Literary History, 21.3 (2009), pp. 647–59 (p. 649). 23 Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2003), pp. 29–30. 24 Aaron Mauro, ‘The Languishing of the Falling Man: Don DeLillo and Johnathan Safran Foer’s Photographic history of 9/11’, MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, 57.3 (2011), pp. 584–606 (p. 585). 25 Mauro ‘Languishing’, p. 588.

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with the certainty of death was not discussed, or not discussed nearly as much as the fact that it had been captured on film. As an image, it certainly has an irresistible cinematic quality, but both the photo and the performance piece that recreated the act became a distraction, a way to circumvent the discussion about the act itself. Lianne explicitly confronts the sublime nature of the falling man image, the conflation of graceful movement and impending death – ‘Headlong, free fall, she thought, and this picture burned a hole in her mind and heart, dear God, he was a falling angel and his beauty was horrific.’26 Much like Virilio’s ‘divine anger’,27 Lianne resorts to religious terminology when attempting to depict what could be referred to as a contemporary ineffable; a man plunging into a quick death in an attempt to escape a slow and excruciating one. Through Lianne’s focalisation, he is an angel who has fallen from the grace of God rather than a desperate human being who has chosen his own death in the face of the certainty of his demise. Some researchers have mediated the gap between art and violence via the spectacle, in which the street performer David Janiak’s re-enactments of the ‘Falling Man’ are the key figure in understanding how 9/11 can be perceived as a work of art. Jen Bartlett elaborates on the literary unfolding of the spectacle of 9/11 in DeLillo’s novel by emphasising the process of preparations prior to the street performance: ‘This intent on creating a visual spectacle is represented and repeated by DeLillo in Janiak’s meticulous planning of his performances.’28 In this ‘meticulous planning’ lies the seed of the spectacle that sprouts from violence and blossoms into the art of terror: ‘Janiak’s terror-inducing actions in creating an artistic spectacle are the first of DeLillo’s methods exploring the theory that terror through spectacle is art.’29 Structurally speaking, DeLillo’s literary re-enactment of Janiak’s physical re-enactment of the actual ‘falling man’ is yet another mini-vortex within the text that conveys a layered sense of representation. It can also be said that, much like the picture, the falling man performance represents the actual event, but, unlike the picture, the performance re-enacts the event. This 26 DeLillo, Falling Man, p. 222. 27 Virilio, Ground Zero, p. 44. 28 Jen Bartlett, ‘Cultivated Tragedy: Art, Aesthetics and Terrorism in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man’, eTopia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies (2010), 1–11  (4) , accessed 14 February 2012. 29 Bartlett, ‘Cultivated Tragedy’, p. 4.

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re-enactment results in a backlash from spectators who are struggling to discern between the actual act and its artistic simulation: ‘The witnesses – or are they the audience? – are outraged precisely because the distinctions between fiction (his performance) and reality (the death of the man he represents) are unclear.’30 The dominance of the visual takes its toll on written and spoken language and so the novel portrays the absence of words upon the encounter with the visual aftermath of 9/11, such as Keith’s visit to Ground Zero, where the powerful scene of absolute destruction becomes a physical obstacle for speech – ‘His words were muffled by the mask … . It sounded like a speech defect, the words smothered and blurred.’31 Lianne’s creative writing meetings of Alzheimer patients are also conveyed in similarly dumbfounded terms, where the elderly struggle with words in the face of post-9/11 reality: ‘It was in the language, the inverted letters, the lost word at the end of a struggling sentence.’32 It seems that uttered words become another form of noise in the novel, verbal sounds that the characters of Falling Man are somehow unable to metabolise. Thus, these ‘lost’ words become analogous to the befuddled state of Lianne, Justin and, especially, Keith – they are literary ‘lost for words’. Whether as a fragmented sentence hanging in mid-air or as broken words, miscommunication becomes a powerful tool in this novel, turning syllables into auditory rubble that piles up in the corners of the consciousness of each character. It is important to note that the novel seems to be very concerned with the re-enactment of 9/11 on television, not only as a form of repetition but also as an opportunity to throw light on a discussion that deals ‘with charting the limits of representation in the face of the seemingly unrepresentable’.33 This relates to another form of visual re-enactment; just as the television broadcasts create a visual representation of the events, so do the eyewitness accounts. A prime example of this visual phenomenon occurs at the very end of the novel, which revisits the 30 Stefan Polatinsky and Karen Scherzinger, ‘Dying without Death: Temporality, Writing, and Survival in Maurice Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 54.2 (2013), pp. 24–134 (p. 129). 31 DeLillo, Falling Man, p. 25. 32 DeLillo, Falling Man, p. 35. 33 Hamilton Carroll, ‘“Like Nothing in this Life”: September 11 and the Limits of Representation in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man’, Studies in American Fiction, 40.1 (2013), pp. 107–30 (p. 108).

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attack on the World Trade Center; Keith’s focalisation first resorts to a piece of clothing and then to a synecdoche in the portrayal of the ungraspable – a man leaping to his death from the burning tower – ‘Then he saw a shirt come down out of the sky. He walked and saw it fall, arms waving like nothing in this life.’34 In ‘Embedded and Embodied Memories: Body, Space, and Time in Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Falling Man’, Katrina Harack comments on this unusual final passage by stating that the shirt is ‘a placeholder for death and absence, much like the towers themselves’.35 Indeed, DeLillo chooses to end the novel in absence, the corporeal void of the body that fills the shirt, which is of course only a form of visual manipulation. Whether sincere or simply poetic, this final passage illustrates just how limited Keith’s focalisation really is – the eye of the beholder in this case is tainted by the traumatic experience. Kauffman comments on Keith’s detachment from the events of 9/11 by stating that Keith is detached as a way of acting out against the saturation of media images and interpretations: ‘Ever the iconoclast, DeLillo highlights the media’s excesses. In fact, it is precisely the media’s packaged sentimentality that makes Keith so resistant to analyzing his trauma. Emotion, sincerity, authenticity have become suspect. Language has been debased.’36 The duality of the name ‘Falling Man’, which signifies both an actual event and a performance piece, is yet another layer of a compound auditory representation. Heath J. Atchley describes the performance art of the Falling Man as ‘a nearly ascetic reduction in consciousness’,37 which seems to be emblematic of Keith’s and Lianne’s rejection of the noises that follows 9/11 –the proliferation of media-generated emotions and story-angles. This collective noise not only debases language, as Kauffman maintains, but also stands in sharp contrast to the simplicity and finality of the fall, both the actual event and its subsequent dramatisation by the street performer. The temporal structure of the novel, as well as multiple repetitions of certain sentences, greatly contributes to the feeling of déjà vu on the auditory level. The novel concludes moments after the attack of the first 34 DeLillo, Falling Man, p. 246. 35 Katrina Harack, ‘Embedded and Embodied Memories: Body, Space, and Time in Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Falling Man’, Contemporary Literature, 54.2 (2013), pp. 303–36 (p. 330). 36 Kauffman, ‘World Trauma Center’, p. 654. 37 J. Heath Atchley, ‘Attention, Affirmation, and the Spiritual Law of Gravity’, The Pluralist, 5.3 (2010), pp. 63–72 (p. 65).

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plane, in a sea of human distressed noises that Keith will surrender to and never relinquish: There were voices up behind him, back on the stairs, one and then another in near echo, fugue voices, song voices in the rhythms of natural speech. This goes down. This goes down. Pass it down.38

Another notable example is Keith’s dilemma whether to tell Lianne about his affair with Florence, a fellow 9/11 casualty. This dilemma takes place in a form of repetition across two pages, reminiscent of the structure of a chorus: ‘He would tell her about Florence.’39 Such forms of repetitions signal not only the ramifications of trauma but also its music, its particular rhythm and sound throughout the novel. These repetitions not only enhance the sense of trauma and chaos of post-9/11 New York but also trace the circular, chorus-like temporality of the novel, which vibrates throughout the plot of Falling Man. In other words, if the visual imagery in the novel is the MRI of post-9/11 America, then the rhythm composed out of the various repetitions throughout the novel constitutes its cardiac echo. If Keith’s coping mechanism is indeed invested in sound, it stands to reason that his repetitiveness is a way to structure the metaphorical body of sound. It also influences the flow of the narrative, since these echoes sever the continuity of the plot; instead of moving on to the next event, the reader finds himself trapped in these mini-vortexes. Unbeknownst to the reader, these mini-vortexes are also echoes of the entire narrative structure. When the reader finally reaches the end of the novel the structure of the vortex is revealed in its entirety – the narrative ends in a loop, depicting the events of the attack on the World Trade Center. Two other figures in the novel are worthy of mention: Lianne’s mother, Nina Bartus, an art history professor, and her lover, Martin Ridnour, a German art dealer aka Ernest Hechinger, who is rumoured to be a former member of Kommune 1, a radical anti-government group that was founded in Berlin in the late 1960s. As their vocations suggest, both Nina and Martin are preoccupied with the aesthetic–political aspects of 9/11. They often find themselves deeply immersed in a discussion of 9/11 and its religious, philosophical and political implications: 38 DeLillo, Falling Man, p. 245. 39 DeLillo, Falling Man, pp. 161–62.

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t h e m e ta phor ic a l body of sou n d ‘Dead wars, holy wars. God could appear in the sky tomorrow.’ ‘Whose God would it be?’ Martin said. ‘God used to be an urban Jew. He’s back in the desert now.’40

God is not mentioned in vain; if New York is the postmodern Eden, then it is only fitting that God would be banished and Adam and Eve – alternating between Keith and Lianne and Martin and Nina – would be left to dwell in their tainted paradise. The biblical sin of the Tree of Knowledge is a powerful allusion for the state of awareness of terror in Western civilisation; whether is it the insolent World Trade Center towers and their vain stature, or the United States’ seemingly undefeatable status as the world’s only superpower, the sin of pride or hubris is undoubtedly associated with the events of 9/11 as far as the novel is concerned. Much like the fallen Adam and Eve, the characters of post-9/11 New York know too much and are aching not to know once again, not be painfully aware of their own fragility within the city, which had long stood for American dominance and power. Kauffman discusses the different approaches to art that are represented in the novel: while Nina represents the strictly visual–analytic approach, Lianne represents the sensory approach: ‘Lianne prefers to absorb the work, rather than intellectualize it.’41 Martin brings yet another fusion of the visual and the intellectual; since he often politicises art and perhaps also because he is the only non-American character in the novel with the exception of the 9/11 hijackers, Martin can easily judge 9/11 in aesthetic terms, offering emotionally detached commentary: But that’s why you built the towers, isn’t it? Weren’t the towers built as fantasies of wealth and power that would one day become fantasies of destruction? You build a thing like that so you can see it come down. The provocation is obvious. What other reason would there be to go so high and then to double it, do it twice? It’s a fantasy, so why not do it twice? You are saying, Here it is, bring it down.42

It is clear that Martin’s character also has a symbolic role; it is not only that ‘Ridnour/Hechinger represents the intersection of radical politics and culture’,43 but rather that his political–cultural agenda, along with 40 DeLillo, Falling Man, p. 46. 41 Linda S. Kauffman, ‘Bodies in Rest and Motion in Falling Man’, in Don DeLillo: Mao II, Underworld, Falling Man, ed. Stacey Olster (New York: Continuum, 2011), pp. 135–51 (p. 147). 42 DeLillo, Falling Man, p. 116. 43 John Carlos Rowe, ‘Global Horizons in Falling Man’, in Don DeLillo: Mao II,

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his distinct European sensibilities, provides DeLillo with the platform to makes these Baudrillardian statements regarding 9/11. Furthermore, DeLillo’s choice to designate two peripheral characters with the responsibility for the visual commentary underscores the importance that the novel attributes to the visual dimension of 9/11 – it cannot tell the story in its entirety. In Circles Prior to writing Falling Man, DeLillo wrote an essay in the wake of 9/11 entitled ‘In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September’. In this essay, DeLillo juxtaposes the ‘utopian glow of cyber-capital’,44 which does not allow any sense of history, with America’s ‘perceived godlessness’,45 only to conclude that ‘there is no logic in apocalypse’.46 When he announces that ‘We like to think that America invented the future’47 he is presenting the possibility that America’s religion has become its technology: ‘Technology is our fate, our truth.’48 And so, precisely because America represents the future, 9/11 represents a chronotopic gap that has altered America’s timeline – ‘Now a small group of men have literally altered our skyline. We have fallen back in time and space.’49 This sense of circular temporality is reinforced when one considers DeLillo’s prophetic warning in Cosmopolis – which had been almost entirely completed prior to the events of September 11 2001 – when one of the characters refers to the World Trade Center as the modern-day Tower of Babel: ‘You live in a tower that soars to heaven and goes unpunished by God.’50 Randy Laist describes this state as a ‘compulsion toward self-negation’,51 a fusion of Baudrillard’s ‘hegemonic west’52 and DeLillo’s ‘homo technologicus’. Underworld, Falling Man, ed. Stacey Olster (New York: Continuum, 2011), pp. 121–34 (p. 127). 44 Don DeLillo, ‘In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September’, Harper’s Magazine (Dec. 2001), pp. 33–40 (p. 33). 45 DeLillo, ‘In the Ruins’, p. 33. 46 DeLillo, ‘In the Ruins’, p. 34. 47 DeLillo, ‘In the Ruins’, p. 39. 48 DeLillo, ‘In the Ruins’, p. 37. 49 DeLillo, ‘In the Ruins’, p. 38. 50 Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis (New York: Scribner, 2003), p. 103. 51 Randy Laist, Technology and Postmodern Subjectivity in Don DeLillo’s Novels (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), p. 155. 52 Laist, Technology and Postmodern Subjectivity, p. 155.

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If this state can be traced back to the burst of the dotcom bubble in 2000, as depicted in Cosmopolis, only to return during post-9/11, then it is clear that DeLillo’s chronotopic choice is hardly coincidental but rather a powerful statement in its own right. Just like the protagonist in a Greek tragedy, America is doomed to be punished by the gods because of its innate hubris, despite its best efforts to avoid it. Crosthwaite maintains that ‘Cosmopolis did not predict 9/11, but it does display an acute sensitivity to the structural conditions underpinning the “global accident”, of which 9/11 is one, contingent example.’53 However, the similarities are striking enough, to the extent that some have asked themselves: ‘Has there been a series of events more DeLilloesque than those of 9/11? Death from above; the clash of technology-and-capitalheavy, belief-light Western civilization with a mobile, fanatical counter force; the audacious stratagem led by the philosophizing madman.’54 Another eerie circular connection is pointed out by Vince Passaro in ‘Don DeLillo and the Towers’, where Passaro describes the cover of DeLillo’s Underworld – ‘and there it was, the two towers, dark and enshrouded (by fog, much as they had been by smoke early last Tuesday morning’.55 Yet, even after reviewing the piling list of 9/11 foretellings in DeLillo’s work, it is obvious that the collective need for a prophetic figure overwrites any attempt to attribute these instances to aesthetic choices or cultural critique – ‘suddenly DeLillo became a prophet, in part to fulfill a need for history to have a kind of narrative coherence that someone could see, even if it looked like chaos to us’.56 On the structural level, DeLillo’s Falling Man aptly captures the circular temporality of historical memory as noted by Jameson in ‘The Dialectics of Disaster’, where he discusses the unfolding nature of monumental historical events such as 9/11: 53 Paul Crosthwaite, ‘Fiction in the Age of the Global Accident: Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis’, Static: Journal of the London Consortium, 7 (2008), pp. 1–14 (p. 12) , accessed 13 February 2012. 54 John Broening, ‘“This was the World Now”: 9/11 in American Fiction’, The Faster Times (15 Sept. 2011), p. IX, , accessed 20 February 2012. 55 Vince Passaro, ‘Don DeLillo and the Towers’, Mr Beller’s Neighbourhood (10 Oct. 2001), p.  1, , accessed 13 February 2012. 56 Pamela Thurschwell, ‘Forecasting Falls: Icarus from Freud to Auden to 9/11’, Oxford Literary Review, 30.2 (2008), pp. 201–34 (p. 203).

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t h e m a l e body i n m e dici n e a n d l i t e r at u r e As for the attack itself, it is important to remember that historical events are never really punctual – despite the appearance of this one and the abruptness of its violence– but extend into a before and an after of historical time that only gradually unfold, to disclose the full dimensions of the historicity of the event.57

The novel’s circular temporality is also a structural re-enactment of the trauma of 9/11, representing the victim’s (protagonist and reader alike) ‘compulsion to repeat’.58 This form of temporality also constitutes a predestined future that is forever marked by 9/11, or perhaps as simply a grim outlook on life: ‘The structuring of temporal planes whereby the chronological beginning – 9/11 – comes at the end of the novel serves for a textual reenactment of the original trauma while the circular movement of the narrative, in its refusal of easy closure, underscores the novel’s pessimism concerning the future.’59 However, the novel’s temporality can also be seen as a form of meditation, the act of recalling 9/11, of thinking back and at the same time re-enacting the event of that day.60 In narratological terms the structure of the novel replicates the 9/11 attack; stuck between two sections that depict the collapse of the World Trade Center, the middle part of the novel is chaotic and devoid of insight. This structural segregation is emblematic of the state of the victims of 9/11, as they were struggling to survive and flee in the midst of the horror and shock that characterised Ground Zero: The primary action of the novel is literally trapped between the two towers at the moment of their collapse. The events of September 11 are placed on hold and the novel produces a narrative lacuna in which meaning is suspended as DeLillo grapples with the question of how to represent the unrepresentable.61

The metaphorical body of sound could not have been created throughout Falling Man in the absence of these ‘sound effects’ of telling and retelling, of meditating on what has just being unfolded and the compulsion to repeat it. These layers of voices echoing throughout the novel are an 57 Frederic Jameson, ‘The Dialectics of Disaster’, Dissent from the Homeland: Essays after September 11, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 101.2 (2002), pp. 297–304 (p. 301). 58 Kauffman, ‘World Trauma Center’, p. 650. 59 Özden Sözalan, The American Nightmare: Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (Bloomington: Author House, 2011), pp. 4–5. 60 M. Joseph Conte, ‘Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and the Age of Terror’, MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, 53.7 (2011), pp. 557–83 (p. 568). 61 Carroll, ‘Like Nothing in this Life’, p. 111.

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inseparable part of Keith’s metaphorical body; they affirm the need for such an elaborate coping mechanism and at the same time they are already metabolised in it. Throughout Falling Man, Keith, Lianne, their son Justin and to some extent Nina and Martin are all trying to escape post-9/11 reality in various ways, the primary one being disembodiment. In their effort to reconcile the trauma of 9/11, the protagonists fail to grasp a sense of wholeness, even on the basic corporeal level. However, despite the destruction that surrounded 9/11, the concept of narratives seems to be almost sanctified in Falling Man. All of the characters in the novel cling to the healing power of words even when these very words fail to capture both 9/11 and its aftermath, and all the while the sublime and its unrepresentable horizons darken the New York skyline. The absence of words and their saturation has a palpable effect on one character in particular: Keith is truly transformed by the cacophony of sound that proliferates and surrounds him, including the non-linguistic noises associated with the attack and the repetitive speech patterns he produces. While Keith’s emotional detachment from his physical body and his identification with the metaphorical body of sound are certainly the aftermath of his 9/11 trauma, this process of sensory overload also stems from the medical crisis that Keith endures during his initial hospitalisation. In essence, the medical establishment fails to reconnect Keith to his corporeality and only tends to his physical injury, and by doing so it plays an active role in the creation of the metaphorical body of sound.

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‘Human Nature is Remorseless’ Masculinity, Medical Science and Nervous Conditions in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway Avishek Parui Masculinity, Medical Science and Nervous Conditions The First World War may be considered a dramatic watershed in popularly received notions of masculinity and military medicine in Britain. Informed largely by the imperial imaginary of enterprise and endeavour and manufactured through the discourses of Boy Scouts and public schools, pre-war British masculinity had its most hegemonic representation in the ‘strong and silent’ strand, trained against exhibiting emotions and all that characterised the ‘sissy’. As Julia Grant argues in her astute analysis of the paradigm shift in the politics of turn-of-thecentury British masculinity: While effeminate or unmanly boys were not artefacts of the twentieth century, the meaning attached to them shifted in conjunction with the politics of masculinity and transformations in child rearing, gender socializations and the new sciences of human development. Nineteenth century sissies were castigated by their peers but twentieth century sissies bore clinical as well as social stigma. As the peer group loomed ever larger as a means of the socialization of children, conforming to the code of boyhood became increasingly central to the establishing of the normalcy of boys’ personalities and behaviours.1 1 Julia Grant, ‘A Real Boy and not a Sissy: Gender, Childhood and Masculinity, 1890–1940’, Journal of Social History, 37.4 (2004), pp. 829–51 (p. 829).

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A significant shift in dominant notions and practices of manliness and military medicine in post-First-World-War Britain may largely be attributed to the phenomenon of shell shock, which intrigued neurologists and civilians alike. As a pseudo-medical term as well as a social pejorative, shell shock enacted an ironic inversion of the gendered construct of hysteria, a condition that had historically been classified as a female malady rooted in the uterus.2 In her study of masculinity crisis in the early twentieth century Sandra Gilbert examines how the structural similarities between the claustrophobic domestic space and the closed trenches of the First World War brought the hysteric and repressed Victorian female into problematic proximity with the nervous male soldier of the First World War.3 In a similar vein, Eric Leed argues how the doctors of the combatants realised that the ‘symptoms of shell shock were precisely the same as those of the most common hysterical disorders of the peacetime, though they often acquired new and more dramatic names in War … . What had been predominantly a disease of women before the War became a disease of men in combat.’4 The medical treatment of male hysteria, especially when it was associated with essentialised ‘feminine’ symptoms, often relied on the forceful denial of its existence under the biopolitical gaze. Shell shock thus problematised the socially circulated and consumed notions about military masculinity and may be considered a form of epistemic crisis in post-war British military culture that contemporary medicine struggled to redress. Charles Myers, one of the first physicians to publish a medical paper on shell shock in 1915, came to confess subsequently that a real shell may play little part in actually causing the state of shock but that ‘excessive emotion, e.g. sudden horror or fear – indeed any “psychical trauma” or “inadjustable experience” – is sufficient’.5 Many case studies quickly revealed that the shell-shocked victims had often never been exposed to the front lines that faced shrapnel blasts. As Jessica Meyer argues: ‘Throughout the First World War, and well into the interwar period, the 2 Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture 1830–1980 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), pp. 55–56. 3 Sandra Gilbert, ‘Soldier’s Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women and the Great War’, Signs, 8.3 (1983), pp. 422–50. 4 Eric Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 163. 5 Charles Myers, Shell Shock in France 1914–18 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), p. 26.

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range of physical and psychological symptoms that came collectively to be known as ‘shell shock’ were the subject of intense debate because they fell uncomfortably between the care of medicine and the strictures of military discipline.’6 The introduction of shell shock into the vocabulary of early twentieth-century medical discourse was accompanied by a series of misappropriations and misapprehensions that revolved around a sudden and spectacular shift in the construction and reception of masculine military identity. The occurrence of shell shock has been analysed as the threshold moment in British medical history, which introduced Freudian psychoanalysis into the materialistic model of British neurology.7 The First World War might thus be regarded as an epistemic fault-line in the history of medicine and psychiatry, for thereafter medical discourses about nervousness underwent a paradigmatic shift. British neurology, which had hitherto been ‘brutally materialistic’,8 was evidently inadequate in explaining a medical condition that could not simply be reduced to a physical disorder. The shift in medical attention was from the corporeal to the subconscious, from the order of the body alone to the psychic space of dreams. Thus the poet Siegfried Sassoon, treated for shell shock in Craiglockhart, described the hospital as an ‘underworld of dreams haunted by submerged memories of warfare’.9 The Freudian vocabulary evident in Sassoon’s description points to the medical politics advocated by British neurologists such as W. H. R. Rivers in Craiglockhart. Freud’s own position as healer of hysteria and trauma was increasingly informed by his growing awareness of the blurred borderlines between physical conditions open to empirical science and the more intangible moments of subjective experience which he attributed to the subconscious. The symbolic and metaphoric associations made in the subconscious as examined by Freud – whereby one entity could stand for something else – was structurally and essentially similar to the self-reflectively stylised and figurative literary 6 Jessica Meyer, ‘Shell Shock as a Self-Inflicted Wound, 1915–1921’, in Neurology and Modernity: A Cultural History of Nervous Systems, 1800–1950, eds Laura Salisbury and Andrew Shail (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 232. 7 Martin Stone, ‘Shellshock and the Psychologists’, in The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry, eds W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter and Michael Shepherd, 3 vols (London and New York: Tavistock Publications, 1985), vol. 2, pp. 265–66. 8 L. Hearnshaw, A Short History of British Psychology (London: Methuen, 1964), p. 71. 9 Siegfried Sassoon, Sherston’s Progress (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), p. 51.

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language describing the human mind and its emotional entanglements.10 Shell shock – which ‘initiated the era of psychiatric modernism’11 through an urgent pointer to unmappable and indescribable embodied experience – relocated and regendered the phenomenon of hysteria, in the process refashioning the masculine subject in modernity.12 The returning soldier was a recurring symbolic figure in post-FirstWorld-War English literature, often embodying an order of emasculation characterised by melancholic alienation and existential disconnect in the post-war civilian space. In his nervous movement from the realm of heroism to that of nihilism, the shell-shocked soldier embodied a no-man’s land informed by an irrational displacement and detachment.13 This is instantiated in many post-war novels, such as Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918), a fictional narrative about shell shock and its associated amnesia. In West’s story the soldier Chris Baldry forgets about the trauma of the trench and his unhappy marriage to a superficial woman as he moves back in his mind to that part of his life spent in profound and pure love for a working-class girl, a love that was never consummated owing to class barriers and the war.14 The entanglement of the war and class has a moving, albeit quick, allusion in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), in a conversation about (presumably) birth control pills, loss of youth and infidelity. The exchange in Eliot’s poem takes place between two working-class women anxious to preserve their sexual appeal for their husbands who have recently returned from warfronts.15 10 See Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, Studies in Hysteria, trans. Nicola Luckhurst (1895; London: Penguin Books, 2004), pp. 164–65. For a fuller study of the intersections between Freudian psychoanalysis and literary descriptions, see Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 3. 11 Showalter, The Female Malady, p. 164. 12 For a study of Freudian psychoanalysis and how it was historically contemporaneous to the changing masculine subject, see John E. Toews, ‘Refashioning the Masculine Subject in Early Modernism: Narratives of Self-Dissolution and Self-Construction in Psychoanalysis and Literature’, in The Mind of Modernism: Medicine, Psychology and the Cultural Arts in Europe and America, 1880–1940, ed. Mark S. Micale (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 298–338. 13 William Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 234. 14 Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier (New York: The Modern Library, 2004), p. 15. 15 T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, ed. Valerie Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), p. 66.

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Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) is a complex narrative of human loss that grew out of the author’s personal experiences under the contemporary biomedical gaze.16 An unsettling account of the male body in a state of shock and post-war trauma, Mrs Dalloway is about the horrors of medical treatments enacted by pre-Freudian British neurology. The necro-network in Woolf’s novel is immediately evoked by the shared affect in a mourning metropolis, where ‘everyone has friends who were killed in the War’.17 The city in Mrs Dalloway – like the battlefields of the First World War – is a complex combination of speedy machinic rituals and privately embodied inertia. Woolf dramatises the discourses of medical control that she herself had been subjected to through the fictional characters of Holmes and Bradshaw.18 Commenting on the historical significance of Woolf’s novel, William Greenslade states: ‘Mrs Dalloway is the first to fully comprehend and objectify the myths of degeneration: it is the last, in that no subsequent sophisticated fictional account could or would take degeneration seriously.’19 With its high-Modernist architectonic of one-calendar-day and complex streams of consciousness, Woolf’s novel problematises its contemporary presuppositions about masculinity and war trauma and its medical treatment. By bringing the repressed domestic female self 16 See Stephen Trombley, All That Summer She Was Mad: Virginia Woolf, Female Victim of Male Medicine (New York: Continuum, 1982), p. 63. In this work, Trombley reports that a Japanese psychiatrist named Dr Miyeko Kamiya, planning on doing a psychoanalytic study of Virginia Woolf, diagnosed the latter as anorexic. Trombley reads Woolf’s anorexia as the fallout of her mistreatment by male doctors and as her ‘rejection of male sexuality’. 17 Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (New Delhi: Worldview, 2006), p. 54. Subsequent references to this edition will appear in the text. 18 It may indeed be argued that Woolf’s characterisation of Holmes and Bradshaw in Mrs Dalloway was based on her personal and painful encounters as a patient of George Savage. Woolf’s treatment by Savage entailed confinement and disconnection from the familiar world whereby she was subjected to a ‘rest cure’ in Jean Thomas’ sanatorium in Twickenham, ‘denied pen and paper, kept in a darkened room and fed on cold rice pudding’. Roy Porter, A Social History of Madness: Stories of the Insane (London: Phoenix, 1999), p. 119. Savage’s treatment of Woolf also led to the extraction of her teeth as a mode of therapy. As Roger Poole states, there was a massive disproportion between the amount of food that Woolf thought she needed and the amount that Savage prescribed for her and this actually accentuated her nervous breakdown and enslaved her under the medical eye of Savage. See The Unknown Virginia Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 135. 19 Greenslade, Degeneration, p. 8.

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in close proximity to the shell-shocked male soldier – there is a clear indication of the empathy that Clarissa feels for Septimus despite never meeting him – Mrs Dalloway reconfigures typical gendered binaries and dramatises different yet related orders of crises in feelings, embodiment and agency. Degeneration and decadence in Woolf’s work are carefully and disturbingly juxtaposed alongside notional signifiers of speed and scientific progress. Thus speeding omnibuses and skywriting planes cut across the city in Mrs Dalloway, which also contains hysteric males and repressed females embodying a post-war population of mourners and survivors. The male body in Mrs Dalloway emerges as the site where the biopolitical gaze enacts its corrective measures and its heavy-handed censorship of deviance. In its constant and complex interplay between the external world and the inner mind, Mrs Dalloway instantiates, as Clifford Wulfman argues, the author’s attempt in her fiction ‘to recreate trauma’s stimulus upon the membrane of consciousness’.20 Woolf’s novel is all the more disturbing for the manner in which it depicts how such merciless medical execution was both socially sanctioned and legally permitted. The different orders of masculinity in the post-war metropolis in Woolf’s novel are variously embodied by a range of figures, from Septimus Smith, the enervated shell-shocked soldier back from the war, to Peter Walsh, the confused and disillusioned imperial officer back from colonial British India. Both emerge as painful subjects of an imperial masculinist machinery that is perpetuated in brutal biopolitical systems by merciless medical practitioners: ‘men who never weighed less than eleven stones six, who sent their wives to Court, men who made ten thousand a year and talked of proportion … who mixed vision and the sideboard; saw nothing clear, yet ruled, yet inflicted’ (p. 120). The medical violence dramatised in Mrs Dalloway finds strong resonances in contemporary military medical attitudes to hysterical soldiers, as exemplified by the military neurologist Lewis Yealland, who, in his 1918 work Hysterical Disorders of Warfare, encouraged a strategic system of shaming the shell-shocked soldiers, who were described as the ‘hideous enemy of negativism’21 and ought to be threatened with court martial. 20 Clifford E. Wulfman, ‘Woolf and the Discourse of Trauma: The Little Language of The Waves’, in Virginia Woolf and Trauma: Embodied Texts, eds Suzette Henke and David Eberley (New York: Pace University Press, 2007), p. 160. 21 Quoted in Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992), p. 21.

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Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway dramatises the violence enacted on the male body by a coercive biomedical gaze. The various men who inhabit Woolf’s fictional landscape correspond to different registers of cultural behaviour. The medically coerced and corporeally controlled post-war male body in Mrs Dalloway, as it emerges through the narrative of the novel, is mapped by the biopolitical machinery that seeks to reconstruct and resuscitate its functional frame.22 Mrs Dalloway is a novel that brings the male body, medical politics and psychological trauma together with the backdrop of major socio-political changes wrought by the First World War. What makes Woolf’s novel even more complex is its depiction of the biopolitical panic after the war and how its coercion is resisted by the feeling mind that unlearns its previous presuppositions through embodied and existential change. A novel about a shattered subject who embodies nervous crisis and a state of shock, Mrs Dalloway is a narrative about the changing male identity with an existential experience of emotional alienation. In its human essence, Woolf’s narrative interrogates the ontology of crisis and degeneration, and disturbingly ascribes the same to the dominant biopolitical apparatus that sought to control the body and behaviour of the deviant male subject. A profoundly political text, Woolf’s novel is also a depiction of the manner in which male bodies turned to waste products owing to their inability to reintegrate themselves within the praxis of post-war metropolitan modernity. It is interesting to note, as Sarah Cole does, how Septimus embodies the trauma of war through a suspension in time that denies him the ability to move on temporally from his trauma and assimilate himself into the narrative of normative civilian life. Exploring the politics of time in Mrs Dalloway, Cole argues that, in the context of Woolf’s narrative, ‘to be 22 It is interesting to compare Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway with a case study by one of the first advocates of neuropsychology, the Russian psychologist Alexander Luria, whose work The Man with a Shattered World offers a more directly medical account of what it means to inhabit a liminal landscape characterised by perceptual and feeling mutations. Although it contains the Second World War as its cultural and political backdrop, The Man with a Shattered World offers a very similar account of the changing body and its epistemic systems under a medical gaze. It is based on a medical observation made by Luria of a real man with a brain damaged by a bullet, a man for whom ‘Writing was his one link with life, his only hope of not succumbing to illness but recovering at least a part of what had been lost’. See The Man with a Shattered World: The History of a Brain Wound, trans. by Lynn Solotaroff (London: Cape, 1987), pp. xix–xx. The Man with a Shattered World is about the agency enacted by a mind wounded as well as traumatised by the violence of war.

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arrested in time is a death sentence’.23 The traumatised soldier–survivor in Mrs Dalloway is first introduced in the novel through markers of bodily and emotional enervation: ‘Septimus Warren Smith, aged about thirty, pale-faced, beak-nosed, wearing brown shoes and a shabby overcoat, with hazel eyes which had that look of apprehension in them which makes complete strangers apprehensive too’ (p. 12). In his embodiment of post-war trauma and his inability to narrate the same fully, Septimus inhabits a permanent prenarrative that ‘does not progress in time’.24 Through its high-Modernist stream of consciousness technique, Woolf’s novel depicts the male body in a state of interrupted embodiment whereby the temporality of trauma is fixated as the body repeatedly re-members the experiences of horror and loss in a complex entanglement of trauma and time. Woolf’s representation of Septimus is, as Patricia Moran argues, through ‘preverbal “body memories” that resist narration’, recurring as ‘incomprehensible and intrusive memory fragments that are almost hallucinatory in their quality’.25 Mrs Dalloway further heightens the embodied experience of loss by depicting the inward-looking melancholia of the war survivor under a censorious social gaze that denigrates him for suffering from a pseudo-sickness. In his conversion from a strong military man to a socially withdrawn sick man, Septimus exemplifies the uncertain hysteric body of the melancholic male soldier in the civilian space that sees him no longer as a military hero but as an emasculated waste from the war. Containing the horror of the war and hounded by the nerve doctors who dominate him corporeally, Septimus presents the male body in pain as well as the existential loneliness of the un-understood survivor. As Karen DeMeester persuasively argues, ‘Septimus defies conventional notions of shell shock because he suffers from a delayed stress response’,26 thus exibiting the effect of trauma not in the war zone but four years later in the civilian space, in a state of latency, as described by Cathy Caruth, whereby a traumatic experience is never immediately experienced but always felt in fragments through a ‘temporal delay’.27 23 Sarah Cole, Modernism, Male Friendship, And the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 179. 24 Herman, Trauma and Recovery, p. 174. 25 Patricia Moran, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and the Aesthetics of Trauma (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 5. 26 Karen DeMeester, ‘Trauma, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Obstacles to Post-war Recovery in Mrs. Dalloway’, in Moran, Virginia Woolf, p. 81. 27 Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. and introd. by Cathy Caruth (Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 11.

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The alienation and crisis that Septimus embodies are thus bodily as well as social, blurring the borderlines between the medical and the political realms. As recent studies in trauma have shown: Traumatic disjunction occurs away from the combat zone as well. The failure of friends, neighbours, and other civilians, older and younger, to recognize the complexity of the losses produced by participation in combat and the resulting psychological trauma adds another layer to the devastation which the soldier must endure, and this lack of compassion deepens his isolation. This contrasts sharply with the attitudes shown toward the young men prior to the start of the war.28

The movement from a position of privilege to a position of loss was rendered more complex by the medical attitudes towards shell shock after the First World War. The notoriously class-conscious medical science of the day saw the syndrome as a pseudo-pathological condition ‘suffered’ by an essentially unheroic, de-energised clan of former soldiers. As the hollowed-out figure rendered redundant after the war, Septimus embodies existential emptiness and continually fails to frame himself into the reconfigured post-war metropolis and its mental life.29 The isolation and disconnect he experiences after the trauma of the war take him into a hyper-reflexive inwardness that can no longer attach itself to the notional necessities of culture and its mechanisms in the metropolis. As Woolf’s novel reveals in due course, Septimus’s emotional detachment from such structures of civility and ideologies of ‘manly’ behaviour is a consequence of his experiences in emotional repression during the war, which the doctors treating him do not understand. Instead, the inward-looking melancholia of the shell-shocked soldier is perceived by contemporary medical practitioners as a dangerous form of 28 Jane Robinett, ‘The Narrative Shape of Traumatic Experience’, Literature and Medicine, 26.2 (2007), pp. 290–311 (p. 300). 29 It is interesting to compare the condition embodied by Septimus to that of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that was classified in the medical dictionary after the Vietnam War. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association in 2000 defines PTSD as characterised by Intrusive Recollection, Numbing, and Hyper-Arousal, whereby the sufferer experiences continued encounters with the original moment of trauma. The resultant condition is characterised by a feeling of detachment as well as hyper-vigilance, an inability to recall the fundamental features of the traumatic experience as well as enactment of the effect of the same experience. See Allan Young, The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).

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self-absorption that is pathological. It is problematic precisely because it is counter-productive to the heteronormative capitalist society that seeks to maximise a masculinist profit principle. Thus, unsurprisingly, Dr Holmes advises Septimus’ wife Lucrezia ‘to make her husband (who had nothing whatever seriously the matter with him but was a little out of sorts) take an interest in things outside himself’ (p. 18). Karen DeMeester examines how the physician’s failure to treat Septimus in Woolf’s novel is twofold: he destroys Septimus’s chance to recover by robbing him of the essential way he can give meaning to his war experiences, and he destroys his own culture’s meaningful recovery from the war by perpetuating a social, political, and economic status quo that sacrificed a generation of men to the First World War and enslaved and exploited numerous indigenous cultures and their lands to expand its empire.30

The interrupted embodiment of Septimus is thus not only a glitch in his contemporary medical gaze but also emerges as a problematic suspension of contemporary discourses on desirable models of masculinity that historically informed the ideology of imperialism. Woolf’s novel thus dramatises the collusion of imperialism and medicine by depicting how both operated on masculinist cultures of control and coercion and how both demanded a functioning and productive male body. The sick Septimus Smith thus quickly becomes a symbol of a problematic and pathologised post-war masculinity. In the eyes of the essentially male biopolitical gaze, Septimus embodies the undesirable propensity to solipsistic self-introspection and morbid self-consciousness that Michael Clark studied in his work on medical psychology in late nineteenth-century Britain.31 Thus Septimus is advised by the formidable neurologist Sir William Bradshaw to think as little about himself as possible (p. 80). More importantly, in the context of the melancholia he embodies, Septimus appears to appropriate the Freudian psychoanalytic formulation of traumatic repetitions where ‘the movement of the subject is always a movement towards death: towards the trauma that has not yet occurred, but is still inscribed in the novel’s anticipations and repetitions … [whereby] [t]rauma becomes a foundational principle rather than an exceptional 30 DeMeester, ‘Trauma’, p. 88. 31 Michael Clark, ‘“Morbid Introspection”, Unsoundness of Mind, and British Psychological Medicine, c 1830–1900’, in The Anatomy of Madness, eds Bynum, Porter and Shepherd, vol. 3, p. 91.

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event’.32 Inhabiting the nebulous zone between subject and object, Septimus the shell-shocked soldier embodies the enervated man of modernity who is increasingly emptied of agency and intentionality under a compulsively coercive biopolitical gaze. In the post-war culture of coercion and control that Septimus inhabits, true agency can be enacted only by an inward-looking feeling self with a seemingly solipsistic irrationality that appears absurd in the eyes of biopolitical agents. Tutored in the discourses of ‘manly behaviour’ before the war, Septimus had effaced his emotional self in favour of the ‘manly self’. The return of the repressed occurs after the war in peacetime when Septimus becomes engaged to Lucrezia through the panic ‘that he could not feel’ (p. 71). The repetition of this inability in Septimus’s haunted imagination corresponds closely to Freud’s notion of repetition in war-trauma, whereby ‘dreams occurring in traumatic neuroses have the characteristic of repeatedly bringing the patient back to the situation of the accident’.33 More importantly, this repetition emerges as a pointer to the transformation of a privilege into a loss. Once a manly military virtue, the lack and loss of the feeling emotional self emerges as a state of crisis embodied by the traumatised war survivor. The ‘manly behaviour’ that Septimus congratulates himself for exhibiting during and immediately following the war contains the forceful repression of emotion that automatically extends to an effacement of free will and agency. This is evidently in correspondence with the unemotional masculinity principle advocated by the Boy Scouts and public school culture of his day. Thus: [w]hen Evans (Rezia, who had seen him only once, called him ‘a quiet man’, a sturdy red-haired man, undemonstrative in the company of women), when Evans was killed, just before the Armistice, in Italy, Septimus, far from showing any emotion or recognising that here was the end of a friendship, congratulated himself upon feeling very little and very reasonably. The War had taught him. It was sublime. … The last shells missed him. He watched them explode with indifference. (p. 70)

The masculinity embodied by Evans, with his silent sturdy nature and undemonstrative countenance before women, is also exhibited by Septimus during times of loss and bereavement in the battlefield. Both 32 Ariela Freedman, Death, Men and Modernism: Trauma and Narrative in British Fiction from Hardy to Woolf (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), p. 8. 33 Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), p. 598.

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correspond closely to the popularly supposed superiority of ‘manly’ reason over ‘unmanly’ emotion. The primacy of reason over emotion is obviously in accordance with codes of dominant masculinity, with its steely nerves and strong will, obvious and immediate ingredients in the capitalist production principle as well as on the battlefield. Mrs Dalloway is a significant study of the human mind in a stern biopolitical culture inasmuch as it depicts how the supposedly ‘strong will’ exhibited by manly men (as manifested by lack of emotional attachments) subsequently and ironically informs the negation of will and agency in the fully feeling human self. Woolf’s novel is a moving account of how the repressed emotional self gradually disappears along with the conative self required to enact the necessary rituals of social cohesion.34 Septimus’s loss of his feeling emotional self and the consequent cognitive crisis he experiences may be examined interestingly against current studies in cognitive neuroscience that investigate the role of emotions in cognition. In particular, Antonio Damasio’s work on feelings suggests how the emotional self contributes directly to the construction of the fully functioning cognitive self necessary to carry out social integration and cognition. Examining how emotions and the ability to feel are essentially (and neurologically) linked to the reasoning centres in the brain, Damasio states: ‘In short, feeling your emotional states, which is to say being conscious of emotions, offers you flexibility of response based on the particular history of your interactions with the environment. Although you need innate devices to start the ball of knowledge rolling, feelings offer you something extra.’35 Emotions thus 34 The conative self refers to Spinoza’s notion of the conatus, the tendency to self-preservation that characterises all human beings and is innately related to their ability to feel and be emotional. A compromised conative self is thus accompanied by a loss of emotions as the subject feels herself less and less connected to her world. Spinoza’s notion of the conatus has been taken up by several modern neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio, who study emotions as informing man’s cognitive and conative ability. The loss of the conative self is thus related to emotional apathy and indifference as the subject perceives herself as detached from her world. Damasio states how medical study of alienation and depression relates to an emptiness whereby the subject is ‘cut off from his or her conatus, from the tendency for self-preservation’. See Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain (London: Heinemann, 2003), p. 139. In the same work, Damasio shows how Spinoza’s notion of the conatus influenced Freud’s idea of self-preservation (p. 260). 35 Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (London: Picador, 1995), p. 133. Emphasis in the original.

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contain the ‘something extra’ which – perhaps more than anything else – constitutes that which makes us fully feeling human beings, as well as allowing us a fully embodied interaction and integration with our environment. Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway is a remarkably complex novel inasmuch as it dramatises an entanglement of masculinity crisis and the crisis of agency through an interrupted embodiment of the feeling self, an interruption that cannot be mapped by Woolf’s contemporary neurology. By foregrounding the male body in crisis against a background of biopolitical panic, Woolf’s novel depicts how the cultural and materialist construction of masculinity affects and eventually consumes a human being by robbing him of that which makes him uniquely human. It is thus a novel that blurs the borderlines between the inside and the outside, material presence and unmappable essence, by depicting those together in the site where material interpellations and private emotions are constantly navigated and negotiated in real life: the human body. Once the heroic male who congratulated himself for effacing emotions, Septimus now emerges as a hysteric and ‘unmanly’ subject ironically and precisely because of his inability to feel or emotionally connect to the people and objects around him. Thus: He looked at people outside; happy they seemed, collecting in the middle of the street, shouting, laughing, squabbling over nothing. But he could not taste, he could not feel. … . He could reason; he could read … he could add up his bill; his brain was perfect; it must be the fault of the world then – that he could not feel. (p. 72)

Septimus’ inability to feel is caused not so much by any physical injury but by an intense period of emotional repression tutored and advocated by military masculinity coupled with the unresolved shock arising out of the trauma in the trenches during war. Septimus’s inability to feel corresponds to what William James classifies as the form of melancholic perversion where the sufferers perceive themselves as ‘sheathed in India-rubber; nothing penetrates to the quick or draws blood, as it were’.36 As the ideal of jingoistic heroism disappears from the mind and the war emerges as a landscape of shock and loss, the male subject suffers an annihilation of agency through a combination of ineffectuality and incomprehension. While he retains the function of his reasoning brain and its logic of mathematics, Septimus perceives the 36 William James, The Principles of Psychology, 3 vols (1890; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), vol. 2, p. 298.

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liquidation of his emotional self, which can no longer feel or respond emotionally to the stimuli of the world around him. It is interesting to compare the sense of loss experienced by Woolf’s fictional character to Oliver Sacks’ concept of ‘existential neurology’ that employs Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) for a fuller understanding of the neurological process. Sacks states: ‘Scotoma, in Kantian terms, was an ultimate neuro-ontological extinction (or ‘Akantia’). Physically, physiologically, there was an absence of nerve impulse, image, and field; but metaphysically, or ontologically, an absence of reason, and of its constructs, space and time.’37 Writing of his own experiences after an amputation, Sacks studies how indifference, inattention and alienation may be read as symptoms that suggest a ‘system-breakdown’ in the subject. Sack’s analysis demonstrates how classical neurology – pioneered in England in the works of Henry Head, who was actually one of Virginia Woolf’s personal physicians during her nervous illness – failed to understand the agony of the human being precisely because of its objectivising nature, which did not comprehend the subjective agency of ‘the living ‘I’.38 In correlating neurology and existential ontology, Sacks demonstrates how existential crisis – one experienced by Septimus in his knowledge that ‘it might be possible that the world itself is without meaning’ (p. 72) – is characterised by a loss of the feeling self that is conducive to the normal social and neural functioning of the body. Although his brain was perfect and he could add up the bills, Septimus could not feel and was thus increasingly alienated from the world that moved around him. Woolf’s novel thus flags up the epistemic schism between the mappable brain and the unmappable mind, between the social self and the feeling self that Septimus’s contemporary biopolitical culture did not understand, with its merciless materiality and love of proportion. Perhaps the most unsettling and graphic description of Septimus’s compromised emotive self and its permanently interrupted embodiment 37 Oliver Sacks, A Leg to Stand On (London: Macmillan, 1991), p. 166. 38 Sacks, A Leg to Stand On, p. 164. In this work, Sacks demonstrates how the uniqueness of the self may elude the medical gaze of neurology and neuropsychology, which has been overly reliant on a culture of empirical classification where it is difficult for patients experiencing alienation to ‘convey their feelings: the patient might not speak, the doctor might not hear’ (p. 156). By delineating the difference between the ‘schemata’ and ‘inner images’ of neuropsychology and the ‘experiencing’, ‘willing’ and ‘feeling’ that characterise the subjectivity of the self, Sacks affirms how the neural systems that are visible to the medical machines ‘are embedded in, and transcended by, selves’ (p. 164).

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occurs in Woolf’s description of the shell-shocked soldier’s struggle to respond to his wife’s emotional breakdown, which appears to him as a thumping of a piston: She could not grow old and have no children! She was very lonely, she was very unhappy! She cried for the first time since they were married. Far away he heard her sobbing; he heard it accurately, he noticed it distinctly; he compared it to a piston thumping. But he felt nothing. (p. 73)

In equating the sound of his wife weeping to that of a piston thumping, Septimus exhibits a cognitive system wounded by the war, whereby once familiarised paradigms of perceptions are rendered defamiliarised through a process of disintegration and disorientation.39 The connection and comparison that Septimus’s traumatised mind makes between his wife weeping and a piston thumping emerges as a classic instantiation of PTSD suffered by war veterans, whereby an embodied experience of traumatic recall is immediately accompanied by a process of existential liquidation in which feeling is increasingly reduced to entities. In medical classification, PTSD constitutes ‘recurrent and intrusive recollections’ (Criterion B1) accompanied by an alienation that includes a ‘markedly reduced ability to feel emotions’ (Criterion C6).40 In retaining what he considers to be his reasoning self, while having repressed and subsequently lost his feeling emotional self, Septimus embodies the dual effects of war trauma and masculinist embodiment gone wrong. His inability to emote or feel – which his contemporary neurologists fail to address 39 It is interesting to compare Septimus’s hysteric hearing to the hysteric experience in Eliot’s short poem ‘Hysteria’, where the male hysteric is seated in the social space of the urban café with a female companion and is increasingly disassociated from the logos of social cognition (exemplified by his passive hearing of the waiter’s enquiry whether they wished to take their tea in the garden, an enquiry that appears as an uncanny/mechanic repetition to the hysteric male speaker’s ears). Eliot’s ‘Hysteria’ closes with the speaker focusing attention ‘with careful subtlety’ on the desire to ‘stop the shaking of her [the female companion’s] breasts’ in a bid to collect ‘some of the fragments of the afternoon’. It exemplifies a trait similar to that of Septimus in Woolf’s novel; the hysteric subject’s submergence into a series of sounds (a motif that appears at the end of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ as well) and the impotent attempt to establish an objective correlative of consciousness that the male hysteric can attach himself to amidst the anarchy of stimuli in the post-war metropolis. The impotence that informs such attempts corroborates the masculinity crisis that both Woolf’s novel and Eliot’s early poetry depict. Eliot, ‘Hysteria’, Complete Poems and Plays, p. 32. 40 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition (DSM IV) (Washington DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1994), pp. 424–25.

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– corresponds to that condition of numbness that modern neuroscientists classify as a form of consciousness disorder.41 In its depiction of a war survivor’s inability to connect to his external environment and society, Woolf’s novel is an excellent example of the existential extension of traumatic experiences that ‘shatter the construction of the self that is formed and sustained in relation to others’.42 Unsurprisingly, according to his contemporary biomedical gaze embodied by Dr Holmes, nothing is really wrong with Septimus and the doctors’ orders include playing cricket, a collective male sport that corresponds closely to the hegemonic masculine vocabulary of Edwardian Britain. The suicide of Septimus by jumping from the high window appears ironically as an almost biological response to (and a natural extension of) the bodily panic born out of imminent terror as he perceives himself in the power of Holmes and Bradshaw, who advocate that ‘he must be taught to rest’ (p. 119), thus appropriating the vocabulary of violence of the Mitchell method of coercive cure,43 even while seemingly suggesting peace-therapy. Septimus’s final attempt to save his writings from the clutches of Holmes and Bradshaw by burning them is symbolic of his desperation to retain his private symbols of signification in the face of the panoptic biomedical gaze embodied by the nerve doctors. The masculinist vocabulary of the medical culture embodied by Holmes and Bradshaw is immediately evident in Holmes’ cry of ‘coward’ as Septimus leaps from the large Bloomsbury window, thus voicing not despair but disapproval, not sorrow for the human tragedy but disgust at the unmanliness of the act. The mangled body of 41 In delineating the difference between thoughts and emotions, Joseph LeDoux asserts that ‘emotional feelings and mere thoughts are generated by different subsymbolic systems … [and] that emotional feelings involve many more brain systems than thoughts’. See The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998), p. 299. 42 Herman, Trauma and Recovery, p. 51. 43 The proscriptive strategies and suggestions by Holmes and Bradshaw in Woolf’s novel are an extension of the rest-cure methods prescribed by Silas Weir Mitchell whereby the female patient would be subjected to absolute confinement and not allowed access to any medium of expression, including writing. Mitchell’s method of medical surveillance and the treatment of hysteria through confinement were popular well into the twentieth century and doctors treating soldiers from the war actually hoped to induce a strategic boredom among patients with nervous breakdown through uniform monitoring, confinement and control. See Paul Lerner, Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 140–42.

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the shell-shocked soldier lies as a testimony to the tyranny of contemporary biomedicine and its agents, until it is siphoned away along with the other sirens of the city that thrill Peter Walsh as he hears the high bell of the ambulance speeding through London traffic. Septimus, the shellshocked soldier who is brutalised, dehumanised and denigrated by his contemporary culture of cure and its merciless agents, eventually emerges as an alienated and liquidated subject in the post-war metropolis. In his insight into the horror and loneliness of his loss, and in his interrupted embodiment of the feeling self after the war, Septimus emerges as a subject who remains unarticulated and un-understood under the coercive, controlling gaze of contemporary bioscience. Woolf’s novel is a story about the death of agency and free will in the post-war metropolis. In its depiction of the biopolitical regime that oversees human bodily and social behaviour, Mrs Dalloway demonstrates how the politics of masculinity and medical science reduce human complexities and capacities to mappable methods of classification and cure. In its vivid instantiations of trauma and loss, Woolf’s novel situates the hysteric male body in an ironic and impotent resistance to the biopolitical gaze, thus deconstructing contemporary presuppositions about gender while also critiquing hegemonic medical tenets. In their inconstant and incomplete inscriptions into the systems of patriarchy, best exemplified by the dominant discourses of masculinity and biomedicine, the fictional Septimus and the real soldiers of the First World War embody a nervous condition that is medical as well as immediately political, one that Slavoj Žižek classified as ‘the effect and testimony of a failed interpellation’44 into the symbolic. The ambivalence, crisis and eventual suicide of Septimus in Mrs Dalloway ironically dramatise an order of resistance that shows how ideological interpellations may be disrupted by existential inwardness and change. In its literary and complex descriptions of the hysterical male body subjected to the violence enacted by society and medicine, Woolf’s story shows what it means to be truly, painfully and nervously human in a biopolitical culture that promotes proportion and itemised medical knowledge. Historically located after the First World War, Mrs Dalloway is one of the earliest novels about the entanglements of the hysterically interrupted male body and biomedical control. It emerges with renewed relevance in the neoliberal culture of corrective biomedicine and bioengineering that we inhabit and internalise today. 44 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ontology (London: Verso, 1989), p. 113.

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‘A man must make himself’ Hypochondria in Maria Edgeworth’s Ennui Robin Runia Hypochondria Maria Edgeworth’s Ennui (1809), the first volume of her Tales of Fashionable Life, begins with its hero, Lord Glenthorn, explaining, ‘Whilst yet a boy, I began to feel the dreadful symptoms of that mental malady which baffles the skill of medicine, and for which wealth can purchase only temporary alleviation. For this complaint there is no precise English name; but, alas! the foreign term is now naturalized in England.’1 He goes on to describe his symptoms, some of which include ‘restlessness of body and mind’ and ‘apathy’.2 In attempts to justify the life of dissipated luxury that he will subsequently relate, the Irish-born and English-educated Glenthorn details various attempts to cure his distemper according to the most current fashion. These failed attempts and Glenthorn’s linking them to examples of foreign tyranny and failed patriarchy represent the malady as a moral failure. However, exposure to a distinctly Irish character provides an alternative that highlights the value of domestic affection and makes clear Edgeworth’s unique definition of masculinity. Ultimately, the novel argues that a man must be defined according not to his activities abroad but to his relationships at home. Much critical work has been done to situate Ennui within the context of revolutionary Ireland and to determine Edgeworth’s politics. Marilyn 1 Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent and Ennui, ed. Marilyn Butler (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 144. 2 Edgeworth, Ennui, p. 144.

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Butler’s introduction to her 1992 edition of Castle Rackrent and Ennui, for example, argues that ‘Glenthorn acts for the Anglo-Irish ruling order’ and that the Rebellion and Union are ‘actually the tale’s unspecified axis’.3 More recently, however, Robert Tracy has argued that Ennui suggests: ‘the commitment to Irish tradition … or an unhyphenated Irish identity’.4 In this essay, my intention is to define Ennui’s contributions to the notion of an ‘unhyphenated Irish identity’ according to two preliminary considerations. The first is the work Irene Beesemyer has already done to explore the important connection between Glenthorn’s ‘clinical boredom’ and his 3 Edgeworth, Ennui, p. 33. Following Butler’s lead, subsequent critics have explored the novel according to dichotomised Anglo-Irish and Irish ideologies. Kathleen Costello-Sullivan, for example, develops the novel’s political engagements and argues that the novel is essentially concerned with the ‘need for the Irish to undergo not just a perceptual or behavioural shift, but rather a fundamental alteration according to Anglo-Irish desires for assimilation without colonial revolution or conflict’ but through education (Kathleen Costello-Sullivan, ‘National Character and Foreclosed Irishness: A Reconsideration of Ennui’, in An Uncomfortable Authority: Maria Edgeworth and Her Contexts, eds Heidi Kaufman and Chris Fauske (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2004), pp. 146–61 (p. 147). Similarly, Kevin Whelan reads Ennui as a clear representation of Edgeworth’s own conservative politics (Kevin Whelan, ‘Writing Ireland: Reading England’, in Ireland in the Nineteenth Century: Regional Identity, eds Leon Litvack and Glenn Hooper (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), pp. 185–98. There has also been a trend within scholarship on Edgeworth and Ennui to complicate this political binary. Claire Connolly’s work, for instance, effectively disrupts the novel’s representation of conservative and liberal, imperial and anti-imperial politics, as does that of Mitzi Myers (Claire Connolly, ‘Writing the Union’, in Acts of Union: The Causes, Contexts, and Consequences of the Act of Union, eds Dáire Keogh and Kevin Whelan (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001), pp. 171–86; Mitzi Myers, ‘Canonical “Orphans” and Critical Ennui: Rereading Edgeworth’s Cross-Writing’, Children’s Literature, 25 (1997), pp. 116–36 and ‘Completing the Union: Critical Ennui, the Politics of Narrative, and the Reformation of Irish Cultural Identity’, Prose Studies, 18.3 (1995), pp. 41–77 and ‘Goring John Bull: Maria Edgeworth’s Hibernian High Jinks versus the Imperialist Imaginary’, in Cutting Edges: Postmodern Critical Essays on Eighteenth-Century Satire, ed. James E. Gill (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1995), pp. 367–94. Accordingly, Butler’s subsequent revision of her own earlier position concludes: ‘Edgeworth has other objectives, including but not limited to nationalism, that prove her much more expressively committed than has hitherto appeared to the history, language, and future of Irish people’ (Marilyn Butler, ‘Edgeworth’s Ireland: History, Popular Culture, and Secret Codes’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 34.2 (Spring 2001), pp. 267–93 (p. 267). 4 Robert Tracy, The Unappeasable Host: Studies in Irish Identities (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 1998), p. 29.

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masculinity.5 Describing the Revolutionary context of Wollstonecraftian feminism as a blow to traditional models of masculinity, Beesemyer builds upon Marilyn Butler’s observations about Edgeworth’s knowledge of contemporary medical discourse to explore Glenthorn’s emasculation. Specifically, Beesemyer reads each failed remedy as an impotent yearning for sexual release, and she ultimately concludes that Glenthorn’s cure represents a new model of masculinity, the ‘“bourgeois aristocrat,” a man potentiated no longer by birth, titles, lands, or God’.6 Re-examination of this theme and its conclusion at the novel’s end, however, suggests that a complete understanding of Glenthorn’s cure requires a more nuanced reading of his masculinity. The denouement of the novel does more than simply replace traditional markers of birth, titles and lands with a new capitalist order: it defines Glenthorn’s cure as distinctly private and domestic. The second preliminary consideration is grounded in a more fully fleshed-out acknowledgement of Edgeworth’s commitment to recognising women’s knowledge of and contributions to science and medicine, as testified in her first published work, Letters for Literary Ladies (1795).7 This text parodies the conservative rejection of women’s ability both to reason and to contribute to social reform, and it provides an alternative defence and example of women’s wit. In addition, her co-authorship, with her father Richard Lovell Edgeworth, of Practical Education (1798) and its chapters on ‘Arithmethick’, ‘Geometry’, ‘Chemistry’ and ‘Prudence and Economy’, exemplify her acquaintance with not only the scientific and physical principles motivating her father’s inventions but also those of the Lunar Society of which he was a member.8 Accordingly, a few scholars have begun to recognise the importance of scientific theories 5 Irene Beesemyer, ‘Romantic Masculinity in Edgeworth’s Ennui and Scott’s Marmion: In Itself a Border Story’, Papers on Language and Literature (1999), pp. 74–96 (p. 77). 6 Beesemyer, ‘Romantic Masculinity’, p. 75. Beesemyer also develops this argument in her essay ‘“I thought I never set my eyes on a finer figure of a man”: Maria Edgeworth Scrutinizes Masculinity’, in New Essays on Maria Edgeworth, ed. Julie Nash (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 109–30. Megan Woodworth also argues that Edgeworth’s novel ‘offers a viable alternative masculine model in the professionalized gentleman’, in Eighteenth-Century Women Writers and the Gentleman’s Liberation Movement: Independent, War, Masculinity, and the Novel, 1778–1818 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), p. 141. 7 Maria Edgeworth, Letters for Literary Ladies, ed. Claire Connolly (New York: Orion Publishing Group, 1993). 8 Richard Lovell Edgeworth and Maria Edgeworth, Practical Education (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), Vol. 1.

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and discourse to Edgeworth’s work. James Chandler has recommended that her Lunar Society connections be recognised as an explanation of Belinda’s (1801) experimental themes and form and the novel’s interest in joining the moral and natural world.9 In addition, Nicole Wright’s close reading of the two tricks played with phosphorous in Belinda represents Edgeworth’s commitment to experimentation in science education. Setting a precedent for critical recognition of the Edgeworths’ repudiation of received authority, Wright explains how, in Practical Education, ‘The Edgeworths specifically cavil with a well known book called Hooper’s Rational Recreations.’10 Their rejection of William Hooper’s 1774 text insists on the impropriety of the sensational and sensual. Collectively, these recent studies signal the need for re-examination and reanalysis of Ennui’s medical discourse. To begin, while Glenthorn claims that no English name exists to describe his condition, he goes on to list symptoms frequently associated with the long English tradition of philosophical, medical and literary writing about melancholy: At first I was unconscious of being subject to this disease … the symptoms were sufficiently marked. I was afflicted with frequent fits of fidgeting, yawning, and stretching, with a constant restlessness of mind and body; an aversion to the place I was in, or the thing I was doing, or rather to that which was passing before my eyes, for I was never doing anything; I had an utter abhorrence and incapacity of voluntary exertion. Unless roused by external stimulus, I sank into that kind of apathy, and vacancy of ideas, vulgarly known by the name of a brown study. If confined in a room for more than half an hour by bad weather or other contrarieties, I would pace backwards and forwards, like the restless cavia in his den, with a fretful, unmeaning pertinacity. I felt an insatiable longing for something new, and a childish love of locomotion.11

This extended description of Glenthorn’s malady provides a number of clues to the nature of Edgeworth’s commentary. Firstly, while his diction – ‘disease’ and ‘symptoms’ – acknowledges a more general medicalisation of psychological states, emphasis on its chronic state through ‘frequent’, 9 James Chandler, ‘Edgeworth and the Lunar Enlightenment’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 45.1 (2011), pp. 87–104. 10 Nicole Wright, ‘Opening the Phosphoric “Envelope”: Scientific Appraisal, Domestic Spectacle, and (Un)Reasonable Creatures in Edgeworth’s Belinda’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 24.3 (2012), pp. 509–36. 11 Edgeworth, Ennui, p. 144.

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‘constant’, ‘never’, ‘utter’ and ‘insatiable’ also acknowledges medicine’s failure to provide consistent and successful treatment. Secondly, by claiming that the English language does not contain the very words necessary to denote the existence of the malady, it suggests that it results from foreign contagion and must be understood as the antithesis of English culture and values. Thirdly, Glenthorn’s appeal to the general and widespread knowledge of the malady suggests the severity of the corruption it perpetrates. Finally, the very description of his specific symptoms outlines the moral corruption the rest of Edgeworth’s novel will argue is at the root of ennui. His agency is completely corrupted. His only activity: ‘I sank’. This degeneration into the vulgar ‘brown study’ – which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as a ‘state of mental abstraction’ – illuminates Glenthorn’s unwillingness to take responsibility for his intellectual function.12 He becomes a passive victim – ‘I was afflicted.’ This is further exacerbated by use of the cavia simile. His use of the Latin for ‘to bear’ once again signals the elite nature of his malady, even as he compares himself to a lumbering creature. This combined passivity and helplessness explains his reversion to the ‘childish’. He refuses to be a man. Despite Glenthorn’s attempt to deny any essential Englishness inherent in the malady, his subsequent invocation of William Cullen, renowned physician and important figure within the Scottish Enlightenment, situates his case firmly and specifically within the medical discourse of his moment, further reinforcing the perceived prevalence of the disorder. Quoting the chapter entitled ‘Hypochondriasis’ from the third volume of The First Lines of the Practice of Physick (1781), Glenthorn privileges Cullen’s observation that Whatever aversion to application of any kind may appear in hypochondriacs, there is nothing more pernicious to them than absolute idleness, or a vacancy from all earnest pursuit. It is owing to wealth admitting of indolence, and leading to the pursuit of transitory and unsatisfying amusements, or exhausting pleasures only, that the present times exhibit to us so many instances of hypochondriacism.13

In the introduction of her edition of the novel, Marilyn Butler makes a link between hypochondria and wealth.14 However, Butler’s distortion 12 “brown study,” Oxford English Dictionary Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 7 November 2013. 13 Edgeworth, Ennui, p. 250. 14 Edgeworth, Ennui, p. 32.

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of Cullen’s prescriptions – in particular, her claim that travel, over all other remedies, is the activity he ‘specially recommends’ – contributes to a skewed view of the text as ‘formally a fictional travelogue’ representing the ‘novelty’ of Irish customs and politics.15 This cursory reading of Cullen and over-emphasis on the novel’s depiction of travel contradicts Butler’s own acknowledgement that the text is ‘more profoundly – as an epigraph to one chapter hints – about happiness and self-realization at home’.16 It also misreads a crucial moment in Glenthorn’s remedy – his acquaintance with Lady Geraldine – as a moment of breakdown. In contrast, careful reading of Glenthorn’s symptoms, attempted remedies and cure provides new insight into the novel’s representation of the relationship between masculinity, medicine and domestic concerns. Glenthorn meticulously details his own attempts to cure his malady according to Cullen’s more specific medical directives, depicting his malady as ‘a certain state of the body, which must be inquir’d into in order to its being treated as a disease by the art of physic’.17 This becomes immediately apparent in Glenthorn’s description of his condition: ‘My physician and my guardian, not knowing what to do with me, sent me abroad.’18 As mentioned previously, Cullen does recommend travel in The First Lines by explaining that curing exercise ‘will be most effectual when employed in the pursuit of a journey’.19 However, upon his return, Glenthorn’s symptoms reappear. He explains that, by shunning the company of friends, he chooses instead ‘to indulge [himself] in a solitary, melancholy, walk’, only to have his ‘desperate yawn’ interrupted by one of his neglected guests.20 Glenthorn goes on to apply another of Cullen’s prescriptions when he attributes the ‘discontent’ and ‘oppressive sensations’ he feels to the ‘brackish unwholesome’ water on his estate.21 As Cullen’s First Lines explains, for individuals like Glenthorn, ‘chalybeate mineral waters have commonly been employed in hypochondriasis, and seemingly with success. But this is probably to be imputed to the amusement and exercise usually accompanying the use of these waters, rather than to 15 Edgeworth, Ennui, p. 26. 16 Edgeworth, Ennui, p. 26. 17 William Cullen, First Lines of the Practice of Physic, 3 vols (Edinburgh: Bell & Bradfute, and William Creech, 1791), vol. III, p. 267. 18 Edgeworth, Ennui, p. 144. 19 Cullen, First Lines, p. 285. 20 Edgeworth, Ennui, p. 145. 21 Edgeworth, Ennui, p. 146.

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the tonic power of the small quantity of iron which they contain.’22 Accordingly, Glenthorn ‘hurried to a watering-place, after the example of many of [his] noble contemporaries’.23 Unfortunately, Brighton’s waters fail to heal his distemper. When his symptoms return, Glenthorn again follows another of Cullen’s prescriptions: gaming. And, despite the relief to be found in what Cullen describes as ‘Play, in which some skill is required’, Glenthorn’s symptoms return once again.24 Exemplifying the unreliability of this remedy, Glenthorn proves the rule of Cullen’s warning that, for some, the high stakes of the gaming table may render them ‘liable to sudden and considerable emotion, [that] is dangerous’.25 Sure enough, Glenthorn loses his entire fortune, only to sink back into ennui after a convenient marriage to an heiress. Glenthorn next seeks out another of Cullen’s remedies in ‘amusement’, seizing upon the ‘Epicurism’ fashionable among the ‘wealthy and noble youths of Britain’, only to be again disappointed, concluding, ‘My indulgence in the excesses of the table injured my health; violent bodily exercise was necessary to counteract the effects of intemperance.’26 But when Cullen’s next recommendation of ‘various kinds of sport and hunting’27 and, specifically, ‘riding on horseback’28 ends in the killing of ‘fourteen horses’, Glenthorn admits that he is once more ‘seized with nervous complaint, attended with extreme melancholy’.29 Upon re-examination of each of these critical moments of failed remedy, Edgeworth’s novel provides more than a simple commentary on the leisure activities of wealthy men and the medicine practised upon them. It also situates those activities within the context of foreign political failures. Specifically, each failure is linked to some form of foreign corruption. The novel declares this imbrication on its first page with an epigraph from Dieudonné Thiebault’s memoir of Frederick the Great, Mes Souvenirs de vingt an de séjour á Berline; ou Frederic le Grand, sa famille, sa cour (1804), relating his experiences during the 20 years he spent at the Royal Court of Prussia editing the French writings of 22 Cullen, First Lines, p. 277. 23 Edgeworth, Ennui, p. 146. 24 Cullen, First Lines, p. 283. 25 Cullen, First Lines, p. 285. 26 Edgeworth, Ennui, p. 154. 27 Cullen, First Lines, p. 283. 28 Cullen, First Lines, p. 285. 29 Edgeworth, Ennui, p. 154.

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King Frederick II. Specifically, the epigraph describes Prince Wilhelm’s insistence on the boredom that defines not only his own life but also that of his entire royal circle and, accordingly, it signals Edgeworth’s concerns with the vapid lifestyle enjoyed by cultural elites. Even more damning, it alludes to the extravagance and indolence that led Prince Wilhelm, upon his succession to the throne of Prussia, to provide only weak support on behalf of his sworn ally, King Louis XVI of France, during the Revolution. In addition, Glenthorn, by referring to himself in the third person as ‘Milord Anglois’, admits that the French luxury encountered on his Grand Tour is a powerfully alienating source of his distemper. He also describes the mounting crisis of his symptoms as balancing him ‘between becoming a misanthrope and a democrat’.30 Poised between hatred of mankind and a populism simultaneously committed to the republican ideals of the French Revolution and opposition of his own aristocratic privilege, Glenthorn’s position becomes even more precarious. This condition quickly worsens to the degree that Glenthorn decides to commit suicide, but, at this point, he finds a new and surprising antidote to his symptoms. In contrast to the novel’s continuing detailing of failed medical prescriptions associated with foreign political failures, Ennui also posits distinctly Irish characteristics that, at crucial points, gradually drive Glenthorn to a more effectual remedy. The first instance manifests itself during Glenthorn’s convalescence in the care of his Irish nurse, Ellinor, after his failed attempt to take his own life. Regarding her care of him, he explains: Indeed, when I came to the use of my senses, she was the only person whom I really liked to have near me. […] The very want of a sense of propriety, and the freedom with which she talked to me, regardless of what suited her station, or due to my rank, instead of offending or disgusting me, became agreeable.31

Ellinor’s sincerity, goodwill and candor bring him back to health.32 Significantly, at this moment, an original footnote details the nature of Ellinor’s unusual persuasive power and the benefit of her distinctly Irish character. In this footnote, Edgeworth provides a quotation from John Davies’s Progress through the Wastes and Wildest Parts of the Kingdom: 30 Edgeworth, Ennui, p. 168. 31 Edgeworth, Ennui, p. 160. 32 Edgeworth, Ennui, p. 160.

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h y po chon dr i a For fostering, I did never hear or read, that it was in use or reputation in any country, barbarous or civil, as it hath been, and yet in Ireland … . In the opinion of this people, fostering hath always been a stronger alliance than blood … and do participate of their means more frankly, and do adhere unto them, in all fortunes, with more affection and constancy … . Such a general custom in a kingdom, in giving and taking children to foster, making such a firm alliance as it doth in Ireland, was never seen or heard of in any other country of the world beside.33

Thus it seems that Ellinor’s nursing of Glenthorn provides the foundation for an alliance stronger than mere heredity, an alliance that has, historically, cemented the Irish people together in constant, affectionate and loving communities. This unique Irish practice and its union of familial and national domestic concerns, more than any fascination with quaint or exotic folk history, explains the suspension of Glenthorn’s symptoms. The footnote goes on to provide an additional historical example of experiences similar to those described by Glenthorn from John Lodge’s Peerage of Ireland (1754) and, in so doing, Edgeworth argues for the real efficacy of her character’s narration in providing an example of a positive and useful emotional connection formed between two individuals unrelated by blood but united by their duty to hearth and homeland.34 Unfortunately, Glenthorn’s condition worsens when he is surprised by the intelligence that his wife has been engaged in a love affair with his steward: ‘Astonishment, the sense of disgrace, the feeling of rage against the treacherous parasite by whom she had been seduced, all combined to overwhelm me.’35 Once again, new-found relief corresponds to the medical prescription in Cullen’s First Lines, for in salvaging both his reputation and fortune Glenthorn immerses himself in the recommended ‘occupation of business suitable to [his] circumstances and situation in life’.36 But then Glenthorn also details a new ability to relish his malady: ‘Illness was a sort of occupation to me, and I was always sorry to get well. When the interest of being in danger ceased, I had no other to supply its place. I fancied I should enjoy my liberty after my divorce; but even freedom grew tasteless.’37 Eventually, Ellinor again provides his remedy. He describes: ‘I do not recollect anything that wakened me 33 Edgeworth, Ennui, p. 159. 34 Edgeworth, Ennui, p. 159. 35 Edgeworth, Ennui, p. 162. 36 Cullen, First Lines, p. 282. 37 Edgeworth, Ennui, p. 165.

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from my torpor, during two months after my divorce, except a violent quarrel between all my English servants and my Irish nurse.’38 The reader subsequently learns that this quarrel has rendered Glenthorn vulnerable to ‘discontented, capricious servants’, and he admits that, before his introduction to Ellinor, the ineffectualness of his approach to their ‘tyranny’ is only ‘comforted’ by his ‘recollection of the poor king of Spain and le brasier’.39 In this allusion to Charles IV’s losses against the French during the Revolution, Glenthorn acknowledges: ‘With a regal precedent I could not but be satisfied’ with defeat.40 However, once ‘national prejudice’ provokes the other servants to prey too much upon Ellinor’s Irish ‘good humour’, to insult her and to go so far as to question her loyalty to Glenthorn, he again takes unprecedented action, describing how ‘I protected her as long as I could.’41 Unused to such exertion, however, Glenthorn eventually capitulates, and then ‘despatche[s] Ellinor to Ireland, with a renewal of the promise that [he] would visit Glenthorn Castle this year or next’.42 When separated from his Irish spur to action, Glenthorn falls back into his usual torpor.43 At this point, Glenthorn once again resorts to Cullen’s medically prescribed distractions and, at least initially, he finds respite in a boxing match he encounters upon his resumed journeys. Upon first spectatorship, Glenthorn is ‘so much excited, and that excitation [is] so delightful’.44 But when this experiment, like the many failed medical prescriptions before it, is linked by another spectator to the Romans who ‘were most eager for the fights of gladiators during the reigns of the most effeminate and cruel emperors, and in the decline of all public spirit and virtue’ Glenthorn is immediately seized ‘with a fit of national shame’ at his own repetition of ‘the arguments of some of the parliamentary panegyrists of boxing and bull-baiting’.45 Glenthorn recognises in his own degenerate pleasures the precedent set by the fall of the Roman state and a similar failure among Britain’s political leadership. However, another Irish intervention provides a positive engagement of his attention. Glenthorn goes on to explain that his ‘feelings [are] 38 Edgeworth, 39 Edgeworth, 40 Edgeworth, 41 Edgeworth, 42 Edgeworth, 43 Edgeworth, 44 Edgeworth, 45 Edgeworth,

Ennui, Ennui, Ennui, Ennui, Ennui, Ennui, Ennui, Ennui,

p. 165. pp. 166, 167. p. 167. p. 166. p. 166. p. 167. p. 168. p. 168.

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touched at this time by the dreadful sufferings of one of the pugilistic combatants’, who he has found out is Irish.46 Glenthorn juxtaposes the ‘dreadful sufferings’ of this fighter with the English nobility and approves the Irish pugilist’s dying wish that his little remaining money and a silk handkerchief be delivered to his ‘aged father’ and sister.47 Thus, Glenthorn is roused to the uncharacteristic decision to follow through on his promise to Ellinor and acknowledge his duties to his Irish tenantry. Despite this unusual resolution, the next chapter recording Glenthorn’s travels to and first experiences in Ireland seems, once again, to rehash Cullen’s prescriptions and their failure. For, even while Glenthorn has arranged transportation between Dublin and his rural estate, that fact that the ‘exercise in an easy carriage’ takes place ‘upon rough roads’ proves effective.48 Upon recollecting his adventures travelling in an absurdly dilapidated coach driven by the fearless ‘Paddy’ upon dismal roads, Glenthorn concludes: ‘I never remember having experienced on any journey, any less ennui … . Upon this principle I should recommend to wealthy hypochondriacs a journey in Ireland, preferably to any country in the civilized world.’49 Here, the rusticity of Glenthorn’s mode of travel seems to accord with prescribed medical direction. He argues that Ireland’s rough roads and ‘uncivilized’ transport and accommodation require his physical exertion, providing beneficial treatment unknown to Glenthorn previously. However, the repetition of a French threat in the chapter’s epigraph precedes this journey and foreshadows the imminent failure of this prescription as well. Marilyn Butler translates from French the epigraph’s conversation between two interlocutors as follows: ‘“Are you happy in the prime of your life? Have you got your own tastes and amusements? You must lead quite an agreeable life”. The other answered in two words, “I’m bored”. “That’s unfortunate,” said the fairy. “I think the great thing is to be at home.”’50 The epigraph suggests that, regardless of the amusements to be found in travel, only at home may one find happiness and contentment. Only at home may one fulfil the duties defining the prime of one’s life. 46 Edgeworth, Ennui, p. 168. 47 Edgeworth, Ennui, p. 168. 48 Cullen, First Lines, p. 285. 49 Edgeworth, Ennui, pp. 175–76. 50 Edgeworth, Ennui, p. 355.

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Accordingly, and perhaps not surprisingly, Glenthorn’s ennui quickly returns upon contemplation of the ‘savage wildness’ of the Irish landscape, and he describes how his ‘imagination was seized with the idea of remoteness from civilized society: the melancholy feeling of solitary grandeur took possession of his soul’.51 Only upon assuming intercourse with his tenants, and the ‘occupation of business suitable’ recommended by Cullen, is Glenthorn’s chronic condition again temporarily ameliorated. Specifically, Glenthorn describes that, upon hearing their various and contradictory needs, Never were my ears so weary any day of my life as they were this day. I could not have endured the fatigue, if I had not been supported by the agreeable idea of my own power and consequence; a power seemingly next to despotic. This new stimulus sustained me for three days.52

Acknowledgement of his own rank and power seems to form the foundation of his symptoms’ alleviation. Corresponding to this, albeit fleeting, relief is yet another reference to foreign political failure. He describes his own stubborn refusal to accept the recommendations of his estate manager, McLeod, by invoking Frederick the Great: ‘Like the King of Prussia who was said to be so jealous of power, that he wanted to regulate all the mouse-traps in his dominions, I soon engrossed the management of a perplexing multiplicity of minute insignificant details.’53 While trying to find a cure in the duties attendant upon his position, Glenthorn seizes upon a model that undermines the remedy promised by medicine. Hence, when his usual ‘feverish’ nights and ‘tortured’ dreams return, Glenthorn is drawn to exert himself in the interest of acquiring new acquaintances.54 In this moment, he seems to follow another of Cullen’s prescriptions by seeking ‘within doors, company which engages attention’ that is ‘at the same time of a chearful kind’.55 But, once again, it is only an encounter with a distinctly Irish character that seems to allow a moment of respite from his malady. The specifically Irish Lady Geradine engages his attention to an unprecedented extent, and Glenthorn relates that she, who is not only beautiful and intelligent, displays particularities 51 Edgeworth, Ennui, p. 179. 52 Edgeworth, Ennui, p. 182. 53 Edgeworth, Ennui, p. 184. 54 Edgeworth, Ennui, p. 184. 55 Cullen, First Lines, p. 283.

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of speech in which he ‘detected certain Hibernian inflections [with] nothing of the vulgar Irish idiom’ and, of her manner, that it ‘appeared foreign, yet it was not quite French’.56 From this he concludes that ‘the word striking—fascinating—bewitching’ most perfectly describe both his extraordinary interest in her as well as her ability to prevent his once again sinking into ‘indifference and ennui’.57 In direct contrast to the stultifying distraction provided by the introduction to his other elite neighbours, including the merely ‘pleasant’ Miss Bland, Lady Geraldine, daughter of the Irish Lady Kildangan, provides another example of the Irish character traits that have proven so beneficial to easing Glenthorn’s malady.58 Repeatedly, Glenthorn finds himself ‘piqued’ by the ‘more interrogative, more exclamatory, and perhaps more rhetorical’ contributions of Lady Geraldine, as opposed to the ‘common’ ‘English ladies’.59 Further, when Glenthorn’s pique turns into ‘entertainment’ he admits: ‘I had been so far roused from my habitual apathy, that I actually made some reflections … . I think I owe to Lady Geraldine my first relish for wit, and my first idea that a woman might be, if not a reasonable, at least a companionable animal.’60 Lady Geraldine, like Ellinor and the boxer, provoke a unique interest and activity in Glenthorn. Like Ellinor, Geraldine’s candor proves compelling. Her professed affection and constancy exemplify the strong alliances possible between members of the Irish community. Her nobility, loyalty and wit suspend Glenthorn’s habitual beliefs and attitudes about wealth, status and especially gender, along with his symptoms. Significantly, this relief metamorphoses into Glenthorn’s proposal of marriage, but Lady Geraldine refuses with the confession of her parentally unapproved engagement with a Mr Cecil Devereaux. Describing his own reaction to her vulnerable and heartfelt confession, Glenthorn explains, ‘My soul was so completely touched.’61 But when their private intercourse is interrupted and allowed no satisfactory conclusion he returns home and descends into another sort of depression. He relates, ‘I never shaved for two days, and scarcely ever spoke. I should have taken to my bed to avoid seeing any human creature; but […] I continued to lie stretched 56 Edgeworth, 57 Edgeworth, 58 Edgeworth, 59 Edgeworth, 60 Edgeworth, 61 Edgeworth,

Ennui, Ennui, Ennui, Ennui, Ennui, Ennui,

p. 203. p. 205. p. 203. p. 203. p. 207. p. 239.

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upon a sofa, ruminating sweet and bitter thoughts.’62 Repulsed, his symptoms return. Glenthorn’s resumed attempts to remedy his affliction according to previous successes with travel, exercise and amusement again reinforce his ‘indolent disposition’ as the ‘laziest of mortals’, interested only in an ‘easy life’.63 And not even ‘when the rebellion broke out in Ireland’ is Glenthorn’s ‘state of apathy’ disturbed.64 He explains that when nothing more remained to be done, or to be said – when the hurry of action, the novelty of generosity, the glow of enthusiasm, and the freshness of gratitude, were over, I felt that, though large motives could now invigorate my mind, I was still prey to habitual indolence, and that I should relapse into my former state of apathy and disease.65

Once again removed from all that surrounds him, he finds himself in indolence. Only upon fresh personal motivation from another Irish character does Glenthorn entangle himself with the more general political struggles of the local population. By taking the side of his foster-brother, albeit unsuccessfully, in a squabble between the local loyalist police and those fighting for Irish independence, Glenthorn is once again strangely roused from apathy. Finally he feels himself compelled to participate in local politics, he writes: ‘Party spirit is an effectual cure for ennui; and perhaps it is for this reason that so many are addicted to its intemperance. All my passions were roused, and my mind and body kept in continued activity.’66 In support of his ‘foster-brother’s cause, or, as it was now generally called, Lord Glenthorn’s cause … [he] spared no expence, [he] spared no exertions’, to such an astonishing extent that none ‘could scarcely believe that [he] was the same Lord Glenthorn, of whose indolence and ennui he had formerly heard and seen so much’.67 His own interest and character seem to require activity. Nevertheless, in this moment and despite his concren for the Irish Ellinor and Lady Geraldine, this activity again provides only temporary respite from his symptoms. Explaining the aftermath of this involvement, Glenthorn justifies its healthful benefits: ‘the parading and the galloping, 62 Edgeworth, 63 Edgeworth, 64 Edgeworth, 65 Edgeworth, 66 Edgeworth, 67 Edgeworth,

Ennui, Ennui, Ennui, Ennui, Ennui, Ennui,

p. 241. pp. 218, 219. p. 244. p. 243. pp. 246–47. p. 247.

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and the quarrelling, and the continual agitation in which I was kept, whilst my character and life were at stake, relieved me effectually from the intolerable burden of ennui’.68 Perhaps not surprisingly, however, once the rebellion is quelled Glenthorn feels, once again, ‘spiritless and melancholy’.69 Reflecting upon this relapse, he concludes: ‘I had been driven to exertion by a mixture of pride and generosity; my understanding being uncultivated, I had acted from the virtuous impulse of the moment, but never from rational motive, which alone can be permanent in its operation.’70 By tracing Glenthorn’s logic in this conclusion from its foundation in his initial feelings of self-satisfaction and ‘manliness’ as well as a horrific ‘moral indigestion’, Edgeworth suggests that moral corruption is at the heart of his disease. Motivated in each case only by a view of the magnitude of his own power and influence, a view untethered to his corresponding responsibilities, Glenthorn remains disconnected from both the personal and national responsibilities that have promised brief respite from his ennui. By this point in the novel the reader has repeatedly confronted the utter failure of prescribed medical treatment, its association with foreign political tyranny and the contrasting temporary relief that contact with the Irish seems to offer Glenthorn. In the end, however, only when Glenthorn’s foster-brother is injured in a raid on his forge by authorities searching for rebel weapons does the protagonist embrace his cure from ennui once and for all. Specifically, upon indictment of his foster-brother Owen as a member of the resistance to Anglo rule, nurse Ellinor, for the love of her biological son, insists that Glenthorn use his influence to free Owen from legal prosecution. When Glenthorn resists, claiming it would cause too much damage to his own ‘honour’ and ‘character’, Ellinor reveals that Glenthorn is her own biological son, switched at birth with the real heir of the Glenthorn estates, and he must save his biological brother from the authorities.71 Explaining that she swapped the newborns, Glenthorn and Christy, to alleviate the concerns of her employer about the health of his own progeny, she exposes Glenthorn’s illegitimate claim to his title and estate. At this point, then, Glenthorn confronts the source and responsibilities of his privilege and concludes that he had no right to his own way of life and that he was merely 68 Edgeworth, 69 Edgeworth, 70 Edgeworth, 71 Edgeworth,

Ennui, Ennui, Ennui, Ennui,

p. 248. p. 249. p. 249. p. 270.

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‘habituated’ to it.72 For Glenthorn and the other ‘dissipated and idle’ of his set habit justifies extravagance and indolence as opposed to social responsibility.73 But, in this moment, Glenthorn conceives that the truth of his birth no longer justifies enjoyment of this lifestyle and that it more properly belongs to his foster-brother, Christy. Upon determining to hand over his ‘rank and power’ he describes ‘the moment when I made this virtuous decision was the happiest I had at that time ever felt: my mind seemed suddenly relieved from an oppressive weight; my whole frame glowed with new life’.74 Further, after handing over his position to the rightful heir, he concludes: ‘The philosophy we learn from books makes but a faint impression upon the mind, in comparison with that which we are taught by our own experience; and we sometimes feel surprised to find that what we have been taught as maxims of morality prove true in real life.’75 Suddenly, Glenthorn’s experience corresponds to moral principle. He is forced to reason through the source and benefits of rank and power to see, for the first time, its corresponding duty as well. He goes on to acknowledge the failure of luxury in ‘conferring happiness’ and to imagine the potential for happiness in his new reduced circumstances, concluding ‘that all the changes and modifications of luxury must, in the sum of actual physical enjoyment, be reduced to a few elementary pleasures … enjoyed with a zest that makes it equal in value, perhaps to the largest portion offered to the sated palate of ennui.’76 Glenthorn, finally, perceives individual industriousness as a necessary ingredient in feeling a zest for life, and he perceives moderate pleasure as more satisfying in its preciousness than the ‘sated palate’ of excess.77 This conversion seems complete when, upon meeting scepticism at his decision and concern over his future direction, Glenthorn assures his nurse Ellinor, ‘I now expected to be happier than I had ever been’, making her question her previous decision to elevate her own child to rank and fortune.78 At this point, then, Glenthorn seems absolutely committed to proving the words of Christy, upon exchange of status, that ‘Any man, you see, may be made a lord; but a gentleman, a man 72 Edgeworth, 73 Edgeworth, 74 Edgeworth, 75 Edgeworth, 76 Edgeworth, 77 Edgeworth, 78 Edgeworth,

Ennui, Ennui, Ennui, Ennui, Ennui, Ennui, Ennui,

p. 278. p. 278. p. 279. p. 283. p. 283. p. 288. p. 288.

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must make himself.’79 As a lord, Glenthorn did not recognise his personal responsibilities to those around him. While at this point it becomes clear that Glenthorn was no real man, Edgeworth’s novel still, at the end, provides him the opportunity to ‘make himself a man’. Specifically, after his dispossession from his estates he is invited into the company of a Lord Y—, an Irish nobleman, upon the recommendation of Lady Geraldine, and Lord Y— immediately interests himself in Glenthorn’s affairs. At their first meeting, Lord Y— celebrates Glenthorn’s prospects with assurances of his fitness for a legal career and Glenthorn experiences feelings of gratitude, ‘admiration and affection’.80 Upon his application to Lord Y—’s suggestions, Glenthorn finds himself ‘active, permanently active. The enchantment of indolence was dissolved, and the demon of ennui was cast out for ever.’81 He immediately travels to London to pursue the law, at which point he finds himself able to enjoy every break from his intense studies, concluding, ‘So true it is, that all our pleasures must be earned, before they can be enjoyed.’82 He is energised by comparing his current activities to those he knew before, acknowledging ‘I could compare the ennui I felt when I was a Bondstreet lounger with the self-complacency I enjoyed now that I was occupied in a labourious but interesting and honourable pursuit.’83 Concluding his studies and returning to Dublin, he triumphantly writes ‘that even these, my dullest, hardest tasks, were light, compared with the burden I formerly bore of ennui’.84 And, after his successful trial in the Dublin courts and his marriage to Lord Y—’s ward, Glenthorn writes: ‘From this hour I date the commencement of my life of real happiness. How unlike the life of pleasure, to which so many give influence.’85 Significantly, however, this transformation is not simply a matter of substituting aristocratic indolence for the industry of the middling-ranks. Nor is it simply a matter of embracing the sincerity, goodwill, candour, affection, loyalty, intelligence and friendship of the Irish characters he has met. In order for Glenthorn to make himself a real man, he must also, it seems, accept as primary the value of male domestic duty. Specifically, upon introduction to Cecilia Delamere, Lord Y—’s 79 Edgeworth, 80 Edgeworth, 81 Edgeworth, 82 Edgeworth, 83 Edgeworth, 84 Edgeworth, 85 Edgeworth,

Ennui, Ennui, Ennui, Ennui, Ennui, Ennui, Ennui,

p. 290. p. 296. p. 105. p. 307. p. 312. p. 316. p. 320.

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ward and heir at law to the Glenthorn estate, Glenthorn finds himself increasingly attracted to her Irish beauty. Despite his mortification at learning that his faults are known to her and that she believes him ‘quite uninformed, without any taste for literature, and absolutely incapable of exertion – a victim to ennui’, and despite the fact that she has concluded from these facts, ‘How miserable a woman must be with such a husband!’, Glenthorn grows increasingly infatuated.86 In particular, her ‘wit’, ‘generosity’, ‘forbearance and delicacy of attention’ and ‘pride’ lead Glenthorn to love her.87 Lord Y— supports Glenthorn’s attraction and interest in the heiress, adding, ‘her relations, I fancy, could find means of providing against any pecuniary embarrassments, if she should think proper to unite herself to a man who can be content, as she would be, with a competence, and who should have proved himself able, by his own exertions, to maintain his wife in independence’.88 This yoking of industry with matrimony further develops the novel’s depiction of masculine activity. Accordingly, Glenthorn attributes to this second reversal of his fortunes his determination to ‘exert my own powers, and to rely on himself’, but he also attributes this power to his interest in Cecilia. She is ‘motive sufficient to urge me to persevering intellectual labour’ which have guaranteed ‘pleasures of domestic life most delightful’ in their demand of continuing ‘moral’ ‘exercise’.89 Thus, when Christy abdicates the Glenthorn estate to its legal heir, insisting his own lack of preparedness for its corresponding responsibilities, Glenthorn’s marriage to the estate’s heir-at-law reinstates his patriarchal responsibilities as lord and master. Thus, despite Christy’s previous words of encouragement, it seems that Glenthorn is not able to ‘make himself’. Instead, his cure requires the motive and pleasures of companionate marriage and home. In the end, the novel’s linking of ennui, foreign political corruption and medical discourse sketch out the rampant moral plague of luxury. Throughout, not only does Edgeworth’s meticulous detailing of William Cullen’s prescribed medical remedies for hypochondriasis prove her own interest in contemporary scientific and medical discourse but her novel’s repudiation of those prescriptions also represents the power of women intellectuals and writers to engage and replace them. By offering a domestic solution to the crisis of masculinity prompted by foreign 86 Edgeworth, 87 Edgeworth, 88 Edgeworth, 89 Edgeworth,

Ennui, Ennui, Ennui, Ennui,

p. 300. p. 302. p. 304. Emphasis in original. p. 321.

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precedent, Edgeworth’s novel celebrates the power of domestic virtue and duty by asking us to look to the home and to the Irish. Ultimately, the Irish-born, English-educated Glenthorn is cured from his indolence only by following the models of personal and political interest set by the Irish characters he encounters, rendering Edgeworth’s novel an insistence upon the reformation of patriarchy within the home and nation through marriage. As Mitzi Myers concludes, in her fascinating analysis of Edgeworth’s own tendency to cross-dress as a male narrator, engage in cross-writing for hybrid audiences and practise intertextuality in her fictions, Edgeworth’s ‘interstitial cultural locale [allows] her to represent overtly and covertly – by both authorial statement and symbolic form – utopian possibilities of group formation and communal living’.90 Thus, the end of Ennui allows us to find a utopian solution to failed masculinity, not in medical prescription but, instead, in a distinctly Irish character.

90 Myers, ‘Canonical “Orphans”’, p. 119.

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Fear, Confusion and Contagion

ch a p ter nine

‘Sons of Belial’ Contaminated/Contaminating Victorian Male Bodies Lesley A. Hall Contaminated/Contaminating Victorian Male Bodies

There is a long tradition of female bodies being positioned as dangerous and contaminating. However, men’s bodies have not necessarily been seen as the pure, healthy, wholesome and unproblematic counterpart. While much work has been done on Victorian attitudes to women and their bodies, this chapter examines the less-studied topic of attitudes of Victorian men to their specifically gendered sexual male bodies. Although the male body and its urges was increasingly problematised by the rising social purity movement and a female-centred advocacy of a single moral standard by the later decades of the nineteenth century, this new discourse had deep roots in pre-existing fears and anxieties and, indeed, a sense of disgust around the male body and its sexual functioning. Rob Boddice has made an elegant case that the notion that the white, Victorian, middle-class male’s mind represented the apogee of evolution bore within it the seeds of its own extreme instability.1 Ina ZweinigerBargielowska has delineated the anxieties about the impact of modern urban life on the male body and concerns about its flabbiness, unfitness

1 Rob Boddice, ‘The Manly Mind? Revisiting the Victorian “Sex in Brain” Debate’, Gender and History, 23.2 (2011), pp. 321–40.

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and degeneracy even before the revelations of the high rejection rate of recruits for the Boer War.2 It is far from the case that men’s bodies have necessarily been seen as pure, healthy, wholesome and unproblematic. Certainly in the nineteenth century there was – and this appears to have increased over the course of the decades – a sense that there was something deeply problematic about male sexual bodies. This was not merely the persistent individual male concern about impotence, which can be discovered throughout history in many different cultures, as Angus McLaren has revealed in his monumental study of the topic,3 although that was certainly present. There was a feeling that male bodies were dangerous and potentially both contaminated and contaminating in their own right. Most discussion of Victorian sexual fears and fantasies has focused on the female body, but within that general climate it was hardly possible for men to be unaffected by these pervasive anxieties. Over the past decade or so a number of important and influential studies of male/male sex in Victorian Britain, by Charles Upchurch, Harry Cocks, Morris Kaplan, Sean Brady and Matt Cook, have delineated the state of the law and its practice, plus social attitudes, and the experiences of men who identified themselves as ‘inverted’.4 These, however, existed within a wider penumbra of attitudes to the male body and its sexuality that have so far been little explored: Brady usefully locates his discussions within a wider context of Victorian notions of masculinity, but the discourse of masculinity takes us only so far. To explore issues around the problematic, sexed male body there needs to be a consideration of how men fitted into growing concerns over the spread of venereal diseases and of the fears, widespread throughout society, about the damage that men could do to their bodies and minds 2 Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Managing the Body: Beauty, Health, and Fitness in Britain, 1880–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 17–61. 3 Angus McLaren, Impotence: A Cultural History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 4 Sean Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain, 1861–1913 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005); H. G. Cocks: Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003); Matt Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Morris B. Kaplan, Sodom on the Thames: Sex, Love and Scandal in Wilde Times (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); Charles Upchurch, Before Wilde: Sex between Men in Britain’s Age of Reform (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009).

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and indeed to the community at large through masturbation. How these anxieties might have affected how men felt about their own sexualities will be addressed in this chapter. By the end of the nineteenth century a change of narrative about venereal diseases was developing. Blame for the dissemination of these diseases was laid increasingly on the promiscuous male who purchased casual sex and then took diseases into the respectable domestic sphere, infecting his wife and offspring, with dire social and national repercussions. It was thus the man who was actually circulating these diseases.5 This narrative of sexually dangerous bodies as male was not entirely new, but it now brought into the foreground certain motifs already present in discussions around sexually transmitted diseases, yet given less prominence than concerns around prostitution. The sexually transmitted disease seen as the greatest threat to personal and national health in the nineteenth century was syphilis, which had a long history as being perceived as the most serious of the venereal conditions. Although the initial stage of infection was a painless sore at the site of entry, this was followed some weeks later by a second stage characterised by rashes and lesions of the mucous membranes of the mouth, throat and anus. Irregular hair loss was sometimes experienced, along with aches, pains and headaches. It was a disease, therefore, which was literally stigmatising because it produced a variety of obvious dermatological symptoms – papules, rashes, pustules, crusty ulcerations – that were not easily concealed, though sometimes capable of being confused with the effects of other conditions.6 It was also known that syphilis could cause longer-term effects, most vividly the spread of often extremely disfiguring lesions and ulcers of the skin and mucous membranes as well as the formation of gummata, or rubbery tumours, in muscles and bones, which might cause characteristic changes in locomotion. Gummatous infiltration of the bones of the nose was responsible for one of the most horrible deformities caused by syphilis, in which the nose itself eroded and sometimes collapsed, with ulceration 5 Lesley A. Hall, ‘Venereal Diseases and Society in Britain from the Contagious Diseases Acts to the National Health Service’, in Sex, Sin and Suffering: Venereal Diseases in the European Social Context since 1870, eds Roger Davidson and Lesley Hall (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 120–36. 6 Berkeley Hill and Arthur Cooper, Syphilis and Local Contagious Disorders (London: Smith Elder and Co, 1881), pp. 103–34; Jonathan Hutchinson, Syphilis (London: Cassell and Company, 1887), pp. 13–33.

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spreading to the face.7 While the stories of fathers taking sons to wards of such sufferers as a dreadful warning may be apocryphal, there were certainly cases of medical students receiving a horrid shock when they entered the same wards.8 Towards the end of the century gonorrhoea was seeming more serious than its previous reputation as a relatively trivial affliction.9 Initially the stigma associated with these diseases was located in certain marginal groups already regarded as dangerous and contaminating, and lacking in those qualities of containment and control that the respectable Victorian male was supposed to manifest. Historians have analysed extensively the Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s and how these constructed the identity of the prostitute,10 but relatively little attention has been paid to contemporary perception of the men whose preservation in fighting health was the reason for these acts. While neglected as a problem of public rather than individual health, venereal diseases were considered a significant threat in the military context. Soldiers and sailors – men predominantly drawn from the lowest strata of the working class, forbidden to marry (except for a tiny percentage), mobile, physically fit and in the prime of life – were implicitly perceived as a particularly dangerous and polluting group. Soldiers were looked upon by the rest of society as dangerous and disruptive, particularly when they were in garrison in the UK rather than defending the frontiers of Empire. The ranks of the British army in the nineteenth century were subject to brutal discipline and forced to live in conditions that were 7 Hutchinson, Syphilis, pp. 156–57. 8 J. D. Oriel, The Scars of Venus: A History of Venereology (London: Springer-Verlag, 1994), pp. 46–58; L. W. Harrison, ‘Those were the days! or random notes on then and now in VD’, Bulletin of the Institute of Technicians in Venereology, 2 (1953), pp. 1–7. 9 Michael Worboys, ‘Unsexing Gonorrhoea: Bacteriologists, Gynaecologists and Suffragists in Britain, 1860–1920’, Social History of Medicine, 17 (2004), pp. 41–59. 10 Paul McHugh, Prostitution and Victorian Social Reform (London: Croom Helm, 1980); Frank Mort, Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-moral Politics in Britain since 1830 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), pp. 174–76; Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980); F. B. Smith, ‘The Contagious Diseases Acts reconsidered’, Social History of Medicine, 3 (1990), pp. 197–215; Deborah Dunsford, ‘Principle versus expediency: A rejoinder to F. B. Smith’, Social History of Medicine, 5 (1992), pp. 503–13; F. B. Smith, ‘“Unprincipled expediency”: A comment on Deborah Dunsford’s paper’, Social History of Medicine, 5 (1992), pp. 515–16.

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squalid even when not as appalling as those which became notorious during the Crimean conflict. Among the lower classes, enlistment was traditionally seen as ‘the last step on the downward career of a young man’. The notion that the army was ‘the dustbin of the nation’, providing a lifestyle ‘fit only for paupers and hardened criminals’, was a pervasive one. Soldiers were treated as pariahs: excluded from parks and places of public amusement and prevented from travelling second-class on public transport. It was not a ‘respectable’ career, and the diseases suffered by soldiers were not the diseases of the respectable.11 The Contagious Diseases Acts may from one angle be viewed as attempting to create a hygienic cadre of women to supply the sexual needs of men regarded as outcasts from decent society, while ensuring they remained fit to fight: almost, one might suggest, a cordon sanitaire protecting society from the dangers threatened if what were generally imagined as these men’s brutal and bestial lusts did not have some suitable outlet. While attempts to define and segregate prostitutes as an unclean group have a long history, it might be suggested that this specific group was perceived as particularly unclean because they consorted with soldiers, a stigmatised group who contaminated their associates. Another group seen as peculiarly liable to these contaminating diseases was merchant seamen, who did not even get the medical attention accorded to the army and navy. Venereal diseases were a massive problem among them: admissions to the Dreadnought Hospital for Seamen during the later nineteenth century were ‘overwhelmingly dominated by sexually transmitted diseases’, while many other conditions seen there were the long-term effects of venereal infection. Harry Leach of the Seamen’s Hospital Society described venereal disease as the ‘chief and most enduring scourge of seamen in all parts of the world’, and very largely due to ‘the gross and reckless debauchery in which he dissipates in a few days the entire products of several months labour’ which was ‘often more injurious to his health than toil and privation’. Sailors were alleged to be ‘more prone to fall into sexual excesses than other men’, while the women with whom they associated were ‘the most degraded of their class’ – ‘shameless, 11 Lesley A. Hall, ‘“War always brings it on”: War, STDs, the Military, and the Civilian Population in Britain, 1850–1950’, in Medicine and Modern Warfare, eds Roger Cooter, Mark Harrison and Steve Sturdy (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), pp. 205–23.

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besotted creatures who offend every sense’.12 Even when shipowners were reluctantly obliged to make some form of healthcare provision for their employees, because venereal diseases continued to be classified as ‘self-inflicted’ responsibility for accessing treatment was off-loaded onto the already stigmatised, unfortunate suffering seaman until after the First World War.13 Even within the civilian population, men with venereal diseases were discriminated against. If not conceptualised as a specific contaminated group in the same way as soldiers or seamen, they were individuals who had failed in manly self-control. By the nineteenth century many voluntary hospitals dependent upon the goodwill of philanthropic subscribers refused to admit patients with venereal diseases, except possibly ‘innocent’ married women infected by their husbands. Although there were a few Lock Hospitals established specifically to treat this unfortunate group they always had difficulty in attracting subscribers prepared to donate funds for the benefit of those who were felt to have brought about their own ill-health through ‘immoral’ behaviour. It does not appear that there was any consistent policy about provisions for treatment in workhouse infirmaries, although significant numbers of paupers died of syphilis-related conditions.14 However, no-one has yet done for the nineteenth century the kind of detailed study of what facilities were available, how they were accessed and by whom that has been done for the eighteenth century by Kevin Siena.15 12 Unsigned, ‘Reports on the Present Sanitary Condition of the Mercantile Marine: No III: Accommodation; Forecastles and Deck-Houses; Scurvy in the Spanish Fleet; Clothing and Personal Hygiene; Venereal and Other Self-Inflicted Diseases’, The Lancet (1867), pp. 93–94. 13 Lesley A. Hall, ‘What shall we do with the Poxy Sailor? Venereal Diseases in the British Mercantile Marine’, Journal of Maritime Research, 6 (2004), pp. 113–44: , accessed 1 March 2016. 14 A. Fessler, ‘Venereal Disease and Prostitution in the reports of the Poor Law Commissioners, 1834–1850’, British Journal of Venereal Diseases, 27 (1951), pp. 154–57; T. J. Wyke, ‘Hospital Facilities for, and Diagnosis and Treatment of, Venereal Disease in England, 1800–1870’, British Journal of Venereal Diseases, 49 (1973), pp. 78–85; T. J. Wyke, ‘The Manchester and Salford Lock Hospital, 1818–1917’, Medical History, 19 (1979), pp. 73–86; David Innes Williams, The London Lock: a Charitable Hospital for Venereal Disease 1746–1952 (London: Royal Society of Medicine Press, 1995). 15 Kevin P. Siena. Venereal Disease, Hospitals, and the Urban Poor: London’s ‘Foul Wards,’ 1600–1800 (Rochester, NY : University of Rochester Press, 2004).

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Treatments available for all classes savoured of the punitive. In the case of gonorrhoea in the male these involved astringents and caustics applied locally to the urethra and the passing of sounds into the bladder.16 For syphilis the favoured treatment remained mercury, which did go some way to ameliorating the symptoms, especially the dermatological symptoms, and may have lessened the severity of attacks, but it does not seem to have actually cured the disease. It was also highly toxic and had a number of undesirable side effects: it caused massive amounts of salivation, gastero-enteritis, rashes and liver and kidney damage, as well as having discolouring effects on the teeth. Mercury, as much as the disease itself, produced physical stigmata. Many among those who could afford it were attracted by the lures of those who promised to deal discreetly with venereal ailments in a short space of time without interrupting the normal routine of life and without the application of instruments or the use of mercury.17 During the final decades of the century venereal diseases came increasingly to be perceived as a problem of public health afflicting the entire population rather than as characteristic ailments of certain marginalised groups or the self-inflicted suffering of a few immoral individuals. Changing ideas about these diseases were engendered by the male medical profession itself. Gonorrhoea, for example, though far more prevalent than syphilis, had long been regarded as relatively trivial and localised: a frequent comparison was with the common cold. Because its symptoms were mild or went unnoticed in women, this had led to the idea that there was some noxious factor connected with the female genitalia that caused the far more obvious manifestations of the disease in male partners of apparently healthy women. However, by the end of the nineteenth century gonorrhoea was increasingly, as Michael Worboys has analysed, regendered as a male disease transmitted by promiscuous men to their innocent wives with more serious effects for individual and national health than had been assumed. This new narrative was produced synergistically from an intersection between changing medical understandings both of the extent of the disease and of the mechanisms of infection, on the one hand, and the burgeoning feminist critique of the existing sexual–social system, which enabled 16 Oriel, Scars of Venus, pp. 115–24. 17 Local Government Board, Report as to the Practice of Medicine and Surgery by Unqualified Persons in the United Kingdom Cd. 5422, London, HMSO (1910), p. 15; Royal Commission on VD, Final Report, §188, §133.

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men to become infected and to disseminate the diseases with relative impunity, on the other.18 Developing clinical understandings of syphilis were painting a picture of even more grimness. The extraordinary diversity of tertiary syphilis was greatly illuminated by clinical and pathological observations, until it seemed that no organ could escape. By the end of the nineteenth century syphilis was perceived as a pervasive and insidious disease that could mimic the effects of many others. This sense of its prevalence was only confirmed and extended when the micro-organism was finally identified in 1905 and could be shown to be present in the late manifestations.19 The picture was made even gloomier by the relationship increasingly demonstrated between syphilis in the father and its effects on his children. Not only did it cause an incalculable number of miscarriages, still-births and deaths in early infancy, it caused the birth of babies looking like ‘little old men’: ill-developed, miserable, puny and wizened. The longer-term effects of pre-natal infection were also being identified in greater and greater numbers. Because children with congenital syphilis could be born to women who were apparently healthy, it was even theorised that the developing foetus might be infected directly by the father (rather than through his infection of the mother).20 The advances in medical knowledge about syphilis in the ultimate decades of the nineteenth century were conducive to extreme pessimism, if not medical nihilism. By the 1890s doctors, lawyers and many other professionals were aware of syphilis, and also gonorrhoea, as a looming problem. The law began to take cognisance of the injury inflicted upon a woman whose husband gave her syphilis: in England it was increasingly being defined within the matrimonial courts as an act of cruelty to infect a wife knowingly. A woman infected by her husband with syphilis contracted before the marriage could obtain a separation on the grounds of cruelty; if he had caught the disease afterwards she could obtain a divorce, since this indicated that adultery must have occurred.21 For what was still, at this period, an overwhelmingly male medical profession, dealing with syphilis was basically an issue of damage control 18 Worboys, ‘Unsexing Gonorrhoea’. 19 Oriel, Scars of Venus, pp. 72–80. 20 Oriel, Scars of Venus, pp. 59–70. 21 Gail Savage, ‘“The Wilful Communication of a Loathsome Disease”: Marital Conflict and Venereal Disease in Victorian England’, Victorian Studies, 34 (1990), pp. 35–54.

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and limitation. If it was not possible to prevent men from becoming infected, it might at least be possible to prevent them from communicating infection to the next generation. Men were advised to have premarital medical examinations: however, doctors differed as to how long the prospective bridegroom should be advised to wait if he were infected, and this was an expedient that could prove socially problematic if marriage arrangements were already in hand. It was not suggested that the bride should be informed. In their commitment to a patriarchal family system, doctors suggested that the intended father-in-law should be the one to demand a clean bill of health from his daughter’s intended. However desirable this state of affairs, it was highly unlikely that the degree of openness and honesty it required would have been universal. Coming at the problem from a different angle, drawing on these existing notions of contaminated male bodies, the idea of venereal diseases generally and syphilis in particular provided a potent metaphor for late nineteenth-century proponents of women’s emancipation. In spite of the pervasive rhetoric of the good woman as completely innocent of sexual knowledge and any understanding of the darker side of male desires, the second half of Victoria’s reign saw a forceful speaking-out against male-dominated standards of morality: the campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts accustomed at least some women to engaging with subjects that ‘ladies’ were supposed to know nothing about. The extensive press reporting of the long-drawn-out and high-profile high-society Campbell divorce case, involving the infection of a wife by a husband who had been warned about his disease, surely also ­disseminated to a wider audience that this was a possibility.22 Syphilis was deployed as a vivid metaphor for broader problems within sexual relations in the ‘New Woman’ fiction of the 1890s. This genre dealt with various burning issues of the women’s movement, particularly sexual matters, marriage and motherhood. In Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893) syphilis features as a form of critique of conventional marriage and class attitudes. Grand contrasted the fates of two young women, Edith and Evadne. Edith marries a syphilitic naval officer, gives birth to a syphilitic child, goes mad and dies in agony. Evadne, who has acquired knowledge through reading medical and sociological texts, discovers a few hours after her marriage that her new husband is a ‘moral leper’, ‘a vice-worn man’: that is, he has had 22 Anne Jordan, Love Well the Hour: The Life of Lady Colin Campbell 1857–1911 (Kibworth Beauchamp: Matador, 2010), pp. 55–132.

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a mistress. She refuses to consummate the marriage. Emma Brooke’s A Superfluous Woman (1894) takes up similar themes. Jessamine, the heroine, rejects a strong healthy Scottish farmer and succumbs to the glamorous lure of society represented by a syphilitic aristocrat who passes on the degeneracy of his line. Corruption – embodied in the bodies of contaminated males – lying at the heart of conventionally highly desirable marriages was central to these novelists’ messages. Syphilis in these novels, and in the short stories of George Egerton, pseudonym of another New Woman writer, Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright, operated as a potent metaphor for the risks women ran when pursuing what they were told should be their prime aim, a good marriage.23 It symbolised the moral chasm between knowing, even corrupt and tainted, men and the ‘innocent’ women they married, and also all the perils of adult life from which young girls were shielded through a policy of keeping them deliberately ignorant. Sexual disease blighted not only the lives of women infected by their husbands but those of their children as well. New Women writers tended to imply that if women were properly informed they would be able to readily identify, and thus reject, degenerate and debauched suitors. This view became even more widely articulated in the following decade: works by the woman doctor Louisa Martindale and the author and polemicist Cicely Hamilton on the implication of men in circulating venereal diseases and the consequent perils of marriage for women preceded the most famous outburst, Christabel Pankhurst’s The Great Scourge (1913). The topic was also ventilated in suffrage movement periodicals.24 Few, however, went quite as far as Mrs Frances Swiney, whose works posited semen itself as inherently noxious.25 23 Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing (London: Virago, 1982), pp. 210–14. 24 Louisa Martindale, Under the Surface (London: London Women’s Suffrage Society, 1908); Cicely Hamilton, Marriage as a Trade (London: Chapman and Hall, 1909), pp. 54–55; Christabel Pankhurst, The Great Scourge and How to End It (London: E. Pankhurst, 1913); Les Garner, Stepping Stones to Women’s Liberty: Feminist Ideas in the Women’s Suffrage Movement (London: Heinemann, 1984), pp. 21–22, 38–40. 25 Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality, 1885–1914 (London: Penguin, 1995), pp. 217–21; Lesley A. Hall, ‘Suffrage, Sex, and Science’, in The Women’s Suffrage Movement: New Feminist Perspectives, eds Maroula Joannou and June Purvis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 188–200; Sheila Jeffreys, The Spinster and her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality, 1880–1930 (London: Pandora, 1985), pp. 35–39; George Robb, ‘Race Motherhood: Moral Eugenics vs Progressive Eugenics, 1880–1920’, in Maternal Instincts: Visions

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The way in which views about the responsibility for sexually transmitted diseases were being regendered in the fin de siècle can also be seen in some men’s writing, most famously in Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts (1881, first produced in Britain in 1891), in which syphilis represents the sins of the fathers. Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, published in the same year as the first British production of Ghosts, has what might be read as a syphilitic subtext. The way the increasing horror of the portrait develops, and the description of the unrecognisably loathsome corpse at the end strongly resemble depictions of syphilis. Dorian himself brings destruction to his friends and lovers, but the festering corruption that steals over the portrait is not mirrored in his own unchanging, youthful beauty. Wilde appears to be drawing on traditional iconography associated with syphilis, in which a woman holds up a mask of beauty concealing a skull, or a figure of horror lurks in the shadows behind her, but yet he does change the usual gendering of the image. So by the later decades of the nineteenth century there were various hints about male bodies, at least certain bodies in certain circumstances, being dangerous and contaminating, even if they appeared healthy. This perception was not confined to questions of infection with venereal disease, which after all still only afflicted certain bodies, however miasmatically pervasive these appeared to be. There were other concerns around male sexuality that affected a far greater proportion of the population. Masturbation in the male was the object of enormous and widespread social anxiety and medico-moral and pedagogic policing throughout the nineteenth century: this concern manifested as a constant factor rather than the occasional begetter of scandalous causes célèbres such as Isaac Baker Brown’s controversial claims about masturbation in women and his recommendation of clitoridectomy.26 Masturbation carried an enormous weight of religious condemnation as sinful, and was also believed to have extensive deleterious repercussions on health, including consumption, insanity and even death. It was not just conscious self-abuse that threatened peril to the male organism: involuntary seminal emissions, for example in ‘wet dreams’, were defined of Motherhood and Sexuality in Britain, 1875–1925, eds Claudia Nelson and Ann Sumner Holmes (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Press, 1997), pp. 58–74. 26 Ornella Moscucci, ‘Clitoridectomy, Circumcision, and the Politics of Sexual Pleasure in Mid-Victorian Britain’, in Sexualities in Victorian Britain, eds Andrew H. Miller and James Eli Adams (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 60–78.

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as the disease of ‘spermatorrhoea’, which would have equally horrendous outcomes.27 These beliefs were widely accepted among the medical profession, even by radicals such as George Drysdale, who advocated the use of birth control at a time when, if spoken of at all, it was usually condemned.28 Even those doctors who dissented from the general horror-mongering did not take a positive stance: the eminent surgeon Sir James Paget may have told his students that masturbation did no actual physical harm, but he still considered it ‘a filthiness forbidden by God, an unmanliness despised by men’ and wished that ‘he could say something worse of so nasty a practice’.29 It was not easy for men to avoid the vast amount of propaganda from a wide range of sources warning them of the dangers of the solitary vice and of seminal losses. The upper and middle classes often encountered sermons against the practice at their public schools, which provided a hotbed for the dissemination of masturbatory and homoerotic practices alongside more or less explicit horror-mongering against them. An enormous industry in spurious remedies deployed fly-posters, had handbills distributed in the streets and inserted carefully coded advertisements in newspapers. In larger cities ‘anatomical museums’ offered a mix of enlightenment and titillation as a marketing device to sell patent remedies: lurid waxwork representations of the horrific consequences of self-abuse incited their purchase. London’s West End in the Victorian era is often depicted as a site of erotic opportunity for men, but it was also a site where sexual fears lurked. Although, following the Medical Act of 1858, members of the medical profession and moral reform organisations made efforts to prosecute profiteering quacks who drummed up fears of the consequences of masturbation and the dangers of spermatorrhoea, and then offered expensive ‘remedies’ (sometimes conjoined with blackmail), the belief in their ill effects was equally prevalent among doctors and the pedagogic profession.30 27 Ellen Bayuk Rosenman, Unauthorized Pleasures: Accounts of Victorian Erotic Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 16–49; Elizabeth Stephens, ‘Pathologising Leaky Male Bodies: Spermatorrhoea in NineteenthCentury British Medicine and Popular Anatomical Museums’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 17 (2008), pp. 421–38. 28 J. Miriam Benn, The Predicaments of Love (London: Pluto Press, 1992), pp. 37–45. 29 Sir James Paget, ‘Sexual Hypochondriasis’, in Clinical Lectures and Essays (1875; London: Longmans, Green, 1879), pp. 275–98. 30 Ivan Crozier, ‘Rough Winds do Shake the Darling Buds of May: A Note on William Acton and the Sexuality of the (Male) Child’, Journal of Family History, 26 (2001),

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There was thus a widespread climate of fear among men about masturbation and nocturnal emissions. This applied not just to children or young boys but also to men in early adulthood, as the increasingly late age of marriage in the middle and upper classes led to concerns about how they managed their sexuality before it could achieve ‘legitimate’ outlet in marriage. Many men seem to have been reluctant to take their anxieties to their medical practitioners, fearful of moral condemnation and, perhaps, of the remedies that might be applied. The leading medical journal The Lancet in 1870 mentioned the deployment of caustic preparations and cauterisation to render erection painful and guard against improper manipulation, and to correct any oversensitivity of the organ in question. Blistering and penile infibulation were also recommended and applied.31 J. Laws Milton’s much republished medical tract On Spermatorrhoea (based on articles originally published in The Lancet) included illustrations of toothed and spiked penis rings and electrical alarm systems intended to prevent erection, and thus nocturnal emissions, in sufferers from this dread disease.32 While similar devices were purveyed by quacks, they usually dealt in less painful and drastic treatments, such as herbal compounds and ‘galvanic belts’ (which seem to have deployed electricity as a magic revitalising power, rather than giving electric shocks to the wearer). The topic was also addressed by the proponents of alternative health systems such as phrenology, herbalism, naturopathy and hydrotherapy.33 pp. 411–20; Lesley A. Hall, ‘Forbidden by God, Despised by Men: Masturbation, Medical Warnings, Moral Panic and Manhood in Britain, 1850–1950’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 2 (1992), pp. 365–87, reprinted in Forbidden History: The State, Society, and the Regulation of Sexuality in Modern Europe, ed. John C. Fout (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 293–318; Lesley A. Hall, ‘“It was the doctors who were suffering from it”: The History of Masturbatory Insanity Revisited’, Paedagogica Historica: International Journal of the History of Education, 39 (2003), pp. 686–99; Alan Hunt, ‘The Great Masturbation Panic and the Discourses of Moral Regulation in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Britain’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 8 (1998), pp. 575–615. 31 The Lancet (1870), p. 159. 32 J. Laws Milton, On Spermatorrhoea: Its Results and Complications (London: Robert Hardwicke, 1871). 33 Iwan Rhys Morus, Shocking Bodies: Life, Death and Electricity in Victorian England (Stroud: The History Press, 2011), pp. 136–58; S. Gould, Manhood: How Lost, by Acquired Diseases; How Regained, by Vegetable Compounds (Bradford, 1910); Roy Porter and Lesley Hall, The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650–1950 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 138–41.

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Further evidence of the anxieties aroused by the male body and male sexuality can be found in the rise of advocacy of male circumcision. Although it was never as widespread a practice in the UK as the USA, during the nineteenth century circumcision shifted from being a primarily religious practice to a surgical operation recommended for a range of ills, primarily as a prophylactic against masturbation, but also for other conditions, including venereal diseases. This has been documented in the densely researched study by Robert Darby, A Surgical Temptation (2005). In the light of new ideas about hygiene, the foreskin was increasingly envisaged as a dangerous and polluting excrescence of redundant flesh: William Acton considered that ‘the prepuce is a superfluous piece of skin and mucous membrane which serves no other purpose than acting as a reservoir for the collection of dirt, particularly when individuals are inattentive to cleanliness’. The eminent venereologist Sir Jonathan Hutchinson referred to it as a ‘harbour for filth’. Its removal in infancy or childhood was recommended as both a preventive of and a cure for masturbation. The operation was usually done without anaesthetic and was assumed to be so simple that it did not require advanced surgical skills, so a GP could do it in his surgery or during a home visit. In a certain percentage of cases there was excessive haemorrhaging or subsequent sepsis, leading to pain, scarring and, in some cases, fatality.34 The language used to warn against self-abuse resonated with disease metaphors. Masturbation was of course popularly associated with disease from pimples through to consumption and insanity. But it had an impact beyond the health of the individual, according to the copious literature on what were often referred to as ‘pollutions’. This deployed a good deal of imagery that treated these supposed ailments, especially masturbation, as contagious and epidemic. Much of the advocacy for the enlightenment of young people on the facts of sex, which was one facet of the social purity movement, laid stress on the danger of the innocent young boy being ‘contaminated’ through contact with ‘evil companions’ and undesirable associates.35 During the later decades of the nineteenth century the campaign against the dangers of self-abuse intensified. Largely directed against adolescent boys, and initially focusing on the upper and middle classes, 34 Robert Darby, A Surgical Temptation: The Demonization of the Foreskin and the Rise of Circumcision in Britain (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 118–214. 35 Hunt, ‘The Great Masturbation Panic’.

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it was fed by anxieties about national fitness and the capacity of the existing elite to continue to rule in the face of challenges from rival nations and rising social groups within the nation. A multi-faceted social purity movement was created by the formation of an alliance between the feminists who had fought against the regulation of prostitution under the Contagious Diseases Acts, religious interests (in particular provincial nonconformity), public health advocates (medical and non-medical) and educators. While ‘social purity’ can hardly be reduced to a single-issue campaign to purify the nation through the eradication of masturbation, this was a significant element among its activities. For the feminist groupings within the movement, male lust and its concomitant, the Double Moral Standard (in the male sexual laxity was a peccadillo, in women grounds for social excommunication), was at the root of much that was wrong with society, both on the moral level and in the propagation of disease. It was therefore argued that (since lust was already ineradicably ingrained in the majority of adult males) the target should be youth. Social purity campaigners believed that children should be provided with the clean, pure, true facts about sex and reproduction at a youthful age, preferably by their mothers, as a counterweight to any misinformation they might acquire from servants or ‘corrupt companions’.36 For adolescent boys, however, it was recognised that further warnings were necessary, in particular in the class in which boys were traditionally sent away to school at an early age. This fitted in with the agenda of educators, who believed themselves to be preparing a new generation of the ruling class who needed the values of self-discipline, self-control and mastery over the instincts. Exactly how masturbation endangered these future leaders was not entirely clear-cut. On the one hand, indulgence in self-abuse was seen as fatally eroding habits of self-discipline and resistance to carnal temptation, so that, ultimately, the sufferer would be unable to resist the temptations of later life, such as solicitations to fornication and the associated risk of contracting venereal disease. On the other hand, the traditional discourse of the debilitating effect of masturbation itself was still present, and its ghastly effects on health, sanity, future sexual functioning and capacity to father healthy children featured prominently in the growing genre of advice literature. 36 Sue Morgan, A Passion for Purity: Ellice Hopkins and the Politics of Gender in the Late-Victorian Church (Bristol: University of Bristol, Department of Theology & Religious Studies, 1999).

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The awful warnings of the sex education literature generated by the social purity movement differed, however, from the publications of commercial quacks, who continued to flourish. It offered the possibility of redemption, condemning the despair created by quack literature so that profit could be made from spurious ‘cures’. The traditional lifestyle prescriptions were made: cold baths, hard beds, early rising, physical exercise, the avoidance of rich and highly seasoned foods as well as alcohol, and distracting the mind from impure thoughts. In particularly difficult cases, consulting a properly qualified doctor was recommended. A vast amount of literature was produced and distributed by the social purity movement. As well as books such as the age-graded works of American clergyman Sylvanus Stall in his ‘Self and Sex’ series, What a Young Boy (Young Man, Young Husband, Man of Forty-Five) Ought to Know (Vir Publishing Company, Philadelphia, 1897), widely disseminated in Europe, there was a plethora of pamphlets produced by both individuals and a range of organisations, distributed free or at a cost of a few pence. These found probably their largest outlet in the various youth organisations being established to cope with the newly defined problem of adolescence, thus reaching an ever-widening range of social groups with their dreadful warnings.37 The vast majority of the literature on masturbation, in the UK context at least, was about the male body. A plausible case can be made for men’s attitudes towards masturbation expressing emotions about the nature of their own sexuality; negative feelings around sexuality were manifested in the fears aroused by masturbation and spermatorrhoea, directed by men against themselves. In the light of the fears around sexuality that most Victorian males could scarcely have avoided, it may be worth touching on that much revisited debate about whether the Victorian woman experienced sexual pleasure. One question that historians endeavouring to see what was happening under the crinoline and corsets have neglected to ask is whether the Victorian male, very likely deeply inhibited as a result of fears around masturbation or contracting venereal diseases and believing that he must be imposing his bestial lusts on a pure woman who could not possibly reciprocate, was likely to be the kind of partner to arouse or gratify a woman’s sexual desires. Another question that might be asked is: how enjoyable would a man exposed from childhood 37 Hall, ‘Forbidden by God, despised by man’; Hall, ‘“It was the doctors who were suffering from it”’; Hunt, ‘The Great Masturbation Panic’.

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to fears about masturbation and the enormous perils of losing too much semen find sexual intercourse? Sigmund Freud observed early in the twentieth century that ‘it is scarcely credible how seldom normal potency is to be found in a husband … to what narrow limits marriage life – the happiness that is so ardently desired – is narrowed down’.38 This is even before we consider that many husbands were as anxious as their wives to avoid too-frequent pregnancies and too-large families and the expedients, which might include very clumsy and unsensual contraceptives, or long periods of abstinence, undertaken to achieve that desired state. Ideas of the male body as potentially polluting were not confined to this area of sexual transgression. Alison Bashford, in her provocative and well-argued study Purity and Pollution: Gender, Embodiment and Victorian Medicine (1998), has pointed out that while discourses on ‘purity and pollution, cleanliness and contamination’ had an obvious resonance for the female bodies of nurses and midwives, by the 1860s male practitioners’ bodies also came to be problematised. Bashford suggests that this timing was not an accident and that it was not related to new understandings about the mechanisms of infection, but arose as ‘an explicit politics of sexual difference entered the medical domain’, with, for example, the outburst of activity around the question of women entering medicine. As a result, the ‘masculinity of “normal” practitioners [was rendered] visible and open to question’. In particular, this affected the male accoucheur, a figure already constructed as dubious: anxieties about the communication of puerperal fever were added to existing fears of social and moral contamination of parturient women ‘man-midwives’.39 Later in the century, as the result of the development of antisepsis and germ theory, surgeons became ‘marked … as impure, septic, contaminated’, leading to ‘meaningful and elaborate’ rituals of sterility.40 This brief summary hardly does justice to Bashford’s elegant and densely documented argument, which is very suggestive in the context of the rise of the idea of the male body as centrally implicated in the circulation of venereal diseases and the relationship of both these 38 Sigmund Freud, ‘“Civilised” Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness’ (1908), in Civilisation, Society and Religion, Pelican Freud Library, 12 (1959; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 85. 39 Alison Bashford, Purity and Pollution: Gender, Embodiment and Victorian Medicine (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 63–83. 40 Bashford, Purity and Pollution, pp. 140–47.

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phenomena to complex interactions between changes in gender relations and developing scientific concepts of disease aetiology. In the light of this under-examined motif about the male body as contaminated and contaminating, and of negative attitudes towards male sexuality, it can be argued that that worries around manhood and masculinity were not completely reducible to concerns around the direction of desire. It is possibly not even fanciful to suggest that ideas about homosexuality perhaps need to be read more contextually within historically located discourses about male bodies and their polluting potential more generally. Although it is undeniable that, as many writers have shown, Victorian fears and fantasies around sex were written on the female body, it was also the case, though this has tended to be investigated less, that these fears were also inscribed, sometimes painfully, upon the bodies of Victorian males.

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Syphilis and Sociability The Impolite Bodies of Two Gentlemen, James Boswell (1740–1795) and Sylas Neville (1741–1840) Leigh Wetherall-Dickson The Impolite Bodies of Two Gentlemen

For those unfortunate enough to contract venereal disease in 1725, help was immediately at hand, for the The Secret Patient’s Diary was available to all upon application: ‘Given Gratis, Up One Pair of Stairs at the Sign of that Celebrated Anodyne Necklace’, and for those ‘Persons who may live some Distance from London … a Servant is employed on Purpose to Carry any of these Books or Remedies Privately to whoever writes for them’.1 Although the ‘diary’ is an extended piece of advertising for a patented cure for ‘the secret disease’, it also gives a detailed account of what the sufferer might expect as the infection took hold. For the first three days the ‘Venomous Matter … being of a violent sharp corrosive Nature, lies … Fretting and Fermenting within the Pores and Glands of the Part that has re[c]eived it’.2 On the fourth and fifth days heat and itching make themselves felt, and on the sixth the dripping of foul matter accompanies increasing tenderness and inflammation. By day nine the discharge will have become discoloured, the passing 1 P. Chamberlen, The Secret Patient’s Diary (London: H. Parker, 1725), pp. 1–2. The name is not given on the title page but does appear within the text as the person to whom to apply for the cure (see bottom of p. 12). 2 Chamberlen, Diary, p. 3.

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of urine will be painful, the dripping will have increased and, as the discharge crusts, a blockage will occur and cause the urine to divide into a double stream, causing an almighty mess. At this stage, the patient should be able to identify the seriousness of the infection. The ‘thicker and whiter the dripping is, and the sooner the distemper shows itself’ the better it is for the patient, and the infection can be easily and effectively treated by the purchase of a ‘proper medicinal liquor to wash, cleanse, and draw any infection’, in which the affected part must soak.3 However, ‘the yellower and greener, & the thinner the matter is that comes away’, the worse the infection; the unfortunate sufferers must read on past the treatment of the first degree of the disease to discover what further discomfort awaits them. By day 12 the foreskin will be ‘raw, blistery and sore’ and the discharge so increased ‘as to give the distemper the name of a GONORRHEA’, soon to be accompanied by ‘cold shiverings, sick qualms of the stomach, … Fainting, heats in the palms of the hands, pains in the limbs, a weakness, wearyness, and heavyness about the body’, marking the second degree of infection.4 What the sufferer describes in the ‘diary’ is deemed to have moved on to a more intense stage with additional symptoms, indicating that the author subscribed to the ‘unicist (one disease) theory [that] was held by the general public and by the majority of those who wrote about the disease’.5 Should the unlucky sufferer fail to respond to the heavier artillery of treatment, including mercury, the infection would enter the third degree, during which the patient could be expected to be ‘rotten, looking like death and scarce able to walk the length of the room, with nodes and pains in their joints’.6 The constant leaking of bodily fluids, the overall discomfort and the prolonged treatment made syphilis a disease of the most unsociable kind, although one could, if inclined, meet with others who had similarly ‘sacrificed to the God Priapus, & had unluckily fallen into the Aethiopian fashion of flat faces’ at the Dog Tavern on Drury Lane as a member of the ‘No Nose Club’. Ned Ward describes the membership of this club as the gathering together of the ‘maim’d Leachers, smifling old Stallions, young unfortunate 3 Chamberlen, Diary, p. 4. 4 Chamberlen, Diary, pp. 7–8. 5 ‘Introduction’, in The Secret Malady in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France, ed. Linda Evi Merians (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), p. 5. 6 Chamberlen, Diary, pp. 11–12.

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Whoremasters, poor scarify’d Bawds; & salivated Whetstones, … stigmatiz’d Strumpets & Fornicators … who star’d at one another with such unaccustomed Bashfulness & confused Odness, as if every Sinner beheld their own Iniquities in the Faces of their Companions’.7 Each member may be shy when confronted with a mirror of their disfigurements, but any form of socialising, when ostracised from polite society, is apparently better than none. After the club refreshments were ‘sanctify’d with a short Grace, they all fell to Grinding and Smiffling, for want of clear passages’ with as much appetite for their food as for their sexual pursuits.8 The eighteenth century is typically seen as a period in which British society was radically transformed so as to witness a birth of polite society, and the body served as an important and problematic site for the inscription of politeness and for the working out of what it meant to be polite. Politeness became an ideal of social conduct that was situated within company or, as Lawrence Klein puts it, ‘in the realm of social interaction and exchange, where it governed relations of the self with others’.9 John Brewer notes the ‘aim of politeness was to reach an accommodation with the complexities of modern life and to replace political zeal and religious bigotry with mutual tolerance and understanding’, and this was achieved by ‘conversing and dealing with people, which, by teaching one to regulate one’s passions and cultivate good taste, would enable a person to realize what was in the public interest and for the general good’.10 The satire of the ‘No Nose Club’ resides in the fact that those passions have not been regulated: the assembled company is representative of base human appetites of self-gratification stripped bare. James Boswell likened the performative aspect of the body engaged in society to actors playing a part: ‘Were nothing but the real character to appear, society would not be half so safe and agreeable as we find it. … It being necessary then in the intercourse of life to have such appearances, … we insensibly, for our own ease, adopt feelings suitable to every occasion, and so, like players, are to a certain degree a different 7 Ned Ward, Secret History of London Clubs, Part II (London: J. Dutton, 1709), pp. 23–24. 8 Ward, Secret History, p. 24. 9 Lawrence Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 4. 10 John Brewer, The Pleasures of Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: HarperCollins, 1997), p. 102.

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character from our own.’11 Boswell’s London Journal illustrates this split between body and character, and is indicative of how the gross infection threatens the body’s ‘serving as the visible locus for the inscription of legible notions of civic virtue’.12 By comparison, the journals of Boswell’s lesser-known contemporary Sylas Neville reveal no such split, as he is not a sociable man. Boswell and Neville have much in common. They were both Scottish and were born within a year of each other. They both had to watch every penny while spending pounds in order to maintain their gentlemanly status, and they both had to earn a living. Boswell and Neville shared a penchant for prostitutes and both established a relationship with someone they ultimately considered beneath them and whom they both blamed for their recurring cases of gonorrhoea. But the differences in the diaries, and the apparent purpose of keeping them, make the differences in their personalities manifest. Boswell’s self-reflective sociability is sharply contrasted with Neville’s solitary, secretive and suspicious nature: unpolished by genteel society, his diary appears simply to record the injustice of circumstances that he believes conspired against both him and his fixed view of himself as a gentleman. Boswell’s Calamities Boswell contracted gonorrhoea throughout his life. His first infection was incurred when he was almost 20 years old and had run away from Glasgow to London, ostensibly to escape from his studies. Boswell’s recovery from this infection took ten weeks and, humiliatingly, took place under the parental roof. Almost immediately after recovering from his first infection Boswell contracted a second: I went to a house of recreation in [Edinburgh] and catch’d a Tartar, too, with a vengeance. But I hope you don’t call passing some hours with an infamous creature –when hurried on by the heat of youth – a connection. This season, I have never been, nor do I intend to be a guest in the mansions of gross sensuality.13 11 James Boswell, London Magazine; Or Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligence, 52 volumes (London, 1732–1783), Vol. 39, p. 470. 12 Paul Goring, The Rhetoric of Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 24. 13 Boswell recounts this episode in a letter dated Friday 1 May 1761, making the date of the infection approximately July or August 1760; see The Correspondence of James Boswell and William Johnson Temple 1756–1795 Volume 1: 1756–1777, ed. Thomas Crawford (Edinburgh and New Haven, CT: Edinburgh University Press

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Recovery from this bout took four months and, again, took place in the family home. Boswell’s flight to London, visit to a ‘house of recreation’ and subsequent second infection were all the result of youthful impetuosity. When Boswell suffered from his third ‘calamity’, however, he showed greater awareness of how he should conduct himself in sexual and social intercourse. More details as to the experience of infection were forthcoming as, by this time, Boswell was in the habit of keeping a regular journal, but the journal is also demonstrative of how he wishes to be seen conducting himself as a member of polite society. Boswell’s adventure with ‘Louisa’, which resulted in this third infection, is well documented, but is worth considering again in the light of the relationship between the pox and politeness. In the introduction to the journal Boswell states his reasons for keeping it: ‘The ancient philosopher certainly gave a wise counsel when he said, “Know thyself.” … A man cannot know himself better than by attending to the feelings of his heart and to his external actions, from which he may with tolerable certainty judge “what manner of person he is’”’ (BLJ 39). The journal not only functions as a mirror to reflect back to Boswell ‘what manner of person he is’ but also demonstrates to John Johnston, Boswell’s oldest friend and the recipient of each instalment of the diary, what manner of person he has become since leaving the confines of his father’s jurisdiction: I had a handsome dining room and bed-chamber, just in Pall Mall, the finest part of town … and I had money enough to live like a gentleman … . Since I came up, I have begun to acquire a composed genteel character very different from a rattling uncultivated one which for some time past I have been fond of. I have discovered that we may be in some degree whatever character we choose. Besides, practice forms a man to anything. (BLJ 45–47)

His use of ‘up’ suggests that Boswell views his geographical relocation as a form of social elevation; he travels ‘up’ to London rather than down from Edinburgh and is now situated like a gentleman, thereby distancing himself from the uncouth youth that indulged gross appetites in the ‘house of recreation’ two infections back. He takes issue with what he perceives to be Lord Eglinton’s view of him as being still ‘in the style that … was three years ago: raw, curious, volatile, credulous. and Yale University Press, 1997), p. 33. For a medical perspective of Boswell’s overlapping infections, and also an overview of all 19 infections, see William B. Ober, ‘Boswell’s Gonorrhea’ [sic], Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, 45.6 (1969), pp. 587–636.

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[Eglinton] little knew the experience [Boswell] had got and the notions and the composure [he] had obtained by reflection. … [He] had now got a genteel violet-coloured frock suit’ (BLJ 52–53). Restraint, like character formation, also requires practice: Thursday 25 November … I had now been some time in town without female sport. I determined to have nothing to do with whores as my health was of great consequence to me. … I picked up a girl in the Strand; went into a court with intention to enjoy her in armour. But she had none. … I gave her a shilling, and had command of myself to go without touching her. I afterwards trembled at the danger I had escaped. I resolved to wait cheerfully till I got some safe girl or was liked by some woman of fashion. (BLJ 49–50)

Boswell had, in fact, only been in town for six days and his ‘uncultivated’ appetite threatened to get the better of him. It is not clear whether Boswell thinks of ‘a woman of fashion’ as being safe, or that for such a woman he would be willing to risk another infection. The entry dated 14 December 1763 begins with Boswell again observing how long he has been in London without ‘ever enjoying the delightful sex’, despite the huge variety on offer from the ‘splendid Madam at fifty guineas a night, down to the civil nymph … [who] will resign her engaging person to your honour for a pint of wine and a shilling’ (BLJ 83). His restraint is attributed both to his experience of the ‘loathsome distemper’ and to economic reasons, as he notes the prohibitive expense of surgeons’ fees (BLJ 84). But Boswell’s self-imposed celibacy is also tied up with his gentlemanly aspirations: Indeed, in my mind, there cannot be higher felicity on earth enjoyed by a man than the participation of genuine reciprocal amorous affections with an amiable woman. There he has a full indulgence of all the delicate feelings and pleasures both of body and mind, while at the same time in this enchanting union he exults with a consciousness that he is the superior person. The dignity of his sex is kept up. These paradisial scenes of gallantry have exalted my ideas and refined my taste, so that I really cannot think of stooping so far as to make a most intimate companion of a groveling-minded, ill-bred, worthless creature, nor can my delicacy be pleased with the gross voluptuousness of the stews. I am therefore walking about with a healthful stout body and a cheerful mind, in search of a woman worthy of my love, and who thinks me worthy of hers … . If I should be a single man for the whole winter, I will be satisfied. I have as much elegant pleasure as I could have expected would come to my share in many years. (BLJ 84)

Boswell’s search for safe sex and a reciprocal relationship means he would 182

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rather be celibate, healthy and sociable than self-indulgent, infected and isolated. In ‘Louisa’ he thinks he has found the perfect combination of a woman of fashion and reciprocal companion.14 Having called on Louisa several times previously by way of laying the foundations of ‘an agreeable acquaintance’, he finally is admitted to discuss if he ‘might see her now and then’ (BLJ 85). Boswell is pleased to note that she received him ‘with great politeness’ but also observes that ‘there was constraint upon us – we did not sit right on our chairs, and we were unwilling to look at one another’ (BLJ 85). The constraint is created by the novelty of the situation for Boswell. He is seeking a winter’s worth of safe copulation but his body is awkward because he is not comfortable in negotiating reciprocal terms in the language of politeness. So that he might not be mistaken for the ‘rattling uncultivated’ character he is trying to shake off, on next meeting Louisa they talk of ‘French manners, and how they studied to make one another happy’ (BLJ 88). After waxing lyrical over several journal entries upon the subject of love and gallantry, and after innocent liberties had been taken such as the ‘genteel elevation of the sweet charming petticoat’, Boswell ‘acquired confidence by considering [his] present character in this light: a young fellow of spirit and fashion, heir to a good fortune, enjoying the pleasures of London, and now making his addresses in order to have an intrigue with that delicious subject of gallantry, an actress’ (BLJ 115, 94). Boswell is uncertain of the exact nature of their relationship because of Louisa’s numerous requests for money in tandem with the numerous deferments of the long awaited congress. Not long after ‘this conquest [was] completed’ Boswell’s dismay upon feeling ‘a little heat in members of my body sacred to Cupid’ (BLJ 149) appears to confirm his worst suspicions about having been taken not for a gallant gentleman but simply another punter: I rose very disconsolate, having rested very ill by the poisonous infection raging in my veins and anxiety and vexation boiling in my breast. I could scarcely credit my own senses. What! thought I, can this beautiful, this sensible, and this agreeable woman be so sadly defiled? Can corruption lodge beneath so fair a form? Can she who professed delicacy of sentiment and sincere regard for me, use me so very basely and so very cruelly? … And yet these damned twinges, this scalding heat, and that deep-tinged loathsome 14 ‘Louisa’ is the pseudonym that Boswell gives the actress Anne Lewis, as identified by Fredrick Pottle (see Boswell’s London Journal, ed. Pottle (New York: William Heinemann Ltd, 1951), p. 84, n. 4). In keeping with Boswell’s journal entries regarding this relationship, this article will also refer to Lewis as Louisa.

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t h e m a l e body i n m e dici n e a n d l i t e r at u r e matter are the strongest proofs of an infection. But she certainly must think that I would soon discover her falsehood. But perhaps she was ignorant of her being ill. No, she could not be ignorant. … and am I then taken in? Am I, who have had safe and elegant intrigues with fine women, become the dupe of a strumpet? Am I now to be laid up for many weeks to suffer extreme pain and full confinement, and to be debarred all the comforts and pleasures of life? … And shall I no more (for a long time at least) take my walk, healthful and spirited, round the Park before breakfast, view the Guards on Parade, and enjoy all my pleasing amusements? And then am I prevented from making love to Lady Mirabel, or any other woman of fashion? O dear, O dear! What a cursed thing this is! What a miserable creature am I! (BLJ 155–56)

Boswell is furious with Louisa not only as the source of the infection but also because she has denied him the opportunity of social as well as sexual intercourse. Sociability means so much to Boswell that he defers his treatment for two days so that he can attend Lady Northumberland’s ‘great rout’ (BLJ 158). Boswell is devastated that he is has become infected ‘like some young fellows who get themselves clapped in a bawdy house’ (BLJ 160), thereby creating distance between the newer, more polished version of himself and the younger, uncultivated Boswell of the first calamity. He confines himself to quarters from 22 January: O how severe a prospect! Yet let me take courage … as [Adam] Smith used to observe, a time of indisposition is not altogether a time of misery. There is a softness of disposition and an absence of care which attend upon its indolent confinement. Then, I have often lamented my ignorance of English history. Now I may make up that want. … I gave orders to say at the door I was gone to the country, except to a few friends. … I will be patient. (BLJ 164–65)

Boswell’s philosophical approach toward his confinement suggests that it should be dedicated to self-improvement. Having instructed his landlord to say that he ‘was gone to the country’, a far more polite way of explaining his absence than announcing he has the pox, Boswell spends his time playing the violin, working on his prose, planning for his future and allowing a ‘multitudes of ideas [to] float through my fancy on both sides of the question’ now that he has time to consider any subject (BLJ 165, 184). One subject he pontificates upon is the essence of politeness: In my opinion, perfect simplicity and intimate knowledge of scenes takes away the pleasing sort of wonder and awe that we have for what is not clear to us … . When we know exactly all a man’s views and how he comes to

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t h e i m pol i t e bodi e s of t wo g e n t l e m e n speak and act so and so, we lose any respect for him, though we may love and admire him; at least we lose that kind of distant respect which is very agreeable for us to feel and him to receive. [What needs to be learned is] the nice art of being neither too free nor too reserved; … how much to conceal. Politeness is just what gives that. All its merit consists in that. (BLJ 176–77)

However, as Brewer notes, politeness does not thrive in solitude where it ‘would wither into self-regard or mutate into intolerance unless it was cultivated in society [as it] thrived on being watched and seen’.15 Boswell finds his philosophical state of mind increasingly difficult to maintain in isolation and describes himself as ‘peevish’, ‘angry with himself’, wanting to ‘indulge [his] gloom in solitude’ (BLJ 165). Feeling ‘somewhat morose’, he turns away from introspection and fires out the famous missive to Louisa demanding back two guineas, though, on reflection, he wonders if he was not being too vindictive and whether ‘to mention the money was not so genteel’ (BLJ 175). Boswell needed the ‘persistent gentle frictions of social life, the repeated need to “please in company” [that will produce] the smooth emollience of the polite person’.16 Therefore, he writes, ‘it may appear surprising that I should yet have so many visitors [but that] will soon vanish when I tell that these orders were countermanded [as] a little intercourse with the living world was necessary to keep my spirits from sinking into lethargic dulness or being soured to peevish discontent’ (BLJ 183). Boswell kept his journal with one eye on his eventual re-entry into the social world. His concern about the journal becoming boring and repetitive during his convalescence also applied, by extension, to himself. The small circle of visitors not only brought to Boswell the social world in the form of conversation but also, because they required his attention, drew him away from the dangers of self-regard. It is telling that it is only with his brother, John, that Boswell becomes peevish, but he is also the one person with whom Boswell can be completely natural. John Boswell is on terms far too intimate with Boswell for the latter to be anything other than himself, even when he is feeling annoyed and self-indulgent, but John’s bouts of periodic mental disturbance perhaps also suggest to Boswell that John does not really occupy a place in the social world as represented by the likes of Lord Eglinton and therefore Boswell could dispense with social politeness.17 15 Brewer, Pleasures of Imagination, p. 102. 16 Brewer, Pleasures of Imagination, pp. 102–03. 17 During the time Boswell kept his London journal John was a lieutenant in the earl of Loudon’s 30th Regiment of Foot, but was retired in 1764 on half-pay.

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Boswell’s journals, suggests Felicity Nussbaum, ‘repeatedly articulate the notion that identity may be continually revised and remade’, and she also notes that in an essay Boswell wrote for the London Magazine he ‘indicates his belief that we have “real” character and “real” feelings that are often at odds with social requirements’.18 Nussbaum argues that, for Boswell, ‘public and private categories become increasingly distinct [and that] any breach in the seamlessness of public character may be explained as an aberration’.19 As a sufferer of venereal disease, Boswell’s real ‘feelings’ of discomfort would certainly be at odds with the requirements of sociability, thereby creating that sensation Boswell calls ‘“a kind of double feeling”, possessing himself of the character [of the polite gentleman] while he remains conscious of his own [character] in “real life”’.20 Boswell’s body, or rather the infection that seethed around inside it, was the aberration that threatened to disrupt the public narrative of Boswell as the polite, sociable gentleman that was being constructed. Boswell’s keeping of the journal is supplemental to his physical sociability and will enhance his politeness by becoming what Brewer describes as ‘a spectator of the self’, a process that was begun prior to his entanglement with Louisa:21 I have … determined to keep a daily journal in which I shall set down my various sentiments and various conduct, … knowing I am to record my transactions will make me more careful to do well. Or if I should go wrong, it will assist me in resolutions of doing better. (BLJ 39)

Boswell’s London Journal is a work in progress insofar as it is a commentary on how the alignment between his private and public selves is progressing. Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite note that genres such as the letter and the diary … participate in the particular frissons of the new culture of ‘audience-oriented privacy’, in which forms of intimacy are staged in public [… and are] predicated upon an understanding of an individual not as an isolate, but as a socially recognised entity who is required to perform his or her individuality within a repertoire of codes and modes of 18 Felicity Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in EighteenthCentury England (Baltimore, MD, and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 107–08. 19 Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject, p. 190. 20 Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject, p. 109. The internal quotations are from Boswell’s essay ‘Remarks on the Profession of a Player’, written for the London Magazine, 39 (August–October 1770). 21 Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, pp. 107–08.

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t h e i m pol i t e bodi e s of t wo g e n t l e m e n affect. Such conventions break down any absolute distinction between the solitary and the sociable.22

So, even while Boswell was in isolation as a result of a most impolite disorder, he still required an audience on whom to practise the art of being pleasant. The same self-reflective purpose of journal keeping, however, cannot be attributed to Sylas Neville. The Sexually Transmitted Suspicions of Sylas Neville During the period covered by his extant diaries (1767–88) Neville spent a year in London (apparently doing nothing but attending the theatre); two years in Scratby near Yarmouth, where he attempted to play the role of a local squire; 13 years primarily in Edinburgh while studying medicine; and five years in Norwich. Despite passing his medical exams, Neville never practised medicine and spent the remainder of his life apparently subsisting on the proceeds of begging letters and charity. Unlike Boswell’s work in progress, Neville’s diary begins in medias res, though it is impossible to tell whether the first extant diary (there are 17 in total) is the first or the earliest survivor of a sequence. Throughout the diaries Neville consistently refers to his illustrious name and lineage but does not elaborate for the benefit of others; he does not need to write his history because he knows it already, as he knows why he must meet his mother in secret. The adoption of codes, which Boswell also does in later journals, hints towards scenarios dangerous to his liberty; an unwillingness to reveal names of suspected persecutors suggests paranoia that the diaries may be read by others. Roy Porter describes him as coming from the ‘ranks of distressed shabby gentlefolk, possessed of a scanty private income, just enough to support idleness but not enough to keep him from debt, insecurity and envy’.23 His paranoia, lack of funds and obsessive anxiety about the state of his health conjoin into a self-pitying, misanthropic view of the world through which he barely makes his way, and which finds full expression in his (possibly well-founded) doubts about the sexual faithfulness of his mistress, who is also his housekeeper. Neville’s anxieties are not simply jealousy but 22 ‘Introduction’, in Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture 1770–1840, eds Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 7. 23 Roy Porter, Madmen: A Social History of Madhouses, Mad-Doctors and Lunatics (Stroud: Tempus, 2004), p. 242.

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are primarily fuelled by a perceived lack of respect for his gentlemanly status from a servant, and the pain of the infection is transmuted into external violence that is directed towards the housekeeper as the presumed source of infection. At first glance, Neville’s interaction with prostitutes is merely so that he can persuade them of their sinfulness: I sometimes converse with women of ye Town, not with any bad design, but to persuade them to leave off that course of life. Some of them are deplorably abandoned & their behaviour such as to be a suff[icient] antidote to men of sensibility & virtue against keeping their company. O virtue! what an ornament art thou to human nature! After Innes left us went with Dennison &c to no less than 3 brothels, not with any bad intention, but merely from curiosity. [In] an Edinburgh brothel dirtiness & vice are combined. The last, indeed, we visited is an exception; ye rooms were tolerably clean. It is kept by a Mrs Jap, a most exact old Bawd … . May ye sight of vice always excite abhorrence in me!24

However, a recorded conversation with an acquaintance called Baker sheds a little more light on these excursions of mercy: We had a good deal of conversation after supper about ye nature of Virtue & Vice … B[aker] justly observed that ye votaries of Vice often give an involuntary Testimony in favour of Virtue. If a man’s mistress is faithful to him, she is praised because she so far resembles a virtuous wife. … But he agrees with me in supposing it, when indulged without invading any man’s right or any woman’s virtue, a venial offence arising from a most natural desire. The principal moral argument against indulging it with common women is that you thereby encourage them to continue in that course of life. But this I am not to reproach myself with, as every connexion I have had with such women was accompanied with my most earnest endeavours for their reformation. (p. 149)

Neville’s indulgences with prostitutes allow for a portrayal of himself as a morally and socially superior being. Without the construction of such a narrative Neville would, like the youthful Boswell or members of Ward’s club, be merely indulging in gross and selfish appetites. His intercourse with the ‘common women’ is for their moral improvement, not his 24 Leigh Wetherall Dickson, ‘Sylas Neville, Journals and Letters’, in Depression and Melancholy 1660–1800, Volume 3, ed. Leigh Wetherall Dickson (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012), pp. 149, 163. All further references to this edition will appear in the text.

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gratification. Neville’s relationship with ‘Sally’ is complicated because she is employed ostensibly as a servant, his housekeeper, but she also becomes his mistress whose faithfulness is under constant interrogation.25 Sally is also categorised by Neville as one of the ‘common women’, thereby akin to the prostitutes he visited, and his relationship with her is also presented as an act of class-conscious charity: Continued at ye Lamb, East-Bourne, to engage a young woman (who was seduced by one Bland, a major of ye accursed standing army) to be my serv[ant] when I settle. Some may be censorious; but my motive for this action, ye taking a girl out of her native place where her reputation is blasted, is a benevolent one. (p. 149)

Having engaged Sally initially as his housekeeper at Scratby House in Great Yarmouth, he first takes her to London and the tenor of their relationship is established from the outset. Having been expected a day earlier, Sally writes to Neville on 2 May 1769 to say that ‘she is provided for and cannot come’.26 On 5 June 1769 Neville notes suspiciously that Sally arrives but is nowhere to be found as she has ‘gone with an elderly man’ and that she has also travelled part of the way with the brother of her sister’s husband (p. 149). After an evening at the theatre he spends the next night with her, and by 12 June he is ‘fatally convinced that [he has] again contracted a bad distemper’ (p. 150). Clearly this is not the first infection as Neville recognised the early onset and took himself off to the apothecary, but the diary entry for 15 June records that he ‘spent this & last night with [Sally]’.27 Neville, unlike Boswell, sees no reason to separate himself from the presumed source of infection and views her subsequent infection as judicious: ‘Last week had an answer from Mr. Hill [apothecary] to my letters by which I find the symptoms in them are not dangerous & that [Sally] will escape better than her imprudence in not taking her medicines deserves’ (p. 150).28 Sally is cited 25 Throughout the diaries Sally is also referred to as S.B, Mrs B, Mrs Sarah Russell, Mrs S.R., Mrs. R., R. &, occasionally, Mrs Read. Her name appears to be Sally (or Sarah) Bradford. ‘Mrs Russell’ appears to be adopted for the purposed of respectability in her new role as Neville’s housekeeper, and she became Mrs Read when Neville appears to arrange for Sally to marry his footman, Jack Read, towards the end of the diaries. For the purposes of consistency and clarity, quoted material from the diaries shall refer to her as Sally. 26 The Diaries of Sylas Neville 1767–1788, ed. Basil Cozens-Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950), p. 68. 27 Diaries, ed. Cozens Hardy, p. 72. 28 ‘Mr. Hill’ may refer to ‘Sir’ John Hill, the controversial botanist, apothecary and

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as the presumed source of infection in an earlier entry in which Neville notes that she, ‘for fun’, threatened to leave him which made him very uneasy as he had not, until then, realised the high regard he held for her ‘not withstanding the injury she did [him]’ (p. 150). The injury is the physical infection, but also her lack of regard for his person. Sally is mistress of the house in both senses of the word, and throughout the diaries Neville records how she dictates with whom he can take tea, chastises him for attempting to discipline her child (fathered by Bland, the army officer) and berates the other servants, while he bemoans how embarrassing the connection with her is because of the social gulf that exists between them. Sally occupies a curious hinterland between wife and servant, and Neville is clearly unsure in which capacity she is acting or how he should respond, particularly as the infection problematises her occupation in either category. He constantly bemoans her bad temper as if she was his wife, and attempts to catch her idle as his servant. On one occasion she clearly oversteps the mark by ‘dancing at an improper place’ and two days later he records how Sally ‘promised upon her knees to behave to [him] with more respect’ (p. 155). A few months on from this incident she is ‘made … to take the following oath: “May God strike me blind & may my right hand rot off [if] I have done anything bad by you”’ after he arrived home late and caught her and the other servants sitting down (pp. 158–59). Suspecting an attachment between her and his manservant Neville holds a pistol to Sally’s head and threatens to blow out her brains. Sally, ‘on her knees [wished] to God the pistol to shoot her if what she said was false’, in response to which Neville ‘pretended to be satisfied & must believe her at present. I wish to find her innocent’ (p. 164). He becomes so distracted by suspicions that he spends the nights in the hayloft in order to spy on the early morning comings and goings of the household to determine who has slept where and potentially with whom, and repeatedly makes Sally swear on the bible as to her fidelity. Sounding remarkably like the newly genteel Boswell, Neville is baffled as to the ‘appearance of what seems a G-r-a’: Before breakfast waited on Dr Monro, I shewed him my case. … My new affair he suspects to be an incipient G[onorrhoea]. … If it is a G. I cannot conceive how it has come as [Sally] persists that no man has td her since I left home, & I think she c[ould] hardly be so cruel as to conceal anything actor. See Barry O’Connor, ‘Hill, Sir John (bap. 1714, d. 1775)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online edn, Jan. 2011 , accessed 2 May 2017.

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It is Sally’s apparent ingratitude that appears to stun him more than the infection. Having taken a position in his household, Sally’s inappropriate dancing, bad temper and refusal to allow Neville to discipline her child, as well as the infection of her vile poison, suggest a blatant disregard for his social superiority, but also poses a threat to his idea of himself as a gentleman: ‘I must determine. I know not what to do. … I think I am not treated with so much respect by some people as I used to be. Whether it is imagination or that they begin to suspect the badness of my [financial] situation, I know not’ (p. 166). Boswell was taken advantage of because he played his part too well, whereas Neville is sure that he is being taken advantage of because of his downward slide. According to Neville, Sally has inveigled her way into his house, abused his altruistic nature and treated his house and body with equal contempt. All the World’s a Stage Neville’s recording of his attachment to and extreme reactions towards Sally suggests a lack of the ‘audience-oriented privacy’ present in Boswell’s diary, in that he cannot contain either his passion or his fury. Neville’s lack of restraint, both in the diary and in the way he tries to validate his suspicions, is largely due to his lack of social intercourse with others. He attends the theatre on his own, except when with Sally. He does not appear to have intimate friends, and alienates what male acquaintances he does have by his predatory approach to their wives and female relations. He is hyper-critical of his fellow medical students and is suspicious of the motives of all he encounters. Brewer notes that during the eighteenth century ‘attending [cultural events] had ceased to be a special, isolated event, but was part of cultural repertoire that shaped everyday life’ and that with ‘the gradual profusion of Georgian assembly rooms, plays, picture galleries, libraries, museums and pleasure gardens a full range of cultural resources was now available for those who wish to be refined’.30 It is telling that Neville does go to Vauxhall pleasure gardens 29 ‘Dr Monro’ is Alexander Monro, secundus (1733–1817), professor of medicine and anatomy at Edinburgh University, where Neville was studying for his medical degree. Neville notes that one of the benefits of being a medical student is that they could consult with the staff regarding personal medical issues free of charge. 30 Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 59.

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and all he records of the experience is the inconvenience of getting there and back and the vileness of the wine. He does not consciously engage in social activities in order to enable the rounding off of the rough edges of his personality in the way that Boswell does. Unlike Boswell’s reflections upon his acquiring the attributes of a gentleman, Neville views being a gentleman as innate and considers that he should be recognised as such, despite the shabbiness of his dress and address. Unlike Boswell, whose diary reflects his sense of self as being ‘mutable … constantly refashioned by [his] relationships with others’,31 Neville’s identity remains fixed because of the lack of social interaction and self-reflection. His diary simply records rather than revises his view of himself, and he feels no compunction to render himself agreeable in order to convey respect for others or command it for himself. However, Neville’s dependence upon Sally threatens this certainty, primarily because she has intimate knowledge of his person and circumstances. He can only settle wholly into his idea of himself as a gentleman, unshakeable prior to his relationship with Sally, after marrying her off to his manservant (though her willingness to this turn of events remains unrecorded) and thereby neatly divesting himself of what he continually refers to throughout the diary as a most embarrassing connection. Brewer notes that the proponents of politeness set out to create an ecumenical, urban community of those who shared a vision of the world to form what Addison called ‘the Fraternity of Spectators’ consisting of ‘every one that considers the world a Theatre, and desires to form a right Judgement of those who are the actors on it’.32

Boswell’s membership of the ‘Fraternity’ was the source of his sense of duality, operating as both spectator and actor, even while his body threatened to compromise the ‘right judgement’ of his sociable self. In the words of The Spectator, Boswell took a full and active role in the ‘“chain of mutual Dependance [sic] of Humane Society”’, engagement with which removed ‘“impertinent Prejudices, [and] enlarge[s] the Minds of those, whose views are confined to their own Circumstances”’.33 Boswell manages to rise above his personal circumstances and perform his role of the sociable and polite gentleman with dignity, even when 31 Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 106. 32 Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 103. 33 The Spectator, quoted in Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 104.

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confronting Louisa, and despite the occasional lapse into peevishness, whereas peevishness appears to be Neville’s default setting. Neville’s lack of sociability renders him unable to see beyond his personal circumstances, with perhaps the sole exception of when he is infected. He has no sense of the demeaning spectacle he makes of himself when caught hiding in the hayloft and spying on the servants. Only when infected is there a consideration as to how his view of himself might be challenged, but only among a very narrow circle comprised primarily of servants, landladies and physicians, all of whom Neville considers beneath him socially and therefore not people with whom he needs to socialise. His disregard for the unpleasant symptoms suggests a disregard for sociability, as he clearly saw no need to modify his behaviour in order to accommodate this new set of circumstances in the same manner as Boswell. The Secret Patient’s Diary places a great deal of emphasis upon discretion and secrecy, stating that on taking the cure as advertised the patient ‘will find such comfortable Change and Alteration in themselves, as to be rendered surprisingly easy … (who before were Dejected, Spiritless and Cast-down)’.34 The need for discretion suggests a pre-existing sociability that has been circumscribed by the infection, and the subsequent elevation of mood is therefore indicative not only of physical relief upon being cured, but also of a re-entry into the realm of sociability. Boswell may well have been persuaded, but it is difficult to imagine Neville falling for this sales pitch.

34 Chamberlen, Diary, p. 5.

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‘’Tis My Father’s Fault’ Tristram Shandy and Paternal Imagination Jenifer Buckley Tristram Shandy and Paternal Imagination The eighteenth-century dispute concerning a pregnant woman’s potential to affect her foetus with her imagination is relatively well known. Keenly debated by physicians, midwives and even literary writers, the debate over ‘maternal imagination’ explored in minute detail the strength of a woman’s mind and her ability to control it.1 However, this debate raised 1 English writers have employed a range of terms for this concept, such as maternal imprinting, congenital deformity, maternal fleshmark, maternal impressions and maternal imagination. I have chosen to use the term ‘maternal imagination’ rather than the more common ‘maternal impressions’ throughout the chapter because the dramatic eighteenth-century transformation of the word ‘imagination’ is so significant for the period’s medicine, fiction and culture. ‘Imagination’ is also the earliest and most frequently employed term used by writers of the material under discussion. I have been unable to discover the original coinage of either term, although the Latin word naevus can be translated as either ‘maternal impression’ or ‘birthmark’, which suggests that medical texts written in Latin may have first introduced the phrase; see D. J. Atherton and C. Moss, ‘Naevi and Other Developmental Defects’, in Rooks Textbook of Dermatology, eds Tony Burns, Stephen Breathnach, Neil Cox and Christopher Griffiths, 7th edition (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004). The earliest reference to ‘maternal mental impressions’ is in Buter Lane, ‘Mental Influence of the Mother on the Child’, Provincial Medical and Surgical Journal, 13.5 (1849), pp. 124–25; the earliest mention of ‘maternal imagination’ I have located is in R. U. West, ‘Intrauterine Injuries And Deformities, with a Case Of Compound Dislocation of Vertebræ’, The British Medical Journal, 2.47 (1857), pp. 965–67; however, the earliest use of ‘the imagination of the mother’ is Nicholas Culpeper, A Directory for Midwives, or, A

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corresponding questions regarding the male role in sexual reproduction and the extent of paternal influence over both the parental nurturing and the individual nature of a child. This essay argues that Laurence Sterne tackles issues of paternity, masculinity and the male sexual role by drawing pointed attention to the obscure notion of paternal imagination in his novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67). This text, widely acknowledged for the author’s play with the complex intersections between eighteenth-century spheres of medicine and literature, employs the idea of paternal imagination to challenge eighteenth-century beliefs and assumptions regarding the male body.2 Sterne presents a back-to-front model of paternal imagination in his novel to signal the damaging effects of the very idea of a father’s private thoughts influencing the formation of his offspring. Unlike the common tales of a mother’s monstrous imagination or medical theories regarding a father’s positive imaginative influence, Tristram Shandy is the story of a child who is continually affected in a negative way by the father’s belief in his own imagination. As this chapter will demonstrate, Sterne’s tale of paternal imagination does not follow the typical model of a father’s state of mind physiologically affecting the embryo, but is instead structured around the consequences of a father’s faith in a specific notion of paternal authority. The novel’s insistence upon a warped version of paternal imagination disturbs preconceived notions of a father’s physical and mental contribution to reproduction and serves to highlight the importance of social responsibility as having more influence on a character’s development. Guide for Women in Their Conception, Bearing, and Suckling Their Children (1651; London: Peter Cole, 1656), p. 93. 2 Critics exploring the presence of disease and the body in Tristram Shandy include: Elizabeth K. Goodhue, ‘When Yorick Takes His Tea; or, the Commerce of Consumptive Passions in the Case of Laurence Sterne’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 6.1 (2006), pp. 51–83; and Clark Lawlor, ‘Consuming Time: Narrative and Disease in Tristram Shandy’, in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: A Casebook, ed. Thomas Keymer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 147–70. There are also several articles on Sterne’s engagement with man-midwifery, such as Arthur H. Cash, ‘The Birth of Tristram Shandy: Sterne and Dr Burton’, in Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. Paul Gabriel Boucé (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), pp. 198–224; Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, ‘Of Forceps, Patents and Paternity: Tristram Shandy’, Eighteenth Century Studies, 23.4 (1990), pp. 522–43; and Bonnie Blackwell, ‘Tristram Shandy and the Theater of the Mechanical Mother’, English Literary History, 68.1 (2001), pp. 81–133.

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Maternal and Paternal Imagination A loosely assembled quasi-theory, the notion of paternal imagination usually expressed the idea that a man’s thoughts and feelings at the point of his orgasm could affect any offspring produced by his ejaculation. Mental or physical similarities between a man and child were usually discussed in order to prove, or disprove, paternal responsibility. (If the assertions of paternal imagination were true, there could be serious implications for paternity and inheritance, as a man would be able to identify more easily whether the child who called him father was really his own progeny.) Supporting dominant cultural ideas about the male role in reproduction, the father’s imagination was believed to have a generally positive and aesthetically enhancing effect upon the newly created life, rather than the detrimental imaginative power typically attributed to the mother. Sterne’s idiosyncratic portrayal of paternal imagination is very unusual for the period and needs to be set against the heated disputes during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries concerning the nature of male and female reproductive roles. These discussions were not limited to natural philosophers and physicians; as Tristram Shandy’s eclectic content demonstrates, magic, theology, astrology and medicine were commonly viewed as similar facets of reproductive information.3 However, by the eighteenth century mythologically based explanations of the natural world were beginning to be replaced or assimilated into more empirical or ‘scientific’ theories. It has been argued that the two-sex model was in the process of replacing the longstanding one-sex paradigm based on the views of the second-century physician Galen.4 In the Galenic view, each individual was thought to contain 3 Keith Thomas states that ‘all the evidence of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries suggests that the common people never formulated a distinction between magic and science, certainly not between magic and medicine’. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), p. 668. Alexandra Shepard has noted that medical texts were not always written by physicians and were sometimes authored by clergymen, civil servants and even lawyers. See Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 4 Thomas Laqueur’s work in this field remains crucial: see Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); and The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century, eds Thomas Laqueur and Catherine Gallagher (Berkeley: University of

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both male and female elements; the sexual organs were considered to be mirror images of each other, female genitals being seen as the colder, inverted version of the male reproductive organs, and it was believed that both male and female were required to orgasm in order to reproduce. In contrast, the two-sex model presented men and women as incommensurably different; increasingly as opposites, rather than as complementary. As the two-sex model cast doubt upon whether it was necessary for a woman to orgasm in order to conceive, it was no longer certain that the male and female played an equal part in conception. Such ideas affected theories of parental influence; in light of these changes, who could determine what constituted a mother or father’s contribution to the creation and development of a child? Of course, to a certain extent these hypotheses complemented entrenched popular views on male and female roles. It is worth noting that Aristotle, Hippocrates and Galen had all claimed that man was the progenitor and relegated the woman’s role in reproduction to a secondary position.5 Eve Keller has demonstrated that even William Harvey’s revolutionary claim that all animal life originated from the mother’s egg was presented in terms of masculine authority.6 Keller’s argument alludes to the important fact that ‘science’ often reflected what the (male) scientists expected to see or conclude. Thomas Lacquer and Catherine Gallagher have discussed the political, economic and cultural importance of gender to eighteenth-century understandings of reproduction, while Londa Schiebinger’s pithy reminder that ‘science is a product of society’ warns against privileging scientific discovery over California Press, 1987). Laqueur’s thesis has been challenged notably by Joan Cadden in The Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), among others. I mention the possible one-sex to two-sex shift not to agree or disagree with Laqueur’s thesis but merely to emphasise that this was a period significant for uncertainties, change and heightened interest regarding reproductive knowledge. 5 See Carolyn D. Williams, ‘“Difficulties, at Present in no degree clear’d up”: The Controversial Mother, 1600–1800’, in The Female Body in Medicine and Literature, eds Andrew Mangham and Greta Depledge (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011), p. 17; also Nancy Tuana, The Less Noble Sex: Scientific, Religious and Philosophical Conceptions of Woman’s Nature (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1983). 6 See Eve Keller, ‘Making up for Losses: The Workings of Gender in William Harvey’s de Generatione Animalium’, in Inventing Maternity: Politics, Science and Literature 1650–1865, eds Susan C. Greenfield and Carol Barash (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1999), pp. 34–56.

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deeply held cultural beliefs and social structures.7 Science could be harnessed to prove that the ‘natural’ order of society was indeed correct. In 1677, Dutchman Anton van Leeuwenhoek described the animalculi (‘little animals’) and homunculi (‘little men’) that he had discovered, with the use of a microscope, to be living in the spermatozoa from animals and man. As we shall see, Sterne’s description of Tristram as a tiny, but perfectly formed, homunculus is a clear reference to the extraordinary images that accompanied Leuwenhoek’s theory in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions.8 Assertions such as these confirmed general assumptions that a man produced unequivocally perfect children and that life was a male gift. Operating in counterpoint to these assumptions, the general idea of maternal imagination supported the view that women were to blame for any abnormal birth. The theory had historically been a convenient explanation for monstrous or unusual births for millennia.9 Folk tales and medical texts both circulated the idea that deformed infants, stillbirths and miscarriages were the results of a mother’s dangerous imagination during pregnancy. However, these traditional views were brought under close scrutiny during the eighteenth-century Imaginationist debate. This debate began with the physician James Blondel’s pamphlet The Strength of Imagination in Pregnant Women And the Opinion that Marks and Deformities in Children arise from Thence Demonstrated to be a Vulgar 7 Laqueur and Gallagher, The Making of the Modern Body; Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1993), p. 8. 8 In fact these images were not sanctioned by Leuwenhoek and served as a form of advertisement rather than scientific evidence. Despite this, the drawings of sperm as tiny men were irrevocably linked to Leuwenhoek’s theory. 9 The theory first appears in a lost classical text attributed to Empedocles, who recommended that pregnant women should gaze upon beautiful statues and paintings. Spartans showed their pregnant wives beautiful pictures of Apollo, Castor, Pollux and other gods to encourage strong, good-looking offspring. See Marie-Hélène Huet, Monstrous Imagination (London: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 4–5, 19; and Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (London: The MIT Press, 1997), p. 312. The idea of maternal imagination also appears in the third-century Greek text the Aethiopica, by Heliodorus, in which a white child is born to black parents. This work experienced a surprising revival during the Renaissance and was translated into English in 1569 by Thomas Underdowne. The story of a white child born to Ethiopian parents also recurs in Italian poet Torquato Tasso’s epic poem Geruselemme liberata (1581), which I shall discuss below.

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Error (1727). This pamphlet sparked a controversial medical dispute concerning maternal imagination that would last for several decades. Blondel coined the term ‘Imaginationist’ to describe the argument that a mother could affect her foetus with her imagination, and established himself as the first recorded Anti-Imaginationist.10 In his pamphlet, Blondel used commonsensical and anatomical arguments to deny that a pregnant woman could alter her infant with the power of her mind. Authors of all kinds quickly took up the subject, and by mid-century the discourse of maternal imagination featured in medical texts, popular pamphlets, newspapers, ballads and even novels such as Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751).11 The Imaginationist dispute coincided with an emerging era of sensibility, which reified maternal sentiment as one of the highest marks of sympathy and benevolence.12 As many critics have noted, prescriptive sentimental motherhood was constantly emphasised in conduct books, female health guides, novels and polemic writing. The Imaginationist debate was therefore fraught with cultural, political and medical significance, as interrogating a woman’s ability to affect her foetus with the power of her mind created new questions regarding the strength of feminine passion, the limits of maternal (ir)responsibility and the true nature and extent of the female contribution to reproduction. Consequently, although traditional notions of maternal imagination reinforced ideas of male superiority, new medical and cultural interest in the subject placed the entire concept of the maternal role, as well as Leuwenhoek’s animalculi, under the microscope. Inevitably, new scientific claims concerning the two-sex 10 James Blondel was the first to use the generic label ‘Imaginationist’ to describe persons who believed in the concept of maternal imagination in The Power of the Mother’s Imagination over the Foetus Examin’ d In Answer to Dr Daniel Turner’s Book Intitled A Defence of the XIIth Chapter of the First Part of a Treatise, de Morbis Cutaneis (London: John Brotherton, 1729), p. ix. 11 Peregrine Pickle’s mother fabricates a case of maternal imagination when she is pregnant with Peregrine. G. S. Rousseau has examined this incident in ‘Pineapples, Pregnancy, Pica and Peregrine Pickle’, in Tobias Smollet: Bicentennial Essays Presented to Lewis M Knapp, eds G. S. Rousseau and P. G. Boucé (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 79–109. 12 Julie Costello notes that David Hume and Adam Smith both used the mother as a symbol of benevolence and argues that, for both thinkers, ‘the mother-child bond becomes a model for aestheticized human relations’: see ‘Aesthetic Discourses and Maternal Subjects: Enlightenment Roots, Schlegelian Revisions’, in Comparative Romanticisms: Power, Gender, Subjectivity, eds Diane Long Hoeveler and Larry H. Peer (Woodbridge: Camden House, 1998), pp. 171–88 (p. 175).

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model, the origin of life or the denunciation of maternal imagination disturbed established ideas across different levels of society; at the very least, one can argue that understandings of reproduction during the long eighteenth century were in a state of flux. It is quite possible that Sterne himself was personally interested in the issue of reproduction, as he and his wife found it difficult to conceive a healthy child. (Sterne suffered from syphilis and could have been aware that this condition affected his wife’s pregnancies.13) If the ancient concept of maternal imagination was, as Blondel claimed, ‘a vulgar error’, were conventional suppositions about the positive and life-giving qualities of a father’s role (both physical and imaginative) similarly erroneous? It would be fair to say that, compared with the high volume of unusual births attributed to maternal imagination, references in print to any concept of paternal imagination are relatively scarce. During this period of increased interest in biological materialism, it seems logical that the Imaginationist debate centred upon the culpability of the mother’s imagination because of the more apparent biological links between mother and child, whether through the placenta, the blood or the nervous system. In contrast, the physiological link between father and child was relatively fleeting and severed at the moment of conception; and yet, in Tristram Shandy, Sterne explores the significance of the father’s imagination in great length and detail. In medical literature, the idea of paternal imagination resurfaces sporadically, and without fanfare, throughout the century. In 1727 James Blondel slipped one terse remark into his treatise on maternal imagination: ‘several good authors have formerly pretended that the imagination of the male, as well as of the female in any kind of living creatures, does contribute to the colouring of the foetus, as appears by Pliny’.14 The eighteenth-century man-midwife John Maubray also insisted upon the dangers of imagination and its potential to cause deformities, claiming that while the mother’s imagination affected the physical formation of the foetus, paternal imagination could influence 13 Elizabeth Sterne had at least one stillborn child and at least one daughter who died a day after birth. Ian Campbell Ross states that ‘exactly how many children were born to Elizabeth Sterne is not known. What is certain is that only one would survive beyond the first weeks of life’: Laurence Sterne: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 118. Campbell also speculates that Sterne took the deaths hard and perhaps blamed himself for his wife’s inability to bear a child. 14 See Blondel, The Power of the Mother’s Imagination, p. 8.

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the baby’s character and mental qualities.15 The most extended treatment of the subject appeared much later, as Erasmus Darwin’s theory of paternal imagination in his medical encyclopaedia or nosology Zoonomia (1794–96). Although Darwin’s work on his theory of paternal imagination was not published until the end of the century, several decades after the publication of Tristram Shandy and Sterne’s death, his ideas are worth taking into account as they include principles based upon the claims of ancient authorities such as Aristotle.16 Furthermore, as no other English text places such significance on the possibilities of paternal imagination as Tristram Shandy, it is possible that Sterne’s detailed attention to the theory in some way influenced Darwin’s later thinking upon the topic. Darwin had worked upon Zoonomia since the 1770s; however, he refrained from publication as he feared that some of the more radical views expressed might injure his reputation and medical practice. He finally published the work, including the chapter ‘Of Generation’ which detailed his own particular theory of paternal imagination and promoted the Aristotelian view that women were merely a nidus or nest for the foetus. Moreover, he claimed that the origin of life, the living ‘embryonanimal’, existed solely in the sperm of the male parent.17 Darwin explained that it was impossible for a mere ‘nest’ to have an imaginative influence upon the developing foetus and claimed ‘it would appear, that the world has long been mistaken in ascribing great power to the imagination of the female, whereas from this account of it, the real power of imagination, in the act of generation, belongs solely to the male’.18 According to Darwin, all imaginative influence therefore derived exclusively from the father – a point that may well have been remembered by Mary Shelley, who would later acknowledge Darwin as an influence 15 John Maubray, The Female Physician: Containing all the Diseases incident to that Sex in Virgins, Wives and Widows; Together with their Causes and Symptoms, their Degrees of Danger, and Respective Methods of Prevention and Cure (London: James Holland, 1724), p. 56. 16 While Aristotle did not expound any theory of paternal imagination, Darwin followed the Aristotelian idea in The Generation of Animals (350 BCE) that the male contributed the materials for new life, while the female provided a growth medium and nourishment. 17 Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia; or, the Laws of Organic Life By Erasmus Darwin, M.D. F.R.S. Author of the Botanic Garden, vol. I (London: J. Johnson, 1794), p. 480. Carolyn D. Williams discusses gender roles and the medical history of reproduction in ‘“Difficulties, at Present in no degree clear’d up”’, pp. 16–33. 18 Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. I, p. 520.

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upon the writing of Frankenstein (1818).19 Darwin displayed awareness of his controversial stance by establishing his theory against the ‘world’s’ mistaken belief in the concept of maternal imagination. By contrast, Sterne’s adoption of this position in Tristram Shandy is extraordinarily casual, as he assumes the reader’s familiarity with the collection of ideas concerning paternal imagination. In fact, Sterne never explicitly clarifies the concept of paternal imagination or even acknowledges that such a concept might require introduction or explanation. Nevertheless, the opening paragraph of Tristram Shandy, which occurs memorably in flagrante, should be read against the backdrop of vacillating reproductive knowledge. For example, it is worth noting that the moment of seminal ejaculation was the crucial instant for theories of paternal imagination. As discussed above, the shift to a two-sex model prompted questions about the necessity of female orgasm for procreation, as scientists and philosophers searched for the origin of life. Many natural philosophers advocated the theory of ‘preformationism’, the idea that the foetus was fully formed in miniature and simply grew in size.20 This theory provoked debate over whether the spark of life originated in the maternal egg, as the ‘Ovists’ believed, or whether it was located in spermatozoa, as ‘Spermatists’ claimed. Still others, such as William Harvey, argued for ‘epigenesis’, a theory claiming that the baby grew more complex over time. All of these theories held implications for gender prescriptions of the era as physicians and philosophers disrupted ideas about the reproductive roles of men and women and ignited social debates concerning sexuality, gender, parenthood and, of course, the power of imagination. Sterne alludes to such controversy as he handles the question of biological parental influence in a characteristically brazen manner, 19 In Shelley’s Preface to the 1831 edition she referred to the ‘experiments of Dr. Darwin’ in which a piece of vermicelli moved with voluntary motion. Clearly, Darwin’s ideas and theories had some influence on Shelley’s tale of a creature with only one (male) parent. See Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818; 1831; London: Penguin, 1994), p. 8. 20 Other notable scientists, such as Spallanzani, Haller and Bonnet, believed in preformatism – despite what Lisa Forman Cody describes as ‘quite stunning counter-evidence’ in Birthing the Nation: Sex, Science and the Conception of Eighteenth-Century Britons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 243. Cody observes how this belief in preformatism largely followed from Charles Bonnet’s discovery of parthenogenesis in aphids, which suggested that eggs produced life, in the 1740s.

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explicitly addressing the topic within the first paragraph of the novel. The opening passage to Tristram Shandy directly and self-consciously engages with notions of both ‘maternal’ and ‘paternal’ imagination. As Tristram explains: I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they had begot me; had they duly consider’d how much depended upon what they were then doing; – that not only the production of a rational Being was concern’d in it, but that possibly the happy formation and [temperament] of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind.21

Tristram’s parents are ‘equally bound’ allegedly to mind their respective imaginations during the sexual act, lest they should affect the formation of their newly created offspring. Such a claim for equal parental responsibility was, as Sterne well knew, highly unusual; moreover, the prominence of the father’s imagination throughout the rest of the nine-volume novel is utterly unprecedented. Unfortunately, the novel’s inclusion of both maternal and paternal imagination has produced a critical elision between the two theories that has muted Sterne’s emphasis of the latter.22 Paul Gabriel Boucé briefly recognises the need to differentiate between maternal and paternal imagination in the novel and argues that it might ‘be contended that the whole of Tristram Shandy’s (apparently) melancholy tale of pre- and post-conception woes is but a fictive illustration of the father’s imaginative powers (or abruptly thwarted potency by Mrs Shandy’s untimely liminal question) at the crucial time of seminal ejaculation’.23 This essay aims to build upon Boucé’s isolated, but vital, distinction between the 21 Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, eds Melvyn and Joan New (1759–1767; London: Penguin: 2003), p. 1. All further references to this edition will be given in the text. 22 Dennis Todd mentions the novel as a celebrated literary example of the concept of maternal imagination, while Philip K. Wilson groups Tristram Shandy with Martinus Scriblerus and Peregrine Pickle as fictitious characters affected by their mother’s imaginations; see respectively Todd, Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth-Century England (London and Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 105; and Philip K. Wilson, Surgery, Skin and Syphilis: Daniel Turner’s London (1667–1741) (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), p. 131. 23 Paul Gabriel Boucé, ‘Imagination, Pregnant Women and Monsters, in EighteenthCentury England and France’, in Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment, eds G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), pp. 86–101 (p. 98).

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two Imaginationist strands to highlight Sterne’s p ­reoccupation with, ­specifically, the paternal imagination. During a period of continual enquiry into the nature of sexual reproduction, the power of imagination and parental influence, Sterne mocks Imaginationist theory from the outset and goes on to show the dangers of believing scientific theories at the risk of neglecting the corporeal and the day-to-day. As the novel unveils a particularly strange version of paternal imagination, Tristram’s life and opinions are revealed to be influenced not by the moment of his conception but by his father’s misplaced belief in the significance of that moment. ’Tis my Father’s Fault Although few and far between, commentators on paternal imagination agreed upon the basic principle that the father’s imagination affected the new foetus in a beneficial and permanent manner. Unlike maternal imagination, which could occur at any point during the nine-month gestation, the force of paternal imagination was bound up with the pleasurable and life-giving properties delivered at the instant of the male orgasm. This logic contained the suggestion that paternal imagination was a positive power, rather than the primarily injurious, monstrous workings of maternal imagination. In an analysis of Tasso’s Geruselemme liberata (1581) Valeria Finucci has stated that there is ‘a palpable difference between paternal and maternal imagination vis-à-vis the formation of the fetus’ features’.24 Whereas the father is able to perfectly transmit an image to the foetus, a mother’s confused and wayward imagination produces a distorted or poor reproduction of what she sees upon her offspring. (In Geruselemme liberata the white-skinned character Clorinda is born to black parents because her mother stared continually at a painting of white Europeans.) Finnuci cites Tasso’s belief that ‘thanks to the high quality of men’s fantasy, children tend to reproduce the virtue and the beauty conveyed in the father’s mind at the moment of conception’.25 As Finucci observes, while a mother usually damages the foetus, ‘a 24 Valeria Finucci, ‘Maternal Imagination and Monstrous Birth: Tasso’s Geruselemme liberata’, in Generation and Degeneration: Tropes of Reproduction in Literature and History From Antiquity to Early Modern Europe, eds Valeria Finucci and Kevin Brownlee (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2001), pp. 41–77 (p. 58). 25 Finucci, ‘Maternal Imagination’, p. 48.

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father’s imagination can improve on a child’s genetic baggage’.26 Paternal imagination was thus closely aligned with procreation as a vital, positive and even beatifying force. However, in Tristram Shandy, Walter’s paternal imagination is consistently characterised as extraordinarily negative and debilitating. Walter is convinced that Tristram’s misfortunes are direct results of his, Walter’s, distracted paternal imagination at the moment of Tristram’s conception. Despite the initial emphasis on the imaginative influence of both parents, Sterne quickly flips the focus from the conventional concept of maternal imagination to the lesser-known notion of paternal imagination. He clearly indicates that, for Walter Shandy, the power of a father’s imagination far outstrips that of the mother’s. In the extended passage entitled ‘My Father’s Lamentation’, Walter blames all of Tristram’s misfortunes upon the original incident of paternal imagination and declares, Unhappy Tristram! Child of wrath! Child of decrepitude! Interruption! Mistake! And discontent! What one misfortune or disaster in the book of embryotic evils, that could unmechanize thy frame or entangle thy filaments! Which has not fallen upon thy head, or ever thou camest into the world – what evils in thy passage into it! – What evils since! – produced into being, in the decline of thy father’s days – when the powers of his imagination were waxing feeble. (IV: 266, italics added)

This passage specifically blames the father’s ‘feeble’ imagination at the point of conception for all of the failings of Tristram’s life. It also depicts the foolish stubbornness of Walter’s beliefs, as his staccato vehemence and repeated exclamation marks appear laboured and rather undermine his point. The hyperbolic language is unconvincing, particularly as the reader is thoroughly acquainted with Walter’s eccentric character at this stage in the novel. Walter is clearly upset and disturbed by his suppositions, and therefore demonstrates the way that faith in a foolish theory can be more damaging than the principles of the theory itself. The extract also signals that the belief in paternal imagination is one of Walter’s ‘hobby-horses’. The trope of the ‘hobby-horse’ – certain obsessions that consume each character’s imagination – recurs throughout the novel, but paternal imagination is perhaps Walter’s most sustained 26 Finucci, ‘Maternal Imagination’, p. 58. Finucci notes that not all authorities agreed upon this; some, such as Giambatista Della Porta, believed that the power of maternal imagination could improve a foetus, if properly controlled.

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and injurious ride.27 Walter not only attaches profound significance to the notion of paternal imagination but also, rather unwisely, teaches his son to believe in the concept. This results in yet more unhappiness for Walter, as Tristram excuses his own flaws by attributing them to his father’s faulty paternal imagination.28 As Tristram makes clear from the outset, the Shandys believe that the father plays a critical role in the creation of his offspring; ‘You have all, I dare say, heard of the animal spirits, as how they are transfused from father to son, &c. &c.’ (I:5, italics added). However, the repeated emphasis upon the importance of paternal imagination creates the impression that Walter doth perhaps protest too much. In fact, Sterne satirises the notion of paternal imagination through Walter’s unwavering belief in the concept to signal not only an exploration of masculinity but also, rather ironically, a paradigm of imagination creating physiological effects. It is, after all, Walter’s frequent imagining of his disordered animal spirits that causes him to act in ways that literally disfigure his child. As Tristram reveals more and more about Walter’s misguided attempts at father–son interaction during Tristram’s life, Sterne pointedly emphasises that a character is not moulded by imagination at the point of conception, but rather by ongoing experiences after birth. Tristram himself appears to blame the digressive nature of his narrative upon the character bestowed upon him by Walter’s interrupted ejaculation and states: ‘’tis my father’s fault; and whenever my brains come to be dissected, you will perceive, without spectacles, that he left a large 27 The very concept of Sterne’s hobby-horse is remarkably akin to the model of paternal or maternal imagination, as one particular idea or emotion takes hold of the parent’s mind. This parallel is further embellished by the physical marks that the Shandy men leave as a result of their respective hobby-horses. While Tristram’s body is marked by his father’s fixation with noses and midwifery, Uncle Toby’s fascination with recreating the Siege of Namur transforms the bowling green. Tristram’s own hobby-horse is his autobiography and he leaves unusual marks upon its pages. 28 Ruth Marie Faurot suggests that Tristram blames his mother for his own ill health and cites a passage addressed to his mother in Volume 5 ‘you have left a crack in my back, – and here’s a great piece fallen off here before, – and what must I do with this foot? —— I shall never reach England without it’ (V:331); see Faurot, ‘Mrs Shandy Observed’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 10.3 (1970), pp. 579–89 (p. 588). However, I believe the passage is ambiguous, as Tristram here addresses ‘Madam’, which could refer either to his mother (whom he discusses in the previous sentence) or to the reader (whom he has also addressed as Madam earlier in the text).

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uneven thread, as you sometimes see in an unsaleable piece of cambrick, running along the whole length of the web’ (VI:417, my italics). Here, the image of Walter’s uneven traces weaving around Tristram’s brain is suggestive of the general features of paternal imagination. However, in opposition to the usual positive associations of the would-be theory, Tristram directly blames his father for his own failings. The repetition of such sentiments works not to highlight the physiological effect of Walter’s distracted ejaculation but rather to emphasise the detrimental effect of the Shandy men’s stubborn, and largely self-fulfilling, belief in the idea. All supporters of paternal imagination argued that the father’s thoughts and feelings affected the offspring at the instant of conception. Some of the earliest recorded medical claims for this particular idea can be traced to discussions of maternal imagination in the seventeenth century. Thomas Feyens (Fienus), Professor of Medicine at the University of Louvain, argued strongly for the power of a mother’s imagination in his influential text upon imagination, De Viribus Imaginationis Tractatus (1608), but suggested that imagination itself operated most powerfully during the moment that new life was created.29 This logic offered the possibility that a father’s imagination might also influence the foetus during ejaculation. Fortunii Liceti, the physician, scientist, philosopher and contemporary of Feyens, claimed that while ‘the father’s imagination can affect him during the sexual act, the woman’s is always at work, after copulation and during conception, when the fetus is formed’.30 (Liceti himself had been a seven-month premature baby, and survived only due to his own father’s ingenious makeshift incubator.31) Although Liceti’s statement claimed that the maternal imagination was more potent and had more time to act, it still allowed that a father’s imagination might affect the formation of the foetus during copulation. The man-midwife Maubray affirmed that ‘not only the conceiving woman, but the copulating man, may effect the same thing; if he should imprudently set his mind on such objects, or employ his perverted imagination in 29 De Viribus Imaginationis Tractatus (or On the Forces of Imagination) mainly relies upon the authority of Aristotle, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, but also includes a wide range of ancient, medieval and early modern writers, including Galen, Avicenna, Marsilio Ficino and Pietro Pomponazzi. 30 Fortunii Liceti, De Monstrorum Causiss, Natura et Differentiis Libri Duo (Padua, 1616), quoted in Huet, Monstrous Imagination, p. 15. 31 A. W. Bates, Emblematic Monsters: Unnatural Conceptions and Deformed Births in Early Modern Europe (New York: Rodolpi, 2005), p. 78.

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that way’.32 Referring to ideas of paternal imagination in the same sentence as the concept of maternal imagination suggested that the father’s thoughts and feelings during conception were as formatively influential as the mother’s during pregnancy – if not more so, owing to the superior mental powers of men. Later, in Zoonomia, Erasmus Darwin also pinpointed the moment of conception as the most influential. He argued that when men begot sons it was because they were thinking of their own form during sex and this was ‘proved’ by the fact that there were more men than women in the world because ‘the general idea of our own form occurs to every one almost perpetually’.33 Alternatively, when a daughter was conceived, the father had been thinking of the woman as he ejaculated – Darwin suggested that this was why ‘male children most frequently resemble the father in form, or feature, as well as sex; and the female most frequently resembles the mother, in feature and form, as well as in sex’.34 In Tristram Shandy – a novel, incidentally, with which Darwin was familiar – the moment of paternal imagination is initially portrayed as occurring during conception. Walter mournfully laments, ‘my Tristram’s misfortunes began nine months before ever he came into this world’ (I:7).35 This statement persists in the idea that Walter’s confused state of mind at the point of conception was of far more significance to Tristram’s character than the subsequent nine-month period of gestation in Elizabeth Shandy’s womb. Yet, although it seems clear that this is when Tristram’s misfortunes started, the entire novel is structured to suggest that his life has been continually affected by his father’s theory of paternal imagination. Tristram explains that as a homunculus he was a poor specimen, owing to the disturbance and consequent inattention of his father at the moment of ejaculation. Therefore Tristram’s journey to the womb and his subsequent growth was impeded by a nervous temperament; he was particularly ‘prey to sudden starts, or a series of melancholy dreams and fancies’ (I:7). Tristram’s fancies were not the effect of a mother 32 Maubray, The Female Physician, p. 369. 33 Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. I, p. 520. 34 Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. I, p. 520. 35 In Zoonomia, Darwin directly referred to the text when discussing the best remedies for grief. He asserted that ‘in the first hours of grief the methods of consolation used by Uncle Toby in Tristram Shandy, is probably the best’; see Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. II (London: J. Johnson, 1796), p. 372. Toby’s method of consolation was to mutely comfort Walter with his presence, rather than with an excess of words.

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afflicted by maternal imagination during gestation, but instead a result of the aftershock caused by the distraction of the father’s ‘animal spirits’ (I:5). As the reader soon discovers, this aftershock is only one of many consequences of Walter’s understanding of paternal imagination. The usual presentation of paternal imagination as a positive power that acts during conception is absent in the novel, as Sterne instead discloses a model of paternal imagination that continues to negatively affect key events in Tristram’s life. Early in the novel it becomes clear that Walter perceives the concept of paternal imagination to be behind Tristram’s many problems. Moreover, all of Walter’s worst decisions regarding Tristram originate with his stubborn adherence to an idiosyncratic formula of paternal imagination. Perhaps the most peculiar feature of Walter’s faith in paternal imagination is his persistent belief that he can somehow rectify the damage he believes he has caused to the foetus. As Walter tries to correct the ‘injury’ he believes to have inflicted upon Tristram at the point of conception, he causes a series of more serious incidents. J. Paul Hunter has noted that the conceiving of Tristram is the first of five principal segments of the novel: Tristram’s conception, birth, christening, nose-breaking and circumcision.36 As the narrative unfolds it becomes clear that, for Walter at least, the latter four episodes are pre-determined by the initial calamity of Walter’s paternal imagination at conception. The theory of paternal imagination therefore acts as the fundamentally structuring principle for the narrative, as every event or opinion in Tristram’s life is coloured by his father’s belief in the consequences of interrupted ejaculation. Pained by his role in Tristram’s conception, Walter tries to correct his mistake by exerting some influence over the birth. He tries both to insist upon the presence of man-midwife Dr Slop and to persuade his wife Elizabeth to have a caesarean section.37 Critics of the novel have discussed avidly the implications of Walter Shandy’s insistence upon the presence of a man-midwife; however, the hiring of Dr Slop can be explained by Walter’s misunderstandings regarding the idea of 36 J. Paul Hunter, ‘Clocks, Calendars, and Names: The Troubles of Tristram and the Aesthetics of Uncertainty’, in Rhetorics of Order/Ordering Rhetorics in English Neoclassical Literature, eds J. Douglas Canfield and J. Paul Hunter (London: Associated University Presses, 1989), pp. 173–98 (p. 178). 37 Slop’s name seems wilfully and comically vulgar; however, it is worth bearing in mind that the real-life leading obstetricians in mid eighteenth-century Britain and France were named Dr Leake, Dr Smellie and Dr La Touche.

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paternal imagination, as Walter believes he can continue to exert paternal influence after conception. Walter’s preference for a man-midwife is not particularly unusual for the period – a male practitioner attended Sterne’s own pregnant wife as a matter of course.38 By the mid eighteenth century male midwives were successfully overcoming their negative reputation as butchers, frauds or seducers thanks to leading man-midwifery figures such as the Scotsman William Smellie. The work and influence of Smellie during the 1740s and 1750s significantly transformed the perception of male practitioners, as he taught hundreds of students and compiled an extensive midwifery guide, A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Midwifery (1751). Lisa Forman Cody claims that William Smellie exemplified the cross-gender qualities that gave man-midwives an edge over their female competitors.39 Smellie presented himself as sensitive to female delicacy, yet also strong and rational in his distinctively male knowledge of female bodies. Nevertheless, Walter’s decision to hire Dr Slop fails to take into account some of the lingering concerns surrounding man-midwifery. To begin with, Dr Slop is clearly no William Smellie. Slop demonstrates a worrying degree of forgetfulness, ineptitude and roughness, while displaying none of the cross-gender qualities that Forman Cody suggests raised Smellie to prominence.40 Moreover, as John Tosh has argued, the introduction of a man-midwife into the house effectively usurped the father as the male organiser of childbirth. Tosh states that in the early modern period the mother was rigidly secluded and ‘the father was the central figure in the social drama of childbirth, celebrating with family and friends, arranging the baptism and hiring a wet-nurse’.41 However, by the middle of the eighteenth century the mother and her fashionable man-midwife were centre-stage. Contemporary critics of man-midwifery recognised this displacement and appealed to fathers to reinstate their rights. For example, Phillip Thicknesse’s pamphlet Man-midwifery Analysed (1764) argued that French morals had corrupted Britons into believing that man-midwifery was acceptable. Attacking prominent figures such as Smellie, Thicknesse claimed that employing a man to attend a woman’s matter was offensive and indecent. Man-midwifery Analysed took the 38 See Campbell Ross, Sterne: A Life. 39 See Cody, Birthing the Nation. 40 Cash, in ‘The Birth of Tristram Shandy’, argues that Slop can be identified with John Burton, a less successful rival of Smellie’s. 41 John Tosh, A Man’s Place (1999; London: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 81.

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form of ‘a letter addressed to all men in general and to all married men in particular’.42 Thicknesse admonished the men of Britain and called for them to banish any thoughts of hiring a man as a midwife, arguing that man-midwives would seduce and pervert vulnerable women. By this token, Walter’s method of managing the birth brings into the house the very figure that will be most likely to eclipse the father’s influence over the baby’s entrance into the world. An important consequence of Slop’s involvement is the crushing of Tristram’s nose. Walter believes that a good nose is of paramount importance to an individual, and after the disappointing incident of the conception he is particularly desirous for his son to possess a good nose. With visions of strong, large noses for his child, Walter spends many anxious hours determining the safest method for delivering a child without crushing its head. Yet this careful planning leads only to catastrophe, when his misplaced faith in Dr Slop leads to the breaking of his newborn son’s nose. The bawdy overtones of Tristram’s squeezed infant nose are emphasised when Tristram insists that ‘by the word Nose, throughout all this long chapter of noses, and in every other part of my work, where the word Nose occurs, – I declare, by that word I mean a Nose, and nothing more, or less’ (III:197). Of course this statement, as Tristram is well aware, merely has the effect of associating the word ‘nose’ with the phallus. Additionally, the continual substitution of nose for penis in Tristram Shandy alludes to traditionally paired birthmarks on both body parts. Steve Connor stresses that oracle books, which were used to decipher birthmarks, consistently paired any moles located on the genitals and nose.43 Nose–penis jokes are therefore obliquely connected with birthmarks, which were often associated with instances of maternal or paternal imagination.44 As Tristram’s damaged nose is 42 Philip Thicknesse, Man-midwifery Analysed: and the Tendency of that Practice Detected and Exposed (London: R. Davis, and T. Caslon, 1763), pp. 1 and p. 21. Later John Blunt’s Man Midwifery Dissected (1793) was addressed to Alexander Hamilton but also continually appealed to husbands not to employ man midwives. 43 Steven Connor, The Book of Skin (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), p. 98. 44 Aphra Behn’s The Dumb Virgin (1700) is a story of children marked by their mother’s imagination and the character Dangerfield has a bloody dagger birthmark. In Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742), Joseph is identified by the strawberry birthmark on his breast, caused by his mother’s longing for the fruit. Jenny Jenkins, in The History of Charlotte Summers, The Fortunate Parish Girl (anonymously authored, but which is sometimes attributed to Sarah Fielding, 1753) has the same birthmark. Later in Charlotte Lennox’s Euphemia (1790), the

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an indirect result of Walter’s belief that his imagination failed during Tristram’s conception, the nose–penis connection is further enhanced. Even in the midst of his discourse upon noses, Walter remains defiantly oblivious of any lewd connotations. Moreover, he seems unaware that his choice of a man-midwife, in distinct opposition to his wife’s preference for the local female midwife, has other, more unsavoury, connotations. Despite the efforts of respectable practitioners such as Smellie and his contemporaries, man-midwifery was still tinged with more than a whiff of scandal. Printed accounts of the profession continued to emphasise cuckolded husbands and prurient man-midwives, providing opportunities for sexual jokes and innuendo. Real-life cases of women seduced by their man-midwives became notorious; Henry Bracken was a Lancaster man-midwife who was found guilty in a fornication case in 1734, when he was accused of seducing his patient. Similarly, The Man midwife Unmasqu’ d (1737) satirised the real case of Dr Morley, who had seduced one Mrs Biker.45 Elizabeth Nihell famously attacked the immodesty of Smellie and man-midwives generally in A Treatise on the Art of Midwifery (1760). She was horrified at the impropriety of a man-midwife examining a pregnant woman and questioned, ‘will the husband be present? What must be the wife’s confusion during so nauseous and so gross a scene?’46 An anonymous pamphlet stridently entitled The Danger and Immodesty of the Present Too General Custom of Unnecessarily Employing Man-Midwives (1762) claimed that husbands had become too complacent. The author observed that ‘young men of fashion’ married without love and therefore sought their sexual gratification outside the home. He further argued that husbands actually relied upon the titillating arts of the man-midwife to render women susceptible to extra-marital affairs.47 These men ‘would of course readily risk their wives’ purity being contaminated, rather than be character Edward is prenatally marked with the image of a bow and arrow due to his mother’s fright of Native Americans carrying those weapons. 45 See Jean Donnison, Midwives and Medical Men: A History of the Struggle for the Control of Childbirth (New Barnet: Historical Publications, 1988). Mrs Biker died in a mad house shortly afterwards and the husband was awarded £1,000 in damages. Surprisingly, both Bracken and Morley continued their practice after the accusations with a reasonable degree of success. 46 Elizabeth Nihell, A Treatise on the Art of Midwifery (London: A. Morley, 1760), p. 232. 47 Anon., The Danger and Immodesty of the Present Too General Custom of Unnecessarily Employing Menmidwives (London: J. Wilkie; J. Almon; F.  Blyth; and G. Woodfall, 1772), p. 3.

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disappointed in the pleasure of seducing the wives of their acquaintance, through the preparatory assistance of the Men-midwives’.48 It is therefore notable that there is little mention of man-midwife–patient seduction or titillation in Tristram Shandy, especially considering Sterne’s propensity to the bawdy. In fact, only two muted references to the seductive man-midwife occur: when Toby remarks that ‘my sister, I dare say, does not care to let a man come so near her ****’; and when Dr Slop himself puns on the cuckold meaning of Walter’s discourse on ‘horn-works’ (I:89; II:98). Walter’s unease and annoyance during these two references displays an unwillingness to be reminded of the sexual connotations of the man-midwife. Certainly Dr Slop is portrayed as a bumbling grotesque rather than a charismatic gallant, although presumably this would only increase Elizabeth’s distress if he really were to attempt an attack upon her virtue. Walter’s desperation to repair his faulty paternal imagination by hiring a man-midwife places his wife in moral, as well as physical, peril. It seems likely that an eighteenth-century reader would be alert to Walter’s lack of concern for his wife’s exposure to this danger. His blindness to the risks of his actions highlights the fact that Walter has become obsessed with the idea of rectifying the disturbed moment of conception. Another astonishing example of unconcern for Elizabeth is apparent in the caesarean section episode. Although the employment of a man-midwife was reasonably commonplace for the middling sort in the later eighteenth century, elective surgery was certainly not. Yet Walter wishes Elizabeth to give birth by caesarean section so that the baby’s head is not crushed by her exertions. He explains to Toby: All the children which have been, may, can, shall, will or ought to be begotten, come with their heads foremost into the world: – but believe me, dear Toby, the accidents which unavoidably way-lay them, not only in the article of our begetting ‘em – though these in my opinion, are well worth considering, – but the dangers and difficulties our children are beset with, after they are got forth into the world, are enow, – little need is there to expose them to unnecessary ones in their passage to it. (III:147; italics added)

This statement explicitly links Walter’s extreme interest in Elizabeth’s prenatal and birth arrangements to his botched paternal imagination. His speech conveys regret for the unfortunate moment of paternal imagination during conception when he refers to ‘accidents … not 48 Anon., Danger and Immodesty, p. 4.

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only in the article of begetting’. Eager to positively influence the foetus subsequent to its allegedly disastrous initial formation, Walter applies his mind to forming a solution. When he decides upon the method of caesarean section he makes the procedure sound quite routine; however, caesarean sections were undertaken only in the direst of circumstances and usually resulted in the death of the mother. Although he seems oblivious to the ‘dangers and difficulties’ for the mother in this procedure, Elizabeth is horrified by Walter’s proposal. Walter’s reasoning prioritises the baby’s ‘passage’ to the point where he appears happy to have his wife unnecessarily cut open merely to avoid a minor and very unlikely mishap. This betrays Walter’s loftily abstract and theoretical approach to the birth, without consideration for his wife’s well-being. Such an extreme measure shows not only Walter’s anxiety for the integrity of the child’s body during birth but also his lack of understanding regarding the real exigencies of labour. Unable to persuade Elizabeth to undergo an elective caesarean section, Walter consoles himself with the thought of naming his son ‘Trismegistus’. Predictably, the christening does not quite go according to plan, and the child is named ‘Tristram’, a name that Walter particularly abhors. As Walter believes ‘that there was a strange kind of magick [sic] bias, which good or bad names, as he called them, irresistibly impress’d upon our characters and conduct’ (I:47), Tristram’s misnaming is a further serious blight upon his son’s life. The specific charge that names ‘impress’d upon our character and conduct’ is closely linked to Walter’s belief in the concept of paternal imagination, whereby the father retains an almost mystical power to alter his offspring. Such language signals that Walter views the naming of his child as a potential remedy for his poor conception and also links to the idea of male inheritance. When Tristram is accidentally baptised with the wrong name, Walter views this as utterly catastrophic, as ‘he had the lowest and most contemptible opinion of it of anything in the world, – thinking it could produce nothing in rerum naturâ, but what was extreamly mean and pitiful’ (I:50). Tristram repeats this information and asks, ‘will not the gentle reader pity my father from his soul?’ (I:51). This rather insidious question highlights Walter’s folly and shows the way that Tristram has been negatively affected by his father’s premature disappointment. As with so many elements related to Walter’s hobby-horse, Tristram is not actually affected by the name ‘Tristram’, but by his father’s belief that the name is unlucky. Finally, the incident of Tristram’s unintended circumcision is also obliquely connected to Walter’s peculiar notions regarding paternal 214

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imagination. In Chapter 16 of Volume 5 Tristram describes Walter’s wish to collect his ‘scattered thoughts, counsels and notions’ (V:336) in the form of a personalised education treatise for his son: the Tristrapoedia. This use of the word ‘scattered’ refers back to Tristram’s earlier complaint that his animal spirits ‘were all dispersed, confused, confounded, scattered, and sent to the devil’ (IV:266–7, my emphasis) during his conception. Tristram makes a further link to ideas of paternal imagination when he observes that his father ‘had lost, by his own computation, full three fourths of me – that is my geniture, nose and name, – there was but this one [education] left’ (V:336). While Walter is laboriously writing the Tristra-poedia, however, the five-year-old Tristram is supervised rather carelessly by the housemaid Susannah. In Walter’s absence, Susannah allows Tristram to urinate out of a window with an inadequately fastened sash, which results in Tristram’s accidental circumcision. Walter’s preoccupation with righting the wrongs of his paternal imagination is therefore once again behind a principal misfortune of his son’s life. The five central episodes of Tristram’s life are thus firmly connected by Walter’s understanding of paternal imagination. Walter’s unwise meddling is plainly rooted in the conviction that his paternal imagination has affected the foetus detrimentally. Ironically Tristram’s mind and body are far from improved by Walter’s interventions, as he is alternately man-handled, misnamed, accidentally circumcised and neglected. According to the advice published by man-midwives such as William Smellie, Tristram could also have been harmed by the maternal fright and anxiety caused by Dr Slop and the threat of a caesarean.49 In this way Sterne emphasises Walter’s folly with the implication that Walter’s erroneous beliefs have left more permanent marks upon Tristram than any model of parental imagination.

49 Smellie believed that anxiety, misfortune and disappointment ‘frequently reduce women in labour, to the verge of death’, which would could render the foetus sickly or stillborn; see A Collection of Cases and Observations in Midwifery, 2nd edition, vol. 2 (London: D. Wilson and T. Durham, 1768), p. 301. Other influential man-midwives, such as Fielding Ould and Benjamin Pugh, suggested that ‘the passions of the mind’ could induce a miscarriage; see Ould, A Treatise of Midwifery In Three Parts (Dublin: Oli Nelson and Charles Connor, 1742), p. 73; and Pugh, A Treatise of Midwifery, Chiefly with Regard to the Operation (London: J. Buckland, 1754), p. 10.

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Tristram Shandy’s Inheritance Tristram Shandy is therefore structured around a disorderly collection of ideas concerning paternal imagination. The novel presents paternal imagination as harmful rather than beneficial, and extends paternal influence far beyond the point of conception. These curiously jumbled elements all direct attention to the implications of Walter’s inadequate fulfilment of his paternal role. Sterne’s novel clearly engages with concerns of family inheritance and male failure, and J. Paul Hunter has suggested that this preoccupation indicates that Walter is not Tristram’s father.50 However, whether or not Walter and Tristram are biologically related, Sterne directs attention to Walter’s frequent lapses of paternal responsibility. John Tosh has observed that, by the nineteenth century, fatherhood was an essential component of hegemonic masculinity; fathers were required to spend time at home in order to provide a strong male role model for sons who might otherwise become feminised from too much contact with female family members.51 This scenario is increasingly being perceived as pertinent to the eighteenth century as well. Over the last two decades, arguments challenging the theory of separate spheres have recognised that women were not solely confined to the home and men were deeply invested in the domestic sphere as marital partners and nursing fathers.52 50 Hunter suggests that Toby or Yorick might be Tristram’s father, but concludes that the novel teasingly raises the issue without resolution; see ‘Clocks, Calendars, and Names’. 51 John Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2005), p. 70. 52 For the argument that women were active in the public sphere see Amanda Vickery’s important article ‘Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History’, The Historical Journal, 36.2 (1993), pp. 183–414; Charlotte F. Otten, English Women’s Voices (Miami, FL: Florida International University Press, 1992) shows women in the public sphere via print; Lawrence E. Klein, in ‘Gender and the Public/Private Distinction in the Eighteenth Century: Some Questions about Evidence and Analytic Procedure’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 29.1 (1996), pp. 97–109, questions the need for such binary oppositions inherent in the ‘domestic thesis’; in an argument relevant to my concerns of reproduction in this essay see Lisa Forman Cody, who has described how man-midwives brought female reproduction into public discourse in ‘The Politics of Reproduction: From Midwives’ Alternative Public Sphere to the Public Spectacle of Man-Midwifery’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 32.4 (1999), pp. 477–95. Regarding men in the private sphere, Shawn Lisa Maurer provides a clear outline of the fallacy of ‘separates spheres’ and emphasises the interaction

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Karen Harvey’s The Little Republic: Masculinity and Domestic Authority in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2012) demonstrates the way that a prevalent discourse of oeconomy enforced the idea that men should be involved in domestic matters and how their household authority was in fact an integral feature of their masculinity by examining the evidence of commonplace books, letters and autobiographical narratives written by eighteenth-century men. Her research clearly indicates that males were not expected to eschew the domestic sphere. As Tosh states succinctly, ‘the point is that men operated at will in both spheres; that was their privilege’.53 Advice literature emphasised the role of the father in a child’s life as a kindly, but authoritative, guardian and teacher. Many sources instructed fathers to take a greater interest in domestic life; in 1762 William Buchan’s popular health guide Domestic Medicine maintained that men and women should be equally involved with their offspring. He explained that ‘the mother is not the only person concerned in the management of children. The father has an equal interest in their welfare, and ought to assist in everything that respects either the improvement of the body or mind.’54 The idealisation of the loving father can even be traced in portraiture of the period; Kate Retford explains that compositionally the father ‘was increasingly pictured as absorbed and engrossed in the between public and domestic spheres in Proposing Men: Dialectics of Gender and Class in the Eighteenth-Century Periodical (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); in a revised edition of their seminal study Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850 (1987; London: Routledge, 2002), Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall claim that ‘public was not really public and private was not really private despite the potent imagery of “separate spheres”’ (p. xvi); Matthew McCormack has discussed male domesticity in regard to politics in The Independent Man: Citizenship and Gender Politics in Georgian England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), pp. 12–30. See also Karen Harvey, The Little Republic: Masculinity and Domestic Authority in EighteenthCentury Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), which includes a useful summary of separate spheres debate and its relation to men in the domestic space. 53 John Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities, p. 71. 54 William Buchan, Domestic Medicine; Or a Treatise on the Prevention and Cure of Diseases by Regimen and Simple Medicines, second edition (London: W. Stahan, T. Cadell, 1762), pp. 5–6. Other medical men agreed – Alexander Monro, Professor of Anatomy at Edinburgh University, also believed in the strong paternal role, although he differentiated between the sexes, forming educational societies for his sons and publishing An Essay on Female Conduct (c.1760) for his daughter. See P. A. G. Monro, ‘Introduction’, in The Professor’s Daughter: An Essay on Female Conduct, Alexander Monro (Glasgow: Bell and Bain, 1996).

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well-being of his dependents’.55 The father was literally more central in the picture, rather than depicted as separate to the women and children of the household. Jean Jacques Rousseau also proselytised the benefits of domestic life in Emile, Or On Education (1762). He suggested that the father should be profoundly involved with his children and scolded men who claimed that business and the public sphere monopolised their time.56 He argued that men had a moral obligation to provide decent citizens for the state, and that these well-principled citizens had to be engendered, fed and instructed by fathers, as well as cared for by mothers. Using a sentimental tone, he claimed that domesticity was its own reward; ‘when the family is lively and animated, the domestic cares constitute the dearest occupation of the wife and the sweetest enjoyment of the husband’.57 Within this culture of idealised paternal involvement, the continual emphasis upon Walter’s inept parenting is striking. The episodes revealing Walter’s disastrous paternal efforts are of course designed to amuse; however, this comic emphasis on his ineptitude also works to reinforce the new sentimental, domestic ideal of masculinity. Walter’s paternal incompetence therefore spotlights genuine fears and anxieties concerning the mental and physical standards of paternity and domestic manliness. One cannot avoid Sterne’s suggestion that Walter’s paternal failure is also a failure of manhood, which is repeatedly highlighted by the strangely negative, ongoing version of paternal imagination that structures the narrative. This failure of manhood is one of the many issues concerning the male mind and body that was so carefully avoided by commentators of the maternal imagination debate. After all, if a woman’s imagination was not to blame for imperfect children, then perhaps responsibility lay with the imagination of the father. In an era that so thoroughly investigated the role of the mother and her dangerous imagination, Sterne approaches the subject from the opposite direction to fill in the gaps of the debate. His unique representation 55 Kate Retford, The Art of Domestic Life: Family Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 115. 56 Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile, Or On Education (1762; London: Penguin, 1979), pp. 48–49. 57 Rousseau, Emile, p. 46. Conduct writers also encouraged men to become more involved in paternal activities; see especially James Fordyce, Addresses to Young Men, 2 vols (London: T. Cadell, 1777) and Thomas Gisborne, An Enquiry into the Duties of men in the Higher and Middle Classes of Society in Great Britain, The Second Edition Corrected, 2 vols (1794; London: B. and J. White, 1795).

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of ideas concerning paternal imagination examines the notion of male responsibility by deliberately reversing the few, semi-established ‘facts’ of the concept. These reversals enable a confrontation with the assumption that a man’s imagination was always a positive force and that it was restricted to the moment of conception, and the supposition that male imagination was not responsible for deformities or anomalies. Using the general notion of paternal imagination as a conceptual and structural scaffold, Sterne questions the imaginative, sexual and physical roles of the male in reproduction in order to challenge parental roles and to explore the true extent and obligations of paternal influence. Walter’s eccentric view of the workings of paternal imagination raises questions regarding the nature and power of imagination; when was it active, whom did it affect and was it a positive or negative force? Physicians, scientists and literary writers of the Romantic era would soon take up these questions and make imagination the subject of intense scrutiny.58 In fact, Walter’s own deluded imagination arguably prefigures late eighteenth-century theories of an extreme or diseased imagination that could create physiological effects. With a witty sleight of hand, Sterne intimates that Tristram’s nose, self-esteem and penis are permanently crippled not because of a paternal mind-set during conception but because of the actions inspired by his father’s inherently overactive imagination. Throughout Tristram Shandy Sterne seems to expect, and play with, the typical reader’s incomplete knowledge or semi-awareness of assertions and beliefs regarding paternal imagination. He relies upon medical discourse to exacerbate Walter’s foolishness, to develop sympathy for Tristram, to provide a key to the novel’s structure and to query assumptions regarding the male body and imagination. Tristram Shandy is organised around the would-be theory of paternal imagination with pointed significance, as Sterne suggests that lives, narratives and even Imaginationist theories are built upon individual perception rather than linear accounts. Tristram has somewhat ironically ‘inherited’ his father’s perception that the initial instant of paternal imagination during conception has ruined his life, and manages his narrative according to this opinion. Although Sterne implies that it is Walter’s obstinacy, rather 58 Among others, Richard C. Sha has written extensively on this subject; see ‘Introduction’, in A Handbook of Romanticism Studies, eds Joel Faflak and Julia M. Wright (London: Blackwell, 2012), pp. 19–33; and ‘Towards a Physiology of the Romantic Imagination’, Configurations, 17.3 (2009), pp. 197–226.

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than his distracted ejaculation, that injures his son, it is still the idea of paternal imagination that ultimately shapes the body, life and opinions of both Tristram Shandy and Tristram Shandy.

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Southern Gothic and the Queer Male Body Thomas Lawrence Long Southern Gothic and the Queer Male Body In his social-science study of gay and lesbian adolescence in the American South, education researcher James T. Sears transcribed one of his research informants, a young man identified as ‘Vince’, who had previously come out as gay to his father: My dad is very religious. He claims to have visions. At the same time he has a girlfriend that he sleeps with three times a week. He likes [television evangelist] Jimmy Swaggart but he also takes a shine to Jim Beam [an American whiskey]. At the house, he told me that he really believed that I didn’t have any choice in what I had become. ‘Your orientation’, he said, ‘is the result of some form of demonic possession’. … He took me back to when I was three years old and I let out that yell to [the 1950s rock-and-roll song] Jailhouse Rock. He asked, ‘Why were you so afraid of that song?’ … He told me that was a real significant point in my life. He thought the demon entered my soul through the grooves of that Elvis Presley record.1

In the Elvis-haunted and religion-drenched South, old queens, mid-life gay men and younger postmodern queers are not surprised when the violence of life imitates that of literary art. Rejecting a medicalising explanation of homosexuality (either psychodynamic or genetic), the father imagines that a demon has taken possession of his son’s body. In a culture simultaneously tolerant of queerness-as-eccentricity but hostile toward manifestations of ‘ontological’ difference from a White heterosexual norm (race, ethnicity or sexual orientation, for example), 1 James T. Sears, Growing Up Gay in the South: Race, Gender, and Journeys of the Spirit (New York: Harrington, 1991), p. 38.

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queer men’s survival has depended, on the one hand, on the cunning negotiation of sanctioned social constructions – such as the camp ‘moonlight and magnolias’ view of an idealised aristocratic South or Rebel-flag neo-Confederate Southern nationalism – and, on the other, on proscribed performances (such as sodomy). This contradiction places queer men in a liminal state in which their bodies are objects of both juridical and medical inspection, interpretation and control. Furthermore, from the middle of the twentieth century this subject position has become increasingly significant in the Southern cultural imagination since the ‘shadow of the Negro’ in the South has blended into the scenery to some degree with the end of anti-miscegenation laws, the passage of civil rights legislation, the end of de jure segregation and the growth of a Black middle class. As Leslie Fiedler famously observed in the late 1940s, ‘the fact of homosexual passion contradicts a national myth of masculine love, just as our relationship with the Negro contradicts a myth of that relationship; and those two myths with their betrayals are, as we shall see, one’.2 Like the dark-skinned body, queer men’s bodies are now the signifiers of the dangerous Other and tokens of Southern fear and trembling. Thus, for Southern writers, the inscribing of homosexual desire becomes acutely problematic because of its pre-existing literary genealogy in Southern gothic narratives. What I wish to trace here are two vectors of inquiry: first, the signifier of the queer male body as a permutation of Southern gothicism (a permutation of American gothic fiction, which is itself a permutation of the European gothic); and, second, the very pliability of the genre suggested by this genealogy, as ‘genetically’ susceptible to homophobic discourse and violence while attempting to liberate itself from the same, particularly with ‘post-AIDS’ writing in the 1980s and 1990s. In both England and North America gothic narratives emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century, coinciding with the late Enlightenment consolidation of the medical profession and its expectation of university education for physicians. Preoccupied with both mental and physical pathology, gothic fiction provided a shadow version of Enlightenment medicine by representing a mind–body connection that transcended Cartesian dualism and mechanism. At a time when humoral 2 Leslie Fiedler, ‘Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey’, Partisan Review, 15 (1948), pp. 664–71; reprinted in Huck Finn Among the Critics: A Centennial Selection, ed. M. Thomas Inge (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1985), pp. 93–101 (p. 94).

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theory had lost its grip but ‘heroic’ interventions still persisted in medical practice, gothic fiction offered alternative etiologies and exorcisms. Even in the medical narratives of late Victorian England, Anthony Mandal and Keir Waddington find gothic registers, a reflection of popular anxieties about medicine and its practitioners.3 Likewise, the phrase ‘queer gothic’ may be tautological, for Gothic has, in a sense, always been ‘queer’, as William Hughes and Andrew Smith have argued.4 Diane Mason finds medical registers in late Victorian gothic fiction such as Teleny, or The Reverse of the Medal (1893), whose first edition was subtitled, ‘A Physiological Romance of To-day’.5 Anonymously authored (though often attributed to Oscar Wilde) and set in fin de siècle Paris, Teleny is ‘a medical as well as an erotic work [that] problematizes the pathology … of the homosexual or invert’,6 not unlike Wilde’s more famous The Picture of Dorian Gray of 1890, in which the symptoms of depravity appear not on Dorian’s ageless body but on artist Basil Hallward’s portrait of him.7 Moreover, William Hughes observes that, while literary criticism of gothic fiction has tended to privilege an explanatory framework grounded in psychoanalysis, medical physiology is at least equal if not preeminent in significance, offering compelling explanations of ‘the now-perceptible presence of mental and physical disabilities, the origin of which could likewise be traced to the participation of an ancestor in such transparently deviant practices as masturbation, homosexuality, polyandry, and incest’.8 Gothic fiction thus mirrors queer desires and their medical effects on the male body.9 3 Anthony Mandal and Keir Waddington, ‘The Pathology of Common Life: “Domestic” Medicine as Gothic Disruption’, Gothic Studies, 17.1 (2015), pp. 43–60. 4 William Hughes and Andrew Smith, ‘Queering the Gothic’, in Queering the Gothic, eds William Hughes and Andrew Smith (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), pp. 1–10. 5 Teleny, or The Reverse of the Medal: A Physiological Romance of To-day (London: Cosmopoli, 1893). 6 Diane Mason, ‘“That mighty love which maddens one to crime”: Medicine, Masculinity, Same-sex Desire and the Gothic in Teleny’, in Queering the Gothic, eds William Hughes and Andrew Smith (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), pp. 73–88 (p. 73). 7 Oscar Wilde, ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’, Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine (July 1890), pp. 1–100. 8 William Hughes, ‘Victorian Medicine and the Gothic’, in The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, eds Andrew Smith and William Hughes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), pp. 186–201 (p. 186). 9 For two relevant book-length studies, see Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, Wilkie

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Gothic narratives have also pervaded American culture since the Early Republic in the 1790s and persist in its literature and popular culture even today. In his study of American gothicism, Leslie Fiedler asserted that: [T]he American novel is pre-eminently a novel of terror. … However shoddily or ironically treated, horror is essential to our literature. … Through these gothic images are projected certain obsessive concerns of our national life: the ambiguity of our relationship with Indian and Negro, the ambiguity of our encounter with nature, the guilt of the revolutionist who feels himself a parricide-and, not least of all, the uneasiness of the writer who cannot help believing that the very act of composing a book is Satanic revolt. … It is the gothic form that has been most fruitful in the hands of our best writers.10

According to Fiedler, the American protagonist seeks an ‘innocent homosexuality’ in friendships with male buddies or chums on the road. However, since no homosexuality is ‘innocent’ in post-Freudian America, Fiedler is being disingenuous here. He is probably referring to what Eve Sedgwick would later call ‘homosocial desire’ filtered through Fiedler’s own heterosexist (and even homophobic) Freudian reading of homosexual desire as an emotional calcification of the latency period. Here is Fiedler’s take on the damned mob of scribbling Southern women (including Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor): ‘But it was not until the female intermediaries had begun the grafting of Jamesian sensibility onto the Southern gothic stem, that the true Magnolia Blossom or Southern homosexual style could be produced: pseudo-magical, pseudo-religious, pseudo-gothic.’11 In its more benign form, homosexuals are inscribed as childlike emotional dwarves, while homosexuality-as-child-molesting is its malignant representation. For my purposes, what is interesting about Fiedler’s reading of American fiction is his suggestion that whether it is homosocial or homosexual desire, desire is desire (is obsession is anxiety is panic is paranoia). The narrative that gets told about this poor fellow (whether he is the somnambulist Edgar Huntly in Charles Brockden Brown’s 1799 novel of the same name12 or the abused orphan Huck Finn Collins, Medicine and the Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009); and George Haggerty, Queer Gothic (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006). 10 Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, rev. ed. (New York: Doubleday, 1992), pp. 26–28. 11 Fiedler, Love and Death, p. 476. 12 Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (Philadelphia, PA: Maxwell, 1799).

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fleeing from ‘sivilization’ in Mark Twain’s 1884 classic) takes the literary form of the gothic.13 But American gothic fictions trace themselves to European narratives of obsession, terror and panic. The gothic in England had been flourishing for a decade before the American writer Charles Brockden Brown published his first fictions in the Early Republic. Gothic novels were ‘the first experimental attempts to write a new kind of fiction which dealt primarily with emotional and imaginative awareness, something that had been regarded as the domain of poetry and drama, not of the novel’.14 Gothic fiction was ‘a literature full of curiosity, doubt and anxiety, and at this distance in time we can see working through it the same subversive forces that produced the French Revolution, the Marquis de Sade and the Romantic poets’.15 In particular among its anxieties, ‘the dread of sex runs right through Gothic fiction and is basic to many of its conventions of anxiety and terror. They are full of unresolved conflicts and repressions.’16 Initially the chief trope of this bodily anxiety was incest, an almost universal gothic taboo that was later reinscribed in Southern gothic writing, initially as incest anxiety but then as miscegenation paranoia and finally as homosexual panic – an undercurrent already in the English gothic. The late Eve Sedgwick, in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, saw the ‘Gothic novel as an important locus for the working-out of some of the terms by which nineteenth and twentieth-century European culture has used homophobia to divide and manipulate the male-homosocial spectrum’.17 Her point was not that the authors or the cultural effects of these novels were necessarily homophobic, but that what is at work in the development of the English gothic is a ‘tradition of homophobic thematics’.18 Male homophobia19 is 13 Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (New York: Charles Webster, 1885). 14 Coral Ann Howells, Love, Mystery, and Misery: Feeling in Gothic Fiction (London: Athlone, 1978), p. 1. 15 Howells, Love, Mystery, and Misery, p. 6. 16 Howells, Love, Mystery, and Misery, p. 13. 17 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 90. 18 Sedgwick, Between Men, pp. 91–92. 19 The term ‘homophobia’ is itself an attempt to provide a medical diagnosis for a visceral response. The Oxford English Dictionary attests to the term’s use in the early twentieth century, but meaning a fear of men or of humankind. Only in the late 1960s and early 1970s did the term come to mean a pathological fear of homosexuality and homosexual people. See George Weinberg, Society and the Healthy Homosexual (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press Doubleday & Co,

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a wickedly efficient self-policing regime that circumscribes male bodies and their relationships because they are the sites of power and therefore the objects of prohibition and control: ‘That is to say, the fact that it is about what we would today call “homosexual panic” means that the paranoid Gothic is specifically not about homosexuals or the homosexual; instead, heterosexuality is by definition its subject.’20 Her deliberately anachronistic ‘homosexual panic’ refers, of course, to the sometimes successful forensic tactic employed by criminal lawyers defending men on trial for the bodily assault or murder of gay men of claiming that the victim’s purported sexual overtures produced a temporary insanity in the perpetrator. This pseudo-medical defence projects onto the queer male body an existential danger that evokes the assailant’s pathology and allegedly proportionate response. The American gothic reinscribed these anxieties according to the distinctive political, religious, cultural and geographic conditions of the New Republic. Although we often associate Southern gothic with writing that emerged in the mid twentieth century, its tropes have an even older pedigree. By the early nineteenth century literary conventions already described the South as a decaying region with a noble past. In the travel narrative Letters from the South (1817), for instance, there are references to ‘Ould Virginia’, witch-burning, plantation houses in decay and a Southern plantation aristocracy in decline.21 In another example, a novel set in late seventeenth-century Maryland, John Pendleton Kennedy’s Rob of the Bowl (1838) features a haunted chapel against the backdrop of Roman Catholic and Anglican political conflict.22 Likewise, in early Southern gothic fiction the bodies of African-American slaves and Native Americans became screens onto which writers and readers projected their racial guilt and sexual anxiety. In William A. Caruthers’s historical novel based on Nathaniel Bacon’s 1676 rebellion, Cavaliers of Virginia (1835), Indians are represented as a vanishing nation both dangerous and admirable.23 Rebellion – whether military or political, 1972), published one year before the American Psychiatric Association officially depathologised homosexuality. 20 Sedgwick, Between Men, p. 116. 21 Letters from the South, Written during an Excursion in the Summer of 1816, by the Author of John Bull and Brother Jonathan, 2 vols (New York: Eastburn, 1817). 22 John Pendleton Kennedy, Rob of the Bowl; A Legend of St. Inigoes (New York: Burt, 1838). 23 William A. Caruthers, Cavaliers of Virginia; or The Recluse of Jamestown. An Historical Romance of the Old Dominion (New York: Harper, 1835).

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Baconian and Cromwellian, as in Cavaliers of Virginia, or familial and social, as in Joseph Holt Ingraham’s Lafitte; or The Pirate of the Gulf (1836) – figures prominently in some early Southern gothic fiction and may be read to prefigure the Southern secession of 1861 at the onset of the American Civil War.24 Even Southern writer Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, of Nantucket (1838),25 with its ostensible embarkation from New England and journey to Antarctica, can be read as a journey to the American South complete with the first serious attempt to introduce Black bodies (here in the natives of the Island of Tsalal) into American literature.26 Dangerous Black bodies and their subversiveness (in the form of miscegenation) and open rebellion (as in the case of Nat Turner’s 1831 slave uprising) were central anxieties for Southern writing generally and the gothic particularly. Writers of the South managed these anxieties typically by resorting to common social strategies: denigrating Blacks as comic buffoons or demonising them as violent sexual predators. And since, according to Southern race laws, a person was racially Negro who had ‘one drop’ of Negro blood, either the Black seducer who passes as white or the Black rapist can genetically ‘taint’ a subsequent geometrically expanding population of descendants. However, in the course of the twentieth century the cultural anxieties of the South shifted somewhat from the sexually predatory Black male to the sexually ambiguous or sexually predatory homosexual male. The usual mechanisms of alterity – denigrating the fag or demonising the queer – likewise apply here, as well as the irrevocable logic of alterity: if one drop of Black blood makes a person a ‘nigger’, one sodomitical act, even one sensation of homosexual desire or one moment of affection, makes a person a ‘queer’. Two of William Faulkner’s novels exemplify this trajectory: Light in August (1932)27 and Absalom, Absalom! (1936).28 In the first, the Black man Joe Christmas signifies the segregationist’s nightmare: he can pass for 24 Joseph Holt Ingraham, Lafitte; or The Pirate of the Gulf (New York: Harper, 1836). 25 Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket: Comprising the Details of a Mutiny and Atrocious Butchery on Board the American Brig Grampus, on Her Way to the South Seas, in the Month of June, 1827; with an Account of the Recapture of the Vessel by the Survivors; Their Shipwreck and Subsequent Horrible Sufferings from Famine (New York: Harper, 1838). 26 Fiedler, Love and Death, p. 398. 27 William Faulkner, Light in August (New York: Vintage, 1959). William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Modern Library, 1964). 28 Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

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White (or at least foreign Hispanic White), and he finds an accommodating partner in the racially progressive (she has a Yankee background) and lonely Joanna Burden. Part of the novel’s gothic horror is that Joe’s grandfather, Eupheus Hines, has come to Jefferson in hopes of lynching his grandson. More apposite is the character Rev. Gail Hightower, the androgynously named, dishonoured pastor shamed by his wife’s sexual infidelity, alcoholism and suicide and obsessed with his family’s and the South’s past. He becomes a weak and ridiculous figure, something approximating queer, both for his eccentricity and gender ambiguity. Townspeople spread rumours ‘[a]bout how he had made his wife go bad and commit suicide because he was not a natural husband, a natural man, and that the negro woman [his cook] was the reason’.29 After a party of masked men go to Hightower’s house ordering him to fire the negro woman cook they heard how the next day the woman told that she quit herself because her employer asked her to do something which she said was against God and nature. And it was said that some masked men had scared her into quitting because she was what is known as a high brown [i.e., of mixed racial ancestry] and it was known that there were two or three men in the town who would object to her doing whatever it was which she considered contrary to God and nature, since, as some of the younger men said, if a nigger woman considered it against God and nature, it must be pretty bad.30

After the woman stops working for Hightower, the townspeople’s hysteria becomes even more exaggerated: ‘he did his own cooking for a while, until they heard one day that he had a negro man to cook for him. And that finished him, sure enough.’31 Here race obsession crosses over into homosexual panic: Hightower’s infamy begins with the rumour that he is an adulterer, then a sodomite with a woman and finally a sodomite with a man. One rumour of sodomy does a homosexual make. As Hightower is marked at the beginning of the novel, so he is marked toward its conclusion – the ultimate gothic climax in which the lover is castrated, ejaculating blood. When the White terrorist Percy Grimm runs into Hightower’s house looking for the escaped Christmas, the preacher attempts to offer an alibi for the murderer: ‘Men!’ he cried. ‘Listen to me. He was here that night. He was with me 29 Faulkner, Light, p. 65. 30 Faulkner, Light, p. 66. 31 Faulkner, Light, p. 66.

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sou t h e r n g o t h ic a n d t h e qu e e r m a l e body the night of the murder. I swear to God—’ ‘Jesus Christ!’ Grimm cried, his young voice clear and outraged like that of a young priest. ‘Has every preacher and old maid in Jefferson taken their pants down to the yellowbellied son of a bitch?’ He flung the old man aside and ran on.32

In Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner entangled three gothic mechanisms, through which incest, miscegenation and homoeroticism collide in the Sutpen family epic told in flashbacks from different points of view. As Fiedler has observed of these convolutions: This is the final turn of the screw, the ultimate gothic horror which serves both to produce one more shock and to add one more level of symbolic relevance to the action: the man who screams in panic that some black buck is about to rape his sister is speaking of one who is, indeed, his brother, and whom secretly he loves.33

What Fiedler seems to miss, however, is that these three mechanisms are both inextricable and inevitable irruptions from the Thomas Sutpen patriarchy, a now genetically degenerate family, which ends not with a bang but a whimper. I read the novel as a male hysterical torchpassing: Southern patriarchal anxieties shifting from their customary signifiers – family incest and racial miscegenation – to an increasingly overt homoeroticism. Fiedler and other critics have also missed what Don Merrick Liles has exposed as the novel’s twin homoerotic pairs: Henry Sutpen/Charles Bon (its narrative objects) and Quentin/Shreve (its narrative subjects, constructing the story in their Harvard dorm room).34 However, as Fiedler reminds us, the Quentin/Shreve framing narrative has its own gothic finale in Quentin’s suicide the same year that he and Shreve construct the Henry/Bon narrative.35 By the mid twentieth century the ‘new Southern gothic’ appears to have hybridised into its own conventions: Like traditional gothic fiction, new gothic has a strong element of terror, but the terror is usually brought about by internal weakness and character flaws rather than by some external force. New gothic characters are flat and stylized, narcissistic and obsessive, weak and anxiety-ridden. Southern gothic stories frequently include characters who are cripples, homosexuals, freaks, 32 Faulkner, Light, p. 439. 33 Fiedler, Love and Death, p. 413. 34 Don Merrick Liles, ‘William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!: An Exegesis of the Homoerotic Configurations in the Novel’, in Essays on Gay Literature, ed. Stuart Kellogg (New York: Harrington Park, 1985), pp. 99–111. 35 Fiedler, Love and Death, p. 414.

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It was presumably these conventions that Fiedler so disparaged as a queer grafting (‘by female intermediaries’) of the nineteenth-century queer aesthete Henry James onto the Southern gothic stem.37 Fiedler’s sexism and heterosexism aside (were such an apoliticising tactic desirable), he seems to condemn the very conventions that he had described as ‘essential’ in American fiction, because: [t]o denigrate a novel for its gothicism is to level a charge of irrelevance, to imply a perverse neglect of the common walks of life in favour of some abnormal world of ghosts and demons. Yet, in the public mind, homosexuality itself is essentially ‘gothic’ – a question of violated taboos, dark secrets, guilts and fears.38

Even with a cultural shift from moralising about queer desire to pathologising it, gothic narrative tainted its authors. The twentieth-century medicalisation of the queer male body prompted contemporary critics to charge writers such as Carson McCullers, Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams with ‘morbidity’, a pathological imagination. In 1950 Williams responded to this criticism in an essay on McCullers’ work, defending the vision of writers such as McCullers (and himself), which he characterised as possessing ‘a sense, an intuition, of an underlying dreadfulness in modern experience’.39 This dreadfulness, he suggested, could be expressed only in compressed ‘symbols of the grotesque and violent’ by artists adequately sensitive to, and therefore alienated by, modernity. Later Claude Summers reclaimed the work of these writers by including them in the canon of a ‘literature of compassion’,40 and by unapologetically acknowledging the queerness of their fictions: 36 Helen S. Garson, Truman Capote: A Study of the Short Fiction (New York: Twayne, 1992), p. 3. 37 Fiedler, Love and Death, p. 476. 38 Stephen Adams, ‘Gothic Love: Truman Capote, Carson McCullers and James Purdy’, in The Homosexual as Hero in Contemporary Fiction (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1980), pp. 56–82. 39 Tennessee Williams, ‘Introduction’, in Reflections in a Golden Eye, Carson McCullers (New York: Bantam, 1991), pp. vii–xvii (pp. ix–x). 40 Claude J. Summers, Gay Fictions, Wilde to Stonewall: Studies in a Male Homosexual Literary Tradition (New York: Continuum, 1990), p. 133.

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sou t h e r n g o t h ic a n d t h e qu e e r m a l e body Rather than insisting on the ordinariness of gay people [for example, Gore Vidal’s project in the 1948 novel The City and the Pillar], the Southern writers reveled in the extraordinariness of their exotic – often freakish – characters. In the gay fictions of Williams and Capote, a wide range of extreme character types – including sissy boys, mannish women, transvestites, ‘dirty old men’, flamboyant queens, and male hustlers – coexist with other unconventional, obviously or obscurely wounded characters in a gallery of the dispossessed.41

Summers here constructs a binary opposition, ordinary/extraordinary, from which one might subsequently derive legal/illegal, stable/alterable (literally ‘otherable’) and permitted/proscribed. Mainstream gay and lesbian assimilationists since the 1969 New York Stonewall Riots (often identified, mistakenly, as the birth of a modern gay rights movement in the United States), and a subsequent ‘out-of-the-closet’ identity and visibility politics, have tended both to construct such binarisms – predicated on an erotic essentialism – and to resent their construction. Drag queens or transgender people, for example, may be an embarrassment when you are trying to lobby for gay-friendly public accommodations reform, although you may religiously attend a drag show every Sunday evening at the local gay bar’s weekly ‘tea dance’. In response, queer theorists over the last two decades have suggested the universality of queerness and the deconstruction of those binary oppositions. Outrageousness, which defends one by blazoning rather than concealing, has often been a survival strategy, as James T. Sears narrates in the case of Alston, for whom the 1975 camp cult film The Rocky Horror Picture Show was a turning point: Tim Curry changed my life. I went, ‘Wow!’ The costumes, the grandness, the singing, the dancing, the decadence. I was just overpowered. My senses were blown completely apart. I left the theater going, ‘What a movie’. … I went a few more times by myself. Then I got the nerve up and bought a corset and got a costume together. I started going to the theater in costume. It started becoming a ritual. … The movie just caught us and changed us all. It made life so much easier. It didn’t matter anymore. I had something. I had meaning in my life.42

Carson McCullers’ epicene Anacleto, who dabbles in watercolours in her 1941 novel Reflections in a Golden Eye (1991),43 and William Goyen’s character Folner, who leaves Charity, Texas, to become a vaudeville 41 Summers, Gay Fictions, p. 130. 42 Sears, Growing Up Gay, pp. 242–43. 43 Carson McCullers, Reflections in a Golden Eye (New York: Bantam, 1991).

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performer in The House of Breath (1950), demonstrate the cultural relativity of flamboyant cultural production as a survival strategy.44 Camp, in other words, is a way of resisting the values of a dominant culture by adopting and then inverting them. But Summers’ is not the only binarism. The queer Southern gothic has a congenital dualism that emerges not simply from the conflicted American sexual landscape but is carried by the genre itself. Coral Ann Howells remarks on the tension in English gothic fiction: ‘There is a profound unease and fear of anarchy which runs side by side with expressions of frustration at conventional restraints throughout Gothic fiction.’45 While the gothic is frequently lurid and sensational in its representation of sexuality, ‘the dread of sex runs right through Gothic fiction and is basic to many of its conventions of anxiety and terror. They are full of unresolved conflicts and repressions.’46 This conflict derives in part from the divided purposes of gothic writers: Perhaps the real embarrassment to Gothic writers was their sense of their duty as moralists, for as writers of quasi-romance they were caught in the difficult position of trying to satisfy two entirely different demands: on the one hand the claims of orthodox Christian morality and its extension into social propriety, and on the other hand their own imaginative imperatives leading them in the opposite direction into the dynamics of impulse and irrationality.47

Elizabeth R. Napier has suggested that the formal and stylistic disequilibrium of gothic fiction is generic and even sees Enlightenment and Romantic sensibilities fighting over the body of the gothic: Two opposed, and often battling, currents mark the genre: a tendency towards moral and structural stabilizing, characteristic of much previous eighteenth-century fiction, especially marked in early Gothic novels … and a contrary inclination towards fragmentation, instability, and moral ambivalence, which reaches its height at the end of the period . … The Gothic novel remains essentially a genre of imbalance, because its authors finally neither ascribed convincingly to either extreme nor found a middle way between them.48 44 William Goyen, The House of Breath (New York: Random, 1950). 45 Howells, Love, Mystery, and Misery, p. 6. 46 Howells, Love, Mystery, and Misery, p. 13. 47 Howells, Love, Mystery, and Misery, p. 14. 48 Elizabeth R. Napier, The Failure of Gothic: Problems in Disjunction in an Eighteenthcentury Literary Form (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).

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There is not simply a ‘tonal imbalance’ in gothic fiction, but also a ‘generic instability’ in gothic’s ‘reliance upon a mixture of genres (fairy tale, romance, Jacobean drama, and novel of manners)’.49 Fiedler also notes gothic’s bipolar profile when he asserts that ‘the gothic romance is fundamentally anti-bourgeois and can only with difficulty be adapted to the needs of the sentimental middle classes’,50 which is partly responsible for ‘the confusion at the heart of the gothic about its own method and meaning’.51 Queer Southern gothics, particularly pre-Stonewall writing, with its anxiety about public disclosure and its desire for assimilation, are marked by conflicting desires both to blazon and to conceal homosexual desire, to valorise Otherness and to demonise it, to write a queer body and to erase it in homophobic discourse. This tension is particularly acute in some of Truman Capote’s and Tennessee Williams’ early writing. Although Stephen Adams has tried to rescue Capote’s first published novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948)52 from Leslie Fiedler’s critical savaging, Adams admits that ‘the world it creates is animated by characteristics popularly attributed to the homosexual male: freakishness, affectation and effeminacy. The story of a young boy’s discovery of his homosexuality is decked out with all the trappings of gothic melodrama.’53 Capote, for whom ‘the homosexual’s initiation into adult life is more of an act of resignation to a deathly, ghost-ridden existence’, does not compare favourably with McCullers, ‘for whom the failure of love and not its category is the real gothic nightmare’.54 Claude Summers’ verdict on the Capote novel is even more summary: ‘The result is a muddle: the novel’s positive theme of progress toward self-knowledge is contradicted by its subliminal message that homosexuality is a retreat from real life into a ghostly death-in-life existence.’55 Capote’s Joel Knox and Cousin Randolph – both ineffectual pansies – are the denigrated opposite pole to Flannery O’Connor’s child-molesting stranger in the car at the end of her 1960 novel The Violent Bear It Away, a demonised homosexualas-predator.56 Elsewhere, Helen S. Garson has characterised Capote’s 49 Napier, The Failure of Gothic, p. 67. 50 Fiedler, Love and Death, p. 127. 51 Fiedler, Love and Death, p. 141. 52 Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms (New York: Signet, 1976). 53 Adams, ‘Gothic Love’, p. 57. 54 Adams, ‘Gothic Love’, p. 60. 55 Summers, Gay Fictions, p. 132. 56 Flannery O’Connor, The Violent Bear It Away (New York: Farrar, Straus, and

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characters as ‘anxiety-ridden, obsessive, and narcissistic’.57 One difficulty in engaging a homophobic-resistant reading of the early Capote novel is that the blazoned homosexual tries to upstage the other ‘queers’ of the novel, an assemblage of (apparently heterosexual) freaks and grotesques. Neither Cousin Randolph nor Joel Knox can positively distinguish himself as Capote has constructed and contextualised them. In a sense, they aren’t queer enough. Tennessee Williams’ later critics (in marked contrast to his contemporaries) have evaluated his work more favourably in comparison with Capote’s. Claude Summers has called Williams’ gay short fiction ‘more various and more affirmative’ than Capote’s, presenting ‘homosexuality straightforwardly and unapologetically, and always seriously’.58 Summers himself seems apologetic here as well. The characters of Williams’ gay gothics tend to be prototypes of post-Stonewall gay clones, denizens of the San Francisco’s gay Castro district or New York’s Greenwich Village cruising areas, in contrast to Capote’s pansies. Summers implies that Capote’s writing is too queer when compared with Williams’ prefiguring of post-Stonewall 1970s gay liberationism. Moreover, Summers’ assessment of Williams’ writing as ‘unapologetic’ is not entirely accurate. John M. Clum offers a much more nuanced (and less apologetic) reading of both the fiction and plays by advancing the trope of ‘split vision’ through which the playwright defined the internal conflict that compelled him to write of his homosexuality and, in doing so, to rely on the language of indirection and homophobic discourse. It signified a cloudy sense of his own sexual identity, but it enabled him to write clearly. On the other hand, as the sexual self became clearer, and the plays became more autobiographical, the writing became murkier.59

Of course, Williams’ writing was always autobiographical, but his writing became murkier as the autobiographical became less coded and more manifest. The homosexual gothics of Williams – the stories ‘One Arm’, ‘The Angel in the Alcove’ and ‘Desire and the Black Masseur’, all published in 1948, ‘The Mysteries of the Joy Rio’ and ‘Hard Candy’, published Cudahy, 1960). 57 Helen S. Garson, Truman Capote: A Study of the Short Fiction (New York: Twayne, 1992), p. 4. 58 Summers, Gay Fictions, p. 133. 59 John M. Clum, ‘“Something Cloudy, Something Clear”: Homophobic Discourse in Tennessee Williams’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 88.1 (1989), pp. 161–179 (p. 165).

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together in 1954,60 and the 1958 play Suddenly Last Summer – all inscribe homosexual love as disabled and the homosexual male body as doomed.61 In ‘One Arm’ the rent boy Oliver dies in the electric chair for the murder of a john. The spectral lady of ‘Angel in the Alcove’ no longer appears to the writer–narrator after the eviction and death of his one-time lover, an artist. Anthony Burns is beaten to death and consumed by the ‘Black Masseur’. In both ‘The Mysteries of the Joy Rio’ and ‘Hard Candy’ the cruising protagonists die in the decrepit opera house after finding anonymous sexual partners. And Sebastian Venable, in the play Suddenly Last Summer, becomes a sacrificial offering devoured by the boys he has procured. The queer male body is pummelled, shredded and finally consumed in a pagan ritual or Christian liturgy. Williams’ trope linking homosexual desire and cannibalism descends from an ancient genealogy of slanderous figures for the Other that appear both in early anti-Christian Roman discourse and in later anti-heretical Christian polemics. Noting the genealogy of this originally homophobic figure, David Bergman has asserted: Here I wish to explore how the association of cannibalism and homosexuality has developed, and what uses gay writers have made of it in their representations of themselves. … The trope of gay cannibalism never extricates itself from the homophobic sentiments that gave it birth. … If I emphasize here as elsewhere, the extent to which gay writers have defused and transformed the homophobic origins of their language, it is because I find even partial success more interesting and worthy of note than the inevitable partial failures of these strategies.62

Bergman is articulating an important aesthetic position for post-Stonewall readers of pre-Stonewall writing, particularly its gothic manifestations. We are often divided between a political praxis that mandates orthodox ‘gay’ representations (often characterised as ‘political correctness’), on the one hand, and the allure of the spectacular, on the other. Our political desires are met by novelist David Leavitt’s 1980’s button-down urban bourgeois gay couples with 2.5 cats, while our sensational desires are fed by Williams’ homosexual adventurists and queers. The distance between pre-Stonewall writing and post-Stonewall readers (like that between 60 Tennessee Williams, Collected Stories (New York: Ballantine, 1986). 61 Tennessee Williams, Four Plays (New York: Signet, 1976). 62 David Bergman, Gaiety Transfigured: Gay Self-Representation in American Literature (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), p. 141.

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assimilationist ‘gays’ and postmodern ‘queers’), therefore, may be less actual than perceptual: For the gay writer, the trope of homosexual cannibalism becomes a way to work through his desire for communion with other men and his anxiety about the equality such communion implies. For homosexuality … is both distinguished by the equality of the men involved, and made anxious by the difference such equality imposes. … Cannibalism becomes a screen on which gay writers can project both desire and fear.63

Truman Capote’s ‘queerness’ or Tennessee Williams’ ‘double vision’ cannot be reductively ascribed to a pre-Stonewall past, since as post-Stonewall readers we still find their writing and its gothicism both tremendum et fascinans, even as we reject medicalising explanations for same-sex desire and the claims of pseudo-scientific ‘cures’. Perhaps political orthdoxy has mandated the more rigorous gay Southern gothics typical of recent decades, in which medicine repressed returns again as therapeutics. Dorothy Allison’s ‘Demon Lover’ (1988), dead of a drug overdose, haunts but does not possess the narrator, who shares a marijuana joint with her.64 In Aaron Travis’ erotic ‘Blue Light’ (1992), Michael, the narrator’s landlord and housemate, becomes a sexual magus/master to the narrator’s slave during an exquisite encounter in which the narrator risks losing his sexuality.65 The narrator of Allan Gurganus’ ‘Forced Use’ (1991) is a married man who becomes compelled by a young man at a highway rest stop; his doom is the assault he undergoes after giving the young man a blow job.66 The obsessions and possessions of these gothic narrators seem representative of a post-therapeutic age with its recovery regimes: chemical dependency and emotional codependency. Its doom: a hangover and a next-day bargaining with God. Its expiation: a support group. Its rhetorical framework: quasi-medical language of trauma and healing. Allison’s and Gurganus’ narrators only hint at the dissolution of the narrator as an individual subject, and only suggest the erasure of identity: I would be kept right here for ever, suspended in this creature equilibrium, ready for pleasure, anyone’s, my own. I’d never need an address again. I’d 63 Bergman, Gaiety Transfigured, p. 149. 64 Dorothy Allison, ‘Demon Lover’, in Trash (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand, 1988), pp. 111–17. 65 Aaron Travis, ‘Blue Light’, in Flesh and the Word: An Anthology of Erotic Writing, ed. John Preston (New York: Plume, 1992), pp. 125–57. 66 Allan Gurganus, ‘Forced Use’, in The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction, ed. Edmund White (London: Faber, 1991), pp. 557–78.

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And Travis’ story, like most good erotic writing, rescues the individual consciousness of the narrator in order to save the specular position of the eroticising reader who recalibrates the cerebral pleasures of reading into the body’s pleasures, since both narrator and reader are consumers who live to shop another day: ‘That night, under cover of darkness, I moved my things out of the house on Beauchamp Street and went to a motel. Occasionally I have felt an urge to see Michael again – a glimpse of his broad shoulders, from a safe distance, would do. But I have never returned.’68 He knows when he’s had enough. In this post-Stonewall gothicism, the Marquis de Sade’s mechanisms of sexual power seem more exposed than ever before, even deconstructed or given ironic distance. Absent is the ‘mystery’ that was already an absence for Tennessee Williams: the true sense of dread is not a reaction to anything sensible or visible or even, strictly, materially, knowable. But rather it’s a kind of spiritual intuition of something almost too incredible and shocking to talk about, which underlies the whole so-called thing. It is the incommunicable something that we shall have to call mystery which is so inspiring of dread among these modern artists … .69

Replacing ‘mystery’ in Travis, Gurganus and Allison’s gothic narratives are signifiers familiar to Middle Americans: substance abuse, sexual repression and appetite – learning how to be a girl who can ‘Just say no’. However, in Harlan Greene’s 1991 Southern gothic novel What the Dead Remember,70 what Jeff Nunokawa characterised as the ‘figure of the doomed homosexual’ in AIDS writing once again confronts us.71 Cultural representations of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s amplified a medicalising tradition in which the queer male body was both pathological and infectiously dangerous to others. Greene’s anonymous narrator is an adolescent when the novel opens, exiled, for a summer from the Midwest while his father works and his mother and sister 67 Gurganus, ‘Forced Use’, p. 578. 68 Travis, ‘Blue Light’, p. 157. 69 Williams, ‘Introduction’, pp. xii–xiii. 70 Harlan Greene, What the Dead Remember (New York: Plume, 1991). 71 Jeff Nunokawa, ‘“All the Sad Young Men”: AIDS and the Work of Mourning’, The Yale Journal of Criticism, 4.2 (1991), pp. 1–12.

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tour Europe to the home of his Aunt Violet and Uncle Reynaldo in Charleston, where his sexual initiation occurs. That he never names himself and he is never addressed by name becomes metonymical of the unspeakability of homosexual desire, another venerable gothic trope.72 The aunt and uncle have a queer childless marriage. The boy seeks refuge in the uncle’s closed library, where, among other artefacts, the boy finds a stuffed Carolina paroquet, a bird whose body becomes emblematic of extinction and, in this post-AIDS gothic, a signifier of the homophobic fantasy of the extinction of the homosexual male. The boy’s inability to connect either with the retarded Stevie or with his own peers comes to a climax (literally) when he begins to sexually service the boys as trade in an abandoned tuberculosis quarantine building on Sullivan’s Island. The nineteenth-century’s emblem of the doomed libertine, TB, is replaced by the late twentieth-century’s: HIV. Returning to Charleston as a young man, the narrator enacts a heterosexualised relationship as a parent to Stevie and a non-sexual spouse to Stevie’s sister and caretaker, Dulcie. At the same time he is drawn into the closed and closeted Charlestonian gay society, among whom he comes to recognise some of the boys he once serviced. Eventually finding their company cloying, the narrator becomes virtually celibate, sublimating his eroticism by parenting Stevie. The narrator even evades his own desires for the mysterious hunk on the beach, Jim, who cruises him repeatedly. When these sublimation tactics erode, the narrator leaves Stevie home alone one night and meets Jim, who takes him into the city for a night of intense eroticism and unprotected sex. During the night, a threatening coastal storm produces a waterspout that kills Stevie, and the narrator comes to the recognition that Jim is also one of the boys of his adolescence (significantly called Jinx), who is now an infamously rumoured HIV-positive man infecting as many other men as possible. The gothicism of Greene’s novel is disturbing for two constructions. The first is the figure of the irresponsible homosexual voluptuary: when the narrator abandons the paradigmatic heterosexual role of parent, he ‘causes’ the death of an ‘innocent victim’. This diseased role used to be reserved for nineteenth-century operatic heroines and fallen women in sentimental novels. In part this figure betrays a perennial bourgeois suspicion of the body’s pleasures, which, when indulged, produce morbidity and mortality. In post-AIDS literature, it marks the homosexual as the guilty perpetrator in a world divided into 72 Sedgwick, Between Men, pp. 95–96.

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infected homosexuals and an uninfected (i.e., presumptively heterosexual) ‘general population’. Within such a binary construction, where the former category penetrates into or permeates the latter, there forms a liminal zone of ‘innocent victims’ (that is, haemophiliacs, wives of men who have sex with men or of IV drug users, and accidentally infected medical workers). The homosexual male is already diseased, guilty and, therefore, deserves to die. Thus, the second construction: the figure of the doomed homosexual. The narrator is ‘fated’ to re-encounter the ‘Jinx’ of his adolescence, who is reconfigured into the adult Jim. The narrator is sentenced twice: for a single night of passion, the death of Stevie; for being a gay male, death by AIDS. His pathological body is marked for extinction. What makes an uncritical reading of this homophobic trope doubly dangerous is what Simon Watney called the ‘spectacle of AIDS’, a homophobic pageant that ‘calmly and constantly entertains the possible prospect of the death of all western European and American gay men from AIDS … without the slightest flicker of concern, regret, or grief’.73 Watney’s apocalyptic tone is mitigated by the heterosexist hysteria in Greene’s gothicism, where the snobbery of Charleston’s straight-acting gay elite is only censured, while the narrator’s sexual passion is condemned to death. Queerness here is the object not only of repression but of extinction as well, the proscription of the unruly queer body. Like its English literary ancestor, the Southern gothic has maintained an ambivalent relationship between the medicalised male body’s conformity and its rebellion. Nowhere is this more clearly signified than in the queer bodies of American Southern gothic fiction. Writers of the South have both literary tradition and social custom to draw on, which include ways of imagining the bodies of those whom we simultaneously fear and desire. Southern writers know where all the bodies are buried and know whose closets contain skeletons. Some of the flavour of these literary and social conventions appears in Vince’s autobiographical account, with which I began this chapter. Only in the South, however, would an alcoholic, born-again evangelical Christian father hypothesise that a demon has possessed his son’s body through the mediation of an Elvis Presley record.

73 Simon Watney, ‘The Spectacle of AIDS’, in AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), pp. 71–86 (p. 85).

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Index Index Ackerman, Michael A. 3 Acton, William 65–66, 70, 72, 74n30, 76, 79, 172 Adams, Stephen 233 Agassiz, Louis 45n28 Alderotti, Taddeo 20 Allen, Marlene D. 8–9, 34–47 Allison, Dorothy, ‘Demon Lover’ 236–37 Altick, Richard 52 Angell, Katherine 9, 48–63 Aristotle 23, 28, 197 Aschenbach, Gustav 91 Atchley, Heath J. 113 Athey, Ron 101 Baker, William 78n37 Banneker, Benjamin 45–46 Barker-Benefield, G. J. 66–67 Bartlett, Jen 111 Bashford, Alison, Purity and Pollution 175–76 Baudelaire, Charles 93 Baudrillard, Jean 110, 116 Beardsley, Aubrey 93 Beesemeyer, Irene 138–39 Behn, Aphra, The Dumb Virgin 211n44 Bergman, David 235 Bidloo, Govard, Anatomia Humani Corporis 6 Blondel, James 198–200n10

Blunt, John, Man Midwifery Dissected 211n42 Boddice, Rob 159 Bonnet, Charles 202n20 Bordo, Susan, The Male Body 2 Boswell, James 12–13, 177, 179–87, 191–93 Boucé, Paul Gabriel 203–04 Boulton, Ernest 89n10 Bracken, Henry 212 Bradley, Katharine 94, 97 see also Field, Michael Brady, Sean 160 Brewer, John 179, 185, 186, 191, 192 Bristow, Joseph 93 Brooke, Emma, A Superfluous Woman 168 Brown, Charles Brockden 224–25 Brown, Isaac Baker 169 Buchan, William, Domestic Medicine 217 Buckley, Jenifer 12, 13, 194–220 Burton, John 210n40 Burton, Robert, Anatomy of Melancholy 76–77 Butler, Marilyn 137–38, 139, 141–42, 147 Campbell Ross, Ian 200n13 Capote, Truman 230–31, 233–34, 236 Caruth, Cathy 127

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t h e m a l e body i n m e dici n e a n d l i t e r at u r e Caruthers, William A. 226–27 Chamberlen, P., The Secret Patient’s Diary 177–78, 193 Chandler, James 140 Charcot, Jean-Martin 89–90 Chaucer, Geoffrey 24 Chesnutt, Charles 35 Clark, Kenneth 37–38 Clark, Michael 129 Clum, John M. 234 Cocks, Harry 160 Cohen, William 69n14 Cole, Sarah 126–27 Collins, Wilkie Heart and Science 52 The Law and the Lady 9, 48–63 Connolly, Claire 138n3 Connor, Steve 211 Cook, Matt 160 Cooke, Francis 64 Cooper, Edith 97 see also Field, Michael Costello, Julie 199n12 Costello-Sullivan, Kathleen 138n3 Crosthwaite, Paul 117 Crowley, Aleister 96–97 Cullen, William 141–43, 148–54 First Lines 142–43, 145, 146 Curtius, Matthaeus 22–23 da Vinci, Leonardo 3–4, 6, 28 Damasio, Antonio 131n34 Darby, Robert, A Surgical Temptation 172 Darwin, Erasmus, Zoonomia 201–02, 208n35 Daston, Lorraine 3 Davidoff, Leonore 217n52 Davies, John 144–45 Davison, Adenike 39–40 de Beauvoir, Simone, The Second Sex 1–2 de Liuzzi, Mondino 20

Delany, Martin 34 DeLillo, Don 10–11 Cosmopolis 116–17 Falling Man 10–11, 103–19 ‘In the Ruins of the Future’ 116 White Noise 106, 113 Dellamora, Richard 92 DeMeester, Karen 127, 129 Descartes, René 76 Devlin, Stephen 102 disease contaminated male body 12–13, 177–93 and debility 64–83, 161–76 dissection, impact on medical science 18–26 domesticity, male 216–18 Donne, John 7–8, 17–33 ‘A Valediction: Of My Name in the Window’ 30–32 ‘Love’s Exchange’ 28–29 ‘Of the Progress of the Soul’ 24–26, 27, 28 ‘The Damp’ 26–27, 32 ‘The Funeral’ 29–30 ‘The Legacy’ 27–28 Douglas, Lord Alfred 88, 92 Douglass, Frederick 42 Dowson, Ernest 93 Drew, Richard 110–11 Drysdale, George 170 Dunbar, Paul Laurence 35 Edgeworth, Maria Belinda 140 Ennui 11, 137–55 Letters for Literary Ladies 139 Edgeworth, Richard Lovell 139–40 Practical Education 139, 140 Egerton, George (Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright) 168 Eliot, George 64–83 Middlemarch 64–83

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i n de x Eliot, T. S. ‘Hysteria’ 134n39 The Waste Land 123 Faulkner, William Absalom, Absalom! 227–29 Light in August 227–29 Faurot, Ruth Marie 206n28 Feyens, Thomas 207 Fiedler, Leslie 222, 224, 229, 230, 233 Field, Michael 97, 98–100 Fielding, Henry, Joseph Andrews 211n44 Finucci, Valeria 204–05n26 Folkenberg, Judith 3 Forman Cody, Lisa 202n20, 210, 216n52 Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality 66 Freud, Sigmund 122–23, 130, 131, 175, 224 Friedman, David M. 3, 6 Galen 23, 26, 28, 196–97 Galison, Peter 3 Gallagher, Catherine 197–98 Garson, Helen S. 233–34 Garvey, Marcus 35 Gerber, Marjorie 41 Gerhardt, Paul 95 Gilbert, Sandra 121 Gliddon, George 45n28 Goetsch, Paul 61 gothic narratives and the male body 222–39 Gould, Steven Jay 45 Goyens, William 231–32 Grand, Sarah, The Heavenly Twins 167–68 Grant, Julia 120 Gray, John 88, 93–97 Silverpoints 93 Tombeau d’Oscar Wilde 102

Greene, Harlan, What the Dead Remember 237–39 Greenslade, William 124 Griggs, Allen 35 Griggs, Sutton, Imperium in Imperio 8, 34–47 Gurganus, Allan, ‘Forced Use’ 236–37 Hall, Catherine 217n52 Hall, Lesley A. 9, 12, 159–76 Hamilton, Alexander 211n42 Hamilton, Cicely 168 Hanson, Ellis 94, 95 Harack, Katrina 113 Harris, Trudier, Exorcising Blackness 44 Harvey, Karen 217 Harvey, William 197, 201 Head, Henry 133 Heseler, Baldasar 22 Hill, Sir John 189–90n28 Hippocrates 197 Hirsch, David 30, 33 Hirschfeld, Magnus 89 Hollinghurst, Alan, The Swimming Pool Library 101–02 Hooper, William, Rational Recreations 140 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 92–93 Howells, Coral Ann 232 Hughes, William 223 Hume, David 199n12 Hunter, J. Paul 209, 216n50 Hutchinson, Sir Jonathan 172 Huysmans, J. K. 62 hysteria, male 121–36, 137–55 Ibsen, Henrik, Ghosts 169 Ikard, David 42 Ingraham, Joseph Holt 227 Jacobson, Karin 60 James, Henry 230

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t h e m a l e body i n m e dici n e a n d l i t e r at u r e James, William 132 Jameson, Frederic 117–18 Jarman, Derek, Sebastiane 87 Jefferson, Thomas 45, 46 Johnston, John 181 Kaminsky, Inbar 10, 103–19 Kamiya, Dr Miyeko 124n16 Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason 133 Kaplan, Morris 160 Kauffman, Linda 113, 115 ‘World Trauma Center’ 110 Keats, John 91–92 Keller, Eve 197 Kennedy, John Pendleton, Rob of the Bowl 226 Klein, Lawrence 179 Knoepflmacher, U. C. 62 Laist, Randy 116 Lallemand, M. 75, 76 Laqueur, Thomas 66, 67, 70n16, 196n3, 197–98 Lea, Daniel 1–14 Leach, Harry 163 Leavitt, David 235 Leed, Eric 121 Lennox, Charlotte 211–12n44 Leuwenhoek, Anton van 198, 199–200 Lewes, George Henry 70, 77–78n37, 79 Lewis, Anne 183n14 Liceti, Fortunii 207 Liles, Don Merrick 229 Lodge, John, Peerage of Ireland 145 Long, Thomas Lawrence 9, 12, 13–14, 221–39 Luria, Alexander 126n22 McClintock, Anne 69–70, 71 Imperial Leather 69 McCormack, Matthew 217n52

McCullers, Carson 224, 230, 231–32, 233 McKinstry, Jamie 7–8, 9, 17–33 McLaren, Angus 2, 160 male body attempts to create objective rationalisation of 2–7 biological parental influence 194–220 early studies of anatomy subject to theological doctrines 19–20, 32–33 effect of religious dogma 3–4, 6 gothic narratives 222–39 history of dissection 18–26 intersections of race and science 8–9 literary treatment of male sexuality 64–83 male domesticity and parental role 216–18 male wound as trope in fin-desiecle poetry 87–102 man midwifery 195n195, 200, 207–13 masturbation and masculine debility and disease 64–83, 161–76 maternal/paternal imagination effect on unborn child 194–99 medical treatment of male hysteria 121–36, 137–55 monstrous forms in literature 48–63 one-sex to two-sex theory shift 196–97n4, 199–200 post-war paradigm shift in notion of masculinity 120–36 relative to female body 1–2, 4, 32–33 as a vector for diseases 12–13, 177–93 Victorian attitudes to 159–76

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i n de x man midwifery 195n195, 200, 207–13 Mandal, Anthony 223 Mangham, Andrew 1–14 Mangum, Teresa 51n6, 55 Mann, Thomas, Death in Venice 91 Mapplethorpe, Robert 101 Martindale, Louisa 168 masculinity, notion of 120–36 Mason, Diane 78n37, 223 maternal imagination, imprint on unborn child 194–99 Maturin, Charles 92n23 Maubray, John 200–01, 207–08 Maudsley, Henry, Body and Mind 79–80 Mauro, Aaron 110 medical science, progression 19–20, 32–33 Melnyk, Julie 97 Meyer, Jessica 121–22 midwifery, male as midwife 195n195, 200, 207–13 Milton, J. Laws 171 Mitchell, Silas Weir 135n43 Monro, Alexander 191n29 monstrous forms in literature 48–63 Montesquieu 76 Moran, Maureen 93 Moran, Patricia 127 Morrison, Toni 38 Playing in the Dark 37 Morton, Samuel 44–45 Myers, Charles 121 Myers, Mitzi 138n3, 155 Napier, Elizabeth R. 232 Nashe, Thomas, ‘A Litany in Time of Plague’ 23–24 Neville, Sylas 12, 177, 180, 187–91, 191–93 Newton, Isaac 76 Nihell, Elizabeth 212 Nordau, Max 88

Nott, Josiah 36, 45n28 Types of Mankind 36 Nussbaum, Felicity 186 O’Connor, Flannery 224, 233 Onania 70n16 one-sex to two-sex reproduction 196–97n4, 199–200 Ould, Fielding 215n49 Paget, Sir James 170 Pankhurst, Christabel, The Great Scourge 168 Park, Frederick 89n10 Park, Katherine 20 Parker, Sarah 10, 87–102 Parui, Avishek 10, 11, 120–36 Passaro, Vince 117 Pater, Walter, Imaginary Portraits 91 paternal imagination, imprint on unborn child 194–99 Patmore, Coventry 98 Peters, Catherine 52 Plessy v Ferguson case (1896) 35, 47 Pliny 23, 28, 200 Poe, Edgar Allan 227 Poole, Roger 124n18 Porter, Roy 187 preformationism 202n20 Pugh, Benjamin 215n49 racial theories rules of inheritance 36–37 scientific evolution 8–9 racism 35–47 Raffalovich, André 88 Raffalovich, Marc-André 91 Raleigh, Sir Walter 23 Rawcliffe, Carol 21 religion, intersection with science 3–4, 6, 19–20, 32–33 Reni, Guido 87, 91–92 Retford, Kate 217–18

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t h e m a l e body i n m e dici n e a n d l i t e r at u r e Ricketts, Charles 97 Rifkin, Benjamin A. 3, 6 Rimbaud, Arthur 93 Rivers, W. H. R. 122 Robertson, John 74–75 Roden, Frederick 90 Rolfe, Frederick (Baron Corvo) 88, 91 Rosner, Mary 51n6, 59 Rousseau, G. S. 199n11 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 218 Runia, Robin 10, 11, 137–55 Russell, Gillian 186–87

Staines, Ronald, Martyrs exhibition 101 Stall, Sylvanus 174 Stengers, Jean 73 Sterne, Elizabeth 200n13 Sterne, Laurence 13 The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy 195–220 Stoddard-Holmes, Martha, Fictions of Afflictions 51n6 Sugg, Richard 22–23 Summers, Claude 230–32, 233, 234 Symonds, John Addington 91

Sacks, Oliver 133n38 Sassoon, Siegfried 122 Savage, George 124n18 Sawday, Jonathon 23 Schiebinger, Londa 197–98 Sears, James T. 221, 231 Sedgwick, Eve 14, 224 Between Men 225–26 Seltzer, Mark 55–56 sexuality, literary treatment of male sexuality 64–83 Shakespeare, William 64–65, 67 Shannon, Charles 97 Sharp, Christine Crockett 9–10, 11, 64–83 Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein 201–02 Shepard, Alexandra 196n3 Showalter, Elaine 88 Shuttleworth, Sally 8, 50–51 Siegel, Jonah 56–57 Siena, Kevin 164 Smellie, William 210, 212, 215n49 Smith, Adam 199n12 Smith, Andrew 223 Smollett, Tobias, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle 199 Soane, Sir John 52 Spencer, Herbert 36–37 Spinoza, Benedict de 131n34

Tasso, Torquato, Geruselemme liberata 198n9, 204 Taylor, Jenny Bourne 8, 56, 57–58, 62 teratology 52–63 Thain, Marion 97, 100 theology, intersection of religion and science 3–4, 6, 19–20, 32–33 Thicknesse, Phillip 210–11 Man-midwifery Analysed 210–11 Thiebault, Dieudonné 143–44 Thomas, Keith 196n3 Timbs, John 52 Tissot, Samuel Auguste 72–74, 76, 81n42–82 Onanism 67, 73 Todd, Dennis 203n22 Tosh, John 210, 216, 217 Tracy, Robert 138 Travis, Aaron, ‘Blue Light’ 236, 237 Tuite, Clara 186–87 Twain, Mark 224–25 two-sex reproduction 196–97n4, 199–200 Ulrichs, Karl Heinrich 88n Upchurch, Charles 160 Van Evrie, J. H., White Supremacy and Negro Subordination 39

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i n de x van Kalkar, Jan Stefan 4–5, 6 Van Neck, Anne 73 Vanita, Ruth 87 Verlaine, Paul 93 Vesalius, Andreas 4–5, 22–23, 26 De Corporis Humani Fabrica 5–6, 22–23 Vicinus, Martha 90 Victorian attitudes to, male body 159–76 Virilio, Paul 111 Ground Zero 105 von Hagens, Gunther, Body Worlds exhibitions 18n2–19 Waddington, Keir 223 Wagner, Tamara S. 56 Wallis, Faith 21 Ward, Ned 178–79, 188 West, Rebecca, The Return of the Soldier 123 Wetherall-Dickson, Leigh 9, 12–13, 177–93

Whelan, Kevin 138n3 Wilde, Oscar 62, 88, 91–92n23, 93, 223 The Picture of Dorian Gray 169, 223 Williams, Tennessee 230–31, 233, 234–37 Wilson, Philip K. 203n22 Woods, Gregory 87 Woodward, S. B. 69–70n15 Woodworth, Megan 139n6 Woolf, Virginia, Mrs Dalloway 11, 120–36 Worboys, Michael 165 Wright, Nicole 140 Wulfman, Clifford 125 Yealland, Lewis 125 Young, Harvey 43–44 Žižek, Slavoj 110, 136 Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Ina 159–60

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