As white men surrendered to carnal impulses and lost control of their bodily flows, they became slaves. Such sensational conclusions were standard fare in a 19th-century rhetorical universe where self-reliance as a corporeal principle was also an issue of political gravity. Far from signaling a breakdown of the body's potential to analogize the body politic, the representational slide from Southern bondage to white corporeality is of tremendous national use. The “natural” body – especially in “aberrant” manifestations that violate ethical, hygienic, and democratic codes broadly classed under the dictum of self-reliance – is an enabling construction that allows white men to concentrate on disruptions in their own bodies while overlooking disruption in the body politic. The linguistic inequality that reads the white male's private body as the public's collective body acts in tandem with political inequality by misrepresenting the scope and character of African-American servitude. American liberal reformers participated in a political distortion by talking about the body as though it had the same valence as the body politic. Equipped with a catachrestic sensibility that (mis)understood the citizen's sexuality via national policies on race, a wide range of cultural critics including medical crusaders, abolitionists, educators, and transcendentalists reconceived of the abstract body politic in fairly specific, highly personal, and ultimately privatizing terms. But what happened when that abstract body became culturally particular, when, for instance, the transparency of white males became li bidinally bound to castigated representations of blackness? As an analogy for certain sexual behaviors, slavery plainly suggested the dire consequences of improper corporeal conduct.
How to Do Things with Surfaces: The Politics and Poetics of Victorian Surfaces
