Victorian Skin: Surface, Self, History 9781501731600

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. The Self as Surface
1. Sense
2. Expression
Part II. Permeability
3. Out
4. In
Part III. Alienated and Alienating
5. Flayed
6. Flaying
Part IV. Inscriptions
7. Marked
8. Tattoo
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

q VICTORIAN SKIN

VICTORIAN SKIN

n

S U R FACE , SE L F, H I STO R Y

Pamel a K. Gilbert

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2019 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 2019 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Librarians: A CIP data record is available from the Library of Congress. “Signs of syphilis on the site of a tattoo.” Illustration to “Notes of Cases on an Outbreak of Syphilis following on Tattooing,” British Medical Journal (May 4, 1889). Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images: images@wellcome. ac.uk. Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only license CC BY 4.0.

q Contents

List of Illustrations  vii Acknowledgments ix

Introduction1 Part I. The Self as Surface

1. Sense

25

2. Expression

63

Part II. P ermeabilit y

3. Out

107

4. In

141

Part III. Alienated and Alienating

5. Flayed

181

6. Flaying

230

Part IV. Inscriptions

7. Marked

279

8. Tattoo

318

Conclusion350 Notes 361 Works Cited  397 Index 417

v

q Illustrations

1.1. Bell, Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression (1824), “Plate One: Being a View of the Nerves of the Head” 1.2. Bell, Anatomy of Expression (1806), showing “reverent attention with elevation of thought” 1.3. Bell, Anatomy of Expression (1806), “Plate IV: Of the Muscles of the Face of Brutes” 3.1. George Henry Fox, “Syphiloderma Tuberculosis,” in Photographic Illustrations of Cutaneous Syphilis (1881), Plate XXV 4.1. Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Marat (1793), Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Belgium 4.2. Paul-Jacques-Aimé Baudry, Charlotte Corday (1860), Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes 5.1. French Officer’s Leg Skin (1793), The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh 6.1. Bell, Anatomy of Expression (1824), “Crying” [from pain] 6.2. Paul Chenavard, La Divine Tragédie, in the museum catalog Divina Tragedia (between 1865 and 1869), Paris, Musée d’Orsay 6.3. Apollo Flaying Marsyas, detail of Chenavard’s Divina Tragedia, Paris, Musée d’Orsay 7.1. Tom sees himself in the mirror, in Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby (1864) 8.1. Tichborne daguerreotype by Thomas Helsby (as published in 1876) 9.1. The “individual ego as a psychical id . . . ,” from Freud’s The Ego and the Id (1923)

37 40 42

121 159 162 213 235

244 246 309 319 355

vii

q Acknow l edgme nts

As is usual with any large project, I owe thanks to too many people to count. Institutions first: I have relied on the generous assistance and friendly atmosphere of the Wellcome Institute at UCL and the Wellcome Library for the History of Medicine, the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, the Senate House Library and Special Collections at UCL and the library at the University of Edinburgh, the Anatomical Museum at the University of Edinburgh, as well as Library West at the University of Florida. I am especially indebted to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University for substantial financial support. Both the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Warwick University provided opportunities for collegial interaction. Thanks also to the Albert Brick Professorship and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida. Of my UF colleagues, all of whom are important sources of intellectual stimulation and emotional nurturance, I would like to especially thank Kenneth Kidd, John Leavey, Judith Page, Malini Schueller, Phil Wegner, Melissa Hyde, Sid Dobrin, Robert Thomson, Susan Hegeman, Chris Snodgrass, Stephanie Smith, John Murchek, Jodi Schorb, Kim Emery, Terry Harpold, Apollo Amoko, Leah Rosenberg, Tace Hedrick, Brandon Kershner, Marsha Bryant, and Roger Maioli. Melissa Davis, Kathy Williams, Carla Blount, Jeri White, and the late Janet Moore kept the department—and me—running and (more or less) sane. My colleagues at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell 2016–17 have all contributed materially to this project; I would like to thank Tim Murray, Gloria Kim, Andrea Bachner, Alana Staiti, Stacey Langwick, Kevin Ohi, Samantha Sheppard, Ricardo Wilson, Naminata Diabate, Nancy Worman, Erik Born, Daniel Smyth, Ricardo A. Wilson II, and Emily Rials, and most particularly Gemma Angel, Elyse Semerdjian, Karmen MacKendrick, Seçil Yilmaz, and Alicia Imperiale for many thoughtful comments and references. Thanks to Elisha Cohn and Ellis Hanson both

ix

x    A C K N O W L E D G M E N TS

for their useful comments and general collegiality and warmth. Thanks also to the stellar staff at the Society, Paula L. Epps-Cepero, Sarah Leigh Hennies, and Emily Parsons. I owe special gratitude to Caroline Levine for her friendship and sense of intellectual community, and for being an ethical rock in a tumultuous time. Of colleagues outside of Florida, I am particularly indebted to Kathy Psomiades, Talia Schaffer, Elizabeth Langland, Laurel Brake, Andrew King, Steve Sturdy, William Cohen, Ross Forman, Arlene Young, Kate Flint, James Kincaid, Sally Shuttleworth, Rohan McWilliam, Peter Logan, Anne Marie Beller, Marlene Tromp, Dino Felluga, Carolyn Day, Teresa Magnum, Lorenzo Servitje, Claire McKechnie-Mason, Peter Capuano, Andrew Mangham, Martin Hewitt, Regenia Gangnier, Heather Tilley, Anna Maria Jones, Meri-Jane Rochelson, Dennis Denisoff, Nancy Armstrong, Marian Thain, Christopher Keep, Susan Zieger, Linda Hughes, Elsie Michie, Deidre Lynch, Kate Newey, Brenda Austin-Smith, Devoney Looser, Carolyn Day, Priscilla Wald, and many others whose comments at conferences or over email and social media have been essential. Many of my UF graduate students have contributed to my thinking and have generally helped make my intellectual environment a productive one, and I’d like to thank them all, but especially Sarah Lennox, Daniel S. Brown, Sarah Kniesler, Christopher Gage, Jackie Amorim, Angela Walther, Gareth Hadykk-DeLodder, and Sabrina Gilchrist. This work or work related to it has been presented at a number of conferences, lists, and working groups, where many scholars have influenced my ideas. These include most notably NAVSA, but also the MLA, the Victorians Institute, BAVS, VPFA, BWWC, VICTORIA-L, and the Victorians Institute, where I have shared my work and relied on the generous commentary of other participants. Anna Kornbluh, Mike Goode, and Coran (Claudia) Klaver, along with others I have already thanked above, kindly read and commented on a chapter at a CNY Corridor Workshop at Cornell. Additionally, I have been fortunate to have the opportunity to present my work at campuses, where I have been helped by questions and comments: at Birkbeck College, Cornell University, Arizona State University, University of Warwick, University of Pennsylvania, University of Toronto, Northwestern University, University of North Texas, CUNY, University of Manitoba and the Affect Project (funded by SSHRC), Hong Kong University, Oxford University, and the University of Edinburgh. I am no doubt forgetting many who have helped me, but I am sure with the same generosity with which they did so, they will now forgive me. It should go without saying—but I will say it anyway—that none of them should be blamed for any of my inaccuracies or misreadings, nor should their

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S     xi

helpfulness be mistaken for endorsement of all my arguments. I must also thank the Cornell University librarian Anne Kenney, and Mahinder Kingra and Dean Smith at Cornell University Press, as well as my generous and helpful anonymous readers. Finally, I am very grateful to John Lowry, who has kept the home fires burning, often and especially when that meant putting fires out.

q VICTORIAN SKIN

Introduction I protest against all our interest, all our effort at understanding being given to the young skins that look blooming in spite of trouble. —George Eliot, Middlemarch

I began research for this study with a simple question: what did Victorians talk about when they talked about skin? For Victorians, the skin was a text to be read, a medium for the expression and interpretation of interiority. This function of the surface predates modernity, of course, but the nineteenth century contributed a scientific and philosophical perspective that refigured the role of the surface: no longer simply a wrapping, it became a substance integral to and having a creative role in the generation of the self. The Victorian period saw a flurry of publications on the skin. A midcentury reprinted lecture aimed at a general reader states flatly, “The skin is what you live in; it is your habitation. . . . It is also that by which you live” (Urquhart 229). This book traces the development of an exuberant, anxious, and fertile discussion in the nineteenth century: where is subjectivity located? How do people communicate with and understand each other’s feelings? How does our surface—which contains us, presents us to others, and mediates between our inner materiality and the larger world outside us—function and create meaning? And how should that embodied process be represented in literature? Though today we often think of this period and its narratives as the great age of interiority, the era’s philosophical and anatomical knowledge in fact insists on a materialist self, located on the surface of the body. It is this move to a surface-self that enables realism as a dominant aesthetic mode of 1

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narration, and in turn interpretation of the body and its affects as an ascendant mode of reading. Whereas the eighteenth century saw new materialist views of the psyche that challenged dualism by locating the self in the body, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries more definitively sourced consciousness in the nervous system and its distributed terminals on the body’s surface. The Terror of the French Revolution marks a radical break with more optimistic narratives of modernity and progress; it also marks a moment when a culture of appearances becomes both especially fascinating and an object of profound unease and suspicion. Challenging the belief that motives and emotions were readable and similar across different bodies, the Terror suggested an opacity and mystery in each human body. As the individual comes to be central to the period’s economics, politics, and literature, the surface-self, so available to the gaze, becomes the principal puzzle for the emergent psychology that underpins the period’s political and aesthetic theories. Much scholarship after Foucault’s work on the body and governmentality focused on discipline and surveillance. After having grounded my own work for many years on disease and the disciplinary functions of public health, I wanted to know what “normal” understandings of skin might be. What did novelists and poets and journalists and scientists say about skin when they were not talking just about deviance or pathology? What did doctors think healthy skin was and did? And when pathology did come up, how did it relate to skin’s overall cultural meanings? The topic of skin, like skin itself, is both narrow and wide, depending upon the angle of approach. In fact, like any basic rubric, it is an inexhaustible one, the kind of topic that excites conference auditors to begin listing their own associations. Taxidermy! Flagellation! (Spoiler: this book is not about taxidermy or flagellation.) And of course, libraries can be written on the topics of color and race. But four general thought-categories emerged fairly quickly: (1) skin as a surface for the sensing and expressive self; (2) as a permeable boundary; (3) as an alienable substance; and (4) as site of inherent and inscribed properties. These areas coalesced within two common themes: surface as perceiving, affective subject, and surface as aesthetic, affective object of interpretation. The first four categories became the structural divisions of the present work, and the last two themes, its overarching narrative. Within these parameters were articulated some of the largest questions in philosophy, medicine, and science: questions about the nature of the self, the boundaries of the human, and the progress of history. The method of selection I have followed here is similarly both expansive and limited. On a first pass, I engaged in what Sharon Marcus has called a kind

I N T R O D U C T I O N     3

of distant reading for “patterns” (11)1—looking for broadly iterated themes and terms through a mass of cultural texts from medicine to journalism to literature. It was only after finding those patterns that I began to select my examples for closer reading. These analyses aim at some traditional targets of close reading—to elucidate, through examination of context and intertext as well as of intrinsic detail, and often, generic and formal properties, a rich web of signification. This book also aims, as a history, to place those significations in terms of the development of a broad array of ideas that have been influential for the history of our aesthetics, literature, and bodies. Though the book’s structure is expository and thematic, it also elaborates an argument about literary history, developing somewhat aslant that structure: this line of reasoning is about how realism enters Victorian aesthetics, how it develops as the preeminent literary impulse of the period and a materialist mode of narration, and how it interacts with idealism, in part through invoking such nonrealist forms as myth and fantasy. In literature, the new physiology and the emergence of the historical concept of the individual subject meant that description focused with increasing keenness on the surface of the body, its actions and reactions. On the one hand, materialism permeated the newer techniques of writing such as realism, and on the other, the invention of the modern bourgeois individual celebrated by Romanticism emphasized ideas of free will, self-determination, and a teleology of human becoming that did not sit easily within a materialist frame. Realism, which I treat as a discursive mode dominant in the period rather than a discrete prose genre, is known for its exhaustive cataloging of objects, and equally for its inventory of bodies’ surfaces. Understanding surface and skin’s history allows us a different, and fuller, understanding of the period’s literary modes and aesthetics. The midcentury realist novel, and its offspring, sensation (essentially a development of the gothic and romance narrative through the lens of the dominant techniques of realist discourse), focused on the psychology of individuals, on sensation and perception. Narrative poetry, especially in the spasmodic movement, took up the same issues and narrative techniques. At the same time, authors influenced most heavily by German idealism, mostly poets and essayists but also a number of novelists throughout the period, diverged from the focus on materialist psychology, taking up the larger historical questions implicit in natural theology. They often sought inspiration in pre- or alternative histories such as mythology, read through an idealist lens. They are also less invested in the body’s surface as subject than in a model of a deep, transpersonal subjectivity, and their interest in surface is less connected to materialist models of embodied mind than to an interest in artistic representations of suffering and transcendence. Yet they also often

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worked with realist techniques and modes of narration, even while having recourse to these techniques within other genres, such as myth and fantasy. As the themes of the book emerged, some topoi were less surprising (blushing, tattoos) than others. I expected color to be important, and it was, but in ways less clearly and directly related to race than I predicted. I was interested to discover that Victorians talked about skin; they also talked—a lot—about history. Perhaps this is because in the context of evolution, any discussion of the body immediately raises the fraught possibility that the human body itself has a history beyond the individual and familial. However, the surface of the body seemed particularly to evoke the question of historical change.2 In an era when the self is to be read on the surface, individual history is supposed to be legible in the body’s habitual expressions, and signs of age and experience such as wrinkles and scars. However, Victorians also linked it to the longer sweep of history in some obvious ways (first, appearance as sign of heredity, and later in the period as signifying prior forms through atavism, etc.)—and some less-obvious ones. I did not imagine that skin, especially flayed skin, would be central to discussions of historical change. Yet, so it was, very often through the influence of Romantic ideas about historical progression linked to the French Revolution. I also did not initially imagine I would be citing so many philosophers, but of course the most influential scientists, especially in the earlier part of the period, often were philosophers, or considered their work to be responding directly to philosophical debates. I began also by treating philosophical texts on a par with the others. However, it emerged that for many of the literary and scientific works I was dealing with, there was an (often explicit) engagement with these as authoritative: that is, the authors were either influenced by or in dialogue with the earlier philosophical texts as authoritative statements. The names from within the period that came up frequently (such as Alexander Bain or Herbert Spencer) were easily included in the first sweep of texts that directly addressed the themes in the moment. But working from my first selection of texts back to their own principal interlocutors, often located in a prior period, I was more surprised than I should have been to see the widespread influence of the Scottish Common Sense school, and very surprised to see the continued and powerful importance of the German idealists throughout the period—often coming through secondary sources into the British conversation. It was not until I saw the repetition of a pattern of dialogue between materialism (often modified through the Scottish Common Sense tradition) and idealism (very often coming up in the context of the historical trauma of the French Revolution) that I came to see those two influences, both in parallel and in dialogue throughout the period, as

I N T R O D U C T I O N     5

a structuring narrative of the story I was telling.3 Moreover, although I am principally focused on the history of how these debates developed in Scotland and England, they developed in dialogue with German and French philosophy and medicine, and especially through French letters and art.4 I have therefore chosen to range beyond the island in my examples. It made sense to include, for example, Zola on realism or Nietzsche on tragedy, each influential in the period and British letters in different ways. Balzac, Carlyle, Collins, and Dickens likewise serve as examples of approaches to the question of the body’s relation to the historical past, which is so often in this period explored through the foundational trauma of the Terror. Finally, a note about the book’s chronological structure: although each chapter traces a theme throughout the period, some themes lent themselves to greater development at different points in the period, and in relation to different genres. Roughly, the nature of sympathy, the emotions, and the significance of the surface of the bourgeois body were being elaborated in the eighteenth century, though their discussion continues throughout the period. The skin’s permeable nature comes into sharper focus in the midcentury era of sanitary reform, and its problematic nature as alienable object reappears as a topic of interest around the same time with the decisive emergence of commodity culture and its critiques. As a representation of violent abjection, the alienated skin persistently evokes historical trauma—especially the trauma of the French Revolution, a persistent topic of midcentury representations trying to bridge the individual embodied self and a larger historical will. Tattooing, fingerprints, and other inscriptions were the delight of criminologists and anthropologists later in the imperial period who were determined to find objectively recognizable signs of atavism, savagery, and civilization on the body. In that sense, to borrow a Victorianism, although each chapter recapitulates the phylogeny of the century, each tends to highlight different moments in that ontogenic development, and the progress of the book roughly accords with that timeline’s forward movement even as it cycles recursively back through it. The book’s arguments emerge, as it were, in layers over the course of the chapters’ progress.

Embodying History To understand skin in this period, one must first understand how the body is emplotted in the period’s understanding of its own history. The Enlightenment, with its hopes pinned upon scientific reason, interpersonal sympathy, and political innovation, saw an unprecedented development of materialist philosophy and science, especially in France. The major response to this

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development in German Romanticism advanced a religious and idealist perspective that nevertheless tried to grapple with the new insights of science. This conversation was radically disrupted and challenged by the ultimate crisis in what Europeans believed to be the center of civilized modernity itself: the Terror of the French Revolution. Involving the latest scientific technology (the guillotine), the latest political and philosophical ideas (including and especially materialist ones), and located in the most culturally sophisticated capital in Western Europe, the Terror introduced the mystery of irrationality and violence, seemingly arising organically out of modernity itself. Intellectuals all over Europe were challenged in the decades following to retheorize the basic terms of the Enlightenment—the nature of the human, the value of empiricism, and the notion of history as progress—in ways that could still salvage the fundamental terms of modern knowledge. And, just as the new knowledge of the body and subjectivity were essential to those discussions, the body became the center of an anxious elaboration of the human, from which the consideration of its shadow—the savage, the animal, the irrational—was never far. Britons in the wake of the Terror inherited both the materialist and the idealist poles of the debate and the anxieties of its extremes. In addition to pursuing new insights in individual physiological psychology, thinkers sought to harmonize these new ideas with theories of a broader human history. Evolutionary history was quickly appropriated by those with a teleological view of progress, but of course, it was also subject to other logics, as Tennyson clearly saw: the aleatory logic of catastrophism and the potentially cyclical logic of species’ rise and fall, with the decline-of-humanity narratives that implied. Materialists increasingly concerned themselves with the individual and the extremes of the temporal spectrum—individual psychology and the deep time of evolutionary change—both of which could locate the impetus for change in the individual body and experience.5 Idealists, however, were most concerned with the mediate period of historical time and the social collective: how do societies change and grow or decline? What force, spirit, or will outside the individual body accounts for such change? How does history progress—dialectically, in cycles, or as a sort of “widening gyre”? Or did it “progress” at all? Idealist visions of history were largely charted onto oscillating structures of myth (which was itself held to be evidence of and to encode historical change), whether the oscillations spiraled toward millennial perfection, as in Hegel, or simply a form of repetition, as in Nietzsche. Though British materialism and physiology per se owe most to the Scottish enlightenment (and through it, French philosophy and medicine), literary writers, especially those educated at the universities in the classical tradi-

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tion, were also strongly influenced by idealist thought disseminated through classical and linguistic scholarship. These fields were dominated by German thinkers, who theorized new scientific information through an overarching idealist philosophy devoted to thinking the long durée of human history. British authors repeatedly return to the problem of history as they wrestle with the materialism of the body. From Carlyle and Arnold to Pater, Hardy, and Wilde, they place the body within a narrative of historical progression, alternating between a faith in teleology and an oscillating, cyclical model of destruction and creation. For the first several decades of the nineteenth century, the Terror remained a sobering spectacle requiring an explanation. Was it evidence of the evolutionary savagery physiologically present within every individual or was it driven by a larger transpersonal influence? Was such viciousness a productive force of history, or a random and meaningless energy capable of erupting and undermining human progress at any time? Realist narrative tended to favor a focus on the material and individual, but these larger considerations were never far, and from midcentury on, especially, often manifested within the realist text as mythic or grotesque elements. Idealist authors tended to approach the question of large-scale historical change primarily through myth, fantasy, and fable, yet they too worried over the problem of embodied consciousness, often importing realist elements into their texts as they worked through the representation of the individual in history. By the end of the nineteenth century, German idealism again becomes strongly significant to British psychology, this time through the newer social sciences of anthropology and history rather than through biology or medicine, which by that time had finally split off from philosophy, and remained firmly materialist. Through studies of myth, for example, idealism offered an explanation for images or narratives’ persistence over historical time and cultural difference, Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious reviving, under the banner of psychology, Kant’s religious and idealist concept of archetypes. I argue that in realist narrative the surface of the body, posited at once as radically transparent to interpretation and as obscure, is made pivotal and offered to the reader as a puzzle to be solved. By gathering data about the context of the body’s responses, including facial expressions, the reader is meant to identify the true nature of the character’s affects and motives—even unconscious ones. The reader is invited to consider a set of circumstances, and a set of bodily responses, and sympathetically imagine causes and effects—a kind of differential diagnosis of possible narratives. Is the red-faced young lady embarrassed, attracted, or just overheated? Is the pale gentleman angry, afraid, or guilty? Yet, when this ambiguous signification utterly fails

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or is disrupted, crisis ensues. Through the early and mid-nineteenth century, moments when the individual in fiction risks being subsumed in the mass, the body’s surface is often troped in terms of the permeability of the skin or its traumatic alienation—the seizure of individuality or individual affect by external forces is narrated as the mythical flaying of Marsyas, or the historical flaying of French aristocrats. By the end of the period, literature and psychology begin to turn away from the body’s surface, toward mythic structures and metaphors of depth. They retain, however, the physiological materialism and realist technique absorbed from the earlier period, put to newer uses. The realist body emerges with the advent of realist texts; one teaches us to read the other, and to read with confidence because we can believe in a common embodied experience, which is thus, potentially, widely comprehensible. But it also teaches that affective experience is complex and often operates outside of conscious will or understanding. It teaches us to be close and even suspicious readers of fiction, a mode of reading that is strongly tied to the post-Enlightenment period.6

What: Parts and Chapters The book is organized in four parts. Each part takes up a category of the nineteenth-century discussion of the skin: the skin as a sensing and expressive surface; as a permeable membrane; as an alienable substance; and as a possessor of intrinsic or inscribed properties. Within each part, two chapters explore individual themes important within those categories. Moreover, each part attends to skin’s Janus-faced nature: that is, as a surface that faces both in and out. Part 1, “The Self As Surface,” establishes how the surface of the body became both a location of perceptual consciousness and a signifying medium for the display of affect. Chapter 1, “Sense,” shows how during the Enlightenment and especially in France, where medicine and philosophy were tightly aligned in advancing materialism, new discoveries in anatomy corresponded to philosophical advances to suggest an increasingly important role for the brain and nervous system in embodying selfhood. In Scotland and England, Common Sense philosophers responded to the materialism of the French and of Scotland’s own David Hume by seeking a way to integrate the body and its sensations into a religious (but not particularly sectarian) model of the world, showing the body’s perceptions as reliable because God-given, rather than embracing either the traditional mind-body split or an anticlerical materialism. In the early nineteenth century, the Edinburgh surgeon and neurologist Charles Bell, educated in the Common Sense tradition, wrote

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an influential treatise on the anatomy of emotional expression that became a vade mecum for a generation of artists. (Darwin extensively debates this work in his later consideration of embodied emotions in his influential The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.) Consciousness is increasingly figured in this period as a phenomenon of the sensing surface of the body, and the discussion around sensation shows the skin’s role in mediating between inside and outside, body and environment, and self and awareness. This focus on surface and perception is framed in part within an aesthetic shift. In Charles Bell’s comments on embodiment, and on the role of art, and in Ruskin’s later commentary on George Eliot, we see an uneasy alignment between neoclassical canons of beauty and the emergence of realist portrayals of the body. These conversations show Victorians’ awareness of the stakes of these developments for the emerging aesthetics of realism and its uneven and contested transformation of the role and meaning of art. Realism, which was not just a question of describing ordinary reality, but of situating that reality in embodied terms, was, even in the middle of the century, aligned with materialism and radicalism. Morally correct aesthetic perception, situated in a healthy sensorium, was at the heart of the reliability of the sensing surface and its appraisal of other surfaces—especially those of other bodies—and of art and literature. Aesthetic theories grappled with contradictory values implied by the mandate to realistically portray the body’s divine natural truth and the idealist tradition in which the artist’s duty is to ennoble and perfect. Emotional expression is communicated physically, and skin-based involuntary expression such as blushing (as opposed to the conscious muscular actions of smiling or frowning) was of particular interest as a true index of inner states—states of which the person in the expressive skin might not be consciously aware. Chapter 2, “Expression,” offers a history of blushing. Commentators of the early nineteenth century identified blushing as involuntary moral communication by divine design, whereas later materialist discussions tried to account for its evolutionary function. All agreed that blushing expressed self-consciousness—not simply meaning embarrassment, but awareness of the self. In fact, there was an ongoing discussion of blushing and flushing as indicative of difficulties in the nervous system’s interior narrative, the brain’s representation of the self to the self. Bell and Darwin, as well as later physicians, psychologists, and criminologists, offer examples of a broad swath of thinking about surface from evolutionary and medical perspectives. The blush, figured as a “language of the soul” unique to humans, became a focus of the conflict between the early nineteenth-century’s Common Sense–inflected religious materialism

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and the harder evolutionary materialism of the mid- to late nineteenth century. Literary representations of the blush demonstrate the importance and difficulty of the mandate to read the body, seen simultaneously as legible and as requiring interpretive expertise. Across several genres, Victorians use such expressions in pivotal scenes that stage the close reading of an ambiguous body as central to making narrative meaning in realist discourse. These moments often display the tendency Fredric Jameson identifies with the affective “scene” crucial to the realist mode: that is, countering the forward movement of the narrative in favor of a visual display of the body’s affect stopped in time. Though Jameson associates this technique only with fiction, it is ubiquitous in a broad range of examples across the period and genres, including lyric and spasmodic poetry. From Keats and Austen to Barrett Browning and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, these moments illustrate the interpretive and moral stakes of the body’s ambiguity as it becomes crucial to literary representation. Part 2, “Permeability,” concentrates on the skin as a porous boundary between self and world. Chapter 3, “Out,” considers what is expressed through the skin. Whereas the healthy body in the 1830s was not itself dangerous to others, by the 1860s, the body is essentially hazardous—if it excretes healthily for itself, it poisons the environment for others. The linkage of an individual body to the political body through disease is important in both French and British literature, but is most frankly explored in French realism, which overtly links political corruption to syphilitic disfigurement of the (woman’s) skin. By midcentury, the British novel parallels the French exploration of a materialist and embodied self situated in a complex relation to a larger historical (and increasingly evolutionary) narrative arc. Both French and British fiction use skin disease to make connections between individual morality and historical immorality, often of the ancien régime or the Regency. The chapter traces the filiation of this representation through Balzac and Zola, as well as in the British fiction of Conan Doyle. It may be in part the influence of these authors of ambitious and encyclopedic French novels that leads British authors at midcentury to stage larger historical connections and analyses in the otherwise more domestic and individually focused British novel.7 However, French realism shades into naturalism earlier and more decisively than the British. Whereas literature by Balzac or Zola tends to represent individuals as symptoms or exemplars of social problems and their fates as subject to external forces, British literature tends to valorize the individual’s capacity for self-invention and transformation. And whereas the French locate historical evil in the present body of the immoral woman,

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the British tradition often makes the individual a victim of corrupt historical antecedents not yet exorcised from the body politic. Chapter 4, “In,” reverses the focus of the prior chapter; instead of attending to what comes out of the body, it works through the midcentury preoccupation with what might enter it. Texts on bathing and dermatology provide a new understanding of the imperial, masculine body’s concern with the skin as a way of eliminating the pollution associated with barbaric or filthy practices. At the same time, practices focused on the care of the body risked compromising the masculinity of the subject, as can be seen in many texts complaining about the “relaxing,” “enervating,” and generally effeminizing effects of bathing. Many were concerned about the body being penetrated through the pores. Porosity meant that the most characteristic element of the individual consciousness, his or her feelings, might be invaded by outer forces. The interpretation of emotion crucial to both realism and Common Sense ideas about social cohesion, shown to be so important and yet potentially so difficult in part 1, was based on eighteenth-century theories about sympathy between the body of a spectator and the object of that spectator’s gaze. By the mid-nineteenth century, the novel and techniques of realist narrative are increasingly used in the service of attempts to link the individual body to a larger community and history. Explorations of sympathy often reached back to the French Revolution as a prime example of a breakdown in affective community bonds; the “natural” tendency of bodies to sympathize and communities to function healthily could easily fail, in which case the emotions transmitted between and through embodied minds could take on the nature of contagion and the force of a flood. The physiological theory finds its metaphor in the figures of bathing and soaking. The French Revolutionaries, and especially Jean-Paul Marat, are often represented as bathing in blood. Theorists of emotion return to this moment as an example of when sympathetic interpersonal reading failed to create a principle of social coherence. Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities retells the Terror as a model of sympathy thwarted and affect perverted through the illegibility of the expressive surface and its inappropriate or inadequate porosity. The focus on the continuity of a porous surface with the self thus suggests the problem of autonomy. Part 3, “Alienated and Alienating,” continues to explore the period’s theorization of history through skin, this time focusing on its excision. By the mid-nineteenth century, psychologists conceptualized the skin as a site of subjectivity’s development, where the mind, formed largely by sensations, took in experience of the world and defined the self against it. Chapters 5 and 6 examine midcentury explorations of a skin alienated from the self, specifically, through grotesque body objects. Chapter 5,

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“Flayed,” explores the fantasies of flaying associated, again, with the Terror. Skinning, traditionally done by humans to animals, also has the capacity to undo the distinction between human and animal or object, especially when done by humans to each other. Magical animal skins and grotesque representation of flayed human bodies become a way to narrate an incomprehensible history; situating these objects in the heart of the quotidian English narrative allows the sensation novel both to remind the reader of the body’s implication in a history beyond rationality and individual self-containment and to distance the present-day English individual from that dark and incomprehensible story. Fable and myth allow for a fuller exploration of this theme than a realism rooted in materialist epistemology, and authors move toward embedding such forms in realist narrative. Midcentury British texts, in their fascination with the excesses of the French Revolution, frequently cited reports of the skinning and tanning of humans as the ultimate expression of the rejection of the old order and its ruling class. The flayed skin of French aristocrats shows up in Carlyle’s French Revolution as an important theme; it comes into Collins’s The Law and the Lady as a gruesome symbol of the vexed relationship of modernity with its immediate past. When the human body passes into the realm of alienated objects, the category disruption enables the realist author to explore the uncanny clash of two mutually exclusive domains: not, as in the gothic, the rational and the magical, but the realm of moral humanity, ruled by sympathy, and considered to be the saving force that makes society possible, and that of the market, ruled by competition, and increasingly understood as amoral and depersonalizing. The ancien régime and the Regency evoke both nostalgia for a time before the rise of the bourgeois market economy and disgust for the antimodern excesses of aristocratic history. Moving beyond representing historical events to representing the nature of history itself, Victorians had recourse to mythic representations of flaying. The figure of Apollo flaying the satyr Marsyas embodies the pain associated with historical change. Chapter 6, “Flaying,” explores this figure in the nineteenth century, in stories often retold within a specifically German idealist model of historical succession derived from myth criticism. Portrayals of Marsyas shifted from justly punished hubris in the premodern period to an Enlightenment interpretation as a victim of tyrannical cruelty to a late Victorian manifestation as a sensitive martyr to artistic and historical transformation. In the art and literature of the period, Marsyas turns up again and again to mark the ambivalence of nineteenth-century artists toward their Enlightenment heritage. As materialism comes to less problematically underlie sci-

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ence and psychology, idealist-humanists from midcentury onward return to German Romanticism to take up questions that midcentury materialists such as Alexander Bain seemed not to address. In late nineteenth-century Britain, German Romantic ideas were taken up through classical myth criticism, literature, and psychology rather than philosophy per se. From the specifically mythical poetry of Arnold to the aestheticism of Wilde, Oxford idealists retold the story of Marsyas as a way to situate their time within a longer durée of historical becoming, which is less simply triumphalist than earlier formulations. Sympathy with embodied suffering comes to seem morally superior to the bright disinterest of the Olympian Apollo’s “cruel reason,” and Enlightenment materialism seems to yearn for the supplement of pantheistic, “primitive,” or exotic spiritualities such as those of the Eleusinian mysteries. Chapter 6 traces the changing aesthetic and cultural fortunes of Marsyas in the writings of Charles Bell on visual art (where Marsyas is treated neoclassically and dismissively), to idealist valorization in the French artist Paul Chenavard’s massive painting Divine Tragedy. In Britain, literature shows authors’ increasing affirmation of Marsyas in the works of Arnold, Pater, and Wilde, as they reach for mythic forms and references to link the idealist treatment of historical will to the individual suffering body. The revaluing of Dionysus made his minister, the flayed Marsyas, a powerful figure for the violent depredations of historical change. Part 4, “Inscriptions,” focuses on qualities seen as inherent in or permanently inscribed on skin. By the end of the century, especially, new materialist approaches to the body insisted on the skin as a site of visible individual identity that could be objectively verified. Chapter 7, “Markings,” considers color and its somewhat elliptical relation with both race and morality in tandem with the scar. Though color was less absolutely tied to race in the UK than in the Americas, racial color was there assimilated into an older aesthetic and moral hierarchy of color tied to class and ethnicity. Color was not a reliable index of racial identity, nor was it the most importance attribute of race. But it still served as an immediately visible cue about subjectivity, and that was assimilable to more explicitly racist narratives. The visual turn to surface combined with scientific racism to give color new meaning, meaning that turned particularly on the immutability of visual markers. Literary attempts to harmonize materialism and idealism were especially challenged by the increasingly common assumption that skin markings provided an easily read, fixed identity. Charles Kingsley uses both realism and fantasy to promote a materialist-idealist vision of a mutable physiology in which race and color are labile. His attempt in the realist novel Two Years Ago to bridge this divide between idealism and materialism in his representation of the body,

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history, and aesthetics meets limited success. The effort is more fruitful in his scientific fantasy narrative for children, The Water-Babies. Chapter 8, “Tattoo,” focuses on a more deliberately acquired kind of scar. Tattooing as a marker of contested identity came to widespread public attention in the 1870s in the case of the Tichborne claimant, but it was familiar as a marker of travel long before then, and a significant body of work on tattooing in the late century from Lombroso and other criminologists was important to anthropometry’s project to identify criminals (as well as to associate criminals with “savage” aesthetic tastes). At the same time, a fad for tattooing emerged among the aristocracy and other elites. This interest in skin markings is showcased in a number of texts based on the theme of identity, from guides to the emerging field of forensic medicine to mystery fiction. The late Victorians focused on the marked skin as a mode of “fail-safe” identification not only through criminological work on tattoos, scars, and other lesions, popular in use in crime fiction and the like, but on the newer technology of fingerprinting, imported from the imperial context. Thomas Hardy at the end of the century more powerfully engages the problem of balancing a materialist-realist individual story with an idealist mythic historical narrative, by making the tension thematically central and staging it as both unresolved and essential to human character. A Laodicean shows in a realist and comic register what Wilde is doing around the same time in the darker and more fantastic vein of Dorian Grey and the spiritual autobiography of De Profundis, discussed in chapter 6. The story showcases visual markers of identity with a tattoo, painted portraits, and photography, in a novel that hinges on the problematic relation of the individual to history. Hardy works ironically at the intersection of the materialist and the Romantic, pitting the modern against the medieval, and the Hellenic against the pre-Olympian, while putting the empirical truth-claims of the confessing body into question. Both Kingsley in chapter 7 and Hardy in chapter 8 use photography to discuss realist aesthetics and their relation to truth. Both gesture to photography’s appeal as a form of supposedly unmediated truth-telling through the direct reproduction of surface. Both also critique its reliability. While Kingsley focuses on photography’s mismatch with natural (and therefore reliable, Common-Sensical) human visual perception, mediated by affect and physiology, Hardy’s later critique insists on photographic representation’s capacity to trick the viewer, in contrast to the more obvious conventions of painters. Kingsley critiques a materialist realism that uses objectivity to deny the transformative power of the spirit, but correct perception is still finally located in the individual body—and in its human capacity to see selectively, even “incorrectly.” Hardy suggests, however, that all representations are mediated

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rather than objective; readers have learned to perceive just the earlier mediations and not yet the new ones. That said, there is both a material and an ideal truth that persists through time, though its meaning, as its form, is liable to change and interpretation. Truth can be only partially available to any one perceiver as each is caught within his or her own historical contingency. Like his predecessors, Hardy reaches for myth to represent that temporally larger story within his otherwise realist novel. He also moves away from surface, toward a model of an essentially deep, unknowable self current in psychology and anthropology of his period, and that will become the signature of the literary generation that follows him. The conclusion outlines this change and limns its roots in midcentury idealism in Eliot’s later work.

With Whom, with Thanks This book is indebted to a number of excellent studies, although it of course aims also to provide something those have not. The two most significant broadly historical works on skin are Claudia Benthien’s Skin: On the Cultural Border between Self and World (2002) and Steven Connor’s The Book of Skin (2004). Both Connor and Benthien identify the late eighteenth century as a moment of change for understandings of the skin; it is in this moment that a truly modern notion of skin (one that is still in many ways current) emerges, and it is at this point that my study begins. Claudia Benthien argues that this is the period in which “the epidermis was able to develop into a surface that could bear semantic meaning and on which individuality could reveal itself ” (313). As the art historian Mechthild Fend, who draws on Benthien, remarks, in the period between the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, “new notions of the nature and properties of the skin emerged” (“Bodily and Pictorial Surfaces: Skin in French Art and Medicine, 1790–1860,” 311). Drawing on the work of Claudia Benthien, Bakhtin, and Elias, she agrees that this model of the body, with its new emphasis on the skin, was brought to full development in the French Revolution. She notes that the term “surface” supplants terms like “envelope” in being principal terms for the description of the skin around 1800, and suggests that this shift “signals a new attention to the visual appearance of the body” as part of the Enlightenment’s visual turn (313). Dermatology, she notes, arises at the same time, “whose diagnostic principles are based upon . . . reading the surface of the body” (313). While older medical tracts “had described skin as a membrane for the exchange of fluids, late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century physiologies of the skin, especially those belonging to the vitalist school associated with physicians such as Albrecht von Haller, Théophile Bordeu and, later,

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Xavier Bichat, described the skin as an interface transmitting information reciprocally from inside to outside” (313). Steven Connor similarly summarizes the shift in purely medical models of the skin from one in force “as late as the early eighteenth century” (39). In the humoral model, “skin was understood as a porous layer with a multitude of possible openings, many of which would no longer be seen as such today. . . . ‘Fluxes’ that . . . continually change their form exit the body as blood, pus, urine, phlegm, or sperm. . . . Wounds and bloody discharges from the skin, which today are regarded as pathological . . . were seen as quite the opposite” (39). Benthien argues that the shift toward seeing the body as a closed vessel covered with an impermeable skin moved the location of dirt from inside to outside over the course of the nineteenth century (42–43). But as we shall see, the process emerges as rather more complex upon a closer look. (In fact, as Benthien notes, although the medical vanguard moved away from this humoral model of the body, ordinary doctors still routinely bled, cupped, and blistered throughout the nineteenth century, though with decreasing verve.)8 Although the existence of pores had long been known, the widespread availability of microanatomical images sparked a more general anxiety about the skin’s porosity just as the body’s closure became central, and the idea of the body’s interior as inherently dangerous intensified through this period. Unlike “fluxes,” which were essentially normal but could go awry, the life process came to be seen as essentially toxic, productive of deadly filth. The skin became a covering not only protective of the body’s interior, but of the world outside as well.9 Of scholarship more specifically focused on Victorian literature, William Cohen’s lovely Embodied: Victorian Literature and the Senses (2009) has been particularly influential for me, and though he focuses on a more limited portion of the period, the present work is very much in dialogue with his. Cohen argues that nineteenth-century thinkers were deeply engaged with the question of what it means to be human and were specifically thinking through materialism; this is a foundational insight for my work. He observes that the traditional explanation of this discussion limns it as a conflict between faith (tradition, belief in the soul as separate from the body, religious certitude) and doubt (modernity, science, materialism). Cohen shows, however, that Victorian authors often came to believe that the essence of humanity was in the human body itself and began to present the famed interiority of the literary individual—the keystone novelistic character of the period—“through the depiction of physical substance, interaction, and incorporation” (xii). Cohen charges that this practice challenged, rather than supported, the concept of the Enlightenment subject, a subject he defines as transcending the

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physical. He identifies this as an antihumanist trend, which located humanity in the human body rather than in some transcendent identity. The age of interiority and the Victorian realist novel were, he argues, “desacralizing,” as they locate their subject in embodiment itself as the “horizon of the human” (xii). Although I suspect Cohen sees this use of the body as more radically antihumanist than Victorians themselves did, his reading is crucial in showing us the complexity and sophistication of Victorians’ engagement with the body and especially sensation and perception. Although Cohen is not interested in the scientific history per se—he claims that often, the literary representation of sensory processes preceded the scientific understanding, which I think demarcates literature, science, and philosophy too decisively for the period—he usefully points to our tendency to understand the period’s debates on materialism in overly simplistic terms. Particularly in the United Kingdom, the materialist/religious dichotomy does not stand up under scrutiny in the early nineteenth century, despite the disproportionate attention given to simplified popularizations of Darwinian debates later in the century. Cohen’s book is most focused on those later Victorian writers who are most directly engaged with what we would now see as a materialist self. I widen the frame, not only temporally to the earlier part of the period, but philosophically, to show how thinkers committed to what I will call an idealist notion of the spirit, such as Arnold and Wilde, also participate in the period’s focus on the material body’s surface. Cohen suggests that “although physiological psychology and evolutionary biology are under development” throughout the century, “their findings are not widely disseminated until the 1870s”; he thus believes that the novelists “anticipate those of the scientists” (xii). He identifies the beginning of the materialist trend with the writings of Herbert Spencer and contribution of such thinkers as Alexander Bain and George Henry Lewes (3–4). I see the development as more continuous than Cohen allows, as the material bases of emotion and perception had been widely discussed by scientists and philosophers and theologians—who were often the same people—since the mid-1700s. If we see the work of such scientists in a continuous context, there is, I think, less reason to suppose that the artists are ahead of the scientists, though indeed the scientists drew on literature for inspiration and examples, just as authors were often more deeply interested in science than required by Cohen’s notion of wide dissemination. At the same time, there is no doubt that artists took the capacities of the new ideas in directions that developed the culture of the embodied mind and the experience of mind as embodied, in ways hitherto unimaginable. And of course, many Victorian authors were scientists or doctors themselves. The historian John Henry points out that the “science of the mind”

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in relation to the body and especially the brain “took over from the soul in natural philosophical debate” in Britain since Locke’s 1690 Essay Concerning Human Understanding (249–50). Identifying the Common Sense school as a psychology-based theory, he notes that in the Scottish Enlightenment, “the study of the mind became the special preserve of moral philosophy” (252)— that is, philosophy itself encompassed physiology and psychology within its purview. Common Sense was particularly important to British aesthetics in the first half of the nineteenth century as well. In focusing on the late eighteenth through the nineteenth century, this book engages a period in which modern medicine, evolutionary biology, and new understandings of society reconfigure understandings of the skin in specific ways often lost in the larger sweep of earlier projects. Several hitherto unnoticed but important themes emerge upon this closer scrutiny (the ongoing importance of permeability, and the importance of Marsyas to the period, for example). This book also situates those developments not only in the history of medicine and the body, but reintegrates that history in its philosophical context. Moreover, it claims an essential place for these developments in the history of the dominant literary mode of late modernity: realism. My broader literary argument is that materialism, in addition to being of longer pedigree than Cohen discusses, makes the body, and specifically its surface, foundational to the realist mode of narration that characterizes post-Enlightenment narrative. I am influenced in this analysis by too many insightful literary critics to enumerate here, but three offered particularly useful interventions: Fredric Jameson’s recent The Antinomies of Realism (2013), Rae Greiner’s Sympathetic Realism (2012), and Nancy Armstrong’s foundational How Novels Think (2005). Jameson’s book posits that realism is distinguished by two characteristics: the narrative impulse, which leads the story forward in time (the récit), and the emphasis on affect, which always tends to instantiate the present as durable, resisting narrative and temporality in favor of what Jameson calls the “scenic” (11).10 The scene is the moment of affective elaboration that counters the forward movement of the story with a claim to a stable truth about character or history or society (for Jameson, this is usually a claim for the permanence of bourgeois society and values). “Affect, or the body’s present” is key to realism in Jameson’s model; affect here is a “nameless bodily state,” a sensation that “activates the body” (32–33), without yet being assigned a name as an emotion. The “temporality specific to affect” is the “incremental” (42); it runs to “description” rather than “narration,” and tends to the open-ended (44). In Jameson’s book, these observations are in service to a somewhat different set of questions than those I engage here, but I would like to take them out of his more strictly lit-

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erary context to observe that the physiological and philosophical thought of the period posits a body—and a radically embodied subjectivity—that both invites interpretation (a kind of physiological detective work on the part of the reader) and insists on its difficulty (when the affect is named, bounded as a specific emotion, narrative restarts, and we move away from character and toward plot). Within literature, this is elaborated as a new emphasis on the description of bodily states and appearances, as well as the use of a new vocabulary in which those states and appearances have shared meanings, some readily apparent to readers and some requiring readerly work to construct, often through the complex workings of sympathy. Rae Greiner’s work on realism in Victorian fiction offers a more direct influence, in arguing that sympathy and feeling are not identical, a fact often forgotten by later critics. Insisting, as does Nancy Armstrong, on the influence of Adam Smith, Greiner notes that sympathy is not an easy or automatic process, but a hard-won achievement as often represented in narratives of failure as in those of success: “Against the standard claim that knowing more and seeing further into the hidden hearts and minds of characters heightens our sympathy . . . , novels . . . are dubious of the tie that binds sympathy to knowledge” (4). For Greiner, realism is distinguished less by extensive lists of objects (that is, things11) than by devotion to the “imaginative social affectivity through which human communities generate the meanings they hold dear. . . . It depicts the sympathetic consciousness as the basis of reality itself ” (10). For Smith (in contrast to Hume), sympathizing was an intellectual process first and foremost, creating feeling rather than deriving from it (Greiner 18). Greiner sees realism as indexing reality “by reading its visible signs” for characters and readers. In constructing a causal relation that is understood to be a shared view, we feel “ourselves to be of the same mind as others,” which allows “continuous, mundane reality to take shape” (32). I would like to build on Greiner’s excellent analysis by observing two things: first, the “social affectivity” she discusses is extensively theorized by the debates of the Scottish Common Sense school beyond Smith, and second, that school of thought specifically built their analysis on a theory of mind based on the experience of the human body. In that model, the surface of the body came to be experienced not only as the source of meaning, but as a realist text itself. Reading the body was an essential skill. A host of recent books has focused on visuality. In an argument that parallels Greiner’s later one (as well as her use of Smith), Nancy Armstrong persuasively argues that the novel as we know it—fundamentally a realist form—coincides with the rise of the individual. While other forms, notably the gothic, dramatize the limits

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of individualism and the fear of the undifferentiated “mass man,” the realist novel (what Armstrong identifies simply as the novel) is essentially committed to the idea of the individual subject. That subject is largely available to others’ understanding through vision (even if often only of the “mind’s eye”), and in other books devoted explicitly to visual culture, Armstrong has insisted upon visual primacy in realism. In Jameson’s “scenic” moment, where affect is detailed yet not yet named, surface invites the reader’s continuously self-reinforcing creation of the norms that enable the construction of the realist universe. These insights are foundational for me, but I want to insist on the distinction between realism as a genre associated with particular novels, and realism as a mode of narration that is associated with the individual body and psychology, yet crosses over into other genres and forms. The nineteenth-century individual is inscribed and perceived, joyously and relentlessly, on the surface of the human body. Theoretical perspectives that have been productive for Steven Connor and Claudia Benthien have also offered fruitful insights for my work. Didier Anzieu’s enormously suggestive psychoanalytic model of the skin ego has been foundational for recent studies, including Connor’s. However, the otherwise productive presentism of psychoanalytic theory has for many readers obscured the fact that it has a history as well.12 Anzieu’s late twentieth-century focus on the skin cycles back to the late nineteenth-century question of how to reconcile a physiological model from embryology that privileges surface and a psychological model that increasingly privileged depth, one that Freud was at the forefront of formulating when the question was relatively new. Anzieu’s compelling conclusion that the skin is identified with the projection of the ego upon the surface of the body, and that the developing child creates an imaginary relationship with this skin ego as the container and embodiment of meanings about the self, can in fact be seen to emerge directly out of modern materialist ways of understanding the body’s surface as the location of subjectivity. Anzieu sets out to account for the ego as a kind of skin of the self. He posits three functions for the skin ego, which relate to my historical reading of the functions of the skin ego in relation to consciousness, and which have largely structured the current theoretical literature on the skin produced in the last twenty years: it operates as a “containing, unifying envelope for the Self; as a protective barrier for the psyche; and as a filter of exchanges . . . and site of inscription . . . a function which makes representation possible” (9). I have been concerned with a prior period in which psychoanalysis yet played no influential role, and so Anzieu appears sparsely here. But his model develops directly out of Freud’s own reliance on the embryology of the mid-Victorian period, and this project provides a kind of

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intellectual prehistory of his very interesting findings. As we shall see, these ideas derive initially from Bichat, and then through embryology, to become crucial for the midcentury psychology of Spencer.13 Bodies, whether referenced in philosophy, anatomy, or literature, are rarely “just” bodies in this period; they imply also a set of ideas in conflict, and very often a conscious position in relation to this conflict. The new realist and materialist focus on the individual body is embedded in the period’s concern with the progress of history, both evolutionary and social. The textual archive is replete with attempts to integrate the new emphasis on the individual body into a longer narrative, often one of transpersonal, historical development framed as being at odds with the materialist focus on the individual body. For both Enlightenment and nineteenth-century thinkers, the French Revolution marked both the decisive high point of materialist physiology and a point of rupture. The Terror prompted efforts to account for a logic of historical development that would integrate that catastrophic event into an acceptable narrative of human development. The long arc of the debate that followed focused both on the body as the locus of human exceptionalism or continuity with the animal kingdom, and on its surface as a site of subjectivity whose legibility was necessary to social cohesion, but dangerously liable to misreading. Its porousness showed the fragility of the self-enclosed subject, liable both to inherited dangers from within and to affective intrusion from without. Likewise, the alienation of this surface came to represent both the vulnerability and the potential brutality of all humankind, even while individual identity was ever more insistently inscribed upon this surface by forces both evolutionary and aleatory. Surface, in other words, becomes discursive: skin communicates, but like any signifier, it must be read and interpreted. Skin’s materiality perpetually claims to be transparent, to exist in a tight coupling with the signified itself; however, its visibility both invites the gaze and evades certainty. George Levine has said of Victorian realism that its authors both yearn to embody the referent in language and are keenly aware of the impossibility of doing so (The Realistic Imagination, 20 and passim). Realism analogously presents the body as a language: attention to visual detail through a scrupulous, almost clinical, articulation of the body’s surface and reactions directs a reader’s focus to the process of interpretation. On the surface of the body to be scrutinized, subjectivity is often least knowable to itself. Readers are invited to construct a legible and meaningful world by inspecting characters, their actions, and most of all, their reactions; in so doing, we construct a “common sense” of how a shared (human, embodied) reality works and contrib-

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ute to its moral evaluation. Our bodies are affected by readerly contact with the imaginary textual bodies before us, as we evaluate and interpret both them and other characters, as well as our own responses to them. I argue, then, that as the surface of the body becomes the site of self, realism becomes a dominant aesthetic mode of narrating that self, one that is profoundly embodied, and deeply enmeshed, in a materialist theory of mind. Realism’s commitment to embodiment models a level of surface detail that invites suspicious and close reading. However, like materialism, it continually struggles to engage a more encompassing representation of history, will, and community. It is throughout the period associated with a troubled attempt to engage the foundational modern historical trauma and anomaly of the French Revolution, and to model a version of history, intention, and community that is rendered more attractively in the idealist tradition. It reaches to intersect with and even absorb other forms—myth, fantasy, and sensational grotesque—to compass that end. By the time psychology, anthropology, and modernist aesthetics turn to “depth” psychology and a notion of a shared unconscious that transcends individual bodies as well as structuring perception and will, realism has been absorbed as technique into an aesthetics that begins to turn away from surface, even while it retains a model of embodied mind that has been elaborated over the prior century.

q Pa rt I The Self as Surface

23

q Ch a p ter 1 Sense If there are certain principles . . . which the constitution of our nature leads us to believe . . . without being able to give a reason for them—these are what we call the principles of common sense. —Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense I love Nature, and Nature’s God. —Charles Bell, Letters of Sir Charles Bell

In 1880, Ruskin attacked George Eliot’s novel The Mill on the Floss as the “single most striking instance” of the “study of cutaneous disease” characteristic of modern fiction. He denounced it as exemplary of a trend common to Balzac and Dickens as well. Critics have often been bemused by both the grouping of these disparate authors and the particular description Ruskin chooses. This chapter clarifies the origin and stakes of Ruskin’s intriguing observation. It explores a long history of aesthetic, philosophical, and physiological thought on the role that both the body and art play in constituting subjectivity and social identity. It shows how the body comes to be understood as the location of subjectivity and how its surface is elevated to a new significance and scrutiny. In so doing, it also makes clear how the focus on a carefully anatomized and sometimes pathologized bodily surface was characteristic of what we call realism, the trend that Ruskin saw as the common quality shared by these diverse authors. To fully understand the significance of nineteenth-century debates on the skin, it is first necessary to place them in a larger context of physiological and philosophical discussions, discussions that only recently had become disciplinarily divided. In this chapter, I limn the history of the concept of the sensus communis and its gradual distinction from the sensorium commune. This discussion forms a background for understanding concepts of common sense specific to the Scottish Enlightenment response to French materialist 25

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physiology, a response that was influential throughout Britain in the period that followed. As this debate focused in part on the nature of the embodied mind, new developments in neurology moved the focus on the sensing self from the body’s interior to its surface. At the same time, such approaches were seen as potentially a materialist challenge to religious views on the soul. The writings of Charles Bell, a Scottish surgeon, anatomist, neurologist, and art teacher, offer a focal point and an excellent example of an important mainstream Scottish reaction to exciting new discoveries about materialism, the body, and the sensing self. Bell shows how the latest advances in science were harmonized with religion in Britain through natural theology (whereas Darwin’s reaction to Bell shows the limits of that harmony at midcentury). These ideas were medical, philosophical, and religious; they were also inextricably aesthetic. The Enlightenment explored questions of materialism and physiology, the relation of the body to the mind, and the existence and location of the soul. The surface of the body moves to the foreground, as new ideas were advanced about the nature and reliability of the senses to comprehend the material world and the understanding of the modern individual as a person formed by his or her sense experiences. The body became less a container for such interiority than a self made of surface interacting with the outer world. In Enlightenment philosophy, the appreciation of beauty was largely thought to be innate and absolute, transcending cultural difference. It was also a moral index; beauty was itself a moral good, and the appreciation of beauty in turn demonstrated the spectator’s goodness. Thus, theories of representation both had to account for the turn to surface and mediate what were seen as its possible excesses. These challenges are foundational to nineteenth-century realism. In addition to his work in science, Bell was an important commentator on the visual arts (and an artist himself ). Positioned here, as in every domain, as a centrist and mediator between old and new, his aesthetic beliefs show the continuity between such anatomical and philosophical debates and emerging forms of what would come to be called realism. Discussions of realism in the visual and the literary arts display a vexed relationship with surface verisimilitude. On the one hand, surfaces were more important to understanding character than ever before; on the other, too much attention to a realistic surface—naturalistic representation—seemed to run counter to traditional aesthetic goals. Bell considered aesthetic representation to demand realistic knowledge of the body, but not its overt display. This background to the discussion of the representation of bodies provides a context for some of the apparent paradoxes of midcentury aesthetic theory. Ruskin, considered a champion of visual realism, found French realist painting disgusting, and, as we have seen, was hostile to literary realism.

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In placing Ruskin in relation to prior debates about aesthetics, anatomy, and the importance of the surface, this chapter illuminates both why his attack is so heated and why he chose the particular metaphors that he did to define the challenge posed by literary realism to long-standing canons of taste. The focus of realism on the surface of the body, and indeed upon the body as materially relevant to psychology, invokes challenges to religion, to history, and to understandings of civilized society that came to a boiling point during, and were subsequently symbolized by, the Terror of the French Revolution. Aesthetic response rooted in the body and its healthy function was believed crucial to social cohesion; long believed to be morally essential, aesthesis is in this period also increasingly physiological. The sensing, judging, and acting self was increasingly sited on the sensory surface of the body, where the embodied individual met the external world and transformed that encounter into thought and action. These writers engaged the problem of how supposedly universal and transcendent aesthetic values could be derived from this increasingly materialist model of the body—as well as throwing the nature of those values radically into question.

French Materialism, German Idealism, and Scottish Common Sense First, I want to provide some background and clarification of terms and history to explain why an apparently “philosophical” debate is basic to this material: this philosophical framework was also the medico-scientific basis of understanding the body, which continued to influence that discussion in ways sometimes less visible to readers today. Many of the historical actors I examine were philosophers as well as physiologists or novelists, or were concerned with philosophical questions to various degrees. That said, this book is not a history of philosophical debates per se. Those debates were of course complex, and if we were to examine their development closely, we would require sustained attention to individual theorists. It may be helpful, however, to name some influences and positions, without getting into the weeds of a more narrowly technical discussion of philosophical ideas that did not cross over into the discourses that principally concern us here. The ideas associated with these debates usually appear in the materials I examine here as broad tendencies, but tendencies no less important and emphatic for their popularization and sometimes disconnection from the very specific formulations in which they originated. Thus, in order to have a sense of the stakes of these discussions and how I will be using the terms (especially “materialism,” “idealism,” and “Common Sense”), an excursus here is in order.

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There was a spectrum from materialism to idealism, and most thinkers fell somewhere in the slippery middle. At the same time, the two poles did—and were understood to—constitute a meaningful opposition throughout the period. On the one side stood (for example) David Hume, Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Charles Darwin, Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer, and their ilk. On the other stood (for example) Georg Wilhelm Hegel, Benjamin Jowett, Thomas Carlyle, and Matthew Arnold.1 The first group sought subjectivity and the mind in the body; the second largely shared a notion of the primacy of a soul, spirit, or idea to which the body and material world owed their form. In seeking a portmanteau term for each extreme to show the continuity throughout the period, I am bound to elide or combine certain specific positions. I have elected to use the term “materialist” for the first group, as that is a term many of them used of themselves, and by which they were identified within the period by others, though its frequent association with atheism in the period is often incorrect. Choosing a term for the second group is harder. One common thread is influence by the German idealists, whether direct or indirect, and those ideas come through literary Romanticism as often as through neoclassical aesthetics. The latter group of thinkers was not necessarily wedded clearly to a particular metaphysics so much as to a general belief in a force that exists prior to or beyond individual embodiment and a loose and evolving theory of the individual’s relation to that force’s presence in history and culture. Moreover, the historical actors identified with this position did not use a single term to label their position. Some simply called themselves religious; some (largely philosophers) called themselves idealist. Some early in the century were influenced as well by the Common Sense movement, and some, especially late in the century, took up loosely metaphysical notions from classical myth or from Eastern or “primitive” religions. Generally, one sees both materialist and idealist strands in the same work. In short, I use these terms not to identify with one clear position beyond that of the historical actor or text at a particular moment, but to place that actor or text in relation to a general tendency in the period to envision the two as positioned in some sort of opposition. As the century progressed, physiological science became increasingly constructed as a domain separate from metaphysics, and so scientists felt less obliged to deal with their subject beyond materialist boundaries. However, among literary and cultural theorists, the struggle to reconcile the two poles continued throughout. A few important intellectual trends formed the background for the discussion we take up in this project. In the eighteenth century, all of Europe wrestled with the implications of new materialisms associated with developments in science, including anatomy and physiology. Spinozan monism,

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emerging from the Low Countries, had sent shock waves through faculties of philosophy and medicine all over Europe. Though materialism as we might understand the term is associated with Descartes, and Spinoza was the opposition (he was a monist who believed that body and mind emanated from the same source and were the same thing, attributes of “God”—Deus—which is also nature, spirit, etc.), Spinoza was by the mid-eighteenth century broadly considered a thorough materialist, because monism appeared to many to undermine the primacy of spirit. Spinoza did believe that man was part of nature rather than exceptional, that there was no free will per se or final causes, and that mind and body were essentially one.2 The idealists who developed his ideas were perpetually in danger of being accused of atheism. Moreover, his ideas were particularly attractive to practitioners of medicine, who were often at the forefront of the new empirical sciences throughout Western Europe. For example, at Leiden, the most influential medical school in the early eighteenth century was directed by the anti-Cartesian Herman Boerhaave, whose students founded Edinburgh’s famous medical school in 1726. Despite his devout Calvinism, he was early on accused of being a secret Spinozan, seemingly simply for his empiricist approach to medicine (and his approval of the devout Isaac Newton), though it is largely agreed that this was an unfounded accusation. The infamous French materialist Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–51)—author of the provocatively titled Man, a Machine (1748)3—studied medicine under Boerhaave in Leiden and self-identified as a Spinosiste (though he may merely have meant that he was a vitalist). In short, Spinoza and vitalism were so identified with both atheism and scientific materialism that it was nearly impossible to practice modern medicine without being suspected of heretical and specifically materialist opinions. Meanwhile, many thinkers were in fact pursuing atheist elaborations of Spinoza. In France, perhaps the most resolutely materialist and antireligious of those developments were associated with the medécins philosophes of the Montpellier school, who were vitalist and generally seen as Spinozan.4 German philosophy was dominated by the Romantic and idealist tradition; yet, German-language philosophy after Kant persistently engaged with Naturphilosophie (as Friedrich Schelling named it), attempting to incorporate new scientific findings into idealism. Naturphilosophie was distinguished by the study of individual forms in relation to an archetypal ideal form (hence idealist); however, it granted organic matter the vitalist capacity for action on its own and placed nature in historical time, allowing for (generally teleological) change over time (see Richards 8–11). In other words, it was both Spinozist and offered an idealist theory of evolution. The philosophers Fichte, Schelling,

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and Hegel all took as their brief the reconciliation of the new vitalist sciences of nature with Romantic idealism, and from Hegel on, most claimed Spinoza as an intellectual forebear.5 (Schelling was particularly important as an influence for UK science, as he elaborated a system of dynamic evolution over time that preserved Kant’s teleological notion of a noumenal ideal or archetype.)6 Though idealists still posited archetypal forms produced by a creator, the granting of productive power to nature itself was considered by many to be pantheist, if not atheist. Moreover, though German medical schools were considered less irreligious than the Dutch or French, even the pietist tradition associated with Georg Ernst Stahl and the Halle medical school engaged materialism.7 In the UK, within the Scottish Enlightenment, approaches ranged from the deeply materialist Hobbes and Hume to the devout Shaftesbury, Thomas Reid, and other philosophers of the Common Sense school. Their work displays the Scottish philosophical tendency to give particular attention to the individual human body’s relation to both mind and community. Scots’ ties to the Continent were strong, both through the influence of Boerhaave in midcentury, and through the long-standing relationship (the “auld alliance”) with French culture and thought. The French Revolution disrupted the development of materialist thought in Britain to some extent, as materialism came to be linked strongly to the Terror and the anticlericalism of the French thinkers. Later Common Sense philosophy, perhaps in response, emphasized its religious investments, and in Germany, Hegel struggled to account for the Terror as a moment of the negative withdrawal of the will from existing forms, arguably inching him closer to Schelling’s account of history as alternations of immanence and transcendence. In short, from the “hard” materialism of France to the idealism of Germany, intellectuals were nearly unanimously devoted to the project of understanding the relationship between the new scientific understanding of the body and subjectivity, and pretty united in granting new kinds of agency to organic matter. Moreover, all struggled to account for historical progress in the light of recent continental events.8 The principal conflict that remained, both in philosophy and in scientific and literary discussion, was between the radical materialists at one end of the spectrum and an idealism that, even if it posited a single essence, insisted that matter was determined by and expressed spirit rather than the other way around. In Britain, two trends dominated the development of discussions of embodied mind, both materialist in the sense of making the mind and body interdependent, but unequally so. Associationism, owing its origins as a modern school to John Locke and David Hume,9 was after Hume more thor-

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oughly materialist. It posited an embodied mind and tended to discount free will or human exceptionalism. According to Hume, all psychological states were based on embodied experiences that created “associations” of pain or pleasure with those experiences. Associationism discounted a priori categories of thought such as the “archetypes” or noumenal forms typical of idealist philosophy’s accounts of the mind, such as Kant’s “archetypes,” which were given by the creator, and instead located thought within individual bodily experience alone. The Common Sense theorists (such as Henry Home, Lord Kames, Thomas Reid, Adam Ferguson, and Dugald Stewart) sought a middle ground to reconcile religion, human exceptionalism, and free will with the new biological psychology. For them, the creator had endowed his creatures with a “common sense,” based upon our intelligently designed bodies, which allowed us not only to recognize the good and the beautiful, but also to have a commonality of response with other humans, based on physiological similarity. They advocated trust in the senses to discover the truth about phenomena, as God had designed those senses perfectly. These theorists also provided for a social dimension to acquired associations, while maintaining some categories of experience as ab origine, yet embodied in nature. Common Sense had a dominant influence through the first half of the century in Britain. The materialist associationist paradigm, after a period of relative eclipse, became once again dominant after midcentury with the influence of Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and Alexander Bain. The Edinburgh medical school was, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the most important site for the production of medical knowledge in the UK, and the physicians there were in dialogue with the strongly materialist psychology of the associationist and Common Sense thinkers for which the Scottish Enlightenment was famed.10 Modern anatomy and physiology were by the late eighteenth century primarily being developed in Scotland and France. On the other hand, the materialist-physiological tradition of Scotland and France, temporarily eclipsed in philosophy after the French Revolution, resurges to become firmly established in medical and psychological circles by the late century. The French Revolution was a disruption, both in the intellectual development of Europe, as all nations reacted to the ideas perceived to have driven it, and in the scientific history of Britain, as anatomical and surgical training shifted decisively to Scottish authorities and away from Paris and Montpellier. By the time mid-eighteenth-century materialist psychology had a full resurgence, mid-nineteenth-century thinkers such as Bain and Spencer, following closely in Hume’s steps, were beginning to be thought of more as scientists than philosophers, and this begins to excuse them from being directly

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engaged in religious and metaphysical debates once perceived as inextricable from the questions of the mind-body relationship. After Darwin, the separation of scientific and metaphysical/religious discourse gradually became normative. But this was not a sudden process, and the revival and revision of German idealist thought in Britain in the latter half of the century, and its recursion through new social sciences such as anthropology and criminology, suggest the ways in which physiological materialism continued to be a metaphysical question, even while economic materialism moved away from such discussions.

Common Sense, Embodied I have said that the Scottish Enlightenment Common Sense theorists and their interlocutors were important to shaping philosophical and physiological knowledge, especially in the Scottish capital, the UK’s acknowledged center of innovation in medical and psychological knowledge. They elaborated the insights of the new anatomy within a concept of a materialist mind-body connection that still allowed for divine design. For these thinkers, the body was designed to sense reality accurately. The process of perception had long been defined as being controlled by a sensus communis, which controls the transformation of sense impressions into perceptions. A quick survey of this topic’s own long history will help us place British thinkers in relation to the age-old problem of perception: how does the mind organize sensory information into a coherent world? This question was both phenomenological and physiological. Historically, the sensus communis was a concept that had united the physiological and the spiritual.11 The mind in Western culture, when locatable in a physiological site, had generally been in the interior of the body. Early on, it was in the liver or perhaps the heart. Aristotle, around 350 BCE, considered the moving spirit to be “in that which lies in the middle, for of both extremes the middle is the limiting point; and this is similarly related to the movements from above [and below,] those that is from the head, and to the bones which spring from the spinal column, in creatures that have a spinal column” (De motu animalium 9, 702b). It was logical, then, that the sensorium would also be at the center of the body, and that there be some division between the unified sense impression and the motor response. Rather than in the spine, however, Aristotle declares the location of the sensorium in the heart. Thus the sensory and the motor are not linked, and there is no recognition of the role of the nervous system: “And the middle of the body must needs be in potency

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one but in action more than one; for the limbs are moved simultaneously from the original seat of movement. . . . There must then be some one thing which moves both. This something is the soul, distinct from the spatial magnitude just described and yet located therein” (9, 702b). He makes further distinctions between the willed actions of the soul, and those outside the direction of the will, such as the heart and the “privy member,” as well as “non-voluntary” movements such as sleep and respiration (11, 703a). The soul, then, was still not located in a clearly defined place and thus, though there began to be a materialist explanation for action, there is still not one for the spirit itself. In the second century, Galen’s Ventricular Hypothesis—influential throughout the Middle Ages and most of the Renaissance (and indeed, in some ways, well into the modern period)—moved the mind to the brain. He described three chambers full of fluids: one for vital spirit and memory; one for thinking; and one for the sensus communis, here responsible for fantasy and imagination. In 1650, Descartes also tucked the “soul” into the middle of the head. Reaching back to Hippocrates, he noted that in the dissected brain there seemed to be two of most structures, but the pineal gland, at the very center of the head’s interior, was a singularity. The movement of fluids, he thought, acted on the pineal gland to link physiological sensory experience with the motions of the soul (Lokhorst). So we see here an interactive model in which the perceiving body, the spirits of the animal passions, and the soul affect each other. This model remained more or less in place until the eighteenth century. The terms sensorium commune and sensus communis, often used to that point to indicate the same thing, a physiological location for sensation with perhaps some relation to the location of the mind and/or soul, begin to split off definitively in the eighteenth century. It was Giambattista Vico who used senzo commune to mean something like a moral sense related to community standards, which was influential for Thomas Reid’s term Common Sense (Agnew 59):12 Reid (1710–96) was a founder of the Scottish Common Sense school. With the Enlightenment rise of the notion of an individual whose soul and mind were one and more definitively tied to individual sensory experience came questions of how it might be possible to have a universal sense of aesthetic goodness, morality, and the like. If each was locked in his or her own body, how could there be such a thing as a common sense experience? And how, in a more democratic world, might that be experienced, or appealed to? In Britain, the term sensus communis came to be used to describe a common political, philosophical, and aesthetic tendency in every individual, and was rarely used to describe a particular physiological site anymore. However, the

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evolution of the term from physiology was not irrelevant. The sensus commmunis became the political correlate of the now physiological sensorium commune. As increasingly materialist—and fragmenting—explanations for the mind-body interaction were proposed, especially in France, a lively counter-discourse that was both humanist and religious strove to locate a universal and shared human experience, both at the level of a “common sense” of perceptions and ideas, and a common physiological basis for sensation and thought. British thinkers engaged deeply with these issues, and Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713) and a student and friend of John Locke (himself both a philosopher and medical researcher), was among the most influential of those who theorized the sensus communis in terms of morality and aesthetics. He argued that correct aesthetic and moral judgment was disinterested and based on the perfect divine design of the universe (and critiqued Hobbes’s contract theory as egoistical). Shaftesbury’s ideas were important for natural theology throughout the nineteenth century, as it implied that the human body and mind was designed by God to use the senses to arrive at correct judgment. His model also called for a certain level of universalism, as all human bodies and societies should then arrive roughly at the same aesthetic and moral judgments. The challenge for a universal humanist notion of common sense has always been, as Shaftesbury recognized, cultural particularity. So it is not surprising that he, in defining common sense, begins with the kind of anecdotal comparison of various cultural differences that we are perhaps more familiar with from, say, Darwin’s later work on sexuality and beauty. Both seek the underlying logic beneath what Darwin would consider superficial though apparently marked differences. Shaftesbury is no relativist: he believes that an entire culture can have gotten to be wrong-headed in some aspect of behavior or belief. Tyranny especially leads to such results. The sensus communis is innate, but individual freedom and judgment must also be fostered for individuals to have a correct moral sense. This is also true for societies: the sensus communis has a civic function of community building that can be exercised only through free discourse, which provides a constant corrective to error.13 In France, the medécins philosophes (philosophical doctors), such as Julien Offray de La Mettrie, were advancing views of the body and soul based on a materialist reading of the relation of mind, soul, and body, placing man on a continuum with animals and even plants. His materialism was too radical for midcentury France, and he was forced into exile. But his views were taken up by later thinkers in France toward the end of the century, where theories that held the mind and body to be fully interdependent were generally asso-

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ciated with materialist atheism. In Scotland, Enlightenment thinkers were fully in dialogue with their French counterparts, but natural theology was there found to be a more productive way to think through a materialist basis for the self without discarding religious beliefs. Especially after the French Revolution, many Scots thinkers moved away from the materialism of David Hume to embrace Thomas Reid. The idea that the body was intelligently designed to offer a natural aesthetic and moral universality, through sensory organs that offered reliable information about the material world, allowed for a materialist view: it did not require a preexisting soul or idealist “forms” that could be explained outside the individual body’s experiences. But it kept a role for divinity and accounted for moral absolutes recognizable through a universal, shared aesthetic tendency. Through shared bodily experience, the theory provided for an explanation of social cohesion through natural sympathy between bodies. At the same time, the sensus communis had to be designed to be both reliable and sufficiently prone to error that entire communities could develop beliefs that were incorrect. Further, in thinking about political transformation toward a more democratic social body—especially after the sectarian violence of the early eighteenth century in Scotland and the even more dramatic horrors of the French Revolution—Scottish and English thinkers trended toward theories that would allow for moderate social change. Some, like Carlyle, found inspiration for this in the German Romantic philosophers like Hegel, wherein ideas of social evolution explained why one period’s truths became another’s “creed outworn” without the need to declare that the earlier period’s beliefs were simply wrong to begin with.14 Beliefs and values were not immutable, but could evolve as society itself developed.15 However, they were not so mutable that an absolute relativism reigned either. In a given society and historical moment, through the movement of the world spirit, multitudes could come to feel—physiologically—at the same time a morally correct commitment to the same new values and beliefs.

Charles Bell and the Sensing Surface The sensorium and the sensus were thus linked, though the terms had by this time come to be used in discrete physiological and political domains. But while earlier models of this executive function of mind had located it deep in the center of the body, the turn of the century saw neurological discoveries that suggested it should be considered as dispersed on the body’s outer surface. The physiology of perception was discussed mostly in relation to new neurological discoveries. It is generally agreed that Charles Bell

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of Scotland and François Magendie of France share credit for an insight that began a modern view of the brain around 1811. Their observations clarified that the sensory and motor (later, afferent and efferent) nerves were separate. This discovery has all kinds of very important ramifications for the history of medicine and neurology. But the links I would like to explore here are on the philosophical and aesthetic side. My chief example is Charles Bell (1774–1842) himself, whose influential work on the nerves was closely related to his equally influential work on art and aesthetics, and his advocacy of natural theology and design. Bell is an ideal exemplar of the intersection of these traditions in the early part of the century: his contribution to his own field was significant, his reach through what were becoming different disciplines was long in influence, and he provided an important focus for Darwin’s midcentury work on emotion, which in turn shaped what came after. Bell did not identify primarily as a philosopher, but he also came of age in a milieu in which such distinctions were not clearly drawn. His interlocutors included several of the great philosophers of his age, who, in turn, often held chairs in mathematics and sciences rather than philosophy at Edinburgh University, at which students who wanted to study Euclidean geometry were expected to complete a year of Greek philosophy in preparation. In Scotland in the early nineteenth century, to study medicine seriously was perforce to engage in metaphysical and philosophical debate. It is perhaps significant that between the 1806 edition, Essays on the Anatomy of Expression in Painting, and the 1824 expanded edition, Bell added a second term to the title: Essays on the Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression in Painting—the addition points to the book’s intervention not only in aesthetic questions, but in a natural theological debate as well.16 Anatomist, neurologist, religious writer, surgeon, and artist, Bell is well known to historians of art and of medicine, but less so to literary scholars. His popular book continued to be influential throughout the rest of the century, particularly for Charles Darwin, who admired and disagreed with Bell with equal vigor. The book detailed the anatomical expression of emotion and included illustrated analyses of facial muscles and nerves (see fig. 1.1). It was well received and praised by artists and anatomists, and such significant lay readers as the royal family. On the strength of it, many artists attended Bell’s anatomy lectures, and his work influenced a generation of midcentury painters. Ruskin cited him frequently and approvingly, and the historian of physiognomy Lucy Hartley shows that Pre-Raphaelites such as Holman Hunt read and cited him with approval. The book underwent multiple printings and three significant editions: the first in 1806, an augmented edition in 1824, and the last, including a very significant augmentation by Bell that

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Figure 1.1. Bell, Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression (1824), “Plate One: Being a View of the Nerves of the Head.” Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY_4.0.

included comparisons with classical and Renaissance continental art, posthumously brought to press in 1844. In medicine, Bell is best known for his work on the craniofacial nerves, and the relationship of the nerves to respiration.17 In addition to aspects of the different roles played by sensory and motor neurons, he first identified the facial palsy known by his name. He is also well known by those interested in

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evolution—though not as well known as he deserves to be, given that Darwin freely acknowledges him as a major influence on his own work on the emotions. Hartley, in her history of physiognomy, has written extensively on Bell; as she establishes, his contributions were foundational in showing the materiality of the senses. This was a tricky business, as any discussion of sensation and expression in this period “tended to involve consideration of the will, along with consciousness and the soul, in determining the voluntary and involuntary movements of the mind and body” (Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression 55).18 Bell, an Episcopalian, was at the forefront of scientific advances, along with the French materialists, while taking simultaneously what would quickly come to seem to later readers a conservative religious position. He was also known as an advocate of natural theology for his 1833 Bridgewater Treatise on the hand. Lady Bell wrote after his death that “in an argument opposing Buffon’s fanciful views of man’s creation, he says—‘a Human being, pure from his Maker, with desires and passions implanted in him adapted to his state, implies something very near what we have been early taught to believe’ ” (407).19 Scientific discovery, he believed, “proceeds upon the principle that Nature does nothing in vain, and that every fibre of the human frame has a specific purpose, which it is the object of science to ascertain” (Letters 428–29). Bell believed that his true contribution to knowledge would be derived from the combination of his artistic work on expression and medical work on the nerves. He wrote in a letter to his brother George in 1818, “If I am to be anything, it is from connection with Natural Philosophy by Anatomy; and every day the subject enlarges upon my view. . . . I wish to publish my essay on Expression. . . . I wish to enter upon the comparative anatomy of the nervous system, which I can make a thing surprising” (Letters 259). Bell’s tome on human expression is recognizable within a long tradition of such illustrated guides, hearkening back to a rich physiognomic literature (especially in France)20 and to actors’ guides to the expressions. Bell’s work is differentiated by his emphasis on anatomy and his belief that the musculature of human faces was divinely designed to allow the fullest range of emotional expression as an index of truth and that the exalted emotions conduced to godliness: “In man we see . . . peculiar muscles, to which no other office can be assigned, than to act as organs of expression; to serve as instruments of that universal language which has been called instinctive, which at least produces something like the effect of innate sympathy, and seems to be independent of experience or arbitrary custom. It is, in short, of man alone that we can with strict propriety say, the countenance is an index of the mind, having expression corresponding with each emotion of the soul” (Anatomy of Expression 1806, 88). Bell believed that humans were

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divinely gifted (we might think, cursed) with the necessity of involuntarily expressing inner truth through expression. This materialist analysis, however, was framed in a natural-theological context; by 1824 he both makes this explicit and defends it. He argues that “if  . . . the mind is dependent on the frame of the body, the discovery ought not to be considered as humiliating. . . . It is a fundamental law of our nature, that the mind shall be subject to the operations of the body, and have its powers developed through its influence. . . . Since we are dwellers in a material world, it is necessary that the spirit should be given up to the influence of a material and organized body, without which it could neither feel, nor re-act, nor manifest itself in any way” (Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression 1824, 15–16). He attributes emotions to the “higher intellectual faculties” that “The Creator” has implanted within all human beings “by which we are drawn toward him” (1824, 16), and this would continue to be used as an explanation for the involuntary expressions of the human face for many authors throughout the century, an explanation with which Darwin disagreed but was compelled to engage. Bell saw his work as congruent with the work of the leading Scottish lights in philosophy and natural theology, and indeed, his findings are strictly in line with Common Sense theory. This is hardly surprising, as the entire milieu of Edinburgh University was immersed in these ideas. At one point when drafting a work on neuroanatomy, Bell asks in a letter to his brother, “Could you not get Dugald Stewart, or Playfair, to look at my manuscript of the brain?” (August 5, 1808). Stewart, chair of mathematics and later moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, was a student of Thomas Reid and a philosopher of the Common Sense movement, and John Playfair advocated Hutton’s geology of deep time, which was foundational for evolutionary theory, and succeeded Stewart as chair of mathematics. (Both men were theists.) Neither was an anatomist—but Bell considered it a matter of course that they were both institutionally and intellectually important interlocutors. Their careers suggest the extent to which all areas of knowledge were continuous under the umbrella of philosophy. Moreover, and important for later discussions in the nineteenth century, Bell not only believed that the more complex emotional expressions were unique to humans, but that the musculature of the face actually enabled humans not only to express, but to experience these emotions in the first place. If these structures were given to express a uniquely human consciousness, they also made such consciousness possible. Such a view diffuses the source and nature of consciousness across the body rather than focusing on a single location of the mind or will. The Anatomy of Expression and The Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression were particularly significant for Darwin’s

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Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). Darwin’s book uses a good deal of Bell’s work, though the argument itself is structured in part as a point-by-point analysis and refutation of Bell’s claims for design. Darwin praises Bell for having “laid the foundations of the subject as a branch of science” and providing a “noble structure” of researched material (2). That said, Darwin is determined to show that there are evolutionary reasons for expression having nothing to do with divine intention. A good example of Bell’s ideas is his observation that the feeling of reverence is instinctively accompanied by uplifted eyes: “the eye indicates the holier emotions. In all stages of society and in every clime, the posture and expression of reverence have been the same. . . . when the voluntary muscles resign their action, . . . the oblique muscles prevail. . . . It is by this instinctive motion we are led to bow with humility—to look upward in prayer” (Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression 94–95; see fig. 1.2).

Figure 1.2. Bell, Anatomy of Expression (1806), showing “reverent attention with elevation of thought,” p. 13. Source: Getty Research Institute.

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Darwin found this aspect of Bell’s analysis tendentious. He notes, “Devotion is chiefly expressed [in painting] by the face being directed towards the heavens, with the eyeballs upturned. . . . But Sir C. Bell’s explanation . . . is . . . incorrect. . . . the movement is probably a conventional one—the result of the common belief that Heaven, the source of Divine power to which we pray, is seated above us” (Darwin, Expression 220–21). Others were less respectful: radical materialist Lancet editor Thomas Wakley satirized both Bell’s theology and his accent: Bell “never touches a phalanx and its flexor tendon, without exclaiming, with uplifted eye and most reverentially-contracted mouth, ‘Gintilmin, behold the winderful eevidence of desin’ ” (Wakley, qtd. in Desmond, Politics of Evolution 111–12). Bell provided a scaffolding for Darwin in part by analyzing the structural relationship between facial muscles of different animals and humans. He determines that human beings are an animal “between” the graminivorous and carnivorous, based on their teeth and jaw muscles (Anatomy of Expression 1806, 93; see fig 1.3). Individuals may tend more toward one or another side of this balance, and that will affect their expression; he expands on this explanation in the 1824 edition with examples from the theater: The excitement of passion will in one man be indicated chiefly by the prevalence of one class of muscles, and in another individual the other class will predominate. . . . In the Kemble cast of features there is a capacity of high excitement; but in that family there never appeared the bloodthirsty expression which Cooke could throw into his face. In the latter the Ringentes [snarling muscles] prevailed: and what determined hate he could express, when, combined with the oblique cast of his eyes, he drew up the outer part of the upper lip, and disclosed a sharp angular tooth! . . . But in the cast of Mrs. Siddons’s countenance . . . the animation is in the mobility of the nostril and the swelling of the upper lip, and a mouth capable of expressing whatever is most exalted in human sentiment. (Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression 1824, 67–68) He explains that Mrs. Siddons’s face has more in common with horses than carnivores.21 (History has not, so far as I know, recorded her reception of this particular compliment.) Bell also has liberal recourse to Shakespeare, Dante, and Homer. These examples mingle somewhat oddly for today’s reader with the detailed anatomical drawings and long, skull-measuring arguments with Cuvier. But they are perfectly in line with one genre in which he is participating, that of artistic discussions of expression, in which there was a long tradition in both theatrical and artistic writing. Although most lacked the deep physiological and anatomical knowledge brought to the topic by Bell, many did refer at least briefly to the current physiological theories of the time.22

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Figure 1.3. Bell, Anatomy of Expression (1806), “Plate IV: Of the Muscles of the Face of Brutes,” facing p. 71. Source: Getty Research Institute.

Art, Realism, and the Body Materialism and the body as a reliable source of truth implied a moral aesthesis. If the body’s sensations were true, and beauty was truth (an old and venerable correlation), then truth might be beauty—and truth might be defined as the accurate representation of the material surface of things perceptible by the body, a much less obvious proposition. Today Bell’s work on expression is best known through Darwin’s resistance to the theological side of Bell’s argument, rather than for the startling degree of materialism Bell actually advocates. But Bell was also important in discussions of art, and art

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historians’ discussions of Bell, which tend to take a different trajectory, are illuminative of the ways the new materialism did and did not directly transfer to the realm of the aesthetic. I would like to argue that the question of realism and representation, one that is associated strongly in literary criticism with the emergence of “interiority,” might be profitably considered in terms of exteriority, of surface.23 Bell’s work has been read as illustrating an important moment of transition between classicism and realism in representation. As an anatomist concerned with accuracy in the representation of the body in painting, he is in many ways a proponent of the new realism, and certainly many artists read him as such. However, his own artistic tastes and theories tend toward neoclassical canons of beauty rather than later realist canons of accuracy. There has been confusion about Bell’s artistic leanings, in part because some art historians have lumped his anatomical illustrations together with his aesthetic work, whereas he considered the functions of the two kinds of art to be quite different. His instructions for artists make some of the stakes of this debate clear. Despite his belief that emotional expression was often beyond conscious control, Bell, much like Darwin and Duchenne after him, was particularly interested in the ability to represent emotions intentionally. First, his book was directed to artists to help them paint faces realistically, in anatomical terms. More remarkably, given his insistence that expressions are not under conscious control, his examples tend to be from the stage. He repeatedly references actors of the day and theatrical performances to explain how actors invoke human emotions through subtle muscular movements that create sympathy in the audience. As a visual artist himself, Bell was interested in composing proper representations of bodies, and as an aficionado of theater, he was interested in how actors composed emotion within their own bodies. The historian Ludmilla Jordanova observes that because Bell is generally perceived as conservative, he has fallen through the historical cracks: “neither art historians nor medical historians have known quite what to do with Charles Bell” (81). The common perception of Bell as simply conservative often seems based more on his religious and racial views than on his work or aesthetics in historical context.24 Bell’s scientific materialist writings in fact seem to imply a radical new aesthetics—but his own artwork seems to some art critics disappointingly regressive. In truth, Bell has a very particular view of what is aesthetically acceptable for those engaged in the artistic representation of the expressions. The human face may participate in the character of both orders of lower animals, but it transcends it in the complexity and mobility of its musculature. In his commentaries, anatomical realism seems

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at first to be his paramount concern: “some painters have thought it allowable to give human expression to the heads of lions, and others have presented human character in their heads of horses. I conceive this to be done upon a mistaken principle, . . . . it appears . . . doubtful, whether the mingling of human expression with the features of the savage animals be in the true spirit of that principle of association, which should govern the adaptation of expression and character in producing an ideal form” (Bell, Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression 1824, 46–47). This might seem such a naturalist view (despite its invocation of “ideal form”) that the reader might forgivably feel astonished if, while reading Bell’s book, liberally illustrated with anatomically correct drawings of human expressions and of the musculature supporting them, he finds, suddenly, a drawing of a satyr weeping with abandon (see chap. 6 and fig. 6.1). He explains, “I have thrown the expression of weeping, from pain, into the face of a faun: for there is in weeping something inexpressibly mean and ludicrous when it appears in the countenance of a man” ’ (1824, 80). Over the course of his careful discussions of musculature, Bell pulls up considerably short of the visual realism introduced in France later in the century. The artist should never exhibit the ludicrous or the disgusting: “Whatever is morally just is beautiful in art: the expression of pain, proceeding from the direct suffering of the body, is disgusting, while that which animates to the highest degree of expression in compassion or sympathy with another’s sufferings, cannot be too powerfully pourtrayed, if it be done truly” (Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression 1824, 142–43). The portrayal should be anatomically realistic—that is how sympathy is evoked, in Common Sense theory, by our observation of an expression that matches what we would feel in our own body under similar emotional pressure, but without depicting anything aesthetically undesirable—which comprises a great deal of human experience.25 Another notable example of “real” emotion and aesthetic representation can be found in Bell’s discussions of mental illness, a favorite subject for “realistic” visual representation later on in the century as well. The mad were thought both to be unable to control their expressions, and to have expressions uniquely indicative of madness. Jean-Martin Charcot later famously compiled albums of photographs displaying the mad and the cured, so their expressions could be compared. Although such photographs claimed to have the advantage of absolute realism, scholars have shown how such representations were heavily mediated. Bell, of course, was working before photography, and insisted on sketching from life, visiting many madhouses in order to frame his illustrations of madness. In advising other artists, he cautions

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against the “error into which a painter would naturally fall” of emphasizing “the swelling features of passion and the frowning eyebrow; but this would only convey the idea of passion, not of madness.” Madness would show in the choice of muscles used: “amidst the utter wreck of the intellect . . . the expression of mental energy should be avoided, and consequently all exertion of those muscles which are peculiarly indicative of sentiment” (Bell, Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression 1824, 122–23). He reins himself in again, however, when he distinguishes between such a drawing—which he offers in the text—and the aims of the artistic painter, advising his students not to shock their audiences, but to educate them. Artists must master such subjects only to then move beyond them: “But these discussions are only for the studies of the painter. The subject should be full in his mind, without its being for a moment imagined that such humiliating or disgusting details are suited to the canvas. If he has to represent madness, it is with a moral to show the consequences of vice and the indulgence of passion” (Bell, Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression 1824, 123–24). In short, Bell is very clear on the difference between the kind of anatomical precision he attempted to inculcate in his artist-students and a verisimilitude he would have considered disgusting and inartistic in the finished work. Bell’s own anatomical works and his artworks are quite separate genres controlled by different standards and techniques. Darwin observes later with some initial puzzlement, “I had hoped to derive much aid [in researching emotions] from the great masters in painting and sculpture, who are such good observers” (14). He laments, however that he has not learned as much as he hoped, for “in works of art, beauty is the chief object; and strongly contracted facial muscles destroy beauty. The story of the composition is generally told . . . by skilfully given accessories” (14). Bell would have considered this obvious. Anatomical training was valuable for enabling the artist to create bodily attitudes realistic enough to immediately spark a sympathetic physiological response in the viewer. But simple replication of suffering, and emotions like animalistic “passions” rather than higher “sentiments,” could be debasing and distressing to the viewer, undercutting the moral intention of the artist. In his journal, Bell reacts painfully to a painting that is too clearly an anatomical study from the dead: In the old library in Basle there is a remarkable painting of Christ by the younger Holbein. The painter must have been where anatomy was to be learned; for I am much mistaken if he has not painted from the dead body in an hospital. It is horribly true. . . . Here is the rigid, stringy appearance of the muscles about the knee. The wounds where the

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nails have penetrated the hands and feet are dark red, with extravasation round the wound, and the hand itself of the livid colour of mortification. The eyes, too, shew from whence he drew; the eyelids are open, the pupil raised, and a little turned out. (n.p.)26 He is also distressed by paintings such as Reynolds’s illustration of Dante’s starving Ugolino that sacrifice the narrative to anatomical realism by painting too strictly from a model. First, such models often have unnatural muscular attitudes due to the length of time they must hold the pose; second, they often come from inappropriate backgrounds. Ugolino, Bell observes, should be a large nobleman, recently starved, not a beggar who clearly has been underfed for years. He also remarks that Reynolds generally leaves him nothing to critique, as he is terrible on anatomical detail.27 This observation was not one he publicly aired in print, but Reynolds was clearly a target for anatomical critiques in his circle and among those who followed his work. The Pre-Raphaelites invoked Bell when they scornfully tagged Reynolds as “Sir Sloshua” for his lackadaisical approach to anatomy.28 Bell believed that artists should, however, sketch studies of all possible affective states, both so they might understand muscular arrangements and so that the disgusting could be avoided in the finished painting. Paint the pain of the body in order to avoid reproducing it in finished art; paint the pain of the mind in sympathy with another’s bodily pain, a re-presentation at two removes (the pained body, the pained perception of pain, the production of sympathetic emotional pain as an expression) that can then be painted, or represented at one more remove. The body’s representations of the “soul’s” states—states that the materiality of the body enables and helps create—and the artist’s responsibility to that materiality, as well as to an aesthetic ideal, can be represented. The direct or animal response to pain, however, indicates no interiority and therefore no nobility; it is thus aesthetically disgusting. Also, the artist’s body must, in some measure, experience these states, at least at one remove. The artist registers visually and through his nervous system these extreme states, in order to transform them through representation into something morally and aesthetically appropriate. In this, the artist is like the surgeon, who must look on all fearlessly and experience everything. (It is perhaps worth noting here that Bell’s own experience as a surgeon was one of acute and painful sympathy; he was well known for suffering nervous strain from the stress of observing the pain of his patients or his animal subjects—and forbore pursuing one of his important theories because he found the vivisection required to confirm his research too distressing.)

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But it is the body’s own anatomy as well as its mirroring of another’s degraded or exalted state that enables and shapes the interior reconception represented in the higher (more complex human) expressions and that is the proper material of art. A person who tends toward the “graminivorous” jaw can express various emotions, but differently from the carnivorously inclined; further, the materiality of that graminivorous dentition will enable the experience of exalted expressions—and sentiments—simply unavailable to him of the passionately exposed canine. So the painter expresses not only a universal truth, but the truth of a particular body and thus character. He does this through his Common Sense understanding of human bodies, cultivated to a higher sensitivity through observation. So what must the artist not attempt to represent as art? In describing the horrors of a suicide inquest, Bell asks rhetorically, “Are such scenes to be represented? Certainly not. But they are to be conceived by those, who consistently with good taste, are . . . to convey an impression to the spectator, to that mind which may be awakened to sensation without all the disgusting circumstances of the actual scene. We may have it in words, as Shakespeare has represented the body of the good Duke Humphry. But in painting, the material makes the representation too true to admit the whole features of horror” (Bell, Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression 1824, 100–101). Bell is clear here that the different arts require different standards, although in his text, the slippage often seems to pass the author unnoticed. The actor is not frozen in time like the moment of the painting, but unfolds his or her craft in narrative order, and must be able to perform villainous as well as noble roles. Bell was an aficionado of the theater, and his letters to his brother, written while he was an impecunious lecturer in London, show that his one luxury was visits to the theater and opera. And here, where it is more possible to convey all the aspects of human emotion, the artist’s difficulty is not to choose the right moment, but to convey both passion and humanity. As with Mrs. Siddons, actors create in their bodies representations of emotions that must be real and immediate enough—that is, sufficiently supported by their material substrate—to trigger the response of sympathy in the audience. Bell sometimes uses examples from drama (here Shakespeare’s Richard III) to illustrate “reality”—here, the stress of genuine guilt: “The villain may command his voice, and mask his purpose with light and libertine words, or carry an habitual sneer of contempt of all softer passions; but his unnatural paleness, and the sinking of his features, will betray that he suffers. Clarence says to his murderers, “How deadly thou dost look!—Speak! your eyes do menace me—Why look you pale?” (Bell, Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression 1824, 23). But the actor portraying a sympathetic character has not only

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to reproduce a certain bodily attitude, but to indicate his self-control: “men will not have the violence of grief obtruded on them. The actor, to preserve the dignity of his character, must permit only those uncontrollable signs of inward suffering to escape, betraying how much he feels, and how much he restrains” (23). So the actor must also pale or blush to induce the audience to feel with him, and as Darwin drily comments, that must be accomplished in haste with the rouge or powder pot. Still, beyond the tricks of makeup, the actor’s craft requires a careful and multilayered composition of the body: first to the attitude of grief, then to that of restraint, then, most difficult of all, to a controlled release of “uncontrollable” expression. Has my reader seen Mrs. Siddons in Queen Katherine . . . ? Who taught the crowd sitting at a play, an audience differing in age, habits, and education, to believe those quivering motions, and that gentle smile, . . . to be true to nature? To see every one hushed to the softest breathing of sympathy with the silent expression of the actress, exhibits all mankind held together by one universal feeling, and that feeling excited by expression so deep laid in our nature, as to have influence without being obvious to reason. (23) Indeed. (And who taught Mrs. Siddons to counterfeit this universal feeling so successfully?) Bell draws heavily on a notion of sympathy based on bodies responding to other bodies at a preconscious level, the idea, current from the days of David Hume to recent discussions of mirror neurons, that what we see other bodies experience is at some level experienced in our own—that this is how we recognize emotion in others, and respond. Emotional authenticity is guaranteed by the involuntary quality of its physiological signs. But the artist must voluntarily create these signs, do so in such a way that we recognize them—and experience them as authentic and compelling. The artist must do all of these things, moreover, while working within an aesthetic framework that disallows a simple naturalism. In these examples, Bell is concerned with art not as representation of “reality” but as something designed to evoke a Common Sense response—and that response is not evoked equally by all visual experiences of human expression, because ultimately Common Sense calls on both the natural and the normative. (For Thomas Reid, as for Kant, beauty was always moral beauty.) What inspires the viewer to have a thoughtful sympathetic response that affirms community norms and moral values is aesthetically valuable; what does not, even if it occurs within nature, is not an appropriate subject of artistic portrayal. Mere pain does not automatically call forth the moral response Bell values; it must suggest transcendence as well as evoke sympathy. Although

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we may have an autonomic response to some kinds of emotional representations, these may be counterproductive; all fellow feeling is not equally valuable. (In chapter 3, we shall see more examples of these distinctions between good and dangerous fellow-feeling.) Ultimately, Bell suggests, the artist is responsible for using the power of sympathy for a moral purpose; in that, he is in line with the tradition of Common Sense theorists. This is also why, despite a notion of authenticity and sincerity that Bell argues connects human emotion to divinity, he seems to suggest contradictorily that the ultimate act of composition is directed to the arrangement of one’s own features. This is a materialist process of spiritual self-discipline, rather than of masking the truth: changing one’s features will change the emotions they give rise to, and thus allow for moral development: “How much influence the instrument of expression has in first rousing the mind into that state of activity which we call the passions or emotions, we may learn from the power which the body has at all times to control these passions” (Bell, Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression 1824, 141). He cites Burke’s remark that by mimicking the expressions of others, he experienced “that passion whose appearance I endeavoured to imitate”—and observes: Whether it be possible to mould the body, and thus to steal into another’s thoughts, I know not; but it is of more consequence to recollect that we may in this way ascertain our own; by the actions and expressions of the body betraying the passions of our hearts, we may be startled and forewarned, . . . and . . . learn to control our passions by restraining the expression of them. . . . As we hold our breath and throw ourselves into an opposite action to restrain the ludicrous idea which would cause us to break out in rude laughter, so may we restrain other rising emotions, . . . and by composing the body, we put a rein upon our very thoughts. (Bell, Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression 1824, 141–42) This is the Common Sense iteration of the Aristotelian notion of the habitus, and differs from Diderot’s idea, that humans have “physiognomic intuition” built up from positive and negative associations that to some extent serve as universals, in the Common Sense attribution of this universality to design rather than experience.29 Here, the goal is to meliorate the emotions through the composition of the body, rather than simply embracing the “natural” human. Each person, then, should become a physiognomist, analyzing his or her emotional reaction to the emotions displayed by others in order to judge their moral appropriateness and desirability. This is itself a pedagogy of com-

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position: one learns to observe the anatomy of others so that each person becomes a performing artist, composing his or her features and attitude in the most desirable way possible to their own musculature. Because the body itself creates mind, as well as being disciplined by it, the action of portraying admirable emotions is a moral discipline, inculcating in muscle memory certain habits of thought and attitude, which itself then tends toward the perfection of the self-composed soul. Through such a discipline, animal passions are transformed physiologically into human emotion, morally edifying and aesthetically correct. Despite his reservations about painting distressing physical states realistically, Bell’s embrace of nature as, essentially, morally good and thus beautiful was, for its era, still aesthetically avant-garde, though that was quickly changing. A more radical artistic exemplar of naturalism was evident in the new realism of French art, whose most shocking exponent was Gustave Courbet, who came to public attention in the early 1850s. Duncan Macmillan’s “French Art and Scottish Philosophy” offers a provocative thesis regarding the dialogue between French artists and Scottish Common Sense philosophers. He notes that the ideas of Thomas Reid about art were disseminated by Victor Cousin, who lectured at Edinburgh, and then went home to France to reform French education under the July Monarchy (Macmillan 25–26), where he disseminated Scottish ideas on art to such artists as Delacroix. Reid had advocated a “naive” or to some extent naturalist approach to painting: the artist was to attend to sense perceptions while attempting to avoid imposing a preconceived order on them. Art, then, began by unlearning traditional ways of seeing. This is an approach we see later in Ruskin’s advocacy of realism, based in the notion that nature is inherently good. Of course, Reid also focused on the artist’s responsibility to represent the (morally) “beautiful,” which seems not to have impressed Courbet with the same force. Macmillan observes that Reid paid particular attention to the question of a physiological basis for perception, but recognized the limits of current knowledge about the mind-body interaction: “how are the sensations of the mind produced by impressions upon the body? Of this we are absolutely ignorant” (Reid, qtd. in Macmillan 29). It is this challenge that is taken up by Charles Bell, whose family moved in the same circles as the generation of philosophers that had studied under Reid. Macmillan also remarks on the challenge Bell’s insistence on expression and movement presented to the reigning neoclassicism of the day, which emphasized form and suggested movement more through narrative elements than the bodies of central figures.30 This debate went well beyond the Scottish medical tradition or French painting, and was entrenched in a larger set of philosophical, scientific, and

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political debates on both sides of the Channel. However, it makes clear that Bell was hardly the artistically conservative figure that he is often thought to be. He again emerges as holding a mix of beliefs that are particularly illustrative of his historical moment. Though he was no early Courbet, he still advocated a realism that went well beyond the aesthetic norms of his own period. Lucy Hartley has persuasively traced the galvanizing effect that Bell had upon such artists as the Landseers, who studied with him (65), and the Pre-Raphaelites (79 and passim), who read him avidly (and were endorsed by Ruskin). To get an idea of how forward and distinct Bell’s view seemed at the time, it is useful to look at a later, less influential work on art by another Edinburgh anatomist, Robert Knox (1791–1862). Knox, whose career in Scotland was derailed by the exposure of his purchase of corpses from Burke and Hare, went on to write his own artistic treatise in 1852: A Manual of Artistic Anatomy. His work represented a genuinely conservative but by no means isolated response to the artists of the late 1840s and early 1850s, based firmly in the neoclassical aesthetics of the late eighteenth century in which Bell came of age.The art historian Allister Neher shows how Knox opposed Bell, arguing that the focus on anatomy had led artists down the wrong path: “in England, utilitarian England, the coping stone of folly was placed by Sir Charles Bell and Mr. Haydon”31 (qtd. in Neher 48). Neher notes as well that Knox was aesthetically “repelled . . . by the interior of the human body. In at least a dozen different places in his books he forcefully expresses his revulsion. . . . [Knox writes,] ‘The instant the interior shows itself through the exterior, however trifling the indication may be, it marks . . . a tendency to dissolution. It is this that rivets the attention of the observer . . . the most dreaded of all human events’ ” (Neher 47). Yet he was equally distressed by an imperfect surface, as we shall see in his remarks on age. Knox indeed is responding to Bell, and as does Darwin later, spends every chapter referring to him. Unlike Darwin, Knox is decidedly not respectful of Bell’s accomplishments, (though he does pay him an unintended compliment in lumping him in a list of such woefully mistaken figures as “Michael Angelo”; Manual 1). His disagreement with Bell often degenerates to the merely spiteful; although he is always at least polite when mentioning Bell by name, he insults him in other passages where the identity of his target cannot be mistaken: “Men, who ought to have been watchmakers, have become surgeons and anatomists, and have written works on the philosophy of the human hand, and on animal mechanics, and on the human machine, without a spark of philosophy, genius, or truth” (Knox, Manual 44). So much for Bell’s rather ingenious “Treatise on Animal Mechanics” and “Essay on the Hand, Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments as Evincing Design.” Whereas

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Bell emphasizes understanding interior structure as the exterior is intimately related to it, Knox observes that “The artist will not be the worse for knowing a good deal of the interior, were it only to teach him what to avoid. On his skill in concealing the interior, or rather in representing it as influencing obscurely the exterior, naturally will depend much of the beauty and perfection of his drawings” (Manual 17). Bell sees in the aging of the body a sign that God intended to be represented and read—after all, he points out, tissues continually renew themselves, so the body itself is not “old”; thus wrinkles and other signs of aging must serve a divine purpose. Knox, however, sees aging as decay that exposes the ghastly interior of the body, which is never beautiful. He exhorts his students, “Look at the neck of a fine woman, and observe how little of the interior, that is, the anatomy, is displayed or intended to be displayed by Nature. . . . nothing can be so unlike the beautiful exterior I now describe as the internal anatomy which partly gives rise to it. . . . In old age . . . the anatomy of the interior shows itself, and the skin hangs in hideous wrinkles. . . . The neck resembles a dissection, and, the nearer it approaches this by, so much the more is it frightful” (Manual 108). For an anatomist, he is singularly disgusted by the structures Bell found so wondrously revelatory of the hand of God; beauty is always in the denial of the organic processes: “To make the front beautiful, Nature had many difficulties to overcome, . . . to conceal anatomical organs of the most appalling shapes” (Knox, Manual 111). I’ll stop now—one is tempted to quote Knox at length, just because his sheer crotchetiness and misogyny offer so much dark entertainment value. But to see him merely as a crank would be a mistake. In fact, his writing is reflective of influential neoclassical ideals of beauty and disgust adumbrated by Hegel, Winckelmann, and others, particularly his disgust toward and rejection of the interior of the body and his preference for smooth, unbroken contours that masked the relation of the interior to the exterior. Winfried Menninghaus observes of the aesthetics of the period that Kant, Herder, and Diderot largely agreed about the beauty of a classically represented body. “The aesthetically pleasing body has no interior,” he observes (54). Kant pronounces that “for thinking beings, art’s highest subject is man. . . . His external surface alone” (qtd. in Menninghaus 54). The interior is disgusting. Herder, working from Winckelmann’s observations on statuary, uses the image of the “gently blown” surface, smooth, hollow, and airy (54). Menninghaus summarizes, “The figure must look as if it has no corporeal interior; put otherwise, it must appear in a manner necessarily suspending any thought of such interiority” (56). The specific referent here is statuary, but the rejection of interiority implicates the aesthetic reception of the

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physical body itself. Knox’s aesthetic is also continuous with earlier aesthetic worries about the rise of the medécins philosophes and their materialist focus on anatomy: Diderot, in his “Notes on Painting,” observes, “Study of the écorché doubtless has its advantages; but . . . this might encourage the artist to become enamoured of his knowledge and show it off; . . . his vision might be corrupted, precluding attentive scrutiny of surfaces; . . . I might encounter this accursed écorché even in his figures of women” (193). Much of this debate centers on the importance of skin as signifying surface in this period, as opposed to merely the outermost layer of a self centered in the interior of the body. The French materialists had more fully embraced the focus on a skin-self, whereas older traditions still promoted an idea of the mind or soul ensconced deep within a fleshy envelope. Bell’s art, like his neurology, still focused on the continuity and interrelation of mind and body. In essence, however, both the conservative aesthetics of the day and Bell’s neurology trended toward a focus on surface as determinative. If the soul had previously been located in the center of the body, Bell’s extension of the sensorium moved sensation and conscious awareness to the body’s surface. Whereas the idealist tradition historically had seen the sensory body as a dangerous, irrational distraction to the moral will, the Scottish Common Sense tradition saw the body as a grounding and corrective source of truth and sympathy.32 Whereas neoclassical canons of beauty saw the interior as a disgusting location of animal passions and our subordination to sin and mortality, the new physiology saw it increasingly as a support system for the self, whose location, like its focus, was outward. Beauty was on the surface. Increasingly, so was truth—or, more precisely, true self. As the mind was increasingly based on the body’s sensory capacity, the location of that capacity was being debated. A major concern of the period was about whether the viscera and interior of the body had sensory capacity: do we feel things in our hearts? Bell was adamant that the sensory body is the body’s surface. As he admonishes when illustrating the anatomy of the nerves: “To perfect the system of signs through the Nerves, it will be necessary to attend to a class of them very much neglected; I allude to the Cutaneous Nerves. . . . just under the skin; . . . they are counted of no importance during demonstration. But . . . internal irritation shows itself by external pain” (Series of Engravings x–xi). Bell noted that the body’s consciousness of itself was largely located on the level of its skin (in the nerve’s termination), just as the expressive self expressed itself on skin and through the subcutaneous muscles of the face. Bell’s work on the nerves effectively supported the removal of the mind from a single location embedded deep within a single site of the brain and

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located it instead in the entire brain, and by extension, the chest through the nerves attendant on respiration, and finally throughout the sensing body. The notion of the sensing, willing self as a deep, central structure is completely rewritten. This view of the self as a function of surface was advanced prior to Bell by revered French anatomist Xavier Bichat, who in 1801 declared that the skin functions to place the body “in relation to external bodies. It is in man a sensitive boundary, placed at the extremity of the domain of the mind, where these bodies continually touch, for the purpose of establishing the relations of his animal life, and of thus connecting his existence to that of every thing which surrounds him” (General Anatomy 2: 744).33 By midcentury, drawing on embryology, the notion that the skin was the developmental origin of consciousness would become the dominant view, elaborated by Herbert Spencer and Alexander Bain, as we shall see in chapter 5. By 1920, anatomist Frederic Wood Jones would draw on embryology to make what was by then the accepted medical consensus clear in his book, adapted for a wider audience from his lectures to students of military surgery: “The whole of the central nervous system is merely an inturned portion of the general surface of the embryonic body. . . . our brains and the whole of our nervous system . . . developed from . . . our skin” ( Jones 258). He emphasizes that “the central nervous system [is] . . . no more than a buried portion of skin, or, alternatively, we may look upon the skin as an exposed portion of the central nervous system” (259). The “buried” portion is thus structured “for the purpose of keeping up connection between those cells which know of the outside world and those cells which act upon this knowledge” (260).

Literary Realism and Skin: The Mid-Nineteenth Century Social cohesion, the common sense, was linked to affective sympathy, which itself was founded in attention to the surface of the body. Thus the body had to be truthful, and representation of this truth squared uneasily with traditional, classical aesthetic canons of value. This turn to surface characterizes literary realism as well, a genre often analyzed by scholars within the visual turn, such as Kate Flint or Jennifer Green-Lewis. Painting has always perforce been an art concerned with surface, though not necessarily with realistic portrayal of the surface. The novel, as is well known, became increasingly obsessed in this period with surfaces as well: catalogues of objects, visual descriptions, and visual details about characters that were to serve as clues to their interiority. Aaron Matz argues that literary realism is obsessed with skin, offering an excellent reading of George Eliot through her own comparison of her work to Dutch genre painting: as she describes her sub-

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jects in Adam Bede as being ugly, and having, in her words, “dingy complexions,” Eliot shows us that these negative characteristics are “a shared human trait—and . . . she will return again and again . . . to the basic facts of surface reality, as represented by our common skin” (Matz 6). As Matz points out, in Mill, the brother-sister pair are distinguished by his pinkness and her undesirable “brown” skin. And while silly Celia in Middlemarch critiques Casaubon on the basis of his “sallow” complexion, as Matz observes, she is ultimately right about what that complexion represents (7). Surface reality is not as opposed to depth as we are first led to expect. Matz perceptively links this to the realist mode: “The human skin appears to serve as some kind of terrain upon which a conflict of realism is to be waged. Nothing is more plainly superficial: skin is pure surface, the perfect subject for a realist description of straightforward, physical fact” (8). Matz links this focus on the skin to satire, and places George Eliot in that tradition. And his reading is persuasive. But Eliot’s focus is a mark not simply of a literary tradition, but of a theory of the embodied mind. Eliot was, as critics have often written, interested in the latest physiological theories and was well read in both anatomy and philosophy. Michael Davis, in a study of Eliot and nineteenth-century psychology, has also traced her links to her partner Lewes’s work in physiological psychology with admirable precision. Lewes, continuing the Common Sense tradition, believed that “Mind [is] . . . a function of the organism” (Problems of Life and Mind 59), and that despite the duality of finding ourselves embodied as both subject and object, we are indissolubly one: “We say that we are both Body and Mind. We . . . exist as objects, perceptible to our senses, and to the senses of others, and as subjects, percipient of objects, and conscious of feelings. We live, feed, and move. We feel, think, and will. The solidity, form, colour, weight and motions of the Body constitute the objective, visible self. . . . The sensations, ideas and volitions constitute the subjective, intelligible self ” (10); therefore, there is an “indispensable union of the physiological with the psychological investigation” (14). Both Lewes and Eliot were heavily influenced by Herbert Spencer, who, with Alexander Bain, became the dominant voices of physiological materialism in the latter half of the nineteenth century, developing the associationist psychological ideas of David Hume along with newer insights from physiology and evolutionary science.34 Lewes was well aware of the work of Bell, which he repeatedly praised, though he was at pains to preserve interiority as a source of consciousness against Bell and Spencer’s surface-ism: to show that the muscles had sensations of their own separate from the nerve terminals in the skin, and that the heart still had the capacity to process emotional sensations. It was of some

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importance to him that the consciousness not be referable solely to skin sensations; he returns to this topic repeatedly, and considers Bell to be mistaken in this. Though he does not position himself as deliberately in dialogue with the philosophical questions of the Scottish school, he has repeated recourse to the language of those thinkers, and his idea—working from Spencer—of a commonality of mind in excess of the individual, hearkens directly back to the notion of the sensus communis with which they worked, though providing a social-evolutionary, rather than a religious, explanation. It also represented a break from the earlier notion of the individual as a separate microcosm, regarding society as an organism with a composite mind that exceeds the sum of its parts. Lewes, informed by the German tradition so vital to Eliot, gestures to the connection between the individual and communal in terms familiar from German explorations into linguistics, which emphasizes a transcendent force beyond the bounded individual body: “While the mental functions are functions of the individual organism, the product, Mind, is more than an individual product. Like its great instrument, Language, it is at once individual and social. . . . the General Mind [is] . . . the residual store of experiences common to all” (Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind 160–61). Perhaps his attachment to an idealist notion of spirit accords with his attachment to interiority of sensation despite the fact that Lewes also unproblematically positioned the sensorium commune as “coextensive with the nervous centres” (Physiology of Common Life 2: 30). Eliot’s well-known tracking of medical research shows some of the links between literary realism and physiological theories of sensation and emotion, of will and action, that were clear to her contemporaries, just as Lewes’s work shows the continuing vitality of questions regarding the sensorium commune and its relation to common sense.35 Her realism is famously the realism of the ordinary and prosaic as they really appear. Her focus on the body, like the focus on homely domesticity or personal transgression that marks the age of domestic realism, was attacked by Ruskin, in his famous essay “Fiction Fair and Foul” (originally published in 1880), as being like the physician who traces a “cutaneous” disease. In suggesting the painful too directly, articulating surfaces too clearly, and seeking to understand causes and mechanisms through them, Eliot’s realism transgresses the boundary of art and becomes something like what Bell would have thought suitable for the artist’s personal studies only. Ruskin attributes the degeneration of the aesthetic to urbanization and industrialism: “beauty has been in the world since the world was made, and human language can make a shift, somehow, to give account of it, whereas the peculiar forces of devastation induced by modern city life have only entered the world lately; and no existing terms of

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language known to me are enough to describe the forms of filth, and modes of ruin” of industrialization (“Fiction” 266). He worries about “children of to-day, accustomed, from the instant they are out of their cradles, to the sight of this infinite nastiness, . . . what is to be the scholastic issue? unless, indeed, the thrill of scientific vanity in the primary analysis of some unheard-of process of corruption” (267–68). The language is remarkably similar to Knox’s distaste for the body’s interior. Ruskin attributes the tastes vitiated by industrial urban life to “the pleasure . . . in the analysis of physical corruption” that has developed a literature and a “modern philosophy” focused on “the reactions of moral disease upon itself, and the conditions of languidly monstrous character developed in an atmosphere of low vitality” (268). Even in the 1870s, Ruskin still has abundant recourse to a neoclassical, antimaterialist discourse on the purpose and function of art as idealist and ennobling, and on naturalist realism as degraded and dangerous. Ruskin uses the language of the sanitary project to explain this turn in physiological terms.36 The “hot fermentation and unwholesome secrecy of the population crowded into large cities, each mote in the misery lighter, as an individual soul, than a dead leaf, but becoming oppressive and infectious each to his neighbor, in the smoking mass of decay” led to a degraded taste for reading about such things, as well as to a legitimate scientific interest, and so, “The resulting modes of mental ruin and distress . . . have accordingly developed a corresponding science of fiction, concerned mainly with the description of such forms of disease, like the botany of leaf-lichens” (268). The worst offenders are (of course) the French realists, and he lambasts Balzac’s Père Goriot as “one of which the violent contrasts and spectral catastrophe could only take place, or be conceived, in a large city” (269). The moral and physical illness of the city promote a fatalism, both in the urban dwellers and in fiction, as “the incapacity of their own minds to refuse the pollution, and of their own wills to oppose the weight, of the staggering mass that chokes and crushes them into perdition, brings every law of healthy existence into question,” leaving them only with a “satiric” materialist philosophy “concerned only with the regenerative vigor of manure . . . the Divinity of Decomposition” (270). This denunciation of the materialist horrors of Balzac does not surprise in an English critic, but it is a bit surprising to find England’s sentimental darling in such company: “In the single novel of ‘Bleak House’ there are nine deaths . . . carefully wrought out . . . with as much enjoyment as can be contrived in the anticipation, and as much pathology as can be concentrated in the description. . . . Neither is Lady Dedlock less reprehensible in her conduct than many women of fashion . . . but it would not therefore have been thought poetically just, in old-fashioned morality, that

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she should be found by her daughter lying dead, with her face in the mud of a St. Giles’s churchyard” (271–72). Ruskin loathes an art that would make physical ills the subject of its study, even if its intent might be that of moral denunciation. Like Bell’s discussion of the inquest, such horrors are not to be directly represented. Further, the true “masters” of fiction “disdain” describing the “mortal phenomena of the sick-room” (Ruskin, “Fiction” 274). Ruskin’s jeremiad identifies the fiction writer with the poor-doctor, as he notes that it is impossible to tell how much authors include such details simply “to meet a vile demand” versus how much this is simply the natural “condition of thought in the minds of men trained from their youth up in the knowledge of Londonian and Parisian misery. The speciality of the plague is a delight in the exposition of the relations between guilt and decrepitude” (“Fiction” 276). This medical language runs through the essay hand in hand with a neoclassical distaste for the representation of disability or illness. He attacks the Hunchback of Notre Dame and “the anatomical preparations . . . of novels like [Collins’s] ‘Poor Miss Finch,’ in which the heroine is blind, the hero epileptic, and the obnoxious brother is found dead with his hands dropped off, in the Arctic regions” (277–78). (In fact, the character’s hands are still attached—but Ruskin’s reading of literature lacks the precision of observation he gives to paintings or architecture. It might be more significant, however, that he thinks of this novel here, as the novel’s most striking feature is that the hero’s skin turns dark blue after a treatment with colloidal silver.) This literature “of the prison house” and “hospitals,” Ruskin argues, is the result of the “precise counter-corruption of the religion of the Sainte Chapelle,” and thus it is “Fiction mécroyante” or doubtful, irreligious fiction (278–79).37 This materialist fiction is associated by Ruskin with the excesses of the Terror, characterized by an “absence of the religious element so total that at last it passes into the hatred of priesthood which has become characteristic of Republicanism; and secondly, by the taint and leprosy of animal passion idealized as a governing power of humanity, or at least used as the chief element of interest in the conduct of its histories” (376). The discussion of moral or physical illness is identified with a skin disease itself linked to materialism, sexual impropriety (see chapter 3), and the dangers of the French Revolution. This connection of realist writing with skin blemishes continues in his famous and peculiar denunciation of Eliot. Deriding her as a “railway novelist,” Ruskin charges that with her realism, “interest is obtained with the vulgar reader for the vilest character, because the author describes carefully to his recognition the blotches, burrs and pimples in which the paltry nature resembles his own. The ‘Mill on the Floss’ is perhaps the most

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striking instance extant of this study of cutaneous disease” (“Fiction” 377). Despite Mill’s setting in a small market town, Ruskin sees this as the same kind of story, poisoned by urban influences, as Père Goriot or Bleak House, because of what he supposes to be the environment of its composition: “this essentially Cockney literature, [is] developed only in the London suburbs, and feeding the demand of the rows of similar brick houses, which branch in devouring cancer round every manufacturing town. . . . in the English Cockney school, which consummates itself in George Eliot, the personages are picked up from behind the counter and out of the gutter; and the landscape, by excursion train to Gravesend, with return ticket for the City-road” (378). Ruskin’s attack shows the extent to which what seem to be quite different forms of realism were perceived, at least by some, to be on a continuum of materialism and radicalism, and how this reading could extend even to someone so far away from what we think now of as “sensation” fiction as Eliot. It is a good illustration of how the focus on the body and its surfaces was recognized as widespread, and, by aesthetic conservatives, read as a kind of physical sickness of the producers and consumers of this new art. Correspondingly, writers of realism are positioned as medics treating the most sordid and unappealing of illnesses, or worse, as sick themselves. But the most compelling reason that these passages puzzle is that Ruskin himself has been perceived to be a champion of realism in the visual and other arts; indeed, he considered himself so.38 Indeed, in April 1856, Eliot had said of his writings in the Westminster Review: The truth of infinite value that he teaches is realism—the doctrine that all truth and beauty are to be attained by a humble and faithful study of nature, and not by substituting vague forms, bred by imagination on the mists of feeling, in place of definite, substantial reality. The thorough acceptance of this doctrine would remould our life; and he who teaches its application to any one department of human activity with such power as Mr Ruskin’s, is a prophet for his generation. (“Art and Belles Lettres” 626) Ruskin at this point was still praising painters for representing things “exactly as they appeared in nature” (“Fiction” 377). Indeed, Ruskin thoroughly qualified his ideas about realism over subsequent writings. But even here, “nature” is not a broad term denoting simply “reality,” but a specific term suggesting landscapes. Nature, when it was healthy, was suitable for artistic description. Nature perverted and infected, as Ruskin thought it was in cities, was simply not appropriate; in fact, the representation itself was morally dangerous.

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To clarify what Ruskin imagined a desirable realism to be, it is helpful to consider his opinions on the vanguard of painterly realism.39 Ruskin unfortunately comments little on French realists (he never commented on Courbet, whom he apparently decided not to dignify with his notice), but his 1867 remarks on Théodore Géricault’s 1819 painting, The Raft of the Medusa, are telling. Raft was a key piece in the French Romantic tradition identified with Delacroix, and predecessor of midcentury realism; it was noted for its dramatic elements, like the later Pre-Raphaelite tendency to paint scenes of strong emotion. Most importantly, it was based journalistically on a recent event, wherein starving and dehydrated survivors of a shipwreck had resorted to cannibalism on a raft initially containing upward of 140 people. Fifteen survived. Determined to do justice to the subject realistically, Géricault did research in morgues, as well as interviewing the survivors. The painting is often seen as a key precursor of realism and naturalism. Ruskin remarks in 1867 that it is exemplary of “modern sensational drama,” and “the strangest form of curse and corruption which attends humanity . . . whenever there is a ruthless pursuit of sensational pleasure it always ends in an insane and wolf-like gloating over the garbage of Death” (“On the Present State of Modern Art” 212.) Interestingly, here what we consider realism becomes “sensational”—a specifically physiological term of excess applied to the novel of the 1860s.

Reliable Surfaces Despite medical and philosophical advances in materialism that moved self to the surface of the body (and corresponding popular movements such as physiognomy that posited the body’s surface as a legible index of interiority), the embrace of this perspective by artists, whether visual or verbal, was subject to alarm and critique. Aesthesis was at the heart of the reliability of the sensing surface and its appraisal of other surfaces—especially other bodies’ surfaces. The Common Sense theory, as we will see in the next chapter, implied certain assumptions about the legibility of emotion, at least to a careful—and sympathetic—observer. The training of such observation and enlargement of such sympathy was, overtly or implicitly, the task of the artist, and especially the brief of the nineteenth-century novelist. Novelistic realism and realism in painting were developing in tandem, and faced some of the same backlash—namely, that the role of art was to elevate, rather than reproduce the realities of the human condition. As beauty and truth were slowly separated by the demands of realism, its earliest advocates found themselves confounded. As we see above, Bell could be quite a thorough

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materialist—subject to attack by fellow anatomist Knox—and yet object to what we would see as painterly realism. Ruskin could advocate a kind of naturalistic realism in landscape painting, yet be offended by French realism and denounce his admirer Eliot as a mere illustrator of dermatological diseases. Debates on the dangers of materialism in representation were thus alive and well in midcentury, and grouped around questions of the representation of the sensing body and its surface, the physiology of emotion and expression, the health of the body and its sensory appetites, and a specifically sanitary language of contagion and pollution. More broadly, these aesthetic debates were tightly coupled to both philosophy and natural history. In the wake of what seem to be eternal hostilities between those committed to evolution and those who today hold a concept of design far more reactionary than the natural theology of the nineteenth century, Darwin’s argument stands in sharp relief against Bell’s. But Victorians just as often saw the two as standing on the same continuum of physiological explanations for expression, as opposed to the physiognomic tradition associated with Lavater. As the historian Paul White notes, “Darwin himself tended to emphasise his continuities with Bell.” White notes that Darwin focused on outward expression, rather than inner feeling, concentrating on what he could measure. He also notes that “Darwin had emphasised the importance of sympathy as an instinct, strengthened by exercise, education, and habit, in the moral nature of man. The flow of fellow-feeling toward others beyond the family circle, to strangers, the poor and unfortunate, even to animals, was crucial to the evolutionary history and future progress of human society.” This focus also reminds us of Darwin’s placement (also having been a student of medicine at Edinburgh for two years) in relation to the Common Sense tradition of materialist thought in the UK, despite his work’s challenge to its theological underpinnings. Bell’s work on expression rested not only on a notion of the sensorium commune, but on the notion of Common Sense; that is, that expressions were legible to all humankind because of our common physiological experience, and thus created a communality of sympathetic emotion. This was dependent upon the function of a healthy body, and in representation to be mediated by moral, communal standards. Darwin approached Bell, and a number of other works on expression, with skepticism, but also with puzzlement: “when I read Sir C. Bell’s great work, his view, that man had been created with certain muscles specially adapted for the expression of his feelings, struck me as unsatisfactory. It seemed probable that the habit of expressing our feelings by certain movements, though now rendered innate, had been in some manner gradually acquired. But to discover how . . . was perplexing in no small degree” (Expression 19). Like

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those before him, he immediately recognized that if expression was not functional—and he believed it often was not—then it must be learned. If learned, then there ought to be wide cultural differences, a belief that had been rejected by his predecessors. Bell, of course, believed that we express and recognize expressions because the mechanism is divinely designed. Because of this, they are universal, and so also, animal emotions are legible to humans, although they are less complex and expressive than human emotions and features. Darwin sent out a general call for correspondence, hoping to prove that there was indeed great variation in human expression, and so proved it. In the same way, he rejected the idea of a universal ideal of human beauty and came up with an ingenious functional way of explaining how evolution would drive minor differences between phenotypes into differing ideals across cultures. In the next chapter, we will trace in detail discussions about one such emotional expression that became something of a linchpin in the debate. The blush—its nature, causes, and significance—became not only an important topic in its own right, but a key point of contention among various positions on the nature of evolution, divine design, and humanity itself.

q Ch a p ter 2 Expression The question about everything was, would it bring a blush into the cheek of the young person? And the inconvenience of the young person was, that . . . she seemed always liable to burst into blushes when there was no need at all. There appeared to be no line of demarcation between the young person’s excessive innocence, and another person’s guiltiest knowledge. Take Mr Podsnap’s word for it, and the soberest tints of drab, white, lilac, and grey, were all flaming red to this troublesome Bull of a young person. —Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. . . . Above all—I need not say it—she was pure. Her purity was supposed to be her chief beauty—her blushes, her great grace. —Virginia Woolf, “The Angel in the House”

At the end of the nineteenth century, Max Beerbohm comically completes his plea for and defense of the “revival of cosmetics” by observing that one of the happiest results is that “surface will finally be severed from soul. . . . Too long has the face been degraded from its rank as a thing of beauty to a mere vulgar index of character or emotion. . . . And the use of cosmetics, the masking of the face, will change this. We shall gaze at a woman merely because she is beautiful, not stare into her face anxiously, as into the face of a barometer” (107–8). Beerbohm suggests that the face expresses too much; it is too distracting from the (implicitly male) viewer’s pleasure in its beauty. Specifically, what is being masked here are the changes of color that index, “like a barometer,” the emotional pressures experienced by the “soul.” Beerbohm’s joke underscores the importance of what the Victorians called “complexion,” meaning not only the permanent color of the face’s surface, but its susceptibility to rubor.

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Blushing (and its sister expression, paling, which often followed or preceded it) gave notice of inner states of which sometimes even the person in that skin was not conscious. It is omnipresent in the literature of the period, but readers less familiar with the lively scientific debate on the topic might miss much of rubor’s significance. In Telling Complexions: The Nineteenth-Century English Novel and the Blush, Mary Ann O’Farrell analyzes the blush in several canonical novels as a physical expression both promising and evading transparency. She is more concerned with the fictional than the physiological understanding of the blush, offering a short summary of the physiological work to note that Victorians understood the blush as an expression of self-consciousness. But self-consciousness here is not merely a phrase expressing embarrassment. Here, I add to O’Farrell’s fine work on the literary use of the blush in Austen by attending to the scientific and philosophical contexts of this ambiguous signifier, which, I argue, allows us to see a larger pattern in emerging literary discourse as well. The blush, as an expression of affect, was implicated in the larger discussion of embodied consciousness, its relation to the idealist concepts of ideas preexisting individual experience, and the evolutionary role of human emotion. Emotional expression, and its universality and legibility, were key to debates about how humans were able to communicate apparently instinctively—for example, that babies learn early to smile and to respond positively to a smile or to be frightened by an angry face was seen by theorists as part of what made human society possible. Whereas idealists accounted for this by a preexisting knowledge of form and “archetypes” situated in the soul, the materialist-associationist who considered each individual body as a tabula rasa to be inscribed by experience was hard put to account for the supposed universality of certain expressions. Common Sense theorists, seeing sociality as predicated on a body that instinctively recognized expression through its own divinely designed material structure—I smile when I am happy therefore I recognize and correctly interpret that expression in others—elided the need to account for experience preexisting the individual. As the epigraphs to this chapter suggest, blushing was evidence of “sympathy,” as well as a means of engaging it. But at the same time, it was unclear exactly what affect was being expressed; one might misidentify the “line of demarcation” between “excessive innocence, and . . . guiltiest knowledge.” In fact, there was an ongoing discussion of blushing as indicative of a combination of psychological and physical malfunction and concomitant problems in the nervous system’s interior narrative: the mind and brain’s representation of the self to the self. The narratives of selfhood were written on the skin.

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This chapter will trace the history of discussions of the blush in the nineteenth century, from an early focus on intelligent design to later evolutionary explanations. Here I will be dealing primarily with scientific texts by the anatomist and surgeon Charles Bell (1824), the physician Thomas Burgess (1839), the scientist Charles Darwin (1872), the neurologist Harry Campbell (1890), and the sexologist Havelock Ellis (1897–1927), who together represent a broad swath of thinking about the blush from both evolutionary and medical perspectives throughout the nineteenth century. A broad range of brief literary examples offers a sense of the pervasiveness of rubor and pallor as signifiers, and the range of meanings they tend to be assigned. In narrative of the period, blushing often marks a moment in which the development of plot is suspended while the reader is directed to the sympathetic interpretation of affect in the face of motives and emotions that are still indeterminate.

Performing Affect in the Enlightenment A blush is a bodily manifestation of affect—and a rather perfect example of it, as it is tied fundamentally to the concept of self-consciousness or self-knowledge, while at the same time highlighting a process of bodily affect becoming, but not yet quite defined as, emotion—becoming understood (or not) and named (correctly, incorrectly, tentatively) by an interpretive spectator. It exists precisely at the moment prior to the articulation of emotion that leads toward (or away from) knowledge, whether of the self or the object of observation. Blushing was certainly not new in the nineteenth century, but it became newly the focus of conflicting explanations of human behavior at the same time that affect—and the uncertainty that the term implies—became central to the novel and to realism more broadly. The blush had special status in emotional expression. At about the same time Charles Bell was writing to visual artists, with occasional comments on the theater, the actor Henry Siddons was translating and adapting the German professor of moral philosophy and playwright Johann Jacob Engel’s 1786 Ideas for a Mimic into Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gesture and Action, which was intended to be a guide to expression for actors. This work came out in 1807, one year after Bell’s book, and shows the state of the topic before the advent of the new physiology. Like Bell, Engel argued that, as opposed to spoken rhetoric, physical expression, here including gesture, expressed the truth of the individual. Like Bell and Darwin, he was interested in the question of how expressions come naturally and how they can be learned. And like Bell and Darwin, Engel analyzes the possibility of cultural differences voiding the universality of gesture. Granting that “It

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is very true that the inhabitants of various countries have different modes of expressing the same passions” (5), he still seeks a physiological universality underlying these differences and finds it in the habitus of the body itself. Thus, some differences are cultural: “The uncovering of the head amongst the Europeans is by no means a natural expression [of reverence], but simply a mere allusion to some ancient and arbitrary custom. Probably it alludes to that of the Romans, who never allowed their slaves to carry any covering for the head till they had been legally affranchised” (5–6). But one should attempt to ignore these “characteristical shades . . . and the truly natural and essential part of the sentiment will yet remain; to wit, the motion of the body” (7; author’s emphasis). Like Bell, he asks, to what extent is expression universal and thus natural to the human body? Crucial for actors, how can expression be understood and counterfeited? The limit case for these lines of inquiry was the involuntary physical sign. Skin rubor was a particularly vexing problem. It was understood not to be under conscious control, and therefore a true index of interiority beyond other expressions. How then was the actor to achieve a full representation of expression? Repeatedly, Engel approaches and avoids the question. He begins, “The tears of grief, the paleness of fear, and the blush of shame or modesty are all . . . involuntary” (45).1 This creates a problem for actors to which he returns repeatedly, often even in the act of disclaiming his intention of doing so: “I shall say nothing concerning blushing. . . . You may consult . . . Aristotle, if you wish to have an exact explanation of it. That which the physiologists state concerning . . . nerves . . . may possibly be very true. But that will not resolve the present question . . . . I am glad that the form of our correspondence and my previous declaration both dispense me from entering into researches of this nature” (169). He muses that, as Descartes says, “the soul always preserves some power over the muscles, she has none over the blood . . . this is the reason why sudden redness and paleness are always independent of our will” (23). What, then, is a poor player to do? “As no one can have a right to expect impossibilities, we dispense with these involuntary variations in the comedian” (45). Finally, however, he suggests that habit can indeed become a kind of nature, even in this regard: “this mode is not at the command of every one. Quintilian mentions having seen actors who, after performing pathetic characters, wept and sobbed for a long time after. . . . The whole of the secret consists in an ardent imagination, which every artist ought both to possess and exercise. . . . He will thus habituate himself. . . . Then, . . . without our exertion, they will in time act with all the energy of spontaneous affections” (46–47). It seems that the blush becomes possible at precisely the point when acting crosses over into

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sincerity—a gift he acknowledges few have (but admonishes that all should possess). The degree of confusion Engel evinces over the topic of the blush and his repeated approach-avoidance tactics indicate how important rubor is both to the display of emotion and to estimations of its authenticity.

The Science of Affective Expression In addition to blushing’s singular status in studies of artistic performance, blushing and paling were significant foci of scientific studies of the emotions, precisely because of their involuntary nature and liminal status between consciousness and lack thereof. Several themes emerge in early scientific considerations of the blush that would continue to be important throughout the century. In addition to its significance in relation to self-consciousness (often paired with self-observation), the blush was important to discussions of human exceptionalism, human universality, and its mediators of race, gender, and degree of “civilization.” Anatomists throughout the period believed that this form of expressive facial rubor was unique to humans. The French “father of anatomy” Xavier Bichat declared the skin a “system” that constituted the person’s sense of self in relation to all other bodies. All animals have a protective skin that also eliminates waste, but the dermis “is in man a sensitive boundary, placed at the extremity of the domain of his mind, where these bodies continually touch, for the purpose of establishing the relations of his animal life and thus connecting his existence with that of every thing which surrounds him” (General Anatomy 2: 744).2 Man differs from other animals in that the subjective life is concentrated and, as it were, projected upon the facial skin. Whereas animals express with subcutaneous muscle movements of the whole body, human emotion is concentrated in the face: in humans, as Thomas Burgess summarizes Bichat, “all the passions are painted as it were upon the face, and the whole exterior of the trunk remains calm in these tempests of the mind” (Burgess 123). But even from behind, one can often determine that an animal is “agitated with passion,” whereas if one veils the human face, “the curtain is drawn over the mirror of his mind; thus almost all nations leave it uncovered” (125).3 The facial muscles are to some extent the servants of the self, but blood always tells the truth: “The passions have in the face three means of expression; first, the capillary system, a means wholly involuntary, and which often betrays what we want to conceal”; second, muscular motion of expression; and third, the state of the eye. These last, Burgess notes, we can control, but “we cannot deceive by the first” (124). Actors, he insists, must use makeup to portray these states (124). Nineteenth-century theorists (with the single exception of

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the Italian neurologist Angelo Mosso in the 1890s) believed that blushing was limited to human beings, as was the particular form of self-consciousness associated with it. The question that most asked was whether all human beings were equally capable of this important affective manifestation. Although unselfconsciousness was occasionally praised as innocence, generally, it was not considered a beautiful thing. It indicated a “lack of affective capacity”: the person could not sympathize with others or feel shame before the gaze of another. There was a great deal of disagreement about whether “idiots” or “savages” could blush, seeing that they (supposedly) lacked self-consciousness, and the disagreements tend to line up along the axis of whether the writer believes that moral feelings were innate and God-given or whether they were the fruit of evolution and civilized consciousness. Disagreeing with many other observers, Thomas Burgess (1839) states flatly, “The idiot cannot blush: . . . conscience . . . is dormant in this being” (73). He concludes that therefore “the seat of the impulse which excites the true blush is higher up in the nervous system than that of the PASSIONS”—that is, the “cerebrum” (73). The passions are those emotions that are considered to be common between human and animal, and the blush does not emerge from those. For Burgess, the idiot is not fully human, and thus no rubor in such a person can be a “true” blush. The inability to blush indicated a lack of what Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham saw in the eighteenth century as fundamental to moral relations: the ability and instinct to feel from another’s perspective (see chapter 3). Part of this facility to see oneself as others see one is the capacity to represent the self to the self. Adam Smith famously detailed the then fairly widely believed understanding that people are born with a moral sense, and to support it we have a faculty for “sympathy” that enables us to feel as others do. In turn, in order to judge ourselves, “we examine it [our conduct] as we imagine an impartial spectator would” (198). A solitary person, isolated from all human contact, could not develop this ability: he “could no more think of his own character, of the propriety or demerit of his own sentiments and conduct, of the beauty or deformity of his own mind, than of the beauty or deformity of his own face” (199). Society provides a “mirror . . . in the countenance and behaviour of those he lives with, which always mark when they enter into, and when they disapprove of his sentiments” (199). He can judge the beauty of his own face as he judges his character—by seeing it reflected and interpreted in the faces of those around him. In this way, the sensations of his emotions cease simply to be sensations; they become the impetus of new sensations as they are reprocessed through the perception of others’ reactions: “Bring him into society, and all his own passions will immediately

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become the causes of new passions. He will observe that mankind approve of some of them, and are disgusted by others. . . . his joys and sorrows, will now often become the causes of new desires and new aversions” (199–200). In order to perform the act of representation that makes possible these new joys and passions, “I divide myself, as it were, into two persons. . . . The first is the spectator, whose sentiments with regard to my own conduct I endeavour to enter into, by placing myself in his situation, and by considering how it would appear to me. . . . The second is the agent, the person whom I properly call myself, and of whose conduct, under the character of a spectator, I was endeavouring to form some opinion. The first is the judge; the second the person judged of. But that the judge should, in every respect, be the same with the person judged of, is . . . impossible” (202). Thus, this act of self-division creates dissent between the perceptive- and object-self. Out of this dissent comes a human subject, an essentially social being. It also may create dissent between the perceptive-self and others, as the perceptive-self judges with special knowledge: “A woman who paints, could derive, one should imagine, but little vanity from the compliments that are paid to her complexion. These . . . ought rather to put her in mind of the sentiments which her real complexion would excite, and mortify her the more by the contrast” (192). It is a curious example, and speaks to the idea that the complexion—and above all, the blood in it—should be truthful. A man’s judgment of his character is compared to the judgment of his own face, not simply as a convenient metaphor, but because the face was ideally an index of truth. A woman of this period who dressed artfully might legitimately be flattered to be told so. But a woman who rouged, Smith indicates, is engaged in a despicable or perhaps pitiable act of deceit. The blush must be natural. The face is the screen of one’s character, but to perceive it, one must approach it through the perceptions of others, which allows one to develop a “feeling” that in turn is part of the sense of the self (and the face) as an object that regulates the flow of the blood within it. When Smith is writing, rouging (for men and women) was still common, especially among the upper classes, and in France, very obvious use of rouge was stylish. By the mid-Victorian period, the only women in Britain who rouged obviously were prostitutes, and men were not supposed to rouge at all. The complexion was supposed to be natural and transparent, and use of makeup became surreptitious and naturalistic among respectable people. Those who advocated divine design found in blushing the proof of a celestial plan of emotional communication and communality of sensation between all human beings. And so this shaped a debate around whether blushing was indeed uniquely human, that is, distinct from animal rubor, and

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then if so, whether it was universally human—or to what extent intelligence, culture, and race mediated the tendency or ability to blush. The focus on surface color highlighted racial color difference: in his third edition of The Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression (1844) Bell notes that “we can perceive an advantage possessed by the fair family of mankind, and which must be lost to the dark; for I can hardly believe that a blush may be seen in the Negro” (95–96). However, he is convinced that blushes take place in dark-skinned persons nonetheless, and cites what will become a significant and highly debated piece of anecdotal evidence used throughout the century: that of a dark woman of African descent with a white scar that supposedly showed the action of blushing otherwise indiscernible on her skin “whenever she was . . . charged with any trivial offense” (96). Burgess and Darwin also had recourse to this same example.4 Finally, blushing offers aesthetic pleasure. Bell observes rather trenchantly: “nothing is more hateful than a dog-face, that exhibits no token of sensibility in the variations of colour” (96). Descriptions of facial rubor figure largely in the British conception of beauty, especially female beauty, throughout the period. But even more importantly, if the ability to blush visibly was a God-given device, then the nonblushing (or non–visibly blushing, black) skin was either a divine mistake, or indicated there was less subjectivity to express, less self to be conscious of.5

Blushing by Intelligent Design The early nineteenth century saw spirituality in the blush. To return to our chief example in chapter 1, Charles Bell’s 1844 remarks on the blush in his treatise on the expression of emotion were foundational for all commentators who followed. He did not believe, as did many earlier thinkers (including Descartes), that blushing was the result of the heart’s response to emotion, and for him, this strengthened the argument for design: “Blushing is too sudden and partial to be traced to the heart’s action. That it is a provision for expression may be inferred from the colour extending only to the surface of the face, neck, and breast, the parts most exposed. It is not acquired; it is from the beginning. It is unlike the effect of powerful, depressing emotions, which influence the whole body. The sudden conviction of the criminal is felt in every pore; but the colour caused by blushing gives brilliancy and interest to the expression of the face” (Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression 1844, 95–96). This question of the physiological location of the blush’s source was important for discussions of emotions, which were historically assumed to come from deep within the body (the heart, for example), and so blushing had long been thought to be driven by the heart itself. But, as

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nineteenth-century commentators so often argue, blushing may be an affair of the surface, of the capillaries subtending the skin.6 That suggested that it was a higher-order cognitive function dependent on the nervous system rather than the viscera. Increasingly, materialist explanations tended to favor the second explanation, whereas less materialist approaches continued to favor a heart-driven etiology in which mind or, often, soul, was located in the inner depths. Burgess’s was the most significant mid-nineteenth-century book devoted entirely to the blush (1839), expanding on Bell’s argument that expression was evidence of “design” by a Creator (and in turn in his 1844 edition Bell cites Burgess). Burgess saw the blush as evidence of the mind-body connection, of ensouled materiality: “When an individual is about to blush, ‘the whole heart and soul and sense in concert move’ transmitting the sensorial impulse from one to the other, and as it were propel the blood by their combination of actions, until it appears in the cheek” (9). The observer is implicated as well, through sympathy, in this material manifestation of the inner life: “When we see the cheek of an individual suffused with a blush in society, immediately our sympathy is excited towards him; we feel as if we were ourselves concerned, and yet we know not why. The . . . innate modesty and timidity which are the general concomitants of youth . . . appeal to our better nature, and secure that sympathy, which we ourselves may have claimed from others on similar occasions” (1). His body speaks to our body, “we know not why.” So far, we are on familiar Common Sense territory. That said, Burgess is aware that this is a potentially controversial topic; he emphasizes that although the blush is all about transparency, it is also—being a spiritual manifestation—beyond our ken: “the cause which produces it, moral and otherwise, remains deep in the obscurity which still encircles the higher attributes of man. The entire phenomenon is certainly intimately connected with the mens conscia recti, with the Soul, and as an investigation into the nature of this might prove dangerous, as it would certainly be fruitless, I have held it more advisable to leave it as among the dark mysteries of life, than to attempt fathoming an abyss that knows no limits” (5). This seems an odd disclaimer at the outset of a rather long tome, but it seems that Burgess means by this that he is limiting himself to an analysis of the physically observable. That said, he hardly dodges debate, coming down solidly on the side of design: “If we reflect on the variety of changes and actions that must take place in our moral and physical constitution before either the blush of shame, or the paleness of fear, can be represented in the human face, we must clearly see that . . . there is a palpable evidence of Design, . . . proclaiming to the hearts of men that ‘the hand that made them is Divine’ ” (10–11). Blushing is not merely exclusively

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the property of humans, it is essentially moral; unlike other emotions, it “cannot be excited by physical means” (156). Burgess explains, “We can make an individual laugh against his will, by tickling the soles of his feet—we can make him cry by corporal punishment—. . . but, we can only make him blush by appealing to his conscience” (156). The “true blush” results only from a “moral stimulus,” Burgess clarifies, “an appeal from the being spiritual, from the ‘divinity which stirs within us’ to the organic sensibility of other vital parts of our system, which readily sympathize with the soul’s emotion in giving external evidence, by the tint of the cheek, of what is going on internally in the moral sanctuary; and, what other evidence could be more eloquent than that which comes gushing from the heart? . . . we all intuitively know that its presence is the result of a painful struggle in the mental feelings” (156). What is this phenomenon, the blush? The blush is generally described in this period as being a feeling of almost painful heat, sometimes accompanied by a feeling of suffocation and profuse sweat. It may be preceded or followed by paling (particularly for those who believe that the blood of the blush comes from the heart, and thus the reaction draws the blood back to its source), and a sensation of cold, possibly with a “fullness” or “heaviness” around the heart. The countenance “droops,” and one may feel faint, nauseous, dizzy, and mentally confused. Burgess delineates its progress: a kind of fluctuating glow pervades the entire frame—there is great mental confusion—the eyes languish, and never look towards the bystander—the countenance loses its wonted animation—every feature seems to droop—the head itself hangs, as if endeavouring to conceal from external gaze the mental emotion which is about to be reflected from the soul upon the face. There is a thrill or throbbing of the heart . . . we feel a momentary oppression in the region of the stomach or centre of sympathies, and semilunar ganglia—the breathing becomes affected in the general sympathy, and a stifling follows as in grief—all self-possession is lost. (134) Apparently, it is simultaneously charming to observe and something one wouldn’t wish on one’s worst enemy. Repeatedly, writers on the blush repeat the truism that no one would blush if he (and the pronoun is important, for reasons that will become clear later) could help it—even writers who simultaneously apostrophize its beauties. Burgess gushes, “blushing is the poetry of the soul” (8), and adduces the works of several poets, from the ancients forward, to prove it. However, Burgess also states repeatedly that “no individual blushes of his own free will” (48), and given the torturous descriptions of the process, we can certainly see why.

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The notion that the blush is the poetry of the soul is not merely figurative. The soul, the mind, or some combination thereof is as repeatedly invoked in medical descriptions of blushing as in poetic ones. The body, through the sympathetic nerves, has a response to a stimulus, which may be initially external or internal, physical or mental. This response undergoes a process of representation and interpretation—again physical, through the nerves, and mental, which then causes a stimulus to the heart and/or the capillaries of the skin. The body thinks the person, whose emotions cause the body to react. Often this entire exchange takes place without the conscious knowledge of the person of the cause, and it is the action of blushing that creates awareness—in the self or in others. On the other hand, it did require a certain kind of consciousness to blush, and that was not necessarily consciousness of the stimulus (Why does Harry’s gaze make me blush?), but consciousness of the body—and the self, which is not identical—as an object, both for the self and for the other (What does Harry think of what he sees? And what do I think of Harry thinking that?). The inability to blush thus conversely indicated the lack of a sense of one’s person as an object of consciousness, as well as a failure of the very mechanisms of representation. Burgess, like Bell, is, as I have said, committed to “intelligent design,” the banner under which a religious popularization of Common Sense approaches to the body rallied in the early part of the century. However, Burgess is not as clear a philosophical thinker as Bell, and often his rhetoric is mixed. Burgess is quite sure that the Creator instilled the blush as a way of keeping us honest: “In Scripture . . . we find Blushing referred to as an illustration of shame. Is it not most probable that it was with this intention the Creator of man endowed him with this peculiar faculty of exhibiting his internal emotions, or more properly speaking, of the internal emotions exhibiting themselves, for no individual blushes voluntarily.” Thus it serves as “a check on the conscience” (24). Burgess is not a philosopher, however, and his rhetoric also often suggests dualism—the “soul” has emotions the body “reflects” rather than creating those emotions, as Bell is always careful to show. This mixed approach is evident in Burgess’s treatment of the nerves and heart as possible locations for emotion. He is interested in the nervous system as a location of affect, but he also envisions a role for the heart in blushing—as is frequently the case with models of the body that are not fully in line with newer materialist models. Burgess provides an extended discussion of the physiology of the blush, which involves the “involuntary” or sympathetic nervous system, “with which the heart, stomach, and lungs seem to sympathize” (79). This somewhat hazily defined role for the viscera argues less importance for the surface than Bell did, and than Darwin

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would. Still, Burgess itemizes as other structures that are important the minute blood vessels of the cheek, and the skin. And finally he concludes that wherever our animal passions may reside, the blush is cognitive and therefore not visceral; he concludes that “the passions . . . can have no seat. They are the result of the action of the nervous system, and particularly that of the brain. They admit then of no explanation” (82–83; author’s emphasis). However, the blush results from an impulse that “wholly originates from the sensorium within the brain, for, . . . this phenomenon is closely allied to reason and understanding” (83). The purpose of the sympathetic nerves is, for Burgess, to free the body from the hazards of “the will; a power of the mind so fickle and so varying, that life would be in constant danger, if we had it in our power to stop or suspend the exercise of functions, with which life is essentially connected” (89). This is an interesting reversal of earlier dualisms that saw the will as degraded by its subordination to the distractions of the flesh, and here Burgess again reflects the Common Sense influence of British thinkers’ trust in the design of the body. Like Bell, Burgess sources materialist anatomy in the service of the theory of intelligent design; he follows Bell in being indebted to Bichat’s treatment of the skin as a “sensitive limit . . . on the boundaries of  . . . [man’s] soul” (qtd. in Burgess 116). He is also indebted to anatomical study for his observation that the skin of the cheeks is different from other skin, and that this difference indicates something of the special properties of the blush, as facial skin is more “abundantly supplied” with red blood (Burgess still subscribed to the rather dated notion that the lymph was “white blood”) than other parts of the body: “Every student of anatomy must have been forcibly struck with the peculiar arrangement of the capillary vessels beneath the surface of the cheek . . . to bid him pause and reflect upon the probable design of the Omnipotent in ordaining [it so]” (114–15). However, despite his emphasis on the special qualities of facial skin, Burgess still finally believes with earlier anatomists that the heart is the seat of moral feeling, just as he states that the blush “comes gushing from the heart.” Though the facial skin has a special role to play as the “focus of every involuntary exhibition of internal feeling and sympathy” (115), he sees “Moral Feelings” as working through the “sympathetic and vagus” nerves through organs like “the heart and stomach” (167–68). Burgess, therefore, still sees interiority as something, well, interior to the body, just as judgment is interior to the brain (168). As the mind reflects upon the ideas imaged in “the mind’s eye” the conscience is engaged to judge the “impression first conveyed to the sensorium.” The memory then compares recollections of similar “past circumstances inimical to the moral feelings” (168–69). Once the

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conscience judges that these memories are similar to the present instance, “it repels the impression, and promulgates to the different vital organs in the system its own feelings. Thus the chain of action is set up which is finally to bring forth the blush on the cheek” (169). The sensorium here is not exactly the site of the mind; the mind is still separate, reviewing and judging, perhaps from a safe bunker in the pineal gland (the “mind’s eye” may refer to the pineal gland, which is often described as a “third eye”). In these ways, Burgess reaches back toward earlier models.

Civilization and Design’s Discontents This might seem straightforward enough, a modified return to past readings of the blush. But blushing is never that simple. It became important to distinguish various forms of rubor, as all blushes were not created equal, and must be carefully decoded. This divine provision, like all our fallen nature, is likely to go awry. Burgess adds a further category: the “False” blush. The “True” blush includes all “changes or variations in colour which take place on the cheek, having some good and substantial moral cause for their production,” such as guilt or the remembrance of “disgrace” (48). The “False” blush includes rubor caused by “an extreme state of morbid sensibility, over which reason and the moral powers seem to have no control whatever; for as I have already stated, no individual blushes of his own free will” (48). This morbidity is both physiological and psychological, and is induced at least in part by excessive self-regard that causes the individual to be so hyperaware of his own visage that his self-consciousness short-circuits the process of having a genuine emotion. This is the process of self-judgment, essential to sympathy, but gone seriously wrong. Burgess’s patients watch themselves react until they begin to react merely to their own involuntary self-surveillance. It is still, however, a blush, rather than a flush, because of the element of self-attention—the element that will continue to be most significant for later, evolutionary explanations of blushing. Burgess blames an “over refined state of sensibility” for blushing “in its diseased state” (11), making it “difficult to judge whether the blush be from an impulse of shame, or merely from a sensibility that is over-wrought” (25). He anticipates Freud in considering this morbid self-attention to be one of the discontents of the civilized state: as we advance in reaping the advantages and virtues of civilization, we are not wholly exempt from the vices of its refinement; it is an overstraining of this refinement which oftentimes makes a vice of a virtue

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by perverting the original intent of nature. In civilized society we find a variety of mental and bodily ailments which are unknown in savage life. . . . the rules of art, the mainspring of civilization, cannot be indiscriminately obeyed without exerting a deleterious influence over the corporeal functions and intellectual faculties. . . . we seldom hear of an Indian squaw dying in child-bed, or of her savage husband becoming mad about religion, politics, or any sudden reverse of fortune. No, these are a few of the taxes which we pay to civilization for the very numerous and invaluable gifts conferred upon us by means of the cultivation of the higher faculties. (44) It is “the rules of art” that Burgess considers the source of our difficulties and the mainspring of civilization; it is representation, whether of objects or of the self as such, that brings us to this debilitated state. We have seen that representation of the self to the self as if to an other is crucial to the development of the kind of moral judgment and sympathy that Common Sense models of social life demand. But this process itself is fraught with peril. As the self is represented to the self, and simultaneously appraised aesthetically, the naturalness of the blush is corrupted. This is particularly dangerous because the blush is God’s provision to make human society possible—to provide a common sense of social interpretation upon which a social body may be built. Burgess states that the “intention” of the “Creator” in giving blushing to humans is that “the soul might have sovereign power of displaying in the cheek . . . the moral feelings whenever they are infringed upon” (49). This allows others to see that “we transgressed . . . rules which should be held sacred, as being the bonds that unite man and man in the civilized state” (49). Further, he stipulates that people’s awareness of the likelihood of betraying bad actions through the blush will “serve as a moral check. . . . In this light, we must certainly admit the utility, and even the necessity of blushing in society, that is, of the true blush” (49). We are not only aware of our transgressions, but of others’ perception that we have transgressed. But civilization’s morbid artfulness may derange this system, creating dysfunction in our system of representation.7 Whence comes the stimulus for the blush? Drawing on the materialist-associationist tradition of Locke, Burgess argues that ideas are not innate, but come from the senses. An external object “impinging upon the sensorium or thinking part of the brain” is associated with pleasure or pain, resulting in “ideas” (20). Our senses are affected by “age, sex, [and] temperament” that mold each person’s “sensibility” (20). Within “civilized societies” our sensibility takes two “perfectly distinct forms, true and false”

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(20). True sensibility is selective and “draws a distinction between right and wrong.” However, “False” sensibility, due to civilized “organisation” and education (20–21), had become “far” more prevalent than true (21). Defining it physiologically as “a peculiar irritability of that part of the sensorium which receives the impression of our ideas,” false sensibility is a “morbid state” that might be generated by harsh or overly judgmental treatment in childhood, or too much encouragement to self-criticism. The other leading danger, for Burgess, is “that sentimentalism or refinement which is the effect of novel reading” (22). Sometimes such morbid self-consciousness can be treated by directing the attention outward—prescribing travel, distraction, and the company of others. But even this may fail. Burgess cites a family of twelve, all “prone to false blushing, to a most painful degree” (182). Although the children were full grown and some had been sent traveling “in order to wear away this diseased sensibility . . . nothing was of the slightest avail” (182). Not only the blush, but consciousness of it, is required for it to be both a legible index and an effective check. But too much of a good thing makes the blush an index only of disease, potentially breaking down society. In this case, associations and “ideas” that the sensorium should experience as neutral become associated with painful self-attention and representations of the self. The process of internal (and so, external) representation itself goes awry. Burgess shows the confluence of a number of philosophical and scientific strands, uneasily cohabiting in a single text (though Burgess seems unaware of their contradictions). He continues a general, relatively unreflective argument for intelligent design embedded in a Common Sense model of social function, but his rhetoric veers toward idealism whenever he speaks of the soul or the heart. When he writes of the mind, however, his language tends to the materialism of his immediate predecessors. Thus, there is a soul, but no “ideas” that preexist experience; the mind is dependent on the nerves and associations, though the soul is not. Moreover, Burgess’s preoccupation with self-consciousness as psychologically and physically negative—a sign of morbid self-involvement (and, as Horn notes, of a concept of overcivilization that anticipates notions of decadence; 119–21)—as well as his sense that divine design can be overridden, not by the free will to commit sin, but simply by the general conditions of human development, suggest new concerns. Burgess raises the disturbing possibility that blushing may have drifted from its original purpose, and by extension, that physiology itself may become corrupt. As O’Farrell argues, the rhetoric around the blush points to the fantasy of a legible, transparently meaningful body: “The blush’s efficacy in fulfilling

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its pledge [to make the body legible] . . . depends on its seeming, by means of its involuntarity, to evade the constructive capacities of gesture, disguise and will” (4), as a kind of “somatic confession” (5). But as she also observes, this belief is always shadowed by anxiety about the blush’s transparency. As we have seen, Burgess is already concerned with blushes that are “true” vs. “false” and “morbid.” Burgess remarks that young ladies’ blushes are beautiful, and parents are pleased to see blushing as a mark of their daughters’ chastity, but he cautions that a blush may not prove “either purity or innocence, for many libertines and prostitutes may be seen to blush as deeply as individuals of the most exalted purity and virtue” (55). And not all rubor is a blush, even a false one. In particular, commentators worried about the differences between blushing and flushing, with flushing being considered a more mechanical or animalistic response resulting from emotion that is not combined with aware “self attention” or from physiological causes (e.g., menopause). Burgess identifies, as do works throughout the period, differences between the blush and the flush—though in more taxonomic detail than previous writers. The flush is also subdivided into the flush of rage and the hectic flush incited by fever and tuberculosis. In the blush, he notes, the countenance “droops” and the eyes are usually averted, but not in the emotional flush. And it is easy to identify the flush of the “consumptive”: “this purple patch situated over the malar bone, with the delicately pale halo that surrounds it,” signals the approach of death (64–65). Flushes offer one more interpretive challenge to the viewer. As Byron writes in his humorous 1821 poem, “Waltz: An Apostrophic Hymn,” the animal passions can be mistaken for their more spiritual doppelgangers: his beau “Leads forth the ready dame, whose rising flush / Might once have been mistaken for a blush” (18), as she is “Hot from the hands promiscuously applied, / Round the slight waist, or down the glowing side” (20). Here the sign of modesty may actually result from its opposite: a physical sign of “ready” passions.

Darwin and the Evolving Blush Until midcentury, then, medical studies of the blush worked in a vitalistmaterialist tradition that generally (if unevenly) considered the “soul” as dependent on the physical body for its perception and expression, but that still ranged itself on the side of religion through some version of the Common Sense model. At midcentury and with Darwin, that would change. Darwin took up the question of blushing and engaged in a spirited debate with Bell, like Burgess, in his own book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man

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and Animals.8 Darwin considered blushing to be the most human and thus latest-developed form of emotional expression, and consequently discusses it at length. Like Burgess, Darwin attributes it to the development of the “habit of self-attention” (319), though he is careful to locate it at the surface of the body and not its depths. He writes, “The relaxation of the small arteries on which blushing depends, seems to have resulted from earnest attention directed at the appearance of our own persons, especially of our faces, aided by habit, inheritance and the ready flow of nerve-force along accustomed channels; and afterwards to have been extended by the power of association to self-attention directed to moral conduct” (364). However, as he does not think it possible that animals would have “closely considered and been sensitive about . . . personal appearance,” he decides that “blushing originated at a very late period in the long line of our descent” (364). (A reader might justly respond that the conclusion begs the question here.) Thus, Burgess and Darwin believed that the blush was essentially human, and that it resulted from “self-attention” that animals lacked. Darwin argues extensively with Bell’s idea that blushing was a special gift from the Creator to enable human expression; although Burgess, Bell, and Darwin all see blushing as a sign of human exceptionalism, Darwin considers it quite a late-acquired trait. Thus monkeys could flush from rage, but not blush from shame. Burgess had located this in neurological structures; “higher” structures of the human brain allowed for the representation of the self to the self, and allowing for the “twinning” of selves that enabled the gaze of the othered self to provoke the blush. This “visual” component seems essential to both. But whereas Burgess doubts that people are able to blush when they are alone, Darwin demurred on the necessity of an actual observer—an imagined one would do. For example, Darwin notes that some blush when charged with a crime of which they are innocent (Burgess would likely categorize that as a flush), and that it is the imputation of guilt—the judgment of another—that provokes the blush more than actual guilt. Darwin observes that the recollection of a crime “committed in solitude” does not provoke a blush, but that of “a detected fault” will, depending on the “feeling of regard for those who have detected, witnessed or suspected the fault” (347). Darwin believes that blushing in solitude is frequent but always related to “the thoughts of others about us” (336). Although Darwin notes that the congenitally blind often blush, he observes that blind children are not naturally aware that they are observed, so that they have to be educated to believe they are in order to learn to blush “by increasing the habit of self-attention” (312).9 Darwin also wished to see the blush not only as uniquely, but as universally human (as did Bell, though for different reasons), and writes in his cor-

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respondence of his pleasure in finding that “Vogt’s microcephalous idiot was not utterly degraded,” as he was capable of a “real” blush in response to a visual examination of his naked body (letter to James Crichton-Browne, 1871). However, Darwin also believed, with Bell, that this most human of emotional expressions was a skin-deep phenomenon, and this accorded with its association with the nervous system and late-evolving cognitive structures, as opposed to the association with the circulatory system. Thus, self-consciousness is an affair not of the heart, but of the embodied mind. Moreover, it was no longer linked to a true consciousness of guilt or sin, but was an entirely social phenomenon based on the human perception of the regard of others. Darwin gives a detailed negative example: Some people flush up . . . at any sudden and disagreeable recollection. The commonest cause seems to be the sudden remembrance of not having done something for another person which has been promised. In this case it may be that the thought passes half-unconsciously through the mind, “What will he think of me?” and then the flush would partake of the nature of a true blush. But whether such flushes are in most cases due to the capillary circulation being affected, is very doubtful; for we must remember that every strong emotion, such as anger or great joy, acts on the heart, and causes the face to redden. (336) Here we see that although deeper circulatory events may mimic the blush, the “true” blush is just below the skin in the capillaries; human interiority is cutaneous rather than visceral. The true blush, for most nineteenth-century theorists, can reflect only “higher” and specifically human emotions, generally involving a consciousness of the self, one that originates and ends upon the surface. For Darwin, even if the blush is not (or is no longer) functional from an evolutionary perspective, the self-consciousness implied by it must be. He observes that the blush involves the surface of the body where the self ’s attention to and thus perception of the self is located. Through frequent self-attention to the face, we have evolved capillaries there that are susceptible to the “relaxation” that displays as rubor. In all of these blushes, even the “false” ones, although mental attention provokes blushing, it remains essentially involuntary. Thus, throughout the century it remained an important index to “true” interiority, though not necessarily of a person’s conscious feelings: self-consciousness, it appears, may not only not be under the control of the mind, it may, confusingly, not even be conscious at all, as is the case when a young woman unaware of her true feelings for someone blushes when charged with such feelings.

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Though to be afflicted with frequent blushing might be pathologically oversensitive, it was worse to be unable to blush at all. David Horn notes that famed fin de siècle criminologist Cesare Lombroso believed that criminals did not blush; indeed, that the lack of an ability to blush was a sign of predisposition to criminality. It was also evidence of savagery, “[linking] the exterior of the criminal body with its interior, an atavistic physiology with an aberrant psychology” (Horn 107). Lombroso confirmed that the lack of ability to blush properly was both moral and physical. He found that “vaso-motor” reactions provoked by amyl-nitrate were significantly delayed in the criminal population. He also found that although excitement might produce a “flush” in these criminals, the blush of true shame (provoked by stern scoldings and/or an unexplained fixed stare by the researcher) was generally absent (109–10). (Fortunately, he could tell the difference; unfortunately, he has not explained how.) The late nineteenth century was more likely to see psychopathology in the blush, and here one sees evidence of evolutionary theory, however imprecisely absorbed. The importance of (implicitly visual) self-regard continues to be central, as does the sense that the blush communicates something important about character. That said, the assumption that the meaning of the blush is transparent has largely evaporated by the 1890s. In 1890, the physician Harry Campbell, in Flushing and Morbid Blushing: Their Pathology and Treatment, continues Bell’s and Darwin’s stance that there is no question of visceral involvement. He sees blushing as evidence of a “nerve storm,” to which women are particularly liable, as their “emotional being” is less stable than men’s (36). More controversially, he also says there is physiologically “no sharp dividing line between flushing and blushing” (23). However, he follows a traditional understanding of their difference, identifying blushes as caused by “emotion—by shyness, by shame, or by modesty; whereas a flush may occur independently of any emotional state” (23). So how do these emotional states work through the body? Campbell believed that vulnerable individuals may experience what we might today think of as a “feedback problem,” in which emotion stimulates the lungs and heart, in turn stimulating the sympathetic nerves, which then send erratic impulses to the brain, causing a nerve storm that Campbell likens to an epileptic seizure (36). (Note that the nerves affect the heart, rather than the other way around.) Campbell also believes that the blush operates through the “higher centres” of the mind (17), and even when a sensation originates in the body, it must become a representation in the mind before it will provoke the reaction of the facial capillaries. Thus, Campbell explains, masturbators are big blushers, because “masturbation acts indirectly on the

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body, through the mind, in a manner which the normal exercise of the sexual function does not” (164). Thus emotions can disorder the brain, through a process of representation that is materially rooted in the body as a medium and in the mind as both author and audience. There is a suggestion of a kind of dualism here, but its operation is not entirely clear. Like Burgess, Campbell provides a kind of taxonomy of consciousness to try to get at this process, critiquing two principal kinds of consciousness already widely accepted in the literature: subjective and objective. Subjective consciousness is when the mind is absorbed in “feelings detached from all material associations . . . but directly the sensation is distinctly localized, above all, directly it is connected with some ‘thing’ external to the body, the consciousness is . . . objective” (139). However, as he points out, these kinds of consciousness often have elements of the other embedded within one, and he uses the comparison of a person preoccupied with planning his daily life, when the attention is focused on objects, and that of “an individual reading a realistic narrative [who] may almost be said to witness—more especially if he have a vivid imagination—the scenes and events which are depicted. It would be a purely artificial distinction to speak of the mind as subjective in the one case and objective in the other” (141). So Campbell articulates a kind of consciousness closer to what we first see in the moral philosophy of Adam Smith and later in the evolutionary theory of Darwin—and perhaps sheds light on why Burgess considered novel reading so dangerous (and likely to provoke morbidity). Novel reading provided a kind of ersatz physiological experience with real physiological consequences. The physiology of this representational process is complex. Campbell follows the work of Hughlings Jackson, an evolutionary theorist and physician, believing that the “most recently evolved [nervous system] centres are the most unstable” (Campbell 10). Jackson argued that there were three main nervous centers, corresponding to three main stages of evolution: “the pons, medulla, and cord” that “represent” the “non-nervous tissues” of the body; the “middle centres” that “re-represent” the “sensory and motor cortical centres” with “double indirectness,” as these must first be “represented” through the lower level; and finally, the highest centers, in the occipital and prefrontal lobes, that represent them “with triple indirectness, i.e. through the middle and the lowest (‘re-re-represent’)” (qtd. in Campbell 14). Each of these centers embodies an evolutionary outgrowth of the ones below, so that “each higher centre is the centre (or many centres below it) ‘raised to a higher power,’ ” so that the “highest centres” have the ability to “re-rerepresent all . . . parts of the body in the most complex sensori-motor combination” ( Jackson, qtd. in Campbell 15). Thus, emotional disturbance, which

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Campbell (and Jackson) situates in the “highest cerebral centres,” necessarily involves all tissues of the body in a complex process of representations at multiple removes (one might almost say, translation). This is by far the most elaborate analysis of the process of representation taking place of the body, within the body, to the body. But it emerges clearly from the medical literature that precedes it, as we have seen. It also suggests something of how a fictional or artistic stimulus could leapfrog over the need for the material presence of a given stimulus—and also how it might derange the nervous process in so doing. Subject-consciousness, for Campbell, entails the awareness of oneself as an individual and also the attention to oneself as an object (142). Moral and physical subject-consciousness develops in childhood and peaks at puberty, and Campbell cautions against too harsh or religious training in self-examination, as “self-examination is a process which easily deteriorates into morbid self-analysis” (148). Like Burgess, he sees a perversion of moral development in excessive self-consciousness, but also a Darwinian threat of degeneration that may threaten the social body: “Excessive self-consciousness of either kind involves Selfishness.—The individual whose attention is absorbed in self has little time to think of others, and hence the nobler altruistic emotions have small chance of proper exercise and development” (Campbell 150). This is a regression to an earlier state: “The excessively self-conscious man is therefore apt to sink to the level of the primitive man of pre-social times, and his case affords an example of the principle that all disease is dissolution—an undoing of evolution” (150). This results in a mental disease of which the “victim . . . , sinking from that high level of morality which teaches that one should spend and be spent for others, lives for himself alone,—in the language of evolution, he reverts to a former type” (150). From the cultivation of sensibility celebrated in the eighteenth century as evidence of the highest degree of civilized development, the blushing, self-conscious body becomes a degenerate, dangerous savage who loses connection to a larger social good. And the reading of literature that was by some seen as training sympathy here becomes a potentially dangerous spur to morbidity, as the body of the reader reacts to the imaginary objects of narrative. Treatment, for Campbell, includes the usual general health recommendations (feed well, rest well, etc.) as well as specific recommendations for childhood education. He also directs that “Great attention should be paid to the skin. . . . Many nervous symptoms are caused by the stimulation of nerve-centres by certain effete matters, and we should therefore—to remove these—direct our efforts to raising the excreting power of the several emunc-

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tories to their full capacity” (241), and for this, he recommends Erasmus Wilson’s program of daily exercise, hot water and Turkish baths and thorough soaping (241) (see chapter 4). For menopausal women he still considers bleeding of use (247–48), helpfully suggesting that “if one lacks the instrument that would allow one to apply leeches directly to the cervix, they can be helpful applied to the groin or the anus” (249). If one’s flushes or blushes survive anal leeches (or are perhaps provoked by them), his final recommendations are to try electric currents or other counter-irritants applied to the facial nerves (250–52).10

Gender, Race, and Shame As Campbell’s discussion suggests, gender and race are important themes related to skin rubor throughout the century, and by the later period, become paramount in discussions of atavism, degeneracy, and so forth. As Angela Rosenthal notes, blushing for a female was a sign of fertility and emotional-sexual awakening; however, somewhat paradoxically the movement of blood also guaranteed her purity. By the mid-nineteenth century, this reading accords well with the neuroscience of the day that posited that an overstimulated nerve would cease to respond to stimulus, and therefore the “corrupt” or sexually experienced consciousness and its corpus would cease to produce the blush response. “The man of the world never blushes” was a common saying. The gendered discussion of the blush continues throughout the period. In 1890, Campbell takes up the problem of this faulty sensitivity. For Campbell, as for other commentators, although women’s blushes are charming (if suspect), men’s are always problematic. Whereas women (especially young women) and children are not considered disabled by blushing, men, after a period of youth, are considered pathological if they continue to blush. Aristotle ruled in the Ethics that “Shame . . . is not becoming to every age, but only to youth. For we think young people should be prone to the feeling of shame because they live by feeling and therefore commit many errors, . . . but an older person no one would praise for being prone to the sense of disgrace, since we think he should not do anything that need cause this sense” (79). The sentiment survived largely unchanged into the nineteenth century. Bell observed, “Blushing assorts well with youthful and with effeminate features” (Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression 1844, 96). The man’s body is expected to undertake the burden of public scrutiny. Though in 1839, Burgess observed that the “habit of blushing from morbid sensibility is as common with young men as with young women,” he notes that though it is “considered a beauty” in young women, it is “a disease,

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when it frequently occurs in men who have arrived at the years of maturity. . . . the bane of it is deeply felt . . . , and notwithstanding its poesied beauty” is “a drawback in male society” (57). By 1890, Campbell uses the term “pathological blushing,” defending his terminology in terms of the market: “If it hampers the individual in his commerce with the world, if it causes him to shun society, to seek solitude, to live the life of a recluse—and it may do all this—then it is essentially pathological. . . . At the best it is no very agreeable experience, and every one (except perhaps the accomplished coquette) would, I suppose, suppress a blush if it were possible to do so” (134). Although in the 133 pages up to this one, practically every case Campbell has examined has been female, the genders switch decisively when the blushing is described as affecting the patient in “commerce.” Nor is this a chance use of a universal masculine pronoun—after the “coquette” exception, we return to the masculine: “Even the strongest-minded individual is placed at a considerable disadvantage if he becomes at times liable to colour on the slightest provocation. . . . For the blush is the external sign of an inward working of the mind; it betrays that which one would be at great pains to conceal” (133–34). The knowledge that he is blushing and has “involuntarily” revealed his secret “makes his confusion worse confounded,” and forces him to abandon his business (134). He then cites nine cases (eight of whom are men), seven of whom have had to give up their careers, careers as various as soldier, prison warden, minister, medical student, chemist, musician, and draper. Only the “tea-taster” has been able to continue his work, though he “lives in constant dread of appearing absurd” (135). Yet rosiness is aestheticized throughout the period, and that of blushing maidens (“such a fresh, blooming, modest little bud . . . chubby, rosy, cozy little Nell!” intones Dickens’s horrifying Quilp) more openly eroticized. It is also, however, as we have seen, invested with moral qualities and made racially specific. Angela Rosenthal traces the raced nature of the emphasis on whiteness in British portraiture; where white is the norm, “black skin, rather than red cheeks, emerges as raced” (89). White women are often painted in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with black pages or servants, in part to emphasize by contrast their pink and white skin tones—but also as problematic symbols of sexuality and white women’s potential sexual “savagery” (see Gikandi for more on this trend). The servants often offer roses or red fruit that plays off the colors used in the women’s cheeks (Rosenthal 89–93), and often also align commodities available in the Empire with the white Briton who consumes the commodity. Rosenthal explains that such whiteness, sometimes appearing as a translucent surface exposing, rather than covering, what lies beneath, is gendered as well. She gives the example

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of the painter Allan Ramsay (and there are many others she does not discuss), who used different colors to underpaint skin in men and women: for men, a blood-like brick red and for women a pink beige that is precisely the color of the blush. Thus, the top paint layer was literally laid like skin over a flesh with different intensities of bloodiness: men have a permanent and stable supply of blood, but women’s flesh is defined by the movement of the blood, by the dilation of capillaries that is the blush. This aligns, Rosenthal observes, with Hogarth’s sense that the ideal cutis was “transparent” and beauty is associated with this transparency and “variation of colour” that can be seen (Rosenthal 95–96). And Uvedale Price, in 1796, found white women most attractive because of their “soft” and highly varied color that allowed the viewer to read the person’s emotions, whereas black skin was “monotonous” (Rosenthal 96). Price states flatly that “no Ethiopian poet could say of his mistress” that she had the close and visible body-mind relationship celebrated in John Donne’s lines from “The Second Anniuersary: Of the Progres of the Soule,” “her pure and eloquent blood / Spoke in her cheekes, and so distinctly wrought, / That one might almost say, her body thought” (Rosenthal 97). This is perhaps another way of saying that the black body is not a seat of mind (or soul). Whiteness is demonstrated by redness in opposition to blackness, purity by the potential eruption of sexuality that has not yet become so endemic to the body that it fails to produce eloquent blood. The blush indicates a self-consciousness that is charming because it is not yet knowingness, but it indicates a civilized refinement that is considered raced. It also indicates, variably throughout the period, an ability to consider the self as an object, an ability mental, cultural, and physiological, to engage in representation and interpretation of one’s own emotions, from which moral and thus social evolution is possible. The aestheticization of sentiment, both embodied in the blushing subject and in the viewer’s response is closely aligned with the aims of sentimentalism as embracing a natural commonality of sense; being responsive to the feelings of others, it was thought, would draw society closer. On the truth of the blush, its visibility and legibility, rested the safety and cohesion of society. But, as the literary scholar Lynn Festa has observed, there were two sides to the passion for sentimentality in the age in which it arose—an age of imperial expansion in France and Britain. Sentimentality “became the literary mode of empire,” she argues, not only because it enabled sympathy with the other, but because it designated the limits of sympathetic possibility (2). The literary application of sentimentality sought to “locate” the circulation of emotion, and define the proper “circulation of feeling between subjects and objects,” demarcating “who will be acknowledged as human” (2).

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Realism takes up this challenge from a more properly Smithian perspective, separating out a visual inspection and analytical process in which the subject determines the appropriateness of fellow feeling with the object; it moves from describing a feeling to describing the visual sign of an affect. The task of enforcing distinctions, however, remains, and becomes increasingly racialized over the period. On the other hand, the “uncivilized” and racially other have their Rousseauian champions. Burgess insists that all human beings blush, as it is God’s plan. However, “We shall find that man, as he progresses from the savage state, in which he obeys or follows the dictates of nature, to that of civilization, wherein he observes the rules of art, advances pari passu in the vices of its refinement. Who ever heard of an American savage blushing from morbid sensibility?” (26). But Burgess believes that the “savage” can indeed feel shame, and his blush is thus always a “genuine example of moral instinct . . . and as such leads us to infer, that it was with this intent the blush was originally designed by our Maker” (26). The “Negro” may be inferior intellectually, he allows, and yet disputes Humboldt’s claim that black men do not blush: “It is only, says Humboldt, in white men that the instantaneous penetration of the dermoidal system by the blood can take place. . . . ‘And how can those be trusted who know not how to blush?’ says the European, in his inveterate hatred to the Negro and the Indian” (30). But this is not so: the “dermoidal system” under the rete mucosum “in the African’s cheek is permeated by thousands of capillary blood-vessels, and that it is not inferior in its organization to that of the white, . . . we can prove by anatomical demonstration” (31). He considers that the African is “inferior” in intellectual but not “moral powers” to Europeans, and as a clincher notes that “the Rete Mucosum, which is the seat of colour, is not re-produced after a breach of surface, and that the cicatrix in Blacks is therefore white. . . . I have frequently observed a Negress, a servant in a gentleman’s family, who had one of these scars on the cheek, which invariably became red whenever she was abruptly spoken to, or charged with any trivial offence” (30–31). But even most authors who believe dark-skinned people blush mourn that one cannot see the blush, and so its purpose and its charm are obscured. Typically, more benevolent interpretations of the continuity between the human “races” give way at midcentury to interest in parsing differences and locating them in the body, as biological evolutionary theory is projected onto the development of cultures and societies. Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) continued the discussion and lent it new momentum, though Darwin was a committed monogenist and believed that all humans blushed. As Horn notes, this discussion was intimately related

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to discussions of savagery and civilization, race and empire. Mary Ann O’Farrell tracks Darwin’s preoccupation with the issue, as he sent questionnaires to missionaries and scientists all over the world, requesting that they record instances of blushing among the darker races. (In some cases, this study required people to work hard to evoke embarrassment.) Darwin concluded that all races blush, but that in darker people, it is largely impossible to see (except in the fortunate instance cited by Burgess that the face is scarred, so that one can trace the movement of the blood). Like races considered inferior, criminals, mentally disabled people, and children offered useful subjects to examine the growth of moral reason. Mosso studied the mechanism of blushing in a ten-year-old boy by recording the movement of his blood with an apparatus while he was restrained and Mosso said unpleasant things to him. (A peculiar pantheon of martyrs to the study of the blush could be constructed that would prominently include the black woman with a scar and several Italians.) Darwin remarked that it is “difficult to prove that our children instinctively recognize any expression,” but valiantly tried with his own firstborn (Expression 359). Fortunately, the paternal seems to have won out over the scientific imperative in his case: “When this child was about four months old, I made in his presence many odd noises and tried to look savage; but the noises, if not too loud, as well as the grimaces, were all taken as good jokes, and I attributed this at the time to their being preceded or accompanied by smiles” (359). By the late nineteenth century, as Horn notes, “Movements of blood, like the ability to feel pain, figured in conversations in and outside the biological sciences about what it meant to be savage or civilized, male or female, black or white” (107–8). Many mechanisms were developed toward the end of the century to trace the movement of blood under the skin. Mosso and his ilk originated a craze for instrumental evaluations of the movement of blood that, even today, as Horn observes, sustain “the fantasy of the confessing body—a body that can alert scientists and others to the presence of a social danger” (131). By this time, Mosso was patronizing toward Darwin’s overemphasis on human intention as determinant of expression, explaining that Darwin assigned “too much importance to the will considered as the cause of expression. We younger physiologists are more mechanical; we examine the organism more minutely; and it is in the structure of the organs that we seek the reasons for their functions” (Mosso 10). Mosso, who considered that rabbits did blush (from the consciousness of being observed, to which they are sensitive as prey animals),11 wished to do away with both human exceptionalism in the blush and the consideration of will, which was by this time a concept associated thoroughly with idealism.

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Evolving Idealism In the fin de siècle, even this newly materialist view of blushing could be placed in a history that returned to a notion of preexisting ideas. Rather than believing the will a transcendent force, late nineteenth-century thinkers theorized that evolutionary history itself imprinted categories on the nascent minds of individuals, sometimes through larger collective consciousness. Havelock Ellis largely worked from the same assumptions as Lombroso, whom he heavily sourced. He considers female modesty to be both innate and a learned response, working from an interesting, though small, control group: “It is quite true, as Stendhal said, that modesty is very largely taught; from the earliest years, a girl child is trained to show a modesty which she quickly begins really to feel. . . . pseudo-hermaphroditic persons, really males, who have from infancy been brought up in the belief that they are girls, . . . show, and feel, all the shrinking reticence and blushing modesty of their supposed sex. But when . . . restored to their proper sex, . . . . they exhibit all the boldness of masculinity” (Studies in the Psychology of Sex 1: 4). Yet even the learned modesty of women can have a natural element, and physical susceptibility to sexual excitement would trigger the modesty response; remarking that Restif de la Bretonne believed that “ ‘the girl who blushes most . . . is most disposed to the pleasures of love,’ ” Ellis follows up this Continental observation with homegrown proverbs: “ ‘Do as the lasses do—say no, but take it,’ is a Scotch saying, to which corresponds the Welsh saying, ‘The more prudish the more unchaste’ ” (Studies 1: 46). Ellis does depart from his colleagues, however, in theorizing that modesty is often less about sexual arousal than the fear of causing disgust in the observer—continuing Darwin’s insistence on the importance of imagining the judgment of the viewer. Ellis notes that when he served on midwifery duty as a student in the slums of London “There was an almost pathetic anxiety, in the face of pain and discomfort, not to be disgusting in the doctor’s eyes. This anxiety expressed itself in the ordinary symptoms of modesty” (Studies 1: 49). However, once he made clear that he was not disgusted, “every sign of modesty at once disappeared” (1: 49). Separate from the “special and elementary conditions” of labor, however, he theorizes that the basis of associating shame with the genitals is their location close to the anus: “that fantastic fate which placed so near together the supreme foci of physical attraction and physical repugnance, has immensely contributed to build up all the subtlest coquetries of courtship” (1: 51). He remarks that many animals hide or avoid their own excrement, and speculates that this aspect of modesty may therefore not be specific to humans (1: 51).

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Ellis waffles, then, on the moral nature of modesty, finally according it, as Darwin does, an evolutionary and physiological origin (for Ellis, the female’s desire to protect herself from unwanted intercourse, aversion to feces, etc.). Despite this, he still believes that, given the variety of manifestations of modesty to be found in human cultures (of which he gives an exhaustive survey), it is likely a learned behavior in each individual instance. If something is “so radically persistent whatever its changes of form, . . . there must be some physiological basis to support it. Undoubtedly such a basis is formed by that vasomotor mechanism of which the most obvious outward sign is, in human beings, the blush. All the allied emotional forms of fear—shame, bashfulness, timidity—are to some extent upheld by this mechanism, but such is especially the case with the emotion we are now concerned with. The blush is the sanction of modesty” (Studies 1: 72). At the same time, he also concedes that the blush is itself only “part . . . of the organic turmoil with which it is associated”—an effect of the “nerve storm” that evokes it, echoing Campbell’s terminology (1: 72). Ellis sides with Darwin’s argument that self-attention to the face tends to produce capillary activity (rather than locating the source in the heart), and agrees that the blush is “the vestigial remains of a general erethism of sex, in which shame originated” (1: 73). Blushing is part of a general rubor and suffusion of erogenous zones of the body: “it has been said that ‘An erection . . . is a blushing of the penis’ ” (1: 73). (Thus he anticipates Freud in reverse, as Freud identified the blush as an erection in the head.)12 Ellis cites the American psychologist Granville Stanley Hall, who suggests that the sexual blush is “a vicarious genital flushing of blood” (1: 73). The sexual blush for Hall derives from “ancestral sex-fear; it is as an irradiation of sexual erethism that the blush may contain an element of pleasure” (1: 73). The blush, Ellis suggests, may serve to excite the aggressive sexual instinct of males: “the expression of an impulse to concealment and flight . . . tends automatically to arouse in the beholder the corresponding impulse of pursuit, so that the central situation of courtship is at once presented. . . . To evoke a blush, even by producing embarrassment, is very commonly a cause of masculine gratification” (1: 74). Ellis agrees with other fin de siècle evolutionary theorists that the association of the blush with shame results from “social selection” (1: 74).13 This social selection occurs, as it does in earlier theorizations such as Smith’s, through the mechanism of sympathy and self-judgment: “modesty necessarily depends on the feelings of the people around. The absence of the emotion by no means signifies immodesty, provided that the reactions of modesty are at once set in motion under the stress of a spectator’s eye that is seen to be lustful, inquisitive, or reproachful” (1: 74). The spectator is still central to the blush, and the blush

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is still essentially a social, rather than an individual, phenomenon. But gone is the connection that Bell and Burgess made to any absolute, transhistorical moral standard, and the multifold aspect of shame as an index of character is reduced to the one engine of sexuality. As to sexual morality, women’s modesty is no longer seen as evidence of their finer moral fiber. Developing the importance of visibility, and extending Darwin’s consideration of blushing in the dark, Ellis concludes that darkness deactivates female modesty: “It has, indeed, been said that a woman is always more her real self in the dark than in the glare of daylight” (Studies 1: 76). Further, he suggests that women are essentially nocturnal and therefore less-evolved creatures: “the influence of the primitive fire-group, abound in woman. . . . she is, in a sense, a night-being” (1: 76). Darkness frees women from their higher burden of civilized self-consciousness, by disguising the body and mind to the self: “not as the mere cloak of a possible blush . . .  it is because it lulls detailed self-realization” (1: 77). Particularly interesting is that Ellis attributes to women not only a modesty about the regard of others but about their own; women fear to be conscious of themselves, or to examine their own motives, civilized life presumably requiring that women mystify their own animal natures even to themselves (or women’s natures being too savage to ever bear illumination in the first place). Throughout “all stages of civilization,” however, modesty has been “to a large extent, maintained by the mechanism of blushing” (1: 79). By this point, modesty has been thoroughly associated with sexuality, rather than morality in general; blushing for any other reason comes to be sexual by extension and misdirection.14 We are here in the realm not only of Frazer, whose Golden Bough in the 1890s sought primal, transhistorical narratives, but of Freud, who found universal images in the unconscious, structured by bodily experience, and of Jung, who in the early twentieth century relocated archetypes in a “collective unconscious” derived from evolution and preexisting individual experience. From the exalted claims made at the beginning of the period to the no less extravagant, though perhaps less poetic ones made for the blush at its end, its existence and etiology was fundamental to discussions of the mind-body connection and the nature of human moral judgment. While the model of the body in Darwin, Ellis, and Mosso is thoroughly materialist, we see hints of the reemergence of idealism (in the form of ideas that preexist the individual body itself in some kind of evolutionary shared mental reservoir) in Ellis’s fantasy of “primitive” behavioral survival in modern women, which draws on the rhetoric of the preclassical revivals of the fin de siècle, of which we shall see more in later chapters.

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Realist Blushing Despite anxious scientific conversations about the blush, art and literature generally celebrated it throughout the period, and the realist mode provided new uses for it. Although sometimes the blush in literature simply continued its function from earlier times as a clear signal—a passing reference to a lady’s blush when someone mentions her acknowledged lover may mean exactly what it seems to and be mentioned simply as an indicator of her beauty, modesty, and so on—it is most emphasized when it functions as an ambiguous signifier, alerting the reader to the need to read closely and speculatively. Indeed, writers made this ambiguity itself the point of commentary: “John, who ne’er blush’d, is chaste, tho’ rarely civil, / While blushing Bill’s queer tricks would shame the devil,” muses Ebenezer Elliot in 1820 (“Extempore Lines” 219). Women’s blushes were read more sexually, but they could be signs of innocence or experience or both at once; Keats, in “Sharing Eve’s Apple” (1818), rings the changes on this theme: O blush not so! O blush not so! Or I shall think you knowing; And if you smile the blushing while, Then maidenheads are going. After all, blushes can signify many emotions: There’s a blush for won’t, and a blush for shan’t, And a blush for having done it: There’s a blush for thought and a blush for naught, And a blush for just begun it. And sometimes there is no blush at all, but simply a flush, which takes dissection both moral and physical to properly identify. Certainly many writers both medical and poetical emphasize the blush’s legibility, often even as they, elsewhere in the same text, emphasize that flushes and blushes are often indistinguishable and that blushes may be caused by no fault at all or by the simple fear of blushing itself. In the famous scene in Pride and Prejudice in which Elizabeth sees Darcy and Wickham face each other for the first time, she sees that “Both changed colour, one looked white, the other red. Mr. Wickham, after a few moments, touched his hat—a salutation which Mr. Darcy just deigned to return. What could be the meaning of it? It was impossible to imagine; it was impossible not to long to know” (75).15 As

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Wickham prejudices her in his favor, by flattering her and by telling his side of the story first, she assumes that Darcy turned white with fear and Wickham was flushed with anger. But in fact, Darcy’s was the pallor of righteous anger, and Wickham’s the rubor of shame, which she finally realizes once she reads Darcy’s letter. Thus, sometimes once must work with an ancillary text to interpret properly; Richard Polwhele writes in his lyric “The Blush of Simplicity” (1798): While Mary, conscious that she loves, Would hide the crimson’s transient hue, She veils the blush, which only proves A heart to Love and William true. In erring maids, that fondly stray, A tinge as bright as thine we see; Yet clouded looks its source betray, Unknown to innocence and thee. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ah! may such glances ever speak The “Simple Blush” on Mary ‘s cheek! Here, a blush can be complex or “simple,” and so it takes a careful reader of other physiological signs (“clouded looks . . . betray” the truth to the careful reader) to contextualize and taxonomize the blush. Moreover, literature celebrated the value of self-consciousness, showing a becoming modesty (or at least absence of criminality). It could signal a salutary awareness—again, sometimes below the level of consciousness—of weakness. The less famous elder brother of the poet laureate, Charles Tenny­ son Turner (1808–79), was particularly fascinated with this element of the blush, especially in young males. In his sonnet “On Seeing a Child Blush on his first View of a Corpse” (from Small Tableaux [1868]), he remarks: ’Tis good our earliest sympathies to trace! And I would muse upon a little thing; What brought the blush into that infant’s face When first confronted with the rueful king? He boldly came—what made his courage less? A signal for the heart to beat less free Are all imperial presences, and he Was awed by Death’s consummate kingliness; A strange bewildered look of shame he wore;

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’Twas the first mortal hint that crossed the lad; He feared the stranger, though he knew no more, Surmising and surprised, but, most, afraid, As Crusoe, wandering on the desert shore, Saw but an alien footmark and was sad! The child’s innate knowledge of mortality, although still below the level of consciousness, causes his “bewildered” recognition of the dominion of death over his own subjecthood. We also see here the idea of innate moral sympathies as evidence of the Creator, so that when we trace our “earliest sympathies” we see the original, divine nature of human emotion before it becomes corrupt (or morbidly sensitive). Though the boy “boldly came” and does not understand “what made his courage less,” he experiences “shame” at his incapacity. Death is the mark of original sin, so perhaps the shame is appropriate, but I would say that here the shame is also pleasing because it signals a salutary understanding of the limits of the power of the self that demonstrates the child is fully human—a moral being. The recognition of the limits of the self also signals a recognition of otherness, as Crusoe’s shock when he realizes his solitude is not absolute. A slightly earlier poem by Turner focuses also on the becoming nature of recognizing one’s own limitations in the presence of a powerful other. The self is no longer all in all, we recognize lack, and know fear. Such a becoming modesty can also be a recognition of the power of God more directly, as in the same poet’s “The Blush of Constantine at the Council of Nice” (from Sonnets [1864]): To that high Council gathered to compose The troubled waters of the Church of Christ, And with her noble words convince her foes, Came the great monarch, faithful to his tryst; But lo! on entering, how his visage glows With sudden reverence, that doth enlist The sympathies of bishop, courtier, priest; Who gaze in tender silence on the rose He brings to their first meeting, and address Themselves with braver hearts to their grand cause; And, though in aftertimes his zeal grew less For the pure creed of those, whose eyes he draws All is congenial now. They find no flaw In that king’s-aspect, dashed with holy awe.

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He is flawless because of his own recognition of his flaw or lack, and the clergy are emboldened but also disarmed by the “rose” he offers of his humility before them. Notable is the pause here to celebrate this moment of youth and affective purity: in “aftertimes his zeal” will grow “less”—a delicate way of saying he would be anathematized as a tyrant who killed his wife and son. Indeed, the next poem in the collection muses on his pleasure in the brutal killing of prisoners in his amphitheater (“Constantine’s Amphitheater at Trêves,” from Sonnets). But we are encouraged to hold in abeyance this darker part of the story even while we keep it in mind—or more precisely, to heighten our appreciation for this moment of affective purity in light of its transience. The reader of Victorian fiction today is likely to be struck by the continuous and meticulously described color changes in its characters, each of which had distinct meaning for readers of the period. Whereas the above examples focus on the young male body and the recognition of forces beyond the individual, women’s blushes tend to be more focused on sexuality and the imagined judgment of powerful others. And blushing women are far more central to narrative than blushing men, as the courtship narrative assumes center stage and other plots are made to intersect with and depend upon it. The virtuous heroine of literature depends particularly on readers’ attention to her blushes, caught as she is between emerging notions of romantic love and traditional understandings of female purity and innocence. The lady must not be conscious of much beyond a prim “preference” for one man’s company, while at the same time being wildly in love with him from the moment he actively pursues marriage. Of course, readers and writers alike well knew this was an exaggerated scenario, but narrative repeatedly has recourse to the young woman who has no idea she has feelings for a male character, but helpfully blushes so that we may be in on her secret before she is. In Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, Aurora’s aunt charges her with loving Romney Leigh, whose proposal she has refused. It is her “probing eyes” that provoke the reaction: She seized my hands . . . And drew her probing and unscrupulous eyes Right through me, body and heart. “Yet, foolish Sweet, You love this man.” (58) Aurora’s response is immediate and physical, though she insists her aunt is incorrect: Girls blush, sometimes, because they are alive, Half wishing they were dead to save the shame.

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The sudden blush devours them, neck and brow; They have drawn too near the fire of life, like gnats, And flare up bodily, wings and all. What then? Who’s sorry for a gnat . . . or girl? I blushed. I feel the brand upon my forehead now Strike hot, sear deep, as guiltless men may feel The felon’s iron, say, and scorn the mark Of what they are not. (58) Exasperated, she rails against feminine nature, which “betrays” the self: Irrational nature of our womanhood, That blushes one way, feels another way, And prays, perhaps, another! After all, We cannot be the equal of the male, Who rules his blood a little. (58) Of course her aunt triumphs in this confirmation, “. . . accrediting / That treason of false witness in my blush.” Aurora insists, “I loved him not . . . nor then, nor since” (59). We, as skilled readers of blushes, suspect this is not true and, by the end of the poem, shall be confirmed in our surmises. Here we are given knowledge Aurora does not consciously have, though her body reflects the fact that she does “know” at a different, perhaps preconscious level. The body’s reaction—the rush of blood to the surface followed by its painful and chilling withdrawal to the core—provokes hysteria (disgusting her aunt with what she thinks of as Aurora’s “Italian” nature): White and cold I grew next moment. As my blood recoiled From that imputed ignominy, I made My heart great with it. Then, at last I spoke,— Spoke veritable words, but passionate, Too passionate perhaps . . . ground up with sobs To shapeless endings. (59; author’s ellipsis) In this case, her body bears witness, whether false or true, that no act of will or persuasion can gainsay. Moreover, her speech is powerless to contradict her body, as she is betrayed into hysterical inarticulacy. Aurora is at the mercy of her cheeks.

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The blush tells the truth of the self here—to her aunt and to the reader, if not to Aurora. But, for Darwin, it might just as easily resulted from Aurora’s shame at her aunt’s regarding her as attracted to Romney. (Barrett Browning, however, who considers the blush to come from the heart directly, would likely have disagreed with the theory of self-conscious capillary blushing.) Blushes tell the truth, but the truth is not necessarily legible to the viewer, or even the blusher, as in Aurora’s case. In this sense, the truth of the body is a deeper truth than the conscious self is aware of. The blush can also represent the self to the self, can provide a text to be decoded that leads to self-awareness. Louisa May Alcott, in Rose in Bloom, has her young heroine blush when her uncle walks in on her reading a novel. Though her uncle—a doctor—assumes she is flushed because she is too close to the fire and needs a screen, Rose knows, though dimly, that something is not right: “the color seemed to deepen in spite of the screen while the uneasy eyes fell upon the book in her lap” (206). (Note the body’s independent agency here—“the,” not “her” color and eyes.) Rose is puzzled when her uncle sees the novel and suggests it is not appropriate, as she honestly doesn’t “see” why she shouldn’t read it: “You may not see, but don’t you feel why not?” asked Dr. Alec gravely. Rose leaned her flushed cheek on her hand and thought a minute, then looked up and answered honestly, “Yes, I do, but can’t explain it, except that I know something must be wrong, because I blushed and started when you came in.” “Exactly.” And the doctor gave an emphatic nod, as if the symptoms pleased him. (207) The body senses what the mind cannot yet recognize, and protects the conscious mind from being damaged by dangerous ideas. Moreover, the body can signal that danger to the self with a sign that must be interpreted. The etiology of the blush is complex here—Rose does not blush when she is alone; she blushes only on being observed with the book. But that blush can bring to her consciousness, through the mediation of the observer (who does not correctly read the blush, thinking it a mere flush of heat), the awareness of her body and self as an object that allows her to correctly understand a moral danger without being sullied by a conscious understanding of its nature. She cannot “see,” but she also cannot consciously “feel” until she is herself seen—even though the doctor himself does not initially “see” what is wrong, since he thinks she is simply overheated. Here the blush is not an indicator of romantic preference, but of moral danger to the heroine’s (sexual) purity.

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In turn, tragedy can arise when the woman’s blush is misread by the male viewer. The spasmodic poetry of the 1840s often focused on the dangers of misreading affect, particularly of male narrators misreading the affect of women. In Tennyson’s Maud, we see through the eyes of the male narrator, whose reading of blushes exemplifies a morbid self-absorption and sensitivity, even if we cannot see his own morbid blushes. The unstable narrator (too self-conscious by far) interprets Maud’s first blush upon seeing him as a sign of disdain: “. . . the fire of a foolish pride flash’d over her beautiful face” (308) He later is delighted to find that her brother had “Chid her, and forbid her to speak /. . . / And this was what had redden’d her cheek” (328). Maud is an excellent example of an entire poem about the movement of blood. From the very first stanza, I HATE the dreadful hollow behind the little wood, Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood-red heath, The red-ribb’d ledges drip with a silent horror of blood” (304), we see that blood will organize the narrative; a bloody suicide, a blood feud, the blush or flush that signals love or disdain, the bloodshed of a brother, the bloodless death of the virgin, and finally, the resolution in bloody war. The narrator articulates the hatred between the two families as a resentment of louse-like vampirism, as Maud’s father “Dropt off gorged from a scheme that had left us flaccid and drain’d” (304). This individual money madness reflects a broader society poisoned at its source: And the vitriol madness flushes up in the ruffian’s head, Till the filthy by-lane rings to the yell of the trampled wife, And chalk and alum and plaster are sold to the poor for bread, And the spirit of murder works in the very means of life. (305) The madness is vitriol that “flushes” the ruffian’s cheek (no blush there), and the “spirit of murder” poisons the “means of life”—food, but also the blood that is poisoned at its source. Into this, love comes as a possible solution to the narrator’s bitterness and to the families’ feuding, but he initially sees Maud as bloodless and thus incapable of love: Maud is perfect, pale, without feeling—  . . . a cold and clear-cut face . . . Perfectly beautiful: . . . where is the fault? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null, Dead perfection, no more; nothing more, if it had not been For a chance of travel, a paleness, an hour’s defect of the rose. (307) Yet we, as readers, note that her eyes are “downcast,” and later find that her pallor indeed tells the truth—not of travel fatigue, but of emotional distress. All this icy perfection is both broken and improved, finally, with the misread blush. The narrator later discovers what the observant reader already suspects; the rubor doesn’t signify pride, but as blushes do, a sympathetic movement of the blood—the sympathy here for his discomfiture as well as her embarrassment at being its cause. When Maud avers her love, she (and her lover) becomes positively plethoric: Rosy is the West, Rosy is the South, Roses are her cheeks, And a rose her mouth When the happy Yes Falters from her lips, Pass and blush the news Over glowing ships; Over blowing seas, Over seas at rest, Pass the happy news, Blush it thro’ the West; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Blush from West to East, Blush from East to West, Till the West is East, Blush it thro’ the West. Rosy is the West, Rosy is the South, Roses are her cheeks, And a rose her mouth. (323–24) The poem balances lilies and roses, Maud’s purity and passion, and as the narrator waits for his lover in the garden, “the soul of the rose went into my blood” (323). But, when he kills her brother in a duel,  . . . the true blood spilt had in it a heat To dissolve the precious seal on a bond, That, if left uncancell’d, had been so sweet. (328)

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The blood of kinship trumps the lovers’ shared heart-throbbings. Maud dies upon learning of the death of her brother, and the narrator’s mind is, for a time, (more) diseased. Finally, the solution is to lose the narrator’s pain in a larger cause; instead of the body of his beloved, it is the body and blood of a nation that can redeem him: “It is time, O passionate heart and morbid eye, That old hysterical mock-disease should die.” And I stood on a giant deck and mix’d my breath With a loyal people shouting a battle cry. (346–47) Thus his passionate heart can, by joining with the force of a larger, healthier body, overcome the morbid self-analysis of his self-directed gaze:  . . . the heart of a people beat with one desire; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The blood-red blossom of war with a heart of  fire. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Let it flame or fade, and the war roll down like a wind. We have proved we have hearts in a cause, we are noble still, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I have felt with my native land, I am one with my kind, I embrace the purpose of God, and the doom assign’d. (346–47) The flush of war and love of country replace the roses of sexual love, and provide a redeeming way for the reader to lose his “self-consciousness” in a larger project that turns outward from the contemplation of the self. (Burgess would be pleased.) As Kirstie Blair argues in her excellent book, Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart, Tennyson here (and indeed all “spasmodic” poetry), “repeatedly plays on the notion of pulse as rhythm. . . . physiological studies . . . and new investigations into English prosody suggested that rhythm might be somatic, the means by which emotion could be transferred between poem, poet and reader” (64).16 This link between the body and poetic rhythm had been a topic of serious medical discussion as early as the 1770s (Blair, Victorian Poetry 75). Tennyson and the prosodists of the 1840s were invested in exploring the pulse and the heart as locations of emotion. The disordered rhythms of Maud mirrored the mental state of the narrator. Poor Maud never gets to say a line in this poem, only to signal us with her cheeks that she is trapped in a narrative in which she is not having a very

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good time. Since her lover is not stable, and all the interpretation of her (in) eloquent blood comes through him, we are left with textual moments to which we have no clear key, and at the end of the poem, her blood is stilled, having served out its purpose. What, finally, did her blushes mean? And if his cure comes from the “common sense” of uniting his own sensorium to that of the broader cause, the national body, is that a threat to his own or to the national body’s sanity? Does he heal himself, or simply transfer his disordered impulses to a shared and larger madness? Tennyson is not always transparent in his evaluation of the martial spirit, a spirit he suggests should be honored, and yet which he more than once relates to the fact that “someone had blundered.”17 The above examples explore the blush and the representation of spectatorship, both the reader’s and other characters’. But sometimes the author uses the text to signal directly to the reader information that is not available to the characters within the novel. By the 1860s, the nerves were king of the novel’s psychological study, and the fiction writer could be more concerned with the elaboration of detail than the maintenance of a steady beat. That most physiological of genres, the sensation novel, with its careful attention to the body of both character and reader, likewise rises chockablock with blushing virtue and unblushing wickedness. In Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, the likable Alicia Audley blushes copiously when her provoking cousin, with whom she is in love, embarrasses her. Lady Audley, however, wicked and mad to boot, rarely does—instead she “pales” from her normal brilliant color. (Given the number of times she pales she must be virtually transparent by the end of the novel.) Early on, when first faced with the possibility of elevating her position through a bigamous marriage to Sir Michael Audley, she drops her paintbrush (something she does frequently when upset, and it is usually loaded with purple or scarlet when she does, substituting for her own blushing insufficiency): “Lucy Graham dropped the brush upon the picture, and flushed scarlet to the roots of her fair hair; and then grew pale again, far paler than Mrs. Dawson had ever seen her before” (Braddon 50). Lucy “flushes” but does not blush—in fact, she is never described as doing so—and the word choice here is important. Any observer might think that a girl would blush, being taxed with having an important admirer. But the narrator (and thus, the reader) knows better—she “flushes,” and that isn’t good news. Later, when Robert suggests that George never left Audley Court alive, Lady Audley is again painting: “Lady Audley’s clear blue eyes dilated as she fixed them suddenly on the young barrister. . . . The small brush fell from her hand, and blotted out the peasant’s face under a widening circle of crimson lake” (150). Lady Audley does not blush, but in her painting,

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the peasant first blushes (crimson spreading on the face) and then appears to die (the head is blotted out). As he pursues the subject, “Faint shadows of green and crimson fell upon my lady’s face from the painted escutcheons in the mullioned window by which she sat; but every trace of the natural color of that face had faded out, leaving it a ghastly ashen gray. . . . Lady Audley had fainted away” (152–53). Again, there is the suggestion of a guilty blush in the sunlight filtered through the stained glass, but the lady herself is distinguished by her pallor. That the blush tends to take place in these (often abortive) scenes of painting suggests the problem is one of representation: Lady Audley does not figure herself to herself the way a normal woman might.18 Phoebe, the lady’s maid who attends her, colludes with her, and eventually blackmails her, has a similar physiological deficiency: “Not one tinge of crimson flushed the waxen whiteness of her cheeks; not one shadow of brown redeemed the pale insipidity of her eyebrows and eyelashes; not one glimmer of gold or auburn relieved the dull flaxen of her hair” (65). Lady Audley despises the often blushing, sincere Alicia: “she hated her step-daughter, and clung to this pale-faced, pale-haired girl, whom she thought neither better nor worse than herself ” (313). Much is made of the similarity of the two women’s looks, with the exception that Lady Audley is beautiful; she advises Phoebe that “it is only color that you want. . . . Your complexion is sallow, and mine is pink and rosy. Why, with a bottle of hair-dye . . . and a pot of rouge, you’d be as good-looking as I, any day, Phoebe” (95). Though as far as the plot goes, their likeness is a red—or white—herring (nothing comes of it; they are never mistaken for each other), it serves to highlight the importance of color as a potentially deceptive sign. Thus, even though Lady Audley’s beauty and “rosy cheeks” are often described, one doubts whether they may be the body’s true indices, particularly when she shows pink cheeks after a long sleepless night, and, though “Other people’s lips turn pale and blue with the chilling influence of the bitter weather, . . . my lady’s pretty little rosebud of a mouth retained its brightest coloring and cheeriest freshness” (167–68). But her regular bright color indeed tells us nothing; it is the movement of blood and therefore always her pallor that informs. When charged with her guilt: “The white change in my lady’s face was the only sign of her having heard these words.” Paling, when not indicating a reaction after blushing, was commonly associated with fear, an animal emotion. Lady Audley never blushes, because she has no shame, only fear of being caught. And as she has no natural shame, she also has no natural sympathy. She admits that she likes things to be pleasant, and to be admired, and so she is lavish in her charity, but not because she is moved by the suffering of others. As she lacks human self-awareness, she lacks the ability to “feel with” the other. Though

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her “normal color” finally returns after episodes of pallor, she never blushes. Other elements of her facial expression not under her conscious control betray her insanity; when hysterical, or “mad,” “hard and cruel lines” appear around her mouth (299). The second time Lady Audley colors from emotion is when she thinks to kill Robert Audley: “The red blood flashed up into my lady’s face with as sudden and transient a blaze as the flickering flame of a fire, and died as suddenly away, leaving her more pale than winter snow. . . . She stopped in her rapid pacing . . . with every drop of blood congealing in her veins, in the terrible process that was to transform her from a woman into a statue. . . . But by-and-by she . . . looked at her reflection in the large, oval glass. She was very pale; but there was no other trace of agitation visible in her girlish face” (322). Her blood “congeals” rather than reveals; whereas a healthy woman’s blood comes to the skin to reveal her interiority, Lady Audley’s ever present color fades when she experiences emotion, and her blood retreats from the skin, rather than infusing it. We are now in the realm of the neuropathological, as Braddon sources contemporary material on mania.19 The realist impulse, Frederic Jameson argues, is characterized in the novel by the combination of plot and affective scene. O’Farrell remarks of the blush that “The English novel repeatedly invokes the fantasy of somatic confusion. . . . Exploiting as it does the notion of confusion as the experience of psychosomatic disorder through blushing, the novel generates evanescent vision of perceptible mechanical relations between and among people” (126). While O’Farrell is interested in the role of courtship narratives as reinforcing or subverting social order, her remarks can be expanded to the larger context of anxieties about the legibility of affect. What the above survey of the blush in multiple forms (spasmodic narrative poem, lyric, sensation novel—and one might easily continue, as examples of blushing are inexhaustible in the period) shows is the extent to which the realist impulse to explore affect, and specifically affect as a visible manifestation on the body, permeates the literature of the period. In each case, the blush in some sense “arrests” the narrative impetus of the text. Both the child and young Constantine in Turner’s poems stop their forward progress, and the poem takes stock of the affect as it dilates on the tableau, speculating on its origins and effects. Aurora Leigh’s narration of her own desires is disrupted and disputed, leading to a failure of language entirely, “ground up . . . to shapeless endings” (59). Time and the narration of the conversation are first elliptically interrupted and then stopped, signaled by the emphasis given in the two-word line set off at the end of a long discussion of the various reasons her blush does not signify what her aunt thinks: “I blushed” (58). Lady Audley faints as her paint spreads over and “blushes” the bucolic picture she is painting, literally draw-

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ing our attention to the lateral movement of a visual scene, rather than the forward movement of story. And the narrator of Maud pauses in the garden for a spatial-geographical celebration of positive affect—to the four cardinal directions as the blush fills geographical space—before his own unanalyzed emotions drive the bloody ending of all his (and her) narratives. The blush, and its illegibility and liminal status, demand both a visual and a psychological consideration of the body, and an attention to scene, and suspend that moment in undecidability. It is the moment of possibilities, and that is, of realist reading. I mean by that that it is a moment in which the reader’s active construction of motive and meaning in the character’s body is the paramount activity, the moment in which outcomes are uncertain, before plot’s inevitable drive toward endings and certainty, death and knowledge, is resumed. By the end of the century, as Beerbohm humorously suggests in the quote with which I began this chapter, the shame Adam Smith associates with a “false complexion” had faded, and although the young lady’s blush was still a common way to signal her emotions in fiction, it had also been rather thoroughly critiqued in representations of madness and pathology from Tennyson through the sensation novelists, as it had been detached from any absolute link with morality by evolutionists. The scientific literature on the blush often did not impact literary representations directly, and the blush’s traditional associations with beauty and modesty are still evident. Yet the gradual move away from a view of rubor as an infallible index of character and toward a more complex sense of how appearance communicated emotional and physiological states broadly reflected the new understanding of the body’s surface as both a crucial and a complex signifier. Most importantly, in moving away from “the language of the soul” to an evolutionary and associationist model, the explanation of the blush mirrored the general progress of science over the course of the period from a religiously inflected materialism to an agnostic or atheistic materialism that sought the source of the body’s structures in evolutionary history rather than divine design. But that movement toward the body that produces, rather than merely housing, the subject is also associated with an increasing emphasis on the ambiguity of affect and the importance of spectatorship (both of the other and of the self-as-external), which attends the kind of close and sometimes suspicious reading that the realist mode implies and demands.20 In the next chapter, we will consider other skin indices, this time distinctly pathological, that show another aspect of the fundamental importance of physiological superficiality both to diagnostic medicine and to emerging practices of literary realism.

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q Ch a p ter 3 Out Nothing is so attractive, so suggestive of purity of mind and excellence of body, as a clear, fine-grained skin. —Susan D. Powers, The Ugly Girl Papers The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac. —Vivian, in Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying”

By the 1830s, the body’s surface was not only expressive of selfhood, but increasingly understood as constitutive of it. Still, the body had an inside, hidden from view, and if the soul were not located there, then what was the nature and function of the corpus within? The simple answer is that the interior comes to be seen increasingly as a purely material mechanism. This is an uneven and by no means totalizing process—for example, the heart, as we have seen, continued to have particular metaphorical significance and, at the level of folk understandings of the body, nonmetaphorical significance, as well as being the imagined location of emotion and will. But as a membrane connecting the inner to the outer world, the skin mediated between the pleasures and danger of the not-self and an interior embodiment that was increasingly scientifically considered to be as strange and dangerous as the world outside it, if not more so. The interior of the body, if working properly, would do two things: rid itself of waste insensibly through the skin, and not produce matter that itself would mark the skin as diseased. When the skin was so marked, it was read, often, not simply as a sign of illness, but as a sign of immorality. If the process of excreting normal waste was inhibited by poor hygienic practices, disease could be the result. But even if excretion worked properly, the results of individual or—and this is an important theme—historical immorality in the family (or more metaphorically, the nation) could well up within the body, 107

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marking the skin with the tell-tale sign of hereditary corruption. The skin encased and represented an individual and regulated his or her interaction with the world, but the body also represented limits of the individual’s ability to overcome a biological inheritance. The manifestation of this historical continuity tends to appear on skin as the site of interaction between self and world. In fiction, the origin of this historical evil often is situated in the Regency in the UK or the Revolutionary period of France—simultaneous time frames that are also linked by the fictional and historical representation of the period as a time of excess and immorality in both nations.

Sanitary Skin New relations between individual health and the social body were being negotiated, not only in medical science, but in parliamentary management of diseases relating to industrialization, as responsibility for contaminating water and air was understood as part of the relationship between citizens and the community at large. Individual body management came to be understood less as someone’s own business than as an obligation to society. The sanitary movement, galvanized in part by highly publicized and politicized epidemics, turned to preventative hygiene in the 1860s. Whereas the individual body in the 1840s had not been in itself a threat to others, especially in health, by the 1850s, Bichat’s tissue theory had thoroughly permeated the medical establishment, and the body was understood to be eternally decaying and renewing itself.1 That process meant that the body was continuously ridding itself of decaying matter, at a time when decay itself was increasingly figured as poisonous. Whereas public health specialists’ concern with the surface of the body was focused on the need to clean off acquired external dirt in the early 1840s, later practitioners emphasized cleaning the body’s own perspiration off, in order to keep the pores open for continuous excretion of what was coming to be understood as the body’s internally generated filth. For the first time, then, even the healthy body itself came to be seen as essentially dangerous—if it excreted properly for itself, it poisoned the environment for other bodies.2 Once evacuations of the gross bodily orifices were being more hygienically disposed of through better sewerage and water management projects by the 1850s and 1860s, it was the continual and insensible excretions of the skin and the lungs that emerged as the next frontier of concern. As the public health leader William Farr noted in 1857, people “are always surrounded, in air and water, by an atmosphere of decaying matter, which is given off from their own bodies” (166). In fact, even

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as medical knowledge moved toward germ theory (as the theory that disease was caused by specific living organisms later came to be called following Louis Pasteur’s discoveries in the late 1870s), popular medical discourse seems to compensate with an ever intensifying suspicion of the normative body itself as a disease agent. By midcentury, from the sanitary perspective the two most important factors in a healthy environment were, first, the allocation of a certain amount of physical space to each individual, that is, physical separation, and second, the related absence of wastes that accrue when people live in close proximity without access to clean water. Spatial separation was a need indicated both by the body’s continual excretion of its waste products, through respiration and perspiration, and by the moral requirement of privacy. The sanitary pioneers Edwin Chadwick and Southwood Smith estimated in 1850 that “health and strength cannot be maintained in a breathing space of less than from 700 to 800 cubic feet”—a typical observation (247). Their writings highlight the ever present dangerousness of the body itself—a significant difference from the earlier focus on nuisances like dung heaps, wherein it was specifically decaying matter and fecal waste, both visible and palpable, that were dangerous, and not living bodies themselves. Chadwick writes: A neglect of ventilation leads to . . . a noxious atmospheric deterioration when any considerable number of persons are collected together. It is well known . . . this is caused by . . . secretions of  . . . the lungs and skin; . . . in the case of the skin, there is, without a moment’s cessation, emitted a vapour . . . which, like the vapour from the lungs, contains effete, that is, decayed, animal matter. That these . . . are most noxious . . . will be immediately inferred from the fact, that one of the express and most important offices of the lungs and skin is to carry them out of the body. (119) This matter, if not dispersed, can be taken back into the same or contingent bodies, poisoning them with wastes: “the blood takes up with avidity all substances, even the most deadly poisons, . . . and with that fluid it rapidly circulates and reaches all parts of the body” (121).3 In sanitary theory by the 1860s, the surface of internal organs like the lungs and intestines is often described as continuing the permeable skin outside the body, thus transforming the entire body into one surface, to which all was exterior, but which is radically permeable: skin looks to the eye as if it were a continued, unbroken covering, but it is not so, it is really full of little holes. . . . You will readily admit that

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three millions of holes and twenty-eight miles of pipes, are not likely to have been placed in the skin of a single body, without a purpose . . . they are DRAINS AND SEWERS WHICH THE GREAT BUILDER, WHO MADE THIS HOUSE FOR YOU TO DWELL IN, HAS FURNISHED for carrying waste matter away from it. . . . a quarter of an ounce of poison is drained away thorough the sewers of the skin, every day. (Ladies Sanitary Association 25–26; emphasis original) As this pamphlet for a general readership of literate workers suggests, this understanding of pores was familiar to the public. Here the language of natural theology is put to work in the sanitary project, and the analogy between building design—so important to the sanitary movement—and the Creator’s design is exploited to the fullest. Norbert Elias has argued that the modern body emerges as a body concerned with closure of its openings and regulation of ingresses and egresses. Pierre Bourdieu has also traced the emergence of the middle-class body, especially of the petit bourgeois, as a body concerned with “narrowness,” regulation, and the diminution of excess. Certainly the gendering of the body, during the emergence of the rhetoric of separate spheres and the consequent reclassification (and reanatomization) of female (and less obviously male) sexuality, confirmed this increasing focus on the disciplining of the body’s openings.4 By the nineteenth century, the normative body was middle-class, male, closed, and active. Both the French version of the normative citizen, from the time of the Revolution, and the British version (a more slowly developing and not quite so overtly politicized phenomenon) was a bourgeois male practicing modern sanitary hygiene. This body was conceived as productive, rather than receptive. But concern about the abject had traditionally focused on conscious control of the gross structure of a few bodily orifices. Suddenly, techniques of microscopy revealed pores in a new way, as a world of orifices continually and unconsciously excreting (and allowing materials to enter the body, as we shall examine in the next chapter). Moreover, popular medical publications made this common rather than specialized knowledge. Sanitary writings and other popularizations of medical models in this period tended to focus on the surface of the body celebrated by Bichat as a container and “sensitive limit” to the individual as also a dangerous point of contact between self and not-self. A midcentury reprinted lecture on bathing reminds the general reader, “The skin is what you live in; it is your habitation. . . . It is also that by which you live” (Urquhart 229). The author shows the influence of tissue theory, which sees the body as constantly tending

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toward death: “Every human being is inventing, second by second, life. . . . Whilst, then, you are constantly producing the phenomena of life, you are as constantly producing the elements of death. . . . You know your own breath will kill; there is not a more deadly poison: all that comes from you kills. The effete matter of your own body is poison. The pollution of man is from himself—is from within. This is the primary sense of the words of Christ, ‘It is that which cometh forth from a man which defileth him’ ” (226–27). This is a singularly physiological (and rather hilarious) reading of Christ’s teaching. But it illustrates handily the usual connection in mid-Victorian literature between hygiene and morality. Such publications insisted on the continuity of the inner and outer body as surface, of the skin as container and envelope mediating between the inner world and the outer: “you are all at this moment engaged, not only in listening to me, but in digesting your dinners. Who do you think is busy on the latter? Your stomachs, you will say. I answer, ‘Not at all; it is your skin that is digesting your dinner and I will prove it.’ First of all, the lining of the stomach is skin. It is the external covering turned in. . . . The skin is what is between you and the world” (230–31). Sir Alfred Power’s 1871 pamphlet, Sanitary Rhymes: Personal Precautions against Cholera and All Kinds of Fever, etc., which was intended to be educational for working-class readers, conveyed current medical understandings of sanitation and the body in verse, beginning with “The Skin.” (The entire body is summarized in three poems on the skin, the blood, and the nervous system, all tissues. There is nothing, for example, on the organ systems as such—even the liver is made cutaneous.) There’s a skin without and a skin within, A covering skin and a lining skin; But the skin within is the skin without Doubled inwards and carried completely throughout. The palate, the nostrils, the windpipe and throat, Are all of them lined with this inner coat; Which through every part is made to extend— Lungs, liver and bowels, from end to end. The outside skin is a marvellous plan For exuding the dregs of the flesh of  man; While the inner extracts from the food and the air What is needed the waste in his flesh to repair . . . (Power n.p.)

In these popular publications, much of what we might think of as interior to the body has become flattened into a two-dimensional surface—a skin—in

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which the inside and outside of the body are not really differentiated as is the difference between self and not-self, body and environment. The body is thus, in one sense, sealed—even materials taken into the body are outside this skin (the stomach is everted, exterior to the body proper), yet radically permeable (the whole surface is a potential place of ingress and egress into the blood and other tissues). Systems like the digestive organs that would earlier have received separate accounting can be absorbed under this model, as eating becomes a form of respiration, just as breathing is tissue nourishment. The focus on skin and elimination of wastes emphasized perspiration as a method of cleansing, building on long-standing interests in more obvious forms of elimination by purges and vomitives. In George Meredith’s 1859 novel, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, when the pragmatic Mrs. Berry wants to warn the hero of the sexual dangers of being away from his bride in the early days of his marriage, she has no better recourse than the analogy of sweating: “ ‘we all know what checked perspiration is. It fly to the lungs, it give ye mortal inflammation, and it carries ye off. Then I say checked matrimony is as bad. It fly to the heart, and it carries off the virtue that’s in ye, and you might as well be dead!’ ” (390). Although this analogy provokes the young men she is addressing to embarrassed laughter, they immediately take her meaning (and the plot proves her correct).

Popular Dermatology, Porosity, and Morality Before skin’s centrality to health was popularized, it first became a separate and specialized topic among medical professionals. Medical specialization in the skin began in the late eighteenth century—most historians agree that Robert Willan was the first of the modern dermatologists, and that the specialty began with his On Cutaneous Diseases (published in parts from 1798 to 1808), which was influenced by the slightly earlier work of the Austrian Josef Plenck in 1776, who had first proposed a morphological system of diagnosis for skin disease, which was then elaborated by Willan. While Willan’s On Cutaneous Diseases is generally understood to be the beginning of modern dermatology as a field (Shelley and Crissey xi), the first major period of dermatology is the mid-nineteenth century—associated with the Viennese-trained Ferdinand von Hebra (influenced by Willan), Jean Louis Alibert (who studied with Bichat), and in England, the great popularizer Erasmus Wilson. Wilson established the first dermatology journal in En­ gland, The Journal of Cutaneous Medicine (1867–71). He also published a superb atlas of skin disease, Portraits of Diseases of the Skin (1847), and an often used textbook, On Diseases of the Skin (1842), but most important, his Healthy

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Skin (1845) crossed over into widespread circulation among laypeople as well as specialists. Healthy Skin went through several editions, eventually ran to 300 pages, and survived in print thirty-one years (Crissey and Parish 137). Wilson was an engaging writer—as the medical historians John Crissey and Lawrence Parish aver, “the lighthearted description of scabies alone is worth the price of the book” (140). Medical historians agree that Wilson’s book did the most to publicize and naturalize the idea of consulting a dermatological specialist. But he also gave readers a theory and practice of skin care and diagnosis: along with recipes for treatments made from common household items, he taught a comprehensive notion of the skin as an index of general health. This dovetailed nicely with other fronts in the sanitary cause and its popularizations of cleanliness as next to godliness and civility. The sanitary cause not only popularized a certain kind of attention to the body but gave it moral and political urgency. The 1840s saw a flurry of popular publications on the skin. Most marveled at the quantity of skin, its complexity, and the extent of its pores, and insisted on the importance of perspiration. The physician Walter Cooper Dendy, author of the booklet Hints on the Disease and Health of the Skin (1843), asserts that “The superficial extent of the skin of an adult is about fifteen square feet, and the quantity of fluid which oozes through its pores is probably about two pounds in twenty-four hours. When we reflect on the immense load of fluid of which the blood is thus relieved, and its constantly oozing in a state of health, we perceive how vitally important is the process of perspiration to the health of the body” (6). In this concentration on cleansing the pores, modern medicine was syncretically combined with an older humoral model of medicine that continued to make sense to the public (and indeed to many doctors). Early modern medical perceptions had seen the skin as far more open than the modern model of the (ambiguously) closed body suggested. As Claudia Benthien notes, earlier models of the skin saw it more as a kind of crust, an extension of the interior, rather than a tissue different in kind (39–41). Moreover, it was a target of aggressive therapeutic invention, in some cases until the mid-nineteenth century, when the skin as an unbroken surface began to assume the value it had in the twentieth century (41). Sweating and poultices, along with more invasive ways of opening the skin such as cupping, blistering, and bleeding, were remedies people had used for generations to remove the evils of sickness; by the mid-nineteenth century, it seemed that those evils were present even during health.5 It also seemed that unlike the visible permanent openings like the nostrils and time-limited orifices made by the blister or incision, the ever present, invisible pores had to work continuously—which also meant things could go wrong without

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visible sign or deliberate control until the damage had been done. The closed body of the modern period offered the skin as a “thick” boundary (xx), and in this context the presence of pores and the idea of porosity seem to have been more destabilizing than were earlier perceptions that took for granted that the skin was open. Just as sanitarians focused on clearing drains, hygienists exhorted their readers and listeners to clear their pores. In a mid-1850s published lecture on the Turkish bath originally delivered at the Bradford mechanics institute, “Dr. Barter” explained that a balance between supply and waste must be constantly maintained. The skin had to work without interruption: “Anything . . . that tends to impede the actions of the pores . . . forces the internal organs to do the work destined for the skin; and so lays the groundwork for Scrofula in all its fearful forms” (13), scrofula being a form of tubercular infection that, as we shall see, was often also identified with venereal disease. (It manifested in lumps under the skin, often around the neck and face, and suppurating sores on the skin’s surface.) He concludes that “thus the perfection of God’s handy-work, that form shaped after his own image, becomes little other than a mass of corruption and filth” (13). Or, as Erasmus Wilson put it, The skin is the greatest medium for purifying our bodies; and, every moment, a multitude of useless, corrupted, and worn out particles evaporate through its numberless small vessels. . . . This secretion is inseparably connected with life, and the circulation of our blood; and by it the greater part of all the impurity of our bodies is removed. If the skin, then, be flabby or inactive, and if its pores be stopped up, an acidity and corruption of our juices will be the unavoidable consequence, and the most dangerous diseases may ensue. (On the Management of the Skin vii) This aggressive promotion of self-help via pore management is coupled with an older sense of the culpability of those whose skin is marred by disease. Skin diseases were pitiable, but there is a sense of moral disapproval even in many medical discussions. Dendy notes in passing that “The functions of the stomach and bowels, it must be remembered, may be severely and permanently affected by emotions of the mind: if such be protracted, all the sympathetic diseases of the skin may, indirectly, have their spring in moral influences” (8). More to the point, many various skin afflictions were, though carefully taxonomized, at root assumed to be of a common source, and that most frequently venereal. As Crissey and Parish write, “Throughout the century, the disciplines of dermatology and venereology were inextricably inter-

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twined” (80), and this in fact was the case long before dermatology emerged as a discipline. Since most such diseases manifest on the skin of the genitals first, this is perhaps not surprising. But the persistence of the connection suggests the longer-standing belief that a person’s virtue shone forth in his or her personal beauty—that virtue itself was skin deep, or put a different way, that skin operated as an index of the condition of human “depth,” not merely of the hidden aspects of the body, but of the condition of the soul. As subjectivity was more insistently corporealized, this seems to have intensified through sanitary discourse even as physiognomic assumptions about character based on physical appearance were increasingly dismissed. A poor complexion had long been associated with vice, just as leprosy was believed to be caused by venery in late medieval Europe. And a good complexion, by contrast, indicated moral health. George Eliot captures this assumption in Mrs. Tulliver’s reaction to the idea that a schoolmaster may not be willing to take on the tutelage of her son: “ ‘I don’t know what he could have against the lad,’ said Mrs. Tulliver, with a slight touch of motherly indignation; ‘a nice fresh-skinned lad as anybody need wish to see’ ” (Mill on the Floss 22). In France, particularly, following Alibert’s interest in pathology, skin diseases tended to be seen as always an outward manifestation of constitutional disease, as opposed to more localized afflictions (Crissey, Parish, and Holubar xiv), though this was hotly contested by midcentury. Samuel Plumbe in 1824 published a Practical Treatise on Diseases of the Skin tracing all common skin diseases to internal constitutional problems, in which he attacked Willan’s morphological approach to diagnosis of skin disease (Crissey and Parish 34). Wilson, however, whose facility for popularization made him a disproportionately important figure in the history not only of dermatology in England, but of popular understandings of skin, tended to also see skin as intimately related to morality, but reversed the causality—care of the skin, especially cleanliness, would make one healthy and virtuous. As Crissey and Parish describe, “it is in the chapter on ‘the influence of ablution on the health of the skin’ that the author [Wilson] becomes truly airborne. With quotations from Homer to Hufeland he bursts forth with a eulogy on the bath that borders on the frenzied” (139). As they point out, this is a reflection of the generally held belief that “skin is a barometer of general health, and that skin disease is in the great majority of cases a reflection of disturbances in the general health” to be treated internally and holistically (139–40). British treatises generally skirted much direct discussion on venereal disease, and it scarcely appeared in publications for the general public. Even medical professionals were often in the dark about modes of contagion. The French specialist Philippe Ricord’s commentary on a British report of sec-

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ondary syphilis without a chancre—there was quite a controversy for a while about whether infection was possible without a primary manifestation on the skin—was that the chancre had probably been anal, but “in England they seldom search for chancres in that location; the English customs reflect the far-fetched modesty characteristic of that nation.” He writes in 1856 of his recollection of the famed English physician William Acton showing him a ward full of patients whom Acton said had developed syphilis without having a sore: “I still have to laugh in recalling the startled expression of the house officer and its assistants when, carrying a bold finger and a scrutinizing gaze into certain mucous folds, I succeeded in finding a rear entrance to this perfidious Albion” (qtd. in Crissey and Parish 141). The story illustrates the culture of silence around venereal diseases, which likely contributed to doctors’ delay in seeing them as separate illnesses with particular etiologies rather than as a general expression of skin-disease-as-moral-index. Crissey and Parish suggest that, for the last dermatologists to cling to constitutional rather than morphological approaches to skin disease, the “world of the diathesis and the constitutional disease collapsed in the 1870s and 1880s” (160), as the cause of syphilis was discovered. That was considerably later than the move to consider febrile diseases as being of separate origin and manifestation. However, the popular understanding of the skin as an index of virtue obviously did not suffer quite the dramatic paradigm shift that Crissey and Parish attribute to the profession of medicine, and it is questionable whether it collapses quite so completely as these historians imagine even among rank-and-file medical practitioners. Wilson’s foundational 1852 work was clear that scrofula and, indeed, most skin diseases could be and likely were fundamentally syphilitic: “the syphilitic poison becomes altered in its mode of manifestation by time; . . . What is syphilis in the parent, may be scrofula in the child; but the latter is no less a modification of syphilis. . . . There are, besides, other and more remote diseases which have appeared to me to take their origin in hereditary syphilis, namely, Lupus, Kelis, Lepra, and Psoriasis” (On Syphilis vii–viii)—in other words, pretty much every common serious skin ailment of the day. He delicately suggests that in consulting with patients, one must consider that their understanding of their loved ones’ health may be imperfect: “The term ‘consumptive,’ used by a wife to explain a delicacy of constitution on the part of her husband . . . suggests a reflection full of interest. Might not the term ‘poisoned with syphilis,’ or ‘saturated with syphilis,’ more correctly express his real state?” (viii). In midcentury, it was thus certainly still quite clear to many medical professionals that the skin was both an outward and a visible sign of both health and moral character, even while it subjected the self to external influences. Moreover,

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all diseases manifested in the skin were likely to be essentially and originally venereal. Although Wilson is widely credited with creating a market for dermatologists in the English-speaking world, he also crusaded for public awareness of the importance of skin health and individual self-management. But even the discussion of skin disease with laypeople was thought likely to morally corrupt. The reaction of Wilson’s contemporaries to the first edition of his book was not encouraging. The Medico-chirurgical Review magisterially dismissed Wilson’s 1845 Healthy Skin, explaining that although it was fine for him to write of such things within the profession, it was inappropriate “to discourse upon similar matters with the public at large”: “We have perused this work with regret, and feel constrained to speak of disapproval. . . . There is in fact but one subject upon which a medical writer should ever allow himself to address the public directly upon—the all-important Hygiene, or the preservation of health and prevention of disease” (“Article XV,” 274). Wilson might justly have objected that this was in fact his aim. But the medical press decried two aspects of his effort: first, the detailed descriptions that might shock the genteel reader or, worse, intrigue the vulgar one, and second, the possibility that any reader might feel qualified to diagnose and, worse, treat his or her own ailments. Of Wilson’s enthusiasm for the water cure, the Medico-chirurgical Review is particularly disdainful. First, it is a quack remedy, and second, he is not talking about skin diseases: “there was no call for any notice of the system whatever, as his remarks are not directed to its application for the treatment of cutaneous affections in particular, but of disease in general” (276). The reviewer admonishes Wilson to “cease to ally. . . [himself] with and defend the gross but popular delusions” of the day (276). Nastily, yet tellingly, the reviewer sarcastically suggests that rather than simply preserving health, Wilson is appealing to a certain kind of sufferer: “we do not doubt (for its faults will prove with many its attractions) it will soon reach a second edition; and we would suggest . . . as a means of giving additional attraction to it in the eyes of the classes who will be its chief perusers, . . . furnishing, . . . a succinct account of the Syphilides—a class of diseases in which hydropathy is vaunted as pre-eminently adapted for treating!” (277). The rather more liberal reviewer of the British and Foreign Medico-chirurgical Review agrees with the Medico-chirurgical Review that popularizing medicine is unseemly; the book seemed a hybrid of general advice and inappropriately technical information: We must confess ourselves to be rather at a loss to know, whether Mr. Wilson’s objects be to address the general public alone, or whether he

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aims at including his professional brethren among his readers. If the former, we must say that we cannot find sufficient reason for selecting an isolated portion of general hygiène, treating it . . . with such copiousness, and especially for appending to it so much information of a purely medical kind, though conveyed in language anything but professional;—except in those unworthy motives, which we have always felt it our duty to expose and condemn, from which we believe Mr. Wilson to be altogether exempt. (Article XVII, 198) Like other reviews, this one is adamant that Wilson’s demystification of medicine is liable to be dangerous to the public: “When we discuss medical topics, we like to call things by their scientific names; and we do not consider ourselves bound to take cognizance of the many pages of Mr. Wilson’s book headed by St. Anthony’s Fire, Mattery Pimples, Branny Tetters, and other old women’s nomenclature” (205). Moreover, this populism obviously encourages “the public in the belief, that the treatment of erysipelas or rupia, to say nothing of impetigo and lepra, may be undertaken by unqualified domestic practitioners” (205), something that appears to the reviewer “very injudicious . . . measure” (205).6 Still, the British and Foreign Medical Review is more measured in its estimation of the book’s educational potential, as it is “well-timed . . . to forward the ‘bath and wash-house’ movement” and other sanitary and temperance initiatives, though the reviewer remarks that “we would have been better pleased if he had . . . omitted many passages . . . of a too popular bearing” (199). So despite the general agreement that the public should not read about medical matters, there was clear disagreement among medical readers on the value of the bathing movement. Notwithstanding these professional expressions of displeasure, Wilson’s treatise did indeed go into a second edition, and then a third, a fourth, and so on—yea, even unto an eighth. It was widely read and became a dermatological vade mecum of the period. Obviously, there was a large and probably anxious market of readers for dermatological advice. British literature of midcentury was generally decorously silent about venereal disease, but coded references to poor complexions can be found, as can early references to the impact of vice. Meredith’s Ordeal of Richard Feverel was poorly received when initially published because of its daring nature, but it suggests the existence of a conversation outside the realm of the literary. When searching out an appropriate wife for his prized and sexually innocent son, Sir Feverel looks among the daughters of his friends who sowed “wild oats” in their youth, and finds all the children wanting:

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Darley was proud of his daughters’ white and pink skins. “Beau­ tiful complexions,” he called them. The eldest was . . . immensely admired. . . . A youth not on his guard, . . . or even a man, might have fallen in love with her, she was so affable and fair. . . . And she was quite well, she said, the baronet frequently questioning her on that point. . . . but towards the close of their conversation her hand would now and then travel to her side, and she breathed painfully an instant, saying, “Isn’t it odd? [My sisters] Dora, Adela, and myself, we all feel the same queer sensation—about the heart, I think it is—after talking much.” Sir Austin nodded and blinked sadly, exclaiming to his soul, “Wild oats! wild oats!” (156) Here, the lovely pink and white complexion reveals the rubor of tuberculosis, as she is short of breath. The lesions manifest on the skin of the lungs, rather than the face, so that “even a man” might have mistaken it, but Sir Austin as an experienced reader with additional context can identify the rubor of disease in plain view. Another friend “vehemently preached wild oats” suggesting that young men must “know the world. . . . take it on medical grounds. Early excesses the frame will recover from: late ones break the constitution.” But his son is unhealthy: “ ‘Wild oats!’ he [Sir Austin] thought, as he contemplated the headless, degenerate, weedy issue and result. Both [his friends] . . . spoke of the marriage of their offspring as a matter of course. ‘And if I were not a coward,’ Sir Austin confessed to himself, ‘I should stand forth and forbid the banns! This universal ignorance of the inevitable consequence of sin is frightful!’ ” (156).

Degenerate Skin The understanding of a wide range of dermatological diseases as essentially venereal did not necessarily vanish in the 1870s, despite the fact that the vanguard of medicine began to make such distinctions. Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1894 publication, Round the Red Lamp: Being Facts and Fancies of the Medical Life (Doyle was another Edinburgh-trained surgeon), contains several references to the identification of “struma” (tuberculosis or scrofula) as a kind of syphilis. Although the stories often look backward in time to the earlier days of his practice, there is every indication that Doyle intends us to consider this part of the medical knowledge he is relaying to be current and correct. In “A Medical Document,” several surgeons trade stories that they are sure the writer among them won’t find anyone willing to read. They agree that the

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diseases of vice are among the “richest human materials a man could study,” though “too medical for the general public” (162). (Still, it might be noted that this was a public becoming accustomed to the discussion of the topic by New Woman authors, even if it was still quite scandalous.) A surgeon picks up the conversational thread: “There’s a famous beauty in London . . . remarkable a few seasons ago for the very low dresses which she would wear. She had the whitest of skins and most beautiful of shoulders” (162). Yet her dresses became increasingly modest season by season. When she comes to see the surgeon, “she suddenly tore off the upper part of her dress. ‘For God’s sake do something for me!’ she cried. . . . A rodent ulcer was eating its way upwards, coiling on in its serpiginous fashion until the end of it was flush with her collar. . . . it was about to invade her face.” He concludes: “She was one of those beautiful white-and-pink creatures who are rotten with struma. You may patch but you can’t mend” (163). Though she could of course be a victim of heredity, the implication in this story seems to be that her fashionable immodesty in dress, like the impulsive nature displayed when she tears away that dress, was emblematic of more blamable behaviors. Serpiginous, or snake-shaped, lesions can have many causes other than syphilis, and rodent ulcers or basal cell carcinomas would now be considered to have nothing to do with syphilis or tuberculosis (though what are now called tertiary syphilitic gummas can look like basal cell carcinoma). In the late nineteenth century, however, any such skin lesions were indeed widely identified with advanced venereal disease and with tuberculosis as permutations of the same pathology (see fig. 3.1). The invasion of the beauty’s face by the lesion will make visible to all her inner corruption. Of course, such lesions can also appear where the vice is hereditary rather than individual. In Doyle’s “The Third Generation,” Horace Selby is a respected specialist in a secluded, yet central location. The scene is set with numerous urban gothic references: “Scudamore Lane, sloping down riverwards from just behind the Monument, lies at night in the shadow of two black and monstrous walls. . . . The footpaths are narrow, and . . . the endless drays roar along it like breaking waves. . . . It is a singular street for so big a man; but a specialist who has an European reputation can afford to live where he likes. In his particular branch, too, patients do not always regard seclusion as a disadvantage” (36). The Monument, commemorating the Great Fire of 1666, was best known in the nineteenth century as a famed location for suicides, and of course the Thames had that reputation as well. The Great Fire was also frequently invoked in the nineteenth century as having had the consequence of ending the plague by sanitizing the city and was

Figure 3.1.  George Henry Fox, “Syphiloderma Tuberculosis.” George Henry Fox, Photographic Illustrations of Cutaneous Syphilis (New York: E.B. Treat, 1881), Plate XXV. Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY.

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frequently mentioned by urban renewal strategists as an example of drastic destructive action with beneficial health results. So between the Monument and London Bridge, on a dark and significantly rainy night, “The air was full of the sounds of the rain, the thin swish of its fall, the heavier drip from the eaves, and the swirl and gurgle down the two steep gutters and through the sewer grating” (36). One figure stands alone in such an urban waste, and it is a lost soul seeking Dr. Selby. Moisture throughout the period’s literature always tends to be evocative of miasma and threats to health, and often threats to individual self-enclosure. The flow of water and waste down toward the Thames through the sewers is emphasized, and the young man caught in this narrow funnel of a declining street is desperate to be saved but in danger of being swept away. What he is in danger of being swept away by, however, is no outer storm; it is the flood of history, flowing out from within his body. The young man, a baronet, has come to see the doctor with a “serpiginous” lesion on his shin (41). When the doctor asks if he can “account for it” (40), the baronet insists he has done nothing to contract a venereal disease. The doctor concurs, but delivers the verdict that he has “a strumous diathesis. In broad terms, I may say that you have a constitutional and hereditary taint” (42). At this point the family history is brought to bear. The baronet’s father, though virtuous, had skin lesions as well, but the real source of the illness is his grandfather, “Sir Rupert Norton, the great Corinthian . . . a notorious buck of the thirties” (42). The term Corinthian, as it was understood in the Victorian period, would have included the fast young wealthy men of the Regency and Georgian era who loved sport and luxury, but preeminently, the term was associated with sexual vice. The doctor remembers hearing about the old man’s life and career: “As he looked at the young man still leaning back in the leather chair, there seemed for the instant to flicker up behind him some vague presentiment of that foul old dandy with his dangling seals, many-wreathed scarf, and dark satyric face. What was he now? An armful of bones in a mouldy box. But his deeds—they were living and rotting the blood in the veins of an innocent man” (43). The man’s family history is inscribed in his body, an inscription now surfacing and becoming legible to view. Though his own character is untainted, he cannot escape his transpersonal past. The baronet pleads, “The coarse and animal is abhorrent to me. . . . And now that this vile, loathsome thing—ach, I am polluted to the marrow, soaked in abomination! And why? . . . Talk about the sins of the father—how about the sins of the Creator?” (44). He appeals to the logic of individual sin and suffering; a man should not suffer the liability of his grandfather’s actions. He then discloses that he is to be married on Tuesday. The doctor responds

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that the marriage must not take place, and that the constitutional effects are dangerous to his progeny: “ ‘The third and fourth generation’ says the trite old text. You may in time eliminate it from your system, but many years must pass before you can think of marriage” (46). The “trite old text” is Numbers 14:18, which specifies that the sins of the fathers will be punished in the children through the third and fourth generations, a text popularly cited by degeneration theorists. It is important here, however, to realize that this is not simply a story of degeneration, in which a family decays progressively after the sins of the grandfather. Indeed, it is potentially the opposite—it takes four generations to purge the taint from the family, but it can be done. Neither the present baronet nor his father engaged in vice. It is a story of the slow progressive reclamation of health and morality from the depredations of the Regency period—its materialism, irreligion, sexual vice, and conspicuous consumption. (We will see again the special significance of the Regency in chapter 5, but suffice it here to say that the evils of the Regency, and the ancien régime and Revolutionary period across the Channel, emerge as an important theme in representations of skin throughout the period.) Whereas the syphilitic woman is often used as an example of individual bad behavior, it is in British fiction most often the body of the potential patriarch that bears the tragic consequences of historical sin, perhaps because men are conceived as the agents of history as well as the bearers of historical meaning.7 Doyle situates this conflict between the individual and heredity in eighteenth-century idealist-materialist debates. The doctor refers to the Pentateuch, but as “trite”; as authoritative, he invokes an eighteenth-century natural theological reference to general providence. The patient cries out against his Creator, an action described in scientific terms that deemphasize the individual: “He shook his two clenched hands in the air—the poor impotent atom with his pin-point of brain caught in the whirl of the infinite.” The doctor attempts to soothe him: “What are we, after all? Half-evolved creatures in a transition stage . . . I think that Pope’s famous couplet sums up the whole matter, and from my heart, after fifty years of varied experience, I can say—” (44).8 (Pope’s own attempt to mediate between science and theology was, in its own day, heavily critiqued for the irreverence of even attempting a justification of science and theology.) Like the card game the doctor is playing when he is interrupted by the baronet (the outcries and laughter of the gamesters from the other room stand in counterpoint to the tense conversation between doctor and patient), the vicissitudes of a large and not particularly morally specific system emerge as the logic of fate rather than individual desert. Doyle evokes both a beneficent logic of

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an overarching general providence, and the irreducible cruelty of nature in which the individual suffers, caught in patterns larger than he can comprehend or influence. The patient, understandably not prepared to take so long a view, cuts the doctor off before he can quote Pope’s couplet.9 He protests that he cannot shame his bride by throwing her over for no apparent reason, nor can he envision disclosing the truth. The doctor watches “the lonely figure” walk away: “It was but his own shadow which trailed up the wall as he passed the lights, and yet it looked to the doctor’s eye as though some huge and sombre figure walked by a manikin’s side and led him silently up the lonely street” (48). The next morning, he reads that the young man was killed by “accident” (49)— implicitly suicide—“falling” in the wet street under a heavy vehicle moments after he leaves the doctor, as he walks toward London Bridge. The doctor’s bedside manner seems to have failed woefully here. His sunny appraisal that the family line can be cleansed is given the lie by the death of the baronet without progeny. In this instance, the individual is not strong enough to cure the ills of history that manifest on his skin. In invoking the young man’s skin lesion as a sign of syphilis, and “struma” as identical with it, Doyle was not simply retailing widely held old stereotypes; he knew a great deal about syphilis. His doctoral thesis of 1885 at the University of Edinburgh was on tabes dorsalis, a spinal nerve degeneration caused by syphilis (see Doyle, “An essay”). Doyle includes other stories in the collection about syphilis sufferers, though in at least two, he concentrates on the neurological symptoms that were his own specialty. “The Third Generation” offers three features of interest here: first, the focus on skin manifestations of syphilis (the father’s symptoms were “cutaneous” as well); second, the unhesitating identification of syphilis with struma or tuberculosis; and third, the identification of the origin of syphilitic or strumatic infection with the Regency period. Four generations are necessary to cleanse Britain of the ills of that period. The fluid references, from the storm to the patient’s sense that he is “soaked in abomination,” are also characteristic of a rhetoric of pollution typical of discussions of syphilis (see “saturated” above in Wilson’s discussion of the husband’s consumptive diathesis). The specter of the “huge and somber figure” (48) at the end leading the youth to his doom recalls the earlier phantom that the doctor briefly fancies superimposed on or behind the patient, the phantom of his grandfather, which truly is visible on the patient—his heredity appearing on his skin. As the century progresses, a materialist view of the individual body is often mediated by references to the longer durée of history, whether familial and evolutionary or social and historical. Here, Doyle situates the medical history of one family in terms

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of the changing historical mores of the Regency and the Victorians, and the doctor’s attempt to provide comfort in Pope’s religious response to the mysteries of the material body is as ineffective for the patient against the brutal materiality of disease as Pope’s philosophy was for his own reproductive potential. Syphilis in literature (or its other constitutional avatars, like scrofula and tuberculosis) mediates between the individual body and the longer durée of heredity and social history. Syphilis dramatized the scandalous moral degeneracy of a nation’s and family’s history as often as that of a sheepish individual sinner. In Doyle’s individualist modern Britain, it seems intolerable and unfair that the young baronet is trapped in a skin manifesting the rottenness of his Regency forebear; but heredity undercuts the modern fantasy of individual self-enclosure.

The Revolutionary Individual British authors took up the theme of the diseased skin and history more obliquely than their French counterparts, though they were still influenced by the French realist linkage of the individual’s skin to a communal history. For the French authors I discuss here, skin disease is inescapably situated in relation to the Revolution, and we do not see the characters protesting their individual fates; they understand themselves to be (or are understood by the narrator to be) more fully determined by their social and familial histories than by any individual actions. Depending on the author’s political investments, either the Revolution is seen to have set in place a cure for the earlier disease of the ancien régime, which was then not allowed to complete itself, leading to a complex set of nervous disorders, or the Revolution itself infected the social body with materialism and individualism, both economic and philosophical. For the British, the same period was a time of dangers as well. In the UK, the later Enlightenment was seen as a period of creeping contagion from French physiological and philosophical ideas, as well as of the threat of revolution. It is from the Regency aristocracy that the constitutional disease comes, defacing the skin of its decent Victorian offspring. Culturally, it had come to be understood as a period of pre-Victorian aristocratic decadence to which the decency and order of the middle classes were conceived as a cure. But in Britain, the revision of the franchise also poised the middle classes as a bulwark against the chaos of the great unwashed, whereas in France, Balzac indicts a “simian” peasantry that he held to have invaded both the bourgeois and the newly made aristocracy.

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As we shall see in Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities in chapter 4, the society of France prior to the Revolution, and the English Regency period, were often seen as having parallels in class polarization, ostentatious expenditure by the Crown, and flagrant public immorality among the ruling classes. Whereas violent revolution was avoided in Britain, it seemed to many to be a narrow escape (or a sad failure of British nerve, depending on one’s politics), and Victorians anxiously watched the fortunes of their continental neighbor throughout the period, fearing a contagion of revolutionary activity in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1860s. Victoria was a living repudiation of the ostentatious lifestyle and activities of the earlier period, and Britain did not undergo the disruptive changes in leadership that France experienced throughout much of the century. But to the extent that Britain had a past identifiable with the excesses of the old regime of France, the Regency was that period. Tamara Wagner has written extensively of midcentury Victorian engagements with the Regency, as feeding “on a fascination with the moral license associated with the Regency while chastising with increasing relish and self-righteousness those who took that license” (“ ‘A Strange Chronicle of the Olden Time’ ”). The Regency, in a sense, was the ancien régime domesticated; the old dandy or sexually inappropriate elderly lady was often a figure of fun in Victorian novels, in which the Regency lacked the weightiness that the Terror had lent the excesses of the aristocracy in their deaths. But their survival meant that all that was dark in Victorian sexuality could be displaced onto that generation. Old Corruption referred to politics before 1832, but also pointed obliquely to a physical heritage of that period in the present day. When Sir Austin of Meredith’s Ordeal of Richard Feverel discusses the corruption of England’s blood by “wild oats,” the doctor to whom he speaks tries to defend the isles: “Certainly . . . You will admit, Sir Austin, that, compared with continental nations—our neighbours, for instance—we shine to advantage” (157). But Sir Austin responds, “I find no consolation in shining by comparison with a lower standard,” though he allows that “the French make no pretences, and thereby escape one of the main penalties of hypocrisy. . . . It is better, perhaps, to pay our homage to virtue. At least it delays the spread of entire corruptness” (157). The French were certainly at least more forthcoming in novels about the details of both immorality and disease than the British Victorians, who were famously squeamish about what could be represented in literature. Doyle’s readers were a little shocked by his candor, even in the 1890s. In France in 1846, Balzac’s Cousin Betty took up the well-worn themes of female sexual and material voracity and linked it explicitly to class warfare. Madame Marneffe (Valerie) figured as something of a sexual and economic predator, keeping multiple lovers on a string and

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ruining several lives, driven on by the resentful and jealous Bette, a peasant woman whose bourgeois and quasi-aristocratic relatives are targets of her hatred. Valerie is the “very pretty” illegitimate daughter of “one of Napoleon’s most famous officers” (part 1: 60). A “Creole of Paris” (116), she has “inherited these courtesan tastes from her mother” (117). For Balzac, the Napoleonic period was marked by the same waste and luxury as the prior century had been. But “Under the Restoration the nobility cannot forget that it has been beaten and robbed, and so, . . . it has become thrifty, prudent, and stay-at-home, in short, bourgeois and penurious. . . . In France, henceforth, there will be great names, but no great houses. . . . Everything takes the stamp of individuality. . . . Family pride is destroyed” (117). Balzac was repulsed by bourgeois possessive individualism, seeing in it a threat to the social fabric, the fundamental unit of which was in his view the family, rather than the individual. Balzac asserts in his introduction to The Human Comedy that “Man is neither good nor bad; he is born with instincts and capabilities,” but that society (especially the monarchy) and religion (especially Catholicism) were forces that contained bad human tendencies, such as the excesses of self-interest. He is careful to distinguish his realism, characterized as it is by the cataloging of “such a mass of facts,” from the purposes of those who embrace a “school of Sensualism and Materialism.” The natural sciences, he suggests, reveal “the relations of God and man” (“Introduction” li). Balzac’s precocious realism, then, is not to be primarily identified with materialist naturalism. At the same time, he lacks the theological optimism of the British Common Sense school, as he does not believe in the Enlightenment notion of “indefinite progress for society as a whole” (li). Balzac aligned his own views of science (sometimes more loosely than others) with vitalist materialism, both the then popular Spinozan model of French medicine and the more eccentric influence of Swedenborg, who believed, daringly early (1735, De Infinito), that the soul was intimately connected to the body. Balzac embraced the tenet that all matter was vital and endowed with motion. However, rather than focusing that interest primarily on tissue theory, he emphasizes the nature of that vitality, which he sees in idealist terms as a transpersonal force. Through the eponymous character in Louis Lambert (and to some extent in Magic Skin), he offers a theory of the will as a “fluid” that permeates the universe and is taken up by physiological organisms and transformed into life and actions (“volition is . . . the act by which a man exerts his will,” Louis Lambert 40). In human beings it is most concentrated, but it is not in kind different from the will of animals (unlike for Hegel, whose concept of spirit is otherwise quite similar). Will itself exists

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prior to the individual mind. The narrator cites Lambert’s treatise, speculating, “Whether, granting that the function of the skin is purely protective, absorbent, excretive and tactile, the circulation of the blood . . . would not correspond with the transubstantiation of the Will, as the circulation of the nerve fluid corresponds to that of the Mind?” (40).10 The narrator remarks that Lambert’s findings are similar to those of the French physiologist Xavier Bichat (41), concluding, “Louis, at first purely Spiritualist, had been irresistibly led to recognize the Material conditions of Mind” (51). Lambert’s search, much like the German idealists, was for a materialist physiology that would still allow for spirituality, and the existence of an overarching force beyond individuals (here, will). Sadly this quest destroys him, as the fulfillment of his spiritual inquiry consumes his body. Among Louis’s findings are that “there is in man a primordial and overruling phenomenon which defies analysis. Man may be dissected completely; the elements of Will and Mind may perhaps be found; but there still will remain beyond apprehension the x against which I once used to struggle. That x is the Word, the Logos. . . . The Word is for ever generating the Substance.”11 This essentially Romantic, idealist, and Christian formulation suggests the importance of the transhistorical and transindividual force against which, for Balzac, modern individualism after the Revolution is positioned as a negative force. In addition to the entrepreneurial Madame Marneffe, there is the eponymous female villain. Bette, the Iago of the novel, is also ethnically suspect, but her natural evil tendencies and “Corsican and savage temperament” (Balzac, Cousin Betty part 1: 118) (Napoleon was Corsican, of course, whereas Bette is in fact a native of Vosges) are concentrated by her virginity: “Virginity, like every other monstrosity, has . . . its absorbing greatness. Life, whose forces are always economized, assumes in the virgin creature an incalculable power of resistance and endurance . . . the black magic of the Will”12 (118). This concentration of will allows Bette to be “the Mohican whose snares none can escape, whose dissimulation is inscrutable, whose swift decisiveness is the outcome of the incredible perfection of every organ of sense. She was Hatred and Revenge, as implacable as they are in Italy, Spain, and the East”—and apparently in North America, unless Balzac is simply confused about the location of the Mohawks (118–19). Bette is “a peasant in the fullest sense of the word, lean, brown, with shining black hair and thick eyebrows joining in a tuft, with long, strong arms, thick feet, and some moles on her narrow simian face” (33).13 Bette is a bête. She is perfected senses with no natural outlet or higher morality, and this makes of her a destructive power. She is counterposed to Valerie, whose villainy is connected to ordinary ambitions for money and social position; Bette is a force of nature, as Balzac’s

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repeated portrayals of her as both animal and savage suggest. Her concentration of will is perverse, in Balzac’s view, because individual virginity is perverse, especially for women, but she also represents a kind of fate, punishing the more generally sterile perversion of historical will by post-Revolutionary society. Bette resents her first cousin Adeline, a typically Alsatian blonde beauty with a “complexion mingled in the unknown laboratory where good-luck presides” (26), who marries up. (As her fair skin suggests, Adeline is a Good Woman, and so her role is largely to suffer in relative silence as a sentimental martyr throughout the novel.) Claudia Benthien observes that nineteenth-century realism takes up “the classical color code of painting in its pathognomic and physiognomic descriptions” (103). Balzac, she suggests, is particularly prone to the emerging technique of offering the color and texture of a character’s skin for the reader’s interpretation (104): the “skin semiotics of literary painting reaches its high point in the nineteenth century” and especially with Balzac (Benthien 109).14 In terms of realism, I would like here to focus less on the portrayal of character noted by Benthien, or of affect that I explored in chapter 2, than on the substitution of the skin for the individual character. Indeed, the skin substitutes for and undermines the very concept of the individual—a practice more characteristic of the French encyclopedic novel series of Balzac and Zola, which tend to try to depict society and illustrate a (usually physiological and philosophical) theory of society and history from all angles, than the British realist novel devoted to the exploration of individual psychology. Here, as in the British fin de siècle representations of skin disease, history is the transindividual truth that will out, and where it manifests is on the skin of the woman. Once her husband dies, Madame Marneffe must decide the best bargain between her lovers, and so she remarries to “shed her skin” (Balzac, Cousin Betty part 2: 56), or to make a new identity for herself. But the reference is also an ironic foreshadowing. Her savage Brazilian lover, Montes de Montejanos, who had expected to marry her himself, takes his revenge, infecting her and her husband deliberately with a “Negro” skin disease from his slaves (50). He does this in a peculiarly mediated way: in revenge for Valerie’s defection, he takes as a mistress Cydalise, a youngster recently brought to sale, with remarkable skin: “Her milk-white skin reflected the light like a mirror. The delicate pink in her cheeks might have been laid on with a brush” (36). Although this disease is transmitted by a “poison” (50), he does not simply give it to his ex-lover, but to his new lover, who then gives it to him, and he gives it to Valerie: in short, it must be communicated venereally: “ ‘One of my negroes has the most deadly of animal poisons, and incurable anywhere

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but in Brazil. I will administer it to Cydalise, who will give it to me; then by the time when death is a certainty to Crevel and his wife, I shall be beyond the Azores with your cousin [Cydalise], who will be cured, and I will marry her. We have our own little tricks, we savages!—Cydalise,’ said he, looking at the country girl, ‘is the animal I need’ ” (50). As for Cydalise, we are not enlightened as to whether Montes actually cures and marries her, or simply chucks her overboard when he is done. What seems essential is the quality of her beauty, and what makes that is the quality—and whiteness—of her skin (see chapter 8). Montes cannot simply infect himself, apparently, which suggests that the disease must first come through the body of a woman. And, indeed, Balzac’s use of the skin to chart the ravages of experience is generally focused on female characters. As Benthien notes, he delights in describing the beautiful skins of young women and then systematically destroying them over time, detailing the ravages to their color, their texture. Benthien argues that Balzac follows the medicine of the day in seeing children and young women as having transparent surfaces, and “diaphenous complexion” (Balzac, qtd. in Benthien 107).15 Over time, their skin becomes marked by past experiences, but less expressive of current affective states. This theme (and literary technique) is particularly marked in Cousin Betty, though it is not unique to Balzac or even to French novels. But here, a larger logic is at work than individual aging and experience. The civilized society that allows itself to become perverted is invaded by savagery, indeed, is made to express its own primitivism. The threat is from within; though the mechanism by which that threat is carried out is figured as a “savage” Brazilian, we should remember that the narrative is set in motion by the “simian” peasant Bette. The body of the nation is female—or vulnerable through its females—and Montes must mount his “savage” and “negro” biological warfare attack through a French female body, the whitest possible. Cydalise, the exquisitely white, beautiful, French prostitute and experimental “animal” is how the disease will actually enter the nation. The disease itself, once in the French body, becomes the mark of a society corrupted by money, Republicanism, and lack of religion, a sign of the vitiated tastes of a “Creole” who rose in such a world to social respectability. The doctor, when asked (in discussing Valerie’s sad case) about the cause of society’s “deep seated evil,” identifies it as “The decay of religion . . . and the pre-eminence of finance, which is simply solidified selfishness. Money used not to be everything; there were some kinds of superiority that ranked above it—nobility, genius, service done to the State. But nowadays the law takes wealth as the universal standard, and regards it as the measure of public capacity. . . . the religious sense is wholly lacking in France” (Balzac, Cousin Betty part 2: 62).

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Regarding Valerie, the doctor, Bianchon (a name itself meaning “the white one,” perhaps indicating his purifying role as a doctor), is at a loss to explain the eruption of a tropical disease in Paris. Identifying such a disease with a prior historical period, he wonders if it is a recrudescence of a medieval disease similar to leprosy (also associated with venery). He muses: The case is to me quite inexplicable. The disease is peculiar to negroes and the American tribes, whose skin is differently constituted to that of the white races. Now I can trace no connection with the copper-colored tribes, with negroes or half-castes, in Monsieur or Madame Crevel [the new married name of the former Madame Marneffe]. And though it is a very interesting disease to us, it is a terrible thing for the sufferers. The poor woman, who is said to have been very pretty, is punished for her sins, for she is now squalidly hideous if she is still anything at all. She is losing her hair and teeth, her skin is like a leper’s, she is a horror to herself; her hands are horrible, covered with greenish pustules, her nails are loose, and the flesh is eaten away by the poisoned humors. (64) Upon seeing her, Bette exclaims, “I cannot recognize her eyes or her mouth! Not a feature of her is there!”; and the odor of rot is so powerful her servants cannot bear to be present (67). Her “scrofulous” illegitimate son inherits the estate (71). Valerie’s new husband, also dying, assumes her disease is venereal: he fears that he might have caused her illness, as “A man is not a traveler in perfumery for nothing; I had blamed myself ” (69). Whereas Valerie asks to be left to the Church, as “I can please no one now but God . . . that will be my last flirtation” (69), he dies refusing to see a priest: “What is to be said? I drank the milk of Revolution” (70). And thus, from the fear that he has contracted the disease through extramarital sex, and the reality that he has received it from his wife, it is transmuted to a disease contracted from another female body, that bad mother of Enlightenment philosophy, who lactates the tainted milk of Revolution. All the evils of the post-Revolutionary period are finally emblematized by a venereal disease that attacks the skin and destroys both the individuality of Balzac’s characters and their sense of self-contained isolation. Balzac thus combines the materialism of the French Enlightenment (and realist fiction) with the historical concerns that we see in Britain. Though drawn to materialist physiology, he rejects the materialism of the medécins philosophes as fostering the Revolution. He requires, therefore, a form of idealism that will account for a transpersonal will and for historical change, without the optimism of German teleological thought, and so he is drawn to Swedenborg, whose identification of the will with what Hegel called Spirit prefigures Nietzsche.

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Nana: History’s Dangerous Lesions By the end of the century in France, the representation of the skin is closer to the British novelists, many of whom take up naturalist techniques pioneered in France. The destruction of the social body—exemplified in the courtesan’s skin—is more clearly materialist, as realism is made to serve the purposes of naturalism and themes of degeneration rather than religious morality. Continuing Balzac’s critique of economic materialism, but from a thoroughly physiologically materialist perspective, Zola identifies a different source of decline: the bourgeois body and the failure of the Revolution. The eponymous heroine of Émile Zola’s novel Nana (1880), who begins as a performer and prostitute, is qualified for success not merely by her general beauty, but specifically by her skin; the stage manager exclaims that her success will be due to “That skin of hers!”—a fair, golden-tinted skin (4). Zola sets his grand opus in the Second Empire, seeking to scientifically chronicle the influences of industrialization and moral decay he saw as defining that period: “Historically the Rougon-Macquarts proceed from the masses, radiate throughout the whole of contemporary society, and ascend . . . by . . . that impulsion of essentially modern origin, which sets the lower classes marching through the social system. And thus the dramas of their individual lives recount the story of the Second Empire” (“Preface” iv). Nana, though set at the end of the Second Empire, was written during the Third Republic. Nana is the descendant of an illegitimate union between the criminal layabout and smuggler Antoine Macquart and the middle-class, mentally disabled Adelaide Fouque16 during the period just before the Revolution. Nana ends with the onset of the Franco-Prussian War, which the French lost. Zola states that he waited for three years for “the fall of the Bonapartes, which I needed artistically,” and then it suddenly and unexpectedly “furnished me with the terrible but necessary denouement” for his twenty-volume project (“Preface” vi). Nana is both primitive and decadent. Zola identifies her with beasts of prey: she decorates with a tigerskin and bearskins, and “Her tawny hair” falls down her back like “the mane of a lion” (Nana 192). Her skin is a pelt: “Nana was very hairy. . . . She was the Golden Beast” (192). Zola has liberal recourse to the language of decay, as well as animality: Nana is compared to vermin: “The Golden Fly,” . . . a tart, the offspring of four or five generations of alcoholics, her blood tainted by a long heredity of deep poverty and drink, which in her case had taken the form of unhinging the nervous balance of her sexuality. . . . she was avenging the poor, underprivi-

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leged wretches from whom she’d sprung. . . . she would carry this pollution upwards to contaminate the aristocracy. She was turning into a force of nature, and, without any intention on her part, a ferment of destruction; between her plump white thighs, Paris was being corrupted and thrown into chaos; she was making it rot. (190) Nana’s own nervous organization is such that she experiences pain as a perverse pleasure, clinging to a lover who beats her, and the beating adds to her skin’s charms: “the effect of repeated thrashings [is that] . . . she becomes as soft as fine linen, her skin delicate, her complexion peaches and cream, so tender to the touch and so radiant that she looked even lovelier” (231). Nana’s physical culture is obsessively directed to the skin; one lover stabs himself with scissors with which Nana had a “constant compulsion for preening herself  . . . to trim off little bits of skin or snip off hairs” (380). Like Madame Marneffe, she is the product of an illegitimate union (though Nana’s goes back several generations, rather than only one). She disappears for a time, during which the rumor flies that she has gone to the East and become the lover of a “big black man” (410). Shortly after she returns to find her child dead, her beauty is destroyed—again like Madame Marneffe, by a skin disease, in this case, smallpox: a pile of blood and pus dumped on a pillow, a shovelful of rotten flesh ready for the bone-yard, her whole face covered in festering sores, one touching the other, all puckered and subsiding into a shapeless, slushy grey pulp, already looking like a compost heap. Her features were no longer distinguishable, her left eye entirely submerged in discharging ulcers, the other one a sunken, fly-blown black hole. A thick yellowish fluid was still oozing from her nose. Starting from the left cheek, a reddish crust had overrun the mouth. . . . Venus was decomposing; . . . the ferment which had infected a whole society, seemed to have come to the surface of her face and rotted it. (425) As she lies dead in the summer of 1870, the troops are marching for Germany; the resulting defeat, though it restored a nominally republican government, would tilt the country rightward politically for some time to come. This is, of course, an updated reworking of the Cydalise and Madame Marneffe story, and especially Madame Marneffe’s death scene by Balzac, who likened himself in the dedication of Cousin Betty to “a humble Doctor of the Faculty of Social Medicine, a veterinary surgeon for incurable maladies.” Zola famously saw himself as a modern clinical observer of social ills and had great admiration for Balzac and particularly for Cousin Betty. But, politi-

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cally far left of Balzac, and informed by a later science, Zola emphasized the differences between his project and Balzac’s: “his work wants to be the mirror of the contemporary society,” but he would describe “a single family, dramatizing the interplay of race and milieu.” His task was “to remain a naturalist, a physiologist. Rather than principles (royalty, Catholicism), I shall have laws (heredity, innateness) [innéité]” (Zola, “Differences between Balzac and Me,” qtd. in F. Brown 188). In other words, instead of mirroring a vast number of social positions to lead deductively to critique, here a few individual “specimens” may inductively stand in for physiological types that gesture toward an entire social ecology. Zola was interested in evolution and heredity and was well acquainted with the work of Darwin. In an 1871 preface to The Fortune of the Rougons, he explained his intent: “Physiologically the Rougon-Macquarts represent the slow succession of accidents pertaining to the nerves or the blood, which befall a race after the first organic lesion, and, according to environment, determine in each individual member of the race those feelings, desires and passions . . . whose outcome assumes the conventional name of virtue or vice” (vi). Of course, Nana does die of smallpox, which was clearly understood not to be venereal, and to originate in contagion rather than within the body itself. And Zola’s choice here is historically motivated: a major and devastating smallpox pandemic swept through France in the summer of 1870. But, as we have seen, skin diseases tend to be metaphorically assimilated to the venereal. This representation is also part of a literary tradition dating back to the Revolutionary period: in Choderlos de Laclos’s 1782 novel, Dangerous Liaisons, Madame Marneffe’s ancien régime literary ancestress, Madame de Merteuil, has her face left permanently scarred by smallpox after she flees to the countryside to escape the consequences of her sexual villainies. Like Nana’s, it is “confluent” smallpox, in which the blisters come together to effectively lift the skin away from the flesh (390). She is left “fearfully disfigured . . . she has lost an eye. . . . really hideous” (392). Her detractors say that “now her soul was to be seen in her face” (392). Thus, this epidemic disease is artistically freighted with the kind of moral and political significance that has little to do with its actual etiology, and everything to do with the uses of skin disease we have seen in the British examples of the nineteenth century. In Nana, the smallpox shows the corruption of the Empire; it is defined as a yeast or “leaven” that has permeated the entire society. Nana is defined as a vector of pollution and disease quite a while before she dies; it matters little that she is personally a good-natured person or that the disease she actually dies of is in fact not related to her sexual activities. Her end is not the result of her own actions, but the just response of outraged nature to generations of decadence.

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Whereas Madame Marneffe appears to begin as an individual (and possessive individualist), and is then punitively shown to be part of the general movement of will in the universe, Nana is from the first never an individual, but always and only the ultimate distillation of the Macquart greed and illegitimacy as well as the social neglect that creates their condition, and so she must die of a disease whose symptoms can be both historically correct and descriptively aligned with constitutional corruption. But she is also the mass of the French people. Daniel Pick persuasively reads Nana not just in the obvious terms of degeneration, but of contemporary theories of crowds, in which “images of depraved women, political unrest, biological degeneration and the threat of levelling or homogenisation, constantly run into one another” (86). Crowds meant mobs, mobs meant revolution, and revolution meant atavism, for such sociologists as Charles LeBon (Pick 92). The psychology of a crowd was always represented as feminine (93). Crowds also meant contagion, both physical and emotional. Nana has never been a true individual with free will—indeed, perhaps none of Zola’s characters are—and the disease must literally efface her, destroying the lovely surface that defines her and appears to mark her to observers, erroneously, as a person. Zola thus treats her individual body as a temporarily illusory surface under which the truth of heredity—indeed, of the social body, will out in the end. In short, Zola emphasizes his distinction from Balzac, but both are reacting against a notion of individualism (far more celebrated in the works of their British counterparts), and both resurrect the family as an essential building block of community—though for different political reasons (while British writers are as likely to write of orphans who overcome their dismal family circumstances). Zola cites Balzac in Nana’s end, but the etiology of the illness—an epidemic associated with the inadequacy of the government’s efforts to vaccinate—is more directly social. Both use the rhetoric of animality, race, and savagery as an analogue for the revenge of Nature upon cultural degeneration. Balzac gives us a simian “Corsican” peasant and a savage Brazilian armed with a “Negro” disease from his slaves exacting revenge on the entrepreneurial individualist, whereas Zola’s deus ex machina is larger scale and Malthusian in nature: the “positive checks” of war and epidemic. But the language of savagery returns in evolutionary form in the theory of decadence in which Nana’s career and end are narrated, right down to the unconfirmed but metaphorically significant rumour of her dalliance with an African lover. Balzac was a religious monarchist, as Zola was certainly not. But Zola believed that inherent in Balzac’s realism, despite the author’s desires, was a radical indictment of power: “today all we perceive in his work is a power-

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ful revolutionary inspiration. . . . where he wrote ‘Royalty [and] Catholicism,’ our children will read the word: Republic.” Perhaps that is because for Zola, power had been rooted in the bourgeois for years, and he believed they had betrayed Revolutionary ideas, whereas for Balzac, the bourgeoisie was only newly powerful. Balzac denounced the bourgeoisie as a new and demeaning incursion into the governing structure, an insurgency that must be put down to protect French society. For Zola, “To speak of the bourgeoisie is to make the most violent indictment that one can cast against French society” (qtd. in Gay 36).17 Art should “show the bourgeoisie naked as more abominable [than the lower classes], this class which sees itself as representing order and respectability” (qtd. in Gay 36). The universal body of the bourgeois, then, presenting itself as the icon of health and social order, should be exposed and displayed precisely in order to show its illness, its insufficiency, its lack of authority.18 And it would seem as well, that for Zola, realism must always show the same radical tendency, by nature of its physiological description, which shows us the truth of naturalism and physiological law rather than what he considered the ideological fables of aristocratic dignity or religious claims to transcendence. Both Balzac and Zola come to insist upon the insufficiencies of a universal bourgeois body and the insufficiencies of a notion of possessive individualism, though for quite different reasons. But instead of attacking the body of the patriarch, both of them dramatize that failure most spectacularly through the flaying and effacement of the beauty of the woman. (Balzac never describes the sick body of Monsieur Crevel in detail, though he is simultaneously dying of the same disease as Madame Marneffe.) And because the evil comes from within the social body, the flaying must take place from the inside out.

Realism, History, and Skin The French nineteenth-century novel was distinguished by the encyclopedic forms of writers such as Balzac and Zola, who sought to use the multiple linked narratives to elucidate large philosophical, historical, and physiological ideas. Britain offers nothing that attempts the same goals, focusing much more on the development of individual character, though a few “chronicles” by such authors as Trollope or Oliphant serially follow the lives of an entire small community, and Trollope’s Palliser series did engage politics. The British novels of this type tend to focus on the humorous exploration of human nature as an enduring truth, whereas political or historical change enters as a colorful backdrop to that focus or as motivation for individual character development. The growth and capacity of the individual tends to retain center stage in British novels, whereas in France, individuality is treated as epiphenomenal.

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Realism developed in both nations at roughly the same time, but in ways that bear a markedly different relationship to the economic and political emergence of possessive individualism. The British novel generally celebrates the individual and the economic and social forms of modernity, if nervously; the French novels also depend upon the themes of modern individualism, but critique them, and rarely offer their individualists to the reader’s sympathy. (Still, notable sympathetic identifications with characters emerge from these novels; much as Nana was meant as a cautionary figure, she caught the imagination of generations of artists, not least, perhaps, Zola himself.) Lynn Festa notes that in the eighteenth century, sentimentalism’s work to define the human varied in a similar way: the French “devote greater attention to an abstract concept . . . of what the human de base might be,” whereas the British begin with the insular individual and seek to coax him or her into relation with the world” (36). The nations were, however, developing in tandem, both economically and as world powers, and their conversations and competitions tended to play out as “mimicry” with each as the others’ “internal shadows” (Festa 48). If the two nations’ realist novels emphasize different aspects in their approach to character, they coincide in foregrounding the modern body as a site of both signification and interpretation.19 The body’s surface in this period is becoming specifically and with new proportional emphasis the site of the Iserian “gap” that invites interpretation; realism becomes more (or at least as much) about entering and assessing the body’s affective, and sometimes physiological states—often indicated by surface appearance—as assessing story and predicting the next plot turn.20 However, in Nana the titular character’s mental state is never the most salient focus; that is, we are never invited to speculate on the meaning of Nana’s emotions, but on her physiology itself (e.g., the meaning of her skin’s clarity, color, or lesions, as well as the size and shape of her body or the texture of her hair). The narrator is in fact always ahead of our speculations on the meaning of her emotions and desires, identifying them briefly and authoritatively before we can question them; it is her surface appearance that is offered for interpretation, and that is consistent with Balzac’s earlier use of the skin as well.21 Valerie’s only appearance as she dies makes her appear lighthearted, and Nana’s emotional suffering at the end is never displayed; she dies offstage. Both narratives eschew any scene that would potentially engage sympathy for the women’s suffering, and instead focus on the women’s damaged bodies and the disgust of the viewers. So physiology more broadly can be the focus of realism as well as emotions or motivations more narrowly defined; what remains the same is the centrality of the body.22

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Jameson’s reading of Zola is particularly pertinent to my argument here that Zola continues and develops the realist mode, because he sees in Zola the culmination and undoing of realism. Jameson sees the suspension of suspense—the move away from story toward the no-time of a destiny preordained—implied by Zola’s degeneration framework as “the unique form taken by the temporality of destiny when it is drawn into the force field of affect and distorted out of recognition by the latter” ( Jameson 46). For him, this “dissolution of the compact between chronology and the present that makes realism possible . . . thereby signals the crisis in plot which has been regularly taken to spell the end of realism as such” (46). Zola undoes realism for Jameson, at least in part because the logic of destiny, in the shape of heredity, takes precedence over the logic of chance or individual will. But I want to point to Zola’s larger project and also his embeddedness in the longer history I have been tracing to show that his portrayal of heredity is entirely consistent with the realist mode. Zola was one of many (if perhaps the greatest of many) working within this evolutionary framework, and thus part of the ongoing general negotiation between materialism (the individual body), a materialist-idealist conception of history as containing forms from which bodies diverge (become decadent) or develop (evolve), and an idealist vision of history itself as corrective (war comes to purge the nation of its decadence, as in more Hegelian or Carlylean views of historical and national identity). This is an older conversation than is readily visible if we focus only on the literature of degeneration at the fin de siècle. Thus, we see in Zola an update of Balzac’s more idealist view of the transcendent will as instead a material, nonidealist force embedded within heredity itself and reinitiated in each individual body. In both cases, however, the individual body is only a portion or iteration of a national or familial transcendent reality. In that sense, both Balzac and Zola are quite at odds with the British model of the Crusoe-like individual who invents his or her own destiny chronicled by Nancy Armstrong as the rise of what she defines as the true type of the novel—the realist novel of individual character in conflict with social constraint that ultimately resolves that conflict with reintegration into society. And perhaps that explains why the bourgeois body is subject to hostility in the French tradition, which it generally remains free from (or is able to transcend) in the British, especially in the first half of the century. The skin and its lesions, however, remind us even in Britain of the tension between the self-regulating individual architect of his own story and the rhetoric of fatedness associated with heredity and the notion of a transcendent idealist force of mind, will, and history.

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Realism, then, I would argue, operates here by positing heredity as part of the constraints of society that demands the sacrifice of those marked as ill for the greater good, the health of the whole social body. In fact, however, all of these stories do emphasize the importance of human choice and agency. Doyle’s young baronet dies, but it is by choice; he is not fated to die, and the doctor suggests that he may be able to be cured over a long treatment, though he must sacrifice his marriage, that usual happy plot resolution. Balzac’s corrupt nation still requires a deus ex machina or Fury in the form of a savage Brazilian slave owner to exact the revenge of outraged will, but it is a punishment for bad behavior that was partly the result of bad historical choice in the Revolution. Zola’s protagonist alone simply suffers the fate of circumstance, but she is also not positioned as an individual. In other words, if the novel were truly the story of Nana, her death would mark the fated failure of the individual, but the chronicles of the Rougon-Macquart family are ultimately simply an example of a larger story about nation and humanity. It is the nation itself that is to blame for the exacerbation by poverty of the disease represented by the Macquart bloodline, and France’s punishment at the hands of Germany is foreshadowed at the end of Nana in 1870. But France itself survives the Second Empire and even the defeat at German hands. Zola himself, a believer in the principles of Revolution, was ultimately optimistic about humanity and its future. Poised against the historical fatedness of heredity is the transhistorical vitality and healing capacity of life itself, as evidenced in the final novel of the cycle, Doctor Pascal.23 Doctor Pascal suggests that heredity may be overcome (as does Zola’s non-Rougon-Macquart novel, Fecundity). The force the doctor posits will allow that the transcendence of heredity is the Spinozan (or Bichatian) vitalist force of biological tissue itself: Dr. Pascal had only one belief—the belief in life. Life was the only divine manifestation. Life was God. . . . And life had no other instrument than heredity; heredity made the world; so that if its laws could be known and directed, the world could be made to one’s will. . . . When all should be healthy, strong, and intelligent, there would be only a superior race, infinitely wise and happy. . . . And as in his study of consumption he had arrived at the conclusion that it was not hereditary, but that every child of a consumptive carried within him a degenerate soil in which consumption developed with extraordinary facility at the slightest contagion, he had come to think only of invigorating this soil impoverished by heredity; to give it the strength to resist the . . . destructive leaven, which he had suspected to exist in the organism, long before the microbe theory. To give strength . . . was also to give

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will, to enlarge the brain by fortifying the other organs. (Zola, Doctor Pascal, trans. Mary Serrano, 37) Though the doctor dies and his papers are destroyed, Zola does not disallow that the solution to heredity will someday be found, and the novel ends with the doctor’s son, the most recent in the Rougon line, nursing avidly: “And in the warm silence, in the solitary peace of the workroom, Clotilde smiled at the child, who was still nursing, his little arm held straight up in the air, like a signal flag of life” (342). In that sense, Zola’s realism is finally as optimistic about the human capacity for transformation as any British novel of the time; he simply invests his hopefulness in physiology itself over individualism.24 French novels show us how central the image of skin and its destruction from within was to the conception of both political and physiological degeneration, a theme that has resonances with thematic relations to Britain’s uses of its own past, even as it is used to different political ends. And British fiction also uses the period and tropes of the French Revolution itself, though it tends for most of the period to be more discreet about the nature of disease and its proximate causes. As British authors read French fiction and absorbed its themes, images, and techniques, these textual elements were taken up, sometimes used unchanged and sometimes repurposed. However, central to this mode of narration in both is a focus on interpreting the body’s surface. In the next chapter, we will pay closer attention to British literature’s representation of the French Revolution, as well as the other side of skin’s radical permeability.

q Ch a p ter 4 In What a wonderful thing is the skin! . . . What millions of pores it contains! The minutest aperture may absorb the deadliest poison. —“Francis Pears,” Skin, Baths, Bathing, and Soap It is the Turkish bath that has made the once-formidable Ottoman Empire the sick man of Europe. . . . we will entice external leakage of such incipient greatness as we have—soaking ourselves in water, as if we were possums, and our virility a eucalyptus flavour that we sought to dissipate. —Joseph Furphy, Such Is Life Meanwhile, do you learn your lessons, and thank God that you have plenty of cold water to wash in; and wash in it too, like a true Englishman. —Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies

In 1896, the suffragist and poet Alice Meynell published a collection titled “The Colour of Life,” headed by an essay of the same title. In it, she ruminates that the color of life is not red—that is the color of blood spilled. It is that of “blood unpublished”: the color of skin over the living body: “Red is the colour of violence, or of life broken open, edited, and published. . . . The true colour of life is the colour of the body, the colour of the covered red, the implicit and not explicit red of the living heart and the pulses. It is the modest colour of the unpublished blood” (1). She follows this with a meditation on the color of boys’ bodies, exposed to spring weather after a long winter, as they bathe in the Serpentine: He sheds the slough of nameless colours—all allied to the hues of dust, soot, and fog, . . . and he makes, in his hundreds, a bright and delicate flush between the grey-blue water and the grey-blue sky. Clothed now with the sun, he is crowned by-and-by with twelve stars as he goes to bathe. . . . Old ivory and wild rose in the deepening midsummer sun, 141

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he gives his colours to his world again. . . . So little stands between a gamin and all the dignities of Nature. They are so quickly restored. There seems to be nothing to do, but only a little thing to undo. (3) From this meditation on the child bathing, she considers a child at the seacoast. The ending, however, addresses women’s bodies, modesty, and history in a surprising turn away from the pastoral, urban or otherwise: In the case of women, it is of the living and unpublished blood that the violent world has professed to be delicate and ashamed. See the curious history of the political rights of woman under the Revolution. . . . She was to spin and cook for her citizen in the obscurity of her living hours; but to the hour of her death was granted a part in the largest interests, social, national, international. The blood wherewith she should, according to Robespierre, have blushed to be seen or heard in the tribune, was exposed in the public sight unsheltered by her veins. Against this there was no modesty. . . . Women might be, and were, duly suppressed when, by the mouth of Olympe de Gouges, they claimed a “right to concur in the choice of representatives for the formation of the laws”; but in her person, too, they were liberally allowed to bear political responsibility to the Republic. Olympe de Gouges was guillotined. Robespierre thus made her public and complete amends. (6–7) I have cited extensively from this quite short essay—the entire piece is under 1,300 words—to show the series of Meynell’s associations that one might consider surprising: the skin’s blush versus the blood beneath, violence and bathing, culture and nature, women’s modesty and the Terror under Robespierre. The multitude of “gamins” strip to bathe and appear crowned with stars, like the woman whose birth pangs mark the beginning of the end of days in Revelations. They are beautiful, but perhaps also dangerous. Meynell stresses that nature can quickly reassert its claims over culture. (Meynell observes, “There is nothing so remediable as the work of modern man. . . . And by remediable I mean, of course, destructible,” 4–5). From pastoral descriptions of grass growing in the streets and a child sea bathing, we have hints here of the undercurrent of violence below modern life that are presaged in the “published” blood of the opening, and the last paragraphs make explicit the possibility of violent destruction hinted at throughout. Talia Schaffer reads the essay brilliantly in the context of Meynell’s feminism and identification with de Gouges, in which she “imagines both the excitement and terror of exposing herself to the urban crowd,” but notes that Meynell writes “with such intense feeling it seems to have done some violence to

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the very structure of the essay; the piece consists of abrupt juxtapositions of unrelated material” (176). I would like to argue, however, that however compressed Meynell’s style, this chain of associations follows a progression well established in Victorian discourse. This chapter will follow Meynell’s example, to trace in part by juxtaposition a series of considerations of the skin’s permeability and the fragility of the modern individual both directly and metaphorically linked to the practice and iconography of bathing. The new distrust of the body’s interior as a site generative of pollution, as we have seen, increased interest in bathing. As Claudia Benthien writes, “Up to the nineteenth century, contact with water remained problematic and anxiety-ridden . . . because the skin was still seen as not closed off ” (42), and even in the late eighteenth century, the body was often anointed with oil to “close” the skin against water penetrating into the body, affecting the “internal organs” (42). But even in the mid-nineteenth-century popular imagination, the focus on encouraging the skin’s excretions evoked the opposite possibility: many worried that the skin’s amazing porosity made the body and the self vulnerable. In this regard, the new anatomy did not break as radically with a premodern understanding of the skin as an open conduit between inner and outer worlds as some have argued. The focus on bathing, and indeed identification of bathing with Englishness, was complicated by concerns about the closed body becoming vulnerable from absorption from without. In this chapter, we shall see how the cult of bathing became a central feature of health discourse in the period, but also what dangers were envisioned as emerging from the very cultivation of the body itself as a site of moral sensibility. Moreover, we can see the skin as a permeable membrane, allowing what should be sealed outside the self to enter, and threatening not only the individual body, but the affective basis of social cohesion.

Soaking Up Affect As we have seen, emotions and affects, and their physical expression, took center stage in the evolutionary and anatomical debates of the period. Their origins in the nerves, or the heart, in the various “lower” or “higher” areas of the brain, related to the understanding of both what constituted the uniquely human and how the skin expressed and even constituted that humanity. But discussions of the emotions in early nineteenth-century Europe were haunted by a specter ancestral to that later envisioned by Marx. Just as discussions of the mind-body connection tended to be framed with reference to the materialism of Enlightenment France, the recent historical trauma of the Terror aligned for many with those scientific and philosophi-

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cal debates demanded an explanation of how eminently reasonable men and women might find themselves in the grip of passions anything but expressive of humanistic values. Throughout the period, one finds Western European authors recurring to the French Revolution as a limit case to understand the movements of history and the world spirit, the workings of mob sentiment and contagion, and the nature of what later generations would think of as the heart of darkness within humanity. If the Enlightenment gave us a body wearing its subjectivity on its skin and its mind in its materiality, the French Revolution offered both the apotheosis of this position and a traumatic negation of the sufficiency of reason to account for human affairs. The iconic body of the Revolution was both transformed and fixed in memory by the event: just as we still remember the bare breast of liberty in Delacroix’s famous painting, nineteenth-century French and British people alike recalled legends and images of Corday’s blushing face held up by the headsman, or Marat’s wounded body collapsed in his bath. Authors on both sides of the Channel described the revolution in terms of bodies either stony—inappropriately invulnerable to sympathetic connection with others—or conversely, spongelike—overly vulnerable to substances or sentiments outside the self. Against contagious emotion that sloshed around like bath water, turning individuals into mobs or impermeable bodies like statuary, whose lack of human connection provoked violence, for many British authors the proper response was to be found in self-containment that responded sympathetically, from the process of individual judgment discussed in chapter 2. Dorinda Outram writes the French Revolution as clinching the development of the closed, impermeable body ideal—the homo clausus of Norbert Elias—that universalized the contained body myth of the middle class in France, subordinating and finally excluding the more radically open body myths of the peasantry (60). Claudia Benthien also argues that it was the work of French medics that showed the skin as a newly nonpenetrable, protective covering by the late eighteenth century (62). But competing with this emphatic closure of the body’s openings was a developing interest in the permeability of the skin. The debate about skin’s permeability was a surprisingly sharp one, and the French anatomists spilled a fair amount of ink on it. Xavier Bichat himself was in fact convinced of the skin’s absorptive properties, and with his characteristic curiosity and purpose, pursued an unusual experiment to prove it. He writes: I have observed that after remaining in the dissecting room some time, the intestinal flatus frequently acquires an odour exactly similar to that

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which the bodies in putrefaction exhale. In the following way I convinced myself that it was the skin as much as the lungs that absorbed these odorous particles. I closed my nostrils, and fitted a long tunnel to my mouth, which passing out of the window allowed me to breathe the external air. The flatus from my bowels, after I had remained an hour in a small dissecting room, at the side of two very fetid bodies, acquired an odour nearly similar to theirs. I have observed also that by touching for a long time fetid substances, the flatus acquires more of this odour, than by remaining only in an air loaded with cadaverous exhalations. (General Anatomy 3: 297–98) He also noted that, although absorption is irregular and depends on various influences that sensitize the skin, touching effects more absorption than mere proximity (298).1 He hypothesized that the effluvia were absorbed into the blood and excreted through “the mucous surface of the intestines,” just as “when urine is absorbed, the saliva, the mucous juices, &c have a urinous odour” (298). (Perhaps mercifully, he does not explain how one might absorb so much urine as that. Anything for science.)2 Bichat’s contemporaries, some of whom were skeptical about the possibility of cutaneous absorption, were not all convinced. However, to those who argued the opposing stance, he attributed all counterexamples to the variability of the skin’s absorbent capacities at different times of the day or states of the organism (General Anatomy 3: 299). Bichat believed that at night, the animal sensibility is interrupted; thus, people are more prone to disease and other penetrations of the skin in their sleep (299). Women and children are more sensitive and have more delicacy, their skin is also thus more vulnerable to penetration by contagious substances, as is that of people who are hungry or otherwise less strong (299). Active consciousness, engaging the skin in contact with external objects, was protective. But at night, the monster under the bed, or in the air, was powerful. He observes that his students who fell ill during dissections were often found to have taken “portions of subjects” to their bedrooms, “the emanations from which had been able to affect them during sleep” (299). Most medical theorists of the period agreed that the mucous surfaces of the interior were more susceptible to penetration, but Bichat emphasized that those surfaces were continuous with the epidermis, and not different in kind. This covering is “everywhere continuous . . . reflected through different openings in the interior of the body” (254), marked only by a “reddish line” between the “mucous” system and the “dermoid” (254). He insists that the demarcation between the skin and mucous membrane is “not so striking in the organization as in the colour. They are

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both confounded in an insensible manner” (254). The continuity between the interior and exterior surfaces, and their vulnerability, are emphasized. Much was at stake in the idea of the skin’s penetrability. Contagious diseases, still seen as airborne in miasma, were an important and developing threat in the period of industrialization and urbanization. And, of course, if the skins of all people were continually excreting toxic matter, as midcentury sanitarians argued, then it stood to reason that such matter was constantly in the surrounding air and water. Although by the mid-nineteenth century, most specialists are at pains to point out that absorption of toxins through the skin is a baseless fear; the fact that they have to write of it suggests how widespread it still was. And in midcentury Britain, the powerful voice of Erasmus Wilson, contrary to the medical mainstream, fanned this fire of anxiety. The first page of his Healthy Skin begins with a definition of the skin that highlights the indeterminacy of the boundaries between inside and outside the body: At the various orifices of the body, the exterior skin is continuous with the internal skin or mucous membrane, and in those situations, from the similarity of their structure, it is difficult to distinguish between them. The difficulty is increased by the circumstance, that when a portion of skin is made to occupy an internal position, it assumes the humid character of mucous membrane; and when a portion of the latter becomes external, it loses its moisture by evaporation, and then takes on the ordinary appearance of skin. This . . . metamorphosis . . . is occasionally seen in domestic life. (1) Though he elsewhere reassures readers that the skin does not easily reverse its properties of excretion to absorption, he still hints that such a reversal is quite possible. As long as the “scarf skin” is in its normal state, “absorption by the skin is impossible. Indeed, were it not so, our lives would scarcely be secure for an instant; for a moist atmosphere, bearing in suspension infectious matter or miasmata, and traversing without impediment the tissues of the skin, would introduce so much of the poison into the system as would be immediately destructive of life” (51). However, when the outer skin is in protracted contact with fluid, it is converted into an absorbent “moist membrane” (51). And indeed, despite Wilson’s high-profile advocacy of bathing as a panacea, moisture emerges repeatedly in his text as an element of danger that causes skin to become indiscriminately absorptive. Wilson was at pains to explain how moisture caused syphilitic poison to be absorbed through the dermis. He believed that the body was particularly vulnerable to syphilis

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because, unlike other skin diseases such as smallpox, syphilis was not essentially “foreign” to the nature of the blood: “The syphilitic poison originates in the human body; it is probably little more than a modification of the natural secretions” and so is easily assimilated by the body when it comes from without (Wilson, On Syphilis 67). This theory was in line with earlier understandings of syphilis as arising from a disordered constitution, and being produced originally by the moral derangement of bodies, rather than by an outside agent. But other poisons could also be introduced through the moist skin, especially if its moisture was over a protracted period. Of course the conditions of prolonged warmth and moisture on the skin are precisely those afforded by the long ritual of the bath. That is one reason the stimulation of sweat is so important: when matter is passing out of the pores, the skin is less vulnerable to matter entering them. Emunctory action (action that removes waste or toxins) can protect the body of the sufferer—like Bichat’s sweaty men—but such action immediately threatens those around the sick body. Wilson cites as an exemplary case a breastfeeding mother who infects her child. The mother, who Wilson believed had never had a chancre, was unaware of the nature of her disease, and so brought her suffering baby to the doctor with no idea of the child’s infection: “The more common form of manifestation of constitutional venereal disease in infants, is for the skin: . . . it is painful to reflect that lactation, under such circumstances, becomes a powerful emunctory to the mother; and that, by means of this outlet, the poison is conveyed from herself to her infant. The mother of this child, doubtless, owed her own safety from an outbreak of constitutional disease chiefly to the action of this emunctory” (On Syphilis 194). Wilson’s prophylactic recommendation is washing with soap and water after intercourse, and for women a vinegar and water douche. These recommendations are accompanied by a stern lecture: “If a man have a venereal sore on the body of the penis, why, he richly deserves it, for nothing but gross neglect could have allowed the contact of the poisonous secretion for the length of time necessary for absorption, and particularly by the skin, which is not so apt at absorption as the mucous membrane” (232). Of course, once in, it has to get back out, and thus, mercury and other emunctories are recommended. Given that venereal skin disease is, as we have seen in the previous chapter, a key symbol for the dangers of both the corrupt individual and the social body, it is inevitable that one man’s cure becomes society’s danger. Healthy Skin, as we have seen, was a popular text aimed in part at the general public. Wilson is more measured about absorption in Diseases of the Skin, his very successful tome for other medical practitioners, but still insists that the absorbing power of the dermis is generally underestimated by doc-

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tors, especially when the body’s fluid content is lowered (45). This worry was taken up by Pears soap for advertising purposes. In an 1859 “informative pamphlet” published by “Francis Pears” entitled Skin, Baths, Bathing, and Soap, the author warns, “People might as well eat anything as wash with anything. . . . What a wonderful thing is the skin! It is the largest and most important integument of the whole human organism! What millions of pores it contains! The minutest aperture may absorb the deadliest poison. Once in contact with the surface of the body, whether the particle be held in a miasma or dissolved in the water of ablution, the pore, like a fatal canal, conveys it into the system, whence its eradication may be impossible, and where it may generate untold mischief ” (v). The speed of the shift from chirpy admiration to dire warning is comic—or would be, if readers weren’t too frightened to note it. (Readers were encouraged to save themselves from such invasions by use of Pears soap.) Certainly in the popular imagination, skin was considered permeable. In the US, particularly, where homeopathy and “natural” therapies enjoyed more legitimacy and institutional power than in Britain, hydropathy was even more popular than in Europe, despite Europe’s long-standing tradition of spa towns and water cures. Packing in wet sheets was a widely used therapy, and the assumption was that the pure water in the sheets would soften the skin and exchange itself for the toxic fluid within the body.3 Concerns about skin vulnerability beyond the ever present threat of syphilis, unsurprisingly in the sanitary age, often clustered around issues of class. Scabies, or “the itch,” is caused by a contagious parasitic infection of the skin by an insect. In 1849, doctor Thomas Innis summed up the prevalent attitude toward it: “Scabies is a species of disease, of all others, perhaps, the most repulsive to our feelings, because we naturally associate it with the ideas of filth, uncleanliness, neglect, and destitution; hence it rarely excites our compassion, its appearance being ascribed to criminal personal impurity” (119): he also points out that this is unfair, and that scabies is “most contagious” (119). Medical historian Daniele Ghesquier points out that the presence of the mite had been observed earlier, but had dropped out of discussions of treatment because of changing medical theories. Many thought its presence was simply coincidental, comparing it to mites seen in sugar and flour. By the eighteenth century, bugs or no bugs, the cause of the disease was considered to be the fluid matter emerging from the infected person’s skin lesions (Ghesquier 30). The mite thus remained to be rediscovered in the nineteenth century.4 It duly was, by a young French medical student in 1812. But his results could not be replicated, and the discovery was largely dismissed as fraudulent. Twenty-two years later, in 1834, Simon-François Renucci again

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demonstrated the mite’s presence in infected skin. Slowly, the presence of an insect who actually burrowed into skin, mated, reproduced, lived, and died there, and that insect as a cause and not a result or coincidence with disease, came to be accepted, though medical writers still debated it well into midcentury. In 1828, a home medical manual represents the general medical understanding of scabies, which involved effective remedies and defective etiology. It prescribed the following: “Half a pound of ointment (composed of equal parts of sulphur and hog’s-lard) must be rubbed over the body, but particularly the parts affected, and be done at bed-time, before the fire. The patient should put on a suit of under garments, go to bed, and remain there till the same hour the next night. He may then take a warm bath, clean himself well, and all the itch will be gone; but all his clothes must be destroyed which have previously been worn. But there are many diseases like the itch, which are dependant upon the digestive organs” (Book of Health 68). The practical—and likely successful—treatment matches oddly for us with the conclusion. But skin diseases were often related by the medical theory of the day to the lining of the digestive tract, which was long believed to have a sympathetic relationship with the outer skin; later in the century, medicine would emphasize its continuity with the outer skin. By the time that the mite became more or less generally accepted as a cause of the illness, the disease had long been associated with poverty already, and its link to a louse-like insect clinched its identification as a filth disease. Wilson, as a popularizer of medical knowledge, also popularized images of the mite. This provoked a wave of—forgive the pun—prurient horror. The earlier notion that the itch was spontaneously generated within filthy bodies meant that unless you were touching the oozing skin of such a body, if you were a cleanly, healthy, elite person, you were likely safe. Now cabs and omnibuses were sites wherein one might brush up against someone’s buggy clothing—or where someone’s buggy clothing had recently been. Even seasoned medical commentators called the itch mites “disgusting.” And the popularization of such images was thought to be even more upsetting and possibly even in worse taste than the existence of the mites in the first place. The Medico-chirurgical Review denounced Wilson for “dragging [such matters] . . . into public view for the mere purpose of exciting and gratifying the gaping wonderment of ignorant readers. . . . The taste, too, with which our author introduces to the notice of his lady-readers a magnified view and description of the Itch-animalcule, seems somewhat questionable” (“Article XV” 275). Those who did approve did so at least in part for political rather than medical reasons: “The delicate town-bred lady of fashion, in descending from her carriage, shrinks instinctively from the mass of rags, filth, and

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vermin, which is brought into contiguity with her precious person by some pertinacious beggar. . . . But we consider that such knowledge ought not to be withheld from deference to fastidious delicacy; . . . it may also have the beneficial moral use, of aiding in the demolition of those barriers between the classes of society” (“Article XVII” 202). Scientific details of “lower-class” diseases demystified class distinctions by affording them material rather than moral causes. This review makes clear the extent to which the discourse surrounding the skin is tied to that of the sanitary movement and thus those of reform and class. Both sources, however, are exemplary in the way in which they deploy gender as well as class: it is the “lady” who needs either to be protected from knowledge or to be frightened into a more charitable attitude. One would think from these reviews that ladies were in the habit of devouring medical books wholesale, yet, with the exception of household medical manuals aimed at mothers, there is no internal evidence in most medical books suggesting that their intended audience was female (rather the opposite). One wonders what is at stake in this anxiety about the permeable minds of women readers being affected as they read about permeable bodies. Perhaps the privileged—and relatively recent—professional standing of male doctors was thought to be particularly threatened if women, as the traditional caregivers of the family, had access to knowledge doctors had justified in keeping in their own control as being too dangerous or upsetting for ladies. Provision as well as promotion of bathing for the laboring classes was an important part of the sanitary project, as its more exalted and recreational forms were for elites. Many homeless poor had access to a bath only at workhouses and other charitable locations. But the proximity of other bodies might mean that even baths were dangerous sources of pollution. Seth Koven provides a helpful reading of journalist James Greenwood’s Night in a Workhouse (1866). Greenwood participated in a trend of doing what we might call ethnographic reportage: in this case, masquerading as a member of the “casual” migratory laboring or homeless community, and spending a night in Lambeth Workhouse for the Pall Mall Gazette. Greenwood’s traumatic introduction to the workhouse is through the bath, en route to being assigned a bed. He strips to the skin, and immerses himself in a “great bath” filled with water “disgustingly like weak mutton broth.” Koven writes that the description of the bath “excited universal commentary, and more than any other incident . . . earned him [Greenwood] a reputation for heroic self-sacrifice” (39). In a later commentary, Reynold’s Miscellany dilates on the bath scene with zesty horror: “the grey and greasy appearance of the water was the result of the filth, floating and liquefied, eliminated from the unclean

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carcasses of miserable paupers” (qtd. in Koven 39)—lest we be somehow misled into thinking actual mutton was involved in producing the color of the water, perhaps. Koven points out that Greenwood’s immersion in the filthy water symbolically foreshadows his physical contact with the naked paupers in the beds, which Greenwood also describes as being a site of sodomy and licentiousness of all descriptions. After his bath, he enters a room “furred with . . . damp and filth” and floored with “flags so thickly incrusted [sic] with filth” that he at first thinks it a dirt floor (Greenwood 5). Dismayed by his mattress, which has a blood stain on it, he is yet more dismayed by the conversation of the other men and boys: “such a deluge of foul words . . . that I could not help thinking of the fate of Sodom; as indeed I did several times during the night” (8). The appearance of Kay, “a boy of about fifteen” with “soft and silky” hair, whose voice and gait is as “soft and sweet” and “light” as “that of any woman,” “pleased” Greenwood “very much” (8). This pleasure turns to horror when Kay trades some of his bread for a share of other men’s bedding and body warmth. The ward, of course, is also full of lice and bedbugs, and Greenwood spends the night miserably scratching, freezing, and speculating about what his neighbors are up to. When he is released the next morning, his editor is waiting in a coach up the street, and Greenwood relates his relief, and his resentment, at “you, sir . . . oh! so detestably clean to look at!” (16). He ends his essay with the statement that he has “some horrors” for the private ear of the workhouse inspector “infinitely more revolting” than what can be published (qtd. in Koven 45). Here the bath has literally exposed him to the filth of other bodies, but metaphorically, as Koven shows, it also serves to signal his passage into a sodomitical space, wherein his mind and body may be penetrated with the moral filth of the other men. Koven also points out something missing from Greenwood’s writing, but to be found in his editor and brother Frederick Greenwood’s notes. He asserts that the journalists (Greenwood had an unacknowledged companion) could not be calmed down or discuss their experience until they had gone home, bathed, dressed, and eaten (Koven 40–41). Koven suggests that the second bath undoes the “parodic baptism” of the first (40). The workhouse bath is both literally and figuratively penetrative. Like the absorption of miasms by sleeping medical students, or the endless concern about ladies’ and their dangerous awareness of the itch mite, a distinctly nonsexual threat is described as a gendered, often sexualized penetration. While middle-class journalists worried about the corrupting baths of the poor, middle- and upper-class Britons frolicked in the seas, sweated in Turkish baths, and immersed themselves in the safety of their homes in a variety of inventive vessels designed for the purpose of bathing. Indeed, frequent

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bathing, especially in cold water, was seen on the Continent as a characteristically English obsession. However, there was also a long-standing recreational and medical bathing culture to which was added in the second half of the century a new emphasis on sea bathing across classes down to the artisan level. Spa or bath towns were popular resorts for the healthy middle to upper classes in the nineteenth century, who came for change of air, sea bathing, and relaxation. This continued an older tradition of using mineral and hot springs medicinally; both the sick and the well came to fast or participate in special supervised diets, and to “take the waters” internally and externally, through enemas, cold showers, hot showers, and so forth, either as preventive maintenance or to treat existing illnesses. Over the course of the nineteenth century, as the free pleasures of the beach were emphasized over those of the costly spa waters, more lower-middle-class workers and artisans came out either for short stays or as “day trippers” after cheaper excursion trains started to run in the 1840s, for example, to Brighton. In the 1850s and 1860s, dry air sauna (Turkish) and vapor (sometimes called “Roman”) baths became popular in northern England, and later in the south (Shifrin). The object of such baths was at least in part to induce sweating to clean the body and the skin: the process of getting out the toxins within. Turkish baths were used mostly by middle-class men and to a lesser extent women, though some artisans did use them, and especially in the north, many were opened to the public with the intention of drawing working-class people. Depending on what one spent and where one went, one could be sweated, plunged, shampooed, and massaged in a Turkish bath establishment, and then enjoy coffee, tobacco, and other refreshments, but regular (wet) public baths were also available for a bit less money. A Turkish bath at Faulkner’s hotel in London could be had for as little as 1 and 6 on a Saturday in the late 1880s (Shifrin). Turkish bathing was particularly good because it caused one to sweat copiously (and perhaps also because it did not immerse the body in anything that could soak its way in). An 1865 pamphlet entitled “Bathing: How to Do It, When to Do It, and Where to Do It,” reprinted from the Journal of Mental Science, the M.D. Edgar Sheppard describes a number of bathing techniques, but waxes lyrical on the Turkish bath: “Your skin will be brought into action in a manner which will astound you; and those who have analysed the sweat of first bathers will tell you how much more charged with impurity it is than that which exudes from the pores of a well-ventilated dermal surface. Your body will be ‘ventilated’ for the first time in life; its millions of pores will stand with open doors and oxygenate all your frame” (11). And the M.D. James Williams, in a pamphlet entitled “Modern Hydropathy, with Remarks on Baths” (1871), warns the unbathed Briton that she or he is unlikely to

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sweat sufficiently without such help: “In the climate of Britain, the skin, in many persons, is not brought into exercise for six months of the year; . . . in many, as in women and persons of sedentary habits, scarcely once in twelve months. . . . The morbid materials are moved hither and thither with the tide of the circulation, they communicate a sadness to the blood . . . they discolour the skin; they give pains and aches to the nerves; heaviness and distemper to the brain; and they rack the joints with gout and rheumatism” (12–13). An astonishing number and variety of both Turkish and immersion bath vessels were made and sold for private use in this period, to combine the good effects of bathing with the privacy of the home. They were used both therapeutically and for general mental and physical hygiene beyond simple cleanliness. One lady wrote in the Rochdale Times, “In future when life ceases to be interesting, and I feel rigid and miserable, I shall get into my Cabinet Turkish Bath and set my skin at work instead of my brain. . . . After sitting in it for half an hour, a tepid cold sponge bath and brisk rubbing with rough towels should follow, and the sensation of relief and comfort is experienced which only those who attend to their skins . . . can realise” (“Penelope” 6). Those taking Turkish baths believed that inducing sweat, and subsequently removing the outer layer of scarf skin, were important moves beyond the simple removal of surface dirt, and especially beyond the traditional bracing cold bath favored by the English. But even regular baths were held to stimulate the skin’s abilities, and many argued that a cold bath was more likely to stimulate the skin than a warm one. Of course, new technologies gave rise to advances in bathing. (The “electro-magnetic bath” was a fairly short-lived phenomenon.) Antibathing beliefs common in the eighteenth century—that bathing was dangerous, that dirt protected the skin and health of children—seem to have become completely outmoded among the middle and upper classes by the mid-nineteenth century, but are said by various writers to have persisted for a while among some working-class and rural people. By the end of the century, the holdouts seem to have gradually given way under the onslaught of hygienic haranguing.

Cold Baths and Imperial Manhood Cold-water bathing was considered both manly and very English; it was also, like athleticism, considered a specific against venery, as well as more general moral laxity. Charles Kingsley admonishes his little boy reader in his children’s book, The Water-Babies, that dirt leads to degeneration: “efts are nothing else but the water-babies who are stupid and dirty, and will not learn their lessons and keep themselves clean; and, therefore . . . their skulls grow flat, their jaws

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grow out, and their brains grow small, and their tails grow long, . . . their skins grow dirty and spotted, and they . . . eat worms, as they deserve to do. . . . Meanwhile, do you learn your lessons, and thank God that you have plenty of cold water to wash in; and wash in it too, like a true Englishman” (182–83). The cold shower as an antidote to lust persists in our culture in jokes (and certainly, being hypothermic might tend to distract the bather from sexual desire, as well as having the well-known effect on the appearance of the male organ). But the connection in the Victorian period to virtue, especially masculine virtue, is probably connected, at least in the public imaginary, to cold bathing both as a preventative of lust and as a mode of removing the body’s natural products, dangerous both physically and morally if left on the skin.5 Frequent bathing was also considered peculiarly English (at least by the English themselves) despite the fact that many bathing practices popularized in Europe and Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were borrowed from the colonies or from the East (as Turkish bathing was copied from practices in the Ottoman Empire). In the broader context of the British Empire, views of native bodies and their health changed dramatically over the course of the century. In British India, for example, the preponderance of beliefs shifts from cosmopolitan (if superficial) admiration of their differences in the eighteenth century to a more constructionist perspective in the early nineteenth century, in which native lands and peoples are seen as in need of colonial guidance to improve their situation, but not as substantially different in kind from the urban British poor, to a late Victorian attitude that Indians were fundamentally biologically different (and inferior). Writings on Indian Hindu and Muslim bathing habits, which were in the Romantic period held up as exemplary of civilized cleanliness, are by midcentury more likely to be thought filthy and disease producing, much like the contaminating bodies of the poor in the lodging house. While cold-water bathing seemed manly, perhaps because there was little temptation to linger over it, warm wet-bathing practices evoked more ambivalence. Lest “pores” be blocked, “to render the skin pure and healthy, no remedy can for one moment be compared to washing the whole surface of the body over daily with pure cold water. . . . Never use a tepid bath, unless to begin before you use cold,—it effeminates the whole system,” observed the American hygienist Samuel Fitch, who quotes Wilson extensively (Fitch 225–27).6 The warm bath might indeed make the skin vulnerable by relaxing it too much. The British doctor Edwin Payne in 1873 admonishes: If warm bathing is continued too long, or repeated frequently, general weakness is very apt to be induced, the surface remaining in a very

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relaxed state; but its occasional use, followed by friction, is conducive to health. Another means which may be used to improve the action of the skin, is dry rubbing with a flesh brush. . . . Many can bear two or three baths a week, and a dry rub every morning or night, who cannot bear every-day bathing. The Turkish bath is of too exhausting a nature to be used generally, but as a remedial means, under proper superintendance, it is likely to prove of great benefit in some cases. (33) Despite the warm bath’s charms, Payne suggests that it is a trial to be endured only by the bravest, and the unattractive-sounding “flesh brush” is supposed to be less demanding for the sufferer—perhaps because one is so unlikely to overuse it. If warm baths were weakening, despite their promotion by British doctors, Turkish baths were still tarred with the brush of Oriental luxury and the effeminacy popularly associated with the East. Because the hot bath was largely passive, and was historically associated with excess and sensuality, men worried about “relaxing” too much. Moreover, Turks were associated with homosexuality, and baths with prostitution, as in the bagnios of Italy. (Flaubert toured Turkey, including the Turkish baths, and sheepishly admitted to his close friend Louis Bouilhet in a letter that he had the whole tourist experience with “a pockmarked young fellow”; qtd. in Zayzafoon 5–6.) “Roman” or steam baths were also associated with tropical climates that Britons believed had enervating effects: “There never perhaps existed a people so thoroughly fitted by habit for a foreign yoke. The physical organization of the Bengalee is feeble even to effeminacy,” Macauley sneered. “He lives in a constant vapour bath” (603).7 Australian humorist Joseph Furphy (1843–1912) facetiously derides the Australian and English cult of bathing—and imperial pretensions—in his novel Such Is Life: “how few of our later novels or notes of travel are without that bit of description [of bathing]; generally set-off by an ungainly reflection on the dirt of some other person, class, or community. The noxious affectation is everywhere” (258). However, he suggests, the notion that bathing is manly is of recent provenance: The Spartans . . . were as much addicted to dirt as the Sybarites to cleanliness. . . . The conquering races of later ages—Goths, Huns, Vandals, Longobards, &c.—were no less celebrated for one kind of grit than for the other. It is the Turkish bath that has made the once-formidable Ottoman Empire the sick man of Europe. . . . Bathing did the business for Italy, as it does the business for all its victims. . . . Indeed, the most sweepingly appropriate bestowal of the title, “Great,” is made when we refer to the adherents of the dirt-cult, collectively, as the Great

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Unwashed. . . . we will entice external leakage of such incipient greatness as we have—soaking ourselves in water, as if we were possums, and our virility a eucalyptus flavour that we sought to dissipate. (266) Furphy is being droll, but the narrator’s logic is one to which those suspicious of spas and hot baths often had humorless recourse. Moreover, the common characterization of the working classes as dirty and unsophisticated jarred with the valorization of traditionally working-class traits as physical strength, anti-intellectualism, anti-aestheticism, and simplicity as masculine. Men should be clean, but not enjoy their cleanliness too much, lest it become a form of effete fastidiousness. Masculinity had to be carefully contained, lest its virility be “dissipated.” However, even cold bathing and healthy exercise could be dangerous, if they implied attention to the body at the expense of other concerns. There was something essentially suspicious about a man paying that much attention to his own surface materiality. Wilkie Collins, in his 1870 novel Man and Wife, launched a fabulously crotchety attack on physical culture (often associated positively with Muscular Christianity) and the adoration of athleticism. In it, Geoffrey, though a handsome man and splendid athlete, is morally bankrupt. We meet Geoffrey on the horns of a dilemma. He has made a young lady pregnant and is trying to figure out how best to get out of his promise to marry her: “his healthy physical instincts sent him to healthy physical remedies for relief. ‘My mind’s in a muddle,’ said Geoffrey. ‘I’ll try a bath.’ ” For this kind of villainy, it seems the plain cold bath will not do (and after all, a cold bath might have prevented it in the first place): it must be Turkish: “It was an elaborate bath, proceeding through many rooms, and combining many postures and applications. He steamed. He plunged. He simmered. He stood under a pipe, and received a cataract of cold water on his head. . . . He came out of it all, sleek, clear rosy, beautiful” (172–73). Even this does not quite set him up, so he lifts weights, swears, and exercises “till his magnificent muscles seemed on the point of starting through his sleek skin.” Only after being beaten about the head by his boxing trainer with “blows which would have stunned—possibly have killed—any civilized member of the community” is he calm and clear-minded (174). He has now decided to betray the lady. (Later he will try to murder her.) The anti-athleticism of Collins may strike us as laughable, certainly as overwrought. But the association of a hyperfocus on the body project of both athleticism and bathing with animality and barbarism is not alien to the broader culture. Natural theology, as popularized by the Muscular Christianity of Charles Kingsley and others, advanced the theory (a popularizing simplification

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of Common Sense philosophical ideas) that as the healthy body expressed adherence to the laws of God, the healthy body’s instincts would tend to be morally correct. Overthinking one’s instinctive responses with “morbid self-attention,” like overthinking one’s health, led to hypochondria, hysteria, and immoral, because vitiated and insincere, responses (not to mention uncontrollable blushing). Still, although Muscular Christianity along with the rise of school team sports became exemplary of a certain kind of national pride, both were also associated by midcentury with anti-intellectualism and a focus on the physical that some considered a degradation of morality and a permutation of a pernicious materialism under the banner of religion. Moreover, this emphasis on the body suggested that middle-class health practices could be identified with the culture of physical display broadly associated with aristocratic corruption. The “Corinthians” of the Regency had been famous sporting men as well as debauchees; their athleticism was part of a pleasure in the body that was also expressed in their sexual exploits and their disregard for their souls. So the Regency dandy who celebrated his materiality through careful dressing and exploits of physical strength was also often pegged as the origin of the constitutional decay we saw in Conan Doyle’s story “The Third Generation” in chapter 3. By the end of Man and Wife, Geoffrey finally overtaxes his body, and collapses, “outwardly an inert mass of strength, formidable to look at, even in its fall; inwardly, a weaker creature, in all that constitutes vital force, than the fly that buzzed on the window-pane.” He subsequently has a stroke, helpfully, just in time to stop him from murdering his wife. Although the kind of physical culture that Geoffrey engages in can hardly be considered effeminate—Turkish bath notwithstanding—it is still perverse, and perhaps all the more so because it cultivates an exterior of vibrant health and beauty that may conceal the moral and even physical truth of the self. Attention to the body, then, even hygienic attention, was potentially two-edged. Being a “nation of good animals” was the ground of “national prosperity,” as the thoroughly materialist midcentury philosopher and psychologist Herbert Spencer argued (untitled essay, The Leader, 1852), and Britons were proud of their reputation as healthy folk washed clean in bracing draughts of cold water. Yet others feared that such an emphasis on the body would lead to a neglect of intellect and spirituality that would lead to a different kind of individual and national degeneration—good animals, but not very admirable human beings. The ideal of the happy Hellenic athlete, in uncomplicated and pleasurable possession of sublime beauty and health, also entailed the suspicion that such a man would be at best childlike and amoral, at worst a Dorian Gray. As this analogy suggests, one underlying

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suspicion of body culture such as bathing was that a homosexual impulse underlay its privileging of body-oriented homosocial practices. Not only was the body dangerous in its physical production of unhealthy substances, but even its vitality itself might be a source of moral as well as physical evil. In Victorian attempts to engage the attention of the skin, then, we see a range of possibilities. The skin could be a moral and physical sentinel—as in Bichat’s argument that the wakeful masculine skin is more protective of the body’s interior than the passive skin either asleep or delicately sensitive, as in a woman or child. But the cultivation of the body’s surface could also engage its materiality in a way that could bypass or pervert the moral sense. The nervous terminals and sense of self that the boundary of the body offered was a way to interact morally with the world, when healthy, through a God-given rightness of the sensorium’s ability to enable the self to judge rightly. But when that sensorium becomes an object in itself rather than a tool, or is insufficiently subordinated to the moral judgment, and the focus of the self turns inward to the individual body rather than outward to the world, the skin’s function is morally perverted. This is a continuing theme from concerns we saw in chapter 2 about morbid self-attention and blushing, wherein blushing is no longer a reliable index of the self ’s reactions to the world, because the self is caught in a feedback loop or “nerve storm” of helpless reaction to its own regard. Like Zola’s Nana, who delights in obsessively “polishing” her own skin, when regard is turned backward too insistently—when the gaze of the doubled observer of Adam Smith looks only to monitor the self ’s appearance and not outward to moral and social norms—moral corruption results.

“Slowly Floating France in Blood” These surfaces that were all realism could access—that is, that were all that were available to the verification of the observer’s senses—could be breached by outer elements that might not only contaminate, but completely transform the self. The passivity of soaking in a warm bath could be an emblem or analogue of the abdication of reason, personal responsibility, and morality. The period’s most famous narrative and visual representation of the bath as a site of corruption, both physical and political, is in the death of Jean-Paul Marat. In France, Marat was a figure whose significance changed dramatically over the course of the period: from patriot to martyr to mass murderer, from a saint bathed in blood to the perpetrator of bloodbaths. According to an eyewitness report, he was in fact not killed in the bath, but near it: when Lebois in Marat’s paper “The People’s Friend” announced the death (asking for a “permanent guillotine,” the death of Corday, “this patricidal

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woman,” and the deaths of “the side that is paralytic in the Convention and vigorous in negotiation [that] conspires against the brave Montagnards”), he reported that Marat left his bath and said to have her come in (Lebois n.p.). But Jacques-Louis David, who was dismayed by the actual death scene, painted him as he had last seen him alive the evening before: in the bath, with his green cloth (see fig. 4.1). David writes, “the best way of showing him to

Figure 4.1.  Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Marat (1793). 65 x 50 in, Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Belgium. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

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his fellow-citizens was to place him in the same attitude in which I myself had surprised him the day before his death; and, therefore, I placed him in his bath, with only one hand, holding a pen, raised above the bath; and at his side I placed a stool with a sheet of paper upon it” (qtd. in Craik and MacFarlane, 3: 340). The 1793 painting makes of him a Christ figure with beautiful features and skin, in a kind of pietà without a mourning virgin—although in fact Corday was famously a virgin as well, if a murderous rather than a merciful one. The truth was quite different: Marat was by the standards of the day an ugly man, and he had a skin disease, which he said he had picked up hiding in the sewers of Paris; it was characterized by pruritis, open sores, and a foul smell, which is why he was in the bath in the first place. As we have seen, skin disorders were generally read as indices of immorality throughout the period. (This disease has been identified by historians and doctors variously as scrofula, herpetiform dermatitis,8 psoriasis, and syphilis.) Carlyle mocks Marat, and his sexual habits and health, describing him “stewing in slipper-bath,” sick “of revolution fever” and, as he archly remarks, sick “of what other malady this history had rather not name . . . with slipper-bath; . . . and a squalid—Washer woman, we may call her” (French Revolution, 647). Note that even Marat’s mistress is described as a soggy “washer-woman” rather than a charwoman or housemaid. Carlyle draws attention to his disease as a venereal one, and the presence of his working-class mistress—pointing to what Carlyle considered both Marat’s immorality and his degraded taste. Whatever Marat’s real illness, like most skin diseases, it was considered disreputable at the time, though Marat and his supporters countered with the claim (which may be true) that it was contracted in hiding from the state in Parisian sewers, thus making the disease a martyrdom rather than an expression of self, an expression of the corruption of Paris’s hidden truths rather than an individual moral reality. The story and the image that historically became and remained iconic is that Corday stabbed Marat in the tub, as David painted him, showing no knife and only a small wound and a note from Corday to indicate the means and agent of assassination. (In fact, she left the knife in.) He still holds his pen, indicating that he was martyred for his journalism. After Marat’s death, the tub was paraded down the street at his funeral.9 The bath Marat was habitually in was likely cool or tepid, but in later British descriptions, it is repeatedly and negatively described as being warm or hot. The passively penetrated Marat is feminized, whereas Corday is described as having “masculine energy”—both by detractors and admirers, and she herself said at her trial that she “never wanted energy.” Her body was

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dissected after death by doctors seeking evidence of “libertinage” (supposedly, no evidence was found, and over the course of the nineteenth century, her virginity was repeatedly asserted by her defenders). No doubt, the examination was done with intent to defame her, and rebuke the sympathy she had received from the crowd, but scholars generally agree that the French authorities were also reluctant to believe a woman could have taken such action without the prompting of a lover—rather curiously, given women’s leading role in the early days of the Revolution and the march on Versailles. Even subsequent fictionalizations sympathetic to Corday usually make her motives more acceptably personal rather than political, portraying her as revenging a father or fiancé. By the 1860s, Marat’s star had sunk well below the horizon, and Corday’s had risen. Paul Aimé Baudry painted Charlotte Corday in 1860, making of her the focal point of the painting and the saint about to be martyred, turned away from the body with her knife protruding from it to face the viewer, bravely awaiting her arrest and execution (see fig. 4.2). The bath scene remains, but the light falls principally on her figure, standing before a wall map of France, defending the country from the fallen monster who was positioned in the bath to view it: his head droops, no longer facing the map. In English-language publications of this time, Marat is described as filthy, hideous, and lustful, as well as murderous. He is often described in amphibious terms such as “frog-like,” and Carlyle characterizes his raspy voice as a “croak” on more than one occasion. An 1867 article about tourist spots in France describes visiting the site of Marat’s death; the narrator envisions it thus: “He lies in his bath, round his head is wrapped a filthy cloth, another across his shoulders. Across the bath is placed a board, and on it lies an unfinished address to the Convention. By the side of the bath, on a rough block of oak, stands the leaden inkstand, from which have poured forth the streams of blood which have so long deluged Paris” (“No 20, Rue de l’École de Medicin” 24). The description identifies the bathing with the violence perpetuated by the Convention, the liquids seeping into Marat and out of his pen with those pouring out of the executed; he is also, for no apparent historical reason, wearing filthy wrappings, perhaps, it seems to be suggested, because he likes them. The description also suggests familiarity with Baudry’s 1860 painting: The whole of the wall opposite us is covered with a map of France. To our right, by the window, . . . stands Charlotte Corday. She stands erect and firm, and her hand yet grasps the reeking dagger, but her face is pale as death. . . . On our left lies Marat, his right arm hangs over the side of the bath, and from the relaxing fingers drops the pen still

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Figure 4.2.  Paul-Jacques-Aimé Baudry, Charlotte Corday (1860). 203 x 154 cm. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

wet with ink. His head drops on his right shoulder, the cloth has fallen from the matted hair and lies on the ground, the cruel eyes are fixed in death. The receding forehead, the sunken cheek, the vast wolfish mouth, all livid with the agony of the death pang, form a picture too horrible to contemplate. (24)

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Marat here is a beast, and a beast with the physiognomic signs of his subhuman character: receding forehead and a wolfish mouth. As for Corday, she is illuminated as a saint, whose triumphant humanity only highlights the beastliness of Marat: “The last rays of the soft summer twilight . . . fall first on the erect noble form, and beautiful features of the murderess, then on the cruel corpse of the murdered monster, and by their tender light render yet more horrible the ghastly scene they disclose” (24). The significant exception in this description’s agreement with the painting is that the writer envisions her with the phallic knife still in hand, whereas the painting distances her from it and turns her body away to face the light. The bestial Marat is a frequent topic of later representations, and in British and especially American periodicals, there is a tendency to cast Corday as Judith, and Marat as a lustful Holofernes. In the 1860s, a period of increasing agitation in England for women’s property rights in marriage and the right to divorce, Corday becomes a feminist heroine, though as a violent woman she is still an ambivalent figure for most authors. The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine (later The Illustrated Household Journal and English-Woman’s Domestic Magazine) launched its first volume in 1866 with an article on “Mademoiselle de Corday.” The article works from the multiple portraits of Corday available, and presents her as a beautiful heroine, “a magnificent young woman of three-and-twenty, in all the exuberance, all the omnipotence of youth and beauty—strong, and yet graceful, elegantly natural, modest above all, and still of a compelling presence. Her hair, of a beautiful chestnut tinge, . . . Her eyes were blue” (11). Compare Marat: “half dwarf, half maniac, coiled plagiarist and savant manqui, prurient romancer, rancorous libeller, envious, revengeful, and despised—had heaped up infinite hatred of all things better than himself  . . . , and struck at all above him with dog-like ferocity, with insatiable malignity” (9). All manner of animals were represented in Marat’s body: “dressed in a filthy shirt, a shabby, patched surtout, and ink-stained velvet smalls. . . . Men knew the enormous head and pallid, leaden face—the sloping, wild-beast brows, and piercing, tigerish eyes—the croaking, ‘frog-like mouth’—the thin lips, bulged like an adder’s poison-bag” (9). Marat becomes the embodiment of not only Revolutionary fever, but of the abuses that lead up to the Revolution in the first place (often represented in British fiction as sexual excess, as we will see in Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities). He slides down the evolutionary scale from large predator to reptile, whose slimy wallowing in Revolutionary sentiment is literalized in his immersion in the liquids of the sewers, in the bath, and in blood. The contagious material that penetrates the skin in literary representations, and often in historical ones, is affect. As the amphibious Marat is

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famed for his soggy fate and his eroded complexion, Corday in contrast is famed for her last blush. The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine notes that her complexion was “marvellously brilliant” (12) and “She blushed very readily” (“Mademoiselle de Corday,” 12)—and indeed, famously, after her head was cut off, held up, and displayed for the people, the man who held it struck her a blow on the cheek, whereupon the other cheek is supposed to have blushed in indignation. The essay admits that “whether it really blushed, whether the wretch’s hands were wet with blood, or whether it was an effect of the sunlight, will be never known” (13). Regardless of the origin of the blush, authors return to its expression of a genuine, self-enclosed, and healthy self capable of real emotion and modesty. It is pointedly opposed to the “feverish” “mad” Marat, whose constant marinating in dangerous affect was “slowly floating France in blood” (9), as he floated his own body in the warm bath. Dorinda Outram argues that the “Corday myth” of the blush was vital in France (despite medical witnesses who said both that no blow had been given to Corday’s head and that in any case the blush could not have happened) “because of the intensity of the need generated by terror and execution to externalize concerns such as the survival of a unitary experience of mind and body, and of the possibility of physical dignity” (121)—a possibility that seemed to be fast disappearing during the Terror. In showing both moral and physical sensibilité after death, Corday’s blush gave fuel to those who wished to make antimaterialist arguments (118). Moreover, Outram argues, it reinvested the body with moral authority. In a system in which even the middle class’s authority was based on self-containment and physical dignity, the guillotine threatened to evacuate all meaning from the body (Outram 122). As Outram points out, there was traditionally no sympathetic emotional communication possible between the classes: “Sensibilité was part of an intra-class language; a rigid self-control was the only proper attitude in the face of inter-class relations” (122, her emphasis). And although the Revolution is often remembered for the execution of a king, and especially a queen, the middle-class victims of the Terror far outnumbered those of the upper classes (111). Outram opposes sensibilité and Enlightenment rationality, but as these concepts evolve in Britain in the early nineteenth century, sympathy emerges on the side of rationality whereas sentimentality (aligned with sensibility) lands on that of irrationality.10 Sympathy, as we have seen, is emotion grounded in the individual body and based on rational judgment, whereas sentiment, from being a term in the eighteenth century that simply referred to feelings, came increasingly to represent something more superficial and spurious, an irrational and potentially free-floating phenomenon rather than

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a genuinely and deeply felt emotion. Genuine emotion and sympathy come from the individual; sentiment comes from without, and is contagious and ambient; one can be immersed in sentiment, especially in a crowd. Dickens, like Balzac, figures the roots of Revolutionary decadence in a sexual transgression; but he is politically opposite Balzac, and he personalizes it. The rape of Madam DeFarge’s older sister by a dissolute and brutal set of aristocratic twin brothers leads to the tumbrel for Charles Darnay, the innocent legitimate son of one of the rapists, who is saved by his English doppelgänger Sydney Carton, as the sibling capitals of Paris and London undergo similar trials. The twins and their progeny are cursed by the teenage brother of the mad and dying victim of rape, as he dies himself trying to avenge her: “ ‘Marquis,’ said the boy, turned to him with his eyes opened wide, and his right hand raised, ‘in the days when all these things are to be answered for, I summon you and yours, . . . I mark this cross of blood upon you, as a sign that I do it. In the days when all these things are to be answered for, I summon your brother, the worst of the bad race, to answer for them separately. I mark this cross of blood upon him, as a sign that I do it’ ” (Dickens, Tale of Two Cities 313). Like a priest blessing the communicant by making the sign of the cross, he curses the brothers with his bloody hand. We have here a combination of two ways of seeing: he curses “you and yours” as an undifferentiated hereditary group, but also “your brother . . . separately” as an individual with unique responsibility. We will see the mediation of these two models evolve throughout the story through the metaphor of blood as a fluid that can be contained by but also penetrate the skin.

Channels of Sympathy: Dickens and Two Cities It has been widely accepted that the nineteenth century consolidated the prior century’s move to sympathy as the dominant model of emotional connection, which balanced against the centrifugal forces of economic and (later) evolutionary competition to sustain human communities. I have focused in the preceding chapters on the way sympathy was defined by thinkers such as Adam Smith as a form of fellow feeling processed through individual perception and judgment, which enabled humans not only to understand each other’s emotions, but to self-regulate, as each imagined how her or his feelings might be perceived by other observers. Seeing and judging was the process by which individual emotion could be regulated into a sustainable social economy. Counter to this, however, remained an older, though increasingly discredited model of contagious sentiment, a wash of feeling that overtopped the boundaries of judgment and perhaps even indi-

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viduality. This model remains active as a folk understanding of the workings of emotion, especially in references to the “masses”—in crowd scenes, for example—but also in other scenes that explore a threat to individual selfhood and self-enclosure. Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities shows how emotional connection he labels “sentiment” in the novel is associated with particular signifiers, often of liquidity or permeability, and is opposed to emotion classified as mature sympathy. The eighteenth century broadly worked with two views of emotion. One saw strong emotion as an overpowering force, certainly dominating reason. Often these emotions were defined as passions, forces one was “moved” by. The sources of these passions were various, but many early thinkers unproblematically locate them both within and outside of the individual. John Mullan offers a rigorous analysis of the concept of sympathy in the period in his book Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (1988). He shows that Shaftesbury takes up the distinction between “natural affections” and dangerous “enthusiasms” in 1711. Shaftesbury observes that such enthusiasms put people “beyond themselves,” and then their “very looks” can become “infectious” as emotions spread “from face to face” (Shaftesbury, qtd. in Mullan 26). Sympathy, which in Enlightenment thought is the basis of social cohesion, here becomes also the potential agent of its destruction (25–27). Mullan shows how David Hume wrestles with this dual capacity of sympathy throughout his work, and increasingly comes to suggest that the contagious passions tend to be both negative and stronger than those from within the individual, and may undermine both the reason and the “natural sociability” of humans (Mullan 26). By the 1750s, Hume begins using the example of a “spectator” to discuss how “calm judgments and discourse” combine with sympathy to mediate “useful” action (Mullan 37). Adam Smith in 1759 takes Hume’s idea of the spectator, but removes Hume’s idea of the immediacy of sympathy by contagion: Mullan observes that for Smith, sympathy is removed from “the realm of contending passions and interests: a willed uninvolvement precedes sympathetic identification” (Mullan 46). This colder, spectatorial vision of sympathy is the one that comes to dominate the theorizing of nineteenth-century writers, as well as current scholarship on sympathy in the Victorian period. Part of its appeal was (and perhaps is) that it identified the springs of emotion as within a responsible, closed self. In 2005 Nancy Armstrong defined this spectatorial model of sympathy as the absolute basis of the novel as we know it, that is, as a form celebrating individualism and modernity. The older model of transpersonal subjectivity—sensibility— persists, she argues, mostly in gothic fiction, where it usually represents a

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threat to both subject and society—the massed replication of vampires versus the familial reproduction of human individuals (How Novels Think 23).11 As Rae Greiner persuasively argues, sympathy in the Smithian model is not an artless, natural “feeling,” but an arduous intellectual process; moreover, “sympathy is in Dickens less a stable human attribute than something perpetually to be worked at against sizable odds” (88). But I would like to argue here first that the model of contagious, transpersonal emotion does remain in evidence even in the mid-nineteenth-century “realist” novel; second, that though it is indeed associated with political threat—often specifically, the French Revolution, which actualizes for Victorians the idea of the catastrophic mass-human—it can also be more neutrally associated simply with immaturity; and third, that Dickens often specifically images this form of affect as a kind of dangerous fluid entering the subject. Gesa Stedman notes that the Victorians were frustratingly imprecise in their use of emotion words—she identifies a number of terms that carried over from earlier periods and continued to be used in increasingly vague ways even while Victorians themselves bemoaned their imprecision. However, it is possible to classify some of their usages, she argues, by looking less at the “lexeme” and more at context: “linguistic patterns of usage, word clusters . . . discursive rules . . . [and] metaphors” allow us to trace the distinctions Victorians were making (31). Stedman identifies a key binary emerging in the Victorian period between expression (largely negative) and control (largely positive). She also notes that water and weather imagery is the most commonly used metaphor (outside that of the heart as seat of emotion) for strong feeling (75). Stedman also notes that contagion as a metaphor tends to be used in relation to moral issues with emotion, but doesn’t follow out any implications of transindividual emotion. Her observations are suggestive, however, for my attempts to classify the various forms of emotion Dickens seems to be counterposing in the novel. Despite our association of Dickens with positive connotations of the term “sentimentality,” and his own shifting use of the term over time, in this novel, Dickens presents both a form of transindividual emotion he identifies with the term “sentimentality” and individual lack of sympathy, as dangerous. When individual sympathy fails to function, he represents the result as a catastrophic “hardening” of individual responsiveness, which he associates with stone imagery. This repression of socially adaptive feeling is paired with dangerous “waves” of contagious, transindividual sentiment rising after long repression, which are destructive at the larger social level. It is in reading these metaphors and contextual cues that we can begin to see the workings of these different emotional forms, which otherwise can be hard to lexically untangle.

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In A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens addresses in detail four affective forms in group scenes: a spectatorial interest in the suffering of others that can be a precursor to sympathy, but can also easily turn to a transindividual impulse to cruelty; true spectatorial sympathy, which requires the capacity to respond to the facial expression of others with imitative expression—that is, mimicking the expression of the other in one’s own face and thus feeling it in one’s own body; a dangerous and destructive form of transindividual affect associated with water imagery; and an incapacity for sympathy associated with stone imagery. Through descriptions of the bodily reactions of his characters to each other, he emphasizes the distinctions between valid emotions and dangerous emotional infection, and links the two to different models of civic life, one flexible and adaptive, and the other characterized by rigidity and ceremony. The first has the capacity to evolve and grow, but the second is doomed to dysfunction and violence. Aristocratic society in pre-Revolutionary France is “disfigured by a leprosy of unreality” (Dickens, Tale 126)—“If the Day of Judgment had only been ascertained to be a dress day, everybody there would have been eternally correct. Such frizzling and powdering . . . , such delicate complexions artificially preserved and mended . . . , would surely keep anything going, for ever and ever” (127). In the French culture of appearances, well-bred persons are not supposed to express emotion, and the result is a “stony” incapacity to feel sympathy for the emotions of others. English people of the same period can also be cruel, but their ability to openly express emotion means that they are also capable of being moved by pity. It is this that changes the fortunes of Charles Darnay in his trial for spying at the Old Bailey. Dickens characteristically genders true sympathy as female; Lucie Manette’s expressions are transparent, and so Dickens is careful to indicate that her emotions thus are not only truly represented in her face, but evoke “true” emotion in those around her: She had drawn close to him, . . . in her dread of the scene, and in her pity for the prisoner. Her forehead had been strikingly expressive of an engrossing terror and compassion. . . . Any strongly marked expression of face on the part of a chief actor in a scene of great interest to whom many eyes are directed, will be unconsciously imitated by the spectators. Her forehead was painfully anxious and intent. . . . Among the lookers-on there was the same expression in all quarters of the court; insomuch, that a great majority of the foreheads there, might have been mirrors reflecting the witness. (84) This sympathy reverses and humanizes the initially less appropriate emotions of the spectators. Before Lucie’s testimony, “The sort of interest with

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which this man was stared . . . at, was not a sort that elevated humanity. Had he stood in peril of a less horrible sentence [that is, drawing and quartering] . . . by just so much would he have lost in his fascination. . . . Whatever gloss the various spectators put upon the interest, . . . the interest was, at the root of it, Ogreish” (71–72). This interest is itself described in terms of a fluid miasma: “All the human breath in the place, rolled at him, like a sea, or a wind, or a fire. . . . Jerry stood: aiming at the prisoner the beery breath of a whet he had taken as he came along, and discharging it to mingle with the waves of other beer, and gin, and tea, and coffee, and what not, that flowed at him, and already broke upon the great windows behind him in an impure mist and rain” (71). But even cruel curiosity is better than a culture of inexpressiveness that occludes the possibility for emotional connection. James Steintrager shows in Cruel Delights that eighteenth-century thinkers exploring the “naturalness” of sympathy went from thinking that children were perhaps naturally cruel to seeing cruelty as not natural to humans and positioning children’s cruelty as a form of curiosity unmediated by mature sympathy. The solution was to train them in sympathetic observation. The cruel spectatorship of Dickens’s English audience becomes, through the educative mediation of Lucie, something nobler—curiosity becomes sympathy. The old regime, however, is based on interactions between people who are capable of neither sympathy nor facial expression. Dickens’s representation of ancien régime France as a facially inexpressive society is not eccentric. The French were famed for the artificiality of their courtly expressions, and especially their very mannered makeup, especially the use of very bright rouge (fard), which obscured the normal rubor and pallor that, as we have seen, were so much prized as indices of true expression and sources of sympathetic recognition. Colin Jones, in his ingenious history of the smile in the period, argues that mid-eighteenth-century France began to see a fleeting “smile revolution” as the rise of the cult of sensibility, influenced dramatically by British novels like Richardson’s Clarissa (67–69), led to weeping, laughing, and smiling newly becoming “acceptable public gestures among the Parisian elite and middling classes” (10), at least in response to imaginative representations such as the drama or novel. This was new in a society in which the aristocracy were trained to present a “fixed and immobile visage . . . favoured in the royal court at Versailles” (10). Noting that Vigée Le Brun’s 1787 portrait of herself showing her teeth in a smile still “provoked a scandal” (1), Jones shows the ways in which the ancien régime favored views of a face tending toward repose, whose expressions should be restrained—small smiles and frowns, rather than anything exposing the open mouth, which was vulgar and unseemly. Moreover, Jones notes, at court the tradition of using whiten-

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ing face creams that dried and tended to crack with movement, and rouge that called attention to the unnaturalness of the complexion, meant that expression was masked both by paint and by the immobility necessary to maintain it (41–42). The Revolution, he argues, briefly democratized the new smile of sensibility, opposing it and Enlightenment values to the unnatural constraint of the aristocratic classes. However, very quickly the smile came to be perceived as dangerous, as it was associated either with unseemly hilarity or with counterrevolutionary scorn (146–50). While Revolutionary politicians such as Robespierre preferred to mold their features in accordance with traditional noble models of restraint and seriousness (151), the most effective gesture of defiance against the Revolution was to go to the guillotine smiling. Finally, after several decades of attention to fleeting expression by such theorists as LeBrun, Jones observes that Lavater’s physiognomy at the end of the century deemphasized the midcentury emphasis on expression by such figures as Charles Lebrun in favor of attention to permanent features, such as the shape of the nose, size of the jaw, and so on (153–56). French culture remained, at the level of “good society,” committed to inexpressivity. In France, Dickens tells us, “The leprosy of unreality disfigured every human creature in attendance upon” the Marquis (Tale 126). The Marquis has “a face like a fine mask. A face of a transparent paleness; every feature in it clearly defined; one set expression on it. The nose, beautifully formed otherwise, was very slightly pinched at the top of each nostril. In those two compressions, or dints, the only little change that the face ever showed, resided. They persisted in changing colour sometimes, and they would be occasionally dilated and contracted by something like a faint pulsation; then, they gave a look of treachery, and cruelty, to the whole countenance” (129). His face is otherwise inexpressive. When Charles accuses his uncle of trying to have him arrested and perhaps killed, “It would have been of as much avail to interrogate any stone face outside the chateau as to interrogate that face of his [uncle]. The nephew looked at him, in vain” (150). The aristocracy, who express no emotion, are in turn incapable of reading the emotions of others. DeFarge tells an informant that this inability to express also offers a corresponding inability to read expression: “While they despise your breath, and would stop it . . . , they only know what your breath tells them” (210–11). The Marquis, thus emotionally impaired, is incapable, for example, of blushing on his own, which perhaps is related to his incapacity to recognize equality or kinship with other humans. He does not think anyone can judge him, and thus has no internally generated spectator who can take the place of that social judging mechanism that leads to moral self-awareness. So his

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blood must be brought out by outside forces: “A blush on the countenance of  . . . the Marquis was no impeachment of his high breeding; it was not from within; it was occasioned by an external circumstance beyond his control . . . the setting sun. The sunset struck so brilliantly into the travelling carriage . . . that its occupant was steeped in crimson. ‘It will die out,’ said . . . the Marquis, glancing at his hands, ‘directly’ ” (Dickens, Tale 134). The Marquis does metaphorically have blood on his hands, most recently because his carriage has just run down a child in the streets of Paris (a girl, of course). These changes from white to red are described in liquid metaphors (steeped) or through liquid images. Three fountains link the city as site of violence to the country: a fountain in Paris, one in the village of the Marquis’s château, and one outside the château itself. The Marquis is reminded of the child he has crushed next to the fountain in Paris that night when he looks out at the fountain outside the window of his château. We do not see the Marquis killed that night; instead our attention is directed toward the château’s fountain. As the night passes, “the fountain at the chateau dropped . . . melting away, like the minutes that were falling from the spring of Time—through three dark hours. Then, the grey water of both [the fountain in the village and at the château] began to be ghostly in the light, and the eyes of the stone faces of the chateau were opened. . . . In the glow, the water of the chateau fountain seemed to turn to blood, and the stone faces crimsoned” (152). In turn, the Marquis’s assassin is executed over the village fountain, “poisoning the water” that is the main source for the villagers (207). When emotion does not properly flow through a contained individual system, it becomes poisonous, and floods out—this toxic fluid also becomes a source of contagion. Vital fluid and unyielding stone are the polar opposites that mark the instability—and vulnerability—of what has become an unnatural and dysfunctional political body. The stone faces are made to appear to blush, despite Dickens’s repeated emphasis that they are expressionless—thus, they can be made to blush only from without. The class difference signified by the aristocrat’s body thus ceases to be a meaningful way of negotiating social relations through ceremony, and these characters cannot bridge the gap between this and the new way of relating to others as individuals. The sense that the role of the aristocracy as representative and protector of the people is fraudulent is replicated by the role of writing: writing no longer signifies truthful content, as paper money is no longer backed by real wealth: “France . . . rolled, with exceeding smoothness down hill, making paper money and spending it” (Dickens, Tale 2). Dickens’s point is a repudiation of the old regime and its emphasis on family as identity in order to embrace the individual as significant his-

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torical actor. Dr. Manette forgives Darnay for his family connections, and Darnay himself repudiates them. The failure of the aristocracy, in its printing and spending of paper money that represents no true wealth, must be righted, and the meaningless notes are replaced by the terribly meaningful notes of the Republicans—notes fraught with meaning and power, but only to destroy and not create. “Carton,” a paper man who puts papers in order for a living, becomes the note that substitutes for the true worth of Darnay, and cancels Darnay’s debt. Darnay is the rebirth of aristocratic Frenchman as middle-class Englishman who both abjures and mends history. But he can do so only by allowing Carton to pay the debt of history, so Darnay may escape and allow what Dickens explicitly calls the “fever” of the Terror to play itself out: “Physical diseases, engendered in the vices and neglects of men, will seize on victims of all degrees; and the frightful moral disorder, born of unspeakable suffering, intolerable oppression, and heartless indifference, smote equally without distinction” (428). Emotion, defrauded of its appropriate use in sympathy, becomes an indiscriminately destructive force of sentimental contagion. The Revolutionaries mirror the aristocracy, and thus become as incapable of sympathy as they. The father of the dead child who kills the stone-faced Marquis is himself petrified, “white as a spectre, tall as a spectre!” (Dickens, Tale 137). Like Dr. Manette’s preternaturally white hair, these white figures of vengeance represent the collateral damage to the oppressed (the father of the child, the brother of the girl), and upon the Marquis’s death, the red tinge does “die out, directly” after dawn, leaving “one stone face too many” at the castle (153). The whiteness of Madame DeFarge, the fate and architect of the Revolution, who has encoded the names of all the doomed in her knitting, is palpable. When she reveals that she is the last survivor of her destroyed family: “the listener could feel how white she was, without seeing her” (421). She becomes the double of the stone-faced Marquis, always “composed,” her face, like his, incapable of expression other than a pallor. As he insists that he will “die, perpetuating the system under which I have lived” (148), the Marquis is a fully contained body: “Every fine straight line in the clear whiteness of his face, was cruelly, craftily, and closely compressed” (148). And like the Marquis, Madame DeFarge is unmoved by the misery of others in her rigid enforcement of class distinctions. When Lucie appeals to her to save her husband, Madame de Defarge’s manner is “stony,” and upon Lucie kissing “one of the hands that knitted” in a “passionate, loving, thankful, womanly action,” the disembodied “hand made no response—dropped cold and heavy,” like statuary (327). Unlike the watchers in the English courtroom, “Madame Defarge met the lifted eyebrows and forehead with a cold,

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impassive stare” (327). Sympathy cannot function here; there is a spectator, but no desire to reflect or internalize the emotion of the object of her gaze. Like that of the Marquis, her visual contact has become ceremonial rather than perceptive. Sympathy rather than ceremony is the social and affective mechanism that allows individuals to escape absorption into either the mob or mindless class identification, while still bridging the affective gap between individual bodies. It was solidly identified as the basis of social morality in the period from at least Adam Smith on through Darwin (and in some form continues today in talk of mirror neurons and other physiological mechanisms for experiencing the affect of others). Dickens makes the expressive face the mediator between the stone faces of the class enemies and the fluid dissolution of bodies into Revolutionary fervor. For Dickens, sympathy is the sign of successful individuation, which itself is one of the principal safeguards against class warfare and revolution. But sympathy is imperfect, as we have seen: it is always based in the viewer’s own body’s capacity to duplicate the experience of another, and so is limited by the capacities of the reading individual as well as the display offered to the reader. As Audrey Jaffe remarks, the link between “sympathy and spectacle . . . takes paradigmatic form in Victorian fiction” (Scenes of Sympathy 2).12 Yet, as Rae Greiner remarks, sympathy for Dickens is always a project urgently necessary but difficult to achieve. Because sympathy is always dependent upon the spectator’s imaginary identification, it is always dependent upon the logic of representation, and in turn of reading. And with the exceptions of Lucie and Darnay, the young lovers, Dickens laments that most are not transparent. Individuals are locked in their separate opacity: A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. . . . It was appointed that the book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. . . . it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life’s end. In any of the burial-places of this city . . . is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them? (Tale 12–13) Frighteningly, whereas deep emotion can be understood only by the time-consuming, careful operation of sympathy, dependent in part upon direct visual contact, sentiment can operate quickly, by contagion, in large groups, as Shaftesbury believed. The Revolutionaries admonish the poor to

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cover their feelings, to carry them in their hearts and not to blazon them for all to see: when the wine spills in the streets outside the DeFarge shop, “The wine was red wine, and had [stained] . . . many hands, too, and many faces, and many naked feet. . . . one tall joker so besmirched . . . scrawled upon a wall with his finger dipped in muddy wine-lees—BLOOD. . . .” [Defarge asks,] “Why do you write in the public streets? Is there—tell me thou—is there no other place to write such words in?” In his expostulation he dropped his cleaner hand (perhaps accidentally, perhaps not) upon the joker’s heart” (36–37). He encourages them to internalize their feelings, to make them both secret and less likely to be dissipated in sentimental displays. For both their safety and the intensification of its energy, emotion should be kept within, not displayed like a stain on the surface of the skin. But this also means that it is hidden and cannot inspire sympathy. Repeatedly, the peasants try to see the aristocracy as being readable and thus potentially capable of sympathetic reading: “A rumour just lived in the village . . . that when the knife struck home [in the Marquis], the [stone] faces [of the castle’s exterior] changed, from faces of pride to faces of anger and pain” and that the hanging of the killer gave them “a cruel look of being avenged, which they would henceforth bear for ever. In the stone face over the great window of the bed-chamber where the murder was done, two fine dints were pointed out in the sculptured nose, which everybody recognised, and which nobody had seen of old” (Dickens, Tale 212). But, of course, we as readers know stone faces cannot change. To the extent that the aristocracy is identified with its landholdings, buildings, and ceremonies, it cannot be identified with individual expressive bodies. The French aristocracy as such has no human face; indeed, it is the house that must represent the expression of the emotion the peasants imagine they have. Even the twin brothers’ titles are interchangeable and signify a position rather than an individual, as Dickens repeatedly emphasizes. When ceremony fails and sympathy is impossible, what is left is custom (the fossil remains of ceremony) and sentiment. But sentiment is a force easily swayed and turned against custom, turned murderous. The Revolutionary witness who has come to report the fate of the Marquis’s murderer in Paris is taken to see the royal family pass through the streets: “in jewels and silks and powder and splendour and elegantly spurning figures and handsomely disdainful faces of both sexes, the mender of roads bathed himself, so much to his temporary intoxication, that he cried Long live the King, Long live the Queen, Long live everybody and everything! as if he had never heard of ubiquitous Jacques in his time. . . . until he absolutely wept with sentiment. . . . throughout Defarge held him by the

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collar, as if to restrain him from flying at the objects of his brief devotion and tearing them to pieces” (Dickens, Tale 210). He “bathes” himself, soaking in and absorbing the wine-like effect of the sentimental emotion of the masses. Dickens’s image, not otherwise an obvious choice in this context, evokes the iconic image of a blood-fevered Marat in his bath, even as it duplicates the earlier scene in which Parisians revel in the free wine flowing from a broken barrel. But this emotional intoxication is not based on any sympathetic identification with the aristocracy, and indeed, tearing them to pieces and bathing in their blood is the other side of this euphoric display. Madame DeFarge asks him: “ ‘you would shout and shed tears for anything, if it made a show and a noise. Say! Would you not?’ ‘Truly, Madame, I think so. For the moment’ ” (211). The carnival atmosphere evoked by the wine spill and the cheering for the royal family is repeated in the darker spectacle of the Terror, when the wine is replaced with blood in earnest. Repeatedly, Dickens uses liquid metaphors for sentiment as an emotion that enters individuals directly, bypassing sympathetic identification. The carnival atmosphere of the earlier wine spill and the cheering for the royal family is repeated in the darker spectacle of the Terror—sentiment is contagious in the crowd, rather than responsive to the emotion of the victim, and so blood comes to seem no different from the intoxicating liquid spilled in the earlier scene, when a drunken man dips his hand in spilled wine and writes “blood” on a wall (Tale 36). The storming of the Bastille is described in the chapter “The Sea Rises” as “The sea of black and threatening waters, and of destructive upheaving of wave against wave, . . . The remorseless sea of turbulently swaying shapes, . . . and faces hardened in the furnaces of suffering until the touch of pity could make no mark on them” (268). Sydney Carton, himself anonymous, dies in a wave of mass sentiment: “The murmuring of many voices, the upturning of many faces, . . . so that it swells forward in a mass, like one great heave of water, all flashes away. Twenty-Three” (464). Yet, with all the emotional intensity, Dickens emphasizes that, of those carried in the tumbrels, “Not one of the whole number appeals by look or gesture, to the pity of the people” (460). Sentiment undermines sympathy; the “whole number” invalidates the appeal of the “one.”13 Sentimentality is a potentially adaptive precursor to sympathy, but without maturing into sympathy itself, it remains a socially dangerous force. I think this model remains consistent for Dickens, although his valorization or critique of the term “sentiment” itself is more uneven and does not transfer across novels. Sentiment and the curiosity about emotion that can become “ogreish” are developmentally prior emotional forms to mature sympathy;

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the first two are positioned as “natural,” whereas sympathy—perhaps natural to women—has to be shaped by education to be socially functional. As I mentioned above, Nancy Armstrong suggests that the preferred model for Dickens is spectatorial sympathy. But spectatorship alone does not offer security that sympathy will develop. Repeatedly, Dickens makes the comparison between the unsustainable conditions of the French pre-Revolutionary period and England at the same time: Tale is cautionary. Spectatorship can lead to sympathy only when the cultural and economic actors are favorable—when human expression itself is valued and can be read, the springs of sympathy are unobstructed, and there is no overwhelming sentiment endangering their proper action. Dickens suggests that a sustainable society must nurture and preserve its sympathy, must teach the attentive observation of others modeled in realist fiction, or risk the pulverizing forces of floods. Dickens situates the location of the Revolutionary germ in the immiseration of the poor, but, more significantly, in French society’s “leprosy” of unreality and the sexual and financial rapaciousness of the aristocracy. For him, the answer (as it was for the first wave of Revolutionaries, though he doesn’t seem to make that connection) was in the work ethic and decent self-containment of the middle classes: the bankers of England, the doctors of Paris. But “Revolution fever,” as Dickens also calls it (Tale 439), must run its course before health can assert itself again; ceremony having failed to be a representation of social truth, sentiment must exhaust itself before sympathy can be restored, and with it, social order. Moreover, Dickens makes clear that the events in France are not specific to that country, nor are they unexampled elsewhere. The state of England is only financially, not morally, better off than that France in the same period. Indeed, the guillotine that Charles is condemned to is more merciful than the drawing and quartering he is threatened with in London when first we meet him at the Old Bailey, diseased as is Paris; the Old Bailey “was a vile place, in which most kinds of debauchery and villainy were practised, and where dire diseases were bred. . . . transactions in blood-money . . . leading to the most frightful mercenary crimes that could be committed under Heaven. Altogether, the Old Bailey, at that date, was a choice illustration of the precept, that ‘Whatever is is right;’ an aphorism that would be as final as it is lazy, did it not include the troublesome consequence, that nothing that ever was, was wrong” (Tale 68–69). Paris, like London, is ruled by a king and queen with more similarities than differences: “There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the throne of France. In both countries it was clearer than crystal . . . that things in general were settled for

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ever” (1). Further, the English bank is described as an ironic reflection of the Bastille: “you fell into Tellson’s down two steps, and came to your senses . . . under a shower-bath of mud from Fleet-street, . . . made the dingier by their own iron bars proper, and the heavy shadow of Temple Bar. If your business necessitated your seeing ‘the House,’ you were put into a species of Condemned Hold at the back” (60). The cash drawers are “wormy” and when they are opened “particles . . . flew up your nose and down your throat. . . . Your bank-notes had a musty odour, as if they were fast decomposing into rags again. Your plate was stowed away among the neighbouring cesspools” (60). Patrons and their documents “were but newly released from the horror of being ogled through the windows, by the heads exposed on Temple Bar with an insensate brutality and ferocity worthy of Abyssinia or Ashantee” (60). And Tellson’s is just as brutal as these exotic savages in persecuting the perpetrators of financial crimes: “the forger was put to Death; the utterer of a bad note was put to Death; the unlawful opener of a letter was put to Death; . . . Tellson’s, in its day, like . . . its contemporaries, had taken so many lives, that, if the heads laid low before it had been ranged on Temple Bar instead of being privately disposed of, they would probably have excluded what little light the ground floor had” (61).14 Dickens is writing at the same time a history of that great mystery, the French Revolution, and the Georgian period in Britain. If the Terror consummated the reign of rational materiality over all traditional loyalties and identities in a tidal wave of destructive sentiment, he shows that it is not by a return to those discredited allegiances that such dangers can be thwarted. Nor is France’s bloodbath a unique case, to be understood as a singular historical event, unreproducible among other peoples. Dickens illustrates that there is only a hair of difference between the two countries, each as cruel as the other, each ruled by self-satisfied wealth, and each liable to mob sentiment. Against these dangers, Dickens erects a thin gray line of decent middle-class cold-water bathers—and the expressive countenance. Only in individuals, capable of forswearing all other identifications of family and country, who blush, pale, and express pity and terror at the rising tide of sentiment, might the dangers of absorption be forestalled. Carlyle’s epic takes as its primary character the nature of human history itself, and his human players are pawns of that larger force. Dickens’s historical novel offers a more typically novelistic telling. But despite working through individual characters, as is typical of the novel form emerging in this period, Dickens still engages historical trauma and interconnection through transpersonal affect, rather than the self-enclosed individual developing over time, which is by then the dominant theme of most novels.15 The historical

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event is cast as a cautionary tale about the fragility of the individual, a theme he continues to address in later novels. Dickens always has an ambiguous relation to realism, but I would place his most realist period in the 1850s and 1860s, with his careful focus on tracing the individual body’s resistance to and connection with systemic social disorder that begin in David Copperfield (1849) and, fully refined in Bleak House (1852), continues through the end of his career. Realist fiction in mid-nineteenth-century Britain privileges themes of self-enclosure, related to the growth of ideologies of possessive individualism and to property. Tale begins to get at a critique of the financial underpinnings of the capitalist economy historically still to come in the time of the Revolution, as he connects the collapse of the relation of signifier to signified to the destruction of bodies. For example, in Tale, he gestures toward a critique of the logic of investment that he later perfects in Our Mutual Friend, both in his long riffs on the government issue of paper money of France that fails to refer to actual value (also a significant topic of Carlyle’s work), and the investment of Tellson’s in capital punishment (whose view of heads on spikes mirrors and foreshadows the spectacle of heads struck off by the guillotines), as individual human beings are killed for forging documents. Dickens, among others, becomes increasingly interested in the question of how human bodies relate to value and to property itself, and how they can be alienated from the subject proper and from their intrinsic, nonmarket value and brought into the market. This was a question taken up urgently in the eighteenth century in relation to slavery; the mid-nineteenth century revisits the question through the figure of the commodity. As the site of sensory engagement with the not-self, and as the location of selfhood, skin stood not only as the visible site of human capacity or deficiency (as we see in Dickens’s stone-faced figures), but as a target of brutality. In the next chapter, we will see how the skin and its alienation became for mid-Victorian Britons, and to a lesser extent for the French themselves, a key metaphor for the failure of the humane in the French Revolution, as well as the problematic blurring of the human and animal and the human and the commodity as the century wore on. If the middle classes and their livelihood of trade between equals were seen as an antidote both to the elitism and hereditary privilege of the aristocratic class in Western Europe, and to the evils of slavery itself increasingly seen as a premodern economic form, the growth of industrial capitalism introduced a new form of inhumane relation between individuals: that of the commodity.

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q Ch a p ter 5 Flayed My body is the embodiment of my freedom and it is with my body that I feel. —Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §48, trans. S. W. Dyde Skin is not a part of the body not because it is separate from it but, surprisingly, because it can’t come apart from it. Unlike a member, an organ, or a nail-clipping, the skin is not detachable in such a way that the detached part would remain recognizable. . . . The skin always takes the body with it. The skin is, so to speak, the body’s face, the face of its bodiliness. —Steven Connor, The Book of  Skin

As the human self floated to the surface of the body and extended its substance there, the skin’s fragility, as well as its permeability, came into sharp focus. The skin was the divider between inner and outer that also constituted interiority, but it was also the questionable divider between human and not-human, between self and alienable object. The alienation of the skin from the body—always a morbidly fascinating theme—took on a new meaning: flaying, effacement, and other damage to the sensing surface pointed to the capacity of a living body to lose its identity, or even to the possibility that the self, so vulnerably exposed, might be forcibly seized for the purposes of others. Skin, as a removable surface that could be preserved, was, like hair, in the category of body parts that are also “things”—subject to conversion into memento, souvenir, or fetish. As for Carlyle, for many Victorians, the supposed flaying and tanning of humans came to symbolize the radical recent break with civilization that the Terror represented. The imaginary relationship between British Victorians and the brutality of the Terror is treated ironically in Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady (1875), as a crippled Victorian dandy of no particular history elaborates an identification with the Regency and keeps a human pelt as a gruesome reminder of the French Terror. But throughout the period, artists and 181

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philosophers are troubled about the distinction between the human body as material basis of individuality and as animalized or commodified thing, a distinction whose erasure calls into question the very possibility of free will. From relic to souvenir to salable commodity, the desacralization of the human skin flaunts the limits of human exceptionalism. It is important to note that although British Victorians tended to think that flaying was something that happened elsewhere and elsewhen, it had not been that long since the trial of William Burke in Edinburgh for murdering people and selling their bodies for dissection: he was sentenced not only to death, but to dissection himself, and permanent display of his skeleton. Burke was hanged January 28, 1829, and on February 1 his corpse was publicly dissected. The skeleton is still displayed in the Anatomical Museum at the Edinburgh Medical School, and a book made from his tanned skin is displayed at Surgeon’s Hall. It is said that other things were made from his skin: souvenir wallets and so forth. In the US, people of African descent were punitively skinned, and this practice continued past the nineteenth century. Mark M. Smith gives the example of Sam Hose, lynched in Georgia in 1899: “Hose’s ears, fingers and genitals were cut off; his face was skinned, and pieces of his skin and bone were sold as gruesome souvenirs” (How Race Is Made 60). Occasionally, whites might be punished in like manner; a cattle thief known as “Big Nose George” was lynched in Wyoming, flayed by medical personnel after death, and made into a bag and shoes. A full discussion of skin objects in the nineteenth century across Anglophone contexts would need to attend fully to these and other such examples. However, in the British context, examples of flayed skin in fiction and public discussion overwhelmingly referenced one context: the Terror. Elaine Freedgood’s luminous The Ideas in Things (2006) has done much to make readers of literature once again attentive to what Asa Briggs called simply “Victorian things” in 1989. Her work, building on Bill Brown’s readings of American literature, has emphasized the ways in which we have historically either ignored and distrusted the thing-richness of Victorian novels, with their detailed lingering on surfaces and objects, or read objects only as metaphor, rather than as commodities with their own relevant histories and narratives.1 This proliferation of object descriptions, of course, is often cited as a defining characteristic of realism. As Freedgood points out, Victorian literature has offered us the richest archive ever of stories about things, but it is tempting to simply let them disappear into background noise in a commodity-rich literary landscape or let them operate merely as symbols. One difference between the body objects I discuss here and the general world of Victorian things is that there is no possibility of body objects mys-

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tifying the means of their production, or disappearing into the general landscape of objects. If interpretation of things first requires that the familiar be made strange, we can skip a step: these objects are already strange as hell. Even body objects that seem culturally less exceptional in the period—such as hair jewelry—announce themselves by their nature as stemming from a specific origin. Such objects are always already overdetermined; they must be read metaphorically in literature, but their materiality demands our attention as well. We might or might not choose to be aware of the colonial source of a mahogany chest, but a tanned human skin draped casually across a hanger demands an inquiry into its origins. Moreover, these objects generally originate outside of commodity culture. Often what we perceive as the deep gothic wrongness of these things, part of their weirdness, is that something that was to be outside of commodity culture is brought into it: human skins made into a pair of breeches or a book binding. Still, these curios are curious; they are unique, and they announce themselves as such. Like relics, they seem to be attached to a particular individuality, and should inspire reverence or at least affection or recognition. At the same time, the fact that they appear in fiction as things—as items to be purchased or collected, having morphed from relics into fetishes or souvenirs—is part of their uncanniness. Hair jewelry, for example, was meant to be worn, whether in mourning or fond remembrance, by someone with a direct connection to the original source. But the body objects in these stories have come unmoored from their original affective context. The realm of the sentient and personal crosses into the impersonal and commercial, and the human and animal collide. These scenes call attention to the fact that the world is somehow out of joint, and that the marketplace of capitalism is not always a clean and modern arena for free will as advertised.

Skin and Self To understand the importance of skin as an alienable object, we must first understand why it is also the idea of the subject. If the surface of the body was the preeminent site of self, it is because that is where the embodied mind gathered sensations of the outer world and then interacted with that world on the bases of those sensations: sensation became knowledge, on the basis of which and in turn, will became action. Though visual scrutiny of others was important to considerations of sympathy and judgment, the sense most thoroughly associated with the skin was touch. Touch is the most diffuse of the senses. Unlike hearing or taste, touch can take place anywhere on the body. Like so many aspects of skin, touch is directed both inside and out: we

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encounter the outer world through touch, but we also find our place within it through constant proprioceptive signals of our bodies’ relation to themselves and other objects in space. Likewise, touch as a willed action emphasizes two aspects of our (for many theorists, specifically human) nature: seeking information about the world and acting upon that world and its inhabitants. As the materialist-associationist tradition resurged in midcentury, psychologists considered the ways tactile input developed the individual’s understanding of the world from infancy. But skin is always Janus-faced, and as considerations of touch explained how sensations shaped mind—that is, information entering the body at the skin—Victorians also considered how that information led outward, to action. Those interested in the human will, and especially those committed to a concept of free will, from philosophers to legal theorists to novelists, often found most inspiration in the older idealist tradition, which considered the human hand to be the preeminent site of the will and the actuator of human freedom. From classical times to the eighteenth century, sight was generally considered the monarch of the senses, aesthetically. Both sound and sight involved the apprehension of objects at a distance from the body itself, and so hearing and seeing were considered “higher” senses, less subject to the interference of the body with the mind. Sander Gilman points out that touch was long thought to be the most primal and “lowest” sense, and cites Lorenz Oken’s 1802 placement of skin “at the nadir of development, which accounts for the primitive basic structure of skin responses” (Gilman, “Touch, Sexuality, and Disease” 215). Oken, who popularized the idea that a fetus recapitulates the whole animal kingdom, believed in a racial hierarchy of human development, in which the white man was the highest, identified with sight, the “Eye-Man,” and the black man the lowest, identified with touch, the “Skin-Man” (Gilman, “Touch” 215). In fact, Oken argued in 1802 that the entire animal kingdom could be divided into five great sense-classes, from the “dermatozoa” (invertebrates) up to the “opthalmozoa” (mammals). As he remarks, however, this did not mean the darker man had a superior sense of touch, as most believed that blacks were less sensitive in all ways than whites (Gilman, “Touch” 216–17). Hegel considered sight the highest sense, and held that the only aesthetic senses were seeing and hearing. As we have seen, however, in the late eighteenth century, the sensing body begins to be identical with mind, and this allowed for a revaluation of touch. Claudia Benthien explains that even the eighteenth century saw careful analysis of active or voluntary touch (and to a lesser extent, “passive” sensation), even in some cases subordinating vision to touch’s priority, as is the case in George Berkeley’s 1709 An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision

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(Benthien 195).2 It is taken up again later in the century by Berkeley, Condillac, and Herder (Benthien 196–97). For many nineteenth-century thinkers, touch determines the relation of self to world. Even in 1985, Michael Serres continues to define touch as a form of sight, describing skin as “ocellated,” a surface covered with eyes (70).3 Touch in the past is always particularly difficult of access for the historian or literary critic, encountering it as we do entirely through text or image. Perhaps that is why scholars have tended to avoid the question, even in the abstract. But as Mark Smith points out, although philosophers long denigrated touch as more embodied and thus less intellectual than vision, modernity also engaged tactility and skin as “essential to the elaboration of modern ideas and processes, from the construction of gender, race, and class to the blueprinting of ideas concerning comfort, pain and capitalism” (Sensing the Past 95). Smith observes that the disciplining of touch, the imposition of physical distance from and among elites, the assumption that the lower classes and non-European races had tougher, less sensitive skins, and the relatively new cultivation of skin comfort as a part of elite culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (102–9) all point to the importance of touch in the period. Voluntary touch is separate from what many writers in the period call “common sensation” or “animal sensibility,” the passive reception of feelings through the skin.4 But only in the nineteenth century do we begin to see an examination of the feedback mechanism between the sensing body, rather than simply the eye, and the body’s perception of itself in space.5 The distinction between touch as an active, information-seeking behavior and a more passive common sensation or animal sensibility is one often reinforced in writings around this time. Sensibility or sensation include the passively received impressions of the senses, including the skin, but touch is also active and is connected to both knowing and doing: gathering information about the world and communicating and imposing human will upon it. Bichat believed that animal (including human) bodies have “two lives”: an organic life shared with plants and all living tissue, and an animal life (General Anatomy 1: 33 and passim). Will, or intentional action and interaction with the world, was unique to animal life, which is concentrated on the surface of the body (though controlled by the brain), whereas organic life was concentrated on the inside of the body and controlled within the viscera. Will and action have to do with animal life, as does interaction with the world.6 Bichat subordinates sight to touch as a mode of knowing, noting, “Most of the other senses do not require the previous exercise of the will” (3: 312). He argues that we want to touch what we have already seen, and the blind

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and deaf do not exercise touch as much; we engage touch when deliberately seeking knowledge (313). Vision becomes apparently supreme only after the knowledge gained through touch has been sufficient for vision to estimate the “qualities of bodies” already known. This follows the developmental path from human infancy, as Charles Bell notes: “the lips and tongue are first exercised; the next motion is to put the hand to the mouth. . . . So that the sensibility to touch in the lips and tongue, and their motions, are the first inlets to knowledge” (Bell, Hand 213). The hand’s touch follows as a later, more sophisticated stage in understanding sense information, obtaining both knowledge of the world and knowledge of the self: “The knowledge of external bodies as distinguished from ourselves, cannot be acquired until the organs of touch in the hand have become familiar with our own limbs” (213–14). Bell notes that as the child grows, “gradually the length of the arm, and the extent of its motions become the measure of distance, of form, of relation” (214).7 So the face is the first surface to engage in voluntary touch, especially via the animal function of suckling. But the infant has no sense of the self as distinct from the world, nor of proprioception, until the hand is able to communicate with both the mouth and the immediate environment. In his influential The Senses and the Intellect (1855) Alexander Bain argues, as does Herbert Spencer in Principles of Psychology, against earlier conclusions that touch is primitive, giving it a higher intellectual priority than taste and smell (171). The whole skin is involved in emotion, and Bain notes that the feeling of underclothing is related to the “softer” emotions, based on early infancy and sensations of warmth and pleasure. Nursing, embracing, or the self-embrace of curling up for warmth is the ground of these pleasures; the other sensitivity is to sharp and sudden impressions: “Hence the efficacy of skin tortures in the discipline of all orders of sensitive beings” (179). Spencer continues to argue, in the same year as Bain’s work was published, that the voluntary touch is fundamental to our notions of space and particularly proprioception.8 From the infant touching itself (Spencer suggests the cheek) with its hands, the experience of motion gives rise to the nascent understanding of space, and the ordinal perception of time arises out of the primary difference between proximal and more distant space. Finally, this development allows sensation to become perception, sensation being defined as the forerunner of “perception proper [which is] the cognition of an external object” (Spencer, Principles of Psychology 279). So sensation, for Spencer, is the contemplation of something “belonging to the ego” whereas perception involves the contemplation of “something . . . as belonging to the non-ego” (279–80). In turn, “our space-perceptions have become a language in which we think of surrounding things,” while the experience of motion becomes

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subconscious (240). Within the directly experienced range of the hand, we have a complete sense of space, whereas the space further away is understood by us less through perception than conception (240). Through this relation of proprioception and touch, we understand the coexistence of two bodies, or parts of the same body, in space, and it is this that creates a basis for understanding sequentiality, and thus temporality: It is impossible to think of Time without thinking of some succession: and it is equally impossible to think of any succession without thinking of Time. Time, like Space, cannot be conceived except by the establishment of a relation between at least two elements of consciousness: the difference being, that while, in the case of Space, these two elements are, or seem to be, present together, in the case of Time they are not present together. (247)9 Spencer thus decidedly subordinates all senses to touch, and provides an evolutionary model wherein “higher” senses develop from more primal ones, just as the more complex animals develop from and still contain the structures of primitive species. He argues that taste and smell even in complex organisms like mammals are still experienced through receptors on the mucus membranes, a modification of touch receptors on skin. However, this primal quality does not make it less important than other senses: it makes it their inclusive basis; all senses are touch, and all cognitive processes are based on sense. The skin, as the basis of mind, is also the foundation for all forms of civilization, society, and politics. Spencer marks the first evolutionary differentiation as “between the inner and outer tissues—the mass, and its limiting membrane—the substance of the body and its skin” (Principles of Psychology 496–97). From a “uniform jelly” the division results in “one marked contrast of conditions—that between contact with each other and contact with the environment,” resulting in a distinction of “structure and function” between inner and outer. The skin then “permanently assumes the office of receiving all those impressions which form the raw material of intelligence” (497). Due to this development, and the skin’s role as the recipient of outer stimuli, the skin becomes the chief organ of mind, “the part in which psychical changes are originated. . . . But now mark the implication. The changes constituting the physical life . . . go on simultaneously throughout the entire mass. Those which foreshadow the psychical life are, in an increasing degree [as the organism grows more complex], localized in its outer surface” (498). On touch is built all experience and consciousness for Spencer, including civic and political “feelings.” He argues that both rights and the desire

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for liberty are late evolutionary developments, deliberately using the term “feelings” to emphasize their link to touch. These feelings derive from the psychical changes taking place in humans that live in structured societies. As feelings develop in tandem with memory and reason, these could not emerge until “mankind grew into definite and permanent social relations” (Spencer, Principles of Psychology 604). Humans then develop a “general sentiment” that comprises “desire for liberty of person, liberty of acquisition and possession, . . . and so on. . . . ultimately, the sentiment of personal rights will yield to none in strength” (605). Will (intention) arises at the same time as feelings (and these are thus linked to property). Spencer remarks that his materialist environmental determinism will seem counter to free will as generally understood, but everyone is free to “desire” (617); the error is in thinking that the self is a thing apart from the “psychical states” that form that desire (618). But the “ego” is not separate from its states of consciousness. In that sense will is consciousness itself, and consciousness is shaped and determined by the organism’s experience of touch.10 These developments offered new impetus to reinforce the already widespread European assumption that civilized, upper-class Europeans had the most sensitive (and therefore superior) skins. By 1860, the surgeon William E. C. Nourse remarks that touch is a more developed sense than previously thought, but includes the widely held belief that “Accompanying a heightened recognition of pleasurable sensation, is generally an increased sensitivity to pain; a thing infinitely less felt by those of blunted capacities and uncultivated intellects” (17). The idea that the senses, and that touch especially, grow more sensitive along class and racial hierarchies is a common one that will continue to be enlarged upon by anthropologists and criminologists through the turn of the century.11 Refined senses were considered fundamental to morality and civilization. In 1864, the physician Denis Cronin flatly states, “The senses, or at least the perfection of the external senses, are not only essential to human happiness, but intimately associated with our moral being” (xv). Considering Spencer’s dictum on political feelings, this sensitivity was thought to contribute to Europeans developing the most civilized and perfect states. Moreover, it tied this superior sensibility to the political desire—and right—to possess property. Generally, refined, fully operating, but not overly or “morbidly” delicate senses were thought to foster moral perfection. Education enhanced sensitivity. Women were considered generally more sensitive than men, as were gentlemen over laborers: The sex has an influence upon this cutaneous life. In general the animal portion of this life is more raised in women, in whom everything that

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belongs to the sensations is proportionally more marked than in man, who predominates by the power of his locomotor muscles. . . . All the arts which require nicety and delicacy of touch are advantageously cultivated by women. The peculiar texture of the chorion, a texture generally more delicate, has no doubt an influence upon this phenomenon. As to the organized portion of the cutaneous life, the difference is not very great. Man appears to be superior in this respect; he generally sweats more; his skin is more unctuous, which provides a greater secretion. (Bichat, General Anatomy 3: 333–34) Again, these assumptions were also embedded in a racial hierarchy. By the end of the century, Havelock Ellis, like Cesare Lombroso, believed in criminal insensibility to pain, and relates it to the lower animals and “lower races of man” (Ellis, Criminal 125), whereas the eyesight, historically considered a “higher” sense, was superior in criminals (127). But their hearing, olfaction, and taste were below normal, showing that criminals were marked by “sensory and tactile obtusity” (129, 130–31, 133). Gender posed an obvious problem. If women were more sensitive, and thus morally developed, then how could they also be less rational and closer to the animal world? These assumptions also placed the figure of the “gentleman,” with his arguably feminized senses, on awkward ground. Cesare Lombroso took exception to the assumption that women were more sensitive, as it did not correspond well with his assumptions about the atavism of criminals and women, though he fully accepted the conventional wisdom about class difference: “I have myself used Weber’s aesthesiometer to measure the power of tact and sensitiveness to pain at the tip of the forefinger in over a hundred women, . . . except in . . . very young girls, . . . women’s sense of touch is, in general, nearly twice as obtuse as that of men. The exact figures in millimetres, are for plebeian, 2.6 mm; for woman of a superior class 2.0 mm; while the average for men is only 1.6 mm” (Lombroso, “Physical Insensibility of Women” 40). Lombroso also theorized that criminals, savages, and women were less sensitive to pain specifically (40). Notwithstanding Lombroso, women continued in Britain to be generally thought more physically sensitive than men, and if gentlemen were more sensitive, by mid-nineteenth-century standards of British manliness, they were not simply more refined, as would have been quite clear a hundred years earlier, but also somewhat feminized and weakened by their tactile abilities. At the site where self was made through contact with the world, sensitivity, texture, and color were all markers (if fluctuating and equivocal ones) of a hierarchy of classed, raced, and gendered claims to value and authority. Objects made of human skin, the site of perception and selfhood,

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embody a particular kind of value that has no exact parallel with other body objects. They can imply a kind of violence against the sensing subject and the human will that is also unparalleled. When such objects enter the realm of exchange, they raise questions about human subjectivity and its relation to the market.

Personal Property In several of the works of fiction I shall examine, the narrative begins with a sale. A magic skin ends up for sale in an old curiosity shop; David Copperfield’s birth-caul is first unsuccessfully offered for sale and then auctioned off.12 Animal skins sit more securely in the realm of the commodity, but they, too, become uncanny when they cross the boundaries of the commercial and noncommercial, or the profane and the sacred. Body objects insistently call attention to their own fetishization and thus connection to their traumatic origin, to the conspicuous absence of their originating body and story. In these stories, they also demand that we pay attention to commodification itself as something strange, as itself potentially a traumatic violation of human relations to each other and to the sacred. These objects can be described in several ways, and each brings to view a different facet of meaning. Might they be relics, fetishes, souvenirs? I want to explore what is at stake in these various descriptions, all of which come into uneasy play in this period. Deborah Lutz, in her insightful work on hair jewelry, notes that the Victorian period saw a “resurgence in relic culture” (128). Though she notes that death became “more secular, personal and private” in the period, she argues that there was still a “fetishistic magic” to the relic of the “beloved individual” so valued in Romanticism (128). As she notes, the relic reminds Christians that they will be reunited with their loved ones in the afterlife, but it also “makes apparent the terrible poignancy of the body becoming object; it can reenact that moment, again and again” (135). She cites Bill Brown’s observation that it makes the body “a thing among things,” though Lutz believes that it invokes the body as “a particularity that cannot be universalized, just as the relic can never be reproduced, copied, multiplied” (135). Though Lutz focuses on hair jewelry, all relics participate in this tradition, and I would like to focus especially on her identification of such items as objects that are strongly associated with an individual body and subjectivity. The relation of the individual and the body to the object world of property was a primary one for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophy, and the definition of the distinction between the two is a key dividing line

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between the self and the environment, or the inner and outer. A key philosophical, economic, and social problem in the period was that of slavery, which brought the whole person into the purview of the commodity, just as the theory of the commodity itself was being elaborated. Moreover, the definition of the individual as exercising free will was formulated as foundational both to the market and to a broader society. A long tradition of economic philosophers wrestled with this problem, including, in the mid-Victorian period, Marx as he revises Hegel. (The materialists had little to say on the matter, though most were antislavery. Hobbes is exceptional: he has long been interpreted as the extreme market liberal for whom everything was fungible, including persons.)13 Among economic theorists, Enlightenment idealists are usually seen in the liberal tradition, because of their emphasis on human freedom and exchange as an arena for exercising it (whereas, for example, Hume’s materialism led him to disbelieve in free will). Because the German idealists were so concerned with human freedom, they engaged in a detailed consideration of the extent to which the human could be subject to exchange without abrogating the freedom that defined the human itself. In so doing, they engaged in detailed considerations of the body as property, tool, and vessel of subjectivity or subject itself. The legal theorist Margaret Jane Radin traces a lineage of this discussion from Kant and Hegel through Mill to late twentieth-century economic liberalism. All of these theorists associated the market with the exercise of freedom and individuality, a position incompatible with the commodification of the person. Radin points out that Kant and Hegel agreed that “only objects separate from the self are suitable for alienation” (Radin 34); the human body, though in some respects like an object, cannot be alienated from the self. As Radin makes clear, the history of the commodity has repeatedly collided with the conceptual problems posed by the subject-object divide. The conceptual lineage I want to trace here is through Hegel, whose views on property as a mode of self-realization would resonate most clearly with later British understandings of the body itself as a complicated form of both person and nonalienable property.14 Hegel engaged in a detailed consideration of slavery, that most fundamental question of human commodification for much of the period (Philosophy of Right). Hegel was key for British Romantics who initially celebrated the French Revolution and later struggled to reconcile their idealistic expectations with the reality of the Terror. This struggle was also to be found in German Romanticism, and Hegel elaborated his theory of history in part to frame and rationalize the event. Hegel had originally seen the French Revolution as a great expression of individual human freedom, and later came to see it

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more specifically as a first movement of that freedom that was “negative”— that is, it expressed itself in the negation of all existing forms, without yet establishing a new order. That is, humanity withdrew its will from existing cultural instruments, but did not invest it in the possession of new ones, until the phase of destruction was completed. (He elaborates this idea in the introduction to the Philosophy of Right, which also extensively theorizes slavery and other violations of human freedom along with contract rights.) Hegel thus connected will and positive freedom with the possession of—but never identity with—a form of property; will could be effected only by being invested in material instruments. Determining what constituted the difference between self and instrument, between property and person, was crucial to identifying what the limits and capacities of human freedom could be. And thus, Hegel decried slavery, which he believed was an illegitimate seizure of the bodies of others in terms of both property and personhood. The historian Dale W. Tomich argues that slavery over the course of the period “came to be understood as the antithesis of the emergent forms of polity, moral sensibility, and economic activity” and eventually became “the negative standard against which the new forms of freedom [such as that of workers within the British Empire] were defined” (297). Slavery was often seen as both uncivilized and pragmatically counterproductive: a pre- or indeed antimodern form of economic and human relations (297). Modernity, founded on respect for property, included also respect for the owning self—for possessive individualism, in which the self was a precious and unalienable property whose value could be realized only through the free exercise of the will. (Of course, this was a partial and theoretical argument. Historians now find that slavery was in fact economically foundational to capitalism in the period—and may be still today.)15 For Hegel, owning alienable property is an expression of the individual will; one can choose to withdraw one’s intention from objects, and yield those objects to the will of others. But it is not possible to do this with objects that are not external to the self (Philosophy of Right §42, p. 5).16 For Hegel, the body (especially the hand) is the mediator between will and objects. Hegel observes that to grasp a thing physically is the “most complete” of the three modes of taking possession of an object (§§54–55, p. 12). That which grasps, however, cannot itself be alienated as property; that is, it cannot be sold or given to another. As Radin points out, potential commodities must be things “external by nature” to the self (35). This definition points to a key divide between different categories of living things. Animals’ bodies were not external to their selves either. But animals could be alienated or commodified; “Animals do in a manner possess themselves. Their soul is in possession of their body. But they have no right

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to their life, because they do not will it” (Hegel, Philosophy of Right §47, p. 8). But one could not demarcate the will and the human body, and so the human should not be made “a beast of burden. While I am alive, my soul . . . and my body are not separated; my body is the embodiment of my freedom and it is with my body that I feel” (§48, p. 8). Thus, the “thing-in-itself,” the soul, would be compromised if the body were “maltreated and . . . subjected to the power of another” (§48, p. 8). Hegel muses that “so far as others are concerned, I am in my body. . . . If another does violence to my body, he does violence to me” (§48, note, p. 9). In personal property, he believes, as opposed to the body itself, “my will is not actually present in this direct fashion” (§48, p. 9). It is the sensing body in which the will inheres, and it is in the body acting on its sensations that human agency and freedom are actualized. All of this is to say that humanity under modernity stakes its exceptionalism in an updated, economic version of the old religious question of free will. However, unlike earlier versions of a soul seeking freedom from an animal body, these theorists—even idealists—situated human freedom within the body, and specifically, within its human sensorium. For many Enlightenment theorists and certainly for the Romantics, the rights of a “man” were, as the US Constitution specifies, “inalienable” (though the US Constitution managed to hedge its bets mightily on what, exactly, constituted manhood). A commodity must be alienable; that is its nature. For Hegel as for many others, the human sensing body is not. The dead body is liminal: it passes out of the realm of the self, but there is still a distinction between such body objects as hair or nails, alienable without trauma during life, and skin, bone, and other items, which bear, by the evidence of their separate existence, either a connection with a traumatic separation during life or postmortem dismemberment. A key issue, then, is that of ownership. Can someone with no organic connection to a human body establish a right of property in it, even in pieces and even after death? Can it simply be invested with the will of another who “grasps” it? Or is that a desecration not only of the vanished person who inhabited that body, but of the whole notion of human personhood itself ? The violation of the sacredness of integral physical components is a theme of both gothic comedy and serious denunciation throughout Dickens’s oeuvre. When Dickens’s Silas Wegg visits Mr. Venus’s taxidermy shop, in which Venus has the bone of Wegg’s amputated leg (purchased from the hospital porter), Wegg expresses a desire to buy it in order to “collect” himself like a “genteel person” (Our Mutual Friend 82). Of course, it would take more than that to make Wegg genteel, but Dickens’s point is serious: a society in which a person’s body can be sold for parts is not one in which healthy human

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relations can thrive. As Mr. Venus’s sweetheart, Pleasant Riderhood, suggests, it is hard to feel loved when one must regard oneself, or be regarded, in such a “bony light” (84). Victorian economic philosophers continued to resist the commodification of the human body. John Stuart Mill, a firm market advocate, still critiqued property laws that “made property of things which never ought to be property,” such as monopoly rights and people themselves (qtd. in Radin 33).17 Victorians had felt the question of even the dead body’s ownership keenly, and it had been a major public issue when the Anatomy Act of 1832 was passed. The act allowed the state to seize the bodies of paupers and criminals for use in medical colleges, so as to stem the illicit trade in bodies that encouraged grave-robbing. At the same time, however, even the separated body part implies some ownership: if it does not belong to the person of whom it was originally a part, it is surely hard to see what other person might establish a right of property in it. Though Mr. Venus buys Wegg’s leg from the hospital porter, the porter’s right to sell it in the first place is at best arguable. In thinking through the discussions of property defined early on by Hegel and later by Marx, one is unavoidably reminded of Marx’s finding that the commodity itself crossed the line into fetishization: it mystified its origins and true cost, becoming something greater. Conversely, bringing the body into the realm of the commodity risked reducing its “true” value to terms merely defined in the realm of exchange. In short, the commodification of the body undervalued the body as a unique container or instrument of the individual will. But I also want to consider another, anthropological nineteenth-century use of the term “fetish” that derives from the work of Auguste Comte, detailed by Peter Logan. As Logan points out, fetishes were defined as culturally other; in fact, as the absence of culture. A fetish usually has a couple of characteristics: first, it is directly representational (that is, it embodies some quality of the object itself, rather than something abstract). In that quality, Victorians understood the fetish to be the sacred or powerful object interpreted as such by a “primitive” culture in a stage of animistic relation to objects: “This very communion of object with spirit, signifier with signified, makes the fetish antithetical to representation” (Logan 10). Africans, Native Americans, and Maoris had fetishes, Europeans had culture—or so Europeans felt. That is, the fetish was defined as something whose value was not immediately apparent to the person defining the object from outside its cultural context. This sense of the fetish was imported into Victorian sexology and psychology: the fetish was something “overvalued” (9) that stood in for the desired object.18

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Logan points out that Freud’s reading of the fetish as both confirming a threat—say, castration—and reassuring the fetishist of his own safety from it stems from earlier anthropological discussions (Logan 11–12). Like the pharmakon, the fetish is both poison and cure. Victorians understood other cultures’ use of unfamiliar body objects, such as shrunken heads, as part of an animistic interpretation of the universe. But when those objects come from within Enlightenment Europe, they become particularly problematic. As fetishes, of course, they are disavowed: either dismissed humorously as superstitions of the peasantry, or more darkly, if emerging from socially elite contexts, as in the French Revolution, as mementos of a traumatic past and a kind of savagery at the heart of civilized humanity. In many narratives I examine here, each object retains its fetishistic nature, animated by its own past, while simultaneously becoming most significantly symbolic of an animality or savagery within the owner-fetishist. The Victorian body object, when it becomes a fetish rather than a relic, blurs the boundaries of human and beast, just as the overvalued animal skin becomes a fetish when it ceases to become simply a commodity or property of such and becomes a significant symbolic object.19

Selling Skin Detached human skins have long been considered to have extraordinary properties. One such case is that of the child born with a caul: the caul was believed to be lucky, to provide protection from drowning, and was consequently much sought after by sailors. In the seventeenth century, Thomas Browne identified the caul as part of the amniotic sac, and cautioned that “herein significations are natural and concluding upon the infant, but not to be extended unto magical signalities, or any other person” (171). Although the belief in their magic powers was even more generally denigrated as a superstition by the nineteenth century, cauls (also called silly-hows, sillt-how, or Silly-hood, meaning “holy or lucky cap”) were still routinely advertised and sold through newspapers in the nineteenth century for considerable sums. The Times lists such items on several occasions: in 1819–20, the asking price runs 12 to 15 guineas. Browne also mentions that the caul is often used medicinally, as a lucky charm generally, and oddly, specifically for the success of lawyers (87). Dickens’s David Copperfield is “born with a caul, which was advertised for sale, in the newspapers, at the low price of fifteen guineas” (David Copperfield 1). It fails to sell to a sailor, and though “an attorney connected with the bill-broking business . . . offered two pounds in cash, and the balance in sherry, but declined to be guaranteed from drowning on

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any higher bargain” (2), it finally ends up being raffled off, when his mother is sold up ten years later, “to fifty members at half-a-crown a head, the winner to spend five shillings. I was present myself, and I remember to have felt quite uncomfortable and confused, at a part of myself being disposed of in that way. The caul was won, I recollect, by an old lady with a hand-basket” (2). Ironically, the lady with a handbasket hates sailors because they impiously “meander” about the world—David immediately follows this detail by observing that the purchaser refuses to understand that her supply of “tea (to which she was extremely partial)” as well as other “conveniences . . . resulted from this objectionable practice” (2). The novel is framed within an anecdote of the commodification of the body, in turn immediately connected to global trade. But instead of the expected tale of a sailor buying the caul in order to “meander” safely, it is a story of an incomprehensible purchase connected to a refusal to acknowledge the conditions of commodity production and marketing. The caul is simultaneously fetishized (“overvalued” or valued symbolically—for why else buy a dried bit of skin?) and undervalued (it is not purchased for its supposed powers, but is sold for a fraction of its original price, just as the boy born with it has lost his social value at his father’s death). Thus, the purchase that frames the story is itself framed within a story of the mystification and denial of the commodity’s significance or origin, the denial of the property rights of the body’s owner, and the misappropriation of a fetish. Identification of a piece of skin with extraordinary powers—and with the person formerly embodied within it—is part of a long tradition of identifying detached body parts with the capacity to mediate between the material and affective or sacred worlds. This is most pronounced in the case of saints’ relics, but also applies to more secular body relics such as clothing worn next to the skin, locks of hair, hair jewelry (sometimes used in mourning, but often also as mementos of living loved ones), and the use of nail clippings, blood, hair, and so forth in folk remedies and enchantments. The commercialization of these relics is often decried by Victorians as grotesque, although there was quite a lively trade in such things. Saints’ relics are often cited indulgently by British writers as the picturesque but primitive peculiarity of Italian Catholic peasants, and as on a continuum with more exotic forms of fetishism. Britons were supposed to be too modern and rational to believe in such primitive nonsense. Still, secular body objects of the living might be commercialized by their association with real historical figures and other celebrities. Fiction of the period often treats these issues comically: Dickens’s beauty expert Miss Mowcher, who trims the Russian Prince’s nails, carries them with her to prove her own value, but also decries the society

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that values them as “humbug.” She also specifically identifies their value as objects desired by the rising middle classes: “The Prince’s nails do more for me in private families of the genteel sort, than all my talents put together. I always carry ‘em about. They’re the best introduction. If Miss Mowcher cuts the Prince’s nails, she must be all right. I give ’em away to the young ladies. They put ’em in albums, I believe. Ha! ha! ha! Upon my life, ‘the whole social system’ (as the men call it when they make speeches in Parliament) is a system of Prince’s nails” (David Copperfield 309). Of course, not only is this an absurd way to establish Mowcher’s value, but the nails’ claim to authenticity is intrinsically unreliable. They could be anyone’s nails. They are both fetishized and overvalued. They clearly derive their value neither from their authenticity nor from any actual use-value nor affective tie to the Prince (which would make them relics). When such objects are directly commodified objects from the dead, the narrative tends to be darker. In an 1852 article titled “Trading in Death,” Dickens criticizes the state funeral for the Duke of Wellington, decrying its tendency to commercialize funerals by making them occasions of public spectacle, encouraging the selling of vantage points and souvenirs. But he is most exasperated by the sale of “relics” advertised in newspapers, among which are several samples of the late duke’s hair, and objects he had touched or worn: “Lastly come the relics—precious remembrances worn next to the bereaved heart, like Hardy’s miniature of Nelson, and never to be wrested from the advertisers but with ready money” (“Trading” 6). As he wryly suggests, these “choice” items, “the value of which may be presumed to be considerably enhanced by the conclusive impossibility of its being doubted in the least degree by the most suspicious mind,” are likely to be spurious (7). Anthony Trollope’s story “The Relics of General Chasse” (1860) comically mocks the tendency to treat clothing as relics and the appetite of European tourists for such items. In it, the narrator and his traveling companion, a clergyman, stop to see the chambers of the general, which are a tourist attraction. The rotund clergyman is determined to show he can fit in the general’s leather uniform (a second skin) and changes into it. Farcically, the two men are trapped by the arrival of a group of British ladies, and the clergyman hides, having left his clothes in the place of those he is trying on. Determined to gain “relics”—specifically, to get enough fabric to make pincushions, reticules, and such out of the general’s clothing—the ladies snip the clothes to pieces, so that the poor minister is left with no breeches. As the narrator observes, “There are people who have a wonderful appetite for relics. A stone with which Washington had broken a window when a boy . . . a button that was on a coat of Napoleon’s . . . suchlike things are great trea-

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sures. And their most desirable characteristic is the ease with which they are attained. Any bullet or any button does the work. Faith alone is necessary” (Trollope). (It is somewhat striking that in both examples, it is persons associated with the Napoleonic Wars who exemplify those inspiring Britons’ desire for relics. Again, the Victorian fascination with the French Revolutionary period seems to express itself morbidly in these texts.) Like Dickens, Trollope mocks not only the intrinsic value of such objects, but the unlikely claim to authenticity as a marker of value as well. Relics raise the question of property. Who owns a relic? Trollope’s ladies might initially seem to have the same view as Dickens’s Gaffer Hexam, who refuses to associate with a character charged with robbery despite the fact that he himself routinely strips the dead bodies he hauls out of the river of valuables. He claims that one “couldn’t” rob a dead man: “ ‘Is it possible for a dead man to have money? What world does a dead man belong to? ‘Tother world. What world does money belong to? This world’ ” (Our Mutual Friend 4). Because the commercial domain and the sacred are separate, Gaffer maintains, there is no need to worry about crossing such boundaries: it is not possible. Still, Lizzie Hexam, the moral compass of the novel, is uncomfortable with Gaffer’s actions, and this tells us that although Gaffer may feel justified, he is in fact making a distinction between the properties (and property) of the living body as sacred and dead body as object to which Dickens does not wish us to adhere. For Gaffer, the value (and proper domain) of objects inheres in their use: the dead cannot use them, and so their right of property evaporates. Lizzie recognizes an affective value of objects associated with the dead, and perhaps also the property rights of the families affectively tied to the dead, to their fungible relics, such as money. The crisis for Trollope’s lady collectors comes when they are boasting of their spoils to another character, who asks the key question: “Did anybody sell them . . . or give them to you?” On receiving a negative response, she inquires, “to whom, I wonder, did the garments properly belong?” (Trollope). The relic hunters falteringly respond that they belonged to the general, but this moment of hesitation gives our narrator a chance to interpose in the conversation and clarify that they were in fact the property of a living person. In a panic over having stolen a gentleman’s trousers, the ladies flee. But the shift from the original question (To whom do these relics belong?) and answer (They are not relics and do indeed belong to a living person, who therefore has an indisputable right of property) dodges the larger question of what right anyone had to disturb items whose value derived from their identification with a specific dead individual. These were not just any used clothes that ended up in a shop, sold or given

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by the wearer or the wearer’s heirs, but relics of a specific person. And, of course, that is why they were a tourist attraction in the first place. Unlike Gaffer Hexam, Trollope’s ladies took possession precisely on the notion that the clothing could be identified as “belonging to,” that is, essentially connected with, the general. For Dickens, that great sentimental writer of death scenes, the human body could not be stripped of its individuality and related sacred status without violating the fundamental dignity of humanity and thus threatening the social order founded on the human-thing distinction. Trading on a particular person’s identity only made the commodification of relics more ghoulish. Still, in Dickens’s view, no body should ever become commodity. And yet, again and again in his novels, bodies do, framing the fundamental problems of exchange and incommensurability that are foundational to midcentury narratives.

The Human and the Animal: The Naked and the Nude There is something great in the moment when a man first strips himself of adventitious wrappages; and sees indeed that he is naked, and, as Swift has it, “a forked straddling animal with bandy legs”; yet also a Spirit, and unutterable Mystery of Mysteries. —Carlyle, Sartor Resartus 45

As we have seen, the body object as a repository of supernatural powers was commonly commented on by nineteenth-century European writers on fetishes in discussing “savage beliefs” in other cultures. Human skin was considered most potent; a common example familiar to Victorians would have been shrunken heads like those Queequeg sells in Melville’s Moby Dick (really shrunken head-skins), and often acquired as curios in Europe as well.20 As books were historically often thought to be powerful or magical objects in Europe, it should not surprise us to find that many valuable books were historically bound in human skin.21 As we shall see, the Revolution and human skin had a special relationship in the nineteenth-century imaginary. The skin was the divider between inner and outer that also constituted interiority, but it was also the questionable divider between human and not-human, whether that be commodity, as we have seen earlier, or the rest of the animal kingdom. Because the body is so insistently tied to conversations about human exceptionalism in this period, I want to take a brief detour here to discuss animality, and animal skins. If human flaying became a way to talk about the fragility of the human in its distinction from the world of things, then the surface of the body, with its distinct emotional and expressive capacities, was

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also what most distinguished human from beast. If the surface were the key distinction between human and other mammals, instead of some underlying and specially developed structure such as the opposable thumb, then the effacement of a few millimeters of surface could blur the boundaries of that distinction. Traditional fairy-tales such as “Catskin” or “Peau d’âne” were repurposed, and new fables, like Balzac’s 1831 La peau de chagrin,22 explored resonances between animal and human pelts. The narratives tend to share two foci: human exceptionalism in relation to the animal, and the ways that unique, perhaps sacred body objects inappropriately enter the marketplace. As Carlyle remarks several times in Sartor Resartus, Man is essentially a “naked” animal. Carlyle’s imaginary German philosopher, Diogenes Teufelsdrock, theorizes that the instinct to decorate and cover his nudity is the primal human urge, an axiom that nineteenth-century anthropologists and criminologists espoused without a hint of irony. More recently Jacques Derrida identifies “nakedness” as one of the salient properties of animals (as opposed to the nudity of humans) throughout philosophical history: for Western philosophers of at least the Enlightenment onward, animals are naked without knowing they are naked, and thus the concept of nudity is not applicable to them. Shame (or self-consciousness, as Darwin would have it) is not an animal property whereas the first mythical technology of Adam and Eve was fashioning dress, to cover their shame. The second important difference is in the animal’s lack of access to language—that is, the human arrogates to himself the right and ability to name things, and also to produce “autobiography” or language about the self. Animals do not own property; they are property. Likewise, animals do not have clothes; they are clothes. The animal, in its fur, is unself-consciously naked; the human, especially in its display of pubic “fleece,” is emphatically nude: as Derrida puts it, “Here we find ourselves already caught in a fleece, in the immense bushy enigma of body hair, of fur, coat, and skin, between Adam and Prom-Epimetheus” (The Animal 57). Derrida here cites the old opposition between impulse and prudence, desire and self-control. Plato narrates Epimetheus as the dim twin brother of Prometheus: the two Titans were in charge of distributing gifts to the newly created animals (in some versions, Prometheus created man, and Epimetheus made the animals). Epimetheus was to give man a positive gift, but he lacked foresight to plan, and humans were last in line. By the time humans arrived at the front, he had nothing to give, so his brother Prometheus made up the deficit with the stolen gift of fire from Apollo (for which Prometheus, as usual, paid a terrible price). The two twins together encompass both sides of human nature, the material and mental; as Plato has it, Epimetheus repre-

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sents materialist nature, in that bodies precede thought. Lucky humans—or unlucky, if one thinks from the Edenic perspective—have the Promethean forethought to know they are nude. (To be born with a caul or cap [in Spanish, a velo or veil] is to be born clothed. This certainly implies a remarkable share of prudence: hence, possibly, its luckiness.) The pubic fleece, however, returns us to the realm of the animal, of pelts, rather than veils. This problematic pubic fleece, as Derrida reads it, is always the woman’s, and as her pudor only emphasizes what it seeks to conceal, “the discourse [of philosophy] . . . never resists placing the woman and child on the side of the animal” (The Animal 57). The more the woman tries to clothe herself, the more nude she is; she would be better off naked, with only the animal fleece to protect her immodesty. The same logic aligns the animal with nature, innocence, goodness, and with “evil, cruelty, murderous savagery” (64). Derrida points out that the sacred function of the animal is to substitute for the “man” in sacrifice (The Animal 100 and passim), a function that woman has often, not coincidentally, been made to fill. Woman and her pubic fleece tend to be continually elevated, made nude (and depilated, as in Greek statuary), only to be vengefully returned to the category of the furry and naked, of nature and the animal, of the material that precedes thought. (Zola’s Nana comes forcefully to mind.) They are the scapegoats of history and philosophy: in some versions of the Epimetheus legend, Pandora is the first woman, and is given to Epimetheus as a kind of Trojan horse bearing the vengeance of Zeus. Epimetheus, of course, is too imprudent to turn down the enticing gift (and Prometheus, out of town, gets back too late to stop him).23 While idealists have largely assumed human exceptionalism and a special human relationship with a Creator or at least a transpersonal spirit or will, materialists have struggled more to make a clear distinction—while still mostly wanting to insist on one. Although Descartes is generally credited as the confident origin of a mechanized notion of the animal and its distinction from the human as a cognizant self, Derrida shows that, in fact, Descartes first frets at, and finally just black boxes, that question. He “objectifies” the human body as a “machine or a corpse” (Derrida, The Animal 72), so that he can identify that which exists as “the presence that presents itself to itself in the present, that is what excludes everything detachable constituted by life, the living body, animal life” (72). Then, in order to distinguish the sensorium that we share with animals from the human, Descartes uses the extraordinary image of the human body stripped bare as the animal analogue. Briefly, this idea of nudity seems to work as animal (nature is to animal as culture/dress is to human.) But this breaks down immediately. Essentially, Descartes is

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unable to distinguish the animal body from the human, and thus, the animal can only be distinguished as something that lacks the “thinking substance” that is by definition the human (76). The argument remains circular. Derrida concludes that, both through the idealist Kant and the materialist Descartes, Western thought has continued a tradition of sacrificing engagement with the animal to preserve an idea of the human: “It is the taboo of this animality that is both forbidden and held in respect, with the ambivalence of religious panic that precisely brands the animal as totem and taboo” (103). The human and animal distinction is, for the thinkers of this period, quite related to the self-object or individual-commodity distinction. The human-I names, and seizes, consumes or exchanges, the animal-it. When does the human become (or remain, or revert to) the animal? In fact, one might argue that whereas the nudity of the animal is in its fleece, its fur, it is sexualized when it is made into culture and commodified: that is, when the animal is skinned, and becomes a veil or caul for human use. The pelt of the animal becomes the sexualized substitute for animal nakedness over the woman’s actual nudity. In turn, the human who loses his skin loses his nudity; there is nothing sexually or aesthetically attractive about the body under the sexualized skin to nineteenth-century observers, only a naked material, animal reality. In being flayed, the human becomes animal, just as in flaying a human, the human flayer becomes barbarous, uncultured, bestial in dehumanizing—making an animal of—another human. Both are thus stripped naked. But the preservation and repurposing of animal skin, its investment with sacred meaning, is another category violation that calls into question the human-animal divide. The nineteenth century continued the former period’s ambivalence about the human-animal divide, as it did the scientific and taxonomic problems of speciation, and the question of racial and societal difference. As is well known, it tended to project the question of racial difference on an evolutionary narrative, in which non-Western cultures were read as both other and earlier than the West: savage, undeveloped forms from a prior point on the evolutionary timeline. (Nowhere was the question of race foregrounded as insistently as in the New World, facing its history and present of slavery and native dispossession.) Animals became, like the savage, emblems of natural vitality, of innocence or cruelty, of a prior state of humanity (variously blessed or fallen), and of the unregenerate qualities inadequately hidden within supposedly civilized humanity. In her recent book on the Victorian relationship with wild animal skins, Ann Colley observes, “For the Victorians, skin was more than merely life’s envelope; it figuratively conveyed life itself. . . . It exhaled life” (97). The Victorian hunter who brought home a tiger

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skin or the viewer who saw and perhaps touched one in a public collection often felt they were making contact with a wild spirit, and possibly their own ancestral self. As the caul of a human can be given mystical meaning, the more everyday object that is the skin of an animal dried and treated can be imaginatively imbued with the power to mediate between the sacred and the profane. Honoré de Balzac’s La peau de chagrin (English: The Magic Skin or The Wild Ass’s Skin), published in 1831, tells the story of a despairing young man (whose name, readers learn midway through, is Raphael), who whiles away time in an old curiosity shop waiting for nightfall so he may drown himself in the Seine. He views a series of pagan and Christian objects until he is finally shown the prize of the Mephistophelian shopkeeper: a Christ of Raphael (de Urbino). He is moved by the painting: “This picture breathed the spirit of prayer, enjoined forgiveness, overcame self, caused sleeping powers of good to waken” (Balzac, Wild Ass’s Skin 27). But when the shopkeeper mentions coolly, and perhaps inconsequently, that he “covered the surface of that picture with gold pieces” (ai couvert cette toile de pièces d’or, dit froidement le marchand) (27), apropos of nothing in particular, the as-yet still unnamed or unknown youth (l’inconnu) is distracted from his namesake’s painting (figuratively eclipsed, defaced by gold), exclaiming, “And now for death!” (27). At that point, the shopkeeper asks him to turn around and shows him, opposite Raphael’s Christ, a piece of wild ass’s skin (that of the famously untamable onager) worked with mystical symbols—the sign of Solomon and an inscription in Sanskrit—that will fulfill his wishes. But for each wish granted, the inscription explains, the skin shrinks, and by the amount of shrinkage, indicates how much of the man’s life has been consumed. The mysterious seller warns him: “ ‘There are To Will and To have your Will, both together,’ he pointed to the bit of shagreen; ‘there are your social ideas, your immoderate desires, your excesses, your pleasures that end in death, your sorrows that quicken the pace of life, for pain is perhaps but a violent pleasure. . . . And what is folly but a riotous expenditure of Will or Power?’ ” (34). (The seller, often seen as a figure of wisdom and moderation, later appears as a caricatured figure, in love with a young cocotte, intent on a life of folly himself—a victim to Raphael’s wish upon departing the shop that “you may fall in love with an opera-dancer. You would understand the pleasures of intemperance then” [36].) Raphael rejects all cautions, and exclaims, “ ‘a life of riotous excess for me!’ . . . pouncing upon the piece of shagreen” (35). The skin, before he takes it, is almost as “rigid as iron.” But upon accepting the skin’s bargain, “he did not even notice the unexpected flexibility of the piece of shagreen, which coiled itself up, pliant as a glove in his excited fingers, till

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it would go into the pocket of his coat, where he mechanically thrust it” (36). The skin becomes a second skin, a glove or veil, a caul or shroud. He who wears the skin of an ass, however, displays the tastes of an ass. Emmanuel Swedenborg, a strong influence on Balzac, believed that as skin was associated with the outer reality, skin spirits or “sirens” could distract and undermine human spirituality by attracting them to purely sensual pleasures or meaningless outer qualities such as wealth and social standing. Balzac’s protagonist overvalues such things in part because of his poverty. Before the narrative begins, Raphael had spent three years in scholarship, writing a “ ‘Theory of the Will.’ . . . for which I studied Oriental languages, physiology and anatomy . . . [to] complete the task begun by Mesmer, Lavater, Gall, and Bichat, and open up new paths in science” (Balzac, Wild Ass’s Skin 94). But with the powers of the skin to grant his desires, he forgets all his scholarship (and its lessons), and immediately wishes for banquets, women, wine, and sensual pleasure. Once brought by the dramatic shrinkage of the pelt to understand the costs of these pleasures, however, he panics. Desperate to survive, he tries to wish for nothing, but inevitably fails. He realizes, once it is too late, that “possession of power, no matter how enormous, did not bring with it the knowledge how to use it. The sceptre is a plaything for a child, an axe for a Richelieu, and for a Napoleon a lever by which to move the world. . . . Raphael had had everything in his power, and he had done nothing” (263). Free will without wisdom can lead only to sin and folly. The skin that “curled” around him shrinks, and each desire fulfilled flays it, and him, away, bit by bit. Before he finds the skin, he has been caught between two women, Foedora, the cold society woman whom he worships, and a virtuous poor girl, Pauline, whom he tutors. He compares her to “the heroine of the fable of Peau-d’Ane [the Donkey’s Skin]” (97). The Donkey’s Skin (first published by Charles Perrault in 1694)—a tale of a princess desired in marriage by her own father, who flees him disguised in the skin of a donkey—is a version of Cinderella. She is later rescued by a prince who falls in love with her, having seen her out of disguise. But in Balzac’s story, even though Raphael himself compares her to the fairy-tale heroine, he is unable to see Pauline’s value until he has wished away all but two months of his life. Then he finds Pauline again, now grown rich. In delight, they marry. He now has more reason than ever to prolong his life. Too late—Raphael had been unable to see the value of Pauline below the peau d’âne of her poverty, and then chose an actual ass’s skin over human connection (and implicitly, in turning away from the painting, over Christ). When the skin shrinks away, there is nothing beneath it: the man is himself eroded away. He saw only the animal materiality of Pauline’s existence, rather than the value of her spirit, and so loses everything.

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The Wild Ass’s Skin is finally about the inevitability of death and the cost of human free will. Humans are made human by the exercise of freedom, but, as Hegel suggests, every positive investment of will also represents a limitation of freedom itself.24 The dying Raphael consults various experts to increase the size of the skin, including various materialist scientists and doctors (who are wonderful send-ups of the noted scientists of Balzac’s day). But the skin resists the action of the chemist, the mathematician, and the engineer. As for the wasting of the vital force, it is a doctor whom Raphael consults who comes closest to at least identifying the process: “the shriveling faculty of the skin is a fact inexplicable, and yet quite natural, which, ever since the world began, has been the despair of medicine and of pretty women” (Balzac, Wild Ass’s Skin 241). Even though tissues replicate themselves, skin—and indeed the whole body—ages and dies. The exercise of the will, untrammeled by the constraints of wisdom, quickly consumes rather than slowly matures the self. (Even the merchant who has so wisely conserved his energy has aged.) It was this conundrum that led Charles Bell to consider that aging was a sign from God intended to be deciphered: “An opinion prevails, that the form and lineaments of old age are a consequence of the deterioration of the material of our frame. . . . It is not so, the material of the frame is ever the same: years affect it not; but infancy, youth, maturity and old age, have their appropriate outward characters,” each to be understood and interpreted as signs, and therefore each with their own beauties (Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression 1844, 113). The divinely designed surface, for Bell, itself signifies as do all physical realities, and age is thus not an erosion of the skin, but a transformation toward greater meaning. For the materialist of Balzac’s caricature, however, the exercise of our own vitality leads only closer to death: moderation can extend life, but one cannot “opt out” of the expenditure of vitality, no matter how Raphael tries to avoid desire. The onager pelt’s deadly gift is to execute all of the owner’s will, so that every stray internal desire expends all the energy associated with the accomplishment of it in fact and deed: the inner and imagined is no longer divided from the outer and material reality. A bit like Dorian Gray’s portrait, which shows the wrinkles of his body’s experiences, the shrinkage of the shagreen chronicles the loss of Raphael’s vital force until “it was as tiny and as fragile as a periwinkle petal” (Wild Ass’s Skin 282). Human free will and awareness mated to animal desires are the human tragedy and the human condition: an animal driven to exact an excess of pleasures with full awareness of its mortal consequences. A human controlled by his animal desires becomes une âne, a word meaning both an animal, the ass, and a human fool. The skin becomes both the will and the body that Raphael hopes to bridle: “ ‘I shall keep my ass

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well in hand ( Je vais tenir mon âne en bride),’ cried he” (221).25 But at that point, the narrator makes an uncharacteristic narrative intrusion, following Raphael’s resolution with a wry counterpoint: “Sterne had said before his day, ‘Let us take care of our ass (Ménageons notre âne), if we wish to live to old age.’ But, he adds, ‘it is such a fantastic brute! (Mais la bête est si fantasque!)’ ” (221). The human beast mates brutal drives to the free will, which pursues them to the detriment of survival itself. The skin, of course, is Raphael’s skin. It is his property, and in becoming so it is also properly himself. Representing and incarnating his “Will,” it becomes a kind of tool, as well as a visible representation of an intangible force. But, throughout, Balzac also emphasizes the scene of the transaction: if the paradigmatic Faustian scene for Goethe is in a scientist’s study, for Balzac it is a shop. But the transaction itself is a parody of commercial exchange. Though the skin becomes Raphael’s possession in the shop, there is no exchange of money. The merchant, though devilish, does not benefit from the transaction, and the actual bargain is made with the skin itself, which is itself an embodiment of pure consumption: desire and fulfillment conjoined. It is thus no mere commodity, but the externalization and fetish of consumption itself—and proves it by rapidly taking possession of its owner. In Hegel’s formulation, the possession that is grasped by the hand becomes an extension of the self that transforms it. But in Raphael’s case, the shagreen curls itself around Raphael’s hand and appropriates it. As the will of the shagreen and Raphael’s will—and thus personhood—become identical, they are simultaneously consumed by Raphael’s exercise of that will. The scene of the exchange both repeatedly references and refuses monetary exchange. What might have saved Raphael from the ruthlessly deterministic logic of the skin—the Christ represented by his namesake—is likewise priceless. The merchant is initially described as looking like Gerard Dow’s (Gerrit Dou’s) painting The Money Changer (Balzac, Wild Ass’s Skin 25). But when he offers the magic skin, he offers it as a substitute for money that is not money: “Without compelling you to entreat me, without making you blush for it, and without giving you so much as a French centime, a para from the Levant, a German heller, a Russian kopeck, a Scottish farthing, a single obolus or sestertius from the ancient world, or one piastre from the new, without offering you anything whatever in gold, silver, or copper, notes or drafts, I will make you richer, more powerful, and of more consequence than a constitutional king” (29). The strange merchant, despite his repeated references to various forms of money, refuses to profit from the basic terms of exchange; he has created desire in Raphael for the object he is showing, but he refuses to profit monetarily from a sale. The fatal transaction both

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mimics and refuses commerce, and Raphael’s failure to acknowledge that everything has a cost—so clearly inscribed on the skin—dramatically cuts short his life. In the face of Raphael’s ardent Epimethean desire, the merchant offers fair warning. He claims to have survived for a hundred years by following a path of “moderation” between the “two instinctive processes [by which] man exhausts the springs of life within him. Two verbs cover all the forms which these two causes of death may take—To Will and To have your Will (Vouloir et Pouvoir). . . . To Will consumes us, and To have our Will destroys us, but To Know steeps our feeble organisms in perpetual calm” (Balzac, Wild Ass’s Skin 33).26 The Promethean merchant claims that in him “Thought has destroyed Will, so that Power is relegated to the ordinary functions of my economy. In a word, it is not in the heart which can be broken, or in the senses that become deadened, but it is in the brain that cannot waste away and survives everything else, that I have set my life” (33).27 This intellectualized detachment has enabled him to move freely in many cultures, participating in all commercially. But these commercial transactions are all defined in problematic terms that highlight the merchant’s refusal of market terms: “I have lent a Chinaman money, taking his father’s corpse as a pledge, slept in an Arab’s tent on the security of his bare word, signed contracts in every capital of Europe, and left my gold without hesitation in savage wigwams. I have attained everything, because I have known how to despise all things” (Balzac, Wild Ass’s Skin 33). Though he has signed contracts “all over Europe” (33), he has traded in things that would be valueless or even obscene by European standards: the word of a nomad, the trade goods of American Indians, and even a corpse. These have value in their own cultural contexts but no exchange value; the merchant is thus the ultimate relativist, engaging in dealings for objects whose intrinsic value he disdains, simply for the sake of trading itself. As the skin represents desire and its satisfaction, the merchant represents a perverse parody of the market middle-man, refusing desire for any object, in favor of pure exchange. Similarly, the object he parts with in the Quai Voltaire is a deadly one that, the merchant is clear, no one with any sense would take. The merchant who deals in commodities, but who devalues physical possession of any object, poses abstract knowledge as the goal and the way to remain outside the circuit of consumption. He defines this as a form of seeing, without touching. To know is to see, and to see is to possess without the draining risk of actual possession: “My one ambition has been to see. Is not Sight in a manner Insight? And to have knowledge or insight, is not that to have instinctive possession? To be able to discover

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the very substance of fact and to unite its essence to our essence? Of material possession what abides with you but an idea?”(Balzac, Wild Ass’s Skin 33).28 Emotional experiences for him are “ideas, which I transmute into waking dreams; I express and transpose instead of feeling them; instead of permitting them to prey upon my life, . . . I divert myself with them as if they were romances which I could read by the power of vision within me” (33). This preserves his “robust health; and as my mind is endowed with all the force that I have not wasted, this head of mine is even better furnished than my galleries. The true millions lie here, he said, striking his forehead” (34). It is instructive to consider Balzac’s merchant in the light of this tension between two models of commerce: that is, one that sees the exchange of vital force for power as part of human freedom and one that positions freedom as the refusal to engage in exchange. Schopenhauer, who considered the Terror an abomination and confirmation of the pointlessness of history, advocated precisely (and rather maliciously) the “denial of the will to live”— ascetic disconnection—as a form of freedom, and Balzac’s merchant is exemplary of his views. In exploring the concept of the Will and Willing (Volonté, Vouloir), Balzac positions the merchant who wills (here, desires) nothing, refuses to choose, and thus values nothing against the boy who overinvests his will—who overvalues or fetishizes—mistaken objects. Yet, though Balzac is strongly invested in Schopenhauer, it is not clear that the merchant is positioned as the superior choice. More precisely, the merchant is presented as self-deluded insofar as he thinks his system is truly a superior alternative, and as evil to the extent to which he cynically promotes Raphael’s suicidal tendencies by continuing to trade in objects that he believes to be intrinsically valueless. Free will can be actuated only by participation in the world, and that involves choosing an object. (When the merchant, cursed by Raphael’s wish, is later drawn into a liaison with the opera dancer, he insists that he is happy.) Balzac is not a Hegelian, but a Schopenhauerian pessimist: will trumps reason, and striving/desire, which is never satisfied, is fundamental to humanity. Hegel would consider the merchant’s separation of intellect and “brain” from the will as an error; the merchant is essentially mistaken in imagining that he is fully alive. But if we see the merchant as an example of negative freedom, refusing the content of any object and investing only in the symbol system of exchange, we see also that the tenets of the merchant, put into operation, are utterly destructive of any specific value. Both the young man and the old are exemplary of the negative aspect of will then, one driven by mere animal appetites and one by pure intellect. One makes a beast of himself, and the other a nullity.

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Balzac is particularly interested in the distinction—or lack thereof—between the human and nonhuman continuum of being and vital force, a permutation of will. In his introduction, written in 1842, to his magnum opus, The Human Comedy, he writes, “The idea originated in a comparison between Humanity and Animality” (Cette idée vint d’une comparaison entre l’Humanité et l’Animalité) (“Introduction” xli). He goes on to clarify that this interest arises out of comparative anatomy and Cuvier’s insight that animals and humans share similar underlying structures.29 In all these authors, Balzac finds a “Unity of Plan”: “There is but one Animal. The Creator works on a single model for every organized being” (xlii). In short, Balzac’s idealist materialism sees man as structurally continuous with animals, because designed so by the Creator. Human exceptionalism resides in our consciousness of our condition subject to the laws of the material world and our ability to make decisions about how to obey those laws, not in an exemption from them. Of the story itself, the first published of the three tales he calls Philosophical Studies (the others being Louis Lambert and Seraphita), Balzac said, “ ‘The Magic Skin’ . . . to some extent forms a link between the Philosophical Studies and Studies of Manners, by a work of almost Oriental fancy, in which life itself is shown in a mortal struggle with the very element of all passion” (“Introduction” liv). As suggested by his comparison of Swedenborg to Bichat, Balzac’s vitalism is mediated by the later physiologist, who identified “sensibility and contractility” as the properties that were distinctive to living tissues.30 Balzac poetically externalizes the diminution of vital force based on willed acts of the animal as an organic contraction of tissue. In affirming the vitalism that links all animal life as both spiritual and physical, Balzac comments both on the conventionally understood animal nature of man as lustful and sinful, and on the organic continuity of man with the animal world. The (tanned, inscribed) onager skin is an emblem of both free will and animality, and so serves as a symbol of the vital force of man. But finally, the end will be the same for both men in any case: all men are mortal. No one escapes the loss of vital force, and in that sense, we are all always already subject to the contract inscribed on the onager’s skin. The story mediates between the form of fable or parable and the more realist form (stories of “manners”); one way in which it does so is by posing its magical story against explicit references to scientific materialists who fail in attempts to account for the skin’s powers.31 The Magic Skin is a fable, and so not fully subject to the realist logic by which the primitive object is devalued as a fetish in post-Enlightenment Europe: the skin here really is a magical object, and the characters’ various scientific attempts to explain it parody realist narrative. The other side of

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this logic is the prevalence of stories of primitive fetishes that have power precisely because they are from exotic cultures conceived as linked to the past and its vital connection to spiritual forces. Balzac’s story participates in this process when it identifies the skin with an Oriental origin, and the merchant says he acquired it from a “Brahmin” (Wild Ass’s Skin 36) (though it should be said that his is a period that idealizes Oriental culture more than fearing it as the source of imperial backlash, as in later tales). Later examples of imperial gothic in Britain (which I lack space to explore here) often use the idea of a magical object, often a body object, from the past (or exotic present), having special powers that wreak havoc in modern Britain (e.g., Richard Marsh, The Joss [1896];32 W. W. Jacobs, “The Monkey’s Paw” [1902]). In this sense, the animal body object is often presented as the fetish of a more primitive culture, but also as an object that, by entering circulation inappropriately through commerce in a “civilized” society, unleashes magical, irrational powers among those ill-equipped to manage them.33 Too far from an acknowledgment of either their own animality or spirituality, these metropolitan sophisticates are easy prey for forces whose power they have failed to appreciate. Very often, these stories emerge around scenes of purchase. In these tales, an animal body object takes on dangerous magical properties because there has been some sort of category violation between the allied dualisms of the human and the animal, the civilized and primitive, and/or the sacred and profane.

The French Revolution, or the Flayer Flayed What then is this Thing, called La Révolution, which, like an Angel of Death, hangs over France, noyading, fusillading, fighting, gun-boring, tanning human skins? —Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution (1837)

Far more ghoulish, however, than magical animal fetishes or human “relics” are the body objects that imply the violent death of the individual associated with them, and the violation of the corpse. The British Victorian fascination with tales of flaying emerges on several occasions (some of which will be deferred for discussion to the next chapter). For the authors of these tales, it is historically an exotic practice associated with tyranny (in the Orient) or savagery (in the widely read History of Mexico by Hubert Howe Bancroft), but, most importantly, recently, and closely of all, with the terrors of political unrest during the French Revolution. Carlyle’s discussion of the latter is evocative:

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Perruques blondes: O Reader, they are made from the Heads of Guil­ lotined women! The locks of a Duchess, in this way, may come to cover the scalp of a Cordwainer; her blonde German Frankism his black Gaelic poll, if it be bald. Or they may be worn affectionately, as relics; rendering one suspect? . . . Citizens use them, not without mockery; of a rather cannibal sort. Still deeper into one’s heart goes that Tannery at Meudon; not mentioned among the other miracles of tanning! “At Meudon,” says Montgaillard with considerable calmness, “there was a Tannery of Human Skins; such of the Guillotined as seemed worth flaying: of which perfectly good wash-leather was made”: for breeches, and other uses. The skin of the men, he remarks, was superior in toughness (consistance) and quality to shamoy; that of women was good for almost nothing, being so soft in texture!—History looking back over Cannibalism, through Purchas’s Pilgrims and all early and late Records, will perhaps find no terrestrial Cannibalism of a sort on the whole so detestable. It is a manufactured, soft-feeling, quietly elegant sort; a sort perfide! Alas then, is man’s civilization only a wrappage, through which the savage nature of him can still burst, infernal as ever? Nature still makes him; and has an Infernal in her as well as a Celestial. (French Revolution 1837, 3: 712) The proximity of these passages suggests that even the wigs are made not only with hair, but with scalps intact. Here, civilization is itself a skin—or veil—and one that may be shed at any time to show the savagery beneath. We begin with the cruelty of the divine toward the human, move toward the cruelty of the human to the animal, and then finally to the cruelty of the human that appropriates the animal’s savagery. And Natural Man is hellish, as well as divine; the tanned human skin, by the nature of its existence as an end product of a posthumous process, refers us to a past moment, a past trauma. The tanned skins of the French Revolution offer a quick referent for a specific historical event, a specific foundational trauma of modern Europe. But they also encyst a notion of pastness more generally, operating as a sign of the corrective process of writing history to understand, to correct, to allow transcendence of the past: if we understand, promises the therapeutic retelling, we can put all that behind us. Carlyle proposes to answer the question, more pressing than causes or consequences, of essence: “What then is this Thing, called La Révolution . . . tanning human skins?” (French Revolution 1837, 3: 713). Carlyle was not alone in his belief that the Revolutionaries flayed, tanned, and wore human skins.

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French post-Revolutionary histories are full of such rumors, if less obsessed with those specific atrocities than the British. Jim Chevalier’s useful compendium of such references in French journalism and history provides numerous examples; an eyewitness who was a teenager during the events at La Vendée said that some shot by the Republican army “were skinned at the midpoint of the body, because the skin was cut below the belt, then along the thighs until the ankle . . . so that, after its removal, the pants were partly formed; all that remained to do was to tan and to sew”—unlikely unless the Republican army was peopled with very tiny men (Chevalier n.p.). Chevalier quotes Cretineau-Joly in the Histoire de la Vendee militaire (1881) as saying that “the republican General Beysier was the first to wear this ‘awful trophy,’ but that the fashion caught on there and in Nantes.” Supposedly an army surgeon skinned villagers at Ponts-de-Cé and “Tried to force a local tanner to prepare them. . . . someone—apparently under constraint—finally did so. The report of the Popular Society of Angers to the Convention makes it clear that this was done unofficially: ‘These cannibals have pushed barbarity to the point of choosing, among these poor people, a hundred of the best looking, who were skinned and their skins tanned! Men who called themselves patriots dressed themselves in this awful garment!’ ” (qtd. in Chevalier). Cretineau-Joly (Histoire de la Vendee militaire) also notes that the Commission of Haut-Rhin sentenced “Morel, surgeon, for having skinned a guillotined person to make himself pants, the tanner who tanned the skin and the tailor who kept it in his shop, showing it to all comers” (qtd. in Chevalier). And, of course, stories abound of rejected lovers revenging themselves by possessing the skins of their desired ones. The existence of a human tannery at Meudon was rumored throughout France at the time of the Revolution and eagerly retailed afterward by historians. Carlyle notes that “breeches, of human skin” were indeed made in Meudon (Critical and Miscellaneous Essays 506). A French source titled “Souvenirs of the Terror” offers a firsthand account, not of the tannery itself, but of the belief in it: “It was whispered that some [members of the Convention] had men’s skins from the tannery of human leather at Meudon. . . . I neither affirm nor deny this. But . . . everybody then believed it. . . . in Meudon above all no one doubted it” (Chevalier). The speaker specifies that the leather was thought to be made into trousers. These macabre fantasies of dominance probably have to do with proximity to the genitals and to the buttocks; those tagged as “sans-culottes” vehemently compensating for this obscenity by making even more obscene culottes of the dead (see fig. 5.1). But did these fantasies originate in rejection of the rebels or as an aggressive identification with them?

Figure 5.1.  French Officer’s Leg Skin (1793). French officer’s skin from the Battle of Breda, 1793. This skin was reportedly tanned by a local man [Mr. Lysing], and was given to the College in 1834 by a Fellow who acquired it in Breda. @LGN Illustration courtesy of The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh.

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Overall, the French vision of the Revolution seems to have focused less on the defacement of the skin than on the much more iconic and frequent phenomenon of the severed head (and to a lesser extent, rumors of cannibalism). The British, however, seem less fascinated by this—perhaps because beheadings were not unknown in Britain and therefore not perceived as uniquely French—than they are by the probably apocryphal flayings associated with the urban legends of the Terror. The violation of social cohesion that was the Terror is embodied and equated to the category violation of making human bodies into things. For Britons, the Terror was at least in part defined by flaying, the barbarous counterpart to the supposedly painless, modern, and industrial operations of the guillotine. Flaying the human, highlighting the human’s status as animal and nonanimal, as both vulnerable body and bestial predator (“man is a wolf to man”), sets off an oscillation between the status of the body—organs, muscles, and brain—in pain and the sensing organ of the skin, between self as animal depth and human surface. The body is stripped of its face, identity, and capacity for expression in its greatest moment of suffering. For an objectively brief but phenomenally endless time, the human self resides in both places, yet cannot be complete in either. In the moment of greatest expression and sensation, flaying deprives the body of the instrument of either, and makes of it a veil for another. How can the resulting object not be animated with the intelligence of its origin and desire for revenge? He who wears the skin of another seeks to humiliate and control the other beyond death. But what of the other function of human skin as potentially persistent postmortem object? Carlyle wonders about such motivations—do the Revolutionaries mock the dead or do homage to them? “Perruques blondes . . . made from the Heads of Guillotined women! . . . they may be worn affectionately, as relics; rendering one suspect? . . . Citizens use them, not without mockery; of a rather cannibal sort” (French Revolution 1837, 3: 712). Who is being mocked here? Hamlet addresses poor Yorick’s skull fondly, disparagingly, sadly—all human bodies are to be both honored and tossed aside, in the tradition of homage to death’s ability to level all difference. The relic can be trophy, homage, and memento mori, a reminder of love lost and war won, and repository of magical powers. Above all, it is a vehicle for the memory of the possessor rather than the original owner, and is thus ever ambiguous. Still, even mad Prince Hamlet never sets out to wear poor Yorick’s skull as a hat. And that is one of the most disturbing things about the Tannery and its products: the conversion of the skins not into relics, fetishes, or even just ghastly trophies—which would at least acknowledge and preserve their exceptionalism—but into objects of use, commodities. A very special shirt,

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but still, a shirt, to be worn—or trousers, wigs, even oil or phosphoric acid. These repurposings of flesh violate the sacred boundary that divides the human from the commodity world of “things.” In so violating the dead, the flayer becomes less than human; and further, in putting the dead into circulation as commodities, the entire economy and all participants in it come to be so tainted. Skinning is associated with the savage and animal, and with the bestial in European human beings epitomized by the Terror. In British literature, the flayed skin can stand for all of these associations with the past, and with the persistence of the past in the present, with cruelty, atavism, and decadence. On the one hand, such skins promise to tell us something about history, about human savagery, while on the other, their meaning is obscure. They are objects that speak to us, but we cannot understand; even so recently as the Revolution, humans entered a zone of savagery that made them speak in unknown tongues. Like maenads, their actions can only be witnessed, not understood. Carlyle leaves his readers, explaining that he has been for us, as guide to understanding the events of the period, merely a “Voice. Yet was our relation a kind of sacred one! . . . Man, by the nature of him, is an incarnated Word” (French Revolution 1837, 3: 775). But elsewhere, in describing the Revolution at its height, he says, “no man can explain himself ” (607). Both of these statements are true for Carlyle, and equally central to his story—which must both be told and not understood. The state of reaction that defines events like the Revolution in “world-historical” progress is resistant to everyday language. In the Dionysian “Delirium” that gripped the nation, the eternal no, the “individual self is lost”: though his “cloak seems to hold the same man, the man himself is not there” (607). This state, in which a man seems to be cloaked in his ordinary skin, but has actually lost the boundaries of his individual self, is a “wonderful, tragical predicament;—such as human language, unused to deal with these things . . . struggles to shadow out in figures. . . . endless Necessity environing Freewill!” (607–8). German idealist philosophers of history themselves obsessively retold the story of the French Revolution. The historian of philosophy Rebecca Comay argues that Germany’s sense of itself as a modern country was elaborated at least in part through its identification with France, and the simultaneous distancing of Germany from the Terror; Germans saw themselves as a people who had been through their revolution in the Protestant Reformation and so could achieve the modernity of France without the carnage of the French Revolution. Comay argues that it was Hegel alone who understood the stakes of this emplotment of the Terror in Germany’s own self-congratulatory narratives. Although Hegel is often charged with being such a fan of the Revo-

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lution that he simply managed to ignore the unpleasantness of the Revolutionaries, Comay shows his serious metacritical engagement not only with the French historical experience, but with Germany’s denial of modernity’s costs. Comay is more interested in German philosophy than in how Hegel was taken up elsewhere, but Hegel continued to be important for the British Romantic reading of the Terror and its aftermath. For our purposes, it is worth examining Hegel’s reading of the Revolution as an expression of human freedom at some length, both because Carlyle took up these ideas fairly directly, and because his ideas about the relation of freedom to property and the body are suggestive of the stakes of body objects related to traumatic historical events. In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel identifies the first, universal phase of the will with “the element of pure indeterminateness, i.e., the pure doubling of the I back in thought upon itself ” (§5, p. xxxi). In this first movement, the will does not invest itself in any particular thing but plays in “the limitless infinitude of absolute abstraction, or universality, the pure thought of itself ” (§5, p. xxxi). Hegel is careful to clarify that thought and the will are not separate. When the will refuses to commit to a specific content, rejecting form as a “limit” on its freedom, this is in fact a form of its “self-direction . . . and is by imaginative thinking insisted upon as of itself freedom. It is the negative side of the will, or freedom as apprehended by the understanding. This freedom is that of the void” (§5, note, p. xxxii). Hegel identifies it with Hindu mysticism and the “fanaticism of pure contemplation” (§5, note, p. xxxii); however, he also clarifies that when this form of the will becomes “actual it assumes both in politics and religion the form of a fanaticism, which would destroy the established social order, remove all individuals suspected of desiring any kind of order, and demolish any organisation which then sought to rise out of the ruins [as] only in devastation does the negative will feel that it has reality” (§5, note, p. xxxii). Despite its supposed intention to bring positive change, “such as universal equality or universal religious life,” it in fact is inherently opposed to such an outcome, as that would impose a limit and a system. This “negative freedom is actuated by a mere solitary idea, whose realisation is nothing but the fury of desolation” (§5, note, p xxxii). Its expression is unique to humans, as opposed to animals, and expresses itself in acts of destruction such as individual suicide or collective fanaticism: Of this nature was the terrible epoch of the French Revolution, by which all distinctions in talent and authority were to have been superseded. In this time of upheaval and commotion any specific thing was intolerable. Fanaticism wills an abstraction and not an articulate asso-

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ciation. It finds all distinctions antagonistic to its indefiniteness, and supersedes them. Hence in the French Revolution the people abolished the institutions which they themselves had set up, since every institution is inimical to the abstract self-consciousness of equality. (§5, note, p. xxxiii) Despite Hegel’s early fascination with the French Revolution, he came to evaluate its aftermath not only as an important world event but as a necessary phase of pure destructiveness. Only when this negative freedom is rejected can the will “transition” to a definite aim, and thus, “Through this establishment of itself as a definite thing the I becomes a reality. This is the absolute element of the finitude or specialisation of the I” (§6, p. xxxiii). The will as a whole combines these two phases (universality oscillating with particularity doubled in on itself ), and in this consists the individual. The Terror withdrew human will from its cultural instruments. But it also was a period in which human beings seized each other and invested their will illegitimately in the bodies of others, denying their humanity in so doing, making property of the bodies of others. (Perhaps this is why Hegel takes up his analysis of the Terror in introducing the treatise most devoted to legal concepts of rights.) Carlyle takes up this aspect of the Terror, dwelling on the perversity and violence of the event, rather than the long durée of the world-historical narrative. The flayed human skin, as an object inalienable from a particular individual, stands as a radical denial and abrogation of the freedom that for Hegel defines the human. It illustrates an absolute and permanent investment of another’s will in the very body of the flayed individual, in perpetuity, beyond death. It implies not only the ultimate act of possession—the killing of a person like an animal, their conversion into an alienated article of use—but the ongoing humiliation of the person’s memory by the wearer.

Souvenirs of Terror? The Skin of the Marquis Carlyle’s half-horrified, half-rapturous (in a Dionysian sense) recursion to the Tannery of Meudon suggests the seductive stakes of the Terror for other nations. The Terror is a singular event, unimaginable, unrepeatable, and yet one threatening an eternal return—especially in the hungry 1840s, or the revolutionary 1860s. The pastness of the flayed skin, its use as a marker both of a past epoch and of a recent one, an incomprehensibly savage moment within modernity, brings me to the last of the terms I introduced earlier that I want to invoke regarding the body object: the souvenir as a memento

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not of travel but of the past. Much recent criticism has focused on the representation and impact of modernity on sensation fiction. But, perhaps in part because of the genre’s strong focus on the present, the past is always simultaneously invoked as shadowing the modern in these tales. Often it is the recent and personal past—an indiscreet first marriage or an inheritance not quite legitimately acquired. But just as often, the community’s past plays an important role: both the larger historical past and the deeper time of the evolutionary past. Against the play of a modernity that dissolves differences of time and space in the high speeds of the modern railway and the near-instant communication of the telegraph was posed the modern-day survival of  barbarism or (by the 1870s) recurrence of atavism. We have up until this point engaged representations of the history itself, in Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities and Carlyle’s historical epic. But what of the survival of objects from the Revolution in the fictive present of the mid-nineteenth century? The sensation novel, as a late midcentury form that uses a domestic and quotidian setting to heighten the effect of its narratives of the unspeakable, hidden, and traumatic, creates a particular space for the past as an ever present, resurging chthonic element that disrupts conventional language. As a realist form that focuses on physiological reaction, on “making the skin crawl,” it offers a particularly resonant structure for the exploration of the meanings of suffering and skin. Nicholas Daly has noted the importance of the railway, Victorian machine culture, and the nervous reaction of the body in sensation discourse, and remarks both the centrality and the vague menace of the new “punctual subject” shaped by railway time (50). Characters like Fosco and Lady Audley represent this new punctuality, using the technologies of their day to foil the good guys, and Daly in a short passage reads Collins’s equivocal villain Miserrimus Dexter (The Law and the Lady) as the “most vivid example” of a dystopian mechanization of modernity. Critics, however, have paid much less attention to the longer durée of the past in these novels, with the exception of Tamara Wagner’s excellent reading of Braddon’s novel Eleanor’s Victory, which takes up the problem of the Regency for Victorian readers. In this reading, the “aristocratic elegance” and “power of fascination” (“ ‘Magnetic’ Clues to the Past” 84) associated with the Regency dandy are used by his daughter to ultimately vindicate Victorian values and reject “the spurious glitter, the mock splendour, the hollow delight” of an era more concerned with conspicuous consumption than with domestic values (86)—an era, thus, more backward than forward looking, more concerned with the substance gathered in the family’s past than with the continuation of its substance in the future. The novel, according to Wagner, evokes this past

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through Eleanor’s flashes of insight and “magnetic” qualities, which are also often instances of déjà vu (91). And this brings me back to the souvenir. In Amnesiac Selves, Nicholas Dames argues that the novel of the period “formalized . . . a specific kind of forgetting. . . . Nostalgia . . . can only survive by eradicating the ‘pure memory,’ that enormous field of vanished detail, that threatens it” (4). He argues that the period and form “[equate] remembrance to a pleasurable sort of forgetting” (5). In Dames’s elegant analysis, this is generally the personal past of the characters, which is reduced by the narrative to vague categorizations, diluted life-narrative, and “object recurrence,” as a reaction to modernity’s overwhelming data and high rate of change and dislocation. He argues that Collins engages in “nostalgic erasure” in the Woman in White and The Moonstone, both of which thematize forgetting, and sees Collins’s turn to using machinery to represent the (naturally, healthily) forgetful mind as a functional mechanism. Forgetting provides closure by eliminating a surfeit of sometimes traumatic detail, and constructing a nostalgically simple narrative. Dames’s persuasive reading is firmly founded in nineteenth-century ideas about the purposes of memory. However, the nineteenth century was not innocent of the idea of pathological repressed or unconscious memories.34 I would argue that certain characters’ nostalgic gestures toward the historical past indicate a horrified fascination with barbarity that cannot be fully contained by nostalgic gestures such as dressing up, or by objects such as portraits. This past is a constant shadow of present civilization, and must be contained, displayed, and, somehow, decorously acknowledged if it can be, on a quotidian level, forgotten, so that modern life can go about its business. In The Law and the Lady (1875), Collins uses skin to consider the relation of character to history and body to commodity. The novel offers a unique protagonist, a man born without legs, who possesses ambiguous gender characteristics, cooks and embroiders, and has a romantic attachment to the past. He dresses exquisitely, if unusually: “His jacket, on this occasion, was of pink quilted silk. The coverlet which hid his deformity matched the jacket in pale sea-green satin; and, to complete these strange vagaries of costume, his wrists were actually adorned with massive bracelets of gold, formed on the severely simple models which have descended to us from ancient times” (215–16). He explains to the female protagonist: I have dressed, expressly to receive you, in the prettiest clothes I have. . . . Except in this ignoble and material nineteenth century, men have always worn precious stuffs and beautiful colors as well as

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women. A hundred years ago a gentleman in pink silk was a gentleman properly dressed. Fifteen hundred years ago the patricians of the classic times wore bracelets exactly like mine. I despise the brutish contempt for beauty and the mean dread of expense which degrade a gentleman’s costume to black cloth, and limit a gentleman’s ornaments to a finger-ring, in the age I live in. (216) Although Dexter is thus self-identified with the past (specifically, two periods in which there was civil unrest that imperiled rulers in France and Rome), the heroine, Valeria, identifies his Regency-like liberties in behavior as requiring an up-to-date response. When she persuades her fatherly friend to go with her to Dexter’s home after Dexter has already insulted her by grabbing her around the waist, she argues that this “liberty” should be passed over tolerantly: “benevolence toward everybody is the great virtue of the time we live in. . . . Come, come, march with the age! Open your mind to the new ideas!” (299). The indignant response of the older gentleman, Benjamin, includes a great many other “ideas of the age”: “Oh, the new ideas! . . . The old morality’s all wrong, the old ways are all worn out. . . . Let’s go and get crammed with ready-made science at a lecture. . . . We were all monkeys before we were men, and molecules before we were monkeys! and what does it matter? . . . Come to Dexter! Come to Dexter!” (299–300). Another character remarks that what “Voltaire said satirically of the character of his countrymen in general is literally true of Miserrimus Dexter. He is a mixture of the tiger and the monkey” (179).35 Dexter’s “newness” is identified with the libertinage and scientific materialism of the past century as well as later scientific theories of evolution and degeneration—but also with atavism and brutality. Dexter’s movements are often compared to those of a monkey by Valeria. For Benjamin, Dexter is nothing more than a cruel (son of a) monkey. Dexter represents both a savage past and a bestial future: both Revolutionary brutality and evolutionary degeneracy. He fits the type of a certain kind of degeneration—that is also an atavic throwback to an earlier stage of development. His senses are acute—he has the “sensitive . . . ears of a dog” (194). He is described as childlike, womanish, hypersexual, and personally charming. His cousin and live-in servant is “an idiot” with a “round, fleshy, inexpressive face, her rayless and colorless eyes, her coarse nose and heavy chin. A creature half alive; an imperfectly developed animal in shapeless form, . . . a mere vegetable” (196–97).36 These are the last of the family, a family that will have no issue. Valeria judges Dexter as beautiful, but remarks, “The one defect that I could discover in his face was at the outer corners of his eyes, just under the temple. Here . . . when he smiled, the skin contracted into

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quaint little wrinkles and folds, which looked strangely out of harmony with the almost youthful appearance of the rest of his face. . . . as a whole (and speaking of him, of course, from a woman’s, not a physiognomist’s point of view), I can only describe him as being an unusually handsome man” (199–200). However, it seems that we as readers might indeed be invited to take the physiognomist’s view: the presence of wrinkles near the temples and beneath the eyes is traditionally a sign of lust and self-indulgence; the massive forehead a sign of both great intelligence and potential madness. These are extremes of both animal and human traits, unrestrained by moderation. “Prince Dexter’s Palace” likewise highlights both his eccentricity and his identification with a past aristocracy. An old manor house now crumbling in the midst of a wasteland of suburban development north of London, the property is purchased by Dexter and has no family connection to him (189–90).37 It is an “ancient house. . . . The footman led the way toward the paling through the boards and the bricks, the oyster shells and the broken crockery, that strewed the ground” (189). Although the house is falling apart and speculators have offered him a good amount, he refuses: “My house is a standing monument of the picturesque and beautiful, amid the mean, dishonest, and groveling constructions of a mean, dishonest, and groveling age. . . . Look at it while you are building around me, and blush, if you can, for your work” (190). Dexter rejects an age of middle-class suburbia and land speculators, incapable of blushing, in favor of a land rendered meaningful by its historical, human associations. Yet the novel gives him no family history, no backstory, and no organic connection to the crumbling manor other than a “freak of fancy” (189). His connection to the estate he inhabits—by purchase, rather than inheritance—is eccentric and imaginative rather than biological, artistic rather than historical, fetishistic rather than authentic. If the supposed aristocratic license of the past century is disdained by the Victorians, the more present dangers of that period are also exemplified by the class warfare of the Terror. Dexter identifies with late eighteenth-century aristocratic ideals of beauty and courtesy against the baseness of a materialist age. Yet he keeps among his gallery of horrors (which includes photographs of the insane), an item tagged “Skin of a French Marquis, tanned in the Revolution of Ninety-three. Who says the nobility are not good for something? They make good leather” (230). The Major’s description of Dexter as tiger and monkey mobilizes the fascinated horror of the English for the French Revolution, and the menace of the crowd. The skin is both a reminder and a way to contain the threat of violence; Valeria encounters it (and we through her first-person narrative) in a “cupboard, with the door

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wide open,” both hidden and exposed. She discovers its nature by touch before sight: “there hung in loose folds a shirt (as I took it to be) of chamois leather” (230). She touches it, and judging it softer than any chamois she has ever touched, her fingers “disarranged the folds, and disclosed a ticket pinned among them, describing the thing in these horrid lines” (cited above). The skin is in plain sight, but to discern its nature, one must plunge one’s fingers into the folds—by that time, one is implicated in the skinning itself, its pleasures (so soft!) as well as horrors (the skin one loves to touch cannot perceive that touch, or “touch back”). This particular form of violence cannot be really forgotten by hiding it away. Like the empty trousers under Miserrimus’s lap robe, the empty skin in the cupboard is (as Derrida’s reading of the pubic fleece suggests, like the folds of the woman’s sex) more exposed in being veiled. The Skin of the Marquis is a souvenir or memento that both hides and reveals, without exorcising, the trauma of mangled flesh, the brutality of class warfare. Dames argues that the souvenir in this period operates as a way of containing the past—proclaiming it finished: “its past is recoverable only by the ritualistic retrospects called forth by contemplating it. No traumas are evoked by the souvenir. . . . the souvenir produces distance; it is the dead end of the past” (55). That is the function of the more quotidian objects Dames is reading, and indeed provides a vision of what some Victorians thought was an appropriate relation to the past. But Dexter obviously uses this skin in a different way—as a relic, perhaps, in Carlyle’s ambivalent sense. Though dated and tagged like any specimen, the commentary draws a wider and more present moral. In evaluating the nobility within the present tense and suggesting a similar fate (they are good for something and make good leather), the tag ironically calls attention to the use-value instead of the kind of symbolic, indexical value of the noble body, and perhaps to his own body, whose use-value is negligible, but whose power to attract visual attention is high. The item operates as a luxurious object (a curio, a soft garment)—yet it is not in fact actually used as leather or as a shirt, but as an object of contemplation. It is placed next to a memento mori in an adjoining cupboard (behind a closed glass door), a woman’s skeleton with a “cynical inscription” placed in plain view over the skull: “Behold the scaffolding on which beauty is built!” (Collins, Law 230). All of these objects are, for Dexter, and for us in using them to triangulate on Dexter’s character, ambiguous. Dexter identifies with the aesthetics of an aristocrat—and yet is not one. In the place normally occupied by family portraits of a hereditary property’s owners he has hung his own paintings

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of murder and cruelty—the flaying and roasting of saints, the persecution of the Wandering Jew. Is he the saint or the tormentor, the Jew or the Jew’s nemesis? Does he identify with the Marquis or the Republican who skinned him? And does he use the skeleton to remind himself of the end of his own boasted beauty, or is it a sour-grapes comment on his own deformity and relation to women? He does not hold the shirt (or not merely) as a celebration of the humiliation of the aristocracy, a vengeful reinscription of the stripping of their freedom, as a Revolutionary likely wore it originally. It is his, no doubt, by purchase, along with the house. Does this Carlylean “relic” show “affection” or “mockery”? Either of these renders his sympathies “suspect,” being of such a “cannibal sort.” Dexter attempts to appropriate other subject positions on several occasions. The first time we see him, Dexter, in an exalted mood of creativity, races around in his wheelchair, shouting, “ ‘I am Napoleon, at the sunrise of Austerlitz! . . . I give the word, and thrones rock, and . . . men by tens of thousands fight and bleed and die!’ The chair rushed out of sight, and the shouting man in it became another hero. ‘I am Nelson! . . . I am leading the fleet at Trafalgar.’ . . . The fantastic and frightful apparition, man and machinery blended in one—the new Centaur, half man, half chair—flew by me again in the dying light. ‘I am Shakespeare!’ cried the frantic creature now. ‘I am writing “Lear,” the tragedy of tragedies’ ” (Collins, Law 193). Dexter collects a history that is not his own through objects and uses those objects to inhabit that history as both its agent and its victim. In evoking the Renaissance and Enlightenment, he doubles the usual opposition of the Regency and the Victorian period (in ways related by midcentury to models of historical change deriving from Oxford classicism, as we shall see in chapter 6). In continually forcing us to choose between Dexter’s disparate and even mutually exclusive aspirational identities, Collins reminds us that historical progression depends on oscillations between opposites that must be reconciled or destroyed. Dexter’s attractive peculiarity does not derive simply from his deformity or his great talents, but from his identification with the aesthetic and romantic freight of the aristocratic past—a past the excesses of which might well be associated with the degeneration of his own family. As with Lear, the mad king, the pomps and vanities of the aristocracy are being whittled away by modernity and the rise of the next generation. Half man, half machine, a very modern centaur (or perhaps simply a crippled Enlightenment satyr, half reasoning man, half animal-machine?), Dexter is nonetheless as backward looking as a creature out of  myth.

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Prostheses and History Dexter’s macabre curio is not the only item that features the ambiguity of skin as simultaneously self and veil, as separable and indivisible from self. Valeria’s “creamy paleness” charms the Regency-identified older men in the novel, though, in fact, her pallor has been modified. When she goes to try to gain information for the Major, with some shame, she allows the maid to give her a “touch of color”: “I saw, in the glass, my skin take a false fairness, my cheeks a false color. . . . The transformation of my face was accomplished” (Collins, Law 55). She later acknowledges that she would never have been admitted without it, and the sixty-year-old major she goes to charm—a Regency survival—rouges as well, and dyes his whiskers and eyebrows to match his youthful brown wig. Skin color, as we know, is key to both sympathy and beauty in this period, but such charms are artificial in this world of pre-Victorian values. Despite access to rouge and wigs, however, one can be trapped within the skin one has; there are limits to cosmetic modification, and one’s skin is the shroud one dies in. The death around which the plot turns, and for which Valeria tries to exonerate her husband, is that of his first wife. Her complexion was very bad, and she was jealous of a Mrs. Beauly, whom her husband admired. Her maid testifies: “Mrs. Macallan was a very plain woman. She had a cast in one of her eyes, and . . . one of the most muddy, blotchy complexions it was ever my misfortune to see”; whereas she describes Mrs. Beauly as having “a most beautifully clear and delicate color. Poor Mrs. Macallan said of her, most untruly, that she painted” (124). But this terrible complexion is not seen merely in the light of a misfortune or deformity; as we saw in chapter 3, it is a sign of character—in this case, Mrs. Macallan’s temper; her maid explains that “the defects in the complexion of the deceased lady were not in any way attributable to her illness. I should call them born and bred defects in herself ” (124). In a quest to improve her skin, the lady determines to try arsenic eating—at the time of the novel’s publication the press was reporting that the Styrian peasantry employed the practice to enhance health and beauty. A female relative testifies that she often said “that there was no risk she would not run, and no pain she would not suffer, to improve” her complexion, believing that “Men . . . are all caught by outward appearances: my husband might love me better if I had a better color” (158). Here we see the tension between beauty as “skin-deep” and the skin as index of character. Trying to alter her skin without addressing character, the lady acquires the means to destroy the self entirely.

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In a fit of jealousy inspired by seeing her husband’s diary, in which he admitted a continuing attraction to Mrs. Beauly, Mrs. Macallan deliberately takes a lethal dose of the arsenic. But this is not known until the end of the novel, and the husband is tried for murder. Although the husband is freed with a verdict of “Not Proven,” the taint of possible guilt clings to him. Meanwhile, Dexter, who alone knows that he himself is responsible for driving the lady to her death—to seduce her, he has shown her the diary, hoping to further his own courtship—is being slowly driven mad by guilt. He plays along with Valeria to throw suspicion on Mrs. Beauly for as long as possible, attempting to provide persuasive motives for her by putting “myself into Mrs. Beauly’s skin, . . . [so as] to think with Mrs. Beauly’s mind” (278). Though we never see Dexter handle the skin of the Marquis, Dexter’s love of costume and propensity to use props to “merge. . . [himself in others’] individualities” give a dark comic turn to what might otherwise be a stock expression (203).38 As this passage suggests, the skin operates here both as identity and as prosthesis—of the body, but to a limited extent alienable from or even supplementing it. The juxtaposition of the woman’s skeleton and the Marquis’s skin suggests the rich context of guilt and disgust over male desire and female beauty, and a self-admonition that one’s skin cannot be escaped. One might say that the specter of Mrs. Macallan’s skin hangs over the narrative; skin stands in for life itself (as in “to save one’s skin”) and was the most salient and inescapable fact of Mrs. Macallan’s own existence. Under the skin is the skeleton, implying there is a truth of the self that underlies and gives the lie to beauty and desire. The arsenic eater improves her skin and poisons her body. Yet when the skin is taken away, nothing is left of the person beneath it—but an empty leather bag. The division is gendered. For the woman the beautiful skin is essential, and alienation from it leaves only death and the skeleton, whereas the man’s skin can remain, a testimony to history and personal martyrdom. (Also, it makes a lovely shirt.) The skin of the Marquis, though insignificant in the plot, looms disproportionately large in the narrative. Its affective impact, mysterious history, and possible meanings to Dexter draw attention. Like Dexter’s chair, the skin is a prosthesis. Dexter can move around on his hands, and frequently chooses to leave the chair behind. But the chair is not entirely separable from the body it supports or the self that depends on it partially for its agency. When police search the home of the Macallans, he resists, and when the police move him aside by pushing his chair, his response is baffled rage: “How dare you touch my chair? My chair is Me! How dare you touch Me?” (321). Dexter can put himself into the skin of others, whether Mrs. Beauly or a marquis.

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But care is needed because the prosthesis becomes the self. The operation of putting himself into another’s skin is inescapable and exhausting, and his extrication from that identity leaves Dexter as hypersensitive as someone flayed: this substitution of himself for the suffering Mrs. Macallan—and the fear of doing so—he explains by his habit of trying on the skins of others: “ ‘I have an immense imagination. It runs riot at times. It makes an actor of me. I play the parts of all the heroes that ever lived. . . . I merge myself in their individualities. . . . I am obliged to do it. . . . It lasts for hours. It leaves me with my energies worn out, with my sensibilities frightfully acute” ’ (203). The skins of others become like the shirt of Nessus, a poisoned gift that cannot be escaped.39 Dexter will finally go mad entirely and die.40 This prosthetic process suggests something of his (and history’s) trouble: for every triumph, he also experiences the fate of the victim. An aesthetic identification with the past is a common motif in several novels of the period (as we shall see in Hardy, in chapter 8), and is often indicated through the description of a character’s collection of portraits, whether in the taste associated with their collection or in the family pedigree implied by their existence. But Dexter’s taste, which aligns itself with the “bright and beautiful,” is also expressive of a certain cruelty. What Valeria sees in Dexter’s own paintings of tortured saints (including one being flayed) adorning the long hall—where family portraits would normally have been—as merely a fascination with cruelty is in fact also a kind of memoir, or pedigree-ofaffinity.41 When Valeria presses him for details about the events surrounding Mrs. Macallan’s death, he bursts out: “Here I am at your mercy—a martyr at the stake. Poke the fire! poke the fire!” (231). Dexter repeatedly positions himself as a martyr of history, left behind by modernity, heroically preserving a past aesthetic. Yet he recognizes that history progresses by violence, conceived as heroic—by Napoleon, for example. Although Dexter’s text below the paintings admonishes the viewer that “Persons who look for mere Nature in works of Art . . . are persons to whom Mr. Dexter does not address himself with the brush. He relies entirely on his imagination. Nature puts him out,” we are invited to see these paintings in the light of what is revealed elsewhere in the novel as having more of a direct relation to reality, if not realism, than Dexter is willing to admit (213). He is of course partially guilty for Mrs. Macallan’s suicide, although he pursued her out of a desire to seduce rather than kill; in showing her the correspondence of her husband, he was indeed cruel, and in his mourning for her death, he pays some penalty for his cruelty. Directly after viewing the letters, Valeria is confronted by Dexter, who describes himself as “A poor solitary creature, cursed with a frightful deformity. How pitiable! how dread-

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ful! My affectionate heart—wasted. My extraordinary talents—useless or misapplied. Sad! sad! sad! Please pity me,” claiming the solitary position of the Wandering Jew pictured in a series of his paintings (216). As with the ambivalence suggested by the relic, Valeria does not know whether to find this self-pity absurd or moving; she feels sorry, then laughs, then is ashamed of laughing. Dexter offers a challenge to sympathy as understood by the Victorian novel, engaging and repelling it at once. When she discovers Dexter’s room to be decorated with photographs of madness, plaster casts of murderers’ heads, the skeleton, and—last but certainly not at all least—the skin of the Marquis, Valeria attributes this to his “insatiable relish for horrors,” but this is also a collection of medical objects related to criminality and degeneration, a materialist exploration of Dexter’s own human condition. Dexter veers between tragic scale and bathetic sentimentalism. History is both tragic and grotesque, grand and absurd. The skin of the Marquis is not a fetish: it is not overvalued, and its origins are not mystified, but explained carefully on a card attached to it. Neither does it have magical powers, nor has any culture attributed such powers to it. Nor is it finally a relic, as, although it is associated with a particular subjectivity, it is not reverenced or loved. It is finally closest to being a souvenir, one with which memory that is not personal to Dexter can be made personal. Like the souvenirs Dames mentions, the Skin of the Marquis is there to serve a function of exteriorizing a memory. However, unlike the use of the souvenir to forget trauma, this object operates most fully as a prosthesis to allow Dexter not only to “remember” a traumatic event he did not himself experience, but to allow him to seize and inhabit a class subjectivity and a history that goes beyond his own. Like the house that memorializes an earlier way of life now out of place—and out of pace—with the neighborhood, the Skin of the Marquis allows the modern centaur to gesture toward the dark and torturous side of history through which modernity is enabled. Dexter attempts to embody that history, to seize it through property, to invest his will in it through ownership of objects. He tries to approximate it by producing a false pedigree in paintings, inhabiting a manor house he cannot keep up, and entering the skins of others. But the very social relations that allow him to own these things mean they can be his only “mechanically,” by purchase, as he can achieve real mobility only through technological enhancements. Although he has the freedom under capitalism to purchase these objects associated with an earlier set of social relations, they cannot operate as sacred relics or fetishes, but only as prostheses that remind him of an earlier time largely through its absence. The Marquis’s skin is not enough to rearticulate the glamour of the ancien régime, as Dexter’s world

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has entered into a financial order in which dilapidated manor houses are no longer owned by good families but are—or should be—pulled down for ugly suburbs. And no matter how much Dexter would like to go back in time, he himself is modern, Darwinist, too cynical to believe in martyrs, and mocking the Marquis’s skin for having nothing left but use-value. Historical body objects allow a way for historical trauma to enter the realist text of Collins as a sensational element: its presence is shocking and odd, but can be accounted for historically and scientifically. The skin itself does not derail the realism of the text; it is not magical and does not introduce a nonrealist plotline. In fact, it does not play a role in the plot at all. It intrudes as a reference to tragic history, a clue to reading the (overdetermined) body of Dexter, and as a quintessentially “sensational” moment for the reader through Valeria and the reader, who makes direct physical contact with the violence of history through the skin as prosthesis. It also anchors the theme of historical repetition. Valeria, the second Mrs. Macallan, resembles the first, and seeks the truth about a past trauma. Her attempt to rewrite the failure of her husband to face his own past, by reconstructing the narrative of his first wife, exposes what Marx would identify in 1852 in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte as the logic of history—that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. Dexter has the freedom under capitalism to possess what he likes (or can afford), but finds that freedom meager and limited, without beauty or grandeur. Moreover, as with that other prosthesis, his wheelchair, the freedom it promises is false. Though he protests that the machine that makes him mobile is “Me!” it is in fact an object that can be and is seized by others and alienated from him. The great negative freedom that was the Terror must be succeeded by the positive and specific freedom that is also the mean and quotidian reality of mid-Victorian suburbia, with its investment of human will in specific forms and behaviors Dexter tries to refuse—endless Necessity environing Free Will. This extraordinary blending of deep and historical recent past with modernity, of animal and human, this faux centaur—Marquis— martyr that is the Most Miserable Miserrimus Dexter, named for the right hand that is the essence of the human, is poised between animality and humanity, and humanity and mechanism. He provides an apt figure both for Carlyle’s subject and for his listener, who regards with fascinated horror but without comprehension the deeds of history and the alienated and sensitive skin of the flayed, the past that persists like a scab on the wound of modernity. As a singular historical trauma, it emerges in the present in historical narratives or through grotesque objects. As a potentially nonsin-

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gular event, one that must be somehow accounted for in a theory of history that still affirms human freedom, it must be represented in other ways. The next chapter takes us from historical reconstruction to mythic present, from contemplation of the past’s flayed skin to the site of historical transition, the present of the flaying itself.

q Ch ap ter 6 Flaying When Marsyas was “torn from the scabbard of his limbs”—della vagina membra sue, to use one of Dante’s most terrible Tacitean phrases—he had no more song, the Greek said. Apollo had been victor. The lyre had vanquished the reed. But perhaps the Greeks were mistaken. I hear in much modern Art the cry of Marsyas. —Oscar Wilde, De Profundis Thinking concerning the animal, if there is such a thing, derives from poetry. There you have a thesis: it is what philosophy has, essentially, had to deprive itself  of. —Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am

In 1840, in his journal on Italian art, Charles Bell commented repeatedly on what seems to have been his long-standing interest in a particular figure: at the Uffizi, he remarks, “I see here two statues of Marsyias [sic]—one restored by Donatello—the other by Verrochio—the subject w. be grand in the hands of good [illegible: sculptors?]. I must look again” ( Journal, vol. 1, n.p.).1 Although he does not remark on these particular works again, some months later, after visiting the Vatican, he writes, “I must return among the Satyrs for my purpose of illustrating the knowledge of the ancients in [sic] the character of the brute given to the human face” ( Journal, vol. 2, n.p.). And again, at the Palazzo Doria, he puzzles over another work: “An. Garacci [Annibale Caracci] has a curious expression in Marsyas teaching ‘Olympus’ how to play the flute. The Satyr has a ludicrous expression lays his head close to the boy-shakes him by the chin! The expression of the satyr is true” ( Journal, vol. 2, n.p., Bell’s emphasis). Caracci’s portrayal is of a lustful and drunken satyr, eyes half closed, affectionately leering and grinning, with large mouth, a prominent and hooked nose, and grapes clustering in his hair. He wears a spotted animal skin, and caresses a blond, fair-skinned youth who plays pipes.2 Bell, in line with his neoclassical artistic leanings, saw Marsyas as more beast than human. 230

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The Marsyas myth has many permutations, but the essentials are as follows: Marsyas was a satyr (or silenus), tutor of Olympus the musician, and devotee (sometimes agent or minister) of Dionysus. He chanced to pick up a double flute, or aulos, discarded by Athena, who didn’t like the way her cheeks puffed out when she played it. He made beautiful music with it, and unwisely challenged the god Apollo to a musical contest, to be judged by the Muses. He played the flute very well, and Apollo, who was playing the lyre, might have lost, but then Apollo challenged Marsyas to play upside down (or in some versions, Apollo sang while playing), and so won the contest. Apollo claimed his prize: to do as he liked with the loser. What he liked to do, it turns out, was to bind Marsyas to a pine tree and skin him alive. Sometimes Apollo is represented as cheerily watching (and plucking his lyre) as minions do his work for him; sometimes he personally flays the flutist. Usually, Olympus, the nymphs, and the wood-gods weep off to the side. In some versions of the legend, the river Marsyas springs from the satyr’s blood; in some, he is made into a wineskin; in others, his skin is simply hung up and continues to flutter in response to some kinds of music. In some versions, Apollo later regrets his cruelty. Mostly, though, not. In most Western art, saints suffer in silence, or supplication. Women may weep from grief or fear, but their faces are generally shielded from view if they are to be disfigured by extreme pain or emotion. The Christian tradition is full of tortured figures sublimating their pain into transcendence. But the extremity of pain in physical torture is often associated in the classical tradition with one figure, Marsyas, whose dual nature allows him to express the extremity of pain without dissolving his claim on the viewer’s interest. By the 1840s, however, Bell is a rather late example of the dismissal of Marsyas as a subhuman who got what he deserved; by midcentury, despite the period’s well-documented veneration of Apollo, Marsyas is seen increasingly as a martyr to cruel reason. The same theme was taken up within the study of myth and the comparative history of religion, foci that anchored a good deal of German idealist discussion of the nature of historical progress. As we saw with Carlyle, idealist thinkers struggled to account for the events of the Terror, inscribing them within the grand narrative of dialectical historical change as a necessary Dionysian moment of pure negativity, allowing for the transition to a radically new era. In historical and realist narrative (and realism’s offspring, such as sensation), flaying marked the moment of barbarism within modernity. Realist narrative limned the surface of the body as an individual signifying surface to be read, and its traumatic violation as a story of the breakdown of social relations. Idealist narratives sought a larger theory of history in which characters serve as symbols of larger trends or groups, rather than individual

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psychologies. They used myth to limn the body’s surface as a symbol of historical rather than personal specificity, and its violation as a metaphor for historical change. Midcentury British idealist writers, often trained in the classical tradition under German models, often had recourse to the flaying of Marsyas to think through questions of apparently destructive historical change. Whereas the previous chapter focused on the memorial objects of history, the tanned commodity that encapsulates the horror of past flayings, this chapter focuses on the tragic transitional moment of the flaying itself. Myth was the source of a story that could allow the artist both to explore the particular suffering of the victim, and to metaphorically reference the structure of historical becoming authors wished to invoke. Tragedy in Victorian literature was largely developed in the novel and in poetry in two forms. In one, often in prose narrative, it may be set in the present or recent historical time and deploy typically realist characters. Such novels tend to attempt to wed materialism and idealism in forms that invoke the associationist formation of a particular individual tragic flaw and relate it to larger historical structures of recurrence and change. Examples include Eliot’s Mill on the Floss at midcentury, or in later realist-naturalist representations, wherein nature or society takes the place of fate crushing an insignificant individuality, several of Hardy’s and Gissing’s novels. In the other, with which this chapter will be concerned, it hearkens back to mythic structures, and may directly employ mythic or historical characters from classical times, as is the case in Arnold and Hardy. The dominant plot, in either case, tends to focus on an individual caught between freedom and historical constraint, a potentially or really heroic individual who is not able to transcend historical circumstance, even while he or she may create conditions for change. This is a structure that reflects Victorian readings of classical myth, and more particularly, their adoption of late Enlightenment idealist readings of mythic structure. This chapter will trace a particular tragic myth most often represented outside realism at midcentury, frequently used to signify the sacrifice of the individual to historical change, particularly in the Oxford tradition’s exploration of mythic and classic historical figures in idealist terms. By 1897, when Wilde closes the century with a reflection on the redemptive power of suffering, he compares his shaming and imprisonment to a symbolic flaying, and the victory of the judicial social system to the triumph of Apollo, who was “cruel to Marsyas” and left Niobe childless, as his own sentence took his children from him. However, he opines, the Olympians are not the winners in the long arc of history: “The two most deeply suggestive figures of Greek Mythology were, for religion, Demeter, an Earth Goddess, not one of the Olympians, and for art, Dionysus, the son of a mortal woman to whom the moment of his birth had proved also the moment of her death.” He sees

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the voice of Marsyas as more plangent and perdurable in modernity than the lyre notes of Apollo. Marsyas is the image that encapsulates the suffering of a human being who knows he cannot know himself; he knows this because he has seen beneath his own surface: “A man whose desire is to be something separate from himself . . . , to be a member of Parliament, or a successful grocer, . . . or something equally tedious, invariably succeeds. . . . That is his punishment. Those who want a mask have to wear it. But with the dynamic forces of life, and those in whom those dynamic forces become incarnate, it is different. People whose desire is solely for self-realisation never know where they are going. They can’t know” (Wilde, De Profundis 1038–39). It is the dynamic and truthful who are “unmasked” or unsheathed, and under the mask is the écorché, whose surface is perpetually consumed by the forces of life, which expose him to the mystery of himself. The torturer, however, though an instrument of history, is incapable of understanding truth or art: “I have said that behind sorrow there is always sorrow. It were wiser still to say that behind sorrow there is always a soul. And to mock at a soul in pain is a dreadful thing” (1040–41). Apollo demeans himself: “The martyr in his ‘shirt of flame’ may be looking on the face of God, but to him who is piling the faggots or loosening the logs for the blast the whole scene is no more than the slaying of an ox is to the butcher. . . . Great passions are for the great of soul” (1052). Through a chain of associations, in what is in some ways a classic redemption story about finding grace, Wilde links the torture of Marsyas to the passion of Christ, and then, himself. The physical agony of a flaying becomes in Wilde a spiritual or emotional “sorrow,” the soul’s “pain.” The tragic fate of Marsyas is a theme throughout much of the period—though in the first half of the century, it is more likely to be Apollo who paves the way for Christ in his triumph over the primitive Dionysiac forces of nature.3 As Wilde’s use of the reference suggests, though, by the later part of the period nineteenth-century artists had reconceptualized Apollo’s role. Some had been influenced by philosophical readings of Dionysus as a necessary and cyclic historical counterpoint to the dominance and decay of successive Apollonian orders, and some by persistent Romantic visions of the artist as representative of the Zeitgeist who is transformed by suffering and defiant of traditional authority. In a perhaps new development in historical representations of Marsyas, however, the period emphasized the two figures’ interdependence and even identity with one another less than their opposition. Apollo is what happens to Marsyas, and through his action upon the body of Marsyas, Apollo becomes both who he is, and less. Apollo’s inhumanity marks Marsyas as more human than animal, and himself as less than divine.4 Marsyas is usually emplotted in an idealist historical progression in which human “becoming” must confront and assimilate materiality figured as the

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animal nature of the human, whether in a teleological paradigm, an evolutionary one, or a narrative of dialectical recurrence. As we have seen, the materialist end of the Victorian spectrum occupied itself with the history of the individual, working through models of the body and mind that privileged the body’s surface as a sensory gathering point of “associations” that conditioned the mind and will. Those on the idealist end of the spectrum, who were concerned with the longer durée of history and the role of human (and divine) will within it, were inspired by German studies of myth and comparative religion to think about trauma and recurrence in historical change. Traditionally, the idealist classical tradition celebrated the triumph of Apollo, the more perfect form, over the primitive, half-animal Marsyas. But over the course of the century, the celebration of Apollo associated with classical scholarship shifted. Even as evolutionary models that accepted the human as an evolutionary iteration of prior animal forms became increasingly accepted, the teleological superiority of the rationality represented by Apollo came into question. The Olympians were increasingly seen to have failed in the capacity for sympathy, as human history was seen less as teleological and more as recurrently tragic. As this shift took place, the Eleusinian mysteries and older, chthonic gods who suffered and were reborn came to seem better models for human experience as part of a world connected to nature. For those who rejected the teleology of Christianity, Dionysus seemed a site of authentic resistance to Apollonian certainty, but by the end of the century, Dionysus also replaces Apollo as the antetype of Christ for those still seeking that kind of developmental model. Victorian Christians came to focus more on the suffering humanity of god than on a god distant, radiant, and triumphant. Accordingly, as the century progressed, Marsyas was read variably as representing bestial hubris or necessary individual daring, and his flaying as the salutary moment of defeat of primitive, animistic religions by Hellenism or—increasingly by the latter decades of the century—as a chthonian ritual (that is, one involving descent to the underworld) presaging a triumphal Dionysian return.5 At the center of his story, however, is the suffering of transformation, and suffering of a particular kind: the removal of the sensing and expressing surface of the body. In embracing a recurring, tragic historical pattern, the place of the modern individual is particularly vexed. The trauma of historical change suggests that the most fully individuated person, indeed, the world-historical individual—who embodies for nineteenth-century readers a very modern notion of individual value—must always to some extent be tragically sacrificed.6 An individual who is elevated to the level of a mytheme is paradoxically stripped of that individualism, caught in a narrative beyond individual will. The figure of Dionysus thus allowed for ways to deal with any modern

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death as epic loss, the defacement of the unique and irreplaceable individual as tragic, but also to emplot some of the broad historical issues around social change that strict materialism had largely relegated to evolutionary discourse.

Materialist Suffering, Idealist History The purpose and significance of suffering are key questions, both in accounts of historical transformation and in the myth of Marsyas—though the nature of the pain felt by Marsyas is generally posited simply as a universal signifier of extreme physical suffering.7 As we saw in chapter 1, Charles Bell in his treatise on expression marks human pain as appropriate as a theme of art only when it is sublimated through compassion or sympathy with another (see fig. 6.1). To

Figure 6.1. Bell, Anatomy of Expression (1824), “Crying” [from pain], p. 79. Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY_4.0.

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portray the expression of weeping from physical pain, he chose a satyr, as “there is in weeping something inexpressibly mean and ludicrous when it appears in the countenance of a man” (Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression 1824, 80).8 But why use a satyr to illustrate weeping from pain, as opposed to a child (which Bell uses elsewhere) or any other character to exhibit “unmanly” expression? In fact, as in many of the illustrations of the Anatomy, I believe Bell has a specific story—and visual artistic tradition—in mind. In the neoclassical tradition, pain, like Marsyas, has a dual nature. It is capable of dehumanizing the sufferer, but it also may cause the subject to transcend the limits of normal perception. But pain alone is insufficient for transcendence, without the “higher” human capacities of compassion and faith. Bell’s satyr is being held by his hair, in a position to pull his head backward, by what appears to be a human hand, and has a rope trailing around his neck. His satyr emphasizes a childish/racially other and animal aspect: long, pointed ears, a rounded face wider than high, a wide mouth with large lips, a flattened, broad nose, and fleecy hair all around the face (though no mustache). He is without dignity, Bell’s text suggests, and as he weeps, instead of screams, he inspires disturbingly little sympathy. He seems to suffer more from pique than from actual pain, though Bell carefully specifies in the text that it is physical pain that causes him to weep. Bell emphasizes what his viewers would have understood as signs of Marsyas’s animal and primitive nature; in turn, for Bell, whose materialism is resolutely buttressed by human exceptionalism, this deprives his anguish of moral significance. Pain, Bell remarks (as Burke had said of terror and the sublime), “first rouses the faculties, both of the body and the mind, and from a dormant state gives us consciousness and real existence” (Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression 1824, 94), but physical pain alone is simply demoralizing and dehumanizing. Years later, Oscar Wilde would arrive at a related conclusion about emotional pain: only through pain is becoming (in Hegel’s sense of the term werden) possible, as a necessary, though not in itself sufficient, cause. Pain, and specifically the loss of the individuality associated with the surface of the body, paradoxically allows the subject to more fully actualize his transformative power, once it can be given meaning within a historical and spiritual narrative. The tragic pain of the destruction of surface allows new forms, new surfaces, to emerge. To unpack the progression that I have outlined above, we need to return to the intellectual landscape of German Romanticism as it was taken up in Britain. Marsyas is best understood within the larger context of his history as a Dionysian figure, and in terms of his importance to the history of classicism

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in the period. The enormous importance of myth itself to the Romantics is of course well known, and the serious scholarly attention given to myth as part of the history of religion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as a form of classical art, both endowed mythic tales with a new dignity and provided a way to contextualize Christianity within a history of religious narrative developments. In essence, this evolutionary model did for Christ what physiology and evolutionary theory were doing for Genesis—they desacralized its uniqueness, while endowing it with new meaning within a longer historical arc. August Schlegel is perhaps the best known of the myth scholars, but most of the German idealist thinkers embraced myth as a way of engaging not only historiography, but metaphysics. Myth scholars Burton Feldman and Robert Richardson affirm that by the time Holderlin, Schlegel, and Schelling write, “the idea of myth as a high mode of truth is not so much a fascinating supposition as something like a settled proposition” (303). As we saw in the previous chapter, the German idealist view of history casts a long shadow over the period, and particularly its understanding of historical change and trauma. In the myth criticism of the German idealists, the succession of the preclassical historical eras and belief systems to classical European culture is often posed in the nineteenth century in terms of the conflict of Apollo and Dionysus. However, the same conflict comes to be used metaphorically as a model for any large historical shift: for example, Pater famously positions the European Renaissance as Apollonian. Scholars have traced this tendency to use Greek myth as a way to understand historical conflict most fully among the British aesthetes—Pater to Wilde, Swinburne, and Egerton; and among German philologists and philosophers—Schlegel, Creuzer, and Hegel to Müller, and Nietzsche to Heidegger. But it was a very widespread discourse, and its connections to a theory of historical progression were widespread as well, though the exact outlines of that theory and its connection to particular philosophical sources are more impressionistic in some authors (Arnold, for example, who blends ideas from Hegel and Herder) than others (such as Pater, more rigorously engaging Hegel). But there is a clear trend; whereas eighteenth-century representations tend to see Marsyas as a sometimes sympathetic but necessary victim of teleology,9 later representations emphasize the two figures’ interdependence in a more cyclical model of historical change. Marsyas is a representative of Dionysus, and the historical investments of the Apollo-Dionysus conflict shift over the course of the century. Alongside a teleological view of Dionysus superseded by Apollo who himself presages Christianity—a Hegelian view—emerges a less teleological view, which, though based on Hegelian antithesis, sees the

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two forces as sides of the same force, and their conflict as a recurrent enactment of the antithesis of darkness and light, the material/animistic and symbolic. It is this view that is dominant by the late nineteenth century. In the UK, Richard Payne Knight’s 1786 work on Priapic cults revalued Dionysian and Orphic fertility rites as possessed of dignity and gravitas, and though it was not widely embraced at the time, Knight’s work was printed again in 1865 and quietly read, especially in the latter years of the Victorian period. And Hegel’s historical vision of religious succession, widely influential, was refigured (from however hostile a perspective) in Nietzsche’s well-known work on tragedy in 1872, as well as influencing the midcentury study of classics at Oxford. Hegel found that “truth” is Dionysian, and that his wild energies embodied the force of antithesis. Antithesis is “simpler,” “purer,” and more intense than the particularity of the more modern deities, but also “primitive” and “savage” (Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 2: 177)—a state of negative will expressed as suicide in the person and in widespread destruction of systems and orders at the social level; his example, as we have seen, is the Terror of the French Revolution (Philosophy of Right). Still, in the introduction to his Philosophy of History, Hegel identifies the historical agent of change as an individual who shapes history as a privileged tool of the Spirit (49–50).10 These persons emerge in a whirlwind of conflict, and move history forward, but often are martyred in the process. In modernity, Hegel asserts, tragedy itself becomes grounded in this world-historical individual rather than in conflicting external moralities of the classical period. The Spirit, or the absolute’s drive to realize itself, results in tragedy, as the particular always contains within itself its own limitations, and thus its own demise. The particular must be transcended (in practice, destroyed) for history to progress dialectically. For those who followed Hegel, this meant that no matter how lovely, phenomenal forms were always finally doomed. Particularity is always limited. The defeat of Marsyas by Apollo was, in the early part of the nineteenth century (and still today), often read as allegorizing the real historical defeat of Phrygian and Etruscan nature worship by Olympian religion, in which Marsyas then survives as a problematically chthonian figure.11 Marsyas is now considered to have had currency in the classical era as a seer, a diviner, and a symbol of liberty. (In Rome, the statue of Marsyas was a figure for liberty and was associated with the representation of the plebs, whereas Apollo was considered the god of the aristocracy.)12 Marsyas and Apollo also represented competing musical aesthetics (flute/breath, vs. the lyre/hand with song/language) as well as competing forms of knowledge. Both were deities of prophecy and divination, though this fact is less often emphasized than their musical differences.13

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Most critics still tend to speak of the British interest in Dionysus as emerging late in the century. Though some note his attraction for the earlier Romantics, even these critics tend to assume midcentury is Apollonian in emphasis. There is, however, a steady, if small, number of critics who have made the case for a different view. Of more recent critics, Margot K. Louis, in her work on Persephone, presented the most comprehensive survey of the nineteenth-century interest in the Orphic or chthonian “mysteries,” as opposed to the Olympians.14 She argues, “Throughout the period, we find a recurrent insistence that the mythology of the ancient Greeks . . . is less deeply, less truly religious than the Mystery cults of the chthonian deities Persephone, Dionysos, and Adonis” (Persephone Rises 329). Louis argues that the early Romantics denigrated the Greek gods as “finite in form, limited in sympathy with mortal suffering. . . . By contrast, the Greek Mysteries were assumed to have satisfied the religious sensibility because they connected celebrants with one another, with nature, and with the infinite” (329). Citing “the persistence of a Romantic strain” in Victorian work on myth, she notes that, by the 1860s, “classical paganism had become vital to authors who had openly condemned and belittled it earlier in their careers,” including Ruskin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Arnold. Nietzsche, she argued, sparked an “influential” change in emphasis from the Eleusinian mysteries to those of Dionysus specifically. Louis shows that by the late Victorian era, the mysteries were used to “attack the Christian cult of transcendence” (330). Her study is mostly centered on myth in relation to religious attitudes, but her observations are instructive for our related interest in historical progression.15 Moreover, her work points to Victorians’ increasing sense that the Olympians lacked a principal qualification important to the modern period—sympathy. The Olympians, often described (whether admiringly or not) as colorless, calm, and expressionless from Winckelmann through Ruskin, lacked the expressive exterior and corresponding capacity to engage, surface to surface, with the sensing, expressive, suffering modern individual. Marsyas’s contest is a particularly resonant subtheme of the fascination with Dionysus in the nineteenth century, during which flaying becomes newly charged as a metaphor for the oscillation between surface and depth, between a phenomenal manifestation that becomes untrue to being (and thus a mask rather than a true expression) and the Marsyan substructure that represents becoming, through conflict with an Apollonian codification of past truth’s authority. By the 1870s, scientific discourse about the mind and body—the physiology and psychology that, as we have seen, is represented by Spencer and Bain—became both resolutely materialist in orientation and had largely separated itself from questions of metaphysics and cultural his-

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tory. These questions were increasingly taken up in the humanist fields of theology, classics, poetics, and literary criticism. For many, Apollo came to seem effete and overintellectualized compared to the connection of nature and human represented by Marsyas—or, in a more holistic view of the two figures as interdependent, Dionysian Marsyas represented a chthonian phase of an Apollo entering a cycle of occlusion. Unlike the notion that the form of the material body dictates substance, the idealist view sought to account for historical change by suggesting that the development of spirit over time periodically dictates the destruction of forms. In both cases, the fundamentally materialist link between form and spirit is accepted, but in the second, spirit precedes and dictates the form that expresses it, rather than emanating from it. By the late nineteenth century, idealist views, channeled through anthropology and other humanist and social science fields, reemerged as dominant in psychology itself (to the despair of Herbert Spencer), as the idea of a shared, irrational subconscious emerged in James Frazer and later, Freud. Literary representations of the satyr from the mid-1870s begin to position decadence as resulting from enlightenment—either as a historical turn leading down a mistaken path, or as a reaction to the exhaustion of a formerly true path. If early critiques of the Enlightenment read the Terror as the traumatic result of materialism, or an assertion of the animal properties of the human, late Victorians began to suspect that in refusing Dionysian properties of the human-animal, the Enlightenment emphasis on reason led to a decadent and stifling Apollonian brutality. Later Victorian idealists sought increasingly to harmonize the new insights of materialist science about the embodied nature of human consciousness with an idealist vision that would account for historical change and progress, and save metaphysics from irrelevance. In these models, both Dionysus and Apollo are partial manifestations. But it is Dionysus who heralds historical change and growth. The Dionysian uprising destroys outmoded authority, and then subsides, allowing a new particularity to form. Marsyas was in service to Dionysus and/or Pan, sometimes substituting for the god in his chthonian phase, a phase that became increasingly important to Victorians’ conception of the god as the century wore on. In the Hegelian formulation, it is both right for Marsyas to challenge the deity, and inevitable that the deity should flay him. But it is also inevitable that the particular victorious deity as embodiment of perfect form should fall, more finally than the protean force of antithesis. Marsyas thus stands as the tragic hero. Every goat has his day, or more precisely, individual goats fall, but tragedy—the Dionysian goat chorus (from

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tragos, or “goat,” and aeidein, “to sing”)16—witnesses and outlasts each individual tragedy. For Hegel, Greek myths represented a phase of development between the animism of the pre-Olympians to a more symbolic religion, and thus ultimately toward Christianity, a religion that approached understanding of true Spirit. But some of Hegel’s later contemporaries (such as Schlegel) and certainly his late nineteenth-century successors often adopted Hegel’s idea of a historical progression effected through a dialectic of nature and spirit, and discarded the religious teleology that went with it. For those seeking to rehabilitate the goat-footed god, the Athenians failed by embracing Apollo over Dionysus. It was Dionysus alone who could grant the necessary encounter with the dark and bestial elements of consciousness that dissolve the self-enclosure of the individual and connect to a common, unconscious element of both the human community and the natural world—piercing the isolation of his skin.

Portraying Marsyas Of the Dionysian characters, Marsyas obviously has particular importance for representations of the skin. The horror of flaying is its capacity to negate the human, both morally, through its cruelty, and physically, through its effacement of human surface both as meaningful beauty and as site of sensibility, of self. Flaying brings one person under control of another in a way that disturbs the very relation of humans to each other and profanes the division between life and death. Claudia Benthien argues that flaying myths throughout Western history show how “the flaying of one man at the hands of others seeks to restore the existing order symbolically through the use of the most extreme means” (72)—using the most profound violation to counter the damage wrought by an equally profane offense. That the flayed man operates as a sacrifice to order may indeed be true of the stories’ origin.17 But Marsyas (like Saint Bartholomew) also became a Christlike figure—even if as a kind of antihero—in the nineteenth century. Violating the existing order to the core comes to be seen as both problematic and de rigueur in the advancement of human history. On one level, Marsyas’s is a tale of hubris; like Arachne and so many others who ended badly, he challenged the gods and met his fate. Still, though the origin of the Marsyas story is lost in antiquity, by the first decade CE, Ovid already gives us a version that emphasizes his suffering more than his transgression. His Marsyas asks, mystified by the god’s implacability, “Why do you tear me from myself ? . . . A flute is not worth such price!” Ovid’s description focuses on the cruelty of the flaying: pouring blood and

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“throbbing guts” (192). By the medieval period, however, Dante writes it as a tale of transcendence wherein he identifies with the satyr. His own flaying will allow him to become a greater musician/poet; he invokes Apollo at the beginning of the Paradiso: “O good Apollo, for this last labor / Make of me such a vessel of thy power / . . . As when Marsyas thou didst draw / Out of the scabbard of those limbs of his” (canto 1, lines 13–14, 19–21, p. 11).18 He thus implies that Marsyas unsheathed becomes more himself, more potent, for being flayed, while also becoming an instrument of the god’s will in being divested of his own. Dante suggests that this sacrifice will make him worthy of Apollo’s laurels, and thus to portray the transcendent material of the Paradiso (an interesting, and clearly metaphorical, invocation, given his Christian theme). His Marsyas, then, is a hero of a story of spiritual transcendence through art and anguish. Benthien charts shifts in the use of the Marsyas figure throughout modernity. The Renaissance was the great age of Marsyas paintings. In sixteenthcentury “visual depictions, Apollo gradually takes an increasingly active part in the act of flaying, until we finally arrive at a kind of unequal duel between a god and a flayed human/animal . . . [that] places him in an immediate relationship to the anatomists” (Benthien 71)—an increasingly cruel and unsympathetic Apollo. By the seventeenth century, Benthien sees a more Dantean emphasis on transfiguration rather than punishment—Marsyas is freed from his animal nature by an Apollo whose tortures are thus ultimately beneficent. Skinless Marsyas emerges in these images stronger and more fully human than in his goatish form. The Enlightenment then returns us to a more Ovidian reading, a cautionary tale (don’t presume too much, especially against the powerful). Art, in this formulation, is a cruel muse that offers little in return but the inevitability of torment with no particular emphasis on transfiguration. The self is not realized or unified, but rent. A flute is not worth this. Then, in the eighteenth century, Benthien states that Marsyas “disappears as a pictorial subject” (81), and does not reemerge as a major literary theme until the second half of the twentieth. I find, however, that Marsyas remains vital throughout the Romantic period in Anglo-European culture, and has a significant revival in the later nineteenth century, as interest in the cult of Pan, nature religions, and other esoteric practices grew alongside a fin de siècle Romantic revival of revaluations of defiant, Faustian figures. This is especially true in literature.19 Wilde chooses as his avatar, then, a literary figure that had a great deal of currency in the period, and precisely as one that carried richly contradictory meanings since its classical inception. He does so, however, in a moment that

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emphasized Marsyas’s interdependence and even identity with his tormentor, and finally his ultimate ascendancy over Apollo. Apollo defines Marsyas, but through his action upon the body of Marsyas, Apollo loses his luster. For the Wilde of Reading Gaol, it is the suffering of the modern artist, the doubt and lack of repose, that is authentic, as opposed to the calmly lovely but spurious certainties of Apollonian reason and critical distance. In a period in which surface is being repositioned as self, in opposition to interiority, surface takes its meaning somewhat differently in the two great currents of nineteenth-century thought, though they are sometimes made to converge in artistic representations. In idealism, form exists as the expression of a larger universal will. In this model, imperfect forms such as Marsyas are superseded by more perfect formal expressions of will such as Apollo—to be superseded in turn by more perfect ones still. Whether Apollo transforms or destroys Marsyas by defacing him, stripping him of his surface, this enactment of world-historical violence is the necessary negative moment of becoming: the destruction of form in order to make way for the new. Beneath the surface lies the dynamic truth of becoming. In materialism, as we have seen, surface determines self: mind/will forms and takes its relation to the world through the interaction of that surface with the not-self. From a materialist perspective, Apollo simply destroys Marsyas. This makes Apollo’s victory much more definitive, but also more base. Apollo here is no instrument of divine justice, but merely vicious—a beastly boy pulling the wings off a butterfly. It also suggests that Apollo’s victory is hollow, in that destruction cannot transform the other. From this perspective, the murder of Marsyas ends the game: with Marsyas gone, there is no purpose to Apollo’s continuance, nor can we assume that Apollo’s victory represents his superiority in any more significant terms than those of the immediate contest. Between the times of Charles Bell and Oscar Wilde, a number of important representations of Marsyas position him specifically as a sacrificial victim of history. The appeal of German thought about myth as representing traumatic historical change extended to France’s own theorizing of its recent past.20 I would like to turn first to a powerful French midcentury visual statement that incorporates commentary on all these elements—and offers either a counter or an exception that proves the rule to Benthien’s argument that Marsyas disappears from visual art after the eighteenth century. It also shows the influence of German Romantic thinking about the Revolution on French representations of history and social change. Good friend of Delacroix, student of Ingres, and artistic darling of the 1848 Revolution, Paul Chenavard (1807–95) is now relatively little known as an artist, having completed few

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Figure 6.2.  Paul Chenavard, La Divine Tragédie, titled in the museum catalog Divina Tragedia (between 1865 and 1869). 400 x 550 cm. Paris, Musée d’Orsay. Photo by Hervé Lewandowski. © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

paintings (Sloane 285). He is better known in literary circles for his philosophical exchanges with Baudelaire. But his great work, The Divine Tragedy (La Divine Tragédie, 1865–69), now hanging in the Musée d’Orsay, provides a chronicle and perhaps commentary on the relations of animal to human and of both to history and revolution (see fig. 6.2). Chenavard was commissioned to decorate the Pantheon by the 1848 Revolutionary Committee.21 He designed a vast series of panels illustrating all of human history, which he approached through the philosophy of Hegel, as a teleology, and as a revolutionary, as the triumph of human reason over religious belief. Before he could paint the works, however, the Pantheon was changed back into a church, and his project was decommissioned. The only panel he ever painted was the Divine Tragedy, an enormous and complex painting shown at the Salon of 1869. As a history painting, it is a visual analogue of the epic form, yet rather than focusing on a single historical event, its ambitious focus is on the nature of religious history itself, as well as actual historical change over human history. Audiences were stunned by the mastery, beauty, and sheer size of the image (400 x 550 cm, a bit over 13 x 18 ft), but were confused by its philosophical and narrative complexity and put off by its classicism, which seemed aesthetically reactionary in 1869. Perhaps

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most of all, audiences were offended by its heterodoxy. Though his extensive notes explain that the painting is a history of religion that shows the triumph of the Christian Trinity, its anticlericism is fairly evident. The Musée d’Orsay cites Chenavard’s notes to explain that the painting shows the fall of pagan religions before Christianity: “As the ancient religions came to a close and with the accession of the Christian Trinity into Heaven, Death, helped by the Angel of Justice and the Spirit, struck down those gods doomed to perish”; and gods from many traditions (Greek, Indian, Roman) are depicted (Musée d’Orsay, quoted from the original Salon booklet). Art historian Joseph Sloane notes, “The philosophy of Hegel made so profound an impression on him that . . . he [Chenavard] . . . formed the idea of placing his art at the service of history with a view to explaining the true nature of human greatness. . . . a huge canvas depicting the final collapse of all religion (La Divine Tragédie) . . . caused much interest at the Salon of 1869” (286). In showing “human greatness,” Chenavard’s portrayal of the triumph of Christianity is ambiguous at best, and justifies Sloane’s observation that it is concerned with the collapse of all religion, rather than just the pagan ones. I am here concerned primarily with the portrayal of Marsyas, which dominates one lower corner of the frame. The canvas is peopled with a crowd of life-size figures. Marsyas forms one corner of a pyramid of bodies at the apex of which lies Christ crucified, in the lap of God the Father. The canvas is painted in grisaille, so that the whole canvas has a misty, ethereal (and rather depressing) air. In the muted colors, it is Apollo’s white body that tonally repeats the suffering Christ, but it is strangely God the Father who mirrors and reverses Marsyas’s color and position (darker body and head toward the angle of the triangle formed by the figures in the painting). Above Marsyas on the pyramid, on one side, is Satan wrestling with an archangel and, on the other, Prometheus and his vulture, both challengers to the Father. Elsewhere on the canvas, other scenes of conflict and death show other religious characters in violent combat, dead or grieving. Chenavard’s Apollo is a particularly brutal depiction (see fig. 6.3). He holds the knife between his teeth, single-mindedly intent on his project, as his right hand holds away the hand of Marsyas’s flayed arm, and the trailing skin, showing the shape of Marsyas’s left hand and arm, lies empty and bloodied on the ground (claiming the authority of Michelangelo’s Saint Bartholomew in The Last Judgment).22 Apollo’s left thumb digs visibly under the skin of the satyr’s shoulder and pushes to loosen it. He squats, resting his right foot on Marsyas’s thigh, gripping Marsyas’s flayed left fingers and stretching the arm taut. Bracing his left foot against the desperately strug-

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Figure 6.3.  Apollo Flaying Marsyas. Detail of Chenavard’s Divina Tragedia. Paris, Musée d’Orsay. Photo by Hervé Lewandowski. © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

gling and bloody victim’s shoulder, he pulls away Marsyas’s flesh, working up toward the throat. We do not see much of the satyr’s lower body (the figure is foreshortened, with the head emerging from the foreground toward the viewer), and Apollo’s face is mostly hidden (we see it from the crown down), whereas Marsyas’s suffering visage is turned fully to the viewer. Also unusual in paintings of this scene, Marsyas is struggling,

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resisting. Whereas the white-toned Apollo shows a splendid physique, it is Marsyas who appears to embody the human condition. In this painting full of very neoclassical figures, Marsyas’s skinless arm shockingly recalls the precision and unapologetic meatiness of anatomical atlases. Strikingly, it is not the hairy pelt of the satyr or the trunk near it that Apollo attacks first, but the hand, arm, and head: it is the humanity of Marsyas that Apollo seeks to despoil.23 The pyramid suggests that the development of civilized religion and human history rests on the barbaric separation of Marsyas from his skin. On the one hand, one might read this as a traditional rejection of the animal side of humanity in favor of the more civilized and spiritual. This would be a typical reading of the defeat of Marsyas as a story enshrining the historical defeat of the older nature religion of southern Italy by the Olympian religion of Apollo: an advance toward a more symbolic, organized, and widespread belief system. However, Chenavard’s revolutionary take on Hegelian views suggests a more ironic interpretation, and the almost obscenely embodied Apollo laboring at the torture of the satyr would suggest little to nineteenth-century viewers of spiritual advancement. Besides, the tragedy of the title is not only those of the gods being struck down, but of Christ’s own torture and death (as for Hegel, the stories of Dionysus and Osiris were imperfect antetypes to that of Christ in their treatment of death and rebirth). The triangulation of Marsyas with Satan highlights his pride in challenging the divine, but the association with Prometheus again suggests a more positive interpretation, especially since Apollo himself, as a pagan divinity, must fall before the Trinity—and a good thing, too, Chenavard seems to suggest. In the other lower corner of the triangle, Dionysus’s consort Ariadne sleeps (or swoons) on a leopard skin, as Dionysus and a putto bear her away from her grief—pulling on the skin as a sling to carry her, actually, rather than touching her body directly, thus duplicating Apollo pulling away Marsyas’s skin on the other side of the canvas.24 So Dionysus triumphant and Marsyas brutalized form the base angles of the triangular structure. Like Dionysus, Ariadne was a non-Olympian, and like him, she becomes an important figure of death and rebirth in the nineteenth century (Nichols 13). Placing her on the leopard skin inscribes her in the tradition of bacchantes celebrating the cult of the god, in which they are of course best known for the dismemberment of Pentheus by his mother in her divine madness. (Bacchus transformed the women into leopards to wreak their vengeance on Pentheus, who was made to appear as a bull or deer when he threatened the worship of the god. In short, even when the woman does the

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flaying, she generally finds herself sacrificed.) Ariadne—the most prominent female figure and the only one in the foregrounded central grouping—is made to signify abandonment to nature and the animal. Her enthronement on leopard fur—that is, on the skin of a bacchante—poses both inversion and parallel to the flaying of Marsyas by Apollo. (Marsyas is sometimes figured in classical representations in a leopard skin.)25 The double nature of human and animal in the heart of divinity is also a theme repeated throughout the lower part of the canvas. At the bottom center, the defeat of preclassical religions is represented: the Indian god Maya (god of the phenomenal, material world) weeps over the Egypto-Roman Jupiter-Ammon, who is facedown (father of the gods, and thus forming an opposition to the center top figure of God the Father, whose face is partially obscured in clouds), and “cow-headed and many breasted Isis-Cybele,” the African mother and fertility goddess, whose supine body is in the background (at about the same distance as Marsyas’s goat-legs, which recede into the background as his head faces us and merges into the foreground) and whose animal face is shrouded. (The figures’ identifications are from Chenavard’s own description written for the Salon of 1869.) Thus modernity is defined as being built on the defeat of preclassical by classical, and then Christian religion.26 It is also an alternation of brutality and suffering on which human history seems to be built—a brutality that seems in the painting to be visited upon darker bodies by lighter ones until Christ reverses the trend by assuming the burden of suffering upon his own. He is held in the Father’s lap as a kind of womanless pietà: Christ is simultaneously being crucified (shown in the pose) and is risen (shown in the radiance of his body, and his location in heaven and no longer on the cross). We do not see his tormentors. Of course, since the Trinity is one god, Christ is both victim and aggressor, man and divinity, beast and spirit, Marsyas and Apollo. He flays himself, and bereft of human form, emerges divine. But Chenavard suggests that his divinity might be as impermanent as the others’, as angels fly above them with death’s-heads (because, he explains in his notes, “death is everywhere”). Like other gods, this new one will fall and the myth of eternity with him. Power oscillates between the suffering animal and the torturing human, who in turn meld as self-torturers, rejecting their own embodied connection with the natural world as they triumph over past, dead figures who embodied and reconciled both. Chenavard takes a Romantic view of religious history, without Hegel’s Christian teleology—a common move across Europe in midcentury.

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The ambivalence Chenavard evinces about the triumph of Christ is consistent with the Revolutionary period’s materialism and idealism’s philosophy and aesthetics, to a point. His self-proclaimed Hegelian ideals are easy to discern. For example, his tracing of a direct line from Indian and Egyptian deities through to Christ is found in Hegel. Yet, though Hegel’s dialectic and the progress of religions are clearly shown, the Christian teleology of Hegel’s vision is less clearly triumphant than the often optimistic mid-nineteenthcentury British elaborations of these ideas. Chenavard projects a continuing pattern of creation, struggle, and destruction, beyond Christ, and thus beyond the present. In an era in which geology and evolutionary science projected a longer and more diverse past (and thus, potentially, a more diverse future) for nature generally and humanity in particular, materialist science eroded Victorians’ ability to believe in a triumphal end of history. In an era also when the human is more material and more tangibly connected to the animal body than ever before, the myth of Marsyas offers particular potency. The myth has two faces: it is a story of divine cruelty or a story of the transcendence of the animal through suffering, and especially through art. If the human cannot transcend the animal—if the self depends entirely upon the animal body—then there can be no purpose to suffering, only a divine cruelty that is itself bestial and meaningless. In the philosophical and scientific context of nineteenth-century materialism and evolutionary theory, Marsyas is the artistic version of the missing link, that which connects animal and human. As usual, the head aspires to challenge the gods, while the lower body is driven by animal desires: the human half nude, and the animal half simply naked in its goat fleece. Flaying makes both halves one, in an ultimate nakedness that is no longer nudity. The Marsyas figure became a powerful image of human continuity with the animal, or sacrifice and suffering, and his flaying at the hands of the god of reason and light, always overdetermined, becomes almost unbearably multivalent. In the context of teleological doubt, the chthonian element of the story becomes dominant, and Dionysus/Marsyas begins to be a more credible antetype of Christ than Apollo.

History’s Victims in Oxford At the same time that Chenavard was history-painting his updated Hegel, Tennyson, Arnold, and Pater were deeply immersed in classical myth. Despite the demise of English Romantic poetry, German Romantic idealism more broadly remained an important influence on the period. Particu-

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larly in Oxford, Hegelian classicists such as Walter Pater and Balliol classicist and theologian Benjamin Jowett favored identifications with Apollonian, Dorian culture. But the 1850s emphasis on evolutionary theory insistently demanded an engagement with materialism, and German idealism provided a strong example of such engagement. Midcentury evolutionary discourse and continuing religious doubt stripped much of the teleological implication of Hegel’s notions of religious development, while leaving in place a dialectical narrative of physiological, religious, and cultural change through conflict.27 Even before Pater’s well-publicized turn to the Dionysian in the 1870s, the cracks are visible in the mid-Victorians’ supposedly unwavering adulation for the Olympians. Although these ideas were taken up with different degrees of attention to the source texts of German idealism, certain themes appear repeatedly: the nature of tragedy as a drama of individual becoming in relation to spirit, a model of history based on conflict, and myth as historical metaphor for religious and cultural development. As early as 1852, Matthew Arnold, that determinedly Apollonian apostle of sweetness and light, was already wrestling with the costs of the aestheticization of experience using the Marsyas myth, in the complex and ambivalent poem that headed his second collection of poetry—and that he famously cut from the 1853 collection of his work.28 “Empedocles on Etna” tells the story of the philosopher-doctor, disheartened by the gullibility of his followers and unbearably lonely in his devotion to rationalism, who commits suicide by leaping into the volcano Etna. (Arnold saw Empedocles as a “Faust” or Hamlet figure, and these were also key figures for Hegel’s understanding of modern tragedy.) As a counterpoint to his musings, two other characters speak: Pausanius, the decent middle-aged disciple who tries to cheer him, and young Callicles, a musician who follows him at a distance singing songs that are often read as representing a simpler period of Greek belief.29 There is no third-person narrator; all is in the first-person voices of the three characters. Optimistic and youthful, Callicles begins speaking of the beauty of nature as a cure for Empedocles’s depression. Though he plays the Apollonian instrument, he seems to invoke Pan and Apollo with equal ease: O Pan, How gracious is the mountain at this hour!  . . . the sun Is shining on the brilliant mountain-crests,

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And on the highest pines; . . . I have my harp too—that is well.—Apollo! What mortal could be sick or sorry here? (act 1, scene 1, lines 5–20, p. 157)

Elsewhere, Arnold famously opines that “cheerful, sensuous, pagan” life cannot be “sick or sorry” (“Pagan and Medieval Religious Sentiment” 28), but also remarks that as moderns, we find this unrelenting cheer oppressive and unsatisfying. Empedocles has figuratively entered a kind of modernity. Ironically, in so doing, he falls from Dorian grace: reason undoes itself. The sun is shining and the birds are singing, but those pines invoke a dark shadow: immediately after Callicles mentions the pines, we have a qualification on the sweetness and light: but farther down, Here in the valley, is in shade; the sward Is dark . . . on these pines That climb from the stream’s edge, the long grey tufts, Which the goats love, are jewell’d thick with dew. (act 1, scene 1, lines 11–17, p. 157)

The bright sun and the lyre contrast with the dark grottoes, and goat-footed creatures have ended badly in piney woods. Callicles sings first of an idyll between human and nonhuman creature, of the centaur Chiron and his pupil Achilles, and next, he hymns a darker ditty of Cadmus and Harmonia, maternal grandparents of Dionysus, who are saved from the miseries of grief for their dead children by being transformed into dumb animals without conscious awareness. Above him, Empedocles proceeds up the mountain, finding scant comfort in Callicles’s cheery warbling of the virtues of the Apollonian lyre, whose  . . . voice is lovely everywhere; . . . Only to Typho it sounds hatefully; To Typho only, the rebel o’erthrown. (act 2, lines 37, 41–42, pp. 188–89)

But Empedocles sides with Typho, as his own litter “wind[s] . . . under the pines” (act 1, scene 1, lines 163–64, p. 163). He unveils himself, taking off his purple robes and golden circlet, as he declares himself “weary” of the suffering and oppression that he hears in Typho’s moans: —Lie there, ye ensigns Of my unloved preeminence

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In an age like this! Among a people of children. (act 2, lines 108, 109–13, p. 192)

In counterpoint, and as Empedocles strips his clothing, Callicles begins to sing (beautifully, obliviously, prophetically) of the contest of Marsyas and Apollo: Oh! that Fate had let me see That triumph of the sweet persuasive lyre, That famous, final victory, When jealous Pan with Marsyas did conspire; . . . And the attentive Muses said: “Marsyas, thou art vanquished!” Then Apollo’s minister Hang’d upon a branching fir Marsyas, that unhappy Faun, And began to whet his knife. (act 2, lines 125–28, 145–50, p. 193)

As Apollo lies on the grass, ignoring the pleas of the Maenads for mercy, young Olympus stands alone, weeping, “For he taught him how to sing, / And . . . flute-playing,” and perhaps even more importantly,  . . . how to please The red-snooded Phrygian girls, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Flashing in the dance’s whirls Underneath the starlit trees In the mountain-villages. (act 2, lines 168–84, p. 194)

These dancing girls echo Empedocles’s lament that the “young implacable god” has separated him from his youthful joys: We had not lost our balance then, nor grown Thought’s slaves, and dead to every natural joy. The smallest thing could give us pleasure then— . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A flute-note from the woods, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The village-girl at her wheel. (act 2, lines 248–50, 252, 257, p. 197)

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Olympus weeps “At his master’s piteous cries” (act 2, line 186, p. 194) and covers his eyes “Not to see Apollo’s scorn;— / Ah, poor Faun, poor Faun! ah, poor Faun!” (act 2, lines 189–90, p. 194). This is certainly a version that emphasizes the cruelty of the god, though the young musician thoughtlessly yearns to see Apollo’s triumph. (And Callicles in the Gorgias suggests that might makes right, that natural law shows that the triumph of the strong over the weak is just, as well as being the way of the world. It is not a view endorsed by either Plato or Arnold, though Nietzsche later takes it up, and so did others who considered themselves “social” Darwinists. Darwin himself did not.) Yet, though Callicles seems to suppose that his songs are cheering to Empedocles, Empedocles reacts to each with increasing unease. Upon completion of the Marsyas song, Empedocles immediately responds by continuing his own apostrophe to his clothing and personal effects: And lie thou there, My laurel bough! Scornful Apollo’s ensign, lie thou there! (act 2, lines 191–93, p. 194)

Like the Faun, Empedocles is divested of his protective coverings, exposed. The description of Apollo as scornful echoes Callicles’s use of the word, as Empedocles declares himself “weary of the solitude / Where he who bears thee must abide,” and then refers to another cruelly displaced figure: Thou guardest them, Apollo! Over the grave of the slain Pytho, Though young, intolerably severe! (act 2, lines 204–6, p. 195)30

Apollo protects his votaries from the “profane,” “But” Empedocles wonders, can life reach him? Thou fencest him from the multitude— Who will fence him from himself ? (act 2, lines 210–12, p. 195)

Apollo is “intolerably severe”—thrust back on himself, Empedocles finds his own body a trap: He hears nothing but the cry of the torrents, And the beating of his own heart. . . . Take thy bough, set me free from my solitude; I have been enough alone!” (act 2, lines 213–14, 218–19, p. 195)

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Still, Empedocles cannot go back to the comradeship of “men” (act 2, line 209, p. 195), from whom he is now separated irrevocably. He finds their chatter “unbearable” (act 2, lines 224, 226, p. 196), leading him to alternate restlessly, repeatedly, between isolation and the crowd miserably bandied to and fro, Like a sea-wave, betwixt the world and thee, Thou young, implacable God! and only death Can cut his oscillations short, and so Bring him to poise. (act 2, lines 230–34, p. 196)

The historical Empedocles (as given to the Victorians by Aristotle, for example) believed that the two motive forces of the universe were love (union) and strife (separation); and that they oscillated. Arnold’s recasting of this basically Heraclitan idea—critiqued and expanded by Aristotle in ways that were important for Hegel’s idea of the dialectic—is close here to Nietzsche’s later reading of Apollo as an individuating, isolating principle. Arnold claimed to be appalled that many misread the poem, seeing his own voice in Empedocles’s narrative. He insisted that he advocated neither suicide nor quietism. Scholars have remained uncertain, however, just what position the verse drama does, in fact, advance. Isobel Armstrong argues persuasively that Arnold rejects all the partial solutions—or nonsolutions—offered by the voices in the poem. “Quietism . . . is dumbness. . . . the Typho story is a myth of repression” (Armstrong 214).31 She concludes that Arnold rejects the detachment and lack of commitment of both Empedocles and Callicles, as “both figures are in retreat” (214). Still, says Armstrong, “there is no doubt that for Arnold, Marsyas is a loser” (214). And of course, he is the loser, in the story. But who here is Marsyas? If Callicles, once beloved and tutored by Empedocles, stands aside and mourns the passing of his master, then is Callicles Olympus, and Empedocles Marsyas? Callicles’s “Poor Faun” might certainly describe the hypersensitive Empedocles, relentlessly individuated by his pain, separated from himself, yet himself too much with him.32 Does Empedocles implicitly embrace Pan by rejecting Apollo? And is that an unrecognized “win” for Pan, or at least a loss for Apollo? If, as is usually the Romantic, early nineteenth-century reading, Pan represents a prior historical state, then Empedocles’s desire for Pan is regressive and futile. But for Arnold, Apollo poses no adequate answer to Empedocles’s dilemma either. Though Arnold does not see the Apollonian principle as regressive, he does not give it a wholly positive endorsement. Progress it may be, but a partial and very uncomfortable form of it—Arnold is not prepared to deny teleology, but his endorsement is notably ambivalent.

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“Empedocles on Etna” is unambiguously a narrative of a failure to achieve reconciliation between the Dionysian elements of animal pleasure and oneness with the community and the Apollonian pleasures of pure thought and civilized aesthetics. That, of course, is the human condition, but Empedocles at least thinks he has achieved a momentary experience of unity (or perhaps, Pater would say, a moment of awareness of the “flickering,” unstable formless form of becoming). So as to forestall the loss of that diaphanous moment, Empedocles leaps into the volcano. In essence, Empedocles chooses against the Olympians, uniting his body with Typho. After Empedocles leaps into the crater, Callicles closes the poem, singing, “Not here, O Apollo! / Are haunts meet for thee” (act 2, lines 421–22, p. 204). He then sees Apollo and “His choir, the Nine” (Muses) on their way out of the haunts of men (act 2, line 446, p. 205)—do they exit the mountain in triumph or retreat? Does it matter, once they are gone?33 It clarifies some of the stakes of Arnold’s portrayal of Empedocles to read Arnold’s poem in terms of its original intentions—and its competition. Arnold originally intended to write about a different figure: Lucretius. But Tennyson’s “Lucretius” came out while Arnold was in the early stages of composition, and Arnold then decided upon Empedocles as a protagonist. Empedocles was a natural second choice, another scientist-philosopher in the same intellectual tradition, who also died by suicide. Lucretius’s De rerum natura and Epicurean philosophy had often been invoked in the eighteenth and nineteenth century as precursors to materialist science and to evolutionary theory, and were cited frequently by materialists such as Hume.34 Martin Priestman argues that the figure of Lucretius “as a representative of tormented modernity is embedded throughout Matthew Arnold’s work” (300), and that the voice of Lucretius himself is strong in Arnold’s “Empedocles in Etna” (300). Lucretius’s De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things) had been a source of inspiration for poets, philosophers, and scientists since its rediscovery in the Renaissance. During the Enlightenment, Lucretius came to be seen as a special forebear of materialists. Eric Baker identifies three “strands” of the dialogue of Enlightenment thinkers with Lucretius: the “ameliorist, the radical and the aesthetic” (274). Locke, Shaftesbury, and Voltaire, Baker shows, used Lucretius to try to “reconcile the authority of science with . . . providence” (274). Mandeville and Rousseau used it in the service of “social critique” (274). And the Romantics, including Kant and Goethe (and to some degree Rousseau) sourced Lucretius to “negotiate the antagonism between Enlightenment progress and religious value” (274), attempting to recuperate the category of the aesthetic from either the materialism of Locke or the degraded category of pure sensuality traditionally accorded to bodily sensations in reli-

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gion. In early nineteenth-century British poetry, Lucretius was decidedly the property of the Romantics, but in science he was most associated with the debate within natural theology, some using Lucretius to try to continue the negotiation between religion and science, and others rejecting him as identified with the materialist philosophes of pre-Revolutionary France.35 Lucretius was an important source for the later materialism of Hume. Arnold appropriates Lucretius as a figure of science and abstract knowledge who is still tormented by the desire for an earlier, less complicated faith in a kind of universal spirit. Unlike those who primarily sourced his work, however, Arnold creatively reworks him in “Empedocles in Etna” as a man tortured by implications of his own creation, and this is what allows him to cast science on the Apollonian side of the divide. (It also potentially places the scientist in the role of the artist who suffers for truth, even if the Apollonian light of that truth destroys him.) Arnold’s Marsyas is driven to pursue his own pain, just as he is driven to escape from it; it is the oscillation of these drives that propels history, and from which Empedocles seeks his escape in death. Certainly there are echoes between Tennyson’s “Lucretius” and Arnold’s “Empedocles.” Tennyson follows the legend that Lucretius killed himself when his wife gave him a love potion that “confused the chymic labour of his brain,” driving him mad. In the poem, Lucretius is particularly disturbed by the lustful thoughts provoked by the potion, which he envisions as a satyr chasing an Oread: a satyr, a satyr, see, Follows; but him I proved impossible Twy-natured is no nature. Yet he draws Nearer and nearer, and I scan him now Beastlier than any phantom of his kind. (lines 193-97)

Though not Marsyas, this satyr functions as a similar symbol of two competing impulses, especially between animal passion and mental abstraction, in one body. As the poet-narrator of Tennyson’s poem notes, he is himself “Twy-natured” (line 194), with a “brute brain within the man’s,” (line 21) and Lucretius sees himself becoming animal, as . . . some unseen monster lays His vast and filthy hands upon my will, Wrenching it backward into his. (lines 219–21)

The “Twy-natured” satyr, like Lucretius’s and Empedocles’s own divided natures, drives him to his death. Tennyson’s Lucretius tries to retreat from

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lust into rationality, whereas Arnold’s Empedocles, having found refuge in Apollonian rationality, finds it barren. Both, significantly, commit suicide in order to preserve their humanity, though from opposite positions. Empedocles tries to preserve a moment’s connectedness to the all: The numbing cloud Mounts off my soul; I feel it, I breathe free.  . . . Ere it flag, . . .  . . . Receive me, save me! (Arnold, “Empedocles in Etna,” act 2, lines 407–8, 413, 416, p. 204)

Lucretius uses it to cling to his rationality: “Why should I, beastlike as I find myself, / Not manlike end myself ?” (Tennyson, “Lucretius,” lines 231–32). Both are trying to preserve a connection to humanity that the poets identify with spirit or soul, though their characters may not. Within the Roman historical context, Lucretius’s suicide would read more clearly as a triumph of masculine self-control than Empedocles’s self-immolation does, in either the Greek or Arnold’s own context. But the continuities between the two poems suggest some common themes. Both Arnold and Tennyson are engaging with questions of materialism and man’s animal nature, through important scientific precursor figures seen as sparking historical and epistemological transitions and simultaneously victimized by those changes’ creation of a world and worldview inimical to their own sense of themselves. Arnold’s interest in the exceptional individual sensitive to change and yet unable to embrace it wholeheartedly continues throughout his oeuvre; the painful challenge of science/reason to human exceptionalism also continues to be important as “The Sea of Faith” recedes, leaving the “ignorant armies” struggling on their “darkling plain” (“Dover Beach,” lines 21, 35, 37, pp. 253–57), which he published in 1869, but likely composed in 1851. Arnold seems to conclude that Empedocles’s resistance to Apollo is historically fruitless, but Apollo himself seems not much of a prize in exchange for the plenitude represented by Pan and the past; the promise of the future remains obscure, latent, giving “neither joy, nor love, nor light / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain” (“Dover Beach,” lines 33–34, p. 256). Empedocles was an excellent second choice for other reasons as well—he was influential for Lucretius as a materialist forebear, and particularly for his argument that thought was shaped by sense-perception, a theme that resonates on all sides of the Enlightenment and nineteenth-century debates on embodiment. For Empedocles, matter (comprising the four elements) was imbued with spirit, and living things are made of such mat-

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ter in varying proportions, in a state of constant movement. Matter constantly separates and combines, through the attraction of like to like and the opposing attraction to unlike. Empedocles’s emphasis on the inseparability of matter and spirit made him attractive to idealists (such as Hegel’s friend Friedrich Hölderlin, who wrote a lyric tragedy on the death of Empedocles), and his materialism and religious skepticism to materialists. Famously, he identified the pores of the skin as crucial to the circulation and aeration of the blood, and to the sensing self. Sensation, Empedocles believed, is based on the passage of matter through pores in the sensing organ: for example, particles of light (fire), attracted to the like particles in the eye, pass through the skin of the eye and create vision. Sense was not wholly dependent upon surface for Empedocles, but the skin had for him a newly important role in mediating and enabling sense. Marsyas is an interesting choice to pair with Empedocles, uniting matter and spirit (or animal and human), and flaying resonates as a metaphor, given the philosopher’s emphasis on skin as a structure through which sensation (and thus thought) is created. Whereas Arnold still seems to see the Dionysian/Apollonian conflict as leading to a forward progression—a teleological narrative stripped of religious but not social significance—later Victorians increasingly seem to see the conflict between Apollo and Dionysus as a perennial one, and one in which Apollo does not appear as either hero or victor. While they continue to attempt a reconciliation of materialism and idealism in reworkings of the myth, Dionysus is increasingly valorized as both more animal and more noumenal than Apollo, who is increasingly identified with a phenomenal and historically limited cerebralism as well as a masculinist, neoclassical aesthetic focused on surface form rather than spirit. That Dionysus is both animal and spirit, both aggressively connected to nature and to becoming, works well with late-century explorations of nature, sexuality, the unconscious, and the feminine as chthonic forces that are more determinative than the formal, rational, and technologically advanced. The interim between Arnold and the later Pater and Wilde is also characterized by skepticism about teleology more generally. Later artists generally embrace the dialectical conflict model of history without any Christian (or even politically utopian) underpinnings, reading it instead as a cyclic model of necessary and repeated conflict. The skepticism about how much “better off ” modernity is than the past that we see in Arnold begins to manifest as an interest in ancient and foreign religions for their spiritual content in various cultural movements, and among others in a sense that historical forward movement is associated with forms of Dionysian ascendancy.

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Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872) defines the Apollonian principle as that of the principium individuationis, or principle of individuation (20 and passim), for Nietzsche a form of illusion, against the plural “One,” which is formed when the human finds that the self is submerged in the many, in animality and the crowd, “when he suddenly begins to doubt the cognitive modes of experience. . . . If we add to this awe the glorious transport which arises in man, even from the very depths of nature, at the shattering of the principium individuationis, then we are in a position to apprehend the essence of Dionysian rapture” (20). At such a moment, “He feels himself to be godlike. . . . No longer the artist, he has himself become a work of art: . . . The finest clay, the most precious marble—man—is here kneaded and hewn” by the “chisel” of the “Dionysian world artist” (22). Dionysus, in Nietzsche, is the artist who defaces to reface, who is positioned “to tear asunder the veil of Maya” in which Apollo is enrobed, a “thin veil” hiding “the whole Dionysian realm” from the individual (25). In tragedy, “The satyr, as the Dionysian chorist, dwells in a reality sanctioned by myth and ritual. . . . the satyr . . . stands to cultured man in the same relation as Dionysian music does to civilization” (48): that is, it represents the “knowledge” of chthonic forces such as death that destroys the (optimistic, rational) capacity for “action” (48). “Traumatically wounded” by knowledge, Nietzsche says, the Greek would have seen “the satyr” as “man’s true prototype, an expression of his highest and strongest aspirations. He was an enthusiastic reveler, filled with transport by the approach of the god; a compassionate companion re-enacting the sufferings of the god; a prophet of wisdom born out of nature’s womb; a symbol of the sexual omnipotence of nature, . . . sublime and divine” (52). Apollo is “phenomenal,” whereas Dionysus is noumenal; Apollo is sculptural, whereas Dionysus is musical (139). But in Nietzsche’s “correction” of history, it is Dionysus who rends Apollo’s veils, etching away sculpturally to reveal the noumenal reality of the universal and divine animality beneath the illusion of the individual human.36 Nietzsche has generally been read as a philosopher not critically engaged with evolutionary theory, due in large part to his caustic, offhand dismissals of Darwin. However, two studies revise our understanding of Nietzsche’s vexed relationship with—and unacknowledged dependence on—British evolutionary theory, with which he seems to have largely familiarized himself through Spencer and Haeckel (Moore 62; Richardson 16–17). Both Gregory Moore’s Nietzsche, Biology, and Metaphor (2002) and John Richardson’s Nietzsche’s New Darwinism (2004) show that Nietzsche was deeply interested in thinking through the issue of human roots in the animal, seeking a naturalistic ontology, and countering degeneration theory with an active

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embrace of what he saw as evolutionary truths. This certainly does not mean Nietzsche was a Darwinist, but we can see him as more actively engaged in thinking through the evolutionary debate than generally acknowledged. Moore argues that Nietzsche was principally critical of the teleological (idealist) structure that many thinkers grafted onto Darwin’s pointedly nonteleological theory in midcentury (Moore 30–34). (Since he came to know Darwin through those thinkers, Nietzsche believed he was critical of Darwin himself.) Nietzsche distinguishes between the extraordinary individual who evolves as such, and the “herd” majority of the species who tend toward stasis and preservation of existing forms, based on a notion of cellular multiplicity making up a single overarching organism (Moore 34–27). The will to power thus can be exhibited in struggle within a single organism (or a herd), and that is the primary driver of change, rather than competition between individuals of a species (46–49). Morality is a herd phenomenon emerging from “habit and . . . tradition” for Nietzsche (Moore 59); moreover, Nietzsche writes, “moral states are physiological states” (qtd. in Moore 65). As we have seen, this rejection of a teleology of the spirit in favor of a physiological one is apparent in Chenavard and Zola in France, and as we shall see, in many thinkers in Britain with increasing decisiveness as well. Nietzsche also participates in the project of elaborating a physiological, evolutionary aesthetics begun by thinkers as diverse as Schopenhauer, Hegel, Hume, and Payne Knight. In his vision, rather than evolving toward poesis, the Dionysian and Apollonian elements must eternally coexist and struggle. The Dionysian Kunsttrieb (art drive or artistic impulse), by utilizing the spectator’s lower, animal drives can “reveal and simultaneously . . . transfigure our shared experience and bestial origins” by pulling the spectator into a shared aesthetic experience in the way rhythm does. Nietzsche sees this process as primal and coincident with the birth of organic matter and also essentially linked to reproduction (Moore 93). Sensation and will are the prime movers of creation: sensation is the fundamental state, and the pain of becoming forces the organism to actively will form out of the chaos, “to deliver itself from the primal pain” (95). Form gives pleasure, which is the antidote being creates to counter pain. Every cognitive act is thus an aesthetic experience of creating form (100)—and of responding to pain, and this basic drive is also reproductive and evolutionary. Of course, this also implies the destruction of prior forms. Nietzsche identified himself as siding with Dionysus against Christ (“against the Crucified”), and “as the incarnation of Dionysus in human form whose illness and recovered health represent his own Passion and Resurrection” (Moore 190–91). In Ecce Homo (written in the 1880s, published in 1908), Nietzsche

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amends the opposition of Dionysus and Apollo to that within Dionysus/ himself, and identifies every form of idealism, from Socrates through Apollo through Christ, as decadent. Dionysus emerges as the antidecadent, primitive root of all forward movement of evolution, the expression of the will to power based on sensation, which is also the will to form new forms. (We see here the influence of Schopenhauer as well.) He also attributes joy in destruction to Dionysus (rather than Apollo): “A Dionysian life-task needs the hardness of the hammer, and one of its first essentials is without doubt the joy even of destruction. The command, ‘Harden yourselves!’ and the deep conviction that all creators are hard, is the really distinctive sign of a Dionysian nature” (Ecce Homo 114). Often, his language in this volume echoes Hegel’s through Carlyle (whom he found fascinating, if incurably “Romantic”): “I promise the advent of a tragic age: the highest art in the saying of yea to life, ‘tragedy,’ will be born again when mankind has the knowledge of the hardest, but most necessary of wars, behind it, without, however, suffering from that knowledge” (Ecce Homo 73–74). Apollo disappears into Dionysus, who skins himself. Dionysus and the figure of the satyr are thus brought to the fore and revalued.37 They are sometimes collapsed or even change places with Apollo and Christ in mid- to late nineteenth-century representations of art, across several European cultures. Many scholars have tried to find links between Nietzsche and the British artists whose work seems so congruent with his (Swinburne, for example), and been forced reluctantly to conclude that there is little evidence of direct influence. But, as we have seen, although Nietzsche’s is a foundational reconceptualization of tragedy (and of Hegel), Nietzsche’s reading of the Dionysian-Apollonian divide runs predictably along the broad path of a trend widespread throughout Europe in midcentury.

Pater and Wilde, Unbecoming Dorians For was it not from the sorrows of Dionysos that tragedy sprang? —Oscar Wilde, “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.”

I have said that in the 1850s, Arnold was very much in dialogue with the Oxford classicists, especially Jowett and Pater. W. J. Mander’s 2011 work on British idealism finally banished not only the notion that idealism had no currency in Britain before the fin de siècle, but showed how much Hegel and other German idealists were seen at Oxford as the mediating solution to problems of materialism’s apparent opposition to Christianity.38 The task of the 1860s was felt by many thinkers to be harmonizing idealism (and sometimes

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religion) with new developments in evolutionary and physiological study: Kant and Hegel with Spencer and Darwin. In 1865, the Scottish philosopher and physician James Hutchinson Stirling’s Secret of Hegel was published in England with considerable success (Mander 18–19) as well as criticism, sparking a great deal of direct engagement.39 These midcentury figures are the origin of the amazing efflorescence of idealism at the fin de siècle and the return of Hegel among the New Liberals; a generation of thinkers who began their adulthood at Oxford in midcentury came to prominence. Especially through the influence of Balliol’s Benjamin Jowett, a classicist who saw ancient Greek culture through the lens of Hegelian commentary on historical development, we see classical myth repeatedly sourced in Britain as a mode of discussing historical antithesis: specifically, as Richard Dellamora has observed, the view that Apollo and Dionysus were simply complementary sides of the same dynamic (168 and passim)—representing successive, alternating modes of human existence—becomes in this period widespread in Britain. But as Stefano Evangelista observes, the 1890s were also a moment in which myth took center stage for a Victorian readership wider than classicists alone: psychology, rejecting the more purely materialist and scientific emphasis of Bain and Spencer in midcentury, makes myth central. The decade “opened with the publication of the first edition of Frazer’s The Golden Bough and ended with the first German edition of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (1899)” (Evangelista, “Greek Studies” 178–79). As Evangelista also notes, the same period “saw the onset of a large-scale English reception of Nietzsche,” whose work was reviewed positively in the Savoy (1896) by Havelock Ellis (Evangelista, “Greek Studies” 179). Dionysus ruled the moment. Part of the centrality of Orphic Dionysus in literature is owed directly to Pater. Pater adapted German idealist notions in his own influential writing, and became increasingly interested in Orphic and chthonian figures in the 1870s; his writing about Dionysus Zagreus, the story of Dionysus as a hunter who is himself torn to pieces and devoured, seems clearly a Victorian reworking of the concerns of Creuzer and Müller, through the Hegelian dialectical model.40 Pater also discusses the myth extensively in his Fortnightly Review article of December 1876, “A Study of Dionysus” (reprinted in Pater, Greek Studies, ed. Shadwell).41 Pater is clear that Dionysus is a “Chthonian god” (39, Pater’s emphasis), and this “darker” quality is embodied in Dionysus Zagreus (37), associated with rites of human sacrifice (44). Out of this, Pater suggests, it is possible to take something of a “moral nature” (45): the rebirth of the beautiful boy, torn to pieces in winter, suggests “chastening and purification . . . [and a] final victory through suffering” (45), as some stories of his birth suggest an Orphic “divine child” who prefigures Christ (45–47).

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Dionysus, instead of Apollo, becomes Christ’s antetype in these writings of the 1870s. Importantly, however, the status of Christ as the final stage of religious evolution is no longer dogma, and Pater challenges that assumption openly. Elisa Bizzotto discusses the impact of Pater’s mythic articulation of history as cyclical on the fin de siècle: “[His] conception of history was both cyclical and evolutionary. It oscillated between Hegel’s triadic system and Vico’s paradigmatic idea of three recurring ages which were followed—unlike in Hegel’s progressive concept of civilisation—by a barbarian condition. Hence Pater saw history as proceeding ‘dialectically by assimilating its past into its present’ ” (n.p.). Pater recasts the mythic conflict of Apollo and Dionysus as this un-succession, as Bizzotto points out, in two 1886 stories, “Denys l’Auxerrois” and “Duke Carl of Rosenmold,” in which “Denys is Dionysian and Carl Apollonian. The characters each die brutally in heralding a change to a new cultural tradition” (n.p.).42 Pater was interested in Dionysus, rather than Marsyas specifically. But Pater is important to us here in part for his influence on Wilde. Wilde’s story “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” (published in 1889 in Blackwood’s Magazine) offers a story of Shakespeare’s muse as a chthonic and thus recurring Dionysian sacrificial figure (Bizzotto).43 I would like to take up the story as a precursor of Wilde’s shift to identification with Marsyas. Bizzotto offers a detailed and persuasive reading of Wilde’s story as a reworking of Pater. In the story, Bizzotto believes, Wilde conflates Apollo and Dionysus to show a lineage from “Greek” culture through the English Renaissance to the Romantics (n.p.). In that, Wilde would be consistent with Pater’s earlier representation—but if so, by the mid-1890s, in De Profundis, Wilde’s relationship to cynicism, martyrdom, and Marsyas shifts dramatically. In that work, he definitely dwells on the distinction between Apollo and Marsyas. Is he seeing a more fundamental conflict between the gods, in which only one can win, and that one is Marsyas/Dionysus? Or does he believe that the art of modernity is shifting back toward Marsyas after a long Apollonian period? A close reading suggests the second: that the “cry of Marsyas” he heard in so much of the art of his time was to figure a renaissance of the Renaissance, a rebirth of Dionysian artistic energy. Wilde had himself read deeply in the German philosophers at Oxford, and like so many of his contemporaries, was particularly interested in the theory of historical progress elaborated by Hegel (see Smith and Helfand). In De Profundis, Wilde casts himself as a world-historical individual using Hegelian language, but in specifically aesthetic terms: “I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. I had realised this for myself at the very dawn of my manhood, and had forced my age to realise it after-

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wards. . . . It is usually discerned . . . long after both the man and his age have passed away” (1017). Hegel positions tragedy as the illumination of historical transitions. As the scholar of the tragic mode Mark Roche summarizes, “For Hegel the individual can be morally right, and the state retrograde, such that an individual may be more aligned with the universal, the state more with the false particularity that must ultimately give way” (13). Through the hero’s sacrifice a new world dawns, Hegel says: “This new principle is in contradiction with the previous one, appears as destructive; the heroes appear, therefore, as violent, transgressing laws. Individually, they are vanquished; but this principle persists, if in a different form, and buries the present” (qtd. in Roche 13). For Hegel, both sides of a tragic conflict—Antigone versus the authority of the state, for example—represent too partial a truth; they must be destroyed and reconciled in a larger historical synthesis. As Wilde writes, “Reason . . . tells me that the laws under which I am convicted are wrong and unjust. . . . But, somehow, I have got to make both of these things just and right to me. And exactly as in Art one is only concerned with what a particular thing is at a particular moment to oneself, so it is also in the ethical evolution of one’s character” (De Profundis 1020). Wilde positions himself as a tragic hero, and his life as the work of art that would mark an era’s transformation. Though disgraced, Wilde had no plans to be a dead hero, and his narrative focuses on tragic suffering, rather than mortality. Whereas the death of Antigone allows a new order to form, Wilde is concerned with the becoming of a new self. Pain is positioned as a force of “revelation,” exposing true form. In De Profundis, Wilde asserts that “pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask” (1024). Through sorrow, “One approaches the whole of history from a different standpoint. What one had felt dimly, through instinct, about art, is intellectually and emotionally realised with perfect clearness of vision and absolute intensity of apprehension. I now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is capable, is at once the type and test of all great art” (1024). As Charles Bell suggests, (human, moral) pain ennobles through clarity and intensity of perception (Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression 1824, 80). Sorrow scores away layers that are “masks,” until they lay bare the soul itself, which is also the true, emergent form of the spirit, having shed the associations and influences of society. Wilde lost “everything,” but this ultimate sorrow allows him to “possess” his own soul, whereas “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are some one else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation” (De Profundis 1030). Wilde becomes fully himself, an individual and historically new being, through suffering: “I am far more of an individualist than I ever was. Nothing seems to me of the smallest

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value except what one gets out of oneself. My nature is seeking a fresh mode of self-realisation” (1041). I have quoted these passages at length, as they comment remarkably on several important idealist themes for Wilde: the roles of masks, the tragic hero, the importance of radical individuality and becoming, and historical/ religious progression. He explores these themes through the metaphor of Apollo and Dionysus, and especially the figure of Marsyas. Let us consider these themes one by one. Many critics have noted that De Profundis is controlled by metaphors of depth, and depth is paired with intensity: “The supreme vice is shallowness. Whatever is realised is right” (Wilde, De Profundis 1002). This rejection of superficiality seems a reversal of Wilde’s commitment to the theme of the mask-as-truth that readers have so often discerned in his earlier work44—but if we look back to “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.,” there is already an increasing sense that he is using the term in a different way from the way he valorizes it in his discussions of art or theater. In the individual, who exists through, but also beyond, art, masks are devalued, allied with habit or association, in opposition to an expression of truth or the spirit. In De Profundis, Wilde is explicit: “People point to Reading Gaol and say, ‘That is where the artistic life leads a man.’ Well, it might lead to worse places. The more mechanical people to whom life is a shrewd speculation . . . always know where they are going, and go there. . . . Those who want a mask have to wear it” (1037). When form leads spirit, inauthenticity is the result. Mechanical people aspire to be “something in particular,” something known, preexistent. But true individuals, “those in whom those dynamic forces [of life] become incarnate . . . never know where they are going. They can’t know” (1038). For the Wilde of De Profundis, it is these who are “unmasked,” but also “unsheathed,” experiencing fully, directly, and often painfully their own truth and history’s as well. In De Profundis, sorrow scores away layers of the person, layers that are “masks,” until they lay bare the soul itself. Wilde links Christ, Marsyas, and himself to the theme of individuality striving to become itself against a cruel social rationality.45 In so doing, he connects Marsyas to Christ risen and Dionysus triumphant, born out of the ashes of his mother, and incarnate in the body of the écorché.46 This is a fulfillment of spiritual, not religious, truth—Wilde rejects religion—but embraces the idea of a Hegelian becoming: “Only that is spiritual which makes its own form,” he concludes (1020). But he also links that redemption with a Dionysian immersion in nature, and a rejection of Apollonian artifice and detachment. In order to see how this transformation is accomplished, it is instructive to examine how the narrative of Marsyas—his animality, his hubris, and his link

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to liberty—was retold. Idealist history offered ways of thinking about art as developing through the same oppositions as religion or government. Victorian idealism allowed for the elevation of art’s importance, even over religion itself (Mander 343). Whereas the conflict between Dionysus and Apollo was between ways of being in the world, the Marsyan competition allowed for two very specific things: it put Apollo in direct personal conflict with the Dionysian figure, and it cast that conflict as specifically an artistic one. The return of Marsyan art could promise a more dynamic, direct expression of the spirit as opposed to a mediated, distant, mannered form. Hegel argued that art progressed from the symbolic (Egyptian) to a focus on sensuous formal perfection (Greek) and thence to the attempt to capture becoming that Hegel (and Pater) saw in what for him was the most perfect form: the drama. Hegel saw Greek tragedy, with its emphasis on change and transition, as the bridge to modern art. But whereas Hegel critiqued Euripides for his emphasis on emotion, Wilde praised him, likening him to Swinburne (Smith and Helfand 27). For Wilde, drama with emotional intensity formed a bridge to the modern period. In his early days, like most earlier Victorian Hellenists such as Pater, Wilde identified with Apollo, even as he saw himself as an idealist. His Hellenism was an idealist commitment to the concept that truth is located on the surface of things, that sensuous form is not empty. But this became increasingly complicated by 1889. Smith and Helfand read “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” as a Hegelian allegory that is superior to Dorian Gray as an account of the rise of the critical spirit, from the “spontaneous wisdom Wilde attributes to the ancient Greeks,” through “naïve materialist thinkers. . . . Only at the end of the story does the narrator realize . . . a modern historical method (analogous to the Greek historians’) which synthesizes idealism and materialism” (93).47 For Smith and Helfand, this presages—and is a superior version of—the conflict in Dorian Gray, an idealist confronted with materialism, who chooses wrongly between them instead of reconciling the two. Both stories take up the idea of a spirit that preexists a historical period or individual and is manifested and recognized within it. Both also take up the theme of historical change and the becoming of new form. In “Portrait,” the narrator realizes that his “passion for Greek art and thought” is because his “soul” recognizes it: “something within us that knew nothing of sequence or extention, and yet, . . . was the spectator of all time and all existence. . . . The soul, the secret soul, was the only reality” (Wilde, qtd. in Smith and Helfand 91). Smith and Helfand argue that Wilde uses “the dialectic of personal relationships” (91) to allow for the realization of this secret soul in “Portrait.” In Picture, however, they observe, Dorian’s relationships retard this development.

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At the moment Dorian is about to confront his eternal self, Lord Henry leads him away from, rather than toward, truth. As Wilde said in a letter of the final scene with the painting, “Dorian Gray . . . tries to kill conscience, and at that moment, kills himself ” (qtd. in Smith and Helfand 96). “Masks” appear to retard becoming in this model, rather than catalyzing it. It is the violent cutting of the mask that allows truth to emerge. I would like to argue that in his use of the myth of Apollo and Dionysus/Marsyas, Wilde shows a significant transition between “Portrait” and Picture, which focus on the role of art, and De Profundis, which examines his own role as artist and also marks a significant shift in his attitude toward masks. Although Dorian identifies his portrait with his soul and his past, he assumes that the soul is of no importance, that it can be destroyed without consequence—with fatal results. The mask—Dorian’s face—is clearly not the reality in this novel; it is art that is the manifestation of Hegelian truth (Smith and Helfand 102). Moreover, whereas in “Portrait” he follows the trend of conflating Dionysus and Apollo, in Picture, he sets up a clearer distinction. Though he seems to suggest that Lord Henry is at once Apollo and Dionysus, the story implies that the Olympian is retrograde. At the end of the tale, referring to their apparent ages, Henry calls Dorian the young Apollo to his own Marsyas.48 But Henry is Dorian’s Evil Genius; he has created him, rather than being defeated by him; or as Wilde himself writes of Picture of Dorian Gray, he himself is Basil, though the world thinks him Lord Henry (Smith and Helfand 100). Henry blurs references to Dionysus and Apollo in Picture; Lord Henry often performs as a Dionysian figure and refers to himself that way, and to Dorian as the obvious (and eponymous) Apollo figure. But Lord Henry the materialist in his private thoughts casts Dorian as the noumenal and ideal. His influence is to mold and mask Dorian’s form, and ultimately cause him to “deface” himself. Apollo deceives and destroys the beautiful boy who has the capacity to be the world-historical individual. Dorian begins the story, for Basil, as the perfect “harmony of soul and body,” of form and spirit, which allows him to create art. Lord Henry, however, sees in his origins a Dionysian story: “A beautiful woman risking everything for a mad passion. A few wild weeks of happiness cut short by a hideous, treacherous crime. Months of voiceless agony, and then a child born in pain. The mother snatched away by death, the boy left to solitude and the tyranny of an old and loveless man. . . . It posed the lad, made him more perfect. . . . Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic. Worlds had to be in travail, that the meanest flower might blow” (Wilde, Picture of Dorian Gray 33). Rewriting the more mundane reality of a marriage Dorian’s powerful paternal grandfather disapproved of as a

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version of Semele’s story, Henry “poses” the boy as the Dionysian avatar of the potential birth of a new age. Yet, Henry is equally aware that Dorian is simply a beautiful boy, still easily molded, rather than clearly marked with an individuality of his own. Despite—or because of—his own dictate that “All influence is immoral. . . . Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions” (18), he decides to mold Dorian—to project an Apollonian mask onto the still inchoate form. In words that foreshadow De Profundis, Henry muses that such influence will subvert the purpose of Dorian’s life: “He becomes an echo of some one else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for” (Wilde, Picture 18). Yet, he decides to use his “influence” precisely to make of Dorian his own work of art, to “project” a mask onto him: “There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence. . . . To project one’s soul into some gracious form; . . . [Dorian] . . . could be made a Titan or a toy” (34). Henry muses that for Basil, Dorian is “the silent spirit that dwelt in dim woodland, . . . because in his soul who sought for her there had been wakened that wonderful vision to which alone are wonderful things revealed; the mere shapes and patterns of things becoming, . . . though they were themselves patterns of some other and more perfect form whose shadow they made real: . . . Was it not Plato, that artist in thought, who had first analyzed it? . . . He would make that wonderful spirit his own. There was something fascinating in this son of love and death” (34). Henry decides to subvert and limit this idealist urge to “become” form; he plans to employ an “experimental” method on him, to explore the limits of materialist psychology. “Soul and body, . . . how mysterious they were! . . . Who could say where the fleshly impulse ceased, or the psychical impulse began? How shallow were the arbitrary definitions of ordinary psychologists! . . . was the body really in the soul, as Giordano Bruno thought?” (52). Henry prematurely projects form onto the immature manifestation of the spirit; it is his own form, and he sets out to make of Dorian a more thorough materialist than he. Whereas he himself wonders about the relation of body to soul, he insists to Dorian that there is nothing but sensation and their accumulated associations. Wilde deliberately misdirects the reader with references to the two men, which must be read very carefully to tease out their true allegiances—allegiances that are themselves only partial between two figures who seem opposed but are so essentially linked. Henry is an Apollonian materialist, but he repeatedly “plays” the Dionysian role. To charm Dorian, “He played with [para-

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dox] . . . and grew wilful; . . . philosophy herself became young, and catching the mad music of pleasure, . . . danced like a Bacchante . . . and mocked the slow Silenus for being sober. Facts fled before her like frightened forest things. . . . He charmed his listeners out of themselves, and they followed his pipe, laughing. Dorian Gray never took his gaze off him, but sat like one under a spell” (38). Such references early on seem to suggest that Henry is the Dionysian figure he references in the last scene between the two men, when he calls himself Marsyas to Dorian’s Apollo. But it is Lord Henry who is victor here, and whose subtle use of paradox is Apollonian—complex and symbolic, rather than the simple piping of Pan. His detachment and fondness for experiments are all associated with Apollonian aspects in the period. Having made of Dorian an imitation Apollonian figure, Henry continues to lead him away from Dionysian simplicity and the possibility of purification through confession when Dorian wonders if he should suffer for his sins. He asks Dorian to play him some music—Dorian plays Chopin, and Henry declares it “marvellously romantic. . . . It seems to me that you are the young Apollo and that I am Marsyas listening to you. . . . What an exquisite life you have had! You have drunk deeply of everything. You have crushed the grapes against your palate. Nothing has been hidden from you. And it has all been to you no more than the sound of music. It has not marred you. You are still the same” (182). But the references here are mixed. If Dorian sees the “hidden,” and “crushes the grape,” he is Dionysian, as is Chopin’s Romanticism, and the association with darkness (he plays a nocturne). And far from being an unmarred Olympian, as Dorian insists, “I am not the same, Harry” (182). His portrait reveals an aged and degraded silenus. Though it is Henry who initially asks, “ ‘what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose—how does the quotation run?—his own soul’?” (180), he then playfully rejects his own question, asserting that “art” has “a soul, but that man had not.” When Dorian rejoins that “The soul is a terrible reality” (181), Henry tells him, in a reprise of the “Portrait” narrator’s determination that no one martyrs himself for anything he really believes in, that “it must be an illusion. The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is the fatality of faith” (181). Lord Henry sounds very Wildean here, but he is in fact—as Wilde insists in his letter, above—the sophist-materialist against whom Wilde’s forces are ranged. With Olympian detachment, Henry announces early on, “I can sympathize with everything except suffering. . . . It is too ugly. . . . There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathize with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life’s sores, the better” (37). When Dorian first embraces his own cruelty to Sibyl and accepts the por-

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trait’s powers, he too becomes Olympian: “Like the gods of the Greeks, he would be strong, and fleet, and joyous” (91).49 Basil notes the change right away: “You talk as if you had no heart, no pity in you. It is all Harry’s influence.” Lord Henry’s last advice to Dorian is a materialist-associationist argument to dissuade Dorian from reforming: “don’t deceive yourself. Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself ” (182). Will and intention are terms aligned with spirit, rather than body. Henry influences Dorian to reject spirit, and in so doing obstructs becoming. The role of art, however, is to catalyze becoming. Whereas Lord Henry argues that art does not inspire action, being “sterile,” Dorian (correctly, for Wilde) believes art looses action into the world; Henry “poisoned” him with a book (183). Dorian’s attempt to destroy the picture rather than face the truth it teaches him destroys his mask, and reveals the truth of his soul on the surface of his own body. Art does not depict the soul; art reveals the truth of the soul to the viewer, or more precisely, in the viewer himself. We see De Profundis’s comments on self-knowledge presaged in “Portrait,” when the narrator says that “Art, even the art of fullest scope and widest vision, can never really show us the external world. All that it shows us is our own soul. . . . And the soul itself, is . . . a mystery. It hides in the dark and broods, and consciousness cannot tell us of its workings. Consciousness, indeed, is quite inadequate to explain the contents of personality. It is Art, and Art only, that reveals us to ourselves” (343). Consciousness, the stuff of nerves and fibers, is insufficient to explain the soul, the impulse that drives the creation of form. Tragic art reveals the transition to a new form. Unlike Marsyas (or Dionysus), who brings the grapes in spring, ages in fall, and is sacrificed as a silenus, Dorian appears untouched, though he drinks deeply and sees all: the sound of music has not “marred” him. He appears to remain an Apollonian Olympian. But we know that is not true. The destruction of the portrait reveals Dorian’s true self; the mask drops away, and the portrait, the truth that is reachable through the experience of art, is inscribed on the body: “the knife . . . was bright. . . . It would kill this monstrous soul-life. . . . He seized the thing, and stabbed the picture with it. There was a cry heard, and a crash. . . . Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage” (188). Although Henry claims to be Marsyas to Dorian’s Apollo, he in fact plays the role of Apollo here—and when Dorian tries to live up to the Apollonian credo, he is stripped of his mask, and his true face is laid bare. Essentially, the two figures are shown to be two aspects of the same force, as they are coming to be seen in the period. Henry the Apollonian materialist

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plays at being the silenus. Dorian Apollo flays himself, exposing a hideously failed Marsyas. Portraiture (and the novel) trumps sculpture; passion and color expose the falsity of colorless Olympian calm. In De Profundis, Wilde develops more fully the theme of becoming he had already begun to explore in Dorian Gray.50 He also finally identifies himself fully with Marsyas, shifting emphasis from the Apollonian and identifying himself with a larger spirit of the age in which modern art expresses the cry of Marsyas. As he does with Dorian, Wilde insists that he must not attempt to obliterate the past, but to fully realize it: “The important thing . . . is to absorb into my nature all that has been done to me. . . . The supreme vice is shallowness. Whatever is realised is right. . . . For just as the body absorbs . . . things common and unclean . . . , and converts them into swiftness or strength, . . . so the soul in its turn has its nutritive functions also, and can transform into noble moods of thought and passions of high import what in itself is base, cruel and degrading; . . . and can often reveal itself most perfectly through what was intended to desecrate or destroy” (De Profundis 1020–21). He identifies the growth of the soul with the tragic mode, which merges with and embraces the absolute, and suffering as the vehicle through which this can be achieved. The tragic mode is Dionysian and emotionally expressive, rather than Apollonian, detached and composed. But he also appropriates a materialist model of the body as an analogue for the soul; suffering embodies humans most fully, and one cannot “reveal” one’s individuality without the nutritive and transformative process by which the body ceaselessly renovates itself by absorbing the not-self. When Wilde identifies Christ with the most fully developed individuality in history, he identifies him both with modernity (the preciousness of the individual) and the absolute: “Since his coming the history of each separate individual is, or can be made, the history of the world. Of course, culture has intensified the personality of man. Art has made us myriad-minded” (1030). But at the same time, he no longer praises that many-sidedness once prized by Arnold and other midcentury classicists: “Not width but intensity is the true aim of modern art” (1039). The true individual concentrates energy rather than dispersing it. Wilde rejects the earlier Hellenism of Pater: “Pater seeks to reconcile the artistic life with the life of religion, in the deep, sweet, and austere sense of the word. But Marius is little more than a spectator . . . too much occupied with the comeliness of the benches of the sanctuary to notice that it is the sanctuary of sorrow that he is gazing at” (1027). In so doing, Wilde also rejects Pater’s ambivalent view of Dionysus as inferior, and (merely, rather than radically) feminized (for example, in Pater’s “The Bacchanals of Euripides,” 1878). Wilde also critiques his own past work as partial

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and incomplete, through references to characters in his own works: “Out of Shakespeare’s sonnets they draw, to their own hurt it may be, the secret of his love and make it their own; they look with new eyes on modern life, because they have listened to one of Chopin’s nocturnes, or handled Greek things” (De Profundis 1031)—we have here both the plot of “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” and the culminating scene between Dorian and Henry in Picture of Dorian Grey, in which Henry praises Dorian’s performance of Chopin. But even the artist—and critic—can understand only what art conveys directly: “To the artist, expression is the only mode under which he can conceive life at all. To him what is dumb is dead” (Wilde, De Profundis 1031). The viewer is deluded by the multiplicity of expressions into thinking that, in beauty, he approaches truth: “But to Christ it was not so. . . . he took the entire world of the inarticulate, the voiceless world of pain, as his kingdom, and made of himself its eternal mouthpiece. . . . and as such has fascinated and dominated art as no Greek god ever succeeded in doing” (1031). Stefano Evangelista observes, “Wilde now wants to amend one of the aphorisms of his former Olympian phase: . . . suggesting to his audience that ‘the secret of life is in art,’ he now writes to Douglas that ‘the secret of life is suffering.’ Sorrow is an epistemology and a key to the mysteries of the world” (“Greek Studies” 181). Wilde’s task is to blend the expressive and the wordless. Marsyas here is Dionysus sacrificed, the purely expressive god whose joy is turned to suffering and sacrifice so that a new world may come. In this figure, Wilde, as do many late Victorians, saw a more enduring truth than in Apollo’s articulate, bright heedlessness. Moreover, Marsyas represented a critique of state power, an assertion of nature’s enduring claims over those of a particular historical moment—perhaps particularly relevant to Wilde in his incarceration. Nineteenth-century readers would likely have been familiar with some references to Marsyas as a figure for liberty and some speculation on his relation to augury. But the most famous pre-Ovidian reference to Marsyas that would have resonated with Wilde—especially in his idealism—was Alcibiades’s drunken comparison of Socrates to the satyr in Plato’s Republic, given both Wilde’s “crime” and his fate. Part of the comparison is a joke about appearance, but the other part of the reference is a well-elaborated comparison of Socrates’s persuasiveness to the piper’s powerfully persuasive music. The rhetorical scene is complex; in the Symposium, Alcibiades praises Socrates backhandedly: “I declare that he [Socrates] is most strictly like those silenuses that sit in the shops of herm sculptors, the ones that craftsmen make holding reed pipes or flutes; and if they are . . . opened up, they show that they have images of gods within. And . . . he bears

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a likeness to the satyr Marsyas. . . . You are hybristic, are you not? . . . You are far more marvelous, to be sure, than Marsyas. He used to charm human beings by means of instruments, with the power from his mouth. . . . And you differ from him only in that you do the same thing with bare words without instruments” (45–46)—words of praise fit for a rhetor, or a poet famous for his wordplay. The spirit within the silenus pushes to become form. Wilde embraces this aesthetic identity. Alcibiades extends the analogy over several pages. He suggests that Socrates’s speeches, like a silenus, appear outwardly “laughable. The words and phrases that they wrap around themselves on the outside are like that, the very hide of a hybristic satyr. . . . But if one sees them opened up and gets oneself inside them, one will find, first, that they alone of speeches have sense inside” (52). This, of course, was Wilde’s trademark; he uses the form of the Socratic dialogue to play with seemingly absurd paradoxes, but with a serious underlying intent. As he says at the end of “The Truth of Masks,” we are never to assume that any one piece of rhetoric represents his own views: “There is much with which I entirely disagree [in my essay]. . . . For in art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true. And just as it is only in art-criticism, and through it, that we can apprehend the Platonic theory of ideas, so it is only in art-criticism, and through it, that we can realise Hegel’s system of contraries. The truths of metaphysics are the truths of masks” (1173). It is notable, however, that Wilde here limits this statement to art and its criticism; it is the viewer who must wrestle truth out of the dialogue that art creates. There is a noumenal truth always in the process of becoming phenomenal, and it is the dynamic, changing expression of the absolute in the becoming of the individual. As do many of the late-century writers who embraced the Orphic gods, Wilde indicts the Olympians’ incapacity for sympathy as a weakness. He says that the Greek gods, though beautiful, lacked pity and so “were not really what they appeared to be. The curved brow of Apollo was like the sun’s disc crescent . . . but he himself had been cruel to Marsyas and had made Niobe childless” (De Profundis 1031). So far, this seems a recasting of the traditional Hegelian explanation of how the Christian era succeeds the Greek, Christ succeeding Apollo. But, as does Pater, at the end of the paragraph, Wilde goes to a different aspect of classical mythology for a Christian precursor: “The two most deeply suggestive figures of Greek Mythology were, for religion, Demeter, an Earth Goddess, not one of the Olympians, and for art, Dionysus, the son of a mortal woman to whom the moment of his birth had proved also the moment of her death” (1031), though Christ ultimately will “reveal to the world the mystical meaning of wine and the real beauties of

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the lilies of the field as none, either on Cithaeron or at Enna, had ever done” (1032). Christ contains more fully realized human experience than any who precede him because he instantiates joy but also and especially suffering. That is what makes suffering Dionysus his antetype, and this capacity to embrace all, and especially painful experience, makes of Christ pure becoming: “if he [Christ] is ‘of imagination all compact,’ the world itself is of the same substance. I said in Dorian Gray that the great sins of the world take place in the brain: but it is in the brain that everything takes place. We know now that we do not see with the eyes or hear with the ears. They are really channels for the transmission, adequate or inadequate, of sense impressions. It is in the brain that the poppy is red, that the apple is odorous, that the skylark sings” (De Profundis 1033). Sympathy is what makes the world-historical individual transformative for others; because she or he feels with others, others can be transformed through his or her agency. A materialism that Wilde (through Henry) positions as locking each individual inside only his own experiences and history fails to offer the possibility of broader transformation. But Christ here is “imagination,” which is also materiality. One does not dominate or precede the other, because they are universal. Wilde here continues to reconcile the materialism of human embodiment (the human brain) with an idealist Christianity (we take up the world through the senses, but all aspects of matter are also spirit). Dorian fails because he wants to erase his past, yet his past constitutes his true materiality. However, change is the one eternal aspect of becoming: “The moment of repentance . . . is the means by which one alters one’s past. The Greeks thought that impossible. . . . ‘Even the Gods cannot alter the past.’ Christ showed that the commonest sinner could do it, that it was the one thing he could do” (1037). Like the body that absorbs good and evil and creates out of it new strength, Christ offers rebirth and transformation within the same individual, rather than through the new social order offered by the Greek—or even a modern Hegelian—model of tragedy. Whereas the aspiration to fill a preexisting form leads to the type, and the type hardens into an unchanging, dead form—a mask that cannot be removed—the artist must express everything, and become formless form, capable of embodying the new: We are no longer in art concerned with the type. It is with the exception that we have to do. . . . When Marsyas was “torn from the scabbard of his limbs”—della vagina della membre sue, to use one of Dante’s most terrible Tacitean phrases—he had no more song, the Greek said. Apollo had been victor. The lyre had vanquished the reed. But per-

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haps the Greeks were mistaken. I hear in much modern Art the cry of Marsyas. It is bitter in Baudelaire, sweet and plaintive in Lamartine, mystic in Verlaine. It is in the deferred resolutions of Chopin’s music. It is in the discontent that haunts Burne-Jones’s women. Even Matthew Arnold, whose song of Callicles tells of “the triumph of the sweet persuasive lyre,” and the “famous final victory,” in such a clear note of lyrical beauty, has not a little of it; in the troubled undertone of doubt and distress that haunts his verses, neither Goethe nor Wordsworth could help him, though he followed each in turn, and when he seeks to mourn for Thyrsis or to sing of the Scholar Gipsy, it is the reed that he has to take for the rendering of his strain. But whether or not the Phrygian Faun was silent, I cannot be. Expression is as necessary to me as leaf and blossoms are to the black branches of the trees that show themselves above the prison walls and are so restless in the wind. Between my art and the world there is now a wide gulf, but between art and myself there is none. I hope at least that there is none. (1039–40) I have argued that realism takes up the materiality of the body and its surface in a new way, corresponding to new ways of seeing the body in the period and attempts to mediate or harmonize idealist and materialist ideas. This history of nineteenth-century Romanticism is implicitly a response to the emphasis on scientific materialism, for which pain has no redemptive function. From the time of Charles Bell to that of Wilde, both pain and the human undergo a transformation. From valuing pain only for its capacity to transcend nature, later artists find transcendence in pain and in nature itself. Far from Bell’s neoclassical notion that the pain of flaying was appropriately punitive for a materialist nature spirit, who could be dismissed as comically subhuman, the late nineteenth century sees the suffering of nature red in tooth and claw as a source of human becoming and transcendence. Whereas for Bell, portraying human suffering from merely physical pain was aesthetically inappropriate, Chenavard’s ostensibly nonhuman figures emphasize both the commonality of suffering and of violence in history and its very human nature. Sourcing myth allowed artists to explore these themes in ways that used the mode of realist narrative—Dorian Gray, for example, is arguably a realist villain, with his descent into carnality and interest in vivisections, with sensational elements such as the murder of Basil and gothic elements such as the magical painting. But it is mythic references that allow these artists to engage the broader thematic of historical progression that continues to be crucial for authors from Balzac and Carlyle to Wilde him-

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self reaching for a sense of an overarching transpersonal will or spirit. For Wilde, Marsyas embodied the pain that was at the heart of becoming, rather than of the phenomenal to be discarded under the scalpel of a triumphant rationality. Flayed and smarting, Wilde contemplates his release, and return to his art. Representations and culture have failed him; like his contemporaries, he turns his back on Apollonian artifice and seeks the ideal in the gods of nature: “I am conscious now that behind all this beauty, satisfying though it may be, there is some spirit hidden of which the painted forms and shapes are but modes of manifestation, and it is with this spirit that I desire to become in harmony. I have grown tired of the articulate utterances of men and things. The Mystical in Art, the Mystical in Life, the Mystical in Nature this is what I am looking for. . . . Nature . . . will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole” (De Profundis 1057).

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q Ch a p ter 7 Marked The first difference which strikes us is that of colour. —Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia People’s souls make their bodies just as a snail makes its shell. —Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies

The latter part of the century saw the return of physiognomy in a new and scientifically rehabilitated form: anthropometry. The stress on visible, immediately interpretable signs included older markers of difference, such as color, and newly significant elements, such as large earlobes (indicating atavism, according to Cesare Lombroso, Criminal Man 235) or wrinkles (also a possible sign of criminality; 233). What all these visual signifiers had in common over the course of the century is that they were interpreted in terms of identifying otherness, and specifically in terms of defining that otherness within a hierarchy: first of moral to immoral, then of civilized to savage, and finally modern to atavistic. While idealist readings of myth focused on cultural history and recurrence in terms of modernity and revolution, the materialists of the latter nineteenth century focused on evolutionary history and recurrence in the bodies of contemporary nonwhites, women, criminals, and sexual deviants. As always, what is at stake is not only the body’s legibility, but its relation to a longer temporal sweep. This chapter focuses on those signs inscribed on the skin “by nature,” from within and without—color, fingerprints, accidental scars and marks. Whereas the period began with interest in differences that were highly visible on the body’s surface, it ends with distrust of the observer’s ability to interpret them. Materialists increasingly valued differences that could be registered “objectively,” quantified and measured technologically without 279

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human bias or error. But the measures for “objectivity” were used selectively to serve the same assumptions about racial and sexual difference that had long been in play. Meanwhile, idealists continue to be interested in a different kind of human perfectibility: one based on the spirit rather than mechanistic evolution. Both sides located markers for this on the visible surface of the body. One place that this discourse comes together is in the emerging technology of photography, which claimed to instrumentally register objective reality, yet was demonstrably prone to misinterpretation and misuse. Photography registered the body as an objective surface in the world at a particular moment, yet was critiqued for lacking the capacity to register what many saw as truly human: movement, mutability, the capacity for change over time. It emerged as a recurring site for critiques of realism in the late century. The emphasis on physiognomy, as we have seen, can be traced to Aristotle, but owed much in modernity to the late eighteenth century, and especially Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741–1801), the Swiss poet and clergyman. His studies of character and physiognomy, Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe (1775–78), gained wide popularity in France, Germany, and England. Although physiognomy per se was abandoned by scientists early on in the nineteenth century, and somewhat later by the general public, efforts continued to provide a more scientific study of expression based on anatomy. Nineteenth-century anatomical and neurological discoveries tended to move the study of character closer to the study of expression, as we saw in chapters 1 and 2, and away from phrenology—away from the bony structure of the skull to the soft tissue of the skin and neuromusculature of the face. Habitual expressions, anatomists argued, traced lines in the countenance that then became permanent, reinforcing the character in question—even producing the emotions they expressed. In a way, this constituted a move toward physiognomy again, though a more anatomically and neurologically based one—a physiological physiognomy, in the tradition of Bell and Darwin. By the latter part of the century, however, science began to focus again on permanent features and on more instrumental ways to identify features supposed to be aligned with certain character traits. Heavily scientific in approach, relying on careful measurements of sample populations with precision instruments, the initial assumptions and hypotheses of scientists like Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) and Francis Galton (1822–1911) still often started in folk wisdom about human “types.” These approaches were driven in part by the territorial issues of the day: much British anthropometry had its origins in the difficulties of controlling colonial populations, and the Italian positivist criminologists emerged in the wake of Italian unification, as the government in northern Italy expanded into and tried to con-

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trol the traditional locally based folk organizations—briganti and mafiosi, but also anarchists and peasants-rights organizations continuing the role of the Carbonari—which had been how the south had long conducted its business without much interference from the law. Lombroso and Galton sought evidence of atavism or essential criminality in the angle of the jaw, the shape of the ear, and the texture of hair. These post-Darwinian scientists tended to couch their observations in the language of evolution and of decadence. Racial others were positioned as either more primitive or more decadent than Europeans, and their differences were associated with traits like brutality, criminality, and hypersexuality. Within modern European society, atavism was invoked to account for these qualities. That is, within modern society, some individuals were “throwbacks,” displaying traits of a more savage and developmentally prior state, which was supposedly readable on the body. This (racialized) difference was invoked to explain criminal behavior, sexual habits, and physical attributes such as hairiness or tattoos. The development of criminology along with anthropometrics fostered two related interests: the possibility of identifying criminal types, and the ability to identify with certainty individual criminals in an age of high mobility. Whereas Lavater used artistic renderings to identify general tendencies, using portraits of kings and statesmen as exemplary of such types, Cesare Lombroso and the Englishman Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) examined hundreds of individual criminal bodies to arrive at a type.1 Finally, the science progressed from a focus on types to one on individuals. Alphonse Bertillon (1853–1914), a police officer in France, created anthropometry (anthropométrie), an identification system based on physical measurements and photographs showing the measurements (of the skull, the length of the forearm, the shape and size of the ears, etc.). The goal was to help authorities recognize repeat offenders in a period in which it was relatively very easy to falsify identity. In England, Francis Galton popularized the use of fingerprints, originally developed in the colonies to keep track of debtors and other contract signatories, for the same purpose, and this system overtook the more difficult and cumbersome method advocated by Alphonse Bertillon in France. In part, these techniques were developed to offset the unreliability of photography, which initially had seemed an ideal mode of identifying criminals, and then was quickly found to require supplementation with more “objective” means as people’s appearances changed, and many viewers found it difficult to match a photograph to its subject in any case. The development of photography, as a form of relatively unmediated physical documentation, was important throughout the century both in attempts to identify bodies

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and in theorizing the relation of realism to mediation. Jennifer Green-Lewis observes, “The most urgent philosophical debates of the nineteenth century have traditionally been polarized by the dichotomies of logical positivism and metaphysical idealism, realism and antirealism (or romance). . . . Proponents on either side were drawn to photography as symbol of the insufficiency of empiricism’s account of reality, or conversely, as proof of the totality of its vision” (20). As we have seen throughout, this is a debate intimately connected to the longer-standing status of the body caught between materialism and “metaphysical idealism”; it is logical that photography should serve as a particularly poignant focus of such meanings in the latter part of the century. Race has an overwhelming, complicated, and crucial role in debates throughout the period, but it is most often discussed, especially early on, in terms of anatomical structure rather than skin. Among the most obvious visual qualities of the skin, of course, and one that had become important in eighteenth-century anthropology, was color. Color overlaps but is not fully identical with race. Just as blushes and complexion were held to be moral indices, color was by many considered a marker not merely of identity, but of moral quality. Darkness was early on classed, just as class was later racialized. Color, when linked to race, was often related to beliefs about whether humankind had a single or multiple origin, or whether it was one or many species (as often for one side of the question as the other), and again regarding the potential equality of the man “of color” to the “white.” More generally, as well, fairness was gendered feminine and aligned with purity, and darkness was sexualized. Moreover, color was related to sensitivity, and tactile adeptness was thus related to sensibility itself—but had the added advantage of being visible at a glance. Older, prescientific views of racial color difference accounted for differences largely in three ways: a religious explanation (Negroes were the descendants of Ham, cursed with a dark skin for laughing at his father’s nakedness), a polygenist explanation (whites and nonwhites were completely different creatures, deriving from multiple different origins), and the climate theory (hot weather makes people darker, as in Africa; very cold weather makes people smaller, as in the Arctic). Climate theory, dominant in the eighteenth century, continued to have currency in the nineteenth and was largely absorbed into evolutionary theory. The “curse of Ham” theory continued to be popular among some religious groups but was largely discredited by those considered serious thinkers. Polygenesis, which was influentially promoted by Cuvier in France, had devoted adherents among slave-holding nations, but again was increasingly discredited among serious European thinkers early in the nineteenth century;2 by midcentury, however, it had experienced

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a revival throughout Western Europe, and had gained ground only in the Americas from the beginning. In Britain, its resurgence was thanks in part to Robert Knox, whose Races of Man (1850) argued that differences between the races were both absolute and more significantly internal than external.3 Arguments about racial superiority tended to focus on climate (Africans were lazy because of hot weather and the consequent easy growth of crops, and this originally acquired trait became hereditary), or on theories of divergence and, later, degeneration from an original standard (often, though not always, envisioned as European). As the century progressed, evolutionary theory gave ammunition to those devoted to the latter explanation, and reintroduced the idea that some humans might be more continuous with or closer to animals than others. But, generally, in the racial “science” of the first half of the nineteenth century in Europe, color was far less important than skeletal structure to racial distinctions per se. In contrast to the New World nations, who were obsessed with racial color specifically, Britain folded its color and related racial discrimination into the larger, older framework of color prejudice and aesthetic preference. Fairness of skin was long seen as a desirable quality, and whiteness overall was associated with purity, goodness, and upper-class status. Fair skin as “white” skin, and that in turn as associated with an ethnic or regional group rather than simply individual beauty, is evident in Shakespeare and may have emerged early in the Renaissance with increased trade contact between regions. That kind of whiteness was invented in relation to nonwhiteness, which seems largely to have been defined as blackness (often, as Sander Gilman has observed, applied to people not of African descent, but simply “other” and vaguely dark of complexion; he observes this of Europeans’ perception of nineteenth-century Jews).4 By the eighteenth century, dark color, for a monogenist, was often seen as the sign of the result of exposure to “bad” climates—though there were those who argued the opposite, that whiteness was the aberrant development of the original. In 1788, Stanhope Smith had advanced a theory based also on climate, that the sun had over time darkened the skin of Southern races, but also that “heat, especially when united with putrid exhalations that copiously impregnate the atmosphere in warm and uncultivated regions, relaxes the nervous system. The bile in consequence is augmented, and shed through the whole mass of the body. This liquor tinges the complexion of a yellow colour, which assumes by time a darker hue” (Smith 25). The bile is stimulated by “vapours of stagnant waters with which uncultivated regions abound,” as well as “fatigue and hardships, poverty,” and, vaguely but evocatively, “nastiness” (31). This theory of perpetual jaundice was generally refuted, but the

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later Victorian period, post-Darwin, reverses the idea that black skin is the deviation; under the influence of evolutionary theory, black skin came to represent a prior evolutionary period—but still therefore inferior—to white. In 1879, the poet and mystic (and MD) William Sharpe simply dismisses the question of origin: there may have once been a white race, from which dark races evolved, but “the present transition appears to be from dark to fair. When races, not destined to extinction, are brought within the pale of high civilization, colour is gradually, in the course of generations, found to give way” (8). In short, “A white skin is characteristic of the great ruling race of mankind, and . . . intensity of colour is, on the other hand, characteristic of the lower races” (9). Some proposed that black skin differed structurally from white skin, containing an extra, perhaps liquid, pigmented layer (the rete mucosum), but anatomists pretty thoroughly debunked this belief, and it seems largely to have been dismissed by the late nineteenth century. Others raised the idea, widely believed in the US and colonies, that black skin was thicker, less sensitive, and smelled different from European skin, but again, this does not seem to have gained the hold in the scientific community of Britain that it did overseas. That said, such beliefs persisted sporadically at the popular level,5 and resurfaced in science toward the end of the century as a broad framing assumption of difference, even if that difference was not structurally definable.

Race in the Eighteenth Century The development of race science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has been extensively covered elsewhere, and I won’t rehearse it in detail here, but a quick sketch may be clarifying. Blumenbach in 1775 first proposed the division of humans into four types (he used the term gens, which can be translated as either “family” or “race”), which he subsequently amended to five: Caucasian, Ethiopian, Mongolian, American, and Malay (Hannaford 207–8). He contested Linnaeus’s idea that there was continuity between humans and monkeys; he believed in human exceptionalism and monogenism. Moreover, he did not believe that “character” could be identified by such groupings (Hannaford 210–13). The materialist David Hume’s racial views are best known by virtue of an infamous footnote to his “Of National Characters,” in which he states, “I am apt to suspect the negroes, and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation” (512). However, Hume never visited the race question

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at any length. The essay accounts for “national characters” not by internal, essential qualities, but by the combination of climate (also held to affect skin color) and associationist ideas (that is, people tend to repeat and intensify the culture and experiences with which they are raised). Hume’s view is prejudiced in a way common in his time, but does not represent any careful intellectual engagement with the concept of race, and certainly does not imply a concept of biological race as we would understand it. The idealist Kant’s work on race, especially in “Of the Different Races of Human Beings” and in “Determination of the Concept of a Human Race,” is also notorious—not least for its approving citation of Hume’s careless footnote as a serious source. Kant is also a monogenist, who accounts for most color changes by reference to climate. However, he does identify the white “race” as the original, from which others have deviated over time. (That said, he believes the “seeds” of all colors are in every human, dependent upon exposure to particular climates to develop them—thus this “deviation” is in some way potential in all human beings.) Using a humoral theory of physiology, he supposes that because of climate, the lungs of Africans are not able to rid the body of “phlogiston,” and so the skin must take over that role (“Determination” 156). The buildup of phlogiston under the skin turns it black.6 He also states, mysteriously, that “the different organization of Negro skin from ours is already noticeable through touch” (157). Most idealist theorists after Kant, however, are less interested in an idea of race as a biological one than in nation (and race is often used interchangeably to mean nation, family, or another grouping). Nation became an important way to talk about “character,” which also meant a manifestation of spirit. Herder and Fichte began to identify nation as an identity rather than primarily a political entity, and Herder developed the idea of the Volk as more significant than the political shape of the nation that represented it. The Volk, as a kind of biological supraentity that had its own growth, development, and crises, was easily assimilated into later evolutionary models. Though Herder was a monogenist and did not believe in a modern notion of “races,” Ivan Hanna­ ford suggests that this biomaterialist basis for national character was easily assimilated to later notions of race as “blood” (230–32). Hannaford credits the philologist and classicist Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776–1831) with the emphasis on blood that enabled race to be identified with state formation. For nearly all of these early theorists, color was among the least important aspects of race. Kant is the notable exception, and for this reason, as well as his broad influence, has attracted considerable attention. Kant famously rebuked Herder for his dismissal of color as a serious factor in distinguishing what Kant had called races—and Herder pointedly refused to call races—in

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Herder’s Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Humanity (Kant, “Review” 139). Herder, just as famously, ignored him. Kant seems to have been invested in skin color, and in the inferiority of Negroes and Native Americans, returning to these themes repeatedly, especially in his later studies on anthropology. The generation following Kant, however, wherever they fell on the spectrum of racial attitudes, tended to find color less significant. Overall, as Roxann Wheeler points out, after some interest in color in the eighteenth century, by the early nineteenth century, “scientists worried that color was too superficial and changeable—in short, that it wasn’t a reliable way to demarcate human differences” (295). Other aspects of perceived racial difference became more significant, such as jaw angle and skull shape. In Britain, color as a principal aspect of race becomes more important over the course of the century, mostly beginning in the late 1830s and 1840s. In Britain, James Cowles Prichard’s influential “Researches into the Physical History of Man” was published in 1813, and included discussions of skin color and other racial phenotypical characteristics. For Prichard, each type was fitted to its environment, but as a mainstream monogenist, he saw all men as of the same species. By the 1842 edition, Wheeler notes, Prichard subordinates his discussion of physical differences to that of “mental” differences in ability (Wheeler 295). Though he remains a monogenist, his remarks about how most readers see race are telling: in 1813, he assumes most readers would take for granted a common family of humanity, but in 1842, he mentions that most of his readers in Europe would not suppose this was the case (Wheeler 295). However, British materialist thinkers did not themselves become significantly involved in producing racial science until the mid-nineteenth century, when we see the emergence of figures such as Knox. By this time the assumption that nonwhite people were in a relationship of descending inferiority to Europeans corresponding to the darkness of their skins was widespread. The events of the Indian Mutiny/Rebellion in 1857 solidified many Britons’ negative attitudes about racial difference and gave a popular impetus to finding “scientific” justification for a newly hostile and punitive attitude toward racial others, as older narratives about uplift (that is, that Indians would, with British tutelage, eventually become more like peers to the British than a subjected race) were discarded. It is ironically Darwin’s work that provided a scientific explanation for the evolution of different phenotypes, despite the fact that Darwin was emphatically a monogenist (and antislavery, in a moment when discussions of race were pressingly about that debate, even in England). Darwin’s theory, however, was taken up and used to suit the aims of a number of later materialist racists, often those interested in degeneration theory—notably his cousin Francis Galton.

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Meanwhile, idealist notions about national characters were imported into the “scientific” conversation about biological race. Whereas Arnold’s Hebraism and Hellenism were still quite idealist, anchored to cultural trends rather than biology, Nietzsche’s idealism picked up the idea that the overwhelming Trieb (drive) of the spirit was reproductive from evolutionary theory, as we saw in chapter 6.

Blackness and Visibility: The Nineteenth Century In recent literary studies of nineteenth-century Britain, scholars have struggled with the question of racial color. Both Nancy Armstrong, in Fiction in the Age of Photography, and Irene Tucker in The Moment of Racial Sight, find that readily visible difference becomes particularly important in the period, but then tend to show that other signifiers “stand in” for color as racial difference. Armstrong argues that literary realism insisted on the reality of visually perceptible difference as a category differentiator, and points to race as part of this trend. As Tucker says, there is no obvious reason race and skin color should have become linked, but that there was a persistent tendency from the last quarter of the eighteenth century to look for signs visible at a glance, specifically on the skin, as ways to determine the likeness or difference of individuals. Tucker’s work makes clear the extent to which the shift to readily perceptible, skin-deep markers was made significant for Kant (and likely others) in the wake of the Terror. In the face of Kant’s assumption that the recognition of the likeness of the other created the basis for ethical and sympathetic behavior between people, the Terror separated “the intentions and interests of individual agents from a discernible outcome” or governmental structure (Tucker 41–42). She argues that the Terror highlighted the vulnerability of bodies allied with one political position, even as Kant’s philosophy depended on the fantasy of bodies’ universality and continuity in a potential future Republic (Tucker 47). For this calculus to make sense, “citizen-subjects” had to be possessed of bodies that were “formally identical” yet “distinct” (49). In Tucker’s view, Kant’s theorizing of universality in relation to the particularity of bodies that grow ill, age, and die forces him repeatedly to confront the problem of change and constancy, and to focus on the skin (and thus, color) as the site on which we perceive likeness on the body instantly by sight. As we saw in chapter 4, the culture of appearances that preceded the Terror was a feature of particular fascination to those attempting to understand that historical phenomenon. And that color becomes part of the obsession with immediately visible difference is, in this context, unsurprising. It tallies with the emphasis of the Common Sense the-

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orists on visibility and natural legibility of expression and the concern that black skin would interfere with that legibility (of the blush, for example). However, critical work linking race and color in nineteenth-century British literature often ends up being a story about not getting the story. As noted above, in contrast to the Anglophone and Hispanophone American cases, for much of the nineteenth century the British interest in race focused mostly on structure, whereas color was considered more minor or epiphenomenal. Both Armstrong and Tucker read race as visually marked almost entirely through texts in which race is represented only metaphorically and is never named as an issue. According to Armstrong, literary realism insisted on the reality of visually perceptible difference as a category differentiator. She argues that Heathcliff is so absolute a racial other that he, despite his transformation by capitalism, cannot intermarry successfully with Isabel Linton, as he (and Catherine Earnshaw) are premodern individuals and Isabel is modern. Armstrong finds that “Victorian fiction . . . proves . . . that certain boundaries cannot be crossed, and that the most intransigent of these are always drawn in terms of race” (172). Her argument requires that we see not only Heathcliff as racially other, but Cathy as the racially differentiated representative of the Celtic fringe within Britain’s internal colonialism. Likewise, Lewis Carroll’s Alice is “Africanized” by her fetishistic relationship to objects. Tucker’s subtle and complex The Moment of Racial Sight is a fascinating discussion of the history of how race “as a category” is constructed through the relation between an “arbitrary signifier” and its signified (3): here, skin color and race (6). But Tucker’s study is likewise marked by the paucity of its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century examples that are avowedly “about” race. Her long first section selects Kant as the origin for skin color coming to stand in for race, which is widely believed to be the case. But in the chapter titled “Kant’s Dermatology,” her British example is the dermatologist Robert Willan’s examination of a man with ichthyosis, a disease that causes hardening and scaling of the skin, which comes to stand in, in Tucker’s reading, for blackness. She then examines Kant’s writing on race at length, and continues to emphasize how skin color was determinative in the emerging categorization of humans. If British literature is full of racial boundary violation framed in terms of visual color, why is so little of it in these studies openly about racialized blackness or brownness? Simon Gikandi’s work on blackness in the Enlightenment is more directly helpful on the issue of racialized appearance per se. He explores the apparently contradictory relationship between slavery and the Enlightenment values of universalism and freedom. Unlike Tucker and Armstrong’s books, Gikandi’s work is full of examples of avowed racial others coexisting with

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whites in European texts and images—and black faces and bodies were everywhere in the visual culture of the late Renaissance and eighteenth century, no matter how comparatively absent in the British novel of the time that followed. However, by the nineteenth century, matter-of-fact portrayals of black subjects in painting become less frequent, and blacks are increasingly shown only in relation to whites (Gikandi 13). The portrayal of black skin contrasting with white was thought to show the virtuosity and range of the painter, and the black subject, usually shown as subordinated to the white principal in a portrait or tableau, enhanced the power of whites and accentuated whiteness—especially of women. Gikandi is not particularly interested in skin color per se; his brief is to show how slavery (and blackness as its sign) is codeterminate with the aesthetics of the eighteenth century, and in fact of modernity. Both are “domains of difference and identity” (xiii), depending explicitly on difference as black. And though this focus does in fact lead to skin color as a key differentiator, aesthetics were not simply about the perceived beauty of whiteness, but, Gikandi argues, evoked viewers’ beliefs about the supposed sensitivity and “tact” of white skin versus the insensitivity of the black dermis. Gikandi likewise uses Kant’s appropriation of Hume’s statement to demonstrate that black people are “excluded from the domain of modern reason, aesthetic judgment, and the culture of taste” required to participate in the Enlightenment as citizen-subjects (5), because the “Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling” (Kant, qtd. in Gikandi 5). Gikandi’s reading reinscribes “feeling” here in its dual meaning as both sensibility and sensitivity. This lack of “feeling,” a result of a character developed in a hot climate, is disqualifying, and Gikandi persuasively reads Kant’s sense of European identity coalescing around racial identity and the idea of a superior natural sensibility, with the African as its other. Gikandi notes, however, that blackness, and thus black skin, entered a preexisting order of color prejudice beyond racial discourse. Gikandi discusses the work of William Cheseldean, a doctor who worked with the blind in London, and wrote that a boy whose sight was restored was instinctively drawn to red and distressed by black, and even after he was reconciled to the color, he was “struck with great Horror” at the sight of a black woman (Gikandi 43). Burke theorized that the color black produced terror because of its impact on the “muscles of the eye”—he associated it with the sublime (Gikandi 43). Gikandi points out that the sublime not only was essential to the ethics of the Enlightenment, but strongly associated with “revolutionary terror” (43). The power of blackness within the “scopic regime of modernity” to trump the nuances of race as it is discussed in anthropological or

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biological texts was this: “color made black difference visible” (44). Gikandi argues that visual representations of blacks are considered remarkably consistent throughout the period, and that it is only when the illustrator or artist wished to downplay difference that persons with black skin were represented outside of these conventions (44). In a culture in which social status depended in part on “taste”—that is, on making aesthetic distinctions according to a standard believed to be innate, natural, and indicative of moral value, the sensorium was crucially important. Sensitivity to touch was, as we have seen, strongly identified with class status, and just as strongly, though more unpredictably, with gender. As Gikandi points out, blacks were considered to have a kind of “negative sensorium” (222). Black skin, it was often believed, was simply less sensitive than whites’. This argument was used, contradictorily enough, to support vicious physical punishment, on the premise that slaves could not feel more moderate punishment—though one might as easily conclude that whipping and branding were not ideal approaches to discipline human beings immune to pain (and they were still in use for white criminals, though they were being phased out throughout the period). Blackness was also, Gikandi argues, a constant reminder that slavery existed, that enlightenment had not been fully achieved, and that race presented the troubling problem of the human refusal of liberty, equality, and fraternity to at least some of their number. But where were black skins in the nineteenth-century British novel, and why do literary critics labor with such energy to find them metonymically in ghosts, Irish people, and all manner of other characters? Given that color (the fair heroine, the dark villain) is all over Victorian fiction, why is racialized skin color still a dominant trope in Victorian visual culture, but mostly present through indirection in the novel? And why is race itself as a general concept often discussed at length, but in the absence of specific black characters? One answer is that many literary critics are working with novels for the domestic middle class—a racially homogenous group, often embarrassed by their colonial connections rather than seeking to celebrate and explore them. There are of course characters such as Bertha Mason, whose Caribbean Creole features are Africanized in contrast to Jane Eyre’s pale complexion. Bertha is often read as genetically African in descent, whereas it is likely that Brontë has in mind the effect of Caribbean climate and madness that makes Bertha “savage” (277), and Brontë uses the language of racial difference to embody that. In other words, Bertha is indeed racialized as African, but that is based on a racial theory that is likely still climatological and moral rather than hereditary. Additionally, Rochester is very dark, Jane herself is dark compared to the odious blonde Georgiana, and the dreadful John Reed

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has a “dingy and unwholesome” skin from “bilious” overindulgence (3): “Her beauty, her pink cheeks and golden curls, seemed to give delight to all who looked at her, and to purchase indemnity for every fault. John no one thwarted, much less punished; though . . . he called his mother ‘old girl,’ too; sometimes reviled her for her dark skin, similar to his own” (Brontë 9). Mrs. Reed’s skin is elsewhere described as “dark and opaque,” though her hair is “flaxen” and her “constitution is sound” (29). The kind servant Bessie Lee has “black hair, [and] dark eyes” with a “good, clear complexion” (23). Here the identification of darkness with self-indulgence and immorality is evoked, and yet, simultaneously, this correlation is disregarded in many cases. Darkness of overall features is not necessarily indicative of character; skin specifically often indicates character, but not necessarily racialization. In fact, blackness was often not associated with visual characteristics at all. Black skin was conceived as less sensitive and “thicker” than white skin (whence perhaps Kant’s belief that it feels different to the touch), though this was more disputed in Britain than in the colonies or the United States. Mark M. Smith has persuasively shown the power in the US of a belief that people of African descent smell different from those of European descent, and that this is due to some difference in their sweat and skin (How Race Is Made, 38 and passim). He traces this widespread belief from pre–Civil War times through segregation and into the present, where it lingers. He notes that these beliefs that race could be sensed even when not seen are crucial to how we understand racial distinction in the face of the fact that, in many cases, race could absolutely not be determined visually—as is dramatized by the fact of countless stories of passing, both fictional and true, and the “tragic octoroon” stories so popular with both the British and the North American public (such as Dion Boucicault’s play, The Octoroon, in 1859, or Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s novel of the same title in 1861). Smith cites examples from the 1780s of British travelers finding the bodies of “Negroes” to be “rank and offensive” (How Race Is Made 13), and the English surgeon Charles White, in 1799, wrote that Africans emitted a “strong and fetid” odor, though this varied between ethnic groups (How Race Is Made 14). Black skin was also associated with leprosy and general ill health (18 and passim). These stories about scent seemed largely to come from the colonies, and had less importance in Britain than in the US, but were sometimes referenced in Britain and were certainly part of an active discourse about the difference between African and European skin, and sometimes about darker and lighter skin more generally. Popular fiction more frequently featured diverse working-class characters and thus persons of color. Still, even popular British fiction set in the

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homeland in fact lagged behind that of the Americas in representing the African other in its midst. The reason for this remains somewhat obscure. Persons of African descent and certainly of Indian and East Asian origin were visible in the streets of London, and remain in evidence in the visual culture of the period, though they are by no means its most frequent subjects. Even in middle-class fiction, by midcentury, Collins has several characters of mixed race in his novels, including the varicolored Ezra Jennings in The Moonstone (1868). Jennings, whose father was English and mother was native, is from an unnamed British colony. The local English are repulsed by him, but he proves to be one of the kindest and most knowledgeable characters in the novel, solving the mystery and allowing the resolution of the lovers’ plot. In Armadale (1866), Ozias Midwinter, the son of an Armadale and his mixed-blood wife (and perhaps, formerly, slave?), whose “tawny, haggard cheeks; . . . bright brown eyes, preternaturally large and wild; . . . rough black beard . . . all tended to discompose the rector. . . . The rector’s healthy Anglo-Saxon flesh crept responsively at every casual movement of the usher’s supple brown fingers, and every passing distortion of the usher’s haggard yellow face” (64). Yet, despite this apparently instinctive racialized reaction, Collins suggests that what really upsets people is Midwinter’s “manner,” not his color, and by the end of the tale, there are suggestions that this has improved. Moreover, Midwinter’s mother, who is visibly African in descent, is described as beautiful enough to completely overcome any antipathy in the dour Calvinist Scot, who meets her as Armadale is dying, and subsequently marries her. Some writers moved away from race as it was understood in the Anglophone world to address color prejudice more directly. In Poor Miss Finch (1872), the novel that so annoyed Ruskin (along with Eliot’s Mill and Dickens’s Bleak House), Collins explores the workings of sight and prejudice in the character of a blind girl who hates dark colors, and so has an aversion to people of color even though she cannot see them (for example, a “Hindoo” dinner guest): “There was no reasoning with her against her blind horror of dark shades. . . . ‘I have the strangest instincts. . . . I associate life and beauty with light colors, and death and crime with dark colors. If I married a man with a dark complexion, and if I recovered my sight afterwards, I should run away from him’ ” (74). Sadly, her unimpeachably white suitor turns dark blue after treatments for epilepsy with nitrate of silver (essentially turning him into a photographic negative of himself ), just as surgery enables her to gain her eyesight. Though the surgeon cites cases of other blind people overcoming this response, her suitor is unable to face the risk and refuses to tell her what has happened—which allows his twin brother, who has also fallen

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in love with Miss Finch, an opening to impersonate him. She is puzzled, however, because his touch feels different to her, and the plot is worked out when she loses her sight, the proper suitor returns, and she once again feels the pleasure of his touch. Collins is drawing on Cheseldean’s research on the congenitally blind, in part to make a point about the unreason of prejudice and the tendency of visible difference to short-circuit sympathy and judgment. The tale is narrated by an “ultra-liberal” French widow (Poor Miss Finch 1), Madame Pratolungo, who serves as companion to Miss Finch, and her reaction to the English is suggestive: “Dimchurch! As for the inhabitants—what am I to say? . . . I remarked one born gentleman . . . , and he was a sheep-dog. . . . He had a . . . good honest white and black face which he poked companionably into my hand. ‘Welcome, . . . and excuse these male and female laborers who stand and stare at you. The good God who makes us all has made them too, but has not succeeded so well as with you and me.’ I happen to be one of the few people who can read dogs’ language as written in dogs’ faces” (9). Here Collins riffs, as he often does, on the foreigner reacting to the absurdity of English prejudices. But he also slyly gestures to the values of “egalité” with the “black and white” dog whose face is expressive, readable, and responsive, and who sees that “God” has made all creatures, in opposition to the inexpressive and unwelcoming English. Though fond of her blind charge, Madame Pratolungo also deplores her prejudices. Her own deceased husband, a South American revolutionary, was, she remarks, “a fine mahogany brown all over” (74). Elizabeth Gaskell deals with the absurdity of color prejudice in a similar way—by focusing on whiteness as the dreaded marker in the essay “An Accursed Race” (1855), about the exclusion and persecution of the Cagots—an ethnic subgroup defined by family heritage—in the French Pyrenees. Forbidden to intermarry with the “pure” in blood, the Cagots suffered under various legal disabilities in terms of property rights and freedom of movement. They were long constrained to enter churches (if they were allowed to enter at all) through a separate door. Gaskell does not compare this explicitly to racial prejudice in the Anglophone world, but does detail various circular justifications for the hostility, which has some similarities to color prejudice in the US, as well as anti-Semitism in Europe: “learned men have attempted to account for the universal repugnance in which this well-made, powerful race are held. Some say that the antipathy to them took its rise in the days when leprosy was . . . prevalent” and that Cagots are known to be prone to a similar ailment marked by “dead whiteness of complexion” (78). She remarks, “In Brittany, . . . their unpleasant smell was again pressed into service. The Jews, it was well known, had this

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physical infirmity” (78). She mocks beliefs that seem unreasonable, ignorant, and alien, but ends the essay with a reminder: We are naturally shocked at discovering . . . the causeless rancour with which innocent and industrious people were so recently persecuted. . . . ‘What faults you saw in me, Pray strive to shun; And look at home; there’s Something to be done.’ (80) Like Collins, Gaskell also suggests that the French Revolution’s liberal values had at least some positive effect, as “the more intelligent . . . tried to overcome the prejudice against the Cagots” (79). In fiction, black and mixed-race protagonists tend to be found most often in antislavery literature, and the sympathetic “tragic mulatta” or octoroon figure often passes as white. Literature that emphasizes the blackness of characters the most tends to be overtly pro-abolition and set in America, if not itself of American origin, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point,” which takes up the common abolition theme of the slave woman raped by the white master. In this case, the runaway slave kills her “too white” child (140) and is hunted down at Pilgrim’s Point, where she curses the Pilgrim fathers with my black face, my black hand, Here, in your names, to curse this land Ye blessed in freedom’s evermore. (137) Here, the emphasis is entirely on color opposites visible at a glance, as the slave, driven to madness, can see only the child’s “too white” face. She cannot “bear / To look” at his face, “so white” (140), and, in her own suffering, is unable to recognize the child’s struggle against suffocation as suffering, but perceives it as a desire for dominance: “For the white child wanted his liberty— / Ha, ha! he wanted his master right” (140). Sympathy and reciprocity cannot survive when color is all her captors, and therefore she, can see:  . . . a child and mother Do wrong to look at one another, When one is black and one is fair. (140) She buries the child in the “black earth” to make him “dark” like herself, and thus they are “reconciled” (143). Barrett Browning here uses the dis-

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course of visibility and sympathy to make the point that the visibility of color has disabled and occluded sympathy, subjecting the speaker to rape and torture. The end result is that this visual marker destroys even the most fundamental sympathy of maternity (thought by Darwin to be the original basis of all sympathy) in a slave state. Generally in midcentury, color functions only as an absolute opposition (white versus black) in depicting slavery. But color does not primarily denote a racial opposition in British literature set in Europe, although darkness has increasingly racialized connotations as the century progresses. Though there are exceptions, it is largely toward the end of the century and in fictions set in the colonies that race and blackness explicitly enter the fictional text in tandem.

Coloring Women Gikandi’s observation that blackness participates in a preexisting order of color prejudice beyond or prior to racial discourse gives us a way to think through the conundrum of color’s significance in the period. As the survey of scholarship above suggests, racial science itself doesn’t help much in understanding changing attitudes toward the color of skin, but thinking about color more directly takes us farther. It is clear that blackness was associated with race, though color is not in racial science very significant in the early nineteenth century. It is also clear that blackness was devalued, when racialized or not. Skin color, increasingly associated with race in the modern sense as the period unfolds, is nonetheless inscribed early on with multiple narratives of power and privilege: some classed, some gendered, some regional/ethnic, and some associated with race as we have come to know it. Racial science assimilates existing discourses and elaborates “scientific” explanations of color as an afterthought. Ann Stoler demonstrates that race as it emerges in the late modern period is inscribed within preexisting narratives, most often of class, and I would argue that it is likewise inscribed at least partially within existing aesthetic and moral narratives of color. Scholars such as Vron Ware and Radhika Mohanram also bring us closer to understanding how color itself—whiteness and its others—operate in the period. Vron Ware shows how the gendered whiteness of European women becomes also a fragile, constantly threatened marker of racial superiority. Mohanram theorizes, however, that whiteness itself was linked with masculinity and thereby became the universal, unmarked body. It thus became available to women only as “a supplement. Their whiteness was retroactively conferred upon them only because of their heterosexual relationships with white men. . . . In short, they could not perform whiteness . . . they could

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only ever mime it” (25). Because British whiteness could be diluted through women, the threat of contamination was at “the very core of British whiteness” (34). Mohanram argues that whiteness was constructed as precisely the quality of bourgeois identity that was supposed to be outside of history, carefully protected in the domestic sphere (35). Thus, the working-class body, and particularly the working woman’s body, was blackened (44)—and one might think of Arthur Munby’s fetish for Hannah Cullwick blackened with soot and for pit-women mine workers as a perfect example here. The whiteness of women both demonstrated European purity and dramatized its vulnerability. Women generally were expected to be lighter—and brighter—in color than men. As we saw in chapter 2, the contrast of blushing cheeks against white skin was highly valued. Instructions on portrait painting throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century are quite clear that one starts work with that assumption, rather than looking at one’s subject to dictate the color. Henry Murray’s oft-reprinted guide to portrait painting (1858–92) flatly states, “In feminine portraits or studies, the work must be brought up to the utmost brilliancy of colour by the brightest and freshest hues, composed of white, Naples yellow, vermilion, and madder, mellowed by yellows, or slightly empurpled with lake or carmine, according to the prevalent tint of the subject.” In the masculine subject “the colours will be stronger, and the half-tints [grays] more positive” (34–35). In fact, the masculine complexion is not simply darker but comprised of almost completely different base colors: “The more strongly tinted masculine complexion may be imitated . . . employing the stronger tones of yellow ochre, light red, vermilion and lake [crimson]. The shades and markings may be of umber, slightly qualified with lake or Indian red” (43–44). Lest one think that photographs encouraged a more open attitude to observing complexions, Robert Johnson’s 1889 guide to retouching observes, “The faces of young people have more pink and white in them than those who are advanced in years. . . . Let us suppose that we are colouring the portrait of a young lady with a fresh complexion. The first wash for the face may be composed of yellow ochre, pink madder with perhaps a very little vermilion” (67).7 Johnson insists that the most important consideration in retouching women is “bloom”: “First consider how brilliant you intend the colour of the cheeks to be, and make up a mixture of vermilion—light red and rose or pink madder, putting more vermilion if you wish them to be very bright. Softly stipple this on to the cheek” (68). Men, however, are defined less by their blushes. Johnson’s example for a masculine subject is more specific, and not nearly so pink: “an old gentleman, with white hair, . . . inclining

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to florid. . . . Commence by mixing terra verte, brown madder, a little raw sienna, and a very little light red” (73). The cheeks are not specifically mentioned, but the lighter parts of the face are painted over this initial color with flake white, emerald green, cobalt, and burnt sienna (73). Consistency of pallor, relieved with “bloom,” was the color of British femininity. As these excerpts suggest, color difference was highly gendered, so highly that gender rather than the actual body determined how skin color was to be portrayed. Discussions of racial difference, particularly African racial difference, often are in turn mapped awkwardly onto gender and sexual difference. Whereas Lombroso sees women as more like Africans in their supposed lack of touch sensitivity and general lack of civilization, most British theorists early on see the woman as the most delicate, spiritually developed and thus most opposite of Africans, who in these comparisons are usually described as male. In 1799, the polygenist surgeon Charles White believed all organisms existed on a static chain of being, with the white man superior to the black. In addition to the usual skull differences popularized by Lavater and so forth, White rested his final argument on the breasts of the white woman: “Where shall we find . . . such . . . rosy cheeks and coral lips [except in Europe, and] except on the bosom of the European woman, two such plump and snowy white hemispheres, tipt with vermilion?” (135). As Susan Meyer points out, however, White also observes that the nipple, anus, and pudenda of European women are often “dark brown” and during pregnancy become quite dark, “black as in the Samoied women” (qtd. in Meyer 18). White cites another authority to point out that “Negresses” show “larger nipples than Europeans,” and adds, “Brutes have still larger” (qtd. in Meyer 18). Susan Meyer adduces several more examples, from various obstetrical authors, to show that “White women . . . occupied an ambiguous position on the racial scales of nineteenth-century science” (19). Their racial superiority could not be related to their inferior intelligence, so it had to be located in the body. Even at the end of the century, European women were still being compared to men and women of “ ‘the lower races’ ” (19–20). It is the similarity between the sexual parts of white women and dark skin in color that is troubling to White, and it is on that ground in part that the opposition made its claims. In 1808, the doctor and anthropology enthusiast T. Jarrold, arguing for the equality of the races, maintains that differences in color are caused by sun and climate, his evidence mirroring and responding to White’s: “Every skin is susceptible of the same impression [of the sun]. That of the European is constructed in every respect like the African’s. . . . Pregnancy very powerfully excites the vascular system . . . similar in its effects to that which the sun manifests. . . . From the publicity with which many

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Europeans, in the lower walks of life, suckle their children, it is familiar to most of my readers, that the aureolae round the nipple of many is as black as the skin of an African” ( Jarrold 211–12). And sometimes the whole body of a pregnant woman becomes black (212): “No dark complexioned English woman becomes a mother, without in part becoming black, like a negress. Who will then dare to scoff, for the wisest of the race has probably been nurtured at such a breast?” (212–13). He concludes, then, that “the capacity to become black, is as universal as man” (213). Although the two authors come to quite different conclusions about the equality of blacks and whites, both accede to the identification of the white woman with the black person. Thus the debate around race was also a gendered one, and remained so to some extent throughout the century, as later anthropologists like Lombroso would argue that white women were like black men—defined by savagery, immaturity, and atavism. Associations of black skin with sexuality were hardly new. Sander Gilman remarks that in the sixteenth century, syphilis was thought to turn one black, and the figure of lust and infection was often iconically represented in art as a black man (“Touch, Sexuality, and Disease” 202–3)—as, quite often, was the devil. But by the mid-nineteenth century, blackness was more emphatically about racial than individual identity or transgressiveness. In accounting for the uneven history of skin color’s association with criminality, Ellis puzzles, “Most writers on criminals speak of the pallor of the skin; this has been noted . . . by . . . early physiognomists. Marro . . . considers that it is related to habitual cerebral congestion” (Criminal 77). However, he concludes that it may not be intrinsic but caused by “prolonged imprisonment” (77–78). (For Lombroso, darkness is clearly connected to criminality, though in his samples, it is likely related to the north-south ethnic and political divides of Italy rather than racial theories with which he attempts to harmonize his data.) Ellis notes that, for Lombroso, criminals are moral idiots and are most frequently “Mongoloid” or “Negroid” types—of Europeans (Ellis, Criminal 91). That said, he also observes that Dr. John Down (for whom Down’s syndrome was named) also finds his “idiots” to be mostly Mongoloid and sometimes Negroid—but mark the description: “In Dr. Down’s Negroid type of idiot there are characteristic cheek-bones, prominent eyes, puffy lips, retreating chins, woolly but not black hair, and no pigmentation of skin” (84–85). Here, color is the least salient racializing characteristic, and indeed Ellis does not consider skin color a significant marker of criminality (moreover, he also notes, contra Lombroso, that some have found additional skin sensitivity among criminals). Gender and sexual anomalies, however, Ellis considers more significant: “Gynecomasty is comparatively common among criminals. In answer to my

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Questions, a prison surgeon wrote in 1888: ‘Many men have large nipples and large, well-marked aureolae’ ” (Criminal 98). These nipples may be “deeply pigmented” (99) and even show “well-defined mammary glands that have periodic seasons of congestion and attempts at functional activity,” including “secretion of an opaque fluid and a sensation of fullness and weight in the region of the nipple” (99). In short, these men have periodicity, as was thought also of Jews by anti-Semitic theorists in nineteenth-century Germany.8 Even when criminal men draw female breasts, they are of a particular type and size: “In the nude . . . prison artists take great delight. . . . There is a certain Hogarthian vigour and ease with which the faces and forms of these coarse, low-browed, animal, energetic women, with their large pendent breasts, are brought before us” (236). In Studies in the Evolution of Sex, Ellis speculates that criminal activity is related to sexual periodicity, again feminizing criminality. Yet he does conclude in The Criminal that the criminal male’s engorged breast has no “histological resemblance to the female secreting breast” but is “a hyperplasia of  . . . the male breast. It is noteworthy that in all true negroes (in whom virile development is otherwise marked) there is a considerable development of the male breast” (132). The phrase “true negro” suggests that for Ellis a marker of negritude itself is breast size rather than skin color. Sander Gilman has observed that the discourse around deviant feminine sexuality in the nineteenth century iconographically linked two figures, the European prostitute and the African woman (specifically the Hottentot woman, Sarah “Saartjie” Baartman, who caught the European imagination when she was displayed widely there and subsequently died and was anatomized). He demonstrates that “the association of the black with concupiscence reaches back into the Middle Ages. . . . By the eighteenth century, the sexuality of the black, both male and female, becomes an icon for deviant sexuality in general; as we have seen, the black figure appears almost always paired with a white figure of the opposite sex” (“Black Bodies, White Bodies” 209). Up through the eighteenth century, the white woman is often displayed in paintings with a black servant, pointing to her sexual deviance. By the nineteenth century, oddly, “certain major shifts in the iconography of the sexualized woman take place, not the least of which is the apparent disappearance of the black female” (208–9). Gilman attributes the apparent need to identify a “unique and observable physical difference” in blacks to “the radical empiricists of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe,” in the distinction they drew between the pathological and the normal in the medical model, the pathological being identified with the black woman’s genitals and buttocks (212). Later descriptions of prostitutes, such as those of

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the French doctor and public-hygiene specialist Alexandre Parent-Duchatelet, tend, Gilman argues, to describe their bodies in terms typical of discussions of African women: plumpness, “lassitude” or laziness (ascribed in the French women’s case to frequent hot-water bathing), and “leading an animal life” (Gilman, “Black Bodies” 223). Gilman points out that Lombroso’s The Prostitute and the Normal Woman (1893) deals with “atavistic” European women, but uses images of Hottentot genitals and buttocks derived from images of Baartman. Gilman reads Manet’s painting Nana—likely inspired by Zola’s character in L’assomoir (1877), which represented her early days prior to her career in the eponymous novel—as a superimposition of the characteristics of the black woman onto the white prostitute. (In turn, Zola writes the novel Nana after seeing Manet’s portrait.) As we saw in chapter 3, Nana is also read as a source of disease, which Gilman asserts is a long-standing association with black skin. Nana’s initial moment of theatrical triumph, he shows, uses several of these icons: “her rounded shoulders, her Amazon’s breasts of which the pink tips stood up rigidly like lances, her broad buttocks which rolled in a voluptuous swaying motion, and her fair, fat hips: her whole body was in evidence, and could be seen under the light tissue with its foamy whiteness” (Zola, qtd. in Gilman, “Black Bodies” 234). Here the “foamy whiteness” of Nana points paradoxically to the blackness of the savage woman; as we saw earlier, this link is reinforced when it is rumored she takes a black lover. The disappearance of the sexualized African woman from the realm of visual art is balanced by her simultaneous emergence as a pathologized body in the medical and scientific literature. Meanwhile the dark woman (and more rarely the explicitly mixed-race woman) in polite fiction is generally portrayed as a passionate brunette, whereas the black man rarely appears at all. The exceptions in midcentury are abolition literature, and colonial fiction, wherein, especially in the wake of the Indian Mutiny, “black” men were seen as both oversexed and cowardly, cruel and childlike. These stereotypes continue into British colonial and African adventure fiction of the fin de siècle. Havelock Ellis offers a trove of fin de siècle beliefs about criminality, atavism, race, and sexuality, continuing the theme of the identification of color with sexuality and femininity. He observes, “The degree of [lip] pigmentation is clearly correlated with sexual vigor” (Studies in the Psychology of Sex 5: 191). He muses that this “connection between pigmentation and sexual activity is very ancient,” traceable from an evolutionary perspective to the display of color in mating animals, “nearly always gorgeous in scales and plumage and hair” (5: 191). Sexual maturity brings darkening of the genitals, and “babies of mixed black and white blood may show no traces

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of negro ancestry at birth, but there will always be increased pigmentation about the external genitalia” (5: 192). Ellis cites also folk-understandings and “popular lore” to reinforce his findings: “the Sicilians, who admire brown skin . . . , believe that a white woman is incapable of responding to love. . . . In England, from notes sent to me by one correspondent, it would appear that the proportion of dark and sexually apt women to fair and sexually apt women is as 3 to 1” (5: 193). Color, initially the least significant aspect of racial difference, is not only used by the end of the period to inscribe gender difference within the newer discourses of scientific racism, but spills out beyond that to reciprocally gender race in turn; white women become black, and black men become feminized. The stereotype of the dark, passionate woman is everywhere in Victorian literature, whether in the explicitly African “tragic mulatta” or in the thoroughly British brunette, who is still described as “Southern” or “Oriental.”9

Marked Criminality If color was often an unreliable index of racial identity, even while it intersected with multiple categories of aesthetic, moral, and racial classification, the growing emphasis on criminology and identification contributed to the quest for more definite and stable markers of individual identity on the body’s surface. The mid-nineteenth century saw particularly lively interest in scars and marks, and considerable study devoted to determining how scars might be effaced over time. But the nineteenth century’s most significant contribution in this area is the late nineteenth-century practice of fingerprinting, pioneered in the colonies (strongly connected to the unreliability of Europeans’ visual recognition of racial others) and widely adopted in many places worldwide in the twentieth century.10 Scars were often used for purposes of identification. Unlike color and fingerprints, of course, scars were acquired experientially rather than being essential to the body. However, that made them in some way particularly characteristic—as physiognomy had suggested that the best marker of character was the facial line drawn by habitual expression, a scar acquired by experience might speak of the character of the person bearing it more clearly than the accident of a sallow complexion resulting from illness. Also unlike color, scars’ recognition depended less on the perception of the beholder, being measurable. Before fingerprints, scars were especially important in establishing identity for legal purposes. The question of their reliability and permanence begins to turn up in guides to forensic medicine by midcentury, when such practices were beginning to be formalized. William Guy in 1861

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offers a summary of findings on the possibility of scars being removed, citing an 1847 Belgian case in which an attribution of identity rested on this question: “The medical man, M. Vandelaer, stated that scars might be removed by time or by artificial means, and the physicians of the prisons of Valvorde and Ghent confirmed . . . that prisoners are in the habit of effacing scars by applying a salted herring to them. MM. Lebeau and Limanges, on the other hand, contended that scars could not be removed. This latter opinion is doubtless the correct one; though it must be admitted that scars grow less distinct with the lapse of time, and may also be rendered less distinct by friction or the use of stimulants” (3). Guy offers a number of examples of scars becoming less dramatic over time, but insists that they are never fully effaced: “a severe flogging . . . is traceable after an interval of some years only by very fine white lines upon the back and sides, and, where the knots had fallen, by little round pits resembling small white circles neatly cut out by a punch” (3). He references a legal case in which the absence of scars led him to conclude that one “man could not have been, as it was alleged . . . , very severely flogged” (3–4). He mentions that the same rule applies to “the blue and red discolorations of the skin produced by the process of tattooing. They admit of removal only by the destruction of the portion of skin in which they are seated” (4). He lists “bleeding, cupping, . . . vaccination, [and] . . . the punishment of the lash” as well as “scrofulous ulcers on the neck. . . . lupus on the face, . . . small-pox on every part of the body, . . . burns and caustic” as scarring agents that leave usefully identifiable marks (4). Thus, it might even be possible to read one scar as the sign of another, if a supposed location of a particular scar was marked by efforts to remove it, such as the use of lunar caustic.11 The concern about scars’ mutability was widespread in midcentury forensics, with the rapid growth of scientific medicine and medical jurisprudence. The German forensic specialist Johann Ludwig Casper, whose 1856 Practisches Handbuch der gerichtlichen Medicin was translated into English in 1861, likewise remarks that “The marks of wounds on bodies, particularly on such as are unknown . . . may give rise to many judicial queries. First of all it may be asked, Do such marks ever entirely disappear?” (2: 103). In one case, “marks left by cupping instruments and tattooing” were sufficiently pivotal that investigators exhumed the corpse (2: 102–3). That said, Casper notes that the depth of the injury to the cutis impacts the persistence of scars, citing the disappearance of cupping marks after many years (2: 103). Moreover, “the scars of even deeper injuries of the skin may disappear during life. Devergie states, namely, that where the brand mark of a galley-slave has vanished, it may be recalled to sight by slapping its usual position with the flat of the hand, till it reddens, the brand mark which cannot redden,

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at once becomes visible by its permanent whiteness” (2: 103). So scars may persist, but without immediate visibility—in that case, one must know their locations to expose them by other means. Still, “Scars accompanied by loss of substance never disappear,” such as “chancres or buboes, . . . issues and blisters, which have suppurated for some time, as well as the marks of variola,” and all wounds that heal by “granulation” (2: 103). These are particularly important in dealing with criminals, “as most of the lower classes have the usual well-known marks of cudgel blows on some parts of their hairy scalp” (2: 103). But it may also be necessary to estimate the age of an injury by the appearance of a scar, and this is trickier. Smallpox scars can whiten in a period spanning anywhere between six months to three years, for example (2: 104). An extensive forensic literature was built around identifying scars across Western Europe in the second half of the century. In fiction, scars, as acquired marks, often have special meaning for character. First, they make characters identifiable to others. Such marks often hold meaning, as they record events in a person’s life, and may indicate something about a character’s actions or temperament as well as plot—whether it is the scarring of Esther’s face in Bleak House as she bears the burden for the evil done by Chancery or the scar wrought upon passionate Rosa Dartle in David Copperfield by the heedless and selfish Steerforth, who throws a hammer at her when they are children. Though it is an “old scar—I should rather call it seam, for it was not discoloured, and had healed years ago” (Dickens, David Copperfield 292), when she was angry, “it was the most susceptible part of her face, and . . . when she turned pale, that mark altered first, and became a dull, lead-coloured streak, lengthening out to its full extent, like a mark in invisible ink brought to the fire” (295). Given the history of discussions of scarring and blushing in this period, this scar seems closely descended from the famous scar on the “negress” described by Burgess, which reddened “whenever she was abruptly spoken to or charged with any trivial offense” (qtd. in O’Farrell 84). As noted in chapter 2, it makes its appearance in every discussion of the blush from Bell to Darwin. As O’Farrell writes, “the frequently scrutinized scar on the frequently flushed face of the invariably accused black woman” satisfies Darwin’s belief in the universality of the confessing body, and perhaps specifically a “corrigible black body” (O’Farrell 84). Dickens, however, O’Farrell argues, shows Rosa as using her scar to resist this corrigibility and legibility. But the resistance is not entirely successful. It is the description of the scar as a mark in invisible ink that is most telling; even when inconspicuous, it is a text inscribed on the body, and reveals that body’s meaning—the meaning of the self—when exposed to the proper stimulus. Copperfield remarks that when Rosa is angry, “I saw it start forth like the old

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writing on the wall” (Dickens, David Copperfield 295). What David Horn calls fin de siècle criminology’s “fantasy of the confessing body” (131) is not only aligned in this earlier example with transitory expressions such as the blush, but transferred to permanent features (scars) as well. With the scar, Rosa has acquired the permanently bitter temperament that disfigures her character.12 In many cases the cause-and-effect relationship between the scarring event and the character’s action is more direct. In Ellen Wood’s East Lynne, the protagonist’s scarring as a result of a railway accident serves both thematic purposes (she is a fallen woman, and her punishment is marked on the body) and plot purposes (it enables her to go unrecognized among people she knows). In this case, the scar effaces her identity within the world of the book, but enables her identity as the mater dolorosa of the melodrama: “Look at the governess, reader, and see whether you know her. You will say ‘No.’ But you do, for it is Lady Isabel Vane. But how strangely she is altered! . . . what the accident left undone, grief and remorse accomplished. She limps . . . , and slightly stoops. . . . A scar extends from her chin above her mouth, completely changing the character of the lower part of her face; some of her teeth are missing, so that she speaks with a lisp” (Wood 384). The marking of her body is not simply the physical result of accident, but of remorse. The fact that the scar changes the shape of her mouth (like Rosa Dartle’s scar) is significant. The mouth was phrenologically aligned with the more animal passions, and its injury represents punishment for Isabel’s adultery, which has altered her nature;13 Rosa’s indicates the marring of her attractiveness not only by but for Steerforth, the man she desires, and by whose disinterest she is embittered.14 But the gold standard for identification, especially of criminals, emerged in the later part of the century—though it lacked the advantage of being immediately visible at a distance or at a glance. In the quest for the perfect identification system, two systems competed at the end of the century. In France, as mentioned above, the police officer Alphonse Bertillon pioneered a system of anthropometry, which required taking extensive measurements, such as arm length, skull size, and facial proportions, as well as, of course, identifying marks such as scars, moles, and tattoos. It was complex, and not incidentally, difficult to carry out with a subject determined to resist it. The other—and ultimately successful—method pioneered by the British was fingerprinting: the ultimate refinement of using the skin as a marker of identity. Unlike scars, which might change the nature of a face, fingerprints could be effaced only by removing the fingertips themselves—which would be a rather dramatic inscription in its own right. In 1877, William Herschel was appointed magistrate of Hooghly. He developed fingerprinting in India as a means to impress or “frighten” Indians

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out of repudiating their signatures on contracts (8), and to discourage imposters from collecting other persons’ pensions or falsifying deeds. He also began the fingerprinting of criminals so that another could not be substituted for jail time, nor a death faked using another’s corpse. Francis Galton quotes Herschel’s letter to him, citing the difficulties of recognizing or adequately describing Indians because “The uniformity in the colour of hair, eyes, and complexion of the Indian races renders identification far from easy, and . . . their handwriting, whether it be in Persian or Devanagri letters, is devoid of character” (Galton, Finger Prints 150). Here we see two elements of “racial sight”: the first being that all members of the identified group are seen as indistinguishable based on a perceived similarity of coloring with each other, which is really simply a difference from the coloring of the European viewer. This indistinguishability extends even to the handwriting “devoid of character,” contrasting the projection of individual character into the future that Hegel sees as characteristic of the (implicitly European) writing hand. In 1880, Herschel published a paper in Nature about fingerprinting, and then wrote a more complete history of his experiences in 1916, shortly before he died, entitled The Origin of Finger-Printing. Francis Galton, as Herschel indicates in his work, took the technique and developed it as a mode of identifying criminals in Europe, and also developed a method of cataloging fingerprints so they might be easily found. Herschel also did much to prove the persistence of fingerprints—the fact that from infancy to old age, the prints remain the same, using comparison of his own prints after fifty-seven years. His friends and native colleagues seem to have humored his desire to exchange multiple prints over long periods to compare with earlier ones as well. (He ultimately sent the whole collection to Galton.) He marvels that these skin patterns, so fragile, are so persistent, concluding, “It goes beyond the proper scope of this narrative, but I cannot refrain from offering my readers here a striking instance of the almost incredible persistency of atomic renovation that takes place in the pads of our fingers, in spite of their being more subject to wear than any other part of the body” (Herschel, Origin of Finger-Printing 31).15 Francis Galton confirmed fingerprints’ persistence with repeated experiments, and remarks that they remain intact long after death: “the marks of many Egyptian mummies, and on the paws of stuffed monkeys, still remain legible” (Finger Prints 97). He remarks that no other “external bodily characteristics, other than deep scars and tattoo marks” can compare to fingerprints’ permanence (Finger Prints 97). Elsewhere, he remarks scarring does not destroy but only distorts fingerprints, in such a way that a scar “becomes an additional mark; it even assists in classification” (Galton, Fingerprint

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Directories 34). As Herschel remarks, however, fingerprints are in fact more durable than such acquired marks. Scars and tattoos are modifications of the original design, and can be modified in turn. But through “atomic renovation,” fingerprints remarkably reproduce themselves true to the original design. As a self-reproducing design, they are immune to changes wrought by age, which do affect scars and other marks. Fingerprints are thus part of the mystery of original identity; rather than being inscribed upon the person by experience, they are ab origine, a given part of the self. This made fingerprinting superior to other identity-tracking plans, specifically, Bertillon’s bodily measuring system widely in use in France for the tracking of criminals, which required multiple measurements of features that might well change over time. Galton quotes a Home Department report in 1894 that Galton’s fingerprint method was superior to Bertillon’s very cumbersome measurement method; in addition, “While in M. Bertillon’s system a margin greater or less has always to be allowed for errors on the part of the operator, no such allowance has to be made in Mr. Galton’s. Fingerprints are an absolute impression taken from the body itself; if a print be taken at all it must necessarily be correct” (Fingerprint Directories 17). Additionally, prints are very individual, persistent, and can be quickly described: “Each person thus possesses a formula which is, as it were, a personal name, that may be read from his fingerprints” (17). This emphasis on the unmediated nature of fingerprinting is characteristic of the period’s desire for instrumental solutions to body measurement and recognition, linked to an increasing distrust of the subjective nature of perceptual recognition. As we have seen, the nineteenth century saw the turn in race science to seeking race in the structure of the body, rather than in what were thought to be more ambiguous signs, such as color. After the long and contested history of skull measuring and genital comparisons (see Gilman for a discussion of the latter), fingerprints seemed at first a promising way to finally prove the biological reality of racial difference.16 Francis Galton looked assiduously for race and class difference in fingerprints, and was surprised not to find it there (though he does find that Jews have more whorls that gentiles) (Finger Prints 195): “The impressions from Negroes betray the general clumsiness of their fingers, but their patterns are not, so far as I can find, different from those of others, they are not simpler as judged either by their contours” or by the designs on them, he concludes with some bewilderment (Finger Prints 195–96). Yet, he believes that there must be a difference: “Still, whether it be from pure fancy on my part, or the way in which they were printed, or from some real peculiarity, the general aspect of the Negro print strikes me as characteristic. The width of the ridges seem more uniform, their intervals

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more regular, and their courses more parallel than with us. In short, they give an idea of greater simplicity, due to causes I have not yet succeeded in submitting to the test of measurement” (196)—perhaps because those causes were rooted entirely in his expectation and wish that they conform to an idea of atavism.17

Revising the Body At the same time that materialist scientific work was hardening its commitment to physiological difference, there were still idealists seeking to reconcile that narrative with narratives of transformation. If the body manifests being, why could the body not change, not merely over evolutionary time, but in the shorter term of the individual life? If scars and even skin color can be read as the inscriptions of experience, might such marks be erased, or reversed? Those whose idealist natural theology theorized a body that reflected the soul, and whose religion allowed for grace and redemption, perforce posited a material body that would evolve to reflect spiritual reality. Charles Kingsley, parson, naturalist, sanitarian, and Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, was, much like Charles Bell, at the center of the controversies of his era without getting much ahead of them. His exuberant, contradictory writings illustrate some of the ways that materialism and idealism came together with the new evolutionary science and theories of history in his belief that “the soul makes the body.” His children’s tale, The Water-Babies (published in 1862–63), emphasized that people could transform physically, in both positive and negative ways, depending on their actions: “If he [a skeptic] says that things cannot degrade, that is, change downwards into lower forms, ask him, . . . does he know about the strange degradation of the common goose-barnacles . . . ? . . . if the changes of the lower animals are so wonderful . . . may not man, the crown and flower of all things, undergo some change as much more wonderful than all the rest . . . ?” (43). When the protagonist, Tom, steals sweets, his body transforms: “he was all over prickles, just like a sea-egg. Which was quite natural; . . . people’s souls make their bodies just as a snail makes its shell. . . . And therefore, when Tom’s soul grew all prickly with naughty tempers, his body could not help growing prickly, too” (119). The story, which is a quest narrative, follows Tom’s efforts to transform himself into adult human form. Scarring and blackness are aligned in the story as undesirable traits that are not integral to identity but destructive of it. Tom is whitened over the course of the story. Framing the fantasy portion of his watery quest is the more mundane story of his apprenticeship as a chimney sweep. He is brought to

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clean the chimneys in a large home and inadvertently ends up, covered with soot, in the room of the young daughter of the house: The room was all dressed in white,—white window-curtains, white bed-curtains, white furniture, and white walls. . . . The next thing he saw . . . was a washing-stand, with ewers and basins, and soap and brushes, and towels, and a large bath full of clean water—what a heap of things all for washing! “She must be a very dirty lady,” thought Tom, “. . . to want as much scrubbing as all that. But . . . I don’t see a speck about the room, not even on the very towels.” And then, looking toward the bed, he saw that dirty lady, and held his breath with astonishment. Under the snow-white coverlet, upon the snow-white pillow, lay the most beautiful little girl that Tom had ever seen. Her cheeks were almost as white as the pillow, and her hair was like threads of gold spread all about over the bed. . . . No. She cannot be dirty. She never could have been dirty, thought Tom to himself. And then he thought, “And are all people like that when they are washed?” And he looked at his own wrist, and tried to rub the soot off, and wondered whether it ever would come off. “Certainly I should look much prettier then, if I grew at all like her.” (17) I have excerpted this at length because no summary can do justice to the determined alliance of whiteness with elite class status, femininity, cleanliness, goodness, and beauty that Kingsley insists on. Tom’s desire to be “like her,” and a chance sight of himself in the mirror, lead him to realize that he is nonwhite: “he suddenly saw, standing close to him, a little ugly, black, ragged figure, with bleared eyes and grinning white teeth. . . . What did such a little black ape want in that sweet young lady’s room? And behold, it was himself. . . . And Tom, for the first time in his life, found out that he was dirty; and burst into tears with shame and anger” (17). The recognition of blackness operates as a conviction of  sin. The illustration by J. Noel Paton in the 1863 one-volume edition, showing Tom in blackface, makes him look quite African, as critics such as Amanda Hodgson have observed (see fig. 7.1). This conversion scene (foreshadowed in part by a picture of Christ in the very white room) is also, of course, a sanitized invocation of racial rape fantasies, as the black male invades the virgin space of the preternaturally white, blonde female—right down to the girl’s awakening and screaming for help upon seeing Tom at her bedside. He is dirty, spiritually and physically, and must be cleaned and whitened—beginning his arduous quest to transform his skin from black to smooth and fair

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Figure 7.1.  Tom sees himself in the mirror. Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby (Boston: T.O.H.P Burham, 1864). This American edition used the same illustrations as the original Macmillan UK edition of 1863. There were only two illustrations in the original edition, and only one of Tom. (The other is a frontispiece, of Mother Nature with unnamed water babies.)

(which he will do in part through learning to pray with Ellie, the “white lady”). It is the incident above that triggers the narrative break into the fantasy portion of the story, as Tom, running away from screaming Ellie and her pursuing avengers, ends up in the water, either transformed into a water baby (or in a darker, realist reading, having a drowning hallucination of being so transformed). Kingsley repeatedly drives home the point, in the language

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of evolution and degeneration, that racial otherness is primitive, and the punishment for (as well as cause of ) bad behavior. Kingsley takes up the language of evolution to illustrate the same moral over the longer durée.18 The nature fairy reads the children a story, posed as a history. When the nation of “Doasyoulikes” fails to heed nature’s warnings, they are largely destroyed by a volcano. The remainder still failing to heed this timely warning to change locations, they degenerate, becoming “too lazy” to cultivate the land: “So they lived miserably on roots and nuts, and all the weakly little children had great stomachs, and then died” (Water-Babies 128). The children observe that the Doasyoulikes become “no better than savages,” and the nature fairy tells them that “when people live on poor vegetables . . . , their jaws grow large, and their lips grow coarse, like the poor Paddies who eat potatoes” (128). Five hundred years later still, they are living in trees and being eaten by lions, but becoming physically strong, “for the ladies will not marry any but the very strongest and fiercest gentlemen, who can help them up the trees out of the lions’ way” (128). Another five hundred years, and they have evolved prehensile feet: “they laid hold of the branches with their great toes, as if they had been thumbs, just as a Hindoo tailor uses his toes to thread his needle” (129), and one has become “very hairy” (129). Over several more demi-millennial increments, “every one wished to marry hairy husbands, and have hairy children too; for the climate was growing so damp that none but the hairy ones could live” (129). These dubious eugenic decisions cause them to become “apes,” lose language, and eventually, “they were all dead . . . except one tremendous old fellow with jaws like a jack, who stood full seven feet high; and M. Du Chaillu came up to him, and shot him, as he stood roaring and thumping his breast. And he remembered that his ancestors had once been men, and tried to say, ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ but had forgotten how to use his tongue; . . . So all he said was ‘Ubboboo!’ and died” (130). (Paul Du Chaillu was famous both for discovering pygmies and for bringing back dead gorilla specimens to Europe from equatorial Africa in the late 1860s.) From the mention of “Paddy” to the famous antislavery slogan, Kingsley invokes a popular belief that humans exist on a scale of most evolved (white, English) through less evolved (white-Irish) to racially other (“Hindoo”) to least evolved—or perhaps most de-evolved—(African) to ape. Moreover, ironically, it is the sexual selection of women that accelerates the downward trajectory, as females select for immediately, rather than ultimately, beneficial traits. Women, it seems, can inspire men to upward evolution, but men control the traits on offer, limiting the female capacity to offer evolutionarily useful traits of their own accord. To what extent Kingsley ascribes to this as a scientifically defen-

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sible model versus a metaphor is not completely clear; having told this story, the nature fairy concludes: Folks say now that I can make beasts into men, by circumstance, and selection, and competition, and so forth. Well, perhaps. . . . That is one of the seven things which I am forbidden to tell. . . . Whatever their ancestors were, men they are; and I advise them to behave as such. . . . if I can turn beasts into men, I can, by the same laws of circumstance, and selection, and competition, turn men into beasts. You were very near being turned into a beast once or twice, little Tom. Indeed, if you had not made up your mind to go on this journey, and see the world, like an Englishman, I am not sure but that you would have ended as an eft in a pond. (130–31) Tom promptly decides to complete his quest, and the result is that eventually he returns to England grown-up and worthy of Ellie—though Kingsley does not quite finalize this cross-class marriage (as he slyly says to the child-listener who asks for this ending, “Don’t you know that no one ever marries in a fairy tale, under the rank of a prince or a princess?” 182). He stops short of a full commitment to the implications of his class analysis, while using race as a mutable characteristic to imply Tom’s ability to overcome his class position through an evolution that is anthropocentrized, racialized, and nationalized, as he becomes human, white, and properly English—and perhaps even marriageable to a “lady.” But Kingsley did not see this idea of physical mutability over the individual lifetime simply as spiritual allegory. His realist novels for adult audiences advance a somewhat more subdued version of the same argument that makes the comparison of racial otherness to physiological primitivism clear. In his novel Two Years Ago (1857), Marie Lavington is an American octoroon ex-slave freed by a kind Englishman. During the time of the novel, she is traveling Europe as a successful “Italian” actress. Kingsley suggests that she has been sexually victimized, as she confesses the story of her life to Sabina, a minor character whose origins are more obscure: “What it was need not be told. A little common sense, and a little knowledge of human nature, will enable the reader to fill up for himself the story of a beautiful slave” (146). In turn, Sabina tells Marie of her own life: “not so dark a one, but almost as sad and strange” (146). Marie is shocked by Sabina’s revelations: “so beautiful and bright as you are! . . . not a scar or a wrinkle has it left behind!” Sabina responds that she had them “once,” but that God and her husband “smoothed them away” (146). Marie has been scarred by whipping: “The scourge I could endure. . . . Do I not bear its scars even now, and glory in them; for they were won by speak-

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ing as a woman should speak?” (Kingsley, Two Years Ago 91). Those marks make it impossible, however, for her to “pass” with a husband as a normal white “lady” (or perhaps as a virgin either). She also does not wish to do so; she wants a husband who will fight for abolition with her. Sadly, she is in love with an American Northerner who prefers to remain above the fray of the abolition discussion, and believes her to be Italian. Her own materiality is fairly labile, as her ability to appear Italian suggests. However, the biology of her African ancestors threatens constantly to visibly mark her. In a moment of stress, she turns to her mirror with horror, almost disgust. . . . Were there not in her features traces of that taint? And as she looked,—was it the mere play of her excited fancy,— or did her eyelid slope more and more, her nostril shorten and curl, her lips enlarge, her mouth itself protrude? It was more than the play of fancy; for Stangrave saw it as well as she. Her actress’s imagination, fixed on the African type with an intensity proportioned to her dread of seeing it in herself, had moulded her features, for the moment, into the very shape which it dreaded. . . . Another half minute, and that face also had melted out of the mirror, at least for Marie’s eyes; and in its place [her great-grandmother,] an ancient negress, white-haired, withered as the wrinkled ape, . . . “I know what I am,” murmured she. (138) A recognition of blackness in the mirror that triggers self-loathing seems a persistent theme for Kingsley—though here, color is conspicuous by its absence, and it is shape and expression that show racial identity. Repeatedly in the novel, Kingsley suggests that she is physically marked by her racial ancestry, but the “essential” nature of racial ancestry is, for Kingsley, inscribed within other kinds of metaphorical and idealist discourses rather than purely biological ones. His racial categories are reminiscent of Matthew Arnold’s: Marie has “that strange double nature which so many Quadroons seem to owe to their mixed blood; a strong side of deep feeling, ambition, energy, an intellect rather Greek in its rapidity than English in sturdiness; and withal a weak side, of instability, inconsistency, hasty passion, love of present enjoyment, sometimes, too, a tendency to untruth, which is the mark, not perhaps of the African specially, but of every enslaved race” (147). Her Africanness is not African (perhaps) but a mark of cultural history (enslavement) and “Greek” in its rapidity and sensitivity—a very midcentury reading of race within idealist categories of European history rather than materialist evolutionary ones. Whatever her racial “character” is, it is mutable. Once Stangrave offers marriage, she is transformed: “Her theatric passionateness had passed;—

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“Nothing was left of her / Now, but pure womanly” (Kingsley, Two Years Ago 527). Kingsley likes this quote, and applies it distressingly elsewhere to the sexually transgressive Mary, Queen of Scots upon her beheading (Westward Ho! 2: 254). The original line, “All that remains of her / Now is pure womanly,” is from Thomas Hood’s “The Bridge of Sighs” (143). It refers to the corpse of the fallen young woman whose sexual “stains” should be forgiven by those who retrieve her body after her suicide in the Thames. Marie’s race is compared to the sexually fallen state, but love rather than death washes away her “stains.” For women, at least (and perhaps especially, when it comes to race), identity markers are unsettled, reflecting a selfhood susceptible of transformation. Marie deprecates her scars, which she has seen as so significant an obstacle to her love affair earlier on: “That you can love me—me, the slave; me, the scourged; the scarred—Oh Stangrave! it is not much—not much really;—only a little mark or two” (Kingsley, Two Years Ago 527). Stangrave declares he will “prize” them as “God’s commandment to me, written not on tables of stone, but on fair, pure, noble flesh” (527). But by the end of the narrative, it is suggested that her scars will be erased, as Sabina’s have been (and as Esther’s perhaps are in Bleak House). Of course, her “fair” flesh that he has previously believed to display the “refined and yet rich beauty of the Italian” (139) was never clearly “black.” The scars, rather than color, are the most reliable marker of her experience, and even they can be effaced. Such transformations are wrought in the flesh, but they are also dependent, as we have seen of the blush, on the eyes of others. Kingsley uses the opposition of painting and photography to position human subjective perception as superior to objective measures of appearance—an elaboration of the long conversation on the aesthetics and readability of human surface throughout the period. Directly following the scene above, Sabina’s husband, a painter named Claude Mellot, notes that his wife says she has wrinkles and gray hair, but that these are not the truth of her beauty, and so he neither sees nor paints them. It is, then, Mellot’s gaze that has “smoothed . . . away” her wrinkles (146). Mellot charges Pre-Raphaelite painters with being untrue to nature: “you must paint, not [as they claim] what is there, but what you see there. They forget that human beings are men with two eyes, and not daguerreotype lenses with one eye, and so are contriving and striving to introduce into their pictures the very defect of the daguerreotype which the stereoscope is required to correct” (142). For portraits, photography is “useless,” for neither the human face nor the observer is ever “perfectly still” (143). In seeing “a face which you love and have lingered over, a dozen other expressions equally belonging to it are hanging in your memory, and blending themselves with the actual picture on your retina: . . . so that the sum

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total of what you see, and are intended by Heaven to see, is something far softer, lovelier . . . than it would look if your head was screwed down in a vice, to look with one eye at her head screwed down in a vice also” (143). He argues, as the Common Sense philosophers did, that human perception is true because it is mediated by human materiality: motion, stereoscopic vision, memory. This is what we are “intended by Heaven to see.” Although Mellot is fascinated with photography’s supposed objectivity—he gives up painting for a time to experiment with it—he declares it a tool that is less, not more, reliable than subjective human perception that is designed by God to elicit truth. Yet, Kingsley shows that human perception can also be influenced by prior, sometimes erroneous belief. In the course of the conversation, Mellot (who does not know the secret of Marie’s identity) observes that Marie’s face, “at rest, in deep thought,” has puzzling “touches which are Eastern, Kabyle, almost Quadroon. . . . But who sees them in the light of that beauty? They are defects, [but] . . . . They express her character no more than a scar would; and therefore when I paint her, . . . I shall utterly ignore them. If, on the other hand, I met the same lines in a face which I knew to have Quadroon blood in it, I should religiously copy them; because then they would be integral elements of the face” (144). Daniel S. Brown has productively read this passage in the light of controversies about artistic realism of the day, and Kingsley’s embrace of aesthetic idealism as the beating heart of his own narrative realism, rather than its opposite.19 I agree. As Mellot says, for Kingsley, these racial markers “express her character no more than a scar would” because they are scars; racial identity, for Marie, is part of her consciousness of victimization and injustice, not an integral part of the self. Yet, Mellot has only part of the puzzle; he also believes that if he “knew” they were present as part of a racial “truth,” then they would be an unalterable part of her character. But for Kingsley, such aspects of character are mutable, and he uses his characters’ partial perspectives to preach his own point that so-called essential and permanent characteristics readable on the body can always be overridden by spiritual growth. Just as Tom’s classed, blackened skin should become white and smooth in his watery adventures, Marie’s racial difference will be washed away. Of course, this formulation depends on Kingsley’s deeply racist sense that ethnic difference from the Northern European type is a defect, produced by historical or evolutionary trauma or incapacity, and one best erased by assimilation (for a few mostly white women, at least) into white society. In essence, his doctrine of physical transformation holds out as a goal that everyone can and should become

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white. But it is racist in a different way than some of his contemporaries who saw race as essential and biologically immutable. The correct perception of the body’s surface depends for Kingsley not only on its actual state, but on the intrinsic physiological nature of the perceiving human gaze—perhaps objectively unreliable, but spiritually true. Whereas women’s scars and marks position them as victims who can be transformed by men’s love, Kingsley’s white men are active, and their scars tend to indicate their own fallen nature. (Men of color do not figure as subjects in Kingsley’s work, and he offers no model for their transformation.) White men must therefore suffer passively in order to experience God’s love as a transformative rescue that renews them. The hero of Two Years Ago, Tom Thurnall, enters the novel with a catalog of scars: he has “a fearful scar” from “a Crow’s tomahawk in the Rocky Mountains. And here’s another token (lifting up his black curls), which a Greek robber gave me in the Morea. I’ve another under my head, for which I have to thank a Tartar, and one or two more little remembrances of flood and field up and down me” (Kings­ ley, Two Years Ago 61). Proud of his scars, physical and moral, as evidence of his athleticism and ability to survive, he sees no reason to change. He “should be sorry” to become a “very different man” (343). His more sage interlocutor suggests that he would be the same person: “You have seen an insect go through strange metamorphoses, and yet remain the same individual; why should not you and I do so likewise?” (343). He suggests that the flaws may not be “part of your character, but mere excrescences of disease: or if that be too degrading a notion, mere scars of old wounds . . . ; and what if, in some future life, all those disappeared, and the true Mr. Thomas Thurnall, pure and simple, were alone left?“ (343). He argues that Tom’s scars are actually marks of his “self-conceit and self-dependence” (344), which must be removed so “true character and true manhood can be developed” (344). Scars, in Kingsley’s formulation, are not marks of individuality gained from experience, but evidence of improper healing. Scars can be eliminated by the healing process of returning to the truth of the self, by spiritual submission to God. Fortunately, Tom is helpfully captured and tortured by Turks, turning his thoughts to religion: “the old heart passed away from Thomas Thurnall: and instead of it grew up a heart like . . . the heart of a little child” (540). All’s well that ends well! Kingsley explicitly connects his novel to the materialist-idealist conversation in the novel’s framing “Prologue,” which actually takes place two years after the novel’s main action and frames the characters’ matured understanding of the novel’s events. Stangrave comments to Mellot that the river they stroll beside is

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“for ever changing, and yet for ever the same” . . . he was given to half-mystic utterances, and . . . Pagan mythology, learnt in the days when he worshipped Emerson, . . . “Those old Greeks had a deep insight into nature, when they gave to each river not merely a name, but a semi-human personality. . . . It may be but a collection of ever-changing atoms of water;—what is your body but a similar collection of atoms, decaying and renewing every moment? Yet you are a person; and is not the river, too, a person—a live thing? It has an individual countenance which you love. . . . How do you know that . . . the river has [not] a spirit as well as you?” (x) Mellot teases him about his “mysticism,” and Stangrave in turn calls Mellot an English “materialist” (xi). Kingsley’s own “materialism” is defined in part in the words of the novel’s hero, Tom Thurnall, “it may be a very materialist view of things: but fact is fact—the corpus sanum is father to the mens sana” (195). Still, Thurnall is overly confident in his doctor’s view of the primacy of the physical over the mental; for Kingsley, the two are not separable. The health of the mind depends on the health of the body, in part because the body reflects the distempers and traumas of experience: each produces the other in a vitalist fashion. Like the river, human identity and the human body itself is both persistent and dynamically mutable. Kingsley sees visible, racialized difference as a kind of scar indicating negative acquired experiences—a form of disease—that can be reversed. He offers a body not independent of the soul, but one formed by it in idealist fashion, while assimilating the new, increasingly materialist insights of evolutionary science to his model. Kingsley was still committed to a view of the soul as preexisting the body, but also integral to and manifesting the body, rather than the other way around. In The Water-Babies, the narrator states that people will not be wise until they give up believing more in John Locke than in Plato (82). He tells his boy-reader, “the great fairy Science . . . can only do you good” if he believes “your soul makes its body” (48), whereas both dualists and hard-line materialists are mistaken: “fancying . . . that your body makes its soul, as if a steam-engine could make its own coke; or with some other people, that your soul has nothing to do with your body, but is only stuck into it like a pin into a pin-cushion!” (48). Both of Kingsley’s works engage the realist mode, focusing on a scientific and materialist view of the body, which focuses on the surface as an index of subjectivity—so insistently, in fact, that its full expression can paradoxically better be credibly detailed in the fantasy genre of the children’s tale rather than the realist novel. Moreover, his view of the body-mind interdependence is not, as is more typical of idealist narrative, mapped onto the longue durée of history

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or the mythical body that represents it, but onto the realist timescale of the individual character. The period’s emphasis on difference visible on the skin led paradoxically to two beliefs: that identity was inscribed in the dermis and required only to be quantified and measured to have a stable way to connect identities to bodies, and that body surfaces, as mutable representations of a human identity capable of change and growth, were themselves hard to pin down, and changeable over time. Color was early on seen as both essential and ineffable, difficult to identify clearly, and with less clear relation to race than to morality and aesthetics. As race became more important, skin color associated with it was assimilated under this older model, and its significance was amplified and reread in the new “scientific” hierarchies of animal to human, savage to civilized. The later development of technologies that promised instrumental, objective ways to quantify, measure, and portray human identity, to which photography as a “print” of the body was integral was attractive to materialist scientists who inscribed their findings within an evolutionary and racist framework. But as Kingsley the scientific idealist points out, the body is mutable, and photography as subjective as its viewer; moreover, the instrumental measurement can never take the full measure of a human being’s potential for spiritual and thus physical change. That said, the very framing of black skin as a scar recalls the racist history of reading blackness as the curse of Ham, a mark of sin. In this sense, even the anti-essentialist view of race in Britain did not significantly challenge the fundamental terms of white supremacy. Generally, in the period, the idea that physiognomy is destiny loses ground steadily through midcentury; then, with the advent of scientific racism and the new criminology, it returns. Havelock Ellis confidently asserts that although “Criminal Physiognomy” is in its infancy, “Many persons, on first meeting an individual, are conscious of an unfavourable impression. . . . It is a mistake to attempt to stifle such instinctive impressions as irrational. They are part of the organised experiences of the race, and, subject to intellectual control, they are legitimate guides to conduct” (Criminal 85). Still, there was a crosscurrent of critique, and a dissatisfaction with the idea that truth was visible on the surface of the body, or that such truths (and surfaces) were unchanging. In Ellis’s gesture toward an inherited sense of racial (or species) “history” that is used to frame knowledge of the world, there is a gesture toward a deep, heritable transpersonal subjectivity that was more reliable than surface experience—provided “intellectual control” moderated it. The assertion that neither surface nor individual was a reliable location of knowledge, while still appealing to their legibility, marks the turn of the century, and, as we shall see, gestures toward a new realist practice.

q Ch ap ter 8 Tattoo When I go through the country, and see this and that beautiful and imposing seat of theirs crowning the landscape, “There,” I say to myself, “is a great fortified post of the Barbarians.” —Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy

The Roger Tichborne trial was a cause célèbre, filled with melodrama, class tension, tragedy, and intrigue—and tattoos. Briefly, a butcher by the name of Arthur Orton, from Wagga Wagga, Australia, came to London in 1866 claiming to be Sir Roger Tichborne, the long-lost heir of a substantial fortune and family name. Roger, born in 1829, had been raised in France, and was lost at sea in 1854. Roger had been a thin man with light brown hair, and a French accent. (French was his first language.) Arthur was a very heavy man with dark hair who did not speak French. But Roger’s bereaved mother grasped at the hope that her child was alive, and accepted the imposture. Some, perhaps in deference to Lady Tichborne, accepted him as well; others did not. Lady Tichborne died in 1868, and the surviving family began to be restive. A trial to establish the claimant’s identity took place over several months in 1871 and 1872. If the scar was a potentially significant marker of experience and identity, a particular kind of scar stood out as most significant, especially later in the period: the voluntarily acquired and communicative scar that is the tattoo. Roger Tichborne had early on tattooed and been tattooed by the future Lord Bellew, “a schoolfellow of Roger’s, [who] deposed that in 1847–8 he saw the cross, heart and anchor on Roger’s arm, and that he himself tattooed the letters RCT in addition to those symbols.” Roger tattooed Lord Bellew’s arm the same day. (Taylor, Manual of Medical Jurisprudence 1879, 297). (Roger was 318

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born in 1829, so at the ripe age of sixteen or so, he already was sporting substantial artwork.) Orton had no such tattoos. Orton, however, still had many, often working-class, supporters who believed he had been done out of his rights. The story was widely fictionalized, and tattoos moved to the fore as plot devices to establish identity. The story continued to be important as evidence of the ways that scars and tattoos were more reliable than other measures of identity (though Herschel did later note that fingerprinting Sir Roger before he left England would have solved the matter summarily). One way in which Orton’s supporters tried to prove his identity as Sir Roger was with photographic evidence. In 1874, they compiled a document with a comparison of a daguerreotype of Roger Tichborne to one of Orton, in which the width of the eyes and proportions of the jaw were compared (as Rohan McWilliam discusses in his excellent book on the subject, The Tichborne Claimant, 456). The photos were decided to be inconclusive, in part because the recent use of altered photographs in France was referenced. After the trial, a card showing the two photos and superimposing them was created, in an unsuccessful attempt to support the claimant’s assertions of innocence after the judgment (see fig. 8.1). These examples highlight both the weight given to photography by some as objective evidence to prove identity and the simultaneous critique of its inadequacies, as well as canny suspicions of photographic retouching or other alteration. A tattoo, on the other hand, might be altered by another tattoo (or other scar), but it could not be simply erased: even the alteration suggested the incriminating presence of the original tattoo. In this chapter, I focus on tattooing as both a practice and an art imported into British culture, and place it in the larger context of anxiety and delight in

Figure 8.1.  Tichborne daguerreotype by Thomas Helsby. Original photographer not identified. Published in Identity Demonstrated Geometrically: With Photo-type Illustrations (1876). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

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the exotic and cosmopolitan—itself mapped onto the savage and the modern in complex ways. Over the course of the period, tattooing has many meanings. It could fix identity (sailors used tattoos in part so their bodies could be identified in case of disaster at sea); it could be defiant about identity (some British soldiers in World War I had the Kaiser’s face tattooed on their buttocks); or it could obscure identity (tattooing was used to alter scars). Criminals’ tattoos (or lack thereof ) were carefully cataloged as part of late nineteenth-century identification systems in France and Britain, a process in part inspired by European administrative experiences in the East. Over the course of the century, there were three principal phases of associations with tattooing. The first association is with exotic travel; the second is the establishment of identity, when that identity is in question. The third and final meaning is an ambiguous association with aristocratic privilege and cosmopolitanism that itself comes to evoke an atavistic, antimodern untrustworthiness. Like the photograph, the tattoo could seem unalterable evidence of an actual individual’s surface untainted by the mediating force of individual interpretation.

Travelers, Sailors, Savages, Criminals—and Aristocrats Tattooing has an ancient history in Europe and Asia; it was also long known in the biblical world, and is forbidden to Jews in Leviticus. It was banned by Pope Hadrian in 487 CE, and appears not to have been a topic of much discussion in Western Europe again in the modern period until the eighteenth century. Although Native Americans were often tattooed and late seventeenth-century explorations in the South Seas brought knowledge of the extensively tattooed islanders there, it was not until Cook in 1774 brought back a “guest” named Omai (or Mai) from Tahiti, who displayed his tattoos at court (and was painted by Joshua Reynolds, among others; Guest 84), that tattooing came again to the forefront of the broader public’s attention in Britain.1 Detailed descriptions of Malay, Indian, and Native American tattooing practices were widely distributed in anthropological literature, and Darwin follows the custom of many other early naturalists and anthropologists when he discusses tattooing at length as an enhancement of sexual attractiveness in various cultures. Tattooing had been familiar to Britons from South Asian contacts since at least the eighteenth century, and tattooing was widely used in India (by Indians) to stigmatize and identify criminals in the Empire, whereas slaves were tattooed and/or branded in many European colonies and in the US (Clare Anderson 107). After 1797, convicts in Bengal had their “name, crime, date of sentence and court by which convicted—in the

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vernacular—tattooed on the forehead” (108). Although by the mid-Victorian period, Britons denounced such practices as cruel in the colonies, they were only recently abolished in Britain. The American traveler Joseph Ballard observes that in Chester in 1815, near where prisoners are held before being brought into court, there is “an iron affixed for the purpose of confining the hands of those who are sentenced to be burnt in the hand, which punishment is put into execution in the presence of the court. A short time ago a fellow thus sentenced bore the iron without flinching and then tore out with his teeth the disgraceful mark and spit it out on the floor” (Ballard 71). The historian Jordanna Bailkin notes, “In continental Europe, criminologists typically associated tattooing with the sailor or soldier, the convict or prostitute” (34). In Britain, it was widespread not only among the marines but among the general working and artisan classes, and, more surprisingly, among schoolboys of elite background. The medical examiner Alfred Swaine Taylor writes casually in 1891 that “In most anatomical museums, preparations of tattooed skin may be seen. In Guy’s Hospital Museum there are many” (Manual of Medical Jurisprudence 1891, 329). Bailkin shows that the turn of the century saw a fashion for tattooing among the leisured and upper classes in Britain: “Tattoo artists of London were lionized in society journals and catered to wealthy clients in lavish ‘Orientalist’ studios” (34). She notes that by the beginning of the twentieth century “the tattoo could function in Britain as an emblem of cultural elitism rather than the radical ‘outsider’ status it conferred elsewhere in Europe” (34). Several magazine articles cover the fashion, and even allowing for possible exaggeration, they certainly suggest the practice was prevalent. In Harms­ worth Magazine, R. J. Stephens writes, When royalty hangs on to a craze, you may be assured that the rest of the exclusive world of wealth and power soon follow in the same path. . . . What wonder, then, that tattooing is just now the popular pasttime of the leisured world? . . . Grand Duke Alexis of Russia, is most elaborately tattooed. And Prince and Princess Waldemar of Denmark, Queen Olga of Greece, King Oscar of Sweden, the Duke of York, the Grand Duke Constantine, Lady Randolph Churchill, with many others of royal and distinguished rank have submitted themselves to the tickling, but painless . . . sensation, afforded by the improved tattooing needle, which is nowadays worked on a simple plan, aided by the galvanic current. (472) Stephens also remarks that “ladies have also taken a strong liking to this form of decoration, which . . . is about as expensive as dress, but not so costly as

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good jewellry” (473). For those of more modest means and less extensive travel, “Professor Purdy” sets out in an 1890s pamphlet to instruct beginners at home in the art of tattooing, and makes a half-hearted claim for national superiority: “English Tattooing, in my opinion, is far superior to Burmese or Foreign Tattooing, but after all it is all a matter of fancy. I believe it is a common thing among Soldiers and Sailors to be Tattooed. . . . Relatives identify sailors when drowned by Tattoo-marks which they have shown them, perhaps when alive” (vii–viii). (Let us hope so.) Purdy recommends vermilion and India ink, and helpfully suggests that practitioners avoid rusty needles, and clean blood and ink off before reusing, or they “make the flesh very sore” (14)—and the tattoos don’t last as long. Bailkin notes that the tattoo craze was generally thought to be sparked by Edward VII, who acquired the customary tattoo marking a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and by his son, George V, who was tattooed by a famous Japanese artist while visiting that country (43–44). Obviously, these inscriptions served as souvenirs of travel. But the content of the privileged classes’ tattoos also tended to reflect their status more directly: “According to the American psychologist Albert Parry, the tattoos of ‘Mayfair denizens’ differed in cost, design and intention from the crosses and love tokens familiar to soldiers and sailors. These new clients, ‘wanted to stamp their own aristocracy and wealth upon themselves. . . . They ordered their own coats of arms tattooed upon their skin, or the names and emblems of their exclusive clubs, or reproductions of money-bills, or scenes of foxhunts in full cry’ ” (Bailkin 44). Tattooing was also often used even by the less elite classes to memorialize important occasions, life events, or journeys. Stephens remarks that “Colonials” who visited England “usually” returned “bearing . . . an emblem of some national importance,” like the flag or Victoria’s portrait (473–74). People sometimes chose reproductions of favorite paintings; Stephens mentions a couple by Landseer and Reynolds (474). During World War I, soldiers’ wounds were marked with dates, as were portraits of husbands, regimental crests, lost comrades, marriages, and even destroyed landmarks: one woman had the cathedral of Ypres, Belgium, tattooed on her after its ruin, as she felt it “as a personal loss” (“Date of Battle Scars Tattooed on Soldiers”).2 Religious pilgrimages were and are still memorialized in this way in some communities. Tattoos could also be done for beauty, or to fix scars, although this kind of “corrective” tattooing does not aim to individualize, and so is less relevant here. The tattoo artist George Burchett recalls permanently tattooing lips and cheeks for color, and marking eyebrows for color and shape was done, according to his memoirs, “long before . . . the first World War” (140). Additionally, he fixed many war scars, and covered the disfiguration of

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inadvertent “gunpowder tattoos” with an opaque flesh-colored tattoo compounded of white lead. Tattooing had long been widely practiced in continental Europe, though its associations there were more decisively supposed to be with the military, working, and criminal classes. Lombroso observed that 10 percent of criminals he examined were tattooed, versus 1.2 percent of soldiers (“Savage Origin” 93). Havelock Ellis notes even higher proportions elsewhere: in the US at Elmira prison, over 34 percent of the inmates were tattooed (Criminal 199), and in Berlin 25 percent (199). But it was not just at the century’s end that tattooing was prevalent. The forensic specialist Kesteven, writing in 1855, cites studies done in France and Germany that give some notion of the prevalence of tattooing. Among soldiers resident at the Hôtel des Invalides, in Berlin, the researcher found thirty-seven individuals who presented tattoo marks (274). A different researcher in Paris found that “Of three thousand invalides, five hundred and six were found to present tattoo marks. These were grouped as follows by M. Hutin. . . . On the arm, 490; on the hands, 114 (?); chest, 48; thighs and buttocks, 4; anus, 1” (Kesteven 274). These “invalides” were tattooed with vermilion, gunpowder, Indian ink, writing ink, washing blue, charcoal, and “black” (possibly shoeblack) (274). The first three were the substances most frequently used. Another researcher, M. Tardieu, found that “out of three hundred and five individuals in the Hôpital la Riboisière, forty-eight . . . were found to have been tattooed” (274). Kesteven observes that “although tattoo marks do not differ essentially from other cicatrices . . . on account of their varied and bizarre forms, they have obviously a peculiar value in connexion with questions of identity. The existence and character of tattoo marks may serve to indicate the social condition [or] . . . the calling” of the bearer (274). Rarely, it seems, was that social condition particularly exalted in these midcentury examples, but then, rarely did such researchers have access to elites. Moreover, midcentury work is typically related to forensic medicine. Kesteven is interested in whether tattoo marks could disappear “in connexion with the disputed identity of the body of a person who had been murdered” (273). Although journalists such as R. J. Stephens wrote gossipy, approving columns on the elite fin de siècle British craze for tattoos, other commentators were less accepting of the fad, especially among women. Bailkin observes that “The notion that tattooed women marked out a distinctively British problem of decline was echoed . . . during and after the Great War. Although exoticist metropolitan consumers took up many objects of empire during this period—from Kashmir shawls to Bantu spears—the adoption of the tattoo by aristocratic British women pointed to a different type of imperial

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traffic, which documented the insecurity of Britain’s rule rather than its successes” (34). Bailkin argues that, in part, the tattoo’s associations with and for “natives” in colonies (she is specifically interested in Burma) were read back toward Europeans’ use of tattoos in complex ways. Cesare Lombroso wrote in 1896 that the attraction to tattoos was evidence of savage and criminal tendencies (in part perhaps because his subjects were largely Southern Italian prisoners, and the Neapolitan Camorra tended to be heavily tattooed): “The chief cause that has spread this custom among us is in my opinion atavism, or that other kind of historical atavism that is called tradition. Tattooing is, in fact, one of the essential characteristics of primitive man, and of men who live still in the savage state” (“Savage Origin” 102–3). Women, Lombroso felt, were already closer to savages than men, but English women seemed to him to be even worse. He sniffs, “I have been told that the fashion of tattooing the arm exists among women of prominence in London Society. The taste for this style is not a good indication of the refinement and delicacy of the English ladies. First, it indicates an inferior sensitiveness, for one has to be obtuse to pain to submit to this wholly savage operation without any other object than the gratification of vanity, and second, it is contrary to progress, for all exaggerations of dress are atavistic” (93). Lombroso’s studies of criminal tattoos are rooted in an explanatory framework that sees them as a form of savage self-expression, wherein the abstractness of civilized writing is replaced by ideographic representation. He notes that in his experience, most of the tattoos hold specific meanings about the criminals’ histories, and muses that this fact gives “striking proof that tattooing contains real idiographic hieroglyphs which take the place of writing” (97). He compares them to “inscriptions of the ancient Mexicans and Indians” as “animated history of individuals. Certainly, these tattooings declare more than any official brief to reveal to us the fierce and obscene hearts of these unfortunates” (97). Both insensitivity to pain and precocity, for Lombroso, also marked the savage state (97), many of the tattoos he surveyed having been acquired by the wearer between the ages of nine and sixteen (100). Havelock Ellis continued Lombroso’s work in the British context. As Bailkin argues, the British placed less emphasis on atavism, probably in part because of its prevalence among the upper class; in fact, by the interwar period especially, tattooing could be seen, especially for women, as associated with modernity. Ellis remarks, “Lombroso attaches prime importance to atavism. . . . It is better to describe it as a survival. . . . The constructive and material expression of metaphor and emblematic language were first adopted by the most elevated classes, who had no other means of communi-

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cating or materializing their thoughts. Little by little this method took refuge with those lower classes who have as yet no better means of expressing what they feel and experience” (Ellis, Criminal 196). Even for Ellis, then, tattooing is a practice persisting from a more primitive period, before abstract linguistic representation.3 Tattoos are, however, seen as fundamentally communicative in nature, and any aesthetic motive is seen as subordinated to purposes of signification. The topic of that signification was most often taken for granted to be the self of the bearer.4

Identity and Imposture Tattoos were functional as well as expressive; they marked the body as distinct and unique. This was part of their appeal to criminologists, but also to tattoo clients. Moreover, one of the great appeals of tattooing is its permanence; this, of course, was also its drawback. There are the predictable stories of people tattooing names of lovers and then needing to change them—a persistent comic theme: “An English actress had a butterfly tattooed on her fair shoulder, the initials of her fiance, ‘FV’ being placed underneath. Not long afterwards she . . . had the ‘F’ converted into ‘E’ and the ‘V’ into ‘W’. . . . She eventually married ‘E.W.’ and to this day ‘E.W.’ thinks his initials were the first tattooed on her arm” (Stephens 473). The tattoo’s permanence also made it attractive to those who wished to memorialize a commitment other than a romantic one, and to make that commitment impossible to deny. This may have been more attractive to criminal groups like the Camorra than any notion of personal expression. In Collins’s Woman in White, the secret revolutionary society to which Pesca belongs and to which Fosco is a traitor marks its members with a “brand” that might also have tattoo elements, by which they recognize each other: “a brand deeply burnt in the flesh and stained of a bright blood-red colour” (592). When a traitor is executed, the mark is effaced by incising a T (for traitor [traditore], not tattoo) in the flesh, thus making it impossible for outsiders (or forensic pathologists) to read. The consistent connection of tattoos to stories of false identity starting in midcentury seems to emerge in Britain as a result of the Tichborne case. Alfred Swaine Taylor’s Manual of Medical Jurisprudence went through thirteen editions in the nineteenth century, and is a good index of the development of professional interest in forensics in the period. The first edition, in 1836, had nothing on tattoos or scars (and also nothing on poisons, which comprise a substantial chunk of the eighth edition of 1844). In 1866, the eighth edition still mentions no tattoos. By the tenth edition, of 1879, there is a detailed section on tattoos and scars, heavily referencing the Tichborne case. The twelfth

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edition, of 1891, boasts few substantial changes in this section, though the long analysis of the Tichborne case is somewhat curtailed, and other cases given a bit more prominence. Taylor also spends more time on other scarring, referring to Roger’s torn eyelid (a shipboard accident) and experiences with cupping, all of which the lucky Orton seems to have avoided. (One is forced to conclude that Roger Tichborne was never lucky.) In 1891, Taylor also cites a case in which the absence of either a wen or a scar indicating its removal freed a prisoner, who claimed not to be the man he was arrested as (317–18). In Smyth vs. Smyth, a claimant to the inheritance of a fortune based his claim on scars alleged to be resulting from the use of forceps during the heir’s birth. However, his scars seemed to the medical expert to be the result of scrofula (Manual 1891, 321), and his story broke down. Taylor also remarks that “In some countries, it is the custom to brand convicts, and the cicatrix from the brand-mark—a letter burnt into the skin—is regarded as the strongest proof of identity” (325). Tattoos might be cauterized off (327), but an expert could usually find the traces of even a removed tattoo. Moles are not quite as reliable (336). Taylor concludes that tattoo marks may furnish “the strongest proof of identity” (325). Indeed, the permanence of tattoos, much like other scars, was an important area of inquiry within forensic medicine from midcentury onward. The German physician Johann Ludwig Casper’s Handbook of the Practice of Forensic Medicine (1861) offers a detailed meditation on the question, “Can tattooing, known to exist during life, ever become so thoroughly effaced as to leave no trace on the body?” (105). Casper examined thirty-six tattooed “old soldiers” in the Royal Invalid Establishment: “I found in one case still some tattoo marks visible after the lapse of fifty-four years; in many others they were quite distinct after more than forty years, whilst in two cases they had completely disappeared after the lapse of the respective periods of thirty-eight and thirty-six years” (106). Citing the work of the aforementioned Dr. Hutin in Paris, who studied 506 men from the Hôpital des Invalides, he notes that marks made with cinnabar disappeared over time, whereas tattoos with Indian ink or powdered charcoal “remain visible, while those made with gunpowder, washing blue or ink, generally fade,” but rarely are “wholly effaced” (106). Even these pigments did not simply vanish but were absorbed, as cinnabar and charcoal could be found in the lymph glands of recently tattooed subjects (107). Casper’s copious notes on the kinds of tattoos he has found on the nonmilitary dead of Berlin and the occupations of their bearers suggest that soldiers and sailors were not the only continental Europeans sporting ink by the mid-1850s. He describes hearts, dates, and initials, but also faces (107), and two journeymen-butchers who are each tat-

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tooed on the right arm: one with a “crown, three initials, and the date 1855” (107), and the other with “a highly ornamental design, consisting of the head of an ox, beneath it two crossed pole-axes, initials, and the date 1851” (107). A shopkeeper, aged thirty-eight, had on his right forearm, “a heart, a cypher, and the date 1841” (108). This suggests that, at least in Germany, French and Italian assumptions about the classes liable to be tattooed may have been as inaccurate as they were for Britain. Casper also addresses the question of whether tattoo marks might be deliberately “effaced by art” (108), citing again the work of Tardieu, who reports a prisoner saying he had done it with acids in order to deceive a judge about his identity (108). Tardieu himself supposedly removed “a crucifix tattooed with Indian ink” on the forearm of a hospital inmate with acid, leaving a scabbing that finally “fell off, leaving a flat scar, in which not the smallest trace of the design formerly existing was any longer visible” (108–9). But Casper is doubtful that this result is replicable (109). Like other sources, Casper is concerned with the reliability of tattoos as a permanent marker of identity. Perhaps because of the variety of his subjects of postmortem examination, Casper decries Tardieu’s assertion “that it is possible to determine from the character of the pattern the doubtful identity of the body and the position in life of the deceased, &c, inasmuch as he thinks he has found that soldiers, sailors, and public women, all as classes affect separate and distinct kinds of pictures” (108). Still, Continental writers on the tattoo are much more likely to associate them with criminal activity than are British writers. This may be because of the use of tattoos in some areas of the Continent to identify criminal organizations, but it may also be because middle-class Britons were more likely to be tattooed. It is possible that British maritime history meant that Britons were more likely to travel by sea than Continentals, and a disproportionate number of travelers and sailors had brought home the practice as a respectable one.

Bodies of Text Whatever the actual history of tattooed Europeans, or of Britons’ own many domestically acquired tattoos, British literature imagines the tattoo as connected to the experiences both of visiting “savage” peoples, especially in the East, and of being absent from England. It was a marker of experience, a souvenir, but also a sign of having passed through an identity-changing exotic experience, and of the home community’s inability to fully identify—or identify with—the traveler who had undergone such change as the “same”

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person who had gone abroad. The skin marking was the outward sign of an inner transformation that could be contaminating, enriching, or both. Coming from without, the tattoo as a permanent part of the body was nevertheless held to be a true sign of inward identity. Yet, tattooing in the British literary tradition also has a strong relation to establishing identity, whether the identity of a drowned sailor, a criminal, or an heir. And the tattoo in such cases may not be so much an expression of the bearer’s will as an alienation of the subject’s control of her body and skin. Thus, tattoos became a staple of fiction, especially the new crime fiction of the 1880s and 1890s. Tattoos are uneasily poised between writing and pictoor ideographics. Moreover, tattooing is often linked to history (personal or public) and the theme of inheritance that is part of that broader concept in nineteenth-century British fiction. By nature containing more intentional meaning than accidental scars, tattoos could also contain symbols or text. Thus, a body could not only be identified, but alienated from itself as the bearer of testimony against or separate from the person on whose body it was inscribed. Like other scars or skin color, tattoos rendered the body open to the scrutiny of and redefinition by others. One story that rings the changes on this theme is H. Rider Haggard’s Mr Meeson’s Will (1888). In it, a young woman, Augusta, shipwrecked on a desert island with a dying man who has financially injured her, allows him to have his will tattooed on her shoulders (in cuttlefish ink) by a sailor in order to benefit another man for whom she has a regard. The story careens from the sentimental mode to dark comedy. The narrative begins with melodramatic scenes of a dying child; the to-be-tattooed lady is her struggling elder sister, who unsuccessfully turned author to support her. The story ends as a comic romance lightheartedly punning on the predicament of the lady who is also a document. Marooned on the island, the dying Mr. Meeson yearns to write his will. Bill, a sailor, explains that he tattooed his own name on his arm as the result of a bet, and Augusta suggests to the dying publisher, Mr. Meeson, that he could have the will tattooed on himself, whereupon he protests being treated “like a savage” (55). But the sailor demurs, given that Meeson is dying: “We might skin you with a sharp stone, perhaps, after you’ve done the trick, you know. . . . But then we have no salt, so I doubt if you’d keep; and if we set your hide in the sun, I reckon the writing would shrivel up so that all the courts of law in London could not make head or tail of it” (55). So Augusta volunteers, and Bill works away on Augusta’s upper back for three hours, “with his fishbone, which he dipped continually in the cuttle-ink, and with the sharp piece of wood, till Augusta began to feel perfectly faint”

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(57). Haggard focuses on the instrumental penetration of poor Augusta by multiple signatories: to make the will legal, Mr. Meeson must take part in signing, so they decide it would be sufficient if he inflicted the first prick of his signature, and then kept his hand upon Bill’s while the rest was done. This accordingly, he did, clumsily running the point of the sharp bone so deep into the unfortunate Augusta that she fairly shrieked aloud. . . . When it was done, the turn of Johnnie [another sailor acting as witness] came. . . . Mr. Meeson having laid his finger upon Augusta’s shoulder, had solemnly declared the writing thereon to be his last will and testament. . . . the same process was gone through with reference to his [Johnnie’s] signature. . . . Then Bill Jones signed his own name, as the second witness to the will; and just as the light went out of the sky the document was finally executed—the date of the execution being alone omitted. Augusta got up off the flat stone where she had been seated during this torture for something like five hours, and staggering into the hut, threw herself down upon the sail, and went off into a dead faint. (57–58) As well she might. It might easily be read, given the period’s associations with tattooed women in captivity narratives, as a bizarre analogue to a gang brutalization, wherein her body bears the impress of many masculine hands and signatures. After she is rescued, the adventure story becomes courtroom dramedy. Now Augusta must be repeatedly put on display as testimony: “It is all very well to be tattooed upon a desert island—not that that was very nice . . . but it is quite another thing to have to show the results in a London drawing-room” (73), she complains. But when Augusta objects to showing her shoulders, her friend Lady Holmhurst warns her that she would be “compounding a felony. . . . you steal the will—that’s felony; and if you don’t show it to him, I suppose you compound it” (73). Augusta pleads that this is ridiculous: “How can I steal my own shoulders? It is impossible” (73). The body as a signifying medium is always to some extent alienated; its visibility belongs to the viewer, and its capacity to be called into evidence means that it can even testify (as did Orton’s lack of tattoos) against the self identified with it. The absurd conversation about compounding a felony gestures toward the status of the testifying body we see so frequently in criminology of the period.5 Once Augusta allows her body to be used as legal evidence, she loses control over it. Her original intention—to be sure the will is entered into evidence—is subverted, as now she is accused of wishing to withhold that

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very evidence. She cannot change her intention; her body has fixed a prior intention as having the primary claim. If the body is a text, then can the body also be a subject with the capacity for change? Upon seeking legal counsel as to the validity of the will, the story’s legatee is told the law stipulates that “a will shall be in writing, and tattooing may fairly be defined as a rude variety of writing. It is, I admit, usual that writing should be done on paper or parchment, but I have no doubt that the young lady’s skin, if carefully removed and dried, would make excellent parchment. At present, therefore, it is parchment in its green stage, and perfectly available for writing” (83). Haggard is elaborating his ghoulish joke about flaying, one that evokes the theme of alienation of the body we see in earlier discussions of body objects (see chapter 5). But, more seriously, as he points out, a tattooed skin may be at once a document with its own meanings and author, and a part of a living person. Many jokes are made in the text about the need to “file Miss Smithers in the registry” (84). As Eustace, now the lady’s suitor, “gasped . . . as a vision of Augusta impaled upon an enormous bill-guard rose before his eyes. ‘You can’t file a lady; it’s impossible!’ ” (84). The sexual implications of the bill guard repeat the earlier images of piercing and penetration in the tattooing scene. In being inscribed with a legal document, Augusta has become common property, as a public woman. Repeatedly, the point is driven home that the body as text is not private: “ ‘Miss  Smithers is the will,’ said Mr. John Short” (87). The clerk dithers, “Inspection of the document—inspection of the document? . . . How am I to inspect the document?” (87). Finally, they photograph Augusta, who accepts that she cannot object, as she seems “to be public property now” (89). Documents and photographs are replicable, and shortly thereafter, she sees that the photographer had duplicated the photograph and sold it to the press, as well as in individual reprints: “In Regent-street itself, the first thing that she saw was a man selling photographs. . . . the photograph was one of herself as she had been taken in the low dress in the Registry. . . . there was the picture of the tattooed will” (91). In court, again, though, she blushes and becomes tearful (104), she is examined under a magnifying glass by the judge, and also “had to walk slowly along the ranks, stopping before every learned leader to be carefully examined, while hundreds of eager eyes in the background were fixed upon her unfortunate neck” (104). This scene duplicates the earlier one in which Augusta is inscribed by several men; writers imply readers, and the lady’s feelings are subordinated to the text’s claim to be read. In Regent Street, that shopping paradise, everything is for sale, and in becoming a document, she has become a commodity as well. Moreover, her body is a commodity in which she is assumed not to have a right of ownership. A body

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made into a text to be publicly read is a body manually seized, subject to the wills and the will of others. Thus, the question repeatedly arises whether becoming a document overrides the individual subjectivity of the person inscribed. During the trial, the opposing counsel try to suppress her attempt to testify to the circumstance surrounding the inscription of the will, as “this young lady is herself the will of Jonathan Meeson, and, being so, is . . . not competent to give evidence. There is no precedent for a document giving evidence, . . . the witness must be looked upon as a document” (101). When the Judge objects that a document “is evidence” (102), the attorney objects that it may be exhibited as such, but that it may not “speak its own explanation” (102): “A document is a thing which speaks by its written characters. It cannot take to itself a tongue, and speak by word of mouth also” (102). In short, the attorney raises the question of whether the testimony of the body is the person, and also whether its signifying overrides the expressed intention and speech of the person. A document is subject to expert inspection and interpretation; it does not “talk back” to its readers. The Judge sums up the question, “is—Is the personality of Miss Smithers so totally lost and merged in what, for want of a better term I must call her documentary capacity, as to take away from her the right to appear before this Court like any other sane human being, and give evidence of events connected with its execution?” (103). Here we see the problem highlighted in earlier representations of body objects (the skin of the Marquis in Collins’s The Law and the Lady, for example) extended to the living body. The body of which criminologists were enamored, the body that testifies its truth independent of the subjectivity of the intelligence that inhabits it, becomes a document, which is also a “thing” rather than a “personality.” The Judge finally resolves the situation in Miss Smithers’s favor by deciding the relation of the subject to the body: “A will is . . . tattooed upon this lady’s skin; but is the skin the whole person? Does not the intelligence remain, and the individuality? . . . let us suppose that the plaintiff had persuaded the witness to be partially skinned”—(here Augusta nearly jumped from her seat)—“and that she, having survived the operation, was again tendered to the court as a witness, would the Court then be able . . . to refuse to accept her evidence? The document, in the form of human parchment, would then be in the hands of the officers of the Court, and the person from whom the parchment had been removed, would also be before the Court. Could it be still maintained that the two were so identical and inseparable

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that the disabilities attaching to a document must necessarily attach to the person? . . . it seems to me that that which is separable must, for the purpose of law, be taken as already separated, and that the will on the back of this witness must be looked upon as though it were in the hands at this moment, of the officers of the Court.” (102–3) Interestingly, the point hinges on the alienability of the body—or parts of the body—from the self, and of a text on the body from the subject speaking from that body. The Judge’s point would be moot if the tattoo covered her whole body, as then it could not be separated from Augusta without the loss of her life. But “that which is separable must . . . be taken as already separated” (103). The Judge’s determination plays with the ways in which the body, and particularly the skin, are identifiable with the subject. Augusta cannot testify as the document, but she has the same standing as any witness of the original inscription to testify about its circumstances. This comically invokes the paradigm of identification between self and body, subject and object or property, that we have seen in earlier chapters. In Hegel’s discussion of the body as inalienable, he worries particularly about the hand as an instrument of human will (an Aristotelian tradition recognized by the law, which gives special status to handwriting as both performative act and sign of identity). The hand is aligned with the voice, but unlike sound, which is evanescent, it mediates between the voice of the self and the durable outer world through writing. Once words are spoken or written and released into the outside world, they are both of the person and separate. Thus the hand mediates between inner and outer. In Phenomenology of Mind (1807), Hegel assesses the hand as an index of spirit or mind, but its status as simultaneously a part of the person, and as a tool of interaction with the external world, troubles him: “The hand, to be sure, does not seem to be such a very external thing for fate; it seems rather to stand to it as something inner. . . . That the hand however, must exhibit and reveal the inherent nature of individuality as regards its fate, is easily seen from the fact that after the organ of speech it is the hand most of all by which a man actualizes and manifests himself. It is the animated artificer of his fortune” (178–79). The hand as the instrument of will is also aligned with the voice as the self ’s primary medium of expression. But, of course, once words are spoken or written and released into the outside world, they are both of the person and outside of it. Thus the hand mediates uneasily between inner and outer: “While the action as a deed or (finished) act is merely external, and inner and outer in this way fall apart. . . . The simple lines of the hand, then, the ring and compass of the voice, as also the individual peculiarity of the language used” is given

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by the hand “more durable existence than the voice can do, viz. in writing, especially in the particular style of ‘handwriting’—all this is an expression of the inner”—yet, “against the multifarious externality of action and fate, this expression again stands in the position of simple externality” (Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind 179). Though writing and the sound of the voice are peculiar to the self, as are the “lines of the hand,” it goes out into the “externality” of the world. Though it still “plays the part of an inner,” having a privileged relation to the self, handwriting becomes subject to the outer. The Judge extends and counters this description in a rather chilling way; anything of which the separation from the body may be survived (which would include the hand, of course) may be considered already alienated. The skin, like the hand, invokes not only the issue of what is the interior and what the exterior of the self, but where the self begins and ends, or what is proper to the self and what is the property of it. Haggard’s story is a playful riff on themes that have more darkly figured in earlier considerations of the relation of the spirit to the signifying and inscribed body. A voluntary tattoo is usually conceived as an expression of the will of the bearer to express something. Here we see the same doubling of the meaning of will as a legal instrument that is evident in The Woman in White, where inscription both indicates the rightful ownership of property and potentially alienates the body itself. George Burchett, a tattoo artist (or “Professor,” as such artists were called), mentions Haggard’s story in his memoirs, and also mentions that in two cases, he participated in tattooing wills. He tattooed a long will on one man’s back in 1928 (140). More disturbingly, he cites the case of a woman who came to be tattooed with someone’s will as a condition of inheritance, who “shuddered” once she saw it done and fled (161–62). (The will was in foreign writing, and Burchett could not read its terms.) This is more closely related to Haggard’s story, in that the will inscribed on Augusta, though present by her consent (by her will), does not represent her will directly, but that of the testator, Mr. Meeson. In Burchett’s example, the inscription of the will alienates the self, making of the woman’s body a property of the dead, as if, in Hegel’s or Mill’s terms, she has sold away the possibility of her freedom in exchange for the legacy, and so enslaved herself (and, of course, Augusta will marry the heir and so obtain the legacy as well). The story of this woman also continues an earlier popular association with forcible inscriptions on women’s bodies. In the earlier part of the century especially, tattoos were often associated, especially in women, by a forcible seizure and inscription of the civilized body by the savage other. In the nineteenth century, tattooing was the topic in many captivity narratives, and among traveling shows,

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ladies, in particular, tended to claim that they had been forcibly tattooed by savages (Native Americans or Pacific Islanders), thus invoking the rape fantasies common to the period that the tattooing scene with Augusta more comically shadows. But in reality, forcible tattooing was not primarily the practice of exotic “savages”:6 Bailkin writes about a case in Burma in which a native woman was forcibly tattooed across the face at the behest of an English functionary, and certainly British imperial administrators often participated in the existing indigenous Indian practice of tattooing criminals, though others opposed it. Punitive tattooing in Britain itself continued to be legal until 1871,7 whereas in the prior century, branding with hot irons was still common. This story resides in a wider context of narratives both gothic and comic about the alienation of the body in the period.8 A more ironic version of this narrative is a story of the body alienated as a bearer of art. In the 1911 short story “The Background,” Saki (Hector Hugh Monro) limns the fate of a man who, in a moment of elation upon receiving a legacy, overspends on a tattoo from a renowned Italian tattoo artist, and then becomes the reluctant prisoner of Italy when he can’t pay and the picture is first repossessed and then declared a national treasure. “The Fall of Icarus” is held to have far more value than the man who “bore on his back the burden of the dead man’s genius” (123). He is prohibited from activities such as sea-bathing, as “salt water might be injurious to the masterpiece” (123). As the work of art begins to live its own narrative of value, the protagonist, Deplis, the eponymous “Background,” finds himself the hapless pawn in a dispute about the authenticity of the work: “A certain German art expert . . . declared it to be a spurious Pincini, probably the work of some pupil” (123). Sadly, Deplis has not even the authority of a witness to his own body’s inscription, as “he had been under the influence of the customary narcotics” when tattooed (123). Thus, as with Mr Meeson’s will, which must be interpreted by legal experts, the expert reader of the body as text is more authoritative than the subject embodied therein. Depressed and harassed, Deplis falls in with anarchists, and the Italian authorities take him to the border to deport the man for his political views, only to then repossess his body as the canvas of “The Fall of Icarus.” Finally, another anarchist defaces his tattoo with acid in a quarrel, with the result that Deplis is at last both freed and deported. However, he is never able to regain his own identity and succumbs to a monomania about his status as a work of art and his value as a piece of property: “He nurses the illusion that he is one of the lost arms of the Venus de Milo, and hopes that the French Government may be persuaded to buy him. On all other subjects I believe he is tolerably sane” (124).

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The status of art as a form of property that is public and may belong to another person or even to the community puts into question the claims of privacy and property in one’s own person.9 Art’s disproportionate value as the art market heats up in the late nineteenth century trumps the value of a mere individual body and life. Saki’s story of course is intentionally absurd, just as Haggard’s story veers into comedy at the moment that Augusta’s body is inscribed. But such a narrative resides, however uneasily, within a continuity of debates around the right of the state in the body of paupers established by the Anatomy Act of 1832 in England, and of continuing use of both living and dead bodies of indigenous peoples from around the world as museum exhibits. When do the claims of the public upon a particular body set aside the claims of the individual to control of their own flesh and privacy from visual scrutiny?10 If every body is a text or representation to be freely read, then what limitations can any individual place on that reading—especially when he or she has voluntarily inscribed or been inscribed by that text? When the body is read, who owns the rights to the interpretation? These issues became most charged for Victorians around the sacred privacy of the (imaginary, ideal) middle-class woman. It is perhaps not surprising that Victorian freak shows and circuses tended to show at least one heavily tattooed person, often a woman. By voluntarily making the body even more readable than it might normally be, there was a kind of presumption of public ownership of the resulting spectacle. Moreover, given that the bodies, dead and living, of “freaks” and indigenous people of colonial lands were often publicly displayed in Europe in the period, the association of tattooing with “savage” customs evokes the way that the woman’s body in particular can become aligned with savagery—in Haggard’s story, while humorously positing a South Seas tattoo not inflicted by Maori kidnappers, but as a legal document created by a British sailor.

Savage Modernity: A Laodicean If tattoos were often associated with the primitive, that connection was complicated—as we saw above. But tattooing could also be, in the late nineteenth century, a symbol of modernity—of global culture, cosmopolitanism, and the rejection of traditional values and even gender roles. By the early twentieth century, the tattoo could even function in Britain as an emblem of cultural elitism. Bailkin argues the aristocracy was increasingly read by the fin de siècle—and perhaps read itself—as an atavistic, premodern class (34). In fact, this concept of atavism dates back quite a bit before the criminologists. As early as 1869, Matthew Arnold tags the aristocracy “Barbarians” in associating them with a class of physical culture and display.

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By the end of the century, Bailkin observes, tattoo stories tended to emphasize the decay and humiliation of the British aristocracy, emphasizing “themes of illegitimacy and catastrophic loss” (47). Although she is largely concerned with novels in the late 1890s or later, her remarks are apposite to Hardy’s A Laodicean (1881), a tale of being caught between old and new ways, between aristocracy and the “march of mind” represented by the new professional classes. The novel prominently features a tattoo and, not coincidentally, a rogue photographer. Typical of Hardy’s symbols, the tattoo functions to invoke a series of oppositions—it is a sign of identity (both biological and aspirational) and fraud, of atavism and modernity, the desire for rootedness and a cosmopolitan disregard of norms. The plot is briefly as follows. De Stancy Castle has passed out of the hands of its old family and into the keeping of Paula Powers, the heiress of an engineering family. Caught between vague longings for aristocratic legitimacy and her own Puritan roots, between feudal notions and “modern” ones, Paula hires a young architect, Somerset, to restore the castle. He courts her successfully. Meanwhile, the scion of the De Stancy name, if not the house, appears. A mysterious young photographer, Dare, appears and uses fraud both to lead De Stancy to court Paula and, unknown to De Stancy, to blacken the reputation of his rival. Dare is one of Hardy’s quasi-mythical figures, described at one point as Dionysian.11 His age and sex are uncertain: “His age it was impossible to say. . . . In repose he appeared a boy; but his actions were so completely those of a man that the beholder’s first estimate of sixteen as his age . . . shifted hither and thither. . . . his hair, which was parted in the middle, hung as a fringe or valance above, in the fashion sometimes affected by the other sex” (45). Somerset finds himself unable to sketch Dare’s features, and Dare is defined, paradoxically, by this indeterminacy of outline. When queried about his nationality, he is evasive: “I have lived mostly in India, Malta, Gibraltar, the Ionian Islands, and Canada.” On another occasion, he is asked, “I never can quite make out what you are, or what your age is. . . . And are you an Englishman, Frenchman, Indian, American, or what?” (124). He responds, “I am a citizen of the world. I owe no country patriotism, and no king or queen obedience. A man whose country has no boundary is your only true gentleman” (124). He is referred to—and refers to himself—as a “cosmopolite” (63) and a “traveller” (328). Dare’s one claim to a fixed identity is a romantic and false investment in a bygone aristocratic past. More crucially, he cannot be properly seen—or therefore “placed,” read. Dare’s boast of being a “citizen of the world” suggests the period’s conflicted attitude toward cosmopolitanism that Amanda Anderson’s work, The Powers of Dis­ tance (2001), discusses: the anxiety that accompanied the otherwise positive

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valuation of cosmopolitanism in midcentury was that a citizen of the world might have no clear allegiances or loyalties, and sophistication might lead to moral sophistry. On one of the occasions when Dare is pressed to name a birthplace, he dodges: “ ‘It would be a fact worth the telling. The secret of my birth lies here.’ And Dare slapped his breast with his right hand. . . . ‘It is necessary that it should be recorded, for one’s own memory is a treacherous book of reference, should verification be required at a time of delirium, disease, or death’ ” (124). We are not then told what is beneath his shirt. Later, he urges De Stancy to marry Paula to regain the castle: “it is the raison d’etre of the landscape, and its possession is coveted by a thousand hearts. Surely it is an hereditary desire of yours? You must make a point of returning to it, and appearing in the map of the future as in that of the past” (145). Dare, it emerges, is De Stancy’s illegitimate son, and plots for his father to regain his lands through marriage to the present owner. But De Stancy does not care for the castle, and when he speaks of his vow to remain true to Dare’s dead mother and marry no other woman, in reparation for not marrying her, Dare “threw open his shirt-front, and revealed tattooed on his breast the letters DE STANCY” (143). In short, Dare claims his body is Castle De Stancy (the original title of Hardy’s novel), as the aristocracy was identifiable with the land they owned and represented. But, of course, he was not born at the castle, and it does not legally belong to his father’s family any more than the name belongs by law to him. Just as this aspirational provenance is marked on his own body, Dare inscribes it on the castle’s surface: “Somerset noticed that on the stonework . . . initials had been cut by explorers in years gone by. Among these antique inscriptions he observed two bright and clean ones, consisting of the words ‘De Stancy’ and ‘W. Dare,’ crossing each other at right angles” (65). This neatly hints at Dare’s “crosswise” relation to the De Stancy bloodline, but also foreshadows, with some irony, what will happen—though he wishes to restore the De Stancy name to glory and its ancestral home, he will end up “crossing” both these purposes. The character of Dare reaches out and back to a larger reality and a longer history than the individual characters of the lovers. Theirs is a realist story, a courtship comedy, whereas Dare, as his description suggests, belongs to the logic of myth. Dare and his principal antagonist, Paula’s uncle Abner, are both uncanny figures who transcend their origins: like Dare, Abner also identifies as a “traveller” who has “come from afar. There was not a square inch about him that had anything to do with modern English life” (208). Dare’s skin is tattooed, and Abner’s is also marked: “His visage, which was of the colour of light porphyry, had little of its original surface left; it was a face

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which had been the plaything of strange fires or pestilences, that had . . . left it pitted, puckered, and seamed. . . . The face-marks had a meaning, for any one who could read them, . . . they signified that this man had either been the victim of some terrible necessity . . . or that he was a man of dogged obstinacy . . . holding his ground amid malign forces” (208–9)—yet Abner has been decorticated by a very modern technology, whose malign force is accidental and self-inflicted. Still, his amorality is atavic, and like tattoos, evokes a certain lack of modern civility. The signification of his scars, then, for “one who could read” them, is not indexed to fact, but a mythic interpretation, in which the realist details “signify” a meaning beyond the realist one, in which terrible necessities and malign forces are fated rather than willed. Both Abner and Dare are cosmopolitan in the worst sense: they affirm that as “travellers,” they are unsurprised by any breach of ethics. Like Dare, Abner has “lost the accent of nationality” (209) and is elsewhere described as “a stranger, with the manner of a Dutchman, the face of a smelter, and the clothes of an inhabitant of Guiana” (216). The particular dangers of cosmopolitanism—deracination and amorality—are in evidence here: trained as a mechanical engineer, modern English Abner ends up abroad, a weapons-maker for hire, who is engaged by a secret “fraternity of political philosophers, whose object was the extermination of tyrants and despots, and the overthrow of established religions” (326). Abner is hired to make this process more efficient, updating the group’s technology, as they wish to develop an “explosive machine that would be both more effectual and less difficult to manage” than daggers (326). When the device blows up in his face, Abner takes the opportunity of his altered appearance to run away from all his old associations, including his employers. The scars, so far from operating as an identifying mark, become a mode of disguise, both from the terrorists and from the police.12 Both Abner and Dare highlight the unreliability of the body’s surface as a mode of interpreting identity. Dare’s appearance is both singular and too uncertain to serve as a useful means of identification, and his tattoo is actively deceptive, even while it signals a kind of aspirational identity. Abner’s unique, late-acquired appearance paradoxically operates as an effective camouflage for his true history. Because human beings change over time, neither youthful indeterminacy nor acquired scars are reliable indices of past or future appearance, nor of any deeper truth of the self. But Abner’s and Dare’s unusual appearances and inexpressiveness also mark their mythic nature. Like the tale of Apollo and Marsyas in chapter 6, Dare and Abner gesture to the larger stakes of history and the dangers around epochal transformations. Hardy figures Dare in explicitly mythic terms, as a preclassical figure.

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Havill considers that, in addition to Dionysus, Dare “resembled the Etruscan youth Tages, . . . a boy with, seemingly, the wisdom of a sage” (1125), and the theme of the puer senex, a wise or old child, runs throughout the novel in Hardy’s depiction of Dare, as in other Hardy texts (consider Little Father Time in Jude the Obscure, or the puer senex in “The Well Beloved”). Tages, an Etruscan prophet, appeared from newly plowed ground and revealed the religious teachings of the Etruscans (as well as helpfully teaching divination from the liver, lightning, and birds). These doctrines were particularly concerned with property boundaries. Jupiter, knowing “the greed of men . . . willed that everything should be surrounded with boundary stones. . . . whoever lays hands on a boundary stone, in order to increase his property . . . will for this offense be condemned by the gods. . . . But when it takes place with the knowledge and consent of their master, his house will be soon be destroyed and his family will come to ruin” (Grant 108). Hardy seems to play with this idea: Dare appears when the ground is broken for the renovation of the castle, and we are repeatedly told that De Stancy’s father, Sir William, carelessly outspent his heritage and thus, even the pictures and furniture “went in a mad bargain of my [De Stancy’s] father with his visitor, as they sat over their wine. My father sat down as host on that occasion, and arose as guest” (165). Both Dionysus and Tages appear at times of change, but unlike Dionysus, Tages does not herald a new order; rather, he appears to mark and avenge the old one. Dare also appears as an avenging spirit, first attempting to bring the property back to the original family, and then destroying it when that is no longer possible. Dangerous cosmopolitanism—aligned with political threat in Abner’s case and domestic threat to the Power family in Dare’s—shows itself in skin markings: the accidentally acquired scars of Abner and the deliberately inflicted ones on Dare. If Abner represents the destructive revolutionary capacity of new ideas—Puritanism, engineering, terrorism—Dare represents the worst tendencies of ancient blood to compass its ends without regard to standards outside its own reasons of state. When De Stancy objects to Dare’s methods, he replies, “we aristocrats must not take too high a tone. . . . And we mustn’t flinch at things” (277). Dare attempts to turn the tide of history back toward aristocratic supremacy by absorbing the modern Powers into history rather than allowing the castle to be absorbed into modernity. Dare is fiercely “Romantic,” to use Hardy’s term, with his historical fantasy of repossession. Abner is anti-Romantic, but also antirealist. His surface is startling, but not expressive: he retains no individuality, as his surface is effaced. He cannot show affect—he notes that “there’s no scarlet left in my face to blush for men’s follies,” and his impetus is to de-individualize, as a member of

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an organization who marks their murders with numbers instead of names: “objectionable persons in power had been from time to time murdered, and curiously enough numbered; that is, upon the body of each was set a mark or seal, announcing that he was one of a series” (326). It is worth noting lightning was associated in Tages’s books of divination with revolution, and that Abner (“son of light”) might be thought of as a man who both wields lightning and is consumed by it.13 Dare and Abner threaten to expose each other, and then come to a stalemate, agreeing not to interfere with the lovers. Abner leaves the diegetic frame without further ado, and his impact on the lovers’ plot is minimal. Although Paula is the Laodicean of the title, lukewarmly wishing both for a medieval romance and for a modern lover and home, she is to some extent the realist double of Dare, also caught between temporalities. At one point, when Somerset expects Paula and Dare enters instead, Somerset thinks of him as a “counterfeit” of Paula. And as Paula identifies with classical culture, saying, “I am Greek” (70), Dare is repeatedly identified with classical and preclassical figures such as Dionysus and Tages, who are displaced by the Greeks, as Marsyas was. But whereas Dare has no legal claim to the name, and so the tattoo itself is a form of counterfeit signature, when Paula has the De Stancy initials pried off the castle gate and replaced with her own, it is the legitimate act of an owner. Still, Paula is a most unwilling Apollo. She wants to identify herself with a romantic past. She fears being denounced as a new kind of ruler by force, or as she calls herself, “a member of the new aristocracy of internationality” rather than “the old aristocracy of exclusiveness” (376): “It is very dreadful to be denounced as a barbarian. I want to be romantic and historical” (95). “Romantic” is a term that not only Paula, but Hardy’s narrator repeatedly uses to define Paula’s attraction to the De Stancy family and castle, and at one point he defines her feelings in language close to that used by Ellis to describe a “survival” (Criminal 196) or what Lombroso calls “that other kind of historical atavism called tradition” (“Savage Origin” 102): “romanticism, which will exist in every human breast as long as human nature itself exists, had asserted itself in her. Veneration for things old, not because of any merit in them, but because of their long continuance had developed in her; and her modern spirit was taking to itself wings and flying away” (242). Her desire for the aristocratic past opens a path for the mythic and realist stories to collide. Finally, the realist story prevails. Dare’s relationship to De Stancy is exposed, and the lovers reunite. Having violated the mythic spiritual laws of property, or perhaps because of the realist biological laws of degeneration, the De Stancy family falls. By the novel’s close, Sir William is dead, and

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De Stancy’s renewed vow not to marry makes it unlikely that there will be legitimate issue. As De Stancy says, “ ‘mine is a fallen family. . . . Would to Heaven it were extinguished!’ . . . ‘we cry for the earth and oblivion!’ ” (317). Charlotte, the last remaining woman of the family, ends up in a convent. Though Paula supposes that Charlotte “is scarcely an instance of the wearing out of old families, for a younger mental constitution than hers I never knew” (78), Somerset privately wonders if that “very simplicity represents the second childhood of her line” (78). Once Paula marries Somerset, Dare sets the castle, with all its De Stancy furnishings and portraits heaped in the main hall, aflame. The novel’s question revolves therefore around whether historical change can be figured as continuity, or must be perceived as a radical break and the introduction of a new order. At one point, De Stancy invokes history as a cycle of such breaks, noting that Paula’s seizure of the castle is merely a repetition of an earlier historical violence, in which “The Roundheads . . . your ancestors . . . knocked down my ancestors’ castle” (311). Now they are returning as the conquering heroes of another revolution, industrial in nature. For Dare, it is an absolute break with the past: “We De Stancys are a worn-out old party. . . . We represent conditions of life that have had their day—especially me. Our one remaining chance was an alliance with new aristocrats; and we have failed. We are past and done for. Our line has had five hundred years of glory, and we ought to be content. Enfin les renards se trouvent chez le pelletier [At last the foxes are at the skinner’s]” (372). It is precisely the identity that both is, and is on Dare’s pelt, if not in his bones, that is being stripped from him, just as he burns the faces of his ancestors off the castle’s surface. The Laodicean does not wish to choose; Dare decides for Paula, his proxy. As the portraits are set on fire, they appear to come to life one last time: “Thereupon the framed gentleman in the lace collar seemed to open his eyes more widely; he with the flowing locks and turn-up mustachios to part his lips; he in the armour, who was so much like Captain De Stancy, to shake the plates of his mail with suppressed laughter; the lady with the three-stringed pearl necklace, and vast expanse of neck, to nod with satisfaction and triumphantly signify to her adjoining husband that this was a meet and glorious end” (374). Over the smoldering ruin, Paula and her lover decide on a fresh start. The castle will survive only as a picturesque ruin, inflecting (infecting?) modernity with a romantic tinge. The novel ends with Somerset’s plan for the (literally) defaced property: “ ‘We will build a new house from the ground, eclectic in style. . . . Stancy Castle will be beautiful in its decay. You, Paula, will be yourself again, and recover . . . from the warp given to your mind . . . by the mediaevalism of

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that place’ ” (379). Paula rejoins ruefully, “ ‘And be a perfect representative of “the modern spirit”?’ she inquired; ‘representing neither the senses and understanding, nor the heart and imagination; but what a finished writer calls “the imaginative reason”?’ . . . ‘Very well, I’ll keep straight on; and we’ll build a new house beside the ruin, and show the modern spirit for evermore. . . . But, George,’ . . . ‘I wish my castle wasn’t burnt; and I wish you were a De Stancy!’ ” (379). Paula’s statement, the last line of the novel, suggests that the desire for the past, with all its complications, cannot be simply overcome: as she says earlier, in a period of historical change, she must remain “lukewarm” in her attachment to the modern until she can “see . . . more clearly” (379). Her invocation of Matthew Arnold, the “finished writer” (the pun suggesting the ambiguity of a two-edged compliment), cites his attempts to use “imaginative reason” to harmonize reason and faith, or materialism and idealism, just as the eclectic modern house standing by the picturesque ruin is to blend the two. The reference gestures to the nonclosure of the mythic story line as well as Paula’s dissatisfaction with the realist one. Arnold introduces the “modern spirit” in his 1864 essay, “Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment,” in which he develops the modified German idealist view of history we have seen emerging in his other works. He discusses the Renaissance as being essentially Hellenic (pagan, sensual) and the German Reformation as what he would elsewhere call Hebraic (religious, morally stringent), in reaction against it. The Enlightenment offered the primacy of reason closer to a Hellenic ethic of “pleasure,” but, Arnold argues, this skepticism does not allow for a satisfying response to sorrow: “That is where the sentiment of a religion of sorrow has such a vast advantage over the sentiment of a religion of pleasure . . . for the mass of mankind, whose lives are full of hardship” (42). He suggests that the early Greeks were closer to a solution for the “modern spirit,” blending the “senses understanding” with the “heart and imagination” and transcending either with the “imaginative reason” (47). The desire for a “satisfying response to sorrow” suggests what fin de siècle writers would find so compelling in chthonic deities such as Dionysus Zagreus. This synthesis Arnold reaches for would allow for both materialist emphasis on senses and understanding and the need for the heart and imagination to engage with the mysteries of suffering and loss. Yet neither Matthew Arnold, who reaches abruptly back to Pindar and Sophocles for examples of what modernity needs, nor Paula, who wishes her castle were intact, quite achieves this vision. Hardy at the last holds the two impulses of the century, materialist and idealist, in productive but unreconciled tension, in a novel that blends the realist and mythic modes.

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Deceptive Image Hardy uses portraits to show the problematic ways in which both readers and characters use surfaces as indices of meaning, as we have seen with the skin markings on Dare and Abner. Paula is anxious about her dispossession of the ancestral owners of the property, but her efforts to return some of the property—especially the portraits—is repeatedly frustrated. Somerset often wonders—and never settles on an answer—about the question of the influence of the individual versus the historical line, about the modern significance of the example, rather than the type. The “animal pedigree” Somerset derides in the aristocracy is associated with the influence of type, as is artistic convention. Such convention is not only encoded—and subject to revision—in the fabric of the castle, but in representation itself. In Dare’s tattoo, in the family portraits that cover the inside of the castle, and in Dare’s photographs, the transparency of representation and accuracy of repetition are both affirmed and denied. None are trustworthy, but none are completely fictive, unmoored from the signified, either: they represent continuity and change simultaneously. Hardy uses the tattoo in ways suggested by all three different periods of the century. Its implication of a knockabout, not too scrupulous traveler’s life is associated with the earliest meanings of the century, as is Dare’s polyglot exoticism. Dare deliberately attempts to exercise the tattoo’s midcentury meanings (to establish identity, to claim the role of heir). Hardy entails on it some of the meanings both late-century criminologists and Bailkin and Clare Anderson discuss—the tattoo as a form of atavistic, talismanic display and the connection of that atavism to the aristocracy as a holdover from the past. Finally, the tattoo is shown to be just another inscription, just another fiction. Just as the fire makes the portraits—another deceptive surface—appear to be enlivened, and Dare’s photographs make his subjects appear to be other than they are, Dare is not what he claims through the inscription on his surface. Still, like any good fiction, what is inscribed on the skin does reveal a deeper truth: Dare is no English gentleman, but an unscrupulous cosmopolitan adventurer, and thus paradoxically, the perfect heir of a bygone aristocracy that was seen in the period as in fact both suspiciously cosmopolitan and atavistically living a life devoted to a “skin-deep” display. In short, the tattoo invokes all of these meanings, but fails simply to index either atavism or modernity, identity or fraud, maintaining instead all oppositions in a state of play, perhaps indicating that like the artistic periods that Somerset and Paula try to choose between “had at all times been as full of shifts and compromises as every other mundane thing; that ideal perfection was never achieved

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by Greek, Goth, or Hebrew Jew, and never would be” (5). The tattoo, which had begun the century as a symbol of foreign exoticism, and savagery, is appropriated in Hardy to signify the exotic savagery of England’s own past, from which modernity is constantly trying to emancipate itself and yet to which it is romantically drawn, an otherness held within the body itself. Like the other tattooing stories mentioned here, Dare’s tattoo links property, identity, and the body. Dare claims a biological identity that spans the long durée and pits that against the shorter-term legal claims of any individual to Castle De Stancy. Yet Hardy’s evolutionary rhetoric reminds us that biology mutates and degenerates. Hardy plays with the notion of the biological (as with the architectural) persistence of the past, as an altered or degenerate form. Upon viewing the gallery of De Stancy portraits, Somerset calls into question the paintings’ use as an index of resemblance: “He wondered how many of the lofty foreheads and smiling lips of this pictorial pedigree could be credited as true reflections of their prototypes. . . . it required a profounder mind than his to disinter from the lumber of conventionality the lineaments that really sat in the painter’s presence, and to discover their history behind the curtain of mere tradition” (21). On the other hand, we are quickly told that the portraits do tell at least one clear story of lineage: “Of the De Stancys pure there ran through the collection a mark by which they might surely have been recognized as members of one family; this feature being the upper part of the nose. Every one . . . had the special indent at this point” (21). When he meets the last daughter of the family, he immediately recognizes her by it, though it seems to have become decadent: “He saw the dinted nose. . . . It was not the De Stancy face with all its original specialities: it was, so to speak, a defective reprint of that face: for the nose tried hard to turn up and deal utter confusion to the family shape” (23). Portraits are supposed to be true renderings of the facial surface, but, of course, even when genuine in intent, viewers understand that they are mediated by historical “conventionality.” Moreover, context mediates reception; imitations may have more verisimilitude than the true portrait. Somerset notices at one point that “there was something in her [Paula’s] look, and in the style of her corsage, which reminded him of several of the bygone beauties in the gallery. The thought for a moment crossed his mind that she might have been imitating one of them” (58). The pictures are not valued by the “true” De Stancys, such as Charlotte or Sir William, who asks, “ ‘What is the utility of such accumulations? . . . Nothing can retain the spirit, and why should we preserve the shadow of the form?’ ” (39). Paula does value (and imitate) them, however, and Captain De Stancy cynically courts Paula by himself imitating the painting of the ancestor he resembles most closely. He

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stands in front of the portrait and draws her attention to it; and then transforms himself: “he had drawn near to the painting of the ancestor whom he so greatly resembled. When her quick eye noted the speck on the face, . . . a new and romantic feeling that the De Stancys had stretched out a tentacle from their genealogical tree to seize her by the hand and draw her in to their mass took possession of Paula. . . . His modern and comparatively sallow complexion, as seen through the open visor, lent an ethereal ideality to his appearance which the time-stained countenance of the original warrior totally lacked” (166–69). Although he works hard to imitate the portrait, and even to remain “enclosed by the frame while covering the figure,” it is the portrait itself that is found wanting in verisimilitude; his “modern complexion” is what is wanted to perfect the image—at least for Paula’s subjective gaze.14 Though Somerset’s trained eye recognizes the ways that portraits reflect the conventions of the time and the artist’s vision, the other characters find them compelling indices of truth. The novel plays extensively with the legibility of surfaces, and with the related idea of “defective” or counterfeit inscriptions and replicas. At one point, when Somerset expects Paula and Dare enters instead, Somerset thinks of him as a “counterfeit” of Paula (45). Dare’s own resemblance to the De Stancys is uncertain. Although the family is easily identified by the marks handed down, Dare is never “mistaken” for a De Stancy—although at one point, Paula and Havill agree that Dare “is something like” Charlotte, Paula then considers that “he is really more like one or other of the old pictures about the house. I forget which” (30). This question of the individual’s inalienable identity versus resemblances by “type” is a persistent one in the novel, as is the question of the ability of the individual to override hereditary identity. The novel begins with controversy over Paula’s last-minute refusal of adult baptism into her hereditary faith, and the lovers first encounter each other through this event. This tension between what one is by inheritance—aristocratic lineage, family religion—and what one chooses to become, as well as to what extent choice is truly possible, is a central concern of the narrative. Another is how inscription and mediation can be read and interpreted; surface is both telling and deceptive, and must be contextualized within both the conventions of narrative and an understanding of histories and contexts for the telling of the tale. This central concern of realism is thematized by references to photography. As we have seen in prior chapters, photography (as opposed to painting) was tightly if somewhat controversially connected in the second half of the century with the aims of the realist novelist. Somerset, a true modern, remarks that Dare’s resemblance to the De Stancys is accidental and goes

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according to type, rather than an individual characteristic: “ ‘People’s features fall naturally into groups and classes,’ remarked Somerset. ‘To an observant person they often repeat themselves; though to a careless eye they seem infinite in their differences’ ” (63). Somerset invokes a classificatory logic not unlike that of a naturalist, rather than one that stresses the individual. But in this case, the observant art critic, son of a painter, is wrong about the origin of the similarity. Dare’s own expertise is in photography, and he hangs about the castle photographing the family portraits. Although photography was used even in midcentury in collage and other altered forms for artistic uses, it was still often understood by the general public as an objective, instrumental form of art free from the conventions that cause Somerset to doubt the truth of the portraits.15 Sun-pictures, it was often said, could not lie. But, of course, they could and did, and many of Hardy’s readers knew it, even if they tended to think of that as an exception rather than the rule.16 Hardy’s narrator emphasizes that Paula and Charlotte De Stancy, however, did not know it: “To them that picture . . . had all the cogency of direct vision. . . . they would as soon have thought that the sun could again stand still upon Gibeon, as that it could be made to falsify men’s characters in delineating their features” (283). Dare specializes in exactly this form of fraud, making photographs “to represent people as they had never been” (336)—in the case of his campaign against Paula’s suitor, showing Somerset as publicly drunk.17 This question of the reliability of “direct” vision and its representation strikes at the heart of debates about both realism and the legible body, just as the question of replicas and the continuity of family types and marks is central to discussions of degeneracy and eugenics. If breeding was everything, what of degeneration within noble families? If every replica was a less faithful copy of an original print, that was bad enough, but what if the degenerate replica was then further altered and degraded? What if the renovation of the faithful copy—the original self—depended on outside factors to preserve its integrity? Without Castle De Stancy, the De Stancys seem to have become flawed replicas; ineffectual, like Paula and the Captain; or worse, mutations that perpetuate further copy errors like the actively malign Dare. Hardy gestures toward degeneration theory here, but also toward a general association of aristocracy with savagery or atavism.18 It is less clear, however, what modernity offers to counter the atavic’s romantic appeal. Dare’s childishness, which is also mistaken for more advanced age, is, like his tattoo, a sign of atavism, as he is a representative both of an old civilization and of a savage state. But, the tattoo also signifies his cosmopolitanism, as a souvenir of his up-to-date wanderings abroad. Like the uncertain modernization of the castle, to which Paula considers adding a Greek peristyle,

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and does add a gymnasium (although she hires Somerset to restore the castle as a medieval expert), Dare has acquired the marks of wider culture. However, the tattoo cannot establish his identity or provenance, as he does not in fact come from anywhere, nor can it serve as a marker of experience, as the mark does not memorialize travel experiences. When Somerset remarks “that he is a being of no age, no nationality, and no behaviour” (63), a rival architect responds that Dare is “A complete negative,” and then puns, “That is, he would be, if he were not a maker of negatives” (63). He is a negative De Stancy, both identical and a dark shadow and opposite; he is also a source of new, corrupt images. Like the photos he takes of the De Stancy family portraits now owned by Paula, he is a copy of a copy of something already alienated. And like his own “patent photographic process” (171), his copies are unfaithful reproductions, as illegitimate as his textual claim to De Stancy identity. The very notion of lineage demands truth in reproduction, a value lost to moderns and those of no ancient blood. Hardy slyly suggests that modernity perhaps demands less allegiance to authenticity and more pragmatic embrace of deviant citations. When Paula finally marries Somerset, a local worker wonders what she will do with the paintings of an unrelated family, and suggests a solution: “Well—why can’t ‘em hire a travelling chap to touch up the picters into her own gaffers and gammers? Then they’d be worth sommat to her” (370). The De Stancy family portraits could, in fact, be “touched up” rather easily—the proposition seems naïve only because their exchange value is historical and would be destroyed if this were done. The reader also knows that portraits are not worth money for their true likeness but for what Somerset calls a “lumber of conventionality,” which proves their provenance, both historical and familial. But the apparently absurd suggestion might be read as analogous to Paula’s desire to reclaim the castle’s medieval purity while marking it with her own “Greek” preferences. She herself hopes to give the pictures to Charlotte, who does not want them. It is Dare who solves the problem: he creates negatives of them, then burns the originals. And that finally is one of the themes of Hardy’s novel: surfaces require both careful reading and rewriting to be functional, but can never be considered as direct indices of material reality or an original referent. All iterations are “defective copies.” If the bioevolutionary discourse of barbarism and atavism that permeated writing about reforms for the working classes and studies in criminology in the Victorian era tended to focus on society’s lower strata, literature was as likely to be concerned with the upper levels. If the aristocracy was often felt to be a holdover of a more primitive state of society by the fin de

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siècle, Arnold identified the aristocracy as barbarians in 1869, as a class preoccupied with physical culture and display: “The care of the Barbarians for the body, and for all manly exercises; the vigour, good looks, and fine complexion which they acquired . . . may be observed still in our aristocratic class. . . . Only, all this . . . was an exterior culture mainly: . . . the chief inward gifts which had part in it were the most exterior, so to speak, of inward gifts . . . courage, a high spirit, self-confidence” (Culture and Anarchy 77). These traits of noble barbarity come perilously close to what later writers would see as throwbacks to an earlier and more savage state. Lombroso understood atavism as something expressed both morally in behavior and physically in the phenotype; he believed that it was an evolutionary reversion to an earlier state. Such persons could be visually identified by traits such as large ears, long arms, a sloping forehead, prognathic jaw, and so on (Lombroso, Criminal Man 10–15 and passim). Such “throwbacks” were also amoral, vainglorious, impulsive, and cruel (35–40). I would suggest that the “magnetic” charm that Tamara Wagner identifies mid-Victorians having for the recent past of the Regency (“ ‘A Strange Chronicle’ ”) is by the period’s end associated with a general nostalgia for the beauty and charm identified with the aristocratic order. But there is an ambivalence in that identification, with an aristocracy thought charming but amoral, beautiful but empty of the kind of refined modern subjectivity cultivated by the middle-class novel reader whose constant practice of introspection would lead to the “examined life.” They seem potentially cruel, as the child or savage is thought to be, untrammeled by modern consciousness or conscientiousness. The novel flirts with the nostalgic glamour of this atavistic character, even if it must eventually turn against it, as Paula’s “Puritanism” demands that she reject the De Stancys once she knows of their forgeries. Early in the narrative, when Somerset first sees the castle, with a telegraph wire trailing up through an arrow-slit, he marvels that “the hoary memorial of a stolid antagonism to the interchange of ideas, the monument of hard distinctions in blood and race, of deadly mistrust of one’s neighbour in spite of the Church’s teaching, and of a sublime unconsciousness of any other force than a brute one, should be the goal of a machine which beyond everything may be said to symbolise cosmopolitan views and the intellectual and moral kinship of all mankind” (18). Still, he reflects that the “modern mental fever and fret that consumes people before they can grow old was also signified by the wire; and this aspect of to-day did not contrast well (at least in his moonlight meditations) with the fairer side of feudalism” (18). The joys of hunting, “leisure, light-hearted generosity,” and “healthy complexions” are associated with “such a living power in architectural art as the world may never again

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see—civilisation having at present a stronger attachment to lath and plaster than to walls of a thickness sufficient for the perpetuation of grand ideas” (18). Hardy summarizes a transition from the easy identification of superiority with “healthy complexions” and “hard distinctions in blood and race” to a complex world evolving toward a deep “moral and intellectual kinship.” Paula’s confused yearning for “Greek” simplicity conjures the Etruscan barbarism of Dare, and the couple, once freed of that incubus, wisely choose to let sleeping gods lie, and instead build their modern house of lath and plaster. Bodily surfaces are both truthful and deceptive, providing evidence of the long shadow of evolution and history and showing the possibility of individuals breaking with that narrative and beginning their own anew and aslant, intersecting with and rewriting histories. Whether inscribed within a “lumber of conventionality” or pretending to unmediated truth telling, representation remakes: there is no direct objective perception; all observation is interested; all narration marked by the stakes of its circumstance. Hardy’s materialist realism that represents individual bodies and stories places these narratives into conversation with larger mythic structures without simply confirming or recapitulating either way of understanding the world—or narrating a story—as definitive.19 For Hardy at the fin de siècle, as for Wilde, the modern novelist must hold both in tension to trace the larger reality of what Hardy elsewhere described as the movement of the “Immanent Will” of the universe (Keen 168).

Conclusion It was something vague and yet mastering, which impelled her to this action. . . . There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms. —George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

I began chapter 1 with Ruskin’s remarks on George Eliot and have come full circle to end with her—as one so often does. I have argued that realism is marked by attention to the body, and specifically, its surface, and that this is a broadly applicable trend in the period. George Eliot—by acclaim a, perhaps the, paradigmatic figure for Victorian realism—is often conspicuous by her absence from the central chapters, or dissent from their central figures. Here, I want to take a few pages to limn her importance in dialogue with the developments I’ve examined, but also as a figure both within and outside of  them. Eliot’s exceptional individuals—Maggie, Dorothea, Daniel—are insistently returned to a larger historical narrative, their exceptionalism repressed and made exemplary of larger trends. Steeped in German idealism as she is, this is hardly surprising, notwithstanding her scientific interests. At the same time, Eliot’s realism as the century progresses increasingly makes affect a function not of the surface but of depth. Though Mill on the Floss (1860) repeatedly directs our attention to Maggie’s dark skin, the narrative is concerned to show that the characters’ focus on this, along with Tom’s misleading features, is misguided: “He was one of those lads that grow everywhere in England, [with] . . . a physiognomy in which it seems impossible to discern anything but the generic character of boyhood; as different as possible from poor Maggie’s phiz, which Nature seemed to have moulded 350

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and colored with the most decided intention. But that same Nature has the deep cunning which hides itself under the appearance of openness, so that simple people think they can see through her quite well, and all the while she is secretly preparing a refutation of their confident prophecies” (33). Eliot is always concerned to show that if skin signals meaning, its meaning cannot be read—Gwendolyn’s blush in Daniel Deronda is a “dubious flag signal” that may “mean either of two contradictories” (360). Affect is defined by metaphors of liquid depths, and of course Mill’s flood theme lends itself handily to this. In the “onward tendency of human things,” two individuals are caught between ties of heredity and affection and a historical and evolutionary drive toward progress—and crushed. Like Schopenhauer or Spinoza, Eliot sees a transindividual evolutionary materialism, rather than a strictly associationist materialism in the composition of the mind. Sally Shuttleworth writes that G. H. Lewes based his psychology in the early 1870s on the French physiologist Claude Bernard’s view of life as a homeostatic “regulative process of interaction between an internal and external milieu” (Shuttleworth 186). Lewes interpreted this as a way to “close the split not only between materialism and vitalism, but also between organism and environment, and mind and body” (Shuttleworth 186). Echoes of that conversation are apparent in Eliot’s observation in Middlemarch that Dorothea’s story is “the mixed result of young and noble impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state. . . . For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it” (784–85). But she also emphasizes both the less conscious and less individual nature of that struggle. Shuttleworth argues that Eliot, like Lewes, rejects the idea of a dominating (conscious) will over the “lower energies” of the nervous system in her reading of Eduard von Hartmann’s 1869 work (Shuttleworth 188–89). Von Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious (Philosophie des Unbewussten) anchored his model of the mind in the thought of Hegel and Schopenhauer (Shuttleworth 21), giving the unconscious three layers, at least two of which are transpersonal. (One is ideal, somewhat analogous to Hegel’s Spirit; one is physiological, analogous to a Schopenhauerian evolutionary drive; the third is psychological, and more individually based.) Shuttleworth suggests that Eliot comes in her last novel to connect both her organicist vision of society and the psychology of her characters to an emerging notion of unconscious mentation. In Daniel Deronda, “Conscious and unconscious thought patterns coexist . . . while the rigid division between the self and the external world predicated upon the notion of a rational actor . . . is also dissolved” (Shuttleworth 193). In this, Shuttleworth concludes, Eliot abandons realism for “idealism” and moves from “tradi-

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tional” character representations to focusing on “the unconscious” (Shuttleworth 201). I would add that Eliot simultaneously abandons the sensing and expressive surface of the self for exploration of “deep” subjectivity and its connection to the long durée of transindividual forces. Daniel Deronda is of all the novels the most committed to metaphors of depth and fluidity, as is evident in the epigraph to this chapter. It traces actions and emotions, both of individuals and nations, as emerging from “unmapped” depths: “Grandcourt’s thoughts this evening were like the circlets one sees in a dark pool, continually dying out and continually started again by some impulse from below the surface” (Daniel Deronda 269). The novel decries the egoism of one protagonist who imagines herself an exceptional individual, in favor of another who yearns to define his life through a project that precedes and outlasts his own existence. Yet, the novel also emphasizes the importance of each individual as a link in the chain of human historical progress, connected through the procreative instinct. The narrator asks, rhetorically, “Could there be a slenderer, more insignificant thread in human history than this consciousness of a girl . . . when ideas were with fresh vigor making armies of themselves . . . ? . . . What . . . are girls and their blind visions?” But the narrator also answers: “They are the Yea or Nay of that good for which men are enduring and fighting. In these delicate vessels is borne onward through the ages the treasure of human affections” (103). The strongly idealist tendency of Daniel Deronda is also confirmed in the philosophers’ debate at the center of the novel, about whether material affordances or ideas have the most force in human history. Eliot seems to come down, through Daniel and the narrator, on the strength of ideas as a transindividual vital force manifested within the individual body—within sexual reproduction itself—as an evolutionary force for social change. In sum, nineteenth-century realism engages the materialist body in relation to history, and Eliot does so brilliantly. But she deliberately moves away from the body’s surface, so important for other midcentury writers, to “depth,” especially in her later work. Eliot is thus both exceptional and exemplary; she marks a shift away from the aesthetic and psychological concern with surface inaugurated in the period of the French Revolution, toward a vision of history once again more concerned with evolutionary development from within. After a period long defined by eighteenth-century thinkers’ concerns with bodies’ relation to subjectivity—expressive, vulnerable surfaces carrying the burdens of history, as it were, on their sleeves—Eliot marks a turn in the discourse of the novel back to the concerns kept alive in the British midcentury principally in poetry and the mythic mode. Her treatment of embodied mind anticipates the idealist resurgence in modernist nar-

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rative. By the modernist period, “depth” psychology and anthropology also increasingly separated from physiology and medicine, leaving behind the materialism of Bain and Spencer to embrace German myth criticism and comparative religion. At the same time, they changed focus from the sensing surface of the individual to an interior and hidden collective unconscious. Her more capacious, transindividualist consciousness still rooted in matter sits more comfortably in the tradition of Zola, Arnold, Hardy, and the moderns than in that of Dickens and Collins. Modernism and psychoanalysis brought myth back into realism explicitly as a structuring principle of consciousness transmitted across generations. The interest in character based on individual associations and experiences faded in favor of a model of  transpersonal, unconscious drives. Schopenhauer, so attractive to Balzac, had not gained much purchase in mid-nineteenth-century Britain (perhaps because of his pessimism), but after von Hartmann’s theory of the unconscious is taken up and critiqued, a modified version of these ideas comes into vogue in British novels. The individual is still conceptualized as a phenomenon of surface, but modernism intensified the displacement of the surface for depth, and the individual for the species or “race.” D. H. Lawrence’s vision is exemplary; he discounts “the old stable ego—of the character” and claims that “it is the inhuman will, call it . . . physiology of matter, that fascinates me.” In his vitalism, character is the instrument of historical and organic forces: he is not interested in how a character “feels. . . . That presumes an ego to feel with. I only care about . . . what she is inhumanly, physiologically, materially . . . as a phenomenon (or as representing some greater, inhuman will)” (Letters 183). Individual character reacting to circumstances, that basic unit of Victorian realism, is out. Instead, he seeks to portray “another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognizable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states which . . . are states of the same single radically-unchanged element. (Like as diamond and coal are the same pure single element of carbon. The ordinary novel would trace the history of the diamond but I say, ‘Diamond, what! This is carbon’ ” (letter to Edward Garnett, June 5, 1914, in Letters 183). As this excerpt suggests, these drives are increasingly imaged as simultaneously deeper than and foundational for the epiphenomenal individual. This model of the self relies on a nonrational consciousness that is not based on the outer senses or conscious judgment, as the Scottish philosophers had believed, and as was central to the nineteenth-century realist mode.1 The new myth-and-ritual critics of Cambridge discarded the notion of reason as the driver of the will. Lawrence writes to the philosopher Bertrand Russell on December 8, 1915: “I have been reading Frazer’s Golden Bough and Totem-

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ism and Exogamy. Now I am convinced of what I believed when I was about twenty—that there is another seat of consciousness than the brain and the nerve system” (Letters 470).2 Whereas nerve or “mental-consciousness” relied on vision and the eye, Lawrence wanted his art to explore the “blood-consciousness . . . without any reference to nerves and brain. This is one half of our life, belonging to the darkness” (470). Nineteenth-century realism had focused on interpreting the seen through a rational consciousness based on the nervous terminals’ processing of external reality—what George Moore decried in 1895 as the “realist sins” of “exteriority” (684).3 This constitutes a destructive misrecognition and suppression for Lawrence: sexuality is to “blood-consciousness” as vision was to the brain’s consciousness, and touch is to its senses as sight is to the other: its primary mode of apprehending the world, transmitted from the mother in the womb, “complete and apart from the mental and nerve-consciousness” (Letters 471). The two are antagonistic, with “mental and nerve-consciousness . . . engaged in the destruction of  . . . blood-consciousness” (470). The goal of his art was to rescue and valorize the latter. I have been using Lawrence as a convenient example for the modernist tendency to embrace both depth psychology and a transpersonal concept of embodied mind that shifts away from nerves and surface to “blood” and depth. Having taken in the insights of materialist psychology and its insistence on an embodied mind, depth psychology envisions a deep transpersonal self with roots in German idealism. Individual experience becomes constitutive not of mind, but of the particular neuroses that define one’s minor differences from a transpersonal norm. Surface retains its association with individuality, but individuality itself becomes, as in late French realism, epiphenomenal: carbon to diamond or coal. The perdurable truth lies beneath, to be elicited through not merely “suspicious,” or even “symptomatic,” but symbolic reading. The body’s surface no longer offers even the suggestion of a direct referent; all signification is mediated through unconscious structures that, though modified by individual experience, essentially precede it. Psychoanalysis interacted with classics and anthropology to link individual development to myth: rather than the founding of nations or seasonal natural changes, myth was here read as telling the story of individual psychosexual development.4 Freud mediates psychology’s new emphasis on depth with the prior period’s focus on surface. Still, he works from the orthodox mid-nineteenth-century assumption that ego and conscious experience are phenomena of the surface. He theorizes that we experience our bodies principally as surfaces, and construct our sense of ourselves there. In The Ego

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and the Id (Das Ich and Das Es, 1923), Freud tells us that a “person’s own body, and above all its surface, is a place from which both external and internal perceptions may spring” (25). To become conscious of anything, even of the interior of our own bodies, we must experience it in reference to that surface. Though touch yields both internal and external sensations, even the internal is experienced as an externalized phenomenon of the surface. Finally, “The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego: it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself  the projection of a surface”—a schematic representation, not to scale, of our own bodily surface that constitutes our perception of self (26). The “anatomical analogy” would be the “ ‘cortical homunculus’ of the anatomists,” where the surface of the body is mapped onto the surface of the brain, and some areas (the genitals, the mouth, and the hands) are disproportionately large by comparison to others (26). But the other parts of the self—much larger in Freud’s famous diagram—are what put the “depth” in depth psychology. Whereas the id is internal to the self, “deep” below the surface, the ego is how “external vicissitudes” can be experienced by the id, as the ego is “the representative of the external world” (38). (See fig. 9.1.)

Figure 9.1.  The “individual ego as a psychical id, unknown and unconscious, upon whose surface rests the ego, developed from its nucleus the Pcpt. System” or perception and consciousness. C and Pcs are Conscious, Preconscious and Unconscious. From Freud’s The Ego and the Id (1923), p. 24.

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Freud examines how the surface ego-individual is related to the transpersonal force of species reproduction. There is no direct communication possible between id and externality, and the ego is subject to its own direct experience within its own body. The ego cannot directly inherit others’ experience: “It is here that the gulf between an actual individual and the concept of a species becomes evident” (38). But there is some slippage between the epiphenomenal individual’s experiences and the deep self of the species. When the same experiences are “repeated often” and strongly enough in “successive generations, they transform themselves . . . into experiences of the id, the impressions of which are preserved by heredity” (38). The id, unlike the ego, can be inherited, and thus, the ego sources the “residues of the existences of countless egos” to shape the superego, perhaps even “resurrecting” one or more of them (38). So the id is what can, in some Lamarckian sense, inherit experience from prior unconsciousnesses. But this patrimony can never be experienced as the ego, the individual, itself. Thus Freud negotiates between the difficult problem of inner and outer individual experience in relation to a model of surface and depth wherein the inner (id) and outer (superego) projections, while fully functions of the individual surface experience, are to some extent also transhistorical, transindividual, and through a mysterious alchemy, heritable—though never knowable as such by the ego. The ego mediates between inside and outside, deep interiority and deep exteriority, species experience and individual temporality. In short, Freud works hard to salvage the significance of surface to consciousness, while maintaining depth as a source of mentation. Inner experiences become conscious as “thought processes” that “represent displacements of mental energy . . . somewhere in the interior of the apparatus” (19). Freud leaves unclear whether these displacements “advance to the surface, which causes consciousness to be generated,” or whether “consciousness make[s] its way to them” (19)—like some sort of pearl-diver. He finally posits that what allows for mentation to move from depth to the surface is linguistic representation; through being attached to language, these preconscious, “internal thought-processes are made into perceptions” (23). Once exteriorized in language, these perceptions can be experienced on the mind-body’s surface, demonstrating “the theorem that all knowledge has its origin in external perception. . . . thoughts are actually perceived—as if they came from without—and are consequently held to be true” (23). Freud keeps Bain and Spencer’s associationism and surface sensation, while engaging a “deep” model of consciousness that transcends the individual temporally. He accepts the prior period’s emphasis on the skin as bearer of self and perception, but moves his clinical emphasis to the processes that

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make manifestations on the surface possible, that is, to a suspicious reading that reads surface manifestation not only as symptom, but as symbol of a reality that is located elsewhere, rooted in a logic that is both of the body’s experience, within, and beyond it. This grounds the centrality of language and especially narrative in connecting the self to the inner world; nothing can be consciously acted on until it is exteriorized, articulated, and thus experienced and known by interpretation. It is a reformulation of earlier, suspicious readings of the body’s surface as directly indexical. Recent critical turns have sought to transcend or reject the symbolic reading that is post-Freudian, but also a suspicious reading that, I have argued, has its roots in the prior mode of realist representation itself. In the Fall 2009 issue of  Representations, Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus wrote that the establishment of psychoanalysis and Marxism as “metalanguages” in the 1970s and 1980s allowed for interdisciplinary exchange in the humanities, by taking “meaning to be hidden, repressed, deep, and in need of detection and disclosure by an interpreter” who performed “symptomatic reading” (1). (This is what I am referring to as a symbolic reading—that is, the text does not simply indicate or index a condition, as fever indicates inflammation, but gestures to it through a more complex third-term relationship, in which something is a symptom of something which itself means something at a further remove, in reference to a larger, transpersonal system—depth psychology, ideology.) Best and Marcus call for a return to “surface reading” techniques in order to reject our investment in “a mode of interpretation that assumes that a text’s truest meaning lies in what it does not say” (1). In some ways, most of my work is an exercise in what Best and Marcus define as two kinds of  surface reading—it aims to understand the references and patterns across a variety of texts, and in so doing clarify an intertext by “attend[ing] to what is present” in the patterns. That said, some have taken up other possible definitions in Best and Marcus’s discussion of surface reading to argue for a nostalgic return to a formalism denuded of political and historical import, a recentering of the “sensuous surface” of the decontextualized artwork.5 As Phillip Wegner writes, “in advancing a claim that it is time to move beyond critiques of literature and culture, these ethical critiques of critique present critique itself as the Other that needs to be flushed out and purged from the collective institutional body” (n.p.). This is more problematic. One critique of psychoanlaytic reading of Victorian novels is precisely that it dehistoricizes and makes transcendent a model of the self that, as I have suggested here, emerges from the period itself. While others suggest that dehistoricized surface reading allows for a more formally responsive approach, I would argue that a useful understanding of both formal and “surface” content does very

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often require historical knowledge. Forms have histories. The very opposition between surface and depth as a locus of truth has a history that this book has in part charted. Some in seeking to emphasize form have called for “presentism” as a counter to historical reading. Yet, I would argue that all scholarship should be—consciously, critically—presentist, in that it privileges present concerns in its approaches and questions (otherwise, why continue to produce new scholarship on old texts?). The more salient question is, what method of scholarship serves the question one is (presently, presentistly) seeking to answer? Some strategies will require a more formally focused approach, others require more historical research; all are valuable insofar as they are well-constructed methods to respond to questions that themselves have value. The fantasy of reading a legible surface where meaning is simply “available” in an uncomplicated way contradicts all that we know about signification from the valuable contributions of twentieth-century formalist and structuralist work. It also ignores the aim of nineteenth-century realism itself to invite a more careful reading of surfaces. Audrey Jaffe has recently argued that such advocates of surface reading are defaulting to “another, unacknowledged Victorian masternarrative” undergirding realism’s truth claims, Matthew Arnold’s ideal of critical “Objectivity” (Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real 141): “in . . . claiming to take us from . . . mere subjectivity to a stable reality, they recapitulate the pattern of novelistic realistic conventions,” engaging in the “realist fantasy of seeing things ‘as they actually are’ ” ( Jaffe 140–41). As George Levine argued in The Realist Imagination in 1981, nineteenth-century realist novelists are quite canny and explicit about their novels’ textuality and the techniques by which the reality effect is created. But it is easy for readers in the historical aftermath to lose the sense of self-conscious play that was so striking for readers in these texts’ original moment. Even though the novels continuously proclaim and warn that we are being fooled, seduced, we forget that surfaces were not, nor were they intended to be, portrayed as simple. Reading that is close, “attends to what is present,” and is yet symptomatic, is itself in large part the legacy of the mid-nineteenth century. The further turn to a more purely symbolic reading of absences that emerges out of nineteenth-century structures of interpretation was motivated precisely by a modernist rejection of the aesthetics, philosophy, and neurology of the midcentury period. In the aesthetics of late Eliot and Hardy, in the writings of Hartmann, Freud, and Frazer, we see the putative end of skin as subject and surface as object of interpretation and the beginning of the move toward a deep, transpersonal structure of the self. At the same time, just as humoral physiology persisted well into the imagination and folk practices of the late

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nineteenth century, the reading of surface persists into present-day narrative and psychology. Victorian skin is still with us, in both its materialist and its idealist guises, and both offer opportunities and dangers. Turning from the aesthetics of literature to theories of embodiment, it would seem now that we are reapproaching, through posthumanism, a postindividualist theoretical notion that bodies cannot be separate, let alone three-dimensional. Rather, in returning to post-Enlightenment materialism, as in medical science, we find an emphasis on the interpenetration of bodies by other bodies, by “vibrant matter” (for example, bacteria, viruses, environmental materials that shape us and perhaps write themselves into our innermost epigenetic structure), and our continuities with both animals and the nonsentient environment. The current rediscovery of Spinoza (as in Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter), who was so foundational for both Enlightenment idealism and Enlightenment materialism, now signals an interest in a self (and world) of surface that is also inward: one that thinks through Deleuze’s Fold (working from Leibnitz, another monist), or subjectivity as topology. Here in the folded, invaginated surface, the distinction between surface and depth dissolves, as in the development of the embryo to create depth through difference. Herbert Spencer is still a precursor here, but the skin is collective and continuous, rather than decisively singular. This moment offers very real differences from the nineteenth century in its modeling of the subject. We find emerging a greater recognition that what most separates us most binds us, that we have tended to know who we are only by defining ourselves against an outer/other whose difference is largely constituted by our own need. This is perhaps the most urgent engagement in an era in which the nationalism and colonialism which defined the late modern period threaten to manifest in new and violent forms. If the emphasis on the skin correlated to the individualism of early nineteenth-century Britain, the new materialism begins to recognize the limits of human agency in a material world in which we are radically dependent on all that we have engaged historically with such disregard from the position of the sovereign Enlightenment self. At the same time, and in part in reaction against the politically urgent work of thinking beyond neoliberal individualism, there is a resurgence of investment in an immediately legible surface, a new physiognomy. Racial and ethnic differences are again elevated by some to the status of nature, and claims for a return to the nation-state based on ideas of racial biology and “culture” are originally rooted in German idealist formulations. The recurrent fantasy that expression can be simply read as character, or as evidence of guilt, persists into present-day discussion, as does the recurrent belief that

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a more objective visual technology will achieve the certainty physiognomy failed to offer in the past. Recently researchers have claimed that AI systems of facial recognition can not only identify individuals, but predict political and sexual proclivities from facial data alone (Kosinski and Wang). And, of course, visual perception of racial differences drives inequities in daily life from how law enforcement encounters citizens to how patients are offered medical treatments. The Terror elevated minor differences into signs of political danger, while asserting their surface legibility, their direct connection to a referent. Once again, we approach a period in which the economic structure fulfills and exhausts itself; once again, it is to be feared, we risk a terror. Yet, whereas liberal optimism about the end of history has proven misplaced, alternative investments in neo-Hegelian cyclical myths of historical change offer, at present, other dangers. Between the perfectable individual, sealed in a single skin and molded by experiences alone, and the fantasy of a deep, transpersonal (and implicitly racialized) spirit, it might be possible to imagine another model, radically interconnected, materially determined, embedded in history without being doomed to its repetition. Perhaps if we really did listen to “the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat,” the “roar on the other side of silence,” we would indeed be able, as Eliot suggested of Dorothea, to find new meaning, new sustainability, in “ordinary human life” (Middlemarch 182). Eliot wonders wryly if our “frames could . . . bear” such interconnectedness (182). Yet Dorothea breaks out of the “narrow cell” of her individual “consciousness that only sees another’s lot as an accident of its own,” her “pale cheeks and pink eyelids” of the mater dolorosa, to see “the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labor and endurance. She was a part of that involuntary, palpitating life, and could neither look out on it from her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor hide her eyes in selfish complaining” (741–42). I suspect Eliot models realist fiction less as a way to train readers’ empathy, as the Common Sense theorists thought, than to explain why we need it, to embed it in a capacious vision of human psychology that is responsible to both a past that cannot be changed and the future we choose to shape. This, at least and at last, is why I read.

q Notes Introduction

1.  Marcus and Best, “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Margaret Cohen cites and elaborates on this method, as well as other considerations related to the method I have in part followed here, in her useful and lucid essay, “Narratology in the Archive of Literature.” 2.  Much as the brain did in a somewhat later period, or DNA does today. 3.  Throughout the book, I refer to the major philosophical opposition in the period using the umbrella terms “materialism” and “idealism” I will provide a more precise definition, or at least a genealogy of these categories, in chapter 1. In brief, for our purposes here, the first sought subjectivity and the constitution of the mind in the body; the second shared a notion of the primacy of a spiritual self, itself indebted to a transindividual spirit or idea to which the body and material world owed its form. In the nineteenth century, literary texts persistently engage the subject within these terms. Of course, this broad dichotomy instantly breaks down and reveals itself instead to be a range of positions along a continuum: German idealism is itself an Enlightenment view deeply engaged with materialism, and the most pragmatic of Victorians absorbed and recirculated Romantic idealist concepts within realist and even naturalist narratives. Furthermore, the most Romantic impulses within the period—the esotericism of the “philosophical” tales of Balzac, or the Dionysian revivals of late nineteenth-century classicists—were inscribed within legitimating scientific narratives of physiology, evolution, race, and anthropology. The crossover between the traditions can be seen in their shared intrigue with the continuity of modernity with savagery or atavism, or of animal with human. In literature, they often cohabit uneasily, yet this opposition is still apparent and threads through the century, with idealists increasingly represented in literature and classical scholarship, rather than the sciences, by midcentury. By the end of the century, however, they were beginning to enjoy a resurgence as anthropology and psychology began to split more decisively from physiology and turned to myth as a ground for understanding history and consciousness. 4.  A note about language: I generally quote from established translations, but in some instances wherein specific wording seemed particularly important, or where the translation chose between significant meanings, I have provided the original language for the reader’s convenience. 5.  Lamarckian ideas about acquired traits being passed on continued to have currency long after Darwin challenged them, and are returning today in the field of epigenetics.

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  6.  I don’t want to imply that close reading itself was new. There is a long history of close readings of religious texts, etc. But the close reading of fictional texts as fiction, I think, develops along with the rise of long-format secular fiction. Suspicious reading had a flowering in the critical reading of religious texts as history—and as therefore fictive or symbolic—in the German Enlightenment, and many of those techniques passed into UK practice (and the practices of college or otherwise classically educated writers) from those sources, and shaped not only reading but writing.   7.  The French realists were widely read in Britain. Braddon adapted their work, Collins admired them, and Dickens repeatedly published articles on Balzac in Household Words from 1850 on, and later in All the Year Round as well.   8.  In folk medicine, it continued far longer. My father used a blistering mustard plaster as a home remedy for lung congestion in the 1970s in the US.   9.  Benthien’s work is more historically grounded than Connor’s theoretically focused argument, and it is her work that I engage most directly and build upon here. Her effort to provide a broad exposition of visual and literary culture across European contexts from the medieval period to the present, however, leaves a good deal of room for more granular histories. This project supplements and extends the work of Benthien and Connor, which largely skips the nineteenth century. 10.  Jameson’s concept of the “scenic” encompasses more than the visual. However, a number of excellent critical works have focused specifically on the importance of visuality in Victorian culture, from historical studies of physiognomy, such as Hartley’s Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression, to discussions of the visual regime of realism, such as Jaffe’s Scenes of Sympathy, Armstrong’s Fiction in the Age of Photography, Green-Lewis’s Framing the Victorians, and Flint’s The Victorians and the Visual Imagination. These studies parallel works devoted more emphatically to visual culture itself, such as Crary’s Techniques of the Observer. This project is not about visuality per se, but the focus on the body’s surface lends itself to visual elements, especially in realist fiction. 11. And as many students of “things” in Victorian literature have observed, things often become affectively invested extensions of the body itself, as well as having their own histories. See especially Freedgood’s The Ideas in Things and Dames’s Amnesiac Selves. 12.  Most of these studies are not aiming for historical perspective. A good (nontheoretical) example is Jablonski’s engaging Skin, which works largely from current biological perspectives, despite the somewhat ambiguous title. When Jablonski does foray briefly into the realm of the historical, some surprising blind spots become apparent, such as when she avers that “the literature on human evolution has paid little attention to the subject of facial reddening” (117). As we shall see in chapter 2, this is not the case. 13.  Anzieu’s primary concern is of course with psychopathology and treatment, rather than historicizing his model. His own historical inquiry extends back only to Freud (and then only occasionally). He notes that Freud “anticipates” the idea of the skin ego, and indeed Freud remarks that “the ego is ultimately derived from bodily sensations, chiefly from those springing from the surface of the body. It may thus be regarded as a mental projection of the surface of the body” (85). Anzieu seems somewhat surprised by this, but partially explains it as part of Freud’s familiarity with

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neurology. However, given the history preceding Freud, we will see that it would be more surprising if he did not come to this conclusion, one that is well developed and generally accepted by his contemporaries and predecessors. 1. Sense

1.  A good example of my difficulty here is that Herder was a counter-Enlightenment figure, and many would consider placing him together with Hegel to be inaccurate. But in terms of discussing the broad influence of the German thought of the period upon Victorians, Herder and Hegel were often read by later generations as part of the same general category of idealist elaborations of history. And of course, Matthew Arnold the idealist was keenly interested in religion as a social structure; finally, however, Arnold was not himself “religious”—he did not, for example, believe in a resurrected Christ. He did, however, seek to articulate a broader historical vision and sense of meaning than he perceived to be offered by materialism. 2.  Spinoza referred to the spirit/will using a classical formulation, the conatus (endeavor, effort). Humans were driven to preserve their existence and extend their activity that is connate with the body and mind; this is the will to live (and later, for Nietzsche, the will to power). 3.  To say nothing of the sequel, Man, a Plant (1748). 4.  For an in-depth discussion of the varied positions of the Montpellier faculty in the period, see Elizabeth Williams. 5.  Moreover, even on the “least materialist” end of the spectrum, Hegel himself sees philosophy in his time as deriving directly from the work of the much-maligned Spinoza. Despite the general association of Spinoza with atheism in the mid-1700s, the Christian idealist Hegel insists that “to be a follower of Spinoza is the essential commencement of all Philosophy” (Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy 257). Hegel absolves Spinoza of atheism: such accusations “are the direct opposite of the truth; with him there is too much God” (258–59). He thus places Spinoza in the idealist tradition: “Spinoza’s idealism is this: The true is simply and solely the one substance, whose attributes are thought and extension or nature: and only this absolute unity is reality, it alone is God. . . . With Descartes corporeality and the thinking ‘I’ are altogether independent Beings; this independence of the two extremes is done away with in Spinozism by their becoming moments of the one absolute Being. This expression signifies that Being must be grasped as the unity of opposites” (258–59). 6.  See Richards for a full discussion of the German idealists and biology. Richards argues that Darwin can be seen in the Romantic tradition, having been influenced by German idealism through his reading of Humboldt, and through his idealist-influenced predecessors Joseph Henry Green and Richard Owen (523, 532, 553, and passim). 7.  As Israel shows. On Stahl, see Geyer-Kordesch; see also Cunningham. 8.  As Shuttleworth puts it, writing specifically of organicism, “the idea of organic development offered an attractive conceptual model” in the wake of the Revolution, as it offered a reconciliation of “threatening notions of social change with more reassuring conceptions of continuity” (x).

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  9.  They drew many ideas from the classical philosophers, and associationism is often traced to Aristotle, but the features of the theory that became important in the nineteenth century originated in the Scottish Enlightenment. 10.  Some see the project of the Common Sense school as fairly close to the aegis of associationism. Medical historian John Henry, for example, states that “The members of the Scottish school [here referencing Reid, Dugald Stewart, and William Hamilton] are chiefly renowned for developing a psychology of mental faculties,” related to the efforts of Hume and David Hartley (Henry 252). 11.  Agnew traces the development of the concept through the Scottish Enlightenment in figures such as Thomas Reid and Whately. See Schaeffer for another excellent brief discussion of the history of the term as related to rhetoric. 12.  Through Shaftesbury; see Schaeffer. 13.  Meanwhile, German idealist theorists were taking on similar questions about the relation of universal history and cultural particularity. It is out of this, Zammito argues, that anthropology develops through Herder, and certainly German comparative linguistics, religious study, and classical scholarship all address this relationship. Whereas the UK seems to have focused more directly on individual biology and psychology in relation to a social whole, the Germans focused on the macro-level of individual cultures’ relation to historical cycles. 14.  And, indeed, German philosophers were struggling with the same questions. On the one hand, Kantian idealism had been found wanting, and on the other, Spinoza was still a byword for atheism. But they also took up the question of the role of the senses and the body. Schelling’s Nature philosophy is a good example, but these interests can be found in Herder and even Hegel. Often they took up such “materialist” precursors as Empedocles and Lucretius, on whom see chapter 6. 15.  Hegel read the Common Sense philosophers with interest, though he believed that their idea of a physiological basis for values was mistaken; all matter derived, he believed, from thought. He uses the term Menschenverstand to identify the Common Sense idea, and in the History of Philosophy, he translates it as “sensus communis” and refers its use to Thomas Reid and James Beattie (see T. Knox’s endnote on the translation of the term in Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right 216, p. 358 n. 68). He notes here also that Hegel writes in the History of Philosophy (i. 379) that “common sense is a way of thinking which is a repository of all the prejudices of the day. It is really controlled by genuine thought but is unconscious of the fact” (358). These remarks are in the Knox translation of 1942; elsewhere in the present book, the Dyde translation of 1894 is used. 16.  Morgan’s fascinating book The Outward Mind came out just as this book was in final preparation for submission; he takes up some questions that parallel this study. His book centers on the relationship between aesthetics and science in the nineteenth century. He notes that “scientific and literary accounts of aesthetic experience intersected through a common grounding in a particular version of materialism” (5). It is this insight that my own book, in part, pursues, though to different ends. He also makes the point that Victorian aesthetic thought was strongly influenced by German “metaphysics” in ways those thinkers sometimes obscured or disavowed (9). 17.  The 1824 edition included substantial added material on the facial nerves, including the plate shown in figure 1.1.

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18.  Desmond has traced in detail the political and philosophical investments of these discussions in Politics of Evolution. 19.  Lady Bell also notes that he defended the “doctrine of Final Causes, when rightly applied,” saying that it, “so far from being ‘barren’ is on the contrary, our chief source of knowledge” (424). The reference is to Bacon, who had called final causes “barren virgins,” thus rejecting teleology. 20.  France was also the site of the development of the most influential theories of physiognomy, of which those of Diderot and Lavater continued to be most important in nineteenth-century Britain. Though these theories were generally decried by scientists even in the early nineteenth century, they continued to be influential for some time, and were not so much eradicated as subsumed in later developments up to and including the anthropometric work of Galton and Lombroso. In all of these theories, however disparate, elements of materialism were implied, as physiology to a greater or lesser extent was perceived not only to express but to determine character. 21.  In this way, also, Bell’s work reaches back to the older physiognomists: “Comparative physiognomy, or zoomorphism, enjoyed a revival of interest in the second half of the seventeenth century in France” (Percival 19); with the advent of anatomical study, interest in comparing animal and human structures revived, and of course, evolutionary theory again drew attention to comparisons. 22.  See, for example, Le Brun, Conference of Monsieur Le Brun (1701) or Henry Siddons’s translation of Engel, Ideas for a Mimic into Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gesture and Action (1807). 23.  As Morgan puts it, in the nineteenth century, “thought and emotion arose from the nervous system. . . . turning the mind ‘outward’: mental life was often conceived in terms of processual interactions of the nervous system and body with extraindividual social and material worlds” (11). Morgan focuses more on the interaction of the subject with objects than the sensing surface, but his work captures much of the same move in the emerging psychology and aesthetics of the period I examine here. 24.  Bell’s later work expands to include the racial (and racist) discussion fairly typical of midcentury: human beauty depends upon its distinction from animal-like features. Caucasians are, for Bell, the most remote from animals, and other peoples are ranked downward. Though this was an increasingly common view, it was not uncontested. 25.  As we will see in chapter 6, the unsympathetic attitudes attributed to the Olympian deities results in a rejection of those figures by many artists in the late century; this supposed incapacity for sympathy is based on their lack of common experience with human beings in matters of sickness and death. Thus, what made them aesthetically ideal by neoclassic standards—their calm, unruffled detachment—led to their rejection at a time when the ideal of art had come to be the representation of an embodied human experience of intense emotional and physical sensation. 26.  I am grateful to the Senate House Library archive at University of London, where the MS of Bell’s journal is held. 27.  Bell writes in his journal, “Sir Joshua’s pictures . . . are beautiful—. . . his portraits of women and children especially, truly beautiful—the expression of the

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children sweet as can be imagined. But his historical pieces, or rather his poetical compositions, and that of Count Ugolino—tho’ it has been praised, and is now praised by the newspaper—will never be spoken of again. . . . He ought to have been a starved Count, large in bones, rugged, manly, wild, desperate, not a lean, pitiful, mean old man, with a nasty bush of grey hair sticking out from his head; and the boys are equally poor, having long suffered from bad diet, fruit, and worms. There is nothing for me to criticize in his paintings; he never ventures on anatomy, never shows his outline, but dexterously conceals it; his conception and execution of great subjects very, very bad” (n.p.). 28.  See Mégroz 142. 29.  See Percival (78–81) for discussion of Diderot. 30.  See, for example, Rothfield. In trying to show the progressive aspect of Bell’s work, Macmillan perhaps overemphasizes Bell’s emphasis on naivete—after all, we have seen that Bell’s aesthetic theory ultimately rejected naturalism as nonartistic; it traces an interesting dialogue between the origins of what would become French and British realism in art and the study of medicine, a correlation often remarked by literary scholars working on authors who wrote later in the century. 31.  In 1844 Benjamin Robert Haydon published a book of lectures on anatomy and art. It was avowedly indebted to Bell and insisted on detailed anatomical knowledge as essential for artists. 32.  See Buck-Morss for a discussion of these two traditions in relation to the aesthetics of fascism. 33.  See Fend, Fleshing Out Surfaces 117–23, for a good discussion of Bichat and skin in the context of the Terror. 34.  See Davis for a discussion of Lewes’s and Eliot’s debt to Spencer. 35.  Morgan usefully differentiates the associationist work of Bain from that of Spencer, which, as he points out, was the first effort to theorize associationism within the longue durée of evolutionary theory (99 and passim). 36.  See Cleere for an extended discussion of Ruskin, Victorian art, and sanitary discourse. 37.  He opposes this neologism to “croyant” (believing, faithful) in an earlier draft. Elsewhere it appears as “miscreant.” See Ruskin, “Fiction,” 279 n. 1. 38.  See Daniel Brown’s work on the development of discourses of realism in painting and literature in Representing Realists. 39.  Though Ruskin insisted that the artist should look at nature to see exactly what is there, rather than being bound by conventions of seeing in art, Caroline Levine has observed how very mediated Ruskin actually does understand good art to be. For a full discussion of Ruskin’s vexed relation to realism and the suspension of judgment, see Levine’s Serious Pleasures of Suspense. 2  Expression

  1.  Although the pallor of fear is often mentioned in tandem with the blush, it tends to drop out of discussions of the significance of emotions. The pallor of fear was shared with animals, as was the “passion” that provoked it, whereas the blush of self-consciousness was thought to be uniquely human and to have moral significance.

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2.  This quote was widely repeated by British writers throughout the century. 3. Bell vigorously opposed this particular point, noting that the torso and indeed the hands and arms were generally drawn into the expression of emotions. 4.  O’Farrell remarks that “The frequently scrutinized scar on the frequently flushed face of the invariably accused black woman . . . offers Darwin the fantasy of a corrigible black body” (84), and that it also shows the disregard with which these men of science view the violence implied by the anecdote. This is quite true; yet, it also represents Darwin’s effort to include the black woman in a single-origin model of humanity in the service of arguments for the abolition of slavery. See Desmond and Moore. 5.  Early discussions of the blush persistently show this fascination with the relation of the complexion to interiority, whether that be seen as a “soul” or a psychology. Rosenthal traces the “legibility of whiteness” in relation to the blush in eighteenth-century British portraiture. Working from Roland Barthes, she describes the visual object as producing a “punctum,” a kind of sympathetic wound, in which the body that observes engages in a visceral reaction to a representation of another body, a representation that in some sense actively inflicts this wound, or specular touch (Rosenthal 87). The blush both was the sign of such contact and was meant to provoke the sympathetic experience in the viewer, a recognition of like-ness. 6.  For a discussion of Bell’s connection of expression to the nervous system, see Hartley, Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression 66–79. 7.  Contemporary reviewers were alert to the internal contradictions of Burgess’s argument, and intelligent design was already under attack (though mostly as being too materialist, rather than too religious). The Medico-chirurgical Review, in a hilarious review of Burgess’s book, remarks on the concept of the false blush being a perversion of a nature constructed by God: “Surely this [contradiction] might have opened the apologist’s eyes to the petty attribute he gave the Diety [sic]. Such attributes are continually given to Him, by well-meaning but injudicious advocates, and the cause of true piety is damaged, not by enemies, but by friends. The theorist makes it ridiculous with his fantastic ornaments—the zealot renders it odious with his bloody dogmas” (Review of Burgess 174). 8.  See Hartley, Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression for a thorough and wide-ranging discussion of Darwin’s theory of emotional expression, including his response to Bell. 9.  Wilkie Collins uses this observation in Poor Miss Finch, in which the narrator observes that the blind heroine is not naturally modest, and does not blush, since she cannot see herself (59). 10.  In recent years, the most common treatments for excessive blushing are talk therapy, hypnosis, compression of the nerves with clips, and cauterization of cerebrospinal nerves. 11.  Italian neurologist Angelo Mosso (1846–1910), as Horn notes, disagreed and believed animals could and did blush as a result of emotion that did not require self-consciousness. Rabbits were the animal of preference for study, and the gendered qualities of blushing appear to have extended to them: in choosing animals to study rubor and fear, Mosso remarks of his experimental subjects that “At the market I chose those animals that blushed most easily and frequently, just as the slave-dealer

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picks out for the harem those women who charm by blushing more vividly than the others” (13). Mosso concluded that rubor resulted from vascular activity after any emotional disturbance, and could be observed in animals and humans alike. 12. Sigmund Freud to Ernest Jones, February 7, 1921, (Complete Correspondence 410). 13.  Like Lombroso, Ellis believes that criminals “blush less easily than normal persons,” though he considers that this might result from habit as well as “congenital abnormality” (Studies 1: 74). 14.  In the criminal or pervert, then, the desire to provoke rubor is a permutation of the desire for sexual contact. Ellis sees exhibitionism, for example, as “a symbolic act based on a perversion of courtship,” as the exhibitionist seeks to produce a blush in the “feminine witness,” wherein “he finds a gratifying similitude of the normal emotions of coitus. He feels that he has effected a psychic defloration” (Studies 5: 94). Flagellation, likewise, achieves rubor of the woman’s body through a substitute penis with which he “inflicts on an intimate part of her body the signs of blushing and the spasmodic movements which are associated with sexual excitement, while at the same time she feels, or the flagellant imagines that she feels, the corresponding emotions of delicious shame” (95). The “ancient sexual relationship of the skin asserts itself; there is marked surface congestion showing itself in various ways. The face tends to become red, and exactly the same phenomenon is taking place in the genital organs; ‘an erection,’ it has been said, ‘is a blushing of the penis’ ” (144). 15.  See O’Farrell for a discussion of this passage (18). 16.  Rudy also traces Victorian prosody to emerging studies of the body and electricity, showing that “Victorian poets turned to various manifestations of electricity—lightning strikes, electric shocks, nerve impulses, telegraph signals—to articulate the work of physiological poetics” (2). 17.  Other excellent examples of morbid males whose readings of a woman’s blushes are tragic for the lady involved are Browning’s “last duchess,” who unfortunately blushes at portrait painters and gifts of flowers, and is murdered for it, and “Porphyria’s lover,” who, having strangled Porphyria, interprets the discoloration of her cheek as a blush of pleasure that she has her “utmost will” in death (359). 18.  And that both most realist and scientific of writers, George Eliot (the only woman to feature in Jameson’s study), impatiently rejects the use of the blush as a meaningful signifier around this time. In Middlemarch, the sensitive and principled Dorothea “rarely” blushes—only from “high delight or anger” (18)—but probably really flushes, whereas the more prosaic Celia seems to “blush as she breathed” (51). See O’Farrell (121–22) for discussion. 19.  Pallor and rigidity were characteristic of mania. See, for example, J. Crichton Browne’s “Clinical Lectures on Mental and Cerebral Diseases” (145–46) and “Analysis of Guislain’s Work on Insanity (436). 20.  Jameson comments that realism (which he notes is not exclusively a late modern European phenomenon) is generally associated with demystification and critique (4–5)—and thus suspicion. He also sees it as producing the bourgeois self and society, and as tied to industrial capitalism (5). I want to argue here something a bit different, though not in disagreement with Jameson—that realism demands close reading in part because realism teaches us both to be suspicious of surfaces, especially of bodies,

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even while celebrating them, and to believe that surfaces are always signifying in complex ways even as (or especially as) we congratulate ourselves on our ability to understand them. 3. Out

1.  See Bichat, “Physiological Researches on Life and Death.” 2.  See Gilbert, Cholera and Nation for fuller discussion of the history of this shift. 3.  See also Roberts, who deals at length with similar issues. 4.  See Lacqueur, for example. 5.  Pores had long been known of before microscopy, of course. Galen inherited a long tradition when he emphasized keeping the pores open. Bathing was decried in the Middle Ages as a process that could close the pores. Lucretius’s physiology depended on pores, and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek first saw pores as we are familiar with them through the microscope in 1693. By the late eighteenth century, when bathing began to be popular, measures were often taken before the bath to seal the pores to keep the water from getting in (Benthien 42). The tone of amazed discovery that marks many discussions of pores in the nineteenth century thus seems peculiar, given pores’ centrality to earlier discussions of health and skin. Still, there was widespread debate on their structure, and some even denied their existence as late as the eighteenth century. In a history of microscopy and skin, Hennepe asserts that, between 1820 and 1850 in Germany, improvements in microscopy enabled a shift from earlier conceptions of the skin as open to one of “a thick, functional and protective boundary organ of the human body” (51). This is an argument that accounts for the focus on sweating and plasters through early modern medicine and related understandings of the body that scientific medicine was (unevenly) displacing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was in the early nineteenth century that the microscope paradoxically made pores hypervisible but also gave sufficient detail to understand the skin as a thick, multilayered structure. In tracing the nineteenth-century discussion, Hennepe shows two things: first, that the structure and function of the pores were still hotly contested, and second, that the increased visibility and dissemination of information about skin’s structure made it a new focus of management in its own right. Finally, the general public’s sense of the skin as permeable was likely enhanced by the new images of pores, rather than eroded, and may have revalorized an earlier Galenic model that became the commonsense understanding of the body underlying the new scientific aegis of tissue theory. 6.  This is an early example of the problem MDs now feel they face with the ready availability of medical information on the internet. 7.  Many New Woman novelists, of course, wrote deliberately against this trend. 8. Pope’s Essay on Man preaches acceptance of God’s “general” laws, which do not discriminate in particular cases, and in it, he eschews (or attempts to) the issues recently raised in his period by anatomy, specifying in his preface that he will “[steer] betwixt the extremes of doctrines seemingly opposite,” sticking with the “large, open and perceptible parts” (27) rather than the “finer nerves and vessels” in discussing “the anatomy of the Mind as in that of the Body” (27), as “The disputes are all upon these last, and . . . have diminished the practice more than advanced the

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theory of Morality” (27). Pope was attracted by views that would evolve into natural theology, but that position was perceived by Pope’s audience as being extreme and irreligious in his time, despite (or perhaps because of ) the ardent Catholic inflection to Pope’s Deism. Pope is also an interesting choice for the doctor to quote, as Pope also was prevented from marriage by his deformity (which was tubercular). 9.  It is hard to say what couplet the doctor has in mind; there are many in Pope’s Essay on Man on the theme. A sample will give the flavor: “Submit—In this, or any other sphere, / Secure to be as blest as thou canst bear: / . . . / All Discord, Harmony, not understood; / All partial Evil, universal Good: / And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason’s spite, / One truth is clear, “Whatever IS, is RIGHT” (36). One can see why the patient would be frustrated. 10.  “Si, laissant au système cutané de notre enveloppe une destination toute défensive, absorbante, exsudante et tactile, la circulation sanguine . . . ne répondaient pas à la transsubstantiation de notre Volonté, comme la circulation du fluide nerveux répondait à celle de la Pensée.” 11.  “Mais il est en l’homme un phénomène primitif et dominateur qui ne souffre aucune analyse. On décomposera l’homme en entier, l’on trouvera peut-être les éléments de la Pensée et de la Volonté ; mais on rencontrera toujours, sans pouvoir le résoudre, cet X contre lequel je me suis autrefois heurté. Cet X est la PAROLE, dont la communication brûle et dévore ceux qui ne sont pas préparés à la recevoir. Elle engendre incessamment la SUBSTANCE.” 12.  “La virginité, comme toutes les monstruosités, a des richesses spéciales, des grandeurs absorbantes. La vie, dont les forces sont économisées, a pris chez l’individu vierge une qualité de résistance et de durée incalculable. . . . une force diabolique ou la magie noire de la volonté.” 13. “Paysanne des Vosges dans toute l’extension du mot, maigre, brune, les cheveux d’un noir luisant, les sourcils épais et réunis pas un bouquet, les bras long et forts, les pieds épais, quelques verrues dans sa face longue et simiesque.” 14.  French dermatology through the mid-nineteenth century held to a persistent belief that all skin manifestations were constitutional, long after Britain, Germany, and the Low Countries moved away from this model. Crissey, Parish, and Holubar write: “To these men [Ernest Bazin and Alfred Hardy, students of Alibert] there were few if any ‘skin diseases’: all lesions were manfestations of diathesis or constitutional diseases. With respect to two of their favorites, syphilis and the tuberculous diathesis, they were on firm ground, but the rest of their creations—arthritism, herpetism and the like—had no basis in reality” (viv). 15.  One might think of Eliot’s famous interpolation in Middlemarch: “Dorothea— but why always Dorothea? Was her point of view the only possible one with regard to this marriage? I protest against all our interest, all our effort at understanding being given to the young skins that look blooming in spite of trouble; for these too will get faded, and will know the older and more eating griefs which we are helping to neglect” (278). 16.  The story is told in The Fortune of the Rougons. Her father died insane (“mourut fou”), and she is described at eighteen as “plus bizzare” (86), her brain cracked like her father’s: “le cerveau fêlé comme son père” (86). 17.  These comments appear in Zola’s notes for Pot-Bouille (1882).

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18.  As Lacan would say much later, the naked body of the patriarch must not be displayed, as once we see the individual penis, it can no longer claim the symbolic power of the phallus, which depends on mystification. 19.  I agree with Jameson in seeing this trend as arising in concert with the emergence of the “phenomenological body”; but I believe that it arises considerably before midcentury. Jameson sees Balzac as pre-realist, in part because he believes Balzac’s emotions are always clearly defined as signifying specifics. Jameson compares Balzac and Zola to show the development of the affective vocabulary and its importance to realism between the two writers. Jameson suggests that we should “associate rise of affect with the emergence of the phenomenological body in language and representation”— the history of which my project is here trying to advance—“and to historicize a competition between the system of named emotions and the emergence of nameless bodily states which can be documented in literature around the middle of the nineteenth century” (32). He sees Flaubert as the primary example of this kind of scenic attentiveness to affect; “sensory experience . . . is in modern times contingent: if such experience seems to have a meaning, we immediately become suspicious of its authenticity. Balzac, however, will not give up on meaning” [deploying metaphor and metonymy to assign meaning to affective states], whereas in Flaubert, affects “no longer mean anything: they simply exist” ( Jameson 34). I have some difficulty with this phrasing, because in the logic of the literary, everything has meaning and nothing “simply exists.” It may not have clear, determinate or “named” meaning, but its inchoate status itself takes on a signifying function: the reader is invited to assign that meaning. (I think this is in fact probably close to Jameson’s meaning anyway, but in any case it is the angle I wish to take up here.) 20.  Perhaps in these passages’ “scenic” nature, in their emphasis on what Jameson calls the “body’s present,” what we are seeing is a relatively new use of the lyric within narrative, which specifically concentrates on the sensorium of the embodied mind. I am thinking here of the lyric mode (vs. epic or dramatic) as it develops in the same period—focused on mood and subjective impression, usually concentrating on a moment or episode rather than narrative. I mean to frame this as a modal adaptation of elements of the lyric form (first-person poetry), rather than a tightly defined formal phenomenon. 21.  Jameson is careful to note that he is talking about literary representation, not the historical emergence of affect itself, but he also suggests that finding a language of representation about the affective body emerging at this moment also supposes the historical emergence of a certain set of beliefs (or desires?) about the bourgeois body at this historical moment. I would speculate that in some ways this affective model emerges a bit later in France than in the UK, in part because the development of the bourgeois body as universal was redirected by the Revolution, and in part because the individual as an ideal and as the fundamental social and economic unit emerges earlier and differently in England, the first fully industrial-capitalist nation. 22.  Jameson’s own definition of affect is capacious enough to include most physiological manifestations. 23.  Jameson refers to the “appeals to the future” at the end of Doctor Pascal as merely “decorative against the background of the narrative preterite [its historical setting] and the social and personal diseases of the period in question” (74). For

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him, the ending of the “rotten power structure” is undercut by the continuation of “heredity and tainted blood. . . . Society and heredity are the long shadows cast by the mind-body problem; nor does Zola dispose of a pineal gland whereby to hypothesize their causal interactions” (74). Jameson’s innovative reading refers to the findings of Dr. Pascal, wherein he discovers that diseases are about “intensities” rather than individual organ systems, positing that this is the turn to a form focusing on intensities of affects, rather than discrete emotions. Oddly, despite his emphasis on affect, Jameson rarely references Spinoza. But this is a key influence for Zola, as for all French doctors from the eighteenth century onward. Spinoza is also foundational for affect theory. The terminology of affect (affectus) thus derives from Spinoza, who used it as a more comprehensive term for the passions, including those that are confused or unclear. For Spinoza, the mind and the body are mutually constitutive, and the mind is aware of the body because of its changing response to stimuli, to things that affect us. So the mind is constituted by affects, which originate and are experienced in the body. Conatus with respectto the mind is its drive for self-preservation, a drive that includes a desire to improve its “power of action.” This is not teleological (there are no final causes), but simply a kind of Nietzschean drive: it just is. (Things that make us experience negative emotions—pity, for example—diminish the conatus, therefore we attempt to maximize pleasurable affects.) This view of human psychology has much in common with Hobbes. However, its view of psychology and of physiological vitalism continued to be most influential in France, where the medécins philosophes of the eighteenth-century medical schools self-identified as Spinozist. Zola’s science, which Jameson questions, is firmly within a recognizable tradition of Spinozan vitalism. 24.  Much as the New Woman novelists believed that maternal carefulness in mating would overcome the depredations of degeneration caused by masculine sexual incontinence. 4. In

1.  “J’ai observé qu’à la suite du séjour des amphithéâtres, les vents prennent fréquemment une odeur exactement analogue à celle qu’exhalent le6 cadavres en putréfaction. Or, voici comment je me suis assuré que c’est la peau, autant que le poumon, qui absorbe alors les molécules odorantes. J’ai bouché mes narines, et j’ai adapté à ma bouche un tuyau un peu long qui, traversant la fenêtre, me servoit à respirer l’air extérieur. Eh bien, mes vents, après une heure de séjour dans une petite salle de dissection, à côté de deux cadavres très-Fétides, ont présenté une odeur a-peuprès semblable à la leur. J’ai observé aussi que, lorsqu’on touche long-temps des matières fétide, les vents se pénètrent bien plus d’odeur qu’en séjournant seulement dans un air chargé d’exhalaisons cadavéreuses. Donc les absorbans portent d’abord ces exhalaisons dans le sang, qui les transmet ensuite au dehors par la surface muqueuse des intestins: ainsi quand l’urine est absorbée, la salive, les sucsmuqueux, etc., présentent une odeur urineuse” (Bichat, Anatomie générale 694). 2.  Fend reminds us that Bichat arrived to complete his medical study in Paris at the Hôtel-Dieux, Paris’s largest hospital, in June 1794, “at the height of the Terror. Death was everywhere in a clinician’s life at this period: . . . while the guillotine was almost ceaselessly in operation” (Fleshing Out Surfaces 118).

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3.  See Cayleff 38. See also Weiss and Kemble for fuller discussion. 4.  For a detailed discussion, see Ghesquier. 5.  Outside of the home, bathing provided another alternative to a club atmosphere. Although middle-class women also attended public baths, they were much more popular among men, and could be, like clubs, spaces of homosocial bonding for business and pleasure. They could also be perceived as something of an equalizer, at least within the ranks of those who could afford the entry fee. Anthony Trollope’s editor in the short story “The Turkish Bath” (1869) humorously describes being trapped into an interview by an indigent writer, whose scruffy clothing on the street provokes the editor’s pity, but whose superb physique and grand manner command respect in the bath, where his sartorial disadvantages are neutralized by nudity. He spends his last few shillings to enter, as it is the only way to gain access to the editor, who would never otherwise have agreed to see him. (The writer turns out to be insane, unfortunately: a state that proves impossible to diagnose when he is nude.) No doubt these circumstances did not often occur outside of fiction. But the uneasy perception that the nudity of the bath could conceal, rather than reveal, identity was part and parcel of the general understanding of the city as a heterogenous space in which social contact was much less mediated than in the highly controlled social rituals of access that were common in the country or in clubs. In the baths, as in stores, parks, omnibuses, and streets, contact with the social other was unavoidable. If epidemic disease was the tragic story of this contact, then scabies and social discomfort were its comic counterpart. 6.  American culture seems to have embraced water and bathing cures with an enthusiasm unparalleled elsewhere, even by the enthusiastic standards of Britain. 7.  From his 1841 review of Memoirs of the Life of Warren Hastings, First GovernorGeneral of Bengal, by Rev. G. R. Gleig (London, 1841), in Macauley. 8.  Dr. Josef E. Jelinek, who diagnosed the illness as herpetiform dermatitis, wrote that the disease started near the anus, and lead to emaciation. 9.  Later it was purchased—presumably as a trophy—by the royalist SainteHilaire. It was more recently advertised in a waxworks attraction, the Musée Grevin. 10.  Festa notes that there was “remarkable” exchange between the two countries’ literary cultures. It is telling that Laurence Sterne used the term “sentimental” in what he believed to be “a French Way,” whereas his French translator thought the term untranslatably English. In Britain, at least for some, the term was associated with French radicalism by the late 1700s (10). 11.  Greiner discusses the Humean view as well, also coming to the conclusion that most realist novelists are Smithian in focus. However, she also notes, many critics have misrepresented sympathy as a sentimental kind of instant “fellow-feeling”; “Against the standard claim that knowing more and seeing further into the hidden hearts and minds of characters heightens our sympathy . . . , novels . . . are dubious of the tie that binds sympathy to knowledge. What’s more, sympathy resists identification. . . . In those moments when sympathy succeeds in inspiring us to feel with others, it does so because we have undertaken the difficult task of thinking in particular ways about them first” (4). For Greiner, the realists are distinguished less by their extensive lists of objects than by their devotion to the “imaginative social affectivity through which human communities generate the meanings they hold dear. In so doing, it depicts the sympathetic consciousness as the basis of reality itself ” (10).

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12. Jaffe productively complicates the notion of spectacle, noting that the “object” of sympathy always is “displaced into representation” (Scenes of Sympathy 7). The viewer is always projecting a narrative of the self into the space occupied by the object, and this may be even easier in a novel, when the words give us nothing to see but our own projection. Dickens complicates this dynamic even further by giving us (a viewer) a description of other viewers viewing an object of sympathy, inviting multiple identifications and disidentifications before we finalize our sympathetic vision. 13.  I want to quickly make the point here that the fluid metaphor, though widely associated with the Terror in the period, continues to appear in Dickens’s later work in reference to any kind of threat to emotional self-containment. A good example for my purpose here is in David Copperfield—of all his novels perhaps the most “realist” in its focus on Bildung and on the individual, rather than broader historical or social concerns. True to the distinction between sympathy and sentiment that we saw in Tale, the development of mature judgment is presented as an ability to avoid being flooded by sentiment. For example, David makes a bad object choice in Dora as he is—“steeped in Dora . . . saturated through and through. Enough love might have been wrung out of me, metaphorically speaking, to drown anybody in” (474). But this is a “mistaken impulse of an undisciplined heart” (664). Moreover, the couple’s own weakness of will is a snare for those less completely developed individuals in the servant class for whom the middle classes are supposed to act as exemplars. David muses that there is “contagion in us. We infect everyone about us” (693). 14.  Rajan reads Dickens as locating France in a developmental phase prior to that of England, one in which the French have failed to adequately “incorporate sacrificial ritual and notions of the sacred/profane into private expressions of individualism and capitalist exchange” (4). In Rajan’s reading, the free-market narrative of liberal individualism depends upon and is intertwined with narratives of sacrifice and communality explored in Victorian comparative religion and anthropology. 15.  Barnaby Rudge in 1841 would be the other principal example of Dickens dealing with mass disturbances, and again channeling his representation of social disorder through individual female victims, male lust, and, iconically, an “idiot” who represents the tendency of the larger public to be swayed by specious persuasions. That said, the earlier novel doesn’t foreground affect, sympathy, or the body’s surface as Tale does. 5. Flayed

1.  “Thing theory,” as Bill Brown christens it, and its products (collectively perhaps best called “thing studies”), have focused rather heavily on the commodity. However, the recent turn to materiality looks back to earlier studies of the body, a natural object with a cultural history and multiple personalities as commodity, project, and container, vehicle or producer of consciousness. The ultimate dialectic of person and thing is the self ’s relation to the body, which is also the body’s relation to itself (its self ). The reification (thing-ification) of personhood requires an understanding of the body as a material, well, embodiment of the person. The reification of the person has always required various kinds of symbolic investments of the body

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(a broken heart, gut feelings, eyes that are windows to the soul, etc.), but from the Enlightenment onward the body object is no longer fully alienable to consciousness. 2.  Kant, who privileged sight above all as the “noblest” sense, because “furthest removed from the sense of touch” (“Anthropology” 267), still noted that “touch lies in the fingertips and in their nerve papillae. . . . Nature seems to have allotted this organ [the hand] only to the human being, so that he could form a concept from the shape of a body by touching it on all sides” (266). 3.  Serres subscribes to the embryological view, dating from the nineteenth century, that other sense organs derive from the skin. He calls the skin itself the “ ‘sensorium commune’: a sense common to all the senses” (70), seeing also touch as the overarching sense, and other senses subordinated to it. This view has commonalities with Spencer and others. 4.  Bell ascribes the concept of “active touch” to Bichat and tends to use this term throughout his work (Bell, Hand 170). I have used the word “voluntary” here to avoid confusion with later uses of the phrase “active touch.” Bichat uses the term “voluntaire” when he states that Man “surpasses” other animals in touch “because this sense is . . . consequent to them [other senses], and corrects their errors. . . . The sense is voluntary; it supposes reflection in the animal that exercises it,” requiring “a preliminary act of the intellectual functions” (General Anatomy 1: 171; see the original passage in Anatomie générale 1: 147). 5.  Cole sources “Research on sensorimotor integration in the UK, and arguably elsewhere too” to Bell’s Treatise on the Hand; though Sherrington “coined the word proprioception,” “Bell . . . first described movement and position sense” (Cole 46). 6.  “Vital Properties . . . are strongly marked in this [dermoid] system. We might say, that nature by giving an excess of life to this dermoid covering, has wished to establish a striking line of demarcation, and to make us perceive the difference between the inorganic bodies with which its external surface is in contact, and the organized textures that its internal surface covers” (Bichat, General Anatomy 3: 311). 7.  Bell asserts that touch involves the action of a complex circuit: “there is a nerve of sensibility to convey the nervous influence from the muscles towards the sensorium, as well as a nerve of motion for conveying the mandate of the will to the muscles” (Hand 217). This allows humans to get information from “sensation” and simultaneously to “convey the mandate of the will and direct its action. . . . And as for the hand, it is not more the freedom of its action which constitutes its perfection, than the knowledge which we have of these motions, and our consequent ability to direct it with the utmost precision” (220–21). 8.  The discussion of space as fundamental to identification of the self versus the not-self may derive from Kant; the relation of that to touch and sensation was further elaborated through Condillac and Thomas Reid. 9.  The significance of Marsyas as a figure for sound has been amply explored by Steven Connor. But the climax of his story is not a musical one; it is his association with tactile sensation for which we most remember him. Spencer cited the generally received truth in 1855 that overwhelming sensations make it difficult to perceive (Principles of Psychology 281), and Marsyas is a figure in which sensation destroys the sensing capacity. We might say that Marsyas is a victim of sensation so powerful that it dissolves the ability to contemplate anything beyond the self. Thus, Marsyas

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loses his hapticity, his relation to the world, and in so doing loses the fundamental quality of self that is contained in the ability to make that differentiation. The loss of ego boundaries operates as a loss of will, and of mind. It is perhaps significant that Marsyas is often portrayed in Renaissance and later paintings following Titian’s 1575 portrayal as being strung upside down from the tree, as was never the case in classical portrayals. Hanging him upside down in space emphasizes not only his helplessness, but the loss of a proprioceptive sense of the human self as upright in a world of objects to be in contact with and acted upon. His hands are usually bound, of course, close to the body or above it, shrinking his effective sphere of action, but also of his perception. Both Serres and Anzieu comment on this aspect of the Marsyas story. 10.  The midcentury interest in skin and touch was at least partly driven by new anatomical information about how touch worked. In the mid-nineteenth century, microanatomical study produced most of the significant discoveries of sensing structures in the skin still embraced today, and proceeded to prove that different bodies were receptors for different sensations. Doctor and historian Roselyne Rey summarizes the major ones in her History of Pain, including Pacini’s discovery of “tactile corpuscles” in the deep dermis in 1840, later understood to be sensitive to pressure, and Meissner and Wagner’s discovery in 1852 of another receptor closer to the surface, which they identified as sensing touch (Rey 196–97). Additional bodies were discovered by Krause in 1860 and Golgi-Mazzoni in the same decade (Rey 233). Microanatomical technique was sufficiently advanced by the late nineteenth century to see clear distinctions in these bodies’ structures, confirming that there were specific receptors for different kinds of sensations (rather than seeing the difference between pressure and pain, for example, as matters of stimulus intensity). These discoveries led in the 1880s and 1890s to the development of instruments to measure touch (Von Frey’s aesthesiometer, for example—for a full discussion, see Rey 234–35). As Rey points out, it was the identification of these various nerve structures in the dermis that made possible the understanding of distinct sensations operating on distinct receptors, and that “opened the era of research into the dissociation of sensations within the larger category of touch in general” (97). It also clarified the importance of the skin, as opposed to the muscles or viscera, even in sensing pressure and weight. 11.  For a discussion of this belief, see, for example, Smith, Sensing the Past 102–9. 12.  And in an American example, a fable of fetishized animality (a whale with a name, a voyage to harvest a commodity that becomes a revenge quest) begins when Pacific Islander Queequeg comes into a New England inn from going around town with shrunken heads for sale “like a string of inions” (Melville 23). 13.  See Radin (6), for example. 14.  See Radin for a detailed discussion of this in relation to alienable property, contracts, and the market (34–40). 15.  On a related note, Gikandi argues that blackness (and its connection to slavery) was aesthetically crucial to defining the culture of taste and Enlightenment values that they negated (see chapter 7). 16.  All references to Philosophy of Right in this chapter are from the translation by S. W. Dyde. 17.  Radin suggests that British thinkers largely dodged Hegel’s problematic distinction between subject and object. Locke believed that the investment of labor

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conferred property rights on the laborer on materials. The body, for Locke, is coextensive with the thinking (sensing and reflecting) self. Despite the actions of Locke in the Carolinas, he also rules out the legitimacy of slavery, noting that it is simply a state of war, as “no man can by agreement pass over to another that which he hath not in himself—a power over his own life” (165). Mill’s discussion of free will rules out slavery on the grounds that a person cannot alienate their own future free will or that of others (Radin 44), but Locke and Mill do not discuss the body of the slave in terms of the physical limits of the self, though Locke’s axiom comes closer. 18.  Yet, Comte and Victorian thinkers such as Arnold also believed fetishism was a fundamental quality of human society, and suggested that culture supply the place of “primitive” fetishes such as religion. So fetishism could only be transcended through fetishism. 19.  Festa discusses the problem of the slave as an object divested of subject-hood in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Oloudah Equiano at length (132–52). 20.  Shrunken heads enjoyed a vogue among collectors in the nineteenth century, especially from the 1860s on, and several remain in the collections of museums today (including the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia), although many have been repatriated in recent decades. Many seem to have come from the Jivaro people of the Amazon basin area, but tattooed ones were largely from New Zealand. The Jivaro shrunken head was actually a kind of skin sack made from the skin of the face and head, cured and sewn shut, and then reshaped into a “face” shape. It is hard to know what these objects meant in their original context, but we do know what the Europeans and Americans who collected them thought. Many believed that they were created ritualistically to give powers of prophecy as well as control over the spirit of the dead warrior; anthropologists thought they were trophies of war and symbols of power over the boundaries of the sacred and the everyday. Some collectors had anthropological interests; others saw them simply as bizarre curios. New Zealand heads were tattooed and preserved in a similar way. The heads were severed, hollowed, padded to hold the shape of the face, then dried and smoked. The demand outran supply, and there was concern that people were killed outside of the ordinary depredations of war simply to provide shrunken heads for the European and North American curio market. Fortunately many of these were actually animal skins—often sloth or goat. Both Europeans and Maoris accused the other group of this practice. In a 2006 memo to its trustees, (http://www.britishmuseum.org/pdf/00%2012%20 Briefing%20note%20to%20Trustees%20dated%2023.11.06.pdf; accessed April 19, 2012), the British Museum acknowledged New Zealand’s request for repatriation of seven “preserved, tattooed heads (mokomokai)” acquired “primarily in the 19th and early 20th century, but possibly (in the case of the ‘NZ’ numbered heads) as early as the end of the 18th century.” The memo observes that four heads show evidence of “post-mortem tattooing,” suggesting they may have been altered for the trade. The museum notes that “The first recorded sale of heads was to Joseph Banks, during Cook’s first visit to New Zealand, 20 January 1770” and that the trade picked up in the nineteenth century, especially 1820–31, when “hundreds” were traded for muskets by Maori, who provoked quarrels in order to justify beheading the losers for sale. The memo also cites as credible an 1863 story of slaves being tattooed and killed for sale, and that “some scholars have suggested the heads with post-mortem tattooing were done so to ‘improve’ them for sale.” Again, shrunken heads were unique objects,

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and those purchasing them believed the objects had ritual ties to their original creators. They should not have been, by the logic of Victorian culture, for sale. That, of course, is what made them so desirable. In addition to their cultural otherness, they offered the paradoxical pleasure of ownership of the unique in a commodity culture increasingly tied to mass production. 21.  Bookbinding with skin was only still done in the nineteenth century with any frequency by anatomists, who sometimes bound their anatomy atlases in the skin of their subjects and who thought of it as an appropriate homage to the subjects memorialized therein. Many such books can be seen today in anatomy museums. 22.  Anzieu remarks in passing that Balzac’s Peau de chagrin is the allegory of one of the mythemes of Marsyas: the skin that consumes itself or is destroyed by another skin by using up its life-force, represented by the expanse of the skin itself (52). This can be associated with vengeance against the one who seizes the skin of the other. 23. Kingsley champions religiously inflected materialism, reversing the traditional hierarchy between the brothers. In The Water-Babies, he has his good fairy (Nature) tell the boy-hero that he must be like Epimetheus, and complete his quest by walking backward. He should allow his dog to lead him, because his dog moves based on instinct rather than human foresight (150). Prometheus, who has foresight, “invented all sorts of wonderful things” that don’t work (151); whereas the slow Epimetheus comes out ahead: “Prometheus . . . would have nothing to do with pretty Pandora and her box. . . . So Epimetheus got a good deal of trouble, . . . but he also got the three best things in the world—a good wife, and experience, and hope. . . . stupid old Epimetheus went working and grubbing on, and . . . began to make things which would work . . . til at last he grew rich as a Jew and fat as a farmer. . . . And his children are the men of science, who get good lasting work done in the world; but the children of Prometheus are the fanatics, and the theorists, and the bigots . . . who go telling silly people what will happen, instead of looking to see what has happened already” (151–52). 24.  A naturalist who identifies the animal source of the skin gives him the history of the Persian onager, a creature of unusual wildness, ability to run, and, according to some, sexual appetites: “Moses forbade that it should be coupled with its own species, and the onager is yet more famous for the prostitutions of which it was the object, . . . often mentioned by the prophets of the Bible” (Balzac, Wild Ass’s Skin 218). In the book of Job, God names the onager as an animal created to be an embodiment of free will, hostile to domestication: “Who set the wild onager free?” he demands of Job rhetorically, from within the whirlwind. “To whom I have [given] the wilderness for a home?” Jeremiah identifies the female onager as a symbol of lust. Like the onager, man hankers after freedom (and for Balzac, woman after sex). But all this exercise of will has a price. Both the social contract and the wilderness have their costs and compensations. As Aesop has it, the onager sees a donkey in the sunshine and compliments him on his sleek, well-fed appearance. Later, however, when he sees the driver beating the heavily laden donkey, he retracts his admiration in recognition of the high price the donkey pays for his prosperity. 25.  Balzac is referring to a favorite source: Laurence Sterne, who in Tristram Shandy attributes to Hilarion the ascetic the habit of calling his body and its appetites an ass that must be beaten so it does not kick: “my father was always making of an

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expression of Hilarion the hermit; who, in speaking of his abstinence, his watchings, flagellations, and other instrumental parts of his religion—would say—tho’ with more facetiousness than became an hermit—‘That they were the means he used, to make his ass (meaning his body) leave off kicking.’ . . . he never used the word passions once—but ass always instead of them—So that he might be said truly, to have been upon the bones, or the back of his own ass, or else of some other man’s, during all that time.—But for my father’s ass—oh! mount him—mount him—mount him—(that’s three times, is it not?)—mount him not:—’tis a beast concupiscent—and foul befal the man, who does not hinder him from kicking.” 26.  “Deux verbes expriment toutes les formes que prennent ces deux causes de mort: VOULOIR et POUVOIR. Entre ces deux termes de l’action humaine il est une autre formule dont s’emparent les sages, et je lui dois le bonheur et ma longévité. VOULOIR nous brûle et POUVOIR nous détruit; mais SAVOIR laisse notre faible organisation dans un perpétuel état de calme.” 27.  “En deux mots, j’ai placé ma vie, non dans le coeur qui se brise, ou dans les sens qui s’émoussent mais dans le cerveau qui ne s’use pas et qui survit à tout.” 28.  Swedenborg is quite specific on many occasions that Sight must collaborate with Touch for a full apprehension of the world, and even describes insight as a kind of “touch.” The refusal of touch here suggests that the merchant is not engaging with the world as he should be. 29.  Balzac continues, “It is a mistake to suppose that the great dispute which has lately made a stir, between Cuvier and Geoffroi Saint-Hilaire, arose from a scientific innovation. Unity of structure, under other names, had occupied the greatest minds during the two previous centuries (“Introduction” xli). Balzac references Swedenborg, as well as the “greatest authors on Natural History—Leibnitz, Buffon, Charles Bonnet, etc.,” comparing Leibnitz’s “monads” (xli) to the “ ‘organic molecules’ of Buffon” and Needham’s “vegetative force” (xlii) to conclude that structure throughout the animal kingdom is indeed unified, but sides with Saint-Hilaire’s natural theological approach. Speciation occurs from the “environment in which it [The Animal] is obliged to develop. . . . this system, which is indeed in harmony with our preconceived ideas of Divine Power, will be the eternal glory of Geoffroi Saint-Hilaire, Cuvier’s victorious opponent on this point of higher science” (xlii). Hilaire’s (1772–1844) evolutionary theory reflected his Deism; his views aligned with natural theology. 30.  Roughly, Bichat argued that sensibility leads to contractility in the tissue, although this was carefully elaborated with exceptions and caveats. When the balance of sensibility and contractility are deranged, a loss of vital force ensues, as life is a perpetual struggle against the forces of dissolution. Moreover, there are two kinds of life: animal life, which involves the entire system of the organism and its consciousness, and organic life, which is the unconscious life of the tissues: each of these kinds of life has sensibility and contractility. 31.  In this sense, it has some relation to early scientific gothic such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, another Faustian tale, which sites the supernatural right in the center of scientific advancement and also founds its critique in the problematic repurposing of body objects. However, it is distinct in that the gothic object itself is produced by magic, not science.

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32.  This story offers two fetishes: one from the Pacific Islands that unsettles its recipient, and one made from the living body of a British sailor who is captured, partially flayed, burned, and tattooed, and having survived, becomes “a god” or fetish object for his tormentors in his own right. He is finally rescued and attempts to return to London, but, having “gone native” in a sense, keeps trying to act like a god after he enters England. 33.  In contrast, the more ordinary commercial object taken out of a sacred, primitive context may also unleash imperial conflict in the metropole, but through human agency rather than magical means: for example, the diamond of Collins’s novel The Moonstone. 34.  See Matus for an extended discussion of Victorian understandings of trauma. 35.  The original quote is from Voltaire’s letter to Madame du Deffand, 1766: “Your nation is divided into two species: the one of idle monkeys, who mock at everything, and the other of tigers, who tear” (qtd. in Hayward, 168). 36.  For detailed discussions of degeneration’s relation to idiocy see Pick, and also McDonagh. 37.  Mrs. Macallan states that “It was originally the manor-house of the district. Dexter purchased it many years since in one of his freaks of fancy. He has no old family associations with the place” (Collins, Law 189–90). 38.  And one Collins uses elsewhere; for example, in No Name, a con artist keeps a list of identities as “Skins to Jump Into.” 39.  Nessus’s shirt was poisoned with the centaur’s blood; Dexter is a “modern centaur.” 40. The threat of paralysis may suggest either a decadent hereditary or an acquired syphilitic illness. 41.  These probably included Saint Bartholomew (also sometimes known as the apostle Nathaniel), who was flayed alive, miraculously lived, and testified his faith through the very end of this process (by the mercy of God), and with the usual ironies of canonization, became the patron saint of tanners. He is often represented, as by Michelangelo in The Last Judgement, in the mode of the Renaissance écorché—jauntily holding his skin like a cape. The other, a deacon named Lawrence, gave away the church’s wealth to the poor, and when the emperor Valerian demanded his riches, brought to the emperor the poor and crippled. Valerian commanded him to be roasted alive before his flock, and Lawrence showed courage and joked from the gridiron, asking his executioners to “turn me over,” as he was done on the one side. He is thus the patron saint of cooks (and, according to some, comedians), and it is not surprising that Dexter would favor him, since cooking is one of his particular avocations (in one long scene he stews Valeria a decadent truffle in burgundy). The saints are one of a series entitled “Illustrations of the Passions,” which include scenes of animal torture and vivisection. The other painting series refers to “episodes in the life of the Wandering Jew,” and the Jew (who supposedly mocked Jesus on his way to Golgotha and was punished by being forced to wander the earth until the Second Coming) is explicitly conflated with the legend of the Flying Dutchman, the plague ship manned by corpses and forced to sail forever without rest—a frequent conflation in the period’s literature. The Jew is thus also caught between the repetitions of history, between the first and second comings of Christ.

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6. Flaying

1.  Bell’s journal is held in the special collections in the Senate House Library, University of London. 2.  The pipes represented are not an aulos. Caracci’s portrayal is currently listed by the Palazzo Doria as Pan e Dafni, rather than Marsyas and Olympus. It may have been otherwise described in Bell’s time, or Bell may simply have been primed to see Marsyas. 3.  Though Friedrich Creuzer explicitly identifies Dionysus as a Christ antetype in 1820, and as identified with purification through suffering, this view was not widely adopted in Britain until late in the century. Zonana offers an excellent reading of German Romantic views of chthonian deities, and their influences on Arnold. She observes that “Creuzer’s Symbolik stresses the centrality of Dionysus in Near Eastern mythology, as well as the importance of the conflict between Dionysian and Apollonian cults, a conflict Creuzer believes was tempered, if not resolved, in Orphism and the Mysteries” (63). 4.  Derrida addresses the Continental Enlightenment’s failure to integrate both “the animal” as a category and actual animals into their analyses, but he notes in passing that one philosopher who asked the right question was Jeremy Bentham, who concentrated not on what the animal is but on animals’ capacity for suffering (Derrida, Animal That Therefore I Am 27). (In fact, La Mettrie, who did not believe in any divide between the human and animal, also concentrated on the capacity for feeling, and believed that feeling was itself thought.) For natural theology, of course, suffering—even to extinction—posed a very basic theological problem. Human suffering had always factored in theological discussions of evil, and had been variously blamed on sin, evil forces, or an incompletely understood benign plan for individual humans. Evolution and vitalism not only posed the possibility that Descartes’s machine-animals suffered as humans did, but that suffering might be purposeless at the individual level: as Tennyson lamented, “Are God and Nature then at strife / . . . / So careful of the type she seems, So careless of the single life.” (Worse, he answers his own question: Nature answers, “I care for nothing, all shall go.”) Paley believed that the created world was a place of more happiness than not, while agreeing with Malthus that excess fertility and consequent starvation were part of the divine plan. But the dismal science was a high hurdle for the belief in the essential goodness of nature. Darwin’s faith eventually foundered upon it, in part because he saw that many species had died out entirely, and in part because he saw a continuity between the experience of man and animal that Paley did not. Paley did go to some lengths to compare what he saw as different human and animal experiences of suffering and death, and to show that animals’ lives were more pleasurable than painful—even unnecessarily pleasurable—and argued that this was evidence of the Creator’s goodness. For example, hunger would be sufficient to cause creatures to eat without enjoyment, and yet both animals and humans enjoy favorite foods. This utilitarian focus on the hedonic calculus in British philosophy seems to coevolve with natural theology’s attempt to draw nature into a scheme of divine goodness, as opposed to Enlightenment rationalists’ view of nature as opposed to human reason, or earlier religious views of nature as fallen and tainted. This British tendency, to assess suffering as an absolute evil in itself, perhaps contributes to the insular growth

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of sympathy for animals in the period—as did the persistent challenge posed by evolution to human exceptionalism. 5.  The emphasis on a chthonian Dionysus come to Victorian classicists through German mythographers and especially Creuzer’s 1820 Symbolik. It came to a broader late Victorian readership both through Euripides’s Bacchae and through Pater’s 1876 “A Study of Dionysus.” Pater observes that the conception of Dionysus, “a dual god of both summer and winter,” became “almost identical with that of Demeter.” Regarding Marsyas, Anzieu remarks that one of the mythemes associated with the story is resurgence: the complete skin represents a shield, and seizing it brings magical protective properties, but also exposes the self to revenge. A complete skin allows for the possibility of return and continued vitality (51–52). 6.  See Rajan for a discussion of the dependence of economic liberal ideas of exchange on a logic and rhetoric of sacrifice. She argues that late nineteenth-century anthropologists position the “atomized, self-interested capitalism” as the “product of modernity’s break” from earlier “communal . . . values,” while simultaneously describing this individual as a protagonist in “primitive sacrificial rituals” (40). This subtle and productive reading also tracks the way narratives of sacrifice embody “opposed values that develop at particular junctures within human history” (40), both in E. B. Tylor (1865) and James Frazer (1890–1915). This discourse parallels and emerges from the comparative religion discourse discussed in this chapter. Frazer’s dying god, in Rajan’s reading, offers a communal sacrifice for economic advancement (say, as the harvest god whose death brings food), but also as a representation of society moving toward industrial capitalism (48). 7.  Interestingly, the definition of suffering is never explored. Despite the fact that the period sees significant gains in the understanding of skin receptors of sensation, and a widespread questioning among physicians and anthropologists of whether pain is universally experienced in the same way (see, for example, chapter 8 discussion of Lombroso’s belief that sensitivity to pain differs by race and sex), the authors who use the Marsyas myth all take for granted the audience’s understanding of Marsyas’s pain as something universal, with which sympathy is therefore easily possible. 8.  Bell discusses Laocoon, that other limit case for the representation of man in extremis and the benchmark for aesthetic discussions of the topic since Gotthold Lessing’s 1766 essay, “Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry” (translated into English in 1836). Virgil describes Laocoon screaming as he is crushed, but the famous sculpture depicts him with his mouth open only slightly. Lessing argues that this depiction is because an open mouth would be less beautiful. Bell counters that it is not unrealistic or disgusting for Laocoon to have his mouth open (not to scream, but to gasp for air). But Homer, he feels, is quite right in having him not “bellow” as Virgil does; “Laocoon suffers in silence” (Bell, Anatomy of and Philosophy of Expression 1824, 136). In fact, Bell sketches what appears to be a statue of Laocoon (the eyes are empty of irises or pupils) to illustrate the expression of extreme pain even in his 1806 edition (Anatomy of Expression 112). For Bell, in the neoclassical tradition, an aesthetic representation of pain must show self-control, morality, or transcendence. In the Christian Renaissance tradition, suffering saints are generally drawn looking toward heaven, their bodies not contorted. Only deserving sufferers, such as the unrepentant thief on the cross, are painted as deformed by torture.

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9.  Kant’s attitude toward the animal, or sensibility (as opposed to reason), insisted on the need for a violent abnegation and “sacrifice” of animality, which lacks the “dignity” of humans, who are an end in themselves rather than just a means, “a price above any . . . market price” (Derrida, Animal That Therefore I Am 100). Derrida points out that Kant’s “sacrificial cruelty [is so] . . . ferocious when it comes to the animal that some, such as Adorno, . . . denounce it as extreme violence, even . . . sadism” (100). 10.  Hegel, however, does not enshrine the notion of the individual’s agency that later readers often did. For Hegel, the individual is merely the unwitting bearer of the Spirit’s intentions. He writes, “great men in history . . . have derived their purposes . . . from a concealed fount—one which has not attained . . . to phenomenal, present existence—from that inner Spirit, still hidden beneath the surface, impinging on the outer world as on a shell, bursts it in pieces. . . . Such individuals had no consciousness of the general Idea they were unfolding. . . . When their object is attained they fall off like empty hulls from the kernel” (Philosophy of History 30–31). Note the language of individual as a surface that is removed in the fulfillment of history. 11.  The later nineteenth century folds a racial model of stadial development onto this, unsurprisingly. Michael Field’s poem on the Perugino Apollo and Marsyas in the Louvre imagines the painter teaching his viewers to see Marsyas as Unapprehending,  Absorbed, the brown, inferior man, On his tune spending All honest power, believes he can Put the young shepherd-god to shame. Scrutinise and hate His spiritless brows, the red down on his pate. (Field, “Apollo and Marsyas,” Sight and Song 87–88) I am indebted to Marion Thain for drawing my attention to this poem. 12. Schertz discusses the iconography of the “earliest known representation of Marsyas in Rome,” a no-longer-extant statue in the Forum Romanum, also called the Forum Marsyas, tracing how Marsyas became a symbol of liberty. Many nineteenth-century writers refer to the existence of this statue. Nichols describes its location and explains that Marsyas was a symbol of liberty (71). Julia famously defied her father, then emperor, and “sold her favors” in the Forum under Marsyas; the tradition is that she garlanded the statue in celebration. The association of Dionysus with political liberty and the common people is mentioned by Pater, though he rejects the link; Pater remarks that “some . . . suspected Dionysus of a secret democratic interest; though indeed he was a liberator only of men’s hearts” (“Study of Dionysus” 15, Pater’s emphasis; originally published in 1876). Some nineteenth-century writers interpreted the presence of a statue of Marsyas in the Forum as an example of the dangers of challenging state power; others note that it may be from the Phrygian legend of Marsyas rather than the Marsyas and Apollo legend, and may simply represent something like fertility, or plenty. 13.  In fact, Apollo was said to have been taught divination by Pan. See Anthon; see also Small. Small identifies the conflict between Apollo and Marsyas as being “between an augural Marsyas and a prophetic Apollo over the right to practice divination” (85), though it is not clear that Victorians would have had precisely that

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reference in mind. Whereas Marsyas’s type of divination (haruspicy) was associated locally with other figures (for example, the Etruscan figure Tages; see chapter 9), Apollo’s form of prophecy was the sibylline form, that of a disembodied voice. Marsyas’s immersion in nature and connection to water give us a more embodied and unmediated truth, whereas Apollo’s truth is disembodied, voiced in sibylline riddles, requiring interpretation. By the later nineteenth century, the associations of Marsyas as a river deity with prophecy were remarked, though not discussed widely. 14.  Evangelista, Levin, and Bizzotto are other notable exceptions. 15. Evangelista states that “Winckelmann’s Apollonian classicism” was the principal influence on Hellenism in Europe, popularized in England by Arnold and Ruskin. He sees this as unchanged until Pater published “A Study of Dionysus” in 1876. Pater’s other work in the 1880s “tried to create a place within Classicism for what was traditionally perceived as anti-classical or romantic, for the . . . irrational and fleshy side of the Greek imagination” (Evangelista, “Revolting Mistake” xx). Evangelista also notes the parallels between Pater and Nietzsche, and suggests that the two authors present “a parallel reaction against what was perceived to be ‘Winckelmann’s bias’ ” (xx). Evangelista notes in passing the parallels to Christ in Pater’s Dionysus, but in tracing a homoerotic lineage from Winckelmann through the Oxford Hellenists, he does not explore the richer and more varied sources of Oxford’s engagement with Dionysus. 16.  τραγωδία or trag(o)-aoidia¯. 17. Benthien also discusses Saint Bartholomew and Sisamnes. The Sisamnes story is not very popular in nineteenth-century Britain, being cited only occasionally simply as an example of stereotypical Oriental cruelty. 18.  In the invocation of canto 1 of the Paradiso, lines 13–14 and 19–21, Dante writes: O buono Appollo, a l’ultimo laboro fammi del tuo valor si’ fatto vaso, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Entra nel petto mio, e spira tue si’ come quando Marsia traesti de la vagina de le membra sue. 19.  There are still many later representations of Marsyas as a victim to his inability to live up to his own artistic expectations. The Welsh poet Lewis Morris’s version, in The Epic of Hades (1877), emphasizes the artist’s inevitable lot as sacrifice, in a retelling that both denigrates Marsyas’s achievement and advances his hubris as something noble and necessary. Delighted and overwhelmed by Apollo, Marsyas decries his own “earthy” song (89), and declares himself happy (perhaps like Dante) to give up his life for the experience of the god’s singing: For to a pine They bound me willing, and with cruel stripes Tore me, and took my life. But from my blood Was born the poets’ race . . . I do not blame

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Phoebus, or Nature which has set this bar Betwixt success and failure, . . . Only suffering draws The inner heart of  song and can elicit The perfumes of  the soul. (pp. 91–92) Even in this very traditional interpretation, however, there is ambiguity. Marsyas is a “failure,” but he boasts that he is a “high failure”: it is hinted that all poets must first fail and be tortured to produce their best work. Suffering is truth, and he who suffers the most, perhaps, wins. 20.  As Benthien notes, the Marsyas theme reemerges powerfully in German twentieth-century culture—which supports the significance of this figure as a way to think through recent historical trauma. Robinson examines the role of the skin in twentieth-century discussions of German politics. His texts fall outside the historical field of my own study, but his reading of Niklas Fühmann’s 1970s mythical stories, and especially his “Marsyas,” is a useful and provocative discussion of how the figure is addressed in late twentieth-century German culture. 21.  The Pantheon was converted from the remodeled Abbey of St. Genevieve completed in 1790, then converted into a secular monument by the first Revolution, then back to a church, then to a Pantheon again by the 1848 Committee. 22.  Bohde notes that Saint Bartholomew in Michelangelo’s painting has the face of the artist on the flayed skin, and that this may reflect a tradition of seeing the true self or soul as being freed through sacrifice of the skin (223–25). Bohde links the preoccupation of cinquecento artists with the skin as separate from an interior self that it conceals to the political uncertainty of the period (32–37), a link that I would argue foreshadows some similar concerns about the truthfulness of surface beginning again in the French Revolutionary period. 23.  Flayings of Marsyas more often start with the legs. Saint Bartholomew is often represented with the hand being flayed first. I am indebted to Gemma Angel for this insight (pers. comm., March 2017). 24.  Ariadne, who was the guardian of the labyrinth in which her half brother the Minotaur was contained, saved Theseus from the creature and fled with him to Naxos, where (depending on the version of the myth) he either abandoned her in her sleep or was led away by Athena, leaving Dionysus to claim Ariadne. 25.  Benthien notes that the fully flayed figure in the premodern period is rarely female (89–92). She concludes, having surveyed a broad variety of contexts, “that the flayed woman is no longer a woman” (89). Female identity can be identified with either the body’s liquid, fecund “depths,” or its lovely unbroken surface, “but not in the powerful and vigorous, though profane, intervening layers of muscle and tissue” (89). One might add that because physical courage is not supposedly the purview of women in the nineteenth century, and because a male god flaying a woman would be as inappropriate as a goddess engaging in any such nastiness, a female Marsyas is less imaginable than she would perhaps have been in the medieval period, when the dismembered Catherine strolled through paintings with her wheel, accompanied by Lucy and her little saucer of eyeballs. Certainly in the nineteenth century, there is a deep gender divide in the literature and to some extent in the national traditions:

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when women are flayed, it is punishment; when men are flayed, they are ennobled by their suffering. (To generalize by nation, the French fiction writers flay their women, and the British their men.) In poetry, the tradition continues and heightens the tendency I argue emerges in midcentury in Arnold: the flayer flays himself, attempting to achieve transformation—though, now, often it is transformation into, rather than from, the Dionysian. 26.  Compare the relevant text from Hegel, in which the emergence of the concept of the spiritual is shown in the development of Egyptian symbols that combine animal and human: “The hidden meaning—the Spiritual—emerges as a human face from the brute. The multiform Sphinxes, with a lion’s body and a virgin’s head” are exemplary of this inquiry into “the meaning of the spiritual.” The realm of the Spirit, of freedom, is first understood as the realm of death through which Osiris and similar figures must pass. Egyptian religion holds in tension the contradiction of the “Spirit sunk in Nature and the impulse to liberate it.” In Greece, these elements interpenetrated each other. Pan represents the promptings of Nature then shaped to the uses of Spirit—but the Spirit is still not “absolute” or independent of form: “This degradation of Nature is the turning point” of all mythology, from the triumph of the Olympians over the Titans onward (Philosophy of History 213). 27.  Hegel’s influence on Pater has been well documented, and Pater’s use of Dionysian-Apollonian antithesis is cataloged in Lenaghan’s thorough 1961 study. Lenaghan sees Pater suggesting the possibility of synthesis in particular individuals in such stories as “Duke Carl of Rosenmold,” and “Emerald Uthwart,” as well as, of course, Marius the Epicurean: “In Apollo Pater sees the concentration of mortal achievement, an ideal human development, and in Dionysus he senses the power of a massive vitality external to man and sees in it the promise of the continuity of life in nature” (73). Interestingly, despite Pater’s general preference for Apollo, Lenaghan suggests that Dionysus offers “spiritual breadth,” as opposed to the “depth and purity” of Apollo (73). He argues that “Marius bears the Dionysian imprint . . . particularly in . . . ‘a sympathy for all creatures, . . . [and] religious veneration for life as such’ ” (82–83). 28.  Arnold had some familiarity with Hegel, but was not nearly as interested in him as Pater was. DeLaura cites the two most significant influences on Arnold’s Hellenism as Goethe and Herder (DeLaura 185 and passim). ApRoberts provides a detailed discussion of the influence of Spinoza and Herder on Arnold, especially Herder’s humanist theory of history, which he preferred to Hegel’s more emphatically divine teleology. Still, as Mark Allison elegantly makes clear, despite Arnold’s disbelief in a resurrected Christ, his thought still tends toward the teleological. Arnold defended organized religion and Christianity’s tendency to promote right conduct, but stripped it of its central doctrines (miracles, the resurrection, etc.). However, he hated what he saw as the Liberal tendency to be antireligious. In 1880, he identifies himself as a “Liberal of the future” (“Future of Liberalism” 138), arguing that eventually Liberalism will be permanently established in power. Here, he explicitly rejects a permanent state of flux, political or otherwise: “Instinctively, however slowly, the human spirit struggles toward the light” (141) or “true civilization,” which is “perfection” (160). For Arnold, then, there was indeed an end of history, millennial in its essential nature, and rooted in the values if not the doctrines of the Christian worldview.

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29.  Callicles is the advocate of pleasure and power in Plato’s Gorgias. Callicles mentions Gorgias in Arnold’s poem, and praises the Sophists, whom Gorgias represents in Plato’s dialogue. 30.  Pytho is another chthonic Typho figure, the dragon of Pythia, who guarded the shrine of the mother-earth goddess Gaia whom Apollo overthrew when he took her temple for his oracle at Delphi. 31.  More recently, Jolly has noted the same point. The problem has no solution, thus rendering it for Arnold in 1853 “ ‘poetically faulty’ . . . He [Arnold] described these situations as ‘painful, not tragic’ ” (30). Yet, one might say this is precisely the Hegelian concept of tragedy. 32.  Jolly’s article is part of a recent trend (exemplified also by Louis) that traces the Dionysian element through midcentury. She sees Empedocles as identifying with chthonian forces against Apollo. She offers a Nietzschean reading of the poem, disregarding the temporal problem that has discouraged many prior scholars from reading the poem in these terms. Tracing the roots of this discourse to the Romantics obviates some of this difficulty ( Jolly 22). Schneider, however, in 1972 also reads Empedocles as rejecting Apollo and at least pitying Marsyas. She, following Müller, sees Empedocles as embracing pre-Olympic, Orphic religion; however, she argues that Marsyas is in fact more identified with Cybele than Dionysus (Schneider 35). I would say that the nineteenth century conflates the two, and that Jolly is likely right that the source for this conflation is at least in part Creuzer. Schneider’s article is particularly useful in that it highlights the sympathy for human suffering thought to be missing in Olympian religion. 33.  Levin notes that Apollo was seen even by the Romantics as a sometimes cruel god of change and uncertainty. His recent reading of Arnold’s poem also identifies Empedocles with Marsyas, though we differ on Apollo’s role. Levin suggests that “Like Marsyas, Empedocles is punished for his vanity” in contending as a “stoic rationalist” with the power of music represented by Callicles, who, like Apollo, is unaware of Empedocles’s death at the end (Levin 27–28). Levin does trace much of the period’s affection for Apollo to the German mythographers, including Max Müller, who had studied Hegel’s ideas at Leipzig before he came to Oxford. Müller believed that Apollo and Dionysus captured two attributes of the same deity. 34.  Priestman argues that critics have not sufficiently considered the importance of Lucretius before Darwin. Priestman cites in particular Frank M. Turner’s influential account. Turner argued that Darwin’s challenge to orthodox Christianity “stirred a major mid-Victorian controversy over Lucretius, with Darwinian/atomist materialists led by John Tyndall claiming him as a philosophical forebear,” whereas “liberal Christians” used Lucretius for their own purposes “on the grounds that his daring challenge to pagan religion left a perfect Christianity-shaped hole” (Priestman 298–99). Priestman argues persuasively that this overlooks the importance of Lucretius as a positive, even optimistic figure for the Romantics, but notes that it is still only “a decade or so after Shelley’s death [that] Lucretius began to be read as a tragic figure.” 35.  Earlier, Common Sense thinker Shaftesbury rejected Lucretius’s atheism, even while he endorsed Lucretius’s praise of the beauty of nature (199, 353 n. 9, 352). 36.  Connor, in a chapter published separately online from his major work on skin, considers Marsyas in detail, mostly from the perspective of the auditory component

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of the legend. Apollo wins either by playing the lyre upside down or by adding his voice. Connor notes that in Europe wind instruments have been considered less cultured than strings, and that “the nobility of the lyre comes largely from the fact that it allows simultaneous speech or song.” He builds on the work of critic Bernadette Leclerque-Neveu to show that the lyre, made from animal guts, displays human transformation of nature in a more pronounced way than the use of found objects such as reed pipes, and observes that Ovid’s description of the flaying, which focuses on the stringiness of the tendons exposed when Marsyas’s skin is ripped away, shows that underneath he is “all lyre” himself: “To skin Marsyas is to remind him in the most forcible way possible that he is now matter rather than form.” Finally, Connor builds on Nietzsche’s reading to observe that the lyre is based on distinctness of notes, just as Apollo’s singing focuses on the word, whereas the Dionysian flute “embodied . . . the principle of dissolution into unity” (Connor, “Windbags and Skinsongs”). Here again, we see the theme of continuity between Apollo and Marsyas—in his challenge with the flute, Marsyas is exposed as truly the very instrument of Apollo, the lyre. 37.  Bohde persuasively argues that this can be seen earlier even in Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas, though she also notes that this is against the grain of most interpretations in the period. In this painting, she believes, “the role of the observer and the observed oscillate, but also that of victim and perpetrator: at the side of the huge satyr, the kneeling god appears small, and his brutal torture appears ineffective” (16). She links this to Titian’s avant-garde use of the surface, which shows the skin as “glowing” rather than opening to free an inner soul (19). She reads Titian’s choices as highlighting his critique of the Apollonian association with the emphasis on form in the disegno tradition, in favor of the unity of form and material. 38.  As Dowling’s Hellenism and Homosexuality also suggests. 39.  Stirling was a Scottish-educated physician who gave up his practice to travel to Germany to study Hegel because he was reputed to reconcile philosophy with religion. Stirling’s essay “On Materialism” was published in 1868. 40.  Pater’s Hegelianism is examined at length by DeLaura. The influence of Creuzer’s Symbolik und Mythologie der Alten Völker, in which it is argued that it is actually the Eleusinian mysteries that prepare the way for Christianity with their focus on sacrifice, pain, death, and rebirth, is persuasively established by Louis in Persephone Rises (6–8 and passim). Louis shows a substantial mid-Victorian engagement with these ideas, and that often they were framed within a view of the Olympians as insufficiently sympathetic with human pain. She identifies 1859–66 as a time in which there was a “revulsion” against the Olympian lack of sympathy and connection, in Arnold, Tennyson, Victor Hugo, and Swinburne (14–17), and the 1870s through the early twentieth century as the period of “the triumph of the mysteries,” spanning Pater through Frazer’s Golden Bough and Jane Ellen Harrison, the leader of the Cambridge Ritualists—by which time the Christian god (the Father, at least) had come to be identified with those remote Olympians as well (Louis, Persephone Rises 17–24). Connor discusses Pater’s interest in the Orphic version of the Dionysus myth as incomplete (that is, without a clear singular source) and therefore highly generative (Connor, Book of Skin 214–15). He sees Pater’s reworking of the Apollo and Dionysus myth as responding to Max Müller’s suspicion of poetry and rejection of myth as degenerate by using fictional reworkings of myth to generate more subtle and

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productive meanings. This allows for a use of myth closer to (but not completely embracing) the typological reading. 41.  Pater writes this in a time in which he was denounced as a hedonist and under suspicion of homosexuality, rejected by his old mentor, Benjamin Jowett, and denied an academic post he expected in 1874. For a full discussion, see Inman. One might read this as an embrace of the Hegelian Dionysus as antithesis that resists illegitimate authority; certainly, such a reading offers additional reasons that Wilde might have made a parallel identification with a Dionysian figure while in prison. 42.  Bizzotto argues that Pater’s engagement with Dionysus and Apollo was foundational for later decades, as “both gods became objects of revived attention. In the works of several artists of the time it is possible to discern a Dionysian-Apollonian paradigm epitomising the antithetical forces constantly operating in the course of history” (n.p.). She works from Dellamora’s observation that from the time of Winckelmann’s 1764 History of Ancient Art the gods’ opposition had been recognized as a form of “congruence”—that is, they were shown to be two sides of the same process. However, as she remarks, Pater never read Nietzsche, and the emergence of similar concepts in Nietzsche and Pater (and later Swinburne) likely simply suggests how widespread these concepts were in the classicism of the mid-nineteenth century—and how influential was the impact of German Romanticism on those readings (Bizzotto n.p.). 43.  Dellamora notes in passing that the central portion of “Portrait” is a retelling of the Dionysian sacrifice myth—the beautiful artist, torn to pieces by the crowd enchanted by his secret—and remarks that Wilde claims a kinship between ancient Greek times and the English Renaissance against the claims Pater makes in his sacrificial Dionysus story, “Denys L’Auxeterre,” for thirteenth-century France as the recurrence of the Hellenic period. Dellamora’s principal concern is tracing a discourse of homoeroticism, however, and so he does not pursue the mythical reading. 44.  For example, Ellman’s Oscar Wilde continues to take this position, though it should be noted that Wilde never uncritically endorses this in his writings. Moreover, when he does seem to endorse it, he is using it in a more narrowly theatrical and artistic sense, rather than in the sense it has in De Profundis, where it is a metaphor for living life as society expects. 45.  Evangelista reads this well: “In De Profundis, Wilde is strongly attracted to the figure of Christ as the supreme image of ‘the Man of Sorrows’ and as embodying a sort of mythic archetype of his own story. But, like Pater’s, Wilde’s Christ is closer to Greek paganism than . . . nineteenth-century theology. The worship of Christ is understood as an evolved form of the Chthonic religion of Dionysus” (“Greek Studies” 181). 46.  Lee’s 1900 story, “Marsyas in Flanders,” actualizes a similar chain of substitutions, in which a statue of Marsyas is mistaken for Christ and bound to a church cross, but wrestles free of it nightly, playing pipes and raising tempests. Eventually, it is secretly staked through the body and imprisoned in the crypt. The story’s first line is an antiquary confirming to the narrator, who has traveled to see the famous crucifix and noticed that it is from the wrong era, the end of the thirteenth century instead of 1195: “You are right. This is not the original crucifix at all. Another one has been put instead. Il y a eu substitution” (71), and the word “substitution” is repeated four times in the opening paragraphs (71, 72, 74). These “substitutions” tend to take

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place in periods of political change, tying the supernatural theme to more pragmatic historical, political, and religious successions. 47.  Smith and Helfand persuasively argue that Wilde was deeply engaged in reconciling Hegel with Herbert Spencer (Smith and Helfand vii). 48.  As suggested by his name. Karl Müller writes in The History and Antiquities of the Doric Race (1830) that Apollo is a principal deity of the Dorians, “the original Hellenes,” and thus Apollo was the ultimate Hellenic deity (Levin 19). Müller, it is worth noting, sees the contest with Marsyas as representing the triumph of the Doric religion and musical aesthetic over an earlier “elementary” religion (Müller 355). 49.  Like Apollo’s Sybil, her wish is cruelly granted by Apollo, and that destroys her happiness. 50.  Smith and Helfand don’t address Wilde’s use of specific myths, nor do they address De Profundis in any detail. Evangelista, however, observes that Wilde was influenced by Pater’s Greek Studies while writing De Profundis (Evangelista, “Greek Studies” 179), and that “Wilde portrays himself throughout as a Dionysian figure: . . . Wilde represents his own biography in tragic terms, as caught in a mythic cycle of death and rebirth” (180). Evangelista is interested primarily in the psychology of Wilde’s use of the figure, but his observation that “De Profundis repeats the same turn from the Olympian to the Chthonian that Pater had performed in his essays” (181) is useful to us in contextualizing Wilde’s use of Marsyas. 7. Marked

1.  Ryan states that by the late nineteenth century, “the intellectual . . . climate for physiological psychology in Britain turned inhospitable” as “new Hegelianism and other strains of German idealism” turned interest away from “empiricist . . . psychology” (169), and this sums up a common narrative. But I would argue that although the New Hegelians indeed launched a counternarrative to materialist psychology, in fact, most British psychologists were still very much in dialogue both with evolutionists and with materialist and even experimental psychology. Ryan also argues that most of the literary community turned against materialist psychology, but, as I argue of Wilde and Hardy, many writers were seeking a more syncretic view. See also Keen for a thorough discussion of Hardy’s materialist interests. Keen identifies G. H. Lewes, Herbert Spencer, and T. H. Huxley as among the most important influences on Hardy, offering “a materialist, biological foundation for Hardy’s view of the centrality of the emotions” (34). 2.  The Common Sense theorist Henry Home, Lord Kames is often cited as a polygenist; in Sketches of the History of Man (1734), Home argued that neither environment nor social conditioning could account for racial differences, so that the races must have come from distinct, separate stocks created by God. However, he remarks that “The colour of the negroes, as above observed, affords a strong presumption of their being a different species from the whites; and I once thought, that the presumption was supported by inferiority of understanding in the former. But it appears to me doubtful, upon second thoughts, whether that inferiority may not be occasioned by their condition. A man never ripens in judgment nor in prudence but by exercising these powers. At home, the negroes have little occasion to exercise either: they live upon fruits and roots, which grow without culture: they need little clothing: and

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they erect houses without trouble or art. Abroad, they are miserable slaves” (42–43). It is rarely remarked that Home’s polygeny is modified by a peculiar catastrophism. He notes that Genesis is clear that humans descended from one set of parents. He thus accounts for racial difference by theorizing that on the occasion of the Tower of Babel catastrophe, God mercifully intervened to modify the bodies of the group destined to be different races, in order to fit them for their residence in different climates (48–49): “had not men wildly attempted to build a tower whose top might reach to heaven, all men would not only have had the same language, but would have made the same progress towards maturity of knowledge and civilization. That deplorable event reversed all nature. . . . From that state of degeneracy, they have been emerging gradually. Some nations, stimulated by their own nature, or by their climate, have made a rapid progress; some have proceeded more slowly” (50–51). 3.  This is the same Robert Knox who purchased bodies from Burke and Hare in Edinburgh, and attacked Charles Bell’s aesthetics. 4.  See Gilman’s Difference and Pathology for a full discussion. 5.  It turns up repeatedly in the US and colonies. Harriet Ward remarks, “a Kaffir skin more resembles the hide of some powerful animal than the skin of a human being. In the early part of this war, some person procured the entire skin of a Kaffir, and had it treated in the same way that leather is first prepared for tanning. I am told that the texture is at least three times the thickness of a white man’s, and I see no reason for doubting the assertion” (The Cape and the Kaffirs, 165). 6.  This is the view showcased in Thomas Jefferson’s infamous remarks in “Queries 14 and 18” (1784), where he proposes abolition of slavery in the US and deportation of former slaves to a new colony, while seeking to make the US an all-white country. Americans’ views develop very differently from Europe’s in this period, but because the statement is so often referenced, I’ll just mark the similarities here. Jefferson first defends the decision to remove “the blacks” rather than folding them “into the state”: he first remarks the prejudice of whites and resentment of blacks regarding the history of slavery, and adds, “To these objections, which are political, may be added others, which are physical and moral. The first difference which strikes us is that of colour. Whether the black of the negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and scarf-skin, or in the scarf-skin itself; whether it proceeds from the colour of the blood, the colour of the bile, or from that of some other secretion, the difference is fixed in nature, and is as real as if its seat and cause were better known to us. And is this difference of no importance? Is it not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two races? Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of colour in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immoveable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race?” He surveys current anatomical explanations of the difference in skin, and then defaults to the importance of the blush, from the standpoint of both aesthetics and legibility. He continues to remark the supposed attraction of black men to white women, “declared by their preference of them, as uniformly as is the preference of the Oran-ootan for the black women over those of his own species,” which suggests the fear of black male sexuality, though it is putatively raised only as proof of the aesthetic superiority of whites. He then returns to the skin and the cause of a difference in odor that Kant also mentions: “They secrete less by the kidnies, and more by the

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glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odour. . . . [or because of] a difference of structure in the pulmonary apparatus.” He concludes with remarks about the supposed lack of “reason” and artistic talent, and “tasteless” imagination. The remarks of Jefferson support Gikandi’s conclusions about the use of blackness to reinforce a culture of taste as a quality of white enlightenment. Skin color was as important in the New World as it was to Kant; yet, this rhetoric is largely absent from other European thinkers.   7.  Several studies have taken up the importance of photography to realist literature and simultaneously to representations of the body that were at times portrayed to be “unmediated” and transparent. Armstrong’s Fiction in the Age of Photography and Green-Lewis’s Framing the Victorians are excellent examples. More recently, Novak, in Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, has focused on the way that photographs were in fact often seen as highly mediated, a suspicious form. All note the particular importance of photography to anthropometry and criminology at the end of the century. The examples I note in this chapter follow their lead in showing the way that photographs were poised as simultaneously truthful and deceitful.   8.  For discussion, see Gilman, “Struggle of Psychiatry,” 302–3.   9.  For example, Jemima in Gaskell’s Ruth. 10.  In the US, Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson offers a brilliant example of how fingerprints become a way to identify race in the absence of clear color indications, to communicate identity that even the character does not himself know—as well as to illustrate an emerging legal relation between agency and identity in US law (Rowe 163). For an incisive reading, see Rowe 163–203. 11.  Lunar caustic, or silver nitrate, was used to cauterize ulcerations. It was also used in early photography in the collodion process popular during the mid-nineteenth century. 12.  In Rosa’s case, the scar is a mark of Steerforth’s poor character, which his mother’s indulgence allows to become a permanent deformity that does not show on his body, but, characteristically, on the body of the woman. However, not all scars equally mar the character of the bearer; scars of illness (especially in Dickens) can mark women for the sins of the fathers, yet not mar their character. One frequently related to goodness and inner beauty by midcentury is the smallpox scar. Esther’s disease (Bleak House) is likely smallpox, and Gaskell’s Jem (Mary Barton) and Ainsworth’s Winifred (Jack Shephard) are both slightly so scarred, to no detriment of the reader’s or their truehearted admirers’ affection. 13.  I am indebted to Sarah Lennox for her discussion of East Lynne in her dissertation, “Reading the Body.” She also discusses the phrenological significance of the mouth in her article “The Mismarked Body of Phoebe Marks.” 14.  Other marks are less meaningful, being natural rather than the result of human action, but still relate to themes of identity, particularly in sensation fiction’s narratives of detection. In Collins’s No Name, the actress heroine, with pale skin and “Personal marks—two little moles, close together, on the left side of the neck” (189) worries as she tries to disguise herself with skillful use of makeup. Her swindler-mentor, Mr. Wragge, gives her a tutorial on how to assume other identities: “My books . . . contain, under the heading of Skins To Jump Into, a list of individuals retired from this mortal scene . . . acquainted. Into some of those Skins I have been compelled to Jump. . . . I am in Mr. Bygrave’s skin at this moment-and it fits without a

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wrinkle” (322). In addition to finding new skins, he alters existing ones. He disguises Magdalen’s moles. When she insists, “They can’t be painted out. . . . No color will stop on them,” he retorts, “My color will. . . . I lived some months once in the neighborhood of Drury Lane entirely on Black Eyes. My flesh-color stood on bruises of all sorts, shades, and sizes, and it will stand, I promise you, on your moles” (412). And he proceeds to paint them out, advancing the plot to hide her identity and obtain her goal. The permanent cosmetic coverage of moles was also a well-established tattooing technique. “The Tattooing of Moles on the Skin, Proposed by Pauli” pragmatically explains that it can be easily done with three needles simultaneously, with white lead and carmine, to match the skin (155). 15.  As so many do, Herschel references the Tichborne case (see chapter 8) as a touchstone on the use of bodily signs to register identity: “As an instance of the value of the thing, I might suggest that if Roger Tichborne had given his ‘sign-manual’ on entering the Army on any register, the whole Orton case would have been knocked on the head in ten minutes” (Herschel 23). 16.  See Breifel for a discussion of Galton, race, and fingerprints (27–35). 17.  There were other unsuccessful competitors with fingerprinting. Miriam Anne Ellis enthuses, “Since there are two ears to each head, it would seem that ears are particularly well adapted for personal identification. A pair affords a double chance of variety, and if one of them should come to harm [there is the other]. . . . As it cannot meet our gaze like the eyes . . . , it cannot disconcert us whilst we are gazing at it” (1, opening of the book). She proposes ear printing as an alternative to Galton’s plan. Henry Frith popularized ear-reading in 1891: “The gentle refined ones are small and sloping, the firm and energetic medium sized; the coarser and material, large, red, and full. . . . The ear should not rise above the eye; if it is do so a revengeful and quick temper is indicated. Some say even a murderous tendency is thus betrayed” (65). Criminologists like Lombroso and Galton, and even Ellis, write extensively about the shapes, sizes, and angles of ears, and their relation to atavism. 18.  As critics have widely discussed. See Beer for a substantial discussion. 19.  For more on the late nineteenth-century quarrel about whether photography was art, and its ability to capture the way of seeing of the human eye, see also Helmreich, especially 129–44. Often this discussion was couched in terms of disenchantment with realism as located in the thing seen or described. The artist’s mind, in contemplation of the object, was a better source. 8. Tattoo

1.  See Rendle-Short. I use the term “guest” because Omai’s trip was apparently at his expressed wish, but the status of agency in the colonial situation is subject to question. 2.  It is interesting to note that something similar happened in the US after 9/11: anecdotally, it is reported that many US patrons began requesting the towers. 3.  Incidentally, there was some concern around tattooing as a way to communicate disease, notably syphilis: Angel cites M. F. Hutin’s 1853 “Recherche sur les Tatouages,” which reports a case of a soldier supposed to have been infected with syphilis by his tattooist (169). These were sometimes thematically linked to the social degeneration associated with tattooing. However, tattooing was thought in some

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contexts to have a medicinal and preventative effect. Angel cites North American examples (176–77). 4.  Arscott provides a counterexample to this general tendency. She cites German anthropologists, especially Alois Riegl, who by the 1890s believed that pure aesthetic tendencies were universally present in human culture, and used as examples Maori moko tattoos (143–44). Here aesthesis is seen as prior to and more significant than signification. 5.  Augusta is a medium for another’s text inscribed upon her, but is also a writer herself. Haggard playfully asks, what is the difference between self and text, or for that matter, self and body? After Eustace (our hero and the principal legatee) reads her shoulders and realizes her sacrifice, he compliments her by saying he has read each of her books twenty times. Though she objects that she is not her books, he replies, “your books are part of you . . . and I have learnt more about your real self through them than I should have done if I had seen you a hundred times” (77). So he argues that the author exposes true subjectivity in her texts, while her body is made the subject of another’s writing. One might give Haggard credit for a shrewd observation on the problem of feminine authority under patriarchy, but that would doubtless be more than he intended. 6.  Though cases did exist. Olive Oatman was captured as a child by Native Americans in 1850 and tattooed after several years with the Mojaves. It is unknown whether she consented to this customary marking, but she did not consent to the abduction. 7.  See University of Newcastle’s Museum of Antiquities, http://www.ncl.ac.uk/ press.office/press.release/item/1156851242. 8.  Though not about the surface or inscriptions, Dracula (1897) and Trilby (1895) can be placed in this tradition, for example. 9.  Absurd as it appears, this continues to be a legal debate. Legal scholar Arrielle Sophia Millstein notes that Rasheed Wallace, an NBA player, appeared in a Nike commercial in 2010 where he explained the meaning behind tattoos on his arms (Millstein 167). His tattooist, Matthew Reed, sued Wallace and Nike “for contributory infringement . . . claiming ownership rights in his tattooed skin” (168). Parties settled out of court. 10.  It is perhaps not accidental that Saki ties the acquisition of the tattoo to the receipt of a legacy. This direction of property through the will of another causes (if indirectly) the alienation of Deplis’s own body. 11.  It is well known that Hardy was interested in myth as a structuring form of narrative encoding feelings that are basic and shared among human beings. Bullen observes that Hardy copied Schlegel’s observation that “The deepest want and deficiency of all modern Art lies in the fact that Artists have no mythology” at least twice in his notebooks (Bullen, “Gods in Wessex Exile” 181). 12.  This follows Collins’s making Fosco (also pursued by a secret society he earlier served) unrecognizable as his younger self precisely through what makes him unmistakable in the novel’s present: his great size, which he diligently maintains through a rigorous program of devouring pastry and eau sucrée. 13.  It is possible that Hardy was thinking of the Etruscan fire god Sethlans, an analogue of Vulcan, another boundary figure who presides over the limits of life and death, and is also a smith and fabricator of technologies.

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14.  This is one of the many examples in the novel wherein vision is partially misleading. Touch is a surer path to knowledge: when Somerset explains medieval architecture to Paula, she must touch the surface to understand it: “She listened attentively, then stretched up her own hand to test the cutting as he had done; she . . . succeeded in putting her finger on the spot. No; she could not understand it through her glove even now. She pulled off her glove, and, her hand resting in the stone channel, her eyes became abstracted in the effort of realization, the ideas derived through her hand passing into her face” (77). 15.  A good deal of recent criticism has been a salutary corrective to the belief that educated Victorian viewers were naïve consumers of photography as unmediated reality. However, even today when most people have at home easy access to photographic enhancement through Photoshop and similar programs, many are still surprisingly susceptible to the truth claims of photography. 16.  See Green-Lewis for a brief discussion of the novel (84–85). 17.  One might think again here of the photos used in the Tichborne trials. They were very persuasive to many viewers, and yet disallowed in the courtroom because the practice of altering photos was known. 18.  Keen notes that Hardy’s The Dynasts includes the idea of an “Immanent Will” (Hardy’s term, qtd. in Keen 167), in a universe imaged as a “giant brain” (164). Keen argues that his formulation derives from his reading of both neurology and the monism of  Spinoza; the Immanent Will is transindividual and unconscious and drives “evolutionary . . . change in the universe” over the long durée (167). Hardy suggests in a letter that the epic represents the possibility that this Will “is growing aware of itself  . . . and, it is to be hoped, sympathetic” (qtd. in Keen 168). 19.  Morgan provides a useful discussion of Hardy’s aesthetics and his reliance on physiological psychology, including Bain and Spencer (Morgan 120–29). Conclusion

1.  Even von Hartmann in 1869 wrote that conscious reason was progressively overcoming the unconscious species drives he elaborates. He also believed that the triumph of reason would lead to species suicide. Hardy’s mythic idealist realism is influenced by Schopenhauer and von Hartmann, the latter perhaps most explicitly in Jude’s reference to Little Father Time’s suicide as the “coming universal wish not to live.” 2.  James Frazer is a key reference point for both myth and comparative religion studies and psychology. He discusses a couple of skin myths, most notably Marsyas as a version of the Attis myth, in which he focuses primarily on annual human sacrifice, as he does with Osiris and Dionysus. He also discusses the snake as a symbol of immortality, skin shedding being renewal, and its connection to origin stories about humans losing the ability to shed skin and thus being subjected to mortality. In Frazer, these myths lose the historical and teleological meaning earlier myth critics ascribed to them; they are also stripped of their connections to artistic suffering and inspiration. The skin is shed or stripped to reveal, beneath the perishable and superficial individual, an eternal, atemporal truth. 3.  “After the romantiques came the realists with their doctrine that man could only be properly explained by an exact description of his environment” (Moore 684).

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This produced art (painting) that was like the “impersonal vision of a camera” (685). Moore had “knelt at the altar” of exteriority (684) and committed “realist sins” for which he is now “repentant” (685), but he hopes to “get clean away from . . . exterior realism” and “to write a book in which everything shall come from within” (685). 4.  Both Freud and Jung are in conversation with von Hartmann, though they departed from his ideas significantly. 5.  I do not include all new formalist work under this category, much of which is both responsible to the text and attentive to its politics.

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q In dex Page numbers in italics refer to figures. absorption, 143 – 53, 163 – 65, 177 acquired traits, 361n5. See also heredity Acton, William, 116 actors, 43, 47 – 49, 65 – 67, 132 Adam and Eve, 200 – 201 Aesop, 378n24 aesthetics, 9, 42; science and, 364n16; sensing surface and, 60; sensus communis and, 34 – 35; universal values, 26 – 27 affect, 2, 7 – 10, 18 – 20; absorption of, 143 – 44, 163 – 65, 177; blushing and, 64 – 65 (see also blushing); performing, 65 – 67; visual arts and, 46. See also emotions affect theory, 372n23 African women, 70, 299 – 300. See also blackness; race; racial hierarchies aging, 52, 205 Agnew, Lois Peters, 364n11 AI (artificial intelligence), 360 Ainsworth, William Harrison, 392n12 Alcibiades, 272 – 73 Alcott, Louisa May, 97 Alibert, Jean Louis, 112, 115 alienated skin, 2, 5, 11 – 13, 21, 181 – 83, 193; identity and, 225 – 26; tattoos and, 328 – 35. See also body objects; flayed skin Allison, Mark, 386n28 anatomy, 8 – 9, 28, 31 – 32, 369n8; art and, 36, 42 – 54, 366n31; atlases bound in human skin, 378n21; emotional expression and, 36 – 41, 280; of facial skin, 74; natural theology and, 370n8 Anatomy Act of 1832 (England), 194, 335 ancien régime, 10, 12; emotional expression and sympathy, 168 – 78; history and, 220 – 28; moral degeneracy of, 108, 123 – 31; sensibility in, 163 – 64, 170 Anderson, Amanda, 336 Anderson, Clare, 320, 343 Angel, Gemma, 385n3, 393n3

anger, 80, 93, 174, 308, 368n18 animality, 220 – 21, 228; body objects and, 195; corruption and, 129 – 30; degeneracy and, 132 – 35; fables and, 376n12; flaying and, 199 – 210, 214; of humans, 199 – 210, 214, 233 – 34, 240, 247 – 49, 251, 256 – 60; of Marsyas, 265; race and, 202 animals: blushing and, 79, 88, 367n11; commodified, 190, 192 – 93; emotional expression, 67, 366n1; nakedness of, 200; senses and, 184 – 85; suffering of, 381n4; sympathy for, 382n4 animal skins, 199 – 210 anthropology, 5, 7, 22, 32, 240, 353 – 54, 364n13, 394n4 anthropometry, 279 – 81, 304 Antigone, 264 antihumanism, 17 antimaterialism, 163 antithesis, 238, 240, 262, 389n41 Anzieu, Didier, 20, 362n13, 376n9, 378n22, 382n5 Apollo, 12 – 13, 200, 231 – 33, 237 – 55, 258 – 76, 338, 383n13, 384n19, 386n27, 387n33, 388n36, 389n42, 390nn48 – 49 ApRoberts, Ruth, 386n28 Arachne, 241 archetypes, 31, 64 Ariadne, 247 – 48, 385n24 aristocracy: Apollo and, 238; atavism and, 320, 335 – 40, 343, 347 – 49; beauty and, 348; corruption and, 157, 221; excesses of, 12, 58, 108, 125 – 27, 163, 223; flaying of, 8, 12; immorality of, 108, 123 – 31; modernity and, 339; primitivism and, 347 – 49; tattoos and, 320 – 25. See also ancien régime; Regency (UK) Aristotle, 32 – 33, 49, 66, 84, 254, 280, 332, 364n9 Armstrong, Isobel, 254 Armstrong, Nancy, 18 – 20, 138, 166, 176, 287 – 88, 392n7 417

418    I N D E X

Arnold, Matthew, 7, 13, 17, 28, 232, 237, 239, 249, 261, 271, 287, 312, 318, 335, 348, 353, 358, 363n1, 377n18, 381n3, 386n28, 388n40; “Dover Beach,” 257; “Empedocles on Etna,” 250 – 58; “Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment,” 342 Arscott, Caroline, 394n4 arsenic, 224 – 25 art, 26; alienated body and, 334 – 35; anatomy and, 13, 36, 42 – 54, 56, 58, 280, 365n27, 366n30 – 366n31; color and, 296 – 97; emotional expression and sensing surface, 42 – 54; mind-body interaction and, 17 – 18; naturalism in, 50; photography as, 393n19; sacrifice and, 384n19; subjectivity and, 25; suffering and, 395n2; sympathy and, 60; theater performance (see actors). See also painting associationism, 30 – 31, 55, 351, 356, 364nn9 – 10; blushing and, 104; evolution and, 366n35; senses and, 76; tragedy and, 232 atavism, 5, 84, 135, 189, 215, 218, 220; aristocracy and, 320, 335 – 40, 343, 347 – 49; ears and, 393n17; markers of, 281; race and, 281, 298, 300; tattoos and, 324 – 25. See also criminality; heredity; primitivism atheism, 29 – 30, 364n14; materialist, 35 athleticism, 153, 156 – 57, 315 Attis, 395n2 Austen, Jane, 10, 64, 92 – 93 autonomy, 11. See also pores/porosity Baartman, Sarah “Saartjie,” 299 – 300 Bacchus, 247. See also Dionysus Bacon, Francis, 365n19 Bailkin, Jordanna, 321 – 24, 334 – 36, 343 Bain, Alexander, 4, 13, 17, 28, 31, 54 – 55, 186, 239, 262, 353, 356, 366n35 Baker, Eric, 255 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 15 Ballard, Joseph, 321 Balzac, Honoré de, 5, 10, 25, 125, 135 – 36, 138, 165, 275, 353, 361n3, 362n7, 371n19, 379n29; Cousin Betty, 126 – 31, 133 – 34; The Human Comedy, 127, 209; La peau de chagrin (The Magic Skin or The Wild Ass’s Skin), 127, 200, 203 – 10, 378n22, 378nn24 – 25; Louis Lambert, 127 – 28, 209; Père Goriot, 57, 59; Seraphita, 209 Bancroft, Hubert Howe, 210 barbarism, 218 – 19, 231, 347 – 49. See also primitivism; savagery

Barrett Browning, Elizabeth, 10, 95 – 97, 103 Barthes, Roland, 367n5 Bartholomew (saint), 241, 245, 380n41, 384n17, 385nn22 – 23 bathing, 11, 141 – 43, 373n5; class and, 150 – 53, 156; cold-water, 141, 152 – 58, 177; corruption and, 151, 158 – 64; effeminacy and, 11, 154 – 55, 157; permeability and, 143, 146 – 53, 369n5; prostitution and, 155; Turkish baths, 114, 141, 151 – 55, 373n5; warm or hot water, 154 – 56 Baudelaire, Charles, 244 Baudry, Paul Amié, 161 – 63 Beattie, James, 364n15 beauty: aristocracy and, 348; character and, 224 – 25; idealism and, 57, 221, 276; morality and, 26, 50, 115; neoclassical ideals of, 52 – 53; racial hierarchies and, 365n24; realism and, 56 – 57; truth and, 42, 60, 272; universal ideal of, 62 becoming, 233 – 34, 236, 243, 265 – 76 Beerbohm, Max, 63, 104 beheadings, 214 Bell, Charles, 8 – 9, 25 – 26, 73, 365n21, 365n24, 382n8; on aging, 205; on art and anatomical realism, 13, 42 – 54, 56, 58, 280, 365n27, 366n30; on blushing, 65 – 66, 70 – 71, 78 – 80, 84, 91, 303; on emotional expression and nervous system, 35 – 41, 53 – 56, 60 – 62; Essays on the Anatomy of Expression in Painting, 36 – 41, 70, 235; Marsyas and, 230 – 31, 381n2; on pain, 235 – 36, 264; on senses, 186, 375n7, 375nn4 – 5 Bell, Lady, 38, 365n19 Bellew, Lord, 318 Bennett, Jane, 359 Bentham, Jeremy, 381n4 Benthien, Claudia, 15 – 16, 20, 113, 129 – 30, 143 – 44, 184, 241 – 43, 362n9, 384n17, 385n20, 385n25 Berkeley, George, 184 – 85 Bernard, Claude, 351 Bertillon, Alphonse, 281, 304, 306 Best, Stephen, 357 Bichat, Xavier, 16, 21, 74, 112; on absorption, 144 – 45, 147; Balzac and, 128, 204, 209; gender and, 158, 189; medical study during the Terror, 372n2; on sensibility and contractility, 209, 379n30; skin as boundary, 54, 67, 74, 375n6; tissue theory, 108, 110, 139; on touch, 185 – 86, 375n4 Bizzotto, Elisa, 263, 389n42

I N D E X    419 blackness, 283 – 84, 287 – 95, 376n15; blushing and, 85 – 88, 367n4; female sexuality, 299 – 300; flaying and, 182; identity and, 13, 307 – 10; passing as white, 294; senses and, 184; skin disease and, 129 – 30. See also race; racial hierarchies Blair, Kirstie, 100 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich, 284 blushing, 4, 9 – 10, 63 – 104; by animals, 79, 88, 367n11; civilization and, 75 – 78; communication and, 69 – 70; criminality and, 81, 88, 303 – 4, 368nn13 – 14; degeneration and, 83 – 84; in Dickens, 85, 170 – 71, 177; evolution and, 78 – 84, 104; “false” and “true,” 75 – 78, 80, 367n7; gender and, 84 – 91, 95, 98, 296; idealism and, 88 – 91; intelligent design and, 69 – 75; interiority and, 66, 74, 80, 367n5; lack of ability, 73, 81; makeup and, 63, 69, 169; modesty and, 89 – 91, 93, 367n9; morality and, 88, 91, 97, 157, 163; nervous system and, 71 – 73, 80, 82 – 83; pathological, 81, 85, 103 – 4; performing affect and, 65 – 67; race and, 70, 84 – 88, 391n6; realist literature and, 92 – 104; savagery and, 68, 87 – 88; scars and, 70, 87 – 88, 303; science and, 67 – 70; self-consciousness and, 64 – 65, 67, 80, 93, 366n1; sexuality and, 84 – 85, 89 – 91, 97, 368n14; spectatorship and, 63, 68 – 69, 98 – 101, 104; sympathy and, 64, 68 – 69, 71, 74, 76, 90, 99, 102; treatments for, 83 – 84, 367n10. See also flushing; pallor; rubor bodies, 2, 21 – 22; destruction of, 178; hazardous interiors, 10, 16, 107 – 9, 143 (see also excretion); as material mechanism, 107; middle-class ideal, 110, 144, 371n21; realism and, 18 – 20, 137 – 40; subjectivity and, 25; transformation of, 307 – 16. See also interiority; mind-body connection; sensing surface; skin; surface body objects, 181 – 83; as commodities, 182 – 83, 189 – 99, 214, 219 – 28; historical trauma and, 227 – 28; as property, 178, 190 – 95. See also hair jewelry; shrunken heads; skin objects Boerhaave, Herman, 29 – 30 Bohde, Daniela, 385n22, 388n37 Bonnet, Charles, 379n29 books, bound in human skin, 199, 378n21 Bordeu, Théophile, 15 Boucicault, Dion, 291 Bouilhet, Louis, 155 Bourdieu, Pierre, 110

bourgeoisie. See middle class Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, 10, 101 – 4, 218 – 19, 291, 362n7 brain, 8–9, 18, 33, 36, 53–54, 74, 81–82, 123, 143, 153–54, 185, 207–8, 256, 274, 354–55; cortical homunculus, 82, 355. See also embodied mind; mind-body connection; nervous system Bretonne, Restif de la, 89 Briggs, Asa, 182 Brighton, England, 152 British and Foreign Medical Review, 118 British and Foreign Medico-chirurgical Review, 117 Brontë, Charlotte, 290 – 91 Brown, Bill, 182, 190, 374n1 Brown, Daniel S., 314 Browne, Thomas, 195 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 239, 368n17; “Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point,” 294 – 95 brutality, 220, 240, 248. See also cruelty; flaying; Terror (French Revolution) Buffon, Comte de (Georges-Louis Leclerc), 379n29 Bullen, J. B., 394n11 Burchett, George, 322, 333 Burgess, Thomas, 65, 67, 70 – 79, 83, 87, 91, 100, 303, 367n7 Burke, Edmund, 49, 236, 289 Burke, William, 182 Byron, “Waltz,” 78 Cagots, 293 – 94 Callicles, 250 – 55, 275, 387n29, 387n33 Cambridge Ritualists, 388n40 Camorra, 35, 325 Campbell, Harry, 65, 81 – 85, 90 capitalism, 227 – 28. See also commodities; property captivity narratives, 333 – 34, 394n6 Caracci, Annibale, 230, 381n2 Carlyle, Thomas, 5, 7, 12, 28, 35, 160 – 61, 177, 181, 199 – 200, 210 – 18, 222 – 23, 228, 231, 261, 275 Carroll, Lewis, 288 Casper, John Ludwig, 302, 326 – 27 “Catskin” (fable), 200 caul, 195 – 96, 202 – 3 Chadwick, Edwin, 109 character, skin as index of, 224 – 25, 392n12. See also morality Charcot, Jean-Martin, 44 Chenavard, Paul, 13, 243 – 49, 260, 275

420    I N D E X

Cheseldean, William, 289, 293 Chevalier, Jim, 212 children: moral reason and, 88; skin sensitivity of, 145, 158 Christ, 233, 245, 247 – 49, 260 – 63, 265, 273 – 74, 384n15, 389n45 – 389n46 Christianity: materialism and, 261; Muscular, 156 – 57; teleology of, 234, 237. See also religion; religious history chthonic figures, 234, 238 – 40, 249, 258 – 59, 262, 342, 381n3, 387n30, 387n32 Cinderella (fable), 204 civilization, 5 – 6; blushing and, 75 – 78; representation and, 76; savagery and, 129 – 30; sensibility and, 83; skin and, 187 – 88; the Terror and, 27 class: bathing and, 150 – 53, 156; fingerprints and, 306; race and, 311; sanitary movement and, 150 – 51; skin sensitivity and, 188 – 89. See also aristocracy; middle class; working class class distinctions, 126, 172 – 73 classicism, 43, 223, 236, 244, 249 – 50, 261 – 62, 271, 285, 361n3, 382n5, 384n15, 389n42. See also neoclassicism class warfare, 221 – 22 climate theory, 282 – 83, 285 close reading, 3, 22, 358, 362n6, 368n20 clothing, as relics, 197 – 99 Cohen, Margaret, 361n1 Cohen, William, 16 – 17 cold-water bathing, 141, 152 – 58, 177 Cole, Jonathan, 375n5 Colley, Ann, 202 Collins, Wilkie, 5, 353, 362n7, 394n12; Armadale, 292; The Law and the Lady, 12, 181, 218 –  2 8, 331; Man and Wife, 156  –   5 7; The Moonstone, 219, 292  –   9 3, 380n32; No Name, 392n14; Poor Miss Finch, 292  –   9 3, 367n9; Woman in White, 219, 325, 333 color, 4, 279; art and, 296 – 97; dark skin, 282 – 83; gender and, 295 – 301; race and, 13, 282 – 95, 305, 317 (see also race); subjectivity and, 13. See also blushing; flushing; pallor; rubor Comay, Rebecca, 215 – 16 commodities: animals as, 190, 192 – 93; commerce and, 206 – 8; flayed skin and body objects as, 182 – 83, 189 – 99, 214, 219 – 28; humanity and, 178; photographs as, 330; thing theory and, 374n1 Common Sense theory, 4, 8 – 9, 18 – 19, 27 – 35, 39, 56, 360, 364n10; Balzac and,

127; blushing and, 78; body and, 47 – 49, 53, 73 – 74, 157; emotion and, 60, 64, 287 – 88; Hegel and, 364n15; Lucretius and, 387n35; perception and, 314; social function and, 77; sympathy and, 44, 71, 76 communication, 1 – 5; blushing and, 69 – 70; emotional expression and, 64. See also blushing; emotional expression comparative religion. See religious history complexion, 55, 63 – 64, 69, 102, 104, 115, 118 – 19, 129 – 30, 133, 164, 168, 170, 224, 282 – 83, 290 – 93, 345, 348 – 49. See also blackness; blushing; color; pallor; rubor; whiteness Comte, Auguste, 194, 377n18 Condillac, Abbé de (Étienne Bonnot), 185, 375n8 Connor, Steven, 15 – 16, 20, 181, 362n9, 375n9, 387n36, 388n40 consciousness, 2, 354 – 56; facial muscles and, 39; interiority and, 55 – 56; myth and, 353; objective, 82; skin and, 54; skin ego and, 20; soul and, 270; subjective, 82 – 83; surface and, 9, 356; will as, 188. See also subjectivity; unconscious consumption, 206 – 7 contagion, 11; crowds and, 135; emotions and, 143 – 44, 163 – 78; permeability and, 145 – 47; revolutionary activity as, 125 – 31; toxic fluid and, 170. See also disease; permeability Cook, James, 320 Cooper, Anthony Ashley. See Shaftesbury, Earl of Corday, Charlotte, 144, 158, 160 – 64 corruption: animality and, 129 – 30; aristocracy and, 157, 221; bathing and, 151, 158 – 64; heredity and, 120 – 25 (see also heredity); physiology and, 77; skin disease and, 134 – 35. See also degeneration cosmetics. See makeup cosmopolitanism, 320 – 25, 335 – 40, 346 Courbet, Gustave, 50 – 51, 60 courtship narratives, 95, 103 Cousin, Victor, 50 Cretineau-Joly, 212 Creuzer, Friedrich, 237, 262, 381n3, 382n5, 387n32, 388n40 crime fiction, 328 criminality, 5, 32, 227, 298 – 99, 317, 340, 393n17; blushing and, 81, 88, 303 – 4, 368nn13 – 14; fingerprinting and, 14, 304 – 7; markers of, 279 – 81, 301 – 7; photography and, 281 – 82; race and, 298,

I N D E X    421 300 – 301; sensitivity and, 189; tattoos and, 14, 320 – 25. See also atavism Crissey, John, 113 – 16, 370n14 Cronin, Denis, 188 crowds, 135, 166 cruelty, 168 – 69, 177, 215, 226, 269; of flaying, 211, 231, 241, 249, 253. See also brutality Crusoe, 94, 138 Cullwick, Hannah, 296 Cuvier, 209, 282, 379n29 Cybele, 248, 387n32 Daly, Nicholas, 218 Dames, Nicholas, 219 Dante, 41, 46, 230, 242, 384nn18–19 Darwin, Charles: acquired traits and, 361n5; Bell and, 26, 38 – 43, 51, 54; on blushing, 65, 70, 73, 78 – 82, 87 – 91, 97, 303; debates over, 17; differences and, 34, 62; emotional expression and, 36, 48, 61 – 62, 173, 280; Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 9, 40 – 41, 78 – 79, 87 – 88; extinction and, 381n4; Lucretius and, 387n34; materialism and, 28, 31 – 32, 262; Nietzsche and, 259 – 61; on race, 286, 367n4; Romanticism and, 363n6; on selfconsciousness, 200; social Darwinism and, 253; on sympathy, 295; on tattoos, 320; Zola and, 134 David, Jacques-Louis, 159 – 60 Davis, Michael, 55 decadence, 163 – 65, 215, 240, 261, 281 decay, 52, 57, 108, 130, 132, 157, 233, 336, 341 degeneration: ancien régime, 108, 123 – 31; animality and, 132 – 35; blushing and, 83 – 84; bourgeois body and, 132 – 36; dirt and, 153 – 54; evolution and, 220, 259 – 60, 344; family, 123 – 25, 132 – 36, 223, 344 – 47; medical objects and, 227; middle class and, 132 – 38; race and, 135, 286; realism and, 138 – 40; savagery and, 135; selfconsciousness and, 83; sexuality and, 372n24; skin disease and, 119 – 25, 133 – 34 de Gouges, Olympe, 142 dehumanization, 202, 236 Delacroix, Eugène, 50, 60, 144, 243 DeLaura, David, 386n28, 388n40 Deleuze, Gilles, 359 Dellamora, Richard, 262, 389nn42 – 43 Demeter, 232, 273 Dendy, Walter Cooper, 113 – 14

depth, 8, 20, 22, 55, 71, 115, 214, 239, 265, 350 – 59, 385n25 depth psychology, 22, 353 – 57 dermatology, 11, 15, 112 – 19, 288, 370n14 Derrida, Jacques, 200 – 202, 222, 230, 381n4 Descartes, René, 29, 33, 66, 70, 201 – 2, 363n5, 381n4 design, divine, 69 – 75, 110 Dickens, Charles, 5, 25, 85, 353, 362n7, 374nn12 – 15; Barnaby Rudge, 374n15; Bleak House, 57 – 59, 178, 292, 303, 313, 392n12; David Copperfield, 178, 190, 195 – 97, 303 – 4, 374n13; Our Mutual Friend, 63, 178, 193 – 94, 198 – 99; Tale of Two Cities, 11, 126, 163, 165 – 78, 218, 374n13, 374n15; “Trading in Death,” 197 Diderot, Denis, 49, 52 – 53, 365n20 difference, 279 – 84, 359. See also race digestive organs, 111 – 12, 149 Dionysus, 13, 215, 217, 231 – 33, 236 – 41, 247, 249 – 50, 258 – 63, 265 – 67, 270 – 74, 339 – 40, 342, 361n3, 381n3, 382n5, 386n27, 387n33, 389nn41 – 42; Zagreus, 262, 342. See also Marsyas disease, 108; medical science and, 108 – 12, 119; permeability and, 145 – 47; poverty and, 149 – 51; sanitary movement and, 148 – 50. See also contagion; scabies; scrofula; skin disease; struma; tuberculosis; venereal disease disgust, 12, 26, 44 – 47, 52 – 53, 69, 89, 96, 137, 149 – 50, 225, 312, 382n8 divine design, 69 – 75, 110 divorce, 163 Donne, John, 86 Doric religion, 390n48 Dow, Gerard, 206 Down, John, 298 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 10, 119 – 20, 126; “The Third Generation,” 120 – 25, 139, 157 Dracula (1897), 394n8 Du Chaillu, Paul, 310 Duchenne de Boulogne, 43 ears, identification and, 279, 393n17 economic liberalism, 191, 382n6 economic materialism, 32, 132 Eden, 200 – 201 Edinburgh University, 36, 39; medical school, 29, 31, 61, 124, 182 Edward VII, 322

422    I N D E X

effacement, 135 – 36, 181, 200, 241, 325, 339; of scars, 301 – 2, 304, 313; of tattoos, 326 – 27 effeminacy, 84; athleticism and, 157; bathing and, 11, 154 – 55, 157. See also feminization Egerton, George, 237 ego, 20, 353 – 56, 362n13 Egyptian symbols, 386n26 electricity, 368n16 Eleusinian mysteries, 234, 239, 388n40 Elias, Norbert, 15, 110, 144 Eliot, George, 9, 15, 54 – 59, 358; Adam Bede, 55; Daniel Deronda, 350 – 52; Middlemarch, 1, 55, 351, 360, 368n18, 370n15; Mill on the Floss, 25, 58 – 59, 115, 232, 292, 350 – 51 Elliot, Ebenezer, 92 Ellis, Havelock, 65, 89 – 91, 189, 262, 281, 298 – 301, 317, 323 – 25, 340, 368nn13 – 14, 393n17 Ellis, Miriam Anne, 393n17 Ellman, Richard, 389n44 embarrassment, 7, 9, 64, 88, 90, 99, 101, 112, 290. See also shame embodied mind, 11, 17, 22, 26, 30 – 31, 56, 80, 183, 352, 354, 371n20. See also mind-body connection embodiment, 9, 17, 22, 28, 107, 193, 257, 274, 359 emotion, Common Sense theory and, 60, 64, 287 – 88 emotional expression, 9 – 10; in ancien régime, 168 – 78; art and, 42 – 54; authenticity of, 67; color and, 287 – 88; communication and, 64; human exceptionalism and, 366n1; materialism and, 64, 104; mind-body connection and, 50 – 51; nervous system and, 36 – 41, 80; by Olympians, 239; realism and, 87; science of, 67 – 70; sympathy and, 43 – 49, 61 – 62, 168 – 78. See also sympathy emotions, 5, 53, 55, 60, 70 – 74, 80 – 81, 90, 97, 100, 107, 143, 167; contagion and, 143 – 44, 163 – 78; fear, 93, 366n1; individuality and, 177 – 78; material bases of, 17; pulse and, 100; senses and, 186 – 88; social cohesion and, 11. See also affect Empedocles, 250 – 58, 364n14, 387nn32 – 33 Engel, Johann Jacob, 65 The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, 163 – 64 Enlightenment: individual subject and, 16 – 17, 33; materialism, 12, 131; reason and, 240, 342; science and, 5 – 6; sense

experiences and, 26; Spinoza and, 359; visual turn, 15. See also Scottish Enlightenment epigenetics, 361n5 Epimetheus, 200 – 201, 207, 378n23 ethnicity, 293 – 94, 359. See also race Etruscan nature worship, 238, 339, 384n13, 394n13 Euripides, 266, 382n5 Evangelista, Stefano, 262, 272, 384n15, 390n50 evolution, 4, 18, 249, 262; associationism and, 366n35; atavism and, 281; blushing and, 78 – 84, 104; degeneration and, 344; expression and, 61 – 62; extinction and, 381n4; human exceptionalism and, 382n4; idealist theory of, 29 – 30; race and, 202, 283, 310 – 11, 314; Zola and, 134 evolutionary history, 4, 6, 21, 218, 237, 279, 349; materialism and, 10, 235, 249, 279, 307, 351 excess, 108, 203, 205; of aristocracy, 12, 58, 108, 125 – 27, 163, 223; body and, 26, 110; hot baths and, 155 excretion, 107 – 12, 143, 146 exhibitionism, 368n14 exoticism, 320 – 25, 327 – 28, 344 extinction, 381n4 fables, 12, 204, 209 – 10, 376n12, 378n24 facial muscles, 36 – 42 facial recognition, 360 facial skin, 74. See also blushing; complexion family: degeneration and, 123 – 25, 132 – 36, 223, 344 – 47; as social unit, 127, 171 – 72 fantasy, 3 – 4, 22 Farr, William, 108 Faustian figures, 206, 242, 250, 379n31 fear, 93, 366n1 feeling, 19. See also affect; emotions; sympathy Feldman, Burton, 237 feminization, 11, 160, 189, 271, 299, 301. See also effeminacy Fend, Mechthild, 15, 372n2 Ferguson, Adam, 31 Festa, Lynn, 86, 137, 373n10, 377n19 fetishes, 181, 183, 190, 194 – 97, 199, 208, 377n18, 380n32 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 29, 285 Field, Michael, “Apollo and Marsyas,” 383n11 filth diseases, 149 – 51 fingerprints, 5, 14, 279, 281, 301, 304 – 7, 319, 392n10, 393n17

I N D E X    423 Fitch, Samuel, 154 – 55 flagellation, 368n14 Flaubert, Gustave, 155, 371n19 flayed skin: as commodity, 182 – 83, 189 – 99, 214, 219 – 28; historical change and, 4. See also body objects; skin objects flaying: animality and, 199 – 210, 214; of aristocracy, 8, 12; cruelty of, 211, 231, 241, 249, 253; in French Revolution, 8, 12, 181, 210 – 17; gender and, 385n25; myths, 8, 12 – 13, 241 – 49, 276; savagery and, 210 – 11; sensation and, 231; as violation of social cohesion, 214, 231. See also Marsyas Flint, Kate, 54, 362n10 flushing, 9, 75, 78, 368n18; realist literature and, 92 – 93, 98, 101. See also blushing; rubor Flying Dutchman, 380n41 forgetting, 219 formalism, 358 Foucault, Michel, 2 Fox, George Henry, “Syphiloderma Tuberculosis,” 121 “Francis Pears,” 141, 148 Franco-Prussian War, 132 – 33 Frazer, James, 91, 240, 262, 353 – 54, 358, 382n6, 388n40, 395n2 freak shows, 335 Freedgood, Elaine, 182 freedom, 191 – 92; history and, 227 – 29, 232; limitations of, 205; negative, 192, 208, 216 – 17, 228; tattoos and, 333. See also liberty free will, 31, 188, 228; flayed skin and, 182 – 83; French Revolution and, 208, 215 – 17; human exceptionalism and, 193; idealism and, 184; property and, 191 – 93; slavery and, 377n17. See also will French art, 5; naturalism, 50 – 51. See also art French materialism, 27 – 32 French medicine, 5 – 6, 8, 25 – 26; Balzac and, 127; on mind-body interaction, 34 – 35; Montpellier, 29, 31; on permeability, 144; physiognomy, 365n20; on skin disease, 370n14. See also Bichat French realism, 5, 10 – 11, 136, 354, 362n7. See also Balzac; Zola French Revolution: body and, 15; decadence and, 163 – 65; as disruption, 31; flaying and, 8, 12, 181, 210 – 17; freedom and, 191 – 92; free will and, 208, 215 – 17; German idealism and, 215 – 16; immorality and, 108; individuality and, 125 – 31, 135 – 36; materialism and, 125; modernity and,

215 – 16; race and, 294; Romanticism and, 243; sans-culottes, 212; sympathy and, 11; women and, 161. See also ancien régime; Napoleonic period; Terror Freud, Sigmund, 20, 75, 90 – 91, 195, 240, 262, 354 – 58, 362n13, 396n4 Frith, Henry, 393n17 Fühmann, Niklas, 385n20 Furphy, Joseph, 141, 155 – 56 Galen, 33, 369n5 Galton, Francis, 280 – 81, 286, 305 – 6, 365n20, 393n17 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 392n12; “An Accursed Race,” 292 – 93 gender: blushing and, 84 – 91, 95, 98, 296; flaying and, 385n25; normative body and, 110; race and color, 295 – 301; sanitary movement and, 150 – 51; savagery and, 324; sensitivity and, 145, 158, 188 – 89, 290, 382n7. See also effeminacy; feminization; men; women geology, 249 George V, 322 Géricault, Théodore, 60 German idealism, 3 – 4, 7, 27 – 32, 354, 359, 364n13; definition, 361n3; Eliot and, 350; French Revolution and, 215 – 16; materialism and, 249 – 50, 261; on myth representing traumatic historical change, 231, 237 – 41, 243, 353. See also idealism German Romanticism, 6, 13, 35. See also Romanticism germ theory, 109, 139 Ghesquier, Daniele, 148 Gikandi, Simon, 288 – 90, 295, 376n15, 392n6 Gilman, Sander, 184, 283, 298 – 300, 306 Gissing, George, 232 God the Father, 245, 248 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 206, 255, 275, 386n28 Golgi, Camillo, 376n10 gothic, 12, 19 – 20, 120, 193, 275, 379n31; body objects and, 182; imperial, 210; sensibility and, 166 – 67; tattoos and, 334 Greek mythology, 232, 239, 249 – 50, 273; trauma of historical change and, 231, 237 – 41, 243, 342, 353. See also Apollo; Dionysus; Hellenism; Marsyas Green, Joseph Henry, 363n6 Green-Lewis, Jennifer, 54, 282, 392n7 Greenwood, Frederick, 151 Greenwood, James, 150 – 51

424    I N D E X

Greiner, Rae, 18 – 20, 167, 173, 373n11 grotesque objects, 7, 11 – 12, 22, 227 – 28. See also body objects; skin objects guillotine, 6, 163, 170, 176, 178, 214 Guy, William, 301 – 2 habitus, 49, 66 Hadrian, 320 Haeckel, Ernst, 259 Haggard, H. Rider, 328 – 35, 394n5 hair jewelry, 183, 190, 196 Hall, Granville Stanley, 90 Halle medical school, 30 Ham, 282 Hamlet, 214, 250 handwriting, 332 – 33 Hannaford, Ivan, 284–85 Hardy, Thomas, 7, 232, 353, 358, 390n1, 394n11, 394n13, 395n1, 395n19; The Dynasts, 395n18; Jude the Obscure, 339, 395n1; A Laodicean, 14 – 15, 336 – 49; “The Well Beloved,” 339 Harmsworth Magazine, 321 Harrison, Jane Ellen, 388n40 Hartley, David, 364n10 Hartley, Lucy, 36, 38, 51 Haydon, Benjamin Robert, 366n31 hearing, 184 – 87, 375n9. See also sound heart, 32 – 33, 77, 107; emotions and blushing, 53, 55, 60, 70 – 74, 80 – 81, 90, 97, 100, 107, 143, 167 Heathcliff (fictional character), 288 Hebra, Ferdinand von, 112 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 6, 28, 30, 35, 52, 127, 131, 181, 184, 191 –  9 4, 206, 208, 215  –   1 6, 236  –   3 8, 244, 247  –   5 0, 254, 260  –   6 6, 273, 332  –   3 3, 351, 363n1, 363n5, 364nn14 –  1 5, 376n17, 383n10, 386n26, 386nn27 –  2 8, 388n40, 390n47 Heidegger, Martin, 237 Helfand, Michael S., 266, 390n47, 390n50 Hellenism, 14, 157, 234, 287, 342, 384n15, 386n28, 389n43, 390n48 Helsby, Thomas, 319 Hennepe, Meineke te, 369n5 Henry, John, 17, 364n10 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 52, 185, 237, 285 – 86, 363n1, 364nn13 – 14, 386n28 heredity, 134 – 40, 165 – 66, 344 – 47, 380n40; corruption, 120 – 25; skin disease and, 108; social body and, 135; Zola and, 134. See also atavism; family herpetiform dermatitis, 160, 370n14, 373n8

Herschel, William, 304 – 6, 393n15 Hindu bathing habits, 154 Hippocrates, 33 historical change, 12 – 13, 360; becoming and, 266 (see also becoming); evolution and, 4 (see also evolution); individuality and, 231 – 41; Marsyas and, 338, 340; myth and, 263 (see also myth); radical breaks and, 341 – 42; the Terror and, 6 – 8, 21 – 22, 172, 231 (see also French Revolution; Terror); trauma of, 211 – 17, 227 – 28, 231, 237 – 41, 243, 342, 353, 385n20; visual representations of, 244 – 45 historical progress, 2, 6, 21, 30, 223; myth and, 231 – 41; skepticism about, 258; violence and, 226. See also teleology history: ancien régime and, 220 – 28; body and, 4 – 8; freedom and, 227 – 29, 232; identification with, 226; materialism and, 138; souvenirs and, 217 – 23; spirit and, 266; subjectivity and, 6; tattooing and, 328; teleological view of, 6, 234, 237, 244, 248 – 50. See also evolutionary history; religious history Hobbes, Thomas, 30, 34, 191, 372n23 Hodgson, Amanda, 308 Hogarth, William, 86 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 237, 258 Holubar, Karl, 370n14 Home, Henry (Lord Kames), 31, 390n2 Homer, 41, 382n8 homosexuality, 155, 158, 373n5, 389n41, 389n43 Hood, Thomas, “The Bridge of Sighs,” 313 Horn, David G., 77, 81, 87 – 88, 304, 367n11 Hose, Sam, 182 Hottentot women, 299 – 300 hubris, 12, 234, 241, 265, 384n19 Hugo, Victor, 388n40 human development, 21 – 22, 77, 184, 386n27 human exceptionalism, 31; animality and, 199 – 210, 214 (see also animality); blushing and, 67 – 70, 79, 88; emotional expression and, 366n1; evolution and, 382n4; flayed skin and, 182; free will and, 193; materialism and, 16, 201 – 2, 236 Humboldt, Alexander von, 87, 363n6 Hume, David, 8, 19, 28, 30 – 31, 35, 48, 55, 166, 191, 255 – 56, 260, 289, 364n10, 373n11; “Of National Characters,” 284 – 85 humoral model, 16

I N D E X    425 Hunt, Holman, 36 Hutin, M. F., 323, 326, 393n3 Hutton, James, 39 Huxley, T. H., 390n1 hygiene, 111, 114. See also sanitary movement id, 355 – 56 idealism: Balzac and, 131; beauty and, 57, 221, 276; blushing and, 88 –  9 1; Chenavard and, 249; as decadent, 261; definition, 361n3; Eliot and, 351 –  5 2; freedom and, 191; free will and, 184; history and, 6 –  8 , 231 –  3 2, 234; human exceptionalism and, 201 –  2 ; materialism and, 4, 13, 27 –  3 2, 258, 266  –   6 7, 315  –   1 6; modernism and, 352 –  5 3; philosophical debates on, 27  –   3 2; realism and, 3  –   4 , 9, 14  –   1 5; soul and, 77; Spinoza and, 363n5; spirit and, 280; tragedy and, 232; transformation and, 307; will and, 88  –   8 9, 243. See also German idealism identity, 13 – 14, 21, 25; alienated skin and, 225 – 26; loss of, 181 – 82; marks and, 13, 301 – 7, 392n14, 393n15; nudity and, 373n5; racial, 13, 289, 307 – 10 (see also race); scars and, 301 – 4, 307, 318 – 19, 325 – 27, 338; tattoos and, 318 – 20, 325 – 28, 336, 343 – 44, 347; transformation and, 307 – 17 “idiots,” 68, 98, 374n15 immorality: of aristocracy, 108, 123 – 31; industrialization and, 132; skin disease and, 107 – 8, 112 – 19, 160. See also morality imperialism, 210, 334, 380n32 imperial manhood, 153 – 58, 288 India, 154; tattooing in, 320, 334 Indian Mutiny/Rebellion (1857), 286 individual/individuality, 2 – 3, 10 – 11; agency and, 383n10; emotions and, 177 – 78; Enlightenment and, 16 – 17, 33; French Revolution and, 125 – 31, 135 – 36; hereditary degeneracy and, 123 – 25, 134 – 36; historical change and, 231 – 41; loss of, 236; materialism and, 234, 274; modernity and, 192, 271; neoliberal, 359 – 60; Nietzsche on, 259; novels and, 19 – 20, 166; psychology and, 6; rationality and, 265; realism and, 353; skin and, 129. See also liberal individualism; neoliberal individualism; possessive individualism industrialization, 56 – 57; disease and, 108, 146; moral decay and, 132 inheritance, 328 – 35, 345. See also heredity

Innis, Thomas, 148 intelligent design, 69 – 75, 110 The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Oloudah Equiano, 377n19 interiority, 16 – 17, 26, 43, 356; blushing and, 66, 74, 80, 367n5; consciousness and, 55 – 56; rejection of, 52 – 53; subjectivity and, 243 Isis-Cybele, 248, 387n32 Jablonski, Nina, 362n12 Jackson, Hughlings, 82 – 83 Jacobs, W. W., “The Monkey’s Paw,” 210 Jaffe, Audrey, 173, 358, 374n12 Jameson, Fredric, 10, 18 – 20, 103, 138, 362n10, 368n18, 368n20, 371nn19 – 23 Jarrold, T., 297 – 98 Jefferson, Thomas, 279, 391n6 Jelinek, Josef E., 373n8 Jews, 283, 293 – 94, 299, 306, 320 Jivaro people, 377n20 Johnson, Robert, 296 Jolly, Roslyn, 387nn31 – 32 Jones, Colin, 168 – 69 Jones, Frederic Wood, 54 Jordanova, Ludmilla, 43 Journal of Cutaneous Medicine, 112 Journal of Mental Science, 152 Jowett, Benjamin, 28, 250, 261 – 62, 389n41 Judith and Holofernes, 163 Jung, Carl, 7, 396n4 Jupiter-Ammon, 248 Kames, Lord. See Home, Henry (Lord Kames) Kant, Immanuel, 7, 29 – 31, 52, 191, 202, 255, 262, 285 – 89, 291, 364n14, 375n2, 375n8, 383n9, 392n6 Keats, John, 10; “Sharing Eve’s Apple,” 92 Keen, Suzanne, 390n1, 395n18 Kesteven, W. B., 323 Kingsley, Charles, 156; Two Years Ago, 13 – 14, 311 – 15; The Water-Babies, 14, 141, 153 – 54, 279, 307 – 11, 309, 316, 378n23 Knox, Robert, 51 – 53, 57, 61, 283, 286, 391n3 Knox, T., 364n15 Koven, Seth, 150 – 51 Krause, Karl Friedrich Theodor, 376n10 Lacan, Jacques, 371n18 Laclos, Choderlos de, 134 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 361n5 Lambeth Workhouse, 150 – 51

426    I N D E X

La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, 28 – 29, 34, 381n4 Landseer, Edwin, 51, 322 language, 357 Laocoon, 382n8 Lavater, Johann Kaspar, 61, 170, 280 – 81, 297, 365n20 Lawrence (saint), 380n41 Lawrence, D. H., 353 – 54 Lear figures, 223 Lebois, René-François, 158 LeBon, Charles, 135 Le Brun, Charles, 170 Leclerque-Neveu, Bernadette, 388n36 Lee, Vernon, “Marsyas in Flanders,” 389n46 Leeuwenhoek, Antonie van, 369n5 Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 359, 379n29 Lenaghan, R. T., 386n27 Lennox, Sarah, 392n13 leprosy, 131, 176 lesions, 120, 122, 138, 148 Lessing, Gotthold, 382n8 Levin, Yisrael, 387n33 Levine, Caroline, 366n39 Levine, George, 21, 358 Lewes, George Henry, 17, 55 – 56, 351, 390n1 liberal individualism, 374n14 liberalism: economic, 191, 382n6; neoliberal individualism, 359; religion and, 386n28 liberty, 266, 383n12; Marsyas and, 238. See also freedom lineage, 344 – 47. See also heredity Linnaeus, Carl, 284 literary realism. See realist literature Locke, John, 18, 30, 34, 76, 255, 316, 376n17 Logan, Peter, 194–95 Lombroso, Cesare, 14, 81, 89, 189, 279 – 81, 297 – 98, 300, 323 – 24, 340, 348, 365n20, 368n13, 382n7, 393n17 Louis, Margot K., 239, 387n32, 388n40 Lucretius, 255 – 57, 364n14, 369n5, 387nn34 – 35 lunar caustic, 392n11 Lutz, Deborah, 190 lynching, 182 lyre, 231, 238, 251 – 52, 274 – 75, 388n36 lyric poetry, 10, 103, 371n20 Macauley, Thomas Babbington, 155 Macmillan, Duncan, 366n30; “French Art and Scottish Philosophy,” 50 madness, 227; blushing and, 104; visual representations of, 44 – 45

Magendie, François, 36 Mai. See Omai makeup, 63, 69, 168 – 69, 224 Malay tattoos, 320 Malthus, Thomas Robert, 135, 381n4 Mander, W. J., 261 Mandeville, Bernard, 255 Manet, Édouard, 300 mania, 103, 368n19 Maori tattoos, 377n20, 394n4 Marat, Jean-Paul, 11, 144, 158 – 64, 175 Marcus, Sharon, 2, 357 market economy, 12. See also capitalism; commodities; economic liberalism; property marks, 279 – 84, 301; identity and, 13, 392n14, 393n15. See also scars; tattoos Marsh, Richard, 210 Marsyas: Balzac and, 378n22; Empedocles and, 258; historical change and, 338, 340; mythical flaying of, 8, 12 – 13, 230 – 41, 252 – 54, 385n23, 395n2; representations of, 230 – 31, 241 – 49, 244, 246, 381n2, 383nn11 – 13, 384n19, 388n37; resurgence and, 382n5; sound and, 375n9, 387n36; sympathy for, 382n7; in twentieth-century German culture, 385n20; Wilde and, 263, 265 – 72, 276 martyrs, 226, 263 Marx, Karl, 143, 191, 194, 228 Marxism, 357 Mary, Queen of Scots, 313 masculinity. See men masks, 265 – 68, 270, 273 – 74 masturbation, 81 materialism, 12 – 13; definition, 361n3; emotional expression and, 64, 104; evolution and, 235, 249, 279, 307; history and, 5 – 8; human exceptionalism and, 16, 201 – 2; idealism and, 4, 13, 27 – 32, 258, 266 – 67, 315 – 16; individuals and, 234, 274; Lucretius and, 255 – 57; moral aesthesis and, 42; pain and, 275; philosophical debates on, 27 – 32; physiological, 55; realism and, 9, 18 – 20; religion and, 17; Romanticism and, 14, 30; sensing surface and, 60, 76, 184, 243; spirit and, 240, 257 – 58; tragedy and, 232; will and, 270, 349 materialist atheism, 35 materialist naturalism, 127 materialist realism, 14, 349 materialist self, 1 – 5, 17 Matz, Aaron, 54 – 55

I N D E X    427 Maya, 248 Mazzoni, Vittorio, 376n10 McWilliam, Rohan, 319 medical science, 18, 29 – 35; cadavers, research on, 194; diseases and, 108 – 12. See also anatomy; dermatology; French medicine; physiognomy; physiology; psychology; science Medico-chirurgical Review, 117, 149, 367n7 Meissner, Georg, 376n10 Melville, Herman, 199, 376n12 mementos, 181, 195 memory, 219 men: as agents of history, 123; bathing and, 11, 153 – 58; blushing by, 84, 95, 296; flaying of, 385n25 Menninghaus, Winfried, 52 mental illness. See madness Meredith, George, 118 – 19, 126 metaphysics, 28, 32, 237, 239 – 40, 273 Meudon tannery, 211 – 12, 217 Meyer, Susan, 297 Meynell, Alice, “The Colour of Life,” 141 – 43 miasma, 146, 148, 151 Michelangelo, 245, 380n41, 385n22 microscopy, 369n5 middle class: bathing and, 151 – 53; decency of, 125; degeneration and, 132 – 38; ideal body, 110, 144, 371n21; victims of the Terror, 163 Mill, John Stuart, 191, 194, 333, 377n17 Millstein, Arrielle Sophia, 394n9 mind-body connection, 32 – 35; blushing and, 71, 91; emotional expression and, 50 – 51; materialism and, 143, 239; realism and, 316 – 17; skin and, 53 – 54. See also embodied mind mites, 148 – 50 mixed-race protagonists, 294 modernism, 352 – 53 modernity, 2, 6, 12; aristocracy and, 339; French Revolution and, 215 – 16; Marsyas and, 263; novel and, 166; possessive individualism and, 192 (see also possessive individualism); savagery and, 217, 227, 231; sensation fiction and, 218; skepticism about, 258; slavery and, 289; tattoos and, 335; touch and, 185; tragedy and, 238 modesty, 89 – 91, 93, 142, 367n9 Mohanram, Radhika, 295 – 96 Mojaves, 394n6 monism, 28 – 29, 359, 395n18 monogenists, 285 – 86

Montpellier, France, 29, 31 Moore, George, 354 Moore, Gregory, 259 – 60, 395n3 morality, 10, 12, 42, 76, 158; beauty and, 26, 50, 115; blushing and, 88, 91, 97, 157, 163; children and, 88; cosmopolitanism and, 338; health and, 157; heart and, 74; as herd phenomenon, 260; hygiene and, 111, 115; senses and, 188; sensus communis and, 34 – 35; sympathy and, 48 – 49, 68 – 69. See also immorality Morgan, Benjamin, 364n16, 365n23, 366n35, 395n19 Morris, Lewis, 384n19 mortality, 205, 209, 395n2 Mosso, Angelo, 68, 88, 91, 367n11 Mullan, John, 166 Müller, Karl, 237, 262, 387n32, 390n48 Müller, Max, 387n33, 388n40 Munby, Arthur, 296 Murray, Henry, 296 Muscular Christianity, 156 – 57 Muslim bathing habits, 154 myth, 7, 22, 275, 395nn1 – 2; as degenerate, 388n40; historical progress and, 231 – 41; individual development and, 354; psychology and, 262; realism and, 3 – 4, 14 – 15; Romanticism and, 236 – 37, 254. See also flaying; Greek mythology; Marsyas mythical poetry, 13. See also Arnold nakedness, 136, 151, 174, 200, 249, 282. See also nudity Napoleonic period, 127, 226; relics of, 197 – 98. See also French Revolution narrative impulse, 18 narrative poetry, 3 – 4 national character, 285 – 87 national degeneration, 123 – 25, 132 – 36, 157 – 58. See also degeneration Native Americans, 320, 394n6 naturalism, 10, 50, 60, 132, 366n30 natural theology, 3, 26, 35; anatomy and, 370n8; Balzac and, 379n29; expression and, 61; healthy body and, 156 – 57; Lucretius and, 256; neurology and, 36, 38 – 39; sanitary movement and, 110; science and, 123; suffering and, 381n4 Naturphilosophie, 29 Needham, John, 379n29 negative freedom, 192, 208, 216 – 17, 228 Neher, Allister, 51 neoclassicism, 50, 52 – 53, 365n25 neoliberal individualism, 359

428    I N D E X

nervous system, 2, 26, 35 – 41, 53 – 56, 60 – 62; blushing and, 71 – 73, 80, 82 – 83; emotion and, 143 New Hegelians, 390n1 New Liberals, 262 Newton, Isaac, 29 New Woman novelists, 369n7, 372n24 Nichols, Francis Morgan, 383n12 Niebuhr, Barthold Georg, 285 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 5 – 6, 131, 237 – 39, 253 – 54, 259 – 62, 287, 372n23, 384n15, 388n36, 389n42 Niobe, 232 nostalgia, 219, 348 Nourse, William E. C., 188 Novak, Daniel, 392n7 novels: individuality and, 19 – 20, 166; New Woman novelists, 369n7, 372n24; physiological consequences of reading, 82 – 83. See also realist literature nudity, 200, 202, 249, 371n18; identity and, 373n5. See also nakedness Oatman, Olive, 394n6 objectivity, 82, 279 – 80, 313 – 14, 319, 349, 395n15, 395n17 octoroon figure, 294, 311 – 16 O’Farrell, Mary Ann, 64, 77 – 78, 88, 103, 303, 367n4 Oken, Lorenz, 184 Oliphant, Margaret, 136 Olympians, 232 – 41, 247, 250, 270; sympathy and, 273, 365n25, 388n40. See also Apollo; Dionysus; Greek mythology Omai, 320, 393n1 organicism, 363n8 Oriental culture, 210 Orphic religion, 238 – 39, 262, 273, 387n32, 388n40 Orton, Arthur, 318 – 19, 326 Osiris, 247 otherness, 94, 357; marks of, 279; racial, 311 – 16 Ottoman Empire, 154 Outram, Dorinda, 144, 163 Ovid, 241 – 42, 388n36 Owen, Richard, 363n6 Oxford classicists, 249 – 50, 261 – 63; at Balliol College, 250, 262 Pacini, Filippo, 376n10 pagan religions, 245, 247 pain, 233, 235 – 41, 264, 269, 275; expression of, 231; form and, 260; gender and, 382n7;

race and, 290, 382n7; realism and, 275 – 76; sympathy and, 235, 382n7; tattooing and, 324. See also sensitivity; suffering painting, 60, 297, 313 – 14, 343 – 45 Paley, William, 381n4 Pall Mall Gazette, 150 pallor: emotion and, 64 – 65, 67, 72, 93, 366n1; makeup and, 224; mania and, 368n19; in painting, 297; realist literature and, 101 – 3, 177. See also blushing Pan, 240, 242, 250, 252, 254, 269, 383n13, 386n26 Pandora, 201, 378n23 Pantheon, 244, 385n21 Parent-Duchatelet, Alexandre, 300 Parish, Lawrence, 113 – 16, 370n14 Parry, Albert, 322 Pasteur, Louis, 109 Pater, Walter, 7, 13, 237, 249 – 50, 255, 261 – 63, 266, 271, 273, 383n12, 386nn27 – 28, 388n40, 389nn41 – 43, 390n50; “A Study of Dionysus,” 262, 382n5, 384n15 Paton, J. Noel, 308 Payne, Edwin, 154 – 55 Payne Knight, Richard, 238, 260 Pears soap, 148 “Peau d’âne” (fable), 200, 204 penis, 90, 147, 368n14, 371n18 Pentheus, 247 perception, 3, 17, 355 – 56; physiology of, 35 – 41; sensation and, 186; sensus communis and, 32 – 35; subjective, 313 – 14, 349; surface and, 8 – 10 permeability, 10 – 11, 16, 18, 107 – 12, 136 – 42, 181; bathing and, 143 – 44, 146 – 53, 369n5; blood and, 158 – 65, 175; contagion and, 145 – 47; pores and, 369n5; sentiment and, 165 – 78. See also contagion; disease; pores/ porosity; sanitary movement Persephone, 239 perspiration, 112 – 13, 147. See also sweating philosophy, 4, 17 – 18; beauty and, 26; debates on materialism and idealism, 27 – 32; medicine and, 36; physiology and, 25 – 26. See also Common Sense theory; individual philosophers photography, 14 – 15, 280, 317, 392n11; as art, 393n19; as commodity, 330; criminology and, 281 – 82; objectivity of, 313 – 14, 319, 395n15, 395n17; realism and, 14 – 15, 345 – 47, 392n7 phrenology, 280, 304, 392n13 Phrygian nature worship, 238, 252

I N D E X    429 physical culture, 156 – 58, 335, 348 physiognomy, 221, 279 – 80, 301, 317, 359 – 60, 365nn20 – 21 physiology, 6, 18, 25 – 28, 31, 60, 239, 262; blushing and, 70 – 75; corrupt, 77; of perception, 35 – 41; philosophy and, 25 – 26; realism and, 137; social cohesion and, 27 Pick, Daniel, 135 Pindar, 342 Plato, 200 – 201, 253, 272 – 73, 316 Playfair, John, 39 Plenck, Josef, 112 Plumbe, Samuel, 115 poetry: lyric, 10, 103, 371n20; mythical, 13 (see also Arnold); narrative, 3 – 4; poetic rhythm, 100; spasmodic, 3, 10, 98, 100, 103 poisons, 145 – 48 Polwhele, Richard, “The Blush of Simplicity,” 93 polygenesis, 282 – 83, 390n2 Pope, Alexander, 123–25, 369n8, 370n9 pores/porosity, 11, 16, 21, 112 – 19, 143; bathing and, 154; excretion and, 108 – 12, 147; medical knowledge on, 369n5; permeability and, 369n5; sensing surface and, 258. See also permeability possessive individualism, 137 – 40, 178, 192. See also individual/individuality poverty, 149 – 51 Powers, Sir Alfred, 111 Powers, Susan D., 107 Pre-Raphaelites, 46, 51, 60, 313 presentism, 358 Priapic cults, 238 Price, Uvedale, 86 Prichard, James Cowles, “Researches into the Physical History of Man,” 286 Priestman, Martin, 255, 387n34 primitivism, 130; aristocracy and, 347 – 49; fetishes and, 194, 209 – 10, 377n18; racial otherness and, 311 – 16; tattoos and, 335. See also atavism; barbarism; savagery privacy, 109, 335 progress, 2, 6. See also historical progress Prometheus, 200 – 201, 207, 245, 247, 378n23 property, 227 – 28; bodies and body objects as, 178, 190 – 95; free will and, 191 – 93; tattoos and, 332 – 33, 344, 394nn9 – 10; women’s property rights, 163. See also commodities; slavery prophecy, 383n13 proprioception, 186 – 87, 375n5, 376n9 prostheses, 224 – 29

prostitution, 69, 78, 130, 132 – 36, 155, 299 – 300, 321, 378n24 psychoanalysis, 20, 353 – 54, 357 psychology, 2 – 3, 6 – 7, 18, 22, 239 – 40, 351 – 60; “depth,” 22, 353 – 57; myth and, 262; New Hegelians and, 390n1; skin ego and, 20, 362n13 public baths, 373n5. See also bathing Purdy (tattoo artist), 321 Pytho, 387n30 quadroon, 312–14 quietism, 254 Quintilian, 66 race, 4; animality and, 202; atavism and, 281, 298, 300; blushing and, 70, 84 – 88, 391n6; color and, 13, 282 – 95, 305, 317; criminality and, 298, 300 – 301; degeneration and, 135; evolution and, 202, 283, 310 – 11, 314; fingerprints and, 306 – 7, 392n10; gender and, 295 – 301; Marsyas and, 383n11; scientific racism, 13; sensitivity and, 188 – 89, 290 – 91, 382n7; skin disease and, 129 – 30; theories of, 281 – 87, 359 – 60, 390n2, 391n6; visibility and, 287 – 95. See also blackness; whiteness racial hierarchies: climate theory, 282 – 83, 285; color and, 317; senses and, 184; whiteness and, 282 – 84, 308 Radin, Margaret Jane, 191 – 92, 376n17 railways, 218 Rajan, Supritha, 374n14, 382n6 Ramsay, Allan, 86 rape fantasies, 334 rationality, 12, 163 – 64, 250 – 51 realism, 3 – 4, 350 – 60; beauty and, 56 – 57; bodies and, 18 – 20, 22, 137 – 40; degeneration and, 138 – 40; emotional expression and, 87; fables and, 209 – 10; as genre, 20; idealism and, 3 – 4, 9, 14 – 15; individuality and, 353; materialism and, 9, 60, 275, 352; as mode of narration, 20; mythic or grotesque elements, 7; philosophy and, 25 – 27; photography and, 14 – 15, 345 – 47, 392n7; representation and, 43 – 54, 276; sensing surface and, 18 – 20, 26 – 27, 54 – 60; subjectivity and, 21 – 22; suffering and, 275 – 76; suspicion and, 368n20. See also French realism realist literature: blushing and, 92 – 104; flushing in, 92 – 93, 98, 101; pallor and, 101 – 3, 177; race and, 288 – 95, 301; skin and, 54 – 60, 316 – 17; slavery in, 294 – 95; tattoos in, 327 – 35

430    I N D E X

Reed, Matthew, 394n9 Reformation, 342 Regency (UK), 10, 12; athleticism and, 157; immorality and, 108, 123 – 31; nostalgia for, 348; values of, 218, 220 Reid, Thomas, 25, 30 – 31, 33, 35, 39, 50, 364n11, 364n15, 375n8 relativism, 34 – 35 relics, 183, 190, 195, 214, 227; clothing as, 197 – 99; of saints, 196, 380n41; skin objects, 222 – 23 religion, 28, 32, 363n1; comparative (see religious history); Doric, 390n48; extinction and, 381n4; human exceptionalism and, 201; liberalism and, 386n28; materialism and, 17; Orphic, 238 – 39, 262, 273, 387n32, 388n40; pagan, 245, 247; skepticism, 258. See also Christianity; design religious history, 231, 237, 244 – 45, 248 – 50, 273 Renaissance, 237, 342 Renucci, Simon-François, 148 representation: body and, 61, 83; civilization’s discontents and, 76; of historical change, 244 – 45; of madness, 44 – 45; materialism and, 61; mediated, 14 – 15, 349, 395n15, 395n17; naturalistic, 26; realism and, 43 – 54, 276 Rey, Roselyne, 376n10 Reynolds, Joshua, 320, 322 Reynold’s Miscellany, 150 Richards, Robert J., 363n6 Richardson, John, 259 Richardson, Robert, 237 Richardson, Samuel, 168 Ricord, Philippe, 115 Riegl, Alois, 394n4 Robespierre, 142, 170 Robinson, Benjamin, 385n20 Rochdale Times, 153 Roche, Mark, 264 Roman baths, 152, 155. See also bathing Romanticism, 4; commodity and, 193 (see also commodities); Darwin and, 363n6; Dionysus and, 239; French Revolution and, 243; Hardy and, 339 – 40; Lucretius and, 255 – 56, 387n34; materialism and, 14, 30; myth and, 236 – 37, 254; relics and, 190; religious history and, 248; suffering and, 233; the Terror and, 191; Wilde and, 269. See also German Romanticism Rosenthal, Angela, 84 – 86, 367n5 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 255

rubor: blushing and, 63 – 70, 78, 80, 84, 90, 99, 104; disease and, 119; forms of, 75; makeup and, 63, 69, 169; sexuality and, 368n14; shame and, 93. See also blushing; flushing Rudy, Jason, 368n16 Ruskin, John, 9, 25 – 27, 36, 50 – 51, 56 – 61, 239, 292, 366n39; “Fiction Fair and Foul,” 56 Russell, Bertrand, 353 Ryan, Vanessa, 390n1 sacrifice, 139, 150, 201 – 2, 232 – 34, 241 – 43, 248 – 49, 262 – 64, 270, 272, 374n14, 382n6, 383n9, 384n19, 385n22, 389n43, 394n5, 395n2 sailors: cauls and, 195 – 96; tattoos and, 320 – 22, 326 – 29, 335 Sainte-Hilaire, Geoffroi, 373n9, 379n29 saints: relics, 196, 380n41; suffering of, 231, 382n8. See also Bartholomew (saint) Saki (Hector Hugh Monro), 394n10; “The Background,” 334 – 35 sanitary movement, 108 – 13, 115, 148 – 51 Satan, 245, 247 satyrs, 44, 122, 223, 230 – 31, 256, 259, 261, 272 – 73; decadence and, 240; expression of pain, 236; silenus, 231, 270, 273. See also Marsyas savagery, 5 – 7; antithesis and, 238; atavism and, 281; blushing and, 68, 87 – 88; civilization and, 129 – 30; degeneration and, 135; flaying and, 210 – 11; gender and, 324; mementos of, 195; modernity and, 217, 227, 231; race and, 202, 298; shame and, 87; skinning and, 215; tattoos and, 14, 320 – 25, 327 – 28, 335, 344. See also barbarism; primitivism scabies, 148 – 50, 373n5 scars, 13 – 14, 279; character and, 392n12; identity and, 301 – 4, 307, 318 – 19, 325 – 27, 338; race and, 311 – 17; tattoos and, 322 (see also tattoos); transformation and, 315 – 16 “scenic,” 18 – 20, 362n10, 371n20 Schaffer, Talia, 142 Schelling, Friedrich, 29 – 30, 237, 364n14 Schertz, Peter J. M., 383n12 Schlegel, August, 237, 241, 394n11 Schneider, Mary W., 387n32 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 208, 260 – 61, 351, 353, 395n1 science, 5 – 6, 17; aesthetics and, 364n16; of emotional expression, 67 – 70;

I N D E X    431 natural theology and, 123. See also anthropometry; French medicine; medical science scientific materialism, 28 – 32, 220, 275 Scottish Enlightenment, 6, 18, 25 – 26, 364n9. See also Common Sense theory scrofula, 114, 116, 119, 131, 160, 326. See also tuberculosis sea bathing, 142, 151 – 52 Second Empire (France), 132 – 36 self-consciousness, 9; blushing and, 64 – 65, 67, 80, 93, 366n1; degeneration and, 83; morbid, 75 – 78, 157 – 58; nudity and, 200 self-judgment, 75, 90, 158, 170 sensation, 3, 9, 17, 185 – 86; consciousness and, 356; flaying and, 231; self and, 375n9; spirit and, 268; will and, 260 sensation fiction, 22, 60, 101 – 4, 218 – 23, 275, 392n14 sensibility, 70, 72, 77, 185; in ancien régime, 163 – 64, 170; civilization and, 83; gothic fiction and, 166 – 67; morbid, 75 – 78 sensing surface, 2, 25 – 62, 183 – 90, 375nn2 – 7; Charles Bell and, 35 – 41; common sense and, 32 – 35; materialism and, 60, 76, 184, 243; philosophy and, 25 – 32; pores and, 258; realism and, 18 – 20, 26 – 27, 54 – 60; reliability of, 60 – 62; visual art and, 42 – 54 sensitivity: of children, 145, 158; class and, 188 – 89; criminality and, 189; gender and, 145, 158, 188 – 89, 382n7; race and, 188 – 89, 290 – 91, 382n7; tattooing and, 324 sensorium, 9, 32, 101, 193; Bell on, 53, 375n7; blushing and, 74 – 77; of embodied mind, 371n20; human exceptionalism and, 201; race and, 290; self-judgment and, 158 sensorium commune, 25, 33 – 35, 56, 61, 375n3 sensus communis, 32 – 35, 56 sentimentality, 86, 163 – 78, 227, 373n10, 374n13 separate spheres, 110 Serres, Michael, 185, 375n3, 376n9 Sethlans, 394n13 severed heads, 214. See also guillotine; shrunken heads sexuality: animal skins and, 202; of black women, 299 – 300; blushing and, 84 – 85, 89 – 91, 97, 368n14; degeneration and, 372n24; female, 126 – 31, 299 – 300, 313; homosexuality, 155, 158, 373n5, 389n41; race and, 297 – 301; skin diseases and, 120 – 25

Shaftesbury, Earl of, 34, 166, 173, 255, 387n35 Shakespeare, William, 41, 47, 214, 223 shame, 232; blushing and, 84, 89 – 90, 93 – 94, 97, 102; nudity and, 200; savagery and, 87. See also embarrassment Sharpe, William, 284 Shelley, Mary, 379n31 Sheppard, Edgar, 152 Sherrington, Charles Scott, 375n5 shrunken heads, 195, 199, 376n12, 377n20 Shuttleworth, Sally, 351 – 52, 363n8 Siddons, Henry, 65 sight, 184 – 87, 375n2, 379n28 signification, 358 silver nitrate, 392n11 Sisamnes, 384n17 skin disease, 107 – 8, 121; degeneracy and, 119 – 25, 133 – 35; French medicine on, 370n14; morality and, 114 – 19, 160; race and, 129 – 30, 298; sexuality and, 120 – 25; syphilis, 116, 120, 121, 124, 146 – 48, 160, 370n14, 380n40; tattooing and, 393n3 skin ego, 20, 362n13 skinning, 215; of animals, 12. See also flayed skin skin objects, 181 – 83; as commodities, 189 – 99; French officer’s leg skin, 213. See also flayed skin slavery, 178, 191 – 92, 202, 376n15, 377n19; abolition of, 367n4, 391n6; free will, 377n17; modernity and, 289; opposition to, 286; in realist fiction, 294 – 95 Sloane, Joseph, 245 Small, Jocelyn Penny, 383n13 smallpox, 133 – 34, 392n12 smell, 186 – 88 smiling, 168 – 69 Smith, Adam, 19, 68 – 69, 82, 87, 90, 104, 158, 165 – 66, 173, 373n11 Smith, Mark M., 182, 185, 291 Smith, Phillip E., 266, 390n47, 390n50 Smith, Southwood, 109 Smith, Stanhope, 283 Smyth vs. Smyth, 326 social cohesion: emotion and, 11; flaying as violation of, 214, 231; physiology and, 27; sensus communis and, 35; subjectivity and, 21; sympathy and, 54, 166 social Darwinism, 253 Socrates, 272 – 73 sodomy, 151 Sophocles, 342 sorrow, 233, 264 – 65, 342

432    I N D E X

soul, 28, 33 – 35, 38, 233; blushing and, 72 – 73, 76 – 78; body and, 127; consciousness and, 270; idealism and, 77; subjectivity and, 28; tragedy and, 271; Wilde and, 266 – 71. See also spirit sound, 184 – 87, 375n9. See also hearing souvenirs, 181, 183, 190; flayed skin objects, 181 – 82, 219 – 28 space, 375n8 spasmodic poetry, 3, 10, 98, 100, 103 spatial separation, 109 spa towns, 148, 152, 156 spectatorship, blushing and, 63, 68 – 69, 98 – 101, 104 Spencer, Herbert, 4, 17, 21, 54, 157, 186 – 88, 259, 359, 375n3, 375n9, 390n1, 390n47; associationism, 356, 366n35; materialism and, 28, 31, 55 – 56, 239 – 40, 262, 353 Spinoza, Baruch, 28 – 30, 127, 139, 359, 363n2, 363n5, 364n14, 372n23, 386n28, 395n18 spirit, 28, 30; Egyptian symbols and, 386n26; history and, 266; idealism and, 280; materialism and, 240, 257 – 58; tragedy and, 238; vitalism and, 210; will and, 270. See also soul Stahl, Georg Ernst, 30 steam baths, 152, 155. See also bathing Stedman, Gesa, 167 Steintrager, James, 169 Stephens, R. J., 321 – 23 Sterne, Laurence, 373n10, 378n25 Stewart, Dugald, 31, 39 Stirling, James Hutchinson, 262, 388n39 Stoler, Ann, 295 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 294 structuralism, 358 struma, 119 – 20, 124 subjective consciousness, 82 – 83 subjectivity, 28, 317, 394n5; history and, 6; market and, 190 – 95; radically embodied, 19; sanitary discourse and, 115; skin and, 1, 3, 11 – 13, 183 – 90; skin color and, 13; social cohesion and, 21; soul and, 28; space and, 375n8; surface and, 1 – 2, 243, 316, 352; tattoos and, 331 – 32; as topology, 359 suffering, 14, 235 – 41, 246, 248 – 49, 264, 269, 271, 274; art and, 395n2; definitions of, 382n7; expression of, 231 – 32; realism and, 275 – 76; sympathy and, 387n32, 388n40; as truth, 385n19. See also pain; sensitivity suicide, 238, 250, 254, 256 – 57, 313, 395n1 superego, 356

surface, 352; consciousness and, 9, 356; destruction of, 243 (see also flaying); as discursive, 21 – 22; individuality and, 354; legibility of, 7 – 10, 343 – 49, 351, 357 – 58; perception and, 8 – 10; subjectivity and, 1 – 2, 243, 316, 352; truth and, 266, 385n22; use of term, 15 – 16. See also sensing surface surface reading, 357 – 59 sweating, 152 – 53, 369n5. See also perspiration Swedenborg, Emmanuel, 127, 131, 204, 209, 379nn28 – 29 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 237, 261, 266, 388n40, 389n42 symbolic reading, 357 sympathy, 5, 373n11, 374nn12 – 13; for animals, 382n4; art and, 60; blushing and, 64, 68 – 69, 71, 74, 76, 90, 99, 102; compared to contagious sentiment, 164 – 78; emotional expression and, 43 – 49, 61 – 62, 168 – 78 (see also emotional expression); feeling and, 19; French Revolution and, 11; incapacity for, 365n25; maternity and, 295; pain and, 235, 382n7; race and, 294; skin objects and, 227; spectatorial, 166, 168, 176, 374n12; suffering and, 387n32, 388n40 syphilis, 116, 120, 121, 124, 146 – 48, 160, 370n14, 380n40; race and, 298; tattooing and, 393n3 Tages, 339 – 40 tanned skin, 12, 181, 211 – 12, 217. See also flayed skin Tardieu, M., 323, 327 taste, 186 – 88 tattoos, 4 – 5, 14; alienated skin and, 328 – 35; aristocracy and, 320 – 25; atavism and, 324 – 25; cosmopolitanism and, 346; criminality and, 14, 320 – 25; effacement of, 326 – 27; freedom and, 333; gothic and, 334; history and, 328; identity and, 318 – 20, 325 – 28, 336, 343 – 44, 347; as memorials, 322, 393n2; modernity and, 335; pain and, 324; primitivism and, 335; property and, 332 – 33, 344, 394nn9 – 10; in realist literature, 327 – 35; sailors and, 320 – 22, 326 – 29, 335; savagery and, 14, 320 – 25, 327 – 28, 335, 344; sensitivity and, 324; subjectivity and, 331 – 32; syphilis and, 393n3; text and symbols, 328 – 35, 394n5; on women, 323 – 24, 328 – 35

I N D E X    433 Taylor, Alfred Swaine, 321, 325 – 26 teleology, 6, 234, 237, 244, 248 – 50, 258, 260, 386n28 Tennyson, Alfred, 6, 98 – 101, 104, 249, 381n4, 388n40; “Lucretius,” 255 – 57 Terror (French Revolution), 2, 142, 191 – 92, 287; alienated skin and, 5; civilization and, 27; class warfare, 221 – 22; color and, 287; contagious emotion and, 143 – 44, 163 – 78; difference and, 360; flayed skin and, 182, 217 – 23; flaying and, 12, 181, 210 – 17; historical change and, 6 – 8, 21 – 22, 172, 231; materialism and, 30, 58, 240; porosity and, 11. See also French Revolution Thain, Marion, 383n11 theologians, 17. See also natural theology things, 181 – 83, 215, 362n11. See also body objects; commodities; skin objects thing theory, 374n1 Third Republic (France), 132 – 33 Tichborne, Roger, 318 – 19, 325 – 26, 393n15, 395n17 Times, 195 tissue theory, 108, 110 – 11, 139, 369n5 Titian, 388n37 Tomich, Dale W., 192 touch, 183 – 90, 290, 355, 375n2, 376n10, 379n28, 395n14 toxins, 146 – 48, 152 – 53, 170 tragedy, 227, 240 – 41, 261, 264, 266, 270 – 71; forms of, 232 – 33; modernity and, 238 “tragic mulatta” figure, 294, 301 transcendence, 3, 30, 48, 136, 139, 211, 231, 236, 239, 242, 249, 275, 382n8 transformation, 307 – 16 travel, exotic, 320 – 25, 327 – 28 Trilby (1895), 394n8 Trollope, Anthony, 136; “The Relics of General Chasse,” 197 – 99; “The Turkish Bath,” 373n5 truth, 15; beauty and, 42, 60, 272; blushing and, 97; suffering as, 385n19; surface and, 266, 385n22 tuberculosis, 114, 119 – 20, 124, 370n14. See also scrofula Tucker, Irene, 287 – 88 Turkish baths, 114, 141, 151 – 55, 373n5. See also bathing Turner, Charles Tennyson, 103; “Constantine’s Ampitheater at Trêves,” 95; “On Seeing a Child Blush on his first View of a Corpse,” 93 – 94; “The Blush of Constantine at the Council of Nice,” 94 – 95

Turner, Frank M., 387n34 Twain, Mark, 392n10 Tylor, E. B., 382n6 Tyndall, John, 387n34 unconscious, 241, 351, 353 universalism, 26 – 27, 34 – 35, 49, 62, 364n13 upper class, 151 – 53. See also aristocracy urbanization, 56 – 57, 146 US Constitution, 193 Valerian (emperor), 380n41 veil, 202, 224 venereal disease: bathing and, 147 – 48; immorality and, 160; skin and, 114 – 19, 129 – 31, 134. See also syphilis Ventricular Hypothesis (Galen), 33 vice: hereditary, 120 – 25; skin disease and, 115 – 16, 120 – 25. See also immorality Vico, Giambattista, 33 Victoria, Queen of England, 126 Virgil, 382n8 virtue, skin and, 115 – 16. See also morality visual arts. See art; painting; photography vitalism, 29 – 30, 127, 139, 372n23; commerce and, 207; death and, 205; spiritual forces and, 210; will and, 209 Volk, 285 Voltaire, 255, 380n35 von Haller, Albrecht, 15 von Hartmann, Eduard, 351, 353, 358, 395n1, 396n4 Vulcan, 394n13 Wagner, Rudolf, 376n10 Wagner, Tamara, 126, 218, 348 Wakley, Thomas, 42 Wallace, Rasheed, 394n9 Wandering Jew, 223, 227, 380n41 Ward, Harriet, 391n5 Ware, Vron, 295 waste, elimination of, 107 – 12, 147 water cures, 117, 148, 373n6 Wegner, Phillip, 357 Wellington, Duke of, 197 Whately, Richard, 364n11 Wheeler, Roxann, 286 White, Charles, 291, 297 White, Paul, 61 whiteness: blushing and, 85 – 88, 367n5; gender and, 295 – 96; passing and, 294; racial hierarchies and, 282 – 84, 308. See also race; racial hierarchies

434    I N D E X

white supremacy, 317, 391n6 wigs, 211, 224 Wilde, Oscar, 7, 13 – 14, 17, 236 – 37, 242 – 43, 349, 389n41, 390n1, 390n47; De Profundis, 14, 230, 232 – 33, 263 – 65, 268, 270 – 76, 389nn44 – 45, 390n50; Picture of Dorian Grey, 14, 157, 205, 266 – 72, 274 – 75; “The Decay of Lying,” 107; “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,” 261, 263, 265 – 67, 269 – 70, 272, 389n43; “The Truth of Masks,” 273 will, 395n18; Balzac and, 127 – 28, 131, 203 – 9; blushing and, 72 – 74, 88; consciousness and, 188; hand as instrument of, 332 – 33; heredity and, 138; idealism and, 88 – 89, 243; materialism and, 270, 349; reason and, 353; senses and, 185 – 86, 260; spirit and, 270 Willan, Robert, 112, 115, 288 Williams, James, 152 – 53 Wilson, Erasmus, 84, 112 – 18, 124, 146 – 49

Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 52, 239, 384n15, 389n42 women: blushing by, 84 – 91, 95, 98, 296; color and, 295 – 301; damaged bodies of, 136 – 37; flaying of, 385n25; modesty of, 89 – 91, 142; nudity, 201 – 2; property rights, 163; sensitivity of, 145, 158, 188 – 89, 382n7; tattoos on, 323 – 24, 328 – 35. See also African women; gender; sexuality Wood, Ellen, 304 Woolf, Virginia, “The Angel in the House,” 63 workhouses, 150 – 51 working class, 150 – 53, 156 wrinkles, 4, 52, 205, 221, 279, 313 Zammito, John H., 364n13 Zeus, 201 Zola, Émile, 5, 10, 129, 260, 353, 371n19; Doctor Pascal, 139 – 40, 371n23; The Fortune of the Rougons, 134, 370n16; L’assomoir, 300; Nana, 132 – 37, 139, 158, 201, 300