The Body and its Representations
THE BODY AND ITS REPRESENTATIONS
Lisa Z. Sigel
Although the body functions as both a material and a symbolic artifact, it received very little attention by historians until the late twentieth century. The intellectual tradition inherited from Plato, arguing that the physical is just a shadow of the real, as well as the biblical verse "in the beginning was the word" have created a legacy making physicality a mere precondition for the more important matters of mind and soul. Nonetheless, bodies have long dominated European history. Preindustrial bodies remained poised precariously between reproduction and starvation. The rapid changes in agricultural production, hygiene, medicine, and labor since the Renaissance have transformed the body and its impact on society. Bigger, healthier bodies and more of them have remade modern Europe into a mass society with changing aesthetic, medical, and psychological norms that balance population concerns with an increased focus on individualism and new demands of privacy. At the same time that history plays out on and through the body, individuals use their bodies to create their own identities: fashion, clothes, cosmetics, and surgery allow people to create, express, and perform their roles in society.
While bodies have always been available for study, historians have only begun to examine them as separate and equal to the minds that dominated previous discussions. This interest in the body by social historians converged from a variety of directions, many of which have attempted to undermine the mind-body dualism inherited from the Enlightenment. As history has become a more inclusive discipline since the 1960s, historians have tried to historicize their own experiences as embodied beings and have attempted to formulate ways that society has used criteria based on physicality to sort and discipline human beings.
At the most concrete and materialist level, social historians have combined techniques from sociology and physical anthropology to document the body as an artifact. To assess the impact of the industrial revolution, for example, social historians have looked to quantifiable data on the body as a source that would speak beyond the positions laid out by more literate sources. Although those who amassed data on bodies from previous generations rarely did so from an unbiased position, the data itself can be retooled to speak to issues of mortality, illness, and health. The body as material can function as a basic economic indicator that registers wealth and well-being of populations.
Approaching the materiality of the body in a much more confrontational way, women's historians have demonstrated a lack of fixity in the relationship between biological sex and gender, even though women have been conceptualized as limited by their own biological nature in much of Western history. To explore how "biology became destiny," to paraphrase Sigmund Freud, women's historians began to theorize how gender or constructions of femaleness and maleness have been wedded to biology. As part of this project, they examine the ways that societies theorize gender and biology, teach beliefs and practices, and represent them historically.
Scholars of sexuality, in many cases building upon the work of women's historians, have examined the ways that sexual roles and meanings become constituted. Scholars of homosexuality first rediscovered a hidden past, then examined the factors that impeded sexual choice, and finally looked toward processes that allow for sexual and social accommodation. Both women's historians and historians of sexuality have radically reexamined what had been considered unchanging by questioning experiences such as family formation, pain and pleasure, and the biological "urges" of the body.
Cultural historians have built on the methods of literary critics, anthropologists, and art historians to read the body as a sign of society. The debates over language that developed in other disciplines encouraged historians to examine discourse of the body. Rather than seeing knowledge as a form of universal, ahistorical truth, social historians, diverging from the practices of intellectual historians of previous generations, have examined the context of that language to see the emergence of the mind-body split. Thus, they have tried to reinscribe the mind in the context of the world rather than accepting the legacy of René Descartes in the form of the disembodied thinker as absolute. By exploring the development of discourse, cultural historians have demonstrated that the province of "nature" has been largely culturally constructed and thus has changed over time.
These multiple and overlapping directions of scholarship have converged upon the body because it is a central symbol in issues of gender and sexuality, aesthetics and representation, politics and ideas. As society has developed since the Renaissance, the understanding, uses, and meanings of the body have been central to the process of change. As the skeletons of our former selves demonstrate, bodies physically document the effect of big structural changes on the inhabitants of Europe; at the same time, the representations of the body whether naked, clothed, or even unencumbered by flesh show the variety of ways that the body can be conceptualized, perceived, and utilized.
THE RENAISSANCE AND EARLY MODERN PERIOD
At a basic level, most bodies during the Renaissance were still caught within the demands of subsistence living. On average, the crops failed every sixth year, leaving most people, and particularly the young, a legacy of malnutrition, ill health, and early death. Epidemic and endemic disease, from the periodic episodes of plague that lasted well into the eighteenth century to the continual scourge of smallpox that caused 10 to 15 percent of all deaths in early modern Europe, made attention to the body and its signs of health and illness a central part of everyday life rather than merely the province of doctors, surgeons, and healers. The body as a medical issue mattered across all levels of society. Beyond medical matters, beliefs about other aspects of physicality mattered as well. The study of the body, the schooling of the body, and the relationship between body, mind, and soul all went through incremental changes that heightened the importance of corporeality during the period. While spirit still mattered and older popular beliefs still flourished, new beliefs about physicality emerged between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries that made the issue of representation as important as the body itself.
Renewed interest in corporeality. During the Renaissance, scholars reexplored beliefs about the body inherited from the ancient world. Some of these beliefs, like the medical beliefs of Aristotle and Galen, had influenced European thought throughout the Middle Ages. Others, like the emphasis on personal experience as a method of learning, gained a new respectability. While religion and religious beliefs still governed the conduct of the individual and served as a foundation of education, art, medicine, and philosophy, Renaissance society gave the corporal a new weight in relation to the spiritual. The Church itself rejected the renunciation of the flesh seen in medieval penitents and flagellants who sought to mortify the flesh and renounce its desires. Furthermore, the renewed interest in ancient learning emphasized that the exterior reflected the interior self; thus the physical being of a person spoke directly to their spiritual states. Aristotelian belief emphasized that one's ethics, character, and morality could be read from the physical state because these states were formed by controlling one's passions.
The way anatomists understood the organs and the material matter of the body was based upon a different schema than our current beliefs. The medical understanding of the body was based upon the Hippocratic and Galenic traditions. In these traditions, both the environment and the imbalances in the substances that made up the body caused illness. Health was a matter of maintaining equilibrium. The basic substances of blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile made up the physical matter of bodies and each substance had its own quality that could be read from the countenance of the individual. The preponderance of a substance affected the individual's temperament and health. Sanguineous people had a preponderance of blood—which was hot and dry—and thus they were faster moving and more animated than the phlegmatic. While people's constitutions helped form their temperaments, the environment played a part as well. Heat and cold, moisture, drafts, exercise, shocks, and accidents affected the balance of the humors and caused illness.
Humors, their properties, and their relationships to the environment created the constitution of the body as a sexed organism but, even in the case of sex, biology was a matter of degree and balance rather than a matter of opposition. Women were understood as essentially similar to men though with different predominating humors and internal rather than external genitals. Anatomists saw the vaginal canal as an internal shaft that corresponded to the penis and the ovaries as internal testes. Both sexes produced semen. Without orgasm from both parties, no conception could occur. Similarity in biology, rather than difference, encouraged both learned and popular belief that women needed to orgasm and ejaculate during intercourse to conceive. Coldness and dampness on the part of women and dry heat on the part of men functioned as some of the main markers of biological difference. Thus, women could theoretically become men if heat or shock drove their internal organs outward. Historians have shown by exhuming anatomical drawings and medical beliefs that the simple platform of biology, even in the supposedly clear example of biological sex, remains subject to projection and representation.
At the same time that medicine and natural philosophy formulated these approaches to the body, magic and religion played a role in catastrophe, illness, and the constitution. Though the body's outward appearance spoke to the balance of fluids and organs, it also spoke to the internal state of the soul. Divine intervention could alleviate illness and divine displeasure could cause it. Not only did people believe that the direct will of the Christian creator could affect the functioning of the individual, more accidental influences played a part on the constitution. For example, the experiences of the mother were transferred to the baby because the spiritual was directly tied to the body. Thus, according to popular belief, seeing a deformity while pregnant could give rise to a likewise deformed child. The combination of formal learning and magical belief constructed the body's relationship to the world. As well, the stars played their part in the constitution of the body. The neo-Platonic tradition emphasized that all nature was alive and animate. The placement of the stars affected the physical relationship of the body because macrocosm and microcosm were innately tied, and the most learned in society used astronomy as a way to predict and encourage good health. The conception of the body as a physical being was thus based on many, highly individualized factors, and medicine had the job of peering beneath the opacity of the skin to discover the right balance toward physical health for each person.
The interest in the physical encouraged a new form of exploration into the body based upon observation and personal experience. Renewed interest in corporeality during the Renaissance and the increased interest in philosophical and medical knowledge encouraged the practice of dissection and anatomy, which flourished in Renaissance learning as a way to understand and experience the body firsthand. Artists and naturalists overlapped in their search to see the relationship between the body's interior and its exterior. Both Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and Michelangelo (1475–1564) based their artistic representations of bodies upon detailed anatomical drawings. The bodies they drew were not necessarily the exact bodies they saw but images heightened by beliefs about notions of beauty in the physical form: central to conceptions of beauty were ideas of symmetry, strength, vigor, and grace. Nonetheless, unlike medieval artists, their firsthand knowledge of anatomy gave their works, even those with an allegorical or religious focus, a representational facility that made their conception of the human form more rooted in worldliness and less in the spiritual realm.
Presenting and representing the body. Books on courtesy and manners dictated new ways of schooling the body and its appearance for aristocrats, courtiers, and the bourgeoisie. These books stressed that deportment could be learned, rather than only scrutinized, and the presentation of self could be cultivated as an art. Physical acts of eating, drinking, dressing, speaking, and moving, all of which bespoke character and social status, could be acquired. These accomplishments governed overt physical acts like the use of table implements and the handkerchief and also less tangible ways of controlling the body and wielding it as a predicator of sophistication. For example, movement and dance meant not only steps and timing, but also grace, energy, physicality, control, composure, and expression. One had to know the steps to dances and also know how to deport oneself through the steps. As formal dancing became a social accomplishment and dances began to emphasize the couple instead of groups of three to four, as they had in the Middle Ages, gender behavior and demeanor became a more formal part of dancing as a learned activity. Women needed to learn to demonstrate sweetness, charm, and restraint as qualities in movement; men had to show steadiness, virility, and control.
The schooling of the body as an art thus crossed over between performance and representation. Acts like dancing allowed individuals to perform gender roles and represent themselves as accomplished individuals. Other arts from the Renaissance, like painting and sculpture, incorporated similar ideals of the body as representing the inner workings of character and morality. Artists stylized the human form to create complex aesthetic and moral representations of body that spoke to the internal and external character. Titian's Adonis in Venus and Adonis (1551–1554), for example, combined delicacy and vigorous movement. His upright form strides away from the more languorous Venus in movement reminiscent of the male Renaissance dancer.
Older beliefs in the body continued to flourish. The body still had magical properties that gave it curative powers. The live bodies of kings, the dead bodies of convicts, and the body pieces of saints transcended the limitations of physicality and provided a reservoir of material for spiritual interaction. The touch of the king as well as that of the corpse could cure skin diseases. The transformative powers of bodies as sacred material made the burial sites and the traffic in saints' pieces part of an early tourist trade. The body politic had both material and symbolic power; the term referred to the physical being of the monarch who reflected the domain of the state.
Just as the king's body had divine powers that performed a social role in providing cohesiveness, the convict's body performed justice, retribution, and divine mercy for the benefit of society. Through public torture and ritualized hangings, society could read the effects of crime and immorality upon the countenances of the criminal. The body formed a conduit to the soul. The criminal was made to perform a walk of penitence often carrying the props of his crime. At crossroads, he called out his crimes and sentence, and when arriving at the scaffold, often erected at the site of the crime, he confessed and was executed. The body or its pieces were sometimes left to mark the site of wrongdoing as a rotting marker of justice. If not executed, the marks of criminality were permanently displayed upon the figure of the criminal. Pierced tongues for blasphemers, amputated hands for thieves, and lopped ears for beggars made the stigma of criminality permanently visible as signs of the social order.
The presence of death in everyday life made the corpse a much more significant part of society in the Renaissance and early modern world than in the twenty-first century. Not only did markers of death like the hanging corpse and the weeping, long-dead saint act as conduits to physical and spiritual rejuvenation, the idea of the corpse hovered behind the daily acts of life, spurred, no doubt, by the precariousness of existence. The dance of death and the stages of life, two traditional motifs in prints, make it clear that death lurked behind every scene. No matter what station one achieved, death—represented in the grinning skeleton and the waiting coffin—would offer the final embrace. The juxtaposition of life and death, beauty and the grotesque worked as experiential as well as representational motifs. For example, St. Bartholomew's Fair featured an open market, a field for jousting, a hospital, and a gallows. Knights and ladies, cripples and saints mingled with entertainers like fire-eaters, puppeteers, animal trainers, dwarfs, half men/half beasts, and other curiosities. The heterogeneity of St. Bartholomew's made it a rich location for the interweaving of commerce and entertainment, physical punishment and physical prowess upon which one could read morality tales in motion.
The protean and ribald body appeared in Renaissance pornography (although the term "pornography" did not itself appear until the nineteenth century). In these representations, the body became a seething mass of profane and spiritual desires that nurtured each other. Through the themes of coitus, bodily evacuation, and the intermingling of orifices, the sexualized body enhanced sexual tensions in society, including the problems of celibacy, the unfaithful wife, the crossed lovers. Through pornography and other representations in the visual and literary arts, men argued about the place and meaning of women and women's bodies in the Renaissance world. Theological understandings of sexuality as well as pornography argued for women's highly sexual nature. Women had the stigma of Eve and were thus biologically insatiable. They needed to be curbed sexually rather than aroused. However, the highly sexed nature of women's bodies offered opportunities as well as problems, and the roles of the courtesan, whore, wife, and mother allowed women to use the social stigmas to their own advantage. Prostitutes in Venice used the rage for small, conical, and firm breasts to advertise their trade by uncovering their breasts in the streets.
The introduction of syphilis to Europe at the end of the fifteenth century (often attributed to Columbus's sailors, as well as foreign troops, Italians, French, or Jews) and its rapid spread brought a physical manifestation of immorality that influenced generations of artists. The rotting nose, open sores, and twisted limbs of the syphilitic and the excessive salivation brought by the treatment of mercury became emblematic of a guilty life and worse death. The importance of physical beauty as indicative of inner purity made the outward manifestations of syphilis markers of sexual immorality. Just as witch's tits spoke of congress with the devil and lopped ears indicated criminality, so the lost nose of the syphilitic announced sexual and moral transgressions. Early attempts to reform and remake the body through surgery began with the reconstruction of the nose to erase the stigma of syphilis. Techniques of skin grafting first developed during the Renaissance, even though they appear largely forgotten until the nineteenth century, when doctors rediscovered techniques of beauty surgery. The mark of the syphilitic continued to counter claims about the progress of humanity even after Enlightenment notions about progress prevailed.
THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION AND ENLIGHTENMENT
While previous generations of scholars saw the scientific revolution as a decisive break marked by scientific advances and a new rationalist approach to the world, social historians who look at actual practice in addition to intellectual changes have some doubts about the clarity of that break. Instead, they tend to see continuity in practice and beliefs. While some large changes in the conception of the body emerged during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these shifts in fact built upon ideas from the Renaissance and were similarly tempered by continuities and contradictions.
At a material level, the world of the body remained limited by a precarious existence. The "little ice age" of the seventeenth century produced famine and starvation. The recovery during the eighteenth century, while allowing for greater agricultural production and a higher population, did not relieve physical misery. In fact, people suffered from the dynamic changes produced by economic development. Growth in the population in the eighteenth century outstripped growth in food production, creating a relative decrease in the standard of living. This resulted in short, sickly bodies suffering from epidemic and endemic disease. The early phases of the industrial revolution and urbanization moved people away from the countryside and its food sources, while higher fertility rates and stagnant mortality rates meant that the population, overall, continued to grow. In late-eighteenth-century England, for example, the rise in population was not offset by an equal rise in food supply, resulting in high food prices, periodic shortages, and frequent riots. Huddled in cities, living in substandard housing, and eating a poor diet overwhelmingly composed of carbohydrates, early industrial workers suffered physically. Up to three-quarters of a worker's income was spent on food in early industrial society, and even with that commitment there was malnutrition and short and sickly bodies. Social class played out in body size and types of diseases. Gout, from rich foods and a heavy diet, affected the wealthy, while scurvy, from too few fresh vegetables and fruits, affected the poor. Thus, notions about progress—a central doctrine of the Enlightenment—need to be weighed against continued physical misery.
While people continued to suffer long-term debility, the elites produced new ideas about the body as a physical organism. William Harvey (1578–1657), in one of the best examples of the revolutionary nature of science, discovered that the heart functions as a pump that moves the blood through the body in a great circle. Harvey, educated in Padua in anatomy and medicine like many Renaissance natural philosophers, saw the soul as a primary force in the body in accordance with Galenic tradition and believed that the blood moved purposefully, rather than mechanically. Thus his ideas seem firmly situated in the Renaissance notions of the body. At the same time, his discoveries, based upon the emerging scientific method of experimentation and observation, contributed to new mechanistic notions of the body.
Even after the idea of the body as a machine emerged, humors and the environment continued to play a large part in ideas of health and sickness. Older conceptions of health augmented the new materialist approach to the body. Theories of miasma and contagion, respectively bad air and the passage of disease between individuals, allowed people to respond to disease by charting weather and draining the swamps. Scientific discoveries based on observation and experimentation yielded results like the discovery of the central nervous system, which contributed to new formulations of ill health. No longer did the spleen predominate in matters of illness, now the nervous system, and particularly the refined nervous system of the upper classes, made certain illnesses more likely.
The scientific revolution and Enlightenment emphasized the process of questioning established belief. The multiple directions of those questions began to pull apart orthodoxies and opened the way for new formulations of the nature of humankind. For example, theories on race, which had emphasized notions of blood, began to examine environmental factors and physiological causes. Competing theories—that all babies are born white but become black within eight days or that the acquirement of dark skin from the African sun was passed from parent to child—implied ways to achieve progress, however dubious and misinformed. Other theories, like that suggesting physiology caused racial degradation, left little room for such improvements. Thus, while attempting to get to root causes of problems, natural philosophers continuously stumbled over the issue of free will versus biology.
As part of the program of mapping the body as discrete and the mind as governed by free will, Enlightenment thinkers tried to do away with superstition, irrationality, spells, faith healing, and magic. In attacking these irrational beliefs and practices, however, Enlightenment thinkers deemphasized the body and its importance in favor of a rational world controlled by the mind. By the eighteenth century the use of religion, astrology, and magic waned in medicine as the body became a more discrete entity that functioned in isolation according to its own laws, rather than one governed by the laws of the cosmos.
The privileging of mind over body, of free will over the symbolics of blood and flesh, however, allowed for a new reliance on the physical and mechanical causes of physical malfunctions. Thus, the body as a mechanical entity came to be seen as causal in "mental" illness. Treatments, from attempts to balance the humors in the seventeenth century to control of the physical and moral environment in the nineteenth century, saw the physical as a conduit to the interior or mental world of the body.
Nonetheless, a new emphasis on biology emerged during the period, influenced in particular by René Descartes (1596–1650), a central figure in the Enlightenment. Descartes's ideas about the body encouraged a new emphasis on the mind as separate from the body. He posited that deceptiveness of sensory data discredited it as a way of knowing one's existence. Instead of believing in the close correlation between soul and body, or even between seeing and knowing that characterized the formulations of many Renaissance scholars and lay people, Descartes saw the mind as paramount and the body, ruled by the mind, as merely responsible for carrying out the animal functions. Because of this formulation, Descartes has been held responsible for the development of the mind-body split characterized as Cartesian dualism and for the ensuing oppositions that have held sway in Europe. As man became characterized by mind and intellect, woman increasingly became seen as antithetical to man, thus more closely aligned to body. Likewise, culture, or the province of the mind, became positioned against nature, the province of the body. These gross divisions were only partially explicated; nonetheless, they affected formulations of the body as a site of meaning and as a physical entity. Later philosophies looked to gender as intrinsic, and natural philosophers developed a standard of biological difference that added to these oppositions.
Anatomists began to draw male and female reproductive organs as incommensurate, and the language for the female organs, terms such as "ovary" and "vagina," entered the European vocabulary. Sex became intrinsic and incontrovertible—heat could not make a woman into a man. As woman became conceptualized as unlike man rather than essentially similar, the role of passion changed as well. Women no longer needed orgasm to conceive, laying the groundwork for later theories that pregnancy could occur through rape and that women's passions were essentially maternal rather than genital. As man and woman became anatomically antithetical, the functions of sex organs became central to an understanding of the natural world. Carolus Linnaeus (1707–1778), a naturalist, developed the classification of mammalia—of the breast—to characterize the animals that suckled their young. Contemporaries pointed out that male mammals did not suckle, but the biological difference between male and female stuck as a central part of biological classification.
The new meanings assigned to men, women, and the body politic reconceptualized maternity. The battle of the breast formed one strand of the decisive differences that emerged during the Enlightenment. While the rich had favored wet nurses in previous centuries to maintain the small, firm breast of the woman, social philosophers argued that maternal nursing was a natural act that cemented the roles of family members. The act of wet nursing, in which the poor suckled the rich, became a metaphor for the larger perversions of the political state. In 1780 only 10 percent of Parisian babies were suckled in their own homes, but within twenty years, roughly half of Parisian babies suckled at the maternal breast. The republican model of nurturing mother, suckling child, and approving father promised a new natural political state of equality for man and domesticity for woman.
THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY
The long nineteenth century (1789–1914), marked at the beginning by the French Revolution and the end by the outbreak of World War I, saw a tremendous transformation in bodies and their meanings. New ideas about the equality of "man" gave rise to a variety of revolutionary movements in 1789, the 1830s, and 1848 that demanded greater self-determination but often resulted in greater bureaucratic control of the poor. During this period, the formation of modern nations, scientific racism, the rise of an industrial and consumer culture, and antithetical gender roles all were closely interrelated with the body and the way it was understood.
The French Revolution of 1789 began a reorientation in European politics toward democracy and a mass society. As part of this movement, a shift away from the king as a representation of the body politic and toward the uniformed body of the soldier-citizen worked as a metaphor to reconceptualize the nation. The bodily corruption of the monarchy and the aristocracy served as central themes in satire and caricature to undercut the legitimacy of the ancient regime. For example, the supposed sexual profligacy of Marie Antoinette, the queen of France, became a popular theme in pornographic propaganda. As well as delegitimizing older symbols, the formation of new ideals about the body played out in myriad directions. The guillotine began as a way to minimize the pain of execution and create a uniform system of justice. The kiss of Madame Guillotine, as it became known, supplanted previous crime- and class-specific methods of torture and execution. Men's fashions downplayed the sumptuousness of aristocratic fabrics and offered a new simplicity in the outfitting of men's figures. In spite of the supposed domesticity of women, the female form still had revolutionary potential. The most famous example of this appears in Eugène Delacroix's Liberty Guiding the People, also know as Liberty on the Barricades. Liberty memorialized the uprising of the July revolution of 1830 in which Parisian workers, soldiers, and students overthrew Charles X's monarchy. In the painting, the bare-breasted and barefoot figure of "Liberty" leads the charge through the dead bodies that lay strewn at her feet. She stands a full head taller than her comrades, waving the flag in one hand and holding a rifle in the other. The painting, withdrawn by the French government from public view because of its subversive potential, reemerged during the revolution of 1848. The female form here combined neoclassical elements with a romantic sensibility to express the political demands for a new society. The male and female body thus served as symbolic repositories for thinking through what equality meant to civil society.
Against this backdrop of new ideals of equality, economics still affected the physical form. During the first half of the century, people continued to go hungry as industrialization spread from England to the Continent. The rich continued to be taller, healthier, and less stricken by disease than the poor. Although conditions were alleviated during the second half of the century through improved agricultural techniques, a leveling off of the birthrate, and improved public hygiene, the changes were incremental and the poor still suffered hunger and debility. Widespread industrialization caused its own infirmities, like scalpings when girls' long hair was caught in machines, dismemberment from industrial accidents, and new forms of industry-related disease like black lung and brown lung. Although sanitary measures became a public health concern, crowding, adulterated food, and dirt and disease made the poor seem like a race apart.
Questions of race. The issues of race were exacerbated by new scientific theories and the renewal of European imperialism. Racialism gained new ground with the development of theories of evolution. Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) examined the way that animal species developed over time. However, his theories were rapidly applied to people. The problems emerged in deciding who constituted the species of mankind and in what direction that species was heading, as Darwin's Descent of Man (1871) made explicit. Concerns with race contributed to two competing theories on the origins of mankind; the first, called monogenesis, posited a single line of descent; the second, called polygenesis, insisted that the races had multiple lines of descent and that each race constituted a different species. Accordingly, each race had different distinguishing marks and scientists developed schemas of body types to classify the races. The Jewish or hook nose, the jug ears of the Irish, the kinky hair of Africans became supposedly scientific facts, rather than mere stereotypes. The science of race tried to document body type and correlate social, emotional, and intellectual factors with the physical form. Eugenicists attempted to sort out the races using basic tools for measurement like calipers, scales, and measuring tapes and tried to assign the races distinct social strengths and pathologies.
The clear diversity of physical forms even amongst whites and fears about what diversity meant for society fostered attempts to fix social ills through breeding. (For example, English aristocrats were almost eight inches taller than working-class men, as recruiters found when trying to enlist soldiers for the Boer War between 1899 and 1902. Out of twenty thousand volunteers, fourteen thousand were rejected on the basis of being unfit.) To combat "race suicide," eugenicists developed two programs. In the negative eugenics program, they believed that if what they considered to be degenerate types could be separated from the rest of society, they would no longer interbreed with the fit and pollute the body politic. They attempted to limit the reproduction of those they identified as social inferiors like criminals, alcoholics, and the insane through voluntary and involuntary birth control. The more positive eugenics program encouraged the proliferation of the fit by promoting reproduction, limiting birth control for the healthy, and providing social insurance programs for children. These positive campaigns became more vehement after World War I, particularly in France and England, because of the enormous death rates both societies suffered and the plummeting birthrates. The search for racial types reached its most radical conclusions under Adolf Hitler, but only after attaining a respectable place in sociology and medicine for almost fifty years from the late nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth century.
As racial types became scientifically defined through body parts, fitness and the development of modern medicine allowed individuals to transform their bodies to fit the new standards. Greater attention to the individual body produced remarkable results in the discovery of antisepsis and anesthetics. These discoveries allowed surgeons to venture beneath the skin to repair and remake the body without killing the patient. The idea that beauty equals health and happiness became paramount. Surgeons could beautify individuals according to the new "scientific" ideals of body standards circumventing the biological standards of race.
Schooling the body. The nineteenth century also saw the rise of physical education, athleticism, sport, and the schooling of the body as an organized educational activity. Although people played physical games and engaged in sport (like boxing and hunting) before the nineteenth century, the nineteenth century characterized these earlier pleasures as barbaric bloodsport and systematized physicality so that control rather than excess became the watchword of exercise. The back-to-nature movement in Scandinavia and Germany promoted heathy exercise for the individual and social renewal for the group. Bathing, in nature and in swimming pools, promoted fitness, vigor, and mental health. Organized hiking allowed people to slough off the pollution and degradation of industrial and urban life and renew their primitive sides. Physical education drew upon military drilling and rhythmic exercises to make children into compliant and productive citizens and workers. The assembly, for example, schooled the body in a posture of discipline, carefully segregated individuals into a uniform mass, and controlled the unregulated habits of children, guaranteeing no kicking, punching, tickling, or other displays of childlike physical pleasures. The careful positioning of bodies made them easy to watch, control, and discipline. The same techniques that applied to children prevailed wherever masses of uniform bodies were needed by the state, such as in prisons, the army, and other institutions.
The overt discipline of the bodies of the poor was matched by more covert ways to discipline according to social class and gender. Changes in fashion begun during the French Revolution continued to heighten the physical differences between men and women throughout the nineteenth century. As men's clothes became plainer with the rise of the ubiquitous black suit that cut across class lines, social class played out on and through the female form. Working-class women's clothes, featuring petticoats, shirts, skirts, shawls, and wooden shoes, marked them as utilitarian working beings. Rich women's clothing guaranteed good posture and a body well-formed for sexual pleasure by straightening the spine, pushing up the breasts, narrowing the waist, and accentuating the buttocks. Corsets and bustles, layers of undergarments, and heavy and expensive cloth marked a rich woman as incapable of work and barely capable of walking. As part of this demarcation, rich women's bodies were transformed by the trappings of their class. They experienced spinal curvatures, displaced internal organs, and a limited physical capacity that hindered their ability to sit, walk, and dance. Fashion magazines and etiquette books offered programs and advice to the parvenue on ways to act, dress, and appear appropriately. Their stylized figures and the mannerisms that emerged to match the clothes demanded the utmost attention and care.
The display of the body. At the same time, however, few people had the opportunity to gaze upon their figures in full. Most peasant villages had only one mirror located at the barbershop, and the urban poor had as little opportunity to see themselves as physical beings. With the rise of a widespread commodity culture in the late nineteenth century, mirrors became more popular even though the tinge of erotic appeal continued to stigmatize them. Gazing at oneself implied a lewdness associated with prostitution and drunkenness because barrooms and brothels featured large mirrors for voyeurism and self-inspection. Parents of respectable girls kept them from viewing themselves as a way to preserve their psychological and physical chastity. Girls washed in light shifts rather than naked and wore costumes for sea bathing that covered their torsos and extremities. The physical form was an object for outward display, rather than close self-inspection.
Against the backdrop of this circumspection, the display of monstrous bodies took on additional potency in the Victorian world. Touring companies and permanent installations of biological curiosities allowed the public to see the supposed wonders from distant (and mostly fictionalized) lands. The "Hottentot Venus" and the "Elephant Man" in England, the "Aztec Twins" and the "Fuegians" in Germany, and the pan-European tours of "Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy" and "Lionel the Lion Man" all brought throngs of spectators to consider the strangeness of biology and the oddity of the physical form. The narratives of the sideshow posited the possibility that these people served as the evolutionary "missing link" between man and animals. These narratives set the people's origins in the remote "jungles" of distant lands where they lived outside modern society surrounded by like individuals. People thronged to such spectacles—a crowd of fifty thousand descended to watch the Fuegians go about their daily lives. They also bought photographs, postcards, and other mementos to remind them of such sights. The fixation on oddities did not stop at casual entertainment; anthropologists debated the origins of such anomalies. Visitors could touch the Hottentot Venus to prove that her rump was unpadded, and scientists wrote papers on the meaning of her genitals. Especially given the close attention to sexual propriety for "normal" female bodies (whose rumps, though padded, were not prodded), the focus on monstrous bodies as entertainment and education in the Victorian world underlined the centrality of the physical form as a basis of meaning. Undergirding the fascination with oddities were questions about the origins of humankind and the meaning of physical diversity.
The eroticism of the naked form and close restrictions on sexuality heightened taboos around sexuality. New injunctions against homosexuality, prostitution, masturbation, and pornography arose during the nineteenth century as a way to channel the energies of sexuality. Behind these conflicts lay a concept of the body as a limited energy system. Masturbation wasted energy and directed sexuality away from marital, procreative sexuality. Furthermore, continued masturbation left the body and mind sapped and impotent resulting in mental and physical illness. Doctors and parents used a variety of methods to discourage the practice. At the simplest level, innuendos and lack of privacy for adolescents discouraged masturbation or at least encouraged the concealment of it. When adolescents continued to masturbate, parents, physicians, and moralists turned to more complicated techniques including sermons and lectures, restraining devices, and physical mutilation to stop the chronic masturbator.
The emphasis on procreative sexuality within marriage should have discouraged prostitution. However, the belief that men needed a sexual outlet meant that men sought prostitutes and that the number of prostitutes continued to rise. European states reacted to the rise in prostitution by alternately outlawing it, regulating it, and ignoring it. The problem of venereal disease kept these problems of prostitution in front of the state. Doctors considered prostitutes one of the main vectors of venereal disease and recommended they be placed in prison or venereal hospitals subject to dubious medical treatment like the ingestion of arsenic and mercury. Feminist campaigns for social purity that emerged across Europe from Britain to Russia built upon the image of the prostitute as the victim of men's promiscuity and the state's unfeeling treatment of women. The prostitute became a powerful icon for addressing male sexual privilege at the expense of women's purity because contemporary theory argued that women had few sexual or economic desires of their own. Often the injunctions against such sexual practices held their own erotic appeal, as can be seen in the white slave trade scandals at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. The popular press reported on the supposed abduction and sexual slavery of young girls. These sensationalist reports heightened concerns about girls' safety and raised the specter of a dark menace that preyed upon the innocence of Western women. Though few cases of sexual slavery were found, and those women who were spirited abroad were generally seasoned prostitutes who went to work in continental brothels, the frisson of fear that accompanied such reports added to the sexual thrills of Victorian and Edwardian society's ideas of race.
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
The factors that limited bodies in the premodern world, such as inadequate food sources and unhygienic cities, had been curtailed by the beginning of the twentieth century. Bodies grew bigger and people had a greater likelihood of surviving to adulthood. The development of antibiotics during World War II, combined with the nineteenth-century medical advances of antisepsis and anesthetics, promised to wipe out disease and ill health. The great scourges of the past, from smallpox to polio, declined and in some cases were eradicated making it seem as if the precariousness of life and the fragility of the body would end. However, the massive mortality of the two world wars combined with the cataclysm of the Holocaust undermined this vision of progress. Instead, the tension between two opposing ideals of bodies that were established during the nineteenth century deepened during the twentieth. On the one hand, bodies became building blocks of a mass society; on the other hand, the rise of individualism played out in the greater attention to the individual body. The world wars and the rise of mass politics during the twentieth century insisted that bodies mattered mostly in quantity. The numbers game of trench warfare, in which each side attempted to throw the most soldiers "over the top" into no-man's-land, set a standard for mass death and dismemberment that has since characterized the twentieth century. At the same time, the development of commercialization and identity politics insisted the individual is distinct and noteworthy. This contradiction still dominated the politics of bodies at the close of the twentieth century.
World War I brought home the necessity of health and fitness in a mass society. At the same time, it also insisted on a fragility of bodies and established a new relationship between mind and body. The sheer numbers of people needed for mass war in World War I encouraged a new rationalization of resources and manpower. The health of the individual and the meaning of bodily fitness became an essential function of the state. In the front lines this meant a greater uniformity of the individual for the formation of a mass army. As the war devoured men on the front lines, they became interchangeable parts in favor of larger objectives of the war. In a grand irony, this commitment to the masses meant greater caloric intake and better health for working-class soldiers even given the appalling casualty rates. Behind the front lines, the rationing of calories, particularly in Germany, weighed the needs of the individual with the needs of the nation's war machine and left a generation of children with the physical consequences of malnourishment. As the state expanded to meet the needs of "total war," it took greater control of the individual's body, molding, using, and ultimately discarding it in accordance with the demands of the greater society.
As the fighting and horrendous conditions affected men's minds, European society needed to confront the mind-body split in new ways. No longer could insanity and the refusal of the mind to function be blamed solely upon a weak feminized biology that allowed for an easily disrupted body. At the outset of the war, doctors first believed that soldiers were faking their conditions. As more seasoned and decorated soldiers experienced neurasthenia and hysteria, doctors and military officials turned to a biological explanation—a blast from high velocity shells disrupted the nervous system causing "shell shock." However, by the end of the war, psychological explanations gained ground—no longer a conscious or a physical act, the unconscious mind of the soldier took over the body, rendering it incapable of action. Although psychologists and doctors attempted to use moral suasion, firmness, and a controlled environment to convince men's minds that fighting constituted progress, the long-term relationship between mind and body continued to be called into question, raising room for a later acceptance of Freudian analysis.
The massive number of mutilated men returning from the front as amputees, invalids, and victims of shell shock encouraged the development of reconstructive surgery to assist in their return to society. Physical reconstruction, though limited in its ability to restore faces and bodies, attempted to provide the patient some semblance of normality and happiness. The reconstructed face could not "pass" as normal: instead, surgeons tried to create a visage closer to humanity. (A French gibe stated that before the patient was horrible and afterward ridiculous.) The limited efficacy of such procedures encouraged a new modernist sensibility that rejected positivist notions about progress, at least in the artistic community. Representations of the wounded hero and particularly the image of veterans mutilated by face wounds became an important visual and literary element in the promotion of interwar pacifism. Exhibitions of facial casts from military hospitals in Paris, Berlin, and London allowed visitors to experience the horrors of war and scrutinize surgical reconstructions of the wounded. Expressionism in particular grappled with the disfigurement of veterans as a metaphor for the ugliness of society. Surrealists incorporated the rawness of bodily effluvia and perceived bodily urges—blood and excrement, sex and death—into their paintings. The veterans themselves fought to get basic benefits like artificial limbs and pensions and worried less about the symbolic uses of their disfigurement. The schism between high and low meanings of disfigurement in the early 1920s quickly disappeared as life as normal returned and the politics of disfigurement retreated to the background of European society. The disfigured continued to be a large part of the European landscape, however, and as late as 1938, 222 thousand officers and 419 thousand enlisted men received disability pensions in Britain alone because of World War I.
The interwar years. The interwar years continued to transform the roles of women, the meaning of sexuality, and the state's responsibility for health and fitness. The exigencies of war had allowed more female autonomy, in part because the needs for women's productive labor superceded demands for reproduction. While women's roles as wife, mother, and daughter remained important for propaganda purposes, the necessities of war afforded women new opportunities to define themselves. For the most part, this meant taking jobs long denied them, having sex outside of marriage, marrying earlier, or striking out on their own. Across Europe, women's freedom during the war contributed to the subsequent contest over sexuality in the 1920s and 1930s. In a striking example, the need for soldiers during the civil war in Russia allowed women to form an independent unit called the Women's Battalion of Death. The women in the battalion shaved their heads, wore regular army gear, and trained to fight. However, the Red Army used them for propaganda purposes—as a way to raise troops—rather than allowing them to contribute on the front lines. Outside of Russia, caricatures of the battalion insisted on seeing them as sexual creatures rather than as equal citizens and soldiers.
The place of women and the meanings of female sexuality and the female body were much debated on all sides. The falling birthrates, the belief in an abortion epidemic, and rising rates of women's paid labor pitted the new woman, with bobbed hair, shaved legs, and a job, against the idea of the traditional wife and mother. Progressives tended to see women's roles as workers and citizens as important as their roles as mothers and made birth control and abortion more available so that women could control their own fertility. Even with their attempts to alleviate sexual misery from unplanned and unwanted pregnancies, though, sex reformers made sexual health, including the female orgasm, part of a program that would serve the state. They recommended that sex education including technical information would restore marriage and stabilize society. Conservatives and fascists tended to see sex education and birth control in a more negative light and stressed women's social and biological roles within the family as primary. (Mussolini gave medals to mothers with large families who provided many sons for the state.) The female orgasm, no longer necessary to conception according to the more recent understandings of sexual reproduction, mattered less than the social imperative of populations and the state.
Discussions of sexuality included a reconceptualization of homosexuality. Sexologists in the nineteenth century, like Richard Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902) and Havelock Ellis (1859–1939), began to reexamine sexuality through the lens of science. They believed that homosexuality and other so-called sexual aberrancies were medical rather than criminal. Building upon the work of these early sexologists, scientists like Magnus Hirschfield argued that homosexuals were "sick people" with a specific etiology rather than individuals who willfully disregarded morality, theology, and the law. As a "sick" person the homosexual should not be prosecuted, but treated and cured. Hirschfield's Institute of Sexual Science in Berlin bore the slogan "per scientam ad justitiam" (to justice through science). The medical model of homosexuality began to affect legislation during the early 1930s, but the fascist backlash circumvented its acceptance. Hirschfield's institute was one of the first sites of Nazi book burnings in the 1930s as the Nazis sought to make an example of the institute's liberalism and supposed disregard of the family.
Society's concern with health, fitness, and the body gained momentum during the interwar period. The rise of modern dance, nudism, and dieting were all predicated upon new ideals of discipline and display rather than concealment. In France, for example, the new culture of dieting emerged in urban areas, particularly for the middle-class woman. The voluptuousness of the corseted female figure from the nineteenth century gave way to a new angularity of women clothed in outfits more attuned to movement, exercise, and athleticism during the twentieth. Doctors began to prescribe regimes of exercise and restraint, overturning traditional ideas of gluttony and plumpness as indicators of good health. While in rural areas food and fatness continued to signal good fortune, the urban ideal of bodies became one of control and moderation. Even Communist Party newspapers during the interwar years embraced fashion and fitness as legitimate concerns indicating a top-down movement of body image. The shift in ideas about weight demonstrates the centrality of control and discipline to the twentieth-century world.
While immediately after the war a focus on the body included a greater sympathy for the heroically wounded and disabled, the shift toward health and vigor as measures of political strength quickly returned. In Germany, the hard, male body became central to ideals of the fascist state. Leni Riefenstahl'sOlympiad (1938) served as a preeminent attempt to apply modernist techniques of representation to the physical form. Her filming techniques, including a nontraditional narrative, close editing, and the use of multiple camera angles, seem divergent from more traditional aesthetic standards set by Hitler's government, which rejected most forms of modernist representation as degenerate. However, the film's emphasis on beauty, fitness, competition, and the interchangeability of perfect bodies seems emblematic of the Nazi cult of the body. The glorification of raw, male power in her film corresponded with the larger objectives of the Nazi government. As political parties made their bids for control of the vastly expanded state, the issue of body politics made its way to the center of political ideologies.
The continued interest in eugenics during the interwar years made the physicality of the body key to the strength of the state. In the most extreme example under the Nazi government, the characteristics of the body correlated to the individual's' political and social place in society. According to this formulation, Jewishness no longer meant a religion or cultural identity, but a series of physical characteristics (skin color, nose shape, ear proportions) that indicated what the Nazis saw as the deeper Jewish goals of promoting communism or capitalism. Thus, while individuals might lie about their purpose, the body could not. The Nazis took the idea of bodies laboring for the state and expanded it so that not only the product of bodies but the bodies themselves belonged to the state. These ideas clearly related to earlier ideas about physical fitness and health, in which the state derived its vigor from that of its citizens. For German citizens, this program meant that their primary allegiance belonged to the state, and they owed it to the state to maintain good health and strong offspring. In a great irony, the Nazi regime began an antismoking campaign as a way to maintain good health. What made the Nazi regime's treatment of physicality particularly disturbing was that they extrapolated these ideas so that the body no longer maintained its integrity, particularly for its subjects rather than its citizens. Hair, fillings, physical functions all served the state as raw material. The body became a resource for experimentation and recycling, as the treatment of Jews and other subjects made clear. Until the 1980s, skeletons and preserved tissue samples from the Holocaust victims of the Nazi era circulated in West German universities and laboratories. The impact of earlier policies lingered in the German reluctance to donate organs, as compared with other European countries where harvesting and donation became more routine. The physical integrity of the body has become paramount as a way to reject Nazism. (In contrast, East German society under communism, which saw organ donation as serving the community and state, had much higher rates of donation and transplant. The overtones of Nazi policies in eastern Germany were superseded by the communist ideal that the individual should serve the state before and after death.)
After World War II. In the postwar world, a number of often contradictory impulses toward the body and its meanings predominated in Europe. In Western Europe, the body entered the provinces of commercialization and identity politics even though the two were often at odds. In Eastern Europe, the body remained subordinated to the needs of the state, but the utilitarian nature of communist regimes sometimes afforded more leeway for individuals in terms of choices for the body than liberal regimes in Western Europe; the availability of abortion is one example. The ideas of health and fitness that dominated the interwar years returned after the end of World War II. Rather than being mediated by the economics of a boom economy in the twenties and the bust economy of the 1930s, the economic growth allowed for a more fully commercialized society in Western Europe.
Commercialization encouraged a deepening concern with beauty, as the continued rise of plastic surgery, creams, fads, and potions show. The body continued to be groomed as a sign of health and happiness, and increasingly this sign became available to all classes. State-sponsored social welfare programs that offered adequate nutrition and medical care allowed the physical differences of class—like height and health—to diminish. In turn, this physical equality combined with a greater availability of consumer goods allowed identity to be at once less permanent and more prominently displayed. Not only did clothes become cheaper, allowing people to put on and take off their allegiance to brands and fashions, but the supposedly innate biological markers like lip shape, biological sex, or nose size could be changed.
Sexual health and a focus on the body beautiful made erotic display and erotic pleasure central to new conceptions of identity. The sexual body joined the realm of commercialization as products to enhance erotic appeal were joined by advertising that used sexuality to sell products of all types. A number of factors including greater access to birth control, a loosening of restrictions around pornography, and new conceptions of marriage predicated upon intimacy, partnership, and love, rather than economics or progeny, allowed the erotic body to be separated from the reproductive body. Sexual pleasure became a worthy goal in and of itself. Sexual education, begun in the interwar years to combat sexual misery, was superseded in the 1960s and 1970s by sexual liberation and the right to sexual pleasure. This conception of sexual pleasures as innately worthy allowed for a further liberalization of laws against homosexuality. Gay activists began to argue that homosexuality was not an aberrancy or pathology but a normal state upon which one's identity rested.
New patterns of formulating life and death, the outermost markers of bodily integrity—demonstrate the continued problems of embodiment and its representations in Europe. Greater control of the body by the medical profession has raised new questions and options toward the body. In vitro fertilization, artificial insemination, and surrogate motherhood further removed boundaries around reproduction. Pregnancy has become a choice, but a choice increasingly made in tandem with doctors and technology. Even death seems fully medicalized. The vast majority of Europeans die in hospitals attached to machines under the watching eyes of the medical community. Medical technology keeps the body alive after severe accidents and organ failure, raising the issue of where the self resides. The older pattern of death as part of life seems to have disappeared. Whether souls reside in the brain, the whole body, or in the beating heart, whether life starts at conception, quickening, or birth, whether cloning replicates the soul as well as the body have become important questions because of developments of technological progress. Whereas philosophers raised such questions during the Enlightenment and saw science as providing new answers, science raises these issues and leaves society struggling to catch up.
On the other hand, older beliefs about death and the body continue to haunt European society. With the breakdown of the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe, the body has again been reformulated as a symbol of massive political change. In one of the more interesting (and gruesome) examples the political implications of change have played out in corpses and dead bodies through the exhumation and reburying of political figures. The rise in ethnic nationalism in the Balkan region encouraged a grand tour of the bones of Prince Lazar to commemorate the battle of Kosovo in 1389. In 1987, his bones began a two-year tour of Serbian monasteries from Belgrade through Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo in an illustration of the belief that Serbia is wherever Serbs are buried. The display of his bones outlined the political geography of greater Serbia. The "politics of dead bodies," to use a phrase by Katherine Verdery, consolidated claims by ethnic national groups in the former Yugoslavia. Mass graves, which had been ignored as part of the formation of the multinational state after World War II, added to the rhetoric of nationalism as each group began to exhume the bodies of their dead. Older beliefs about the body can thus suddenly revive as symbols of massive political change.
The contradiction in the history of the body, as old ideas suddenly reemerge alongside new meanings, demonstrates that conceptions of embodiment are neither integrated nor progressive. Instead, the patchwork of often conflicting beliefs affect bodies and their representations at all levels. The sexual body, the gendered body, the political body, and the commercialized body have all had their own histories that warrant close attention. Historians have only begun to excavate and make sense of the meanings of bodies. Because these beliefs refuse to remain static or stable, work on the topic should continue to preoccupy historians for any number of years.
See also other articles in this section.
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