The ‘Fair Sex’: Skin Colour, Gender and Narratives of Embodied Identity in Eighteenth-Century British Non-Fiction

Abstract In the course of his discussion of the origin of variations in skin colour among humans in the Descent of Man, Charles Darwin suggested that darker skin might be correlated with immunity to certain diseases. To make that suggestion, he drew upon a claim that seemed self-evidently correct in 1871, although it had seemed almost certainly incorrect in the late eighteenth century: that immunity to disease could be understood as a hereditary racial trait. This paper aims to show how fundamental was the idea of ‘constitutions selection’, as Darwin would call it, for his thinking about human races, tracking his (ultimately unsuccessful) attempts to find proof of its operation over a period of more than thirty years. At the same time and more broadly, following Darwin's conceptual resources on this question helps explicate relationships between conceptions of disease and conceptions of race in the nineteenth century. That period saw the birth of a modern, fixist, biologically determinist racism, which increasingly manifested itself in medical writings. The reverse was also true: medicine was a crucial site in which race was forged. The history of what has been called ‘race-science’, it is argued, cannot and should not be written independent of the history of ‘race-medicine’.

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Effects of administration of testosterone, dihydrotestosterone, oestrogen and fadrozole, an aromatase inhibitor, on sex skin colour in intact male rhesus macaques

Reproduction ◽

10.1530/jrf.0.1110051 ◽

1997 ◽

Vol 111 (1) ◽

pp. 51-57 ◽

Cited By ~ 52

Author(s):

L. Rhodes ◽

M. E. Argersinger ◽

L. T. Gantert ◽

B. H. Friscino ◽

G. Hom ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Aromatase Inhibitor ◽

Rhesus Macaques ◽

Skin Colour ◽

Intact Male ◽

Sex Skin ◽

Male Rhesus

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READING CHILDREN'S BOOKS IN LATE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY DISSENTING FAMILIES

The Historical Journal ◽

10.1017/s0018246x99001156 ◽

2000 ◽

Vol 43 (2) ◽

pp. 453-473 ◽

Cited By ~ 8

Author(s):

AILEEN FYFE

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Church Of England ◽

Parental Attitudes ◽

Natural World ◽

Children's Books ◽

Children’S Books ◽

Children's Book ◽

Non Fiction ◽

Late Eighteenth Century ◽

History Of

The eighteenth-century commodifications of childhood and the sciences overlapped in the production of science books for children. This article examines a children's book written by two members of the Unitarian circle around Warrington Academy in the 1790s, and contrasts it with a Church of England work. The analysis reveals the extent to which religious differences could affect parental attitudes to the natural world, reason, the uses of the sciences, and the appropriate way to read and discuss books. Although the sciences were admitted as suitable for children, the issues of the subjects to be chosen, the purposes they were intended for, and the pedagogical methods by which they were presented, were still contested. This article also goes beyond the usual studies of children's books by focusing on non-fiction, and by emphasizing readers and use, rather than authors or publishers. Yet producing a history of reading based entirely on actual readers will be exceedingly difficult, so this article suggests an alternative, by combining accounts of actual readers' experiences with attitudes towards practices like orality and discussion.

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Witchcraft and the Enlightenment: Reinterpreting the Witch in the Eighteenth Century

Septentrio Conference Series ◽

10.7557/5.5072 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Janet Handley

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Seventeenth Century ◽

Belief Systems ◽

Literary Texts ◽

Non Fiction ◽

The Enlightenment ◽

Master's Thesis ◽

The Witch ◽

New Research ◽

Point Of Intersection

New Research Idea: Representing a point of intersection between the natural, the supernatural, law, fact, and fiction, witchcraft makes an excellent case for studying changes in the belief systems during the eighteenth century. Witchcraft remained a topic of intense discussion and heated debates long after it ceased being officially treated as a crime. The period is extraordinarily rich in literary material concerning witchcraft, from pamphlets, essays, news sheets and legal histories to pantomimes, poems, chapbooks, and at least one novel, yet these have so far received relatively sparse academic attention. In order to obtain a deeper knowledge and understanding of the development and the major and minor changes in the discourse on witchcraft during the 1700s, the proposed project analyses its manifestations in English and Scottish non-fiction and literary texts spanning the above-mentioned forms and genres. Exploring the mediation of texts/narratives/stories and examining the sociocultural considerations of “how and why stories are re-worked in different historical and cultural contexts” (Elliott: 149), the proposed project studies how the various texts enter into dialogues with each other and how they play into other concerns. In doing so it gives particular attention to shifts in the representations of the witch figure, its manifestations, function, and voice, and its interrelationship with gender politics. The proposed study builds upon and expands my previous research into the seventeenth century: “Scripting the Witch: Voice, Gender and Power in The Witch of Edmonton (Rowley, Dekker and Ford 1621) and Witchcraft (Baillie 1836)” (Master’s Thesis Nov 2016 UiT).

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Skin colour

Fleshing Out Surfaces ◽

10.7228/manchester/9780719087967.003.0005 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Mechthild Fend

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

French Revolution ◽

Medical Problem ◽

Skin Colour ◽

Microscopic Structure ◽

Body Colour ◽

Medical Illustration ◽

The Enlightenment ◽

Medical Theory ◽

A New Technique

This chapter shows that the notion of skin colour emerged only gradually since the sixteenth century and became a prominent marker of race in conjunction with the development of racial anthropology during the Enlightenment. The colour of a person used to be perceived as body colour and often referred to as complexion, a term linked to the ancient medical theory of the four humours and temperaments. The artistic making and mixing of flesh tones was closely linked to humoral theory. By the eighteenth century most anatomist interested in the microscopic structure of skin agreed that the body's colouring matter – later called pigment – resides in an outer layer of the skin. This was demonstrated in an early medical illustration by Jan Admiral made for a Bernard Albinus‘ anatomical treatise on the colour of the skin. Interestingly, the print also uses a new technique of colour printing, and the argument is that skin colour is simultaneously an artistic, technical and medical problem in this colour mezzotint. Finally, an analysis of Girodet's Portrait of Belley and Benoist's Portrait d'une negresse suggests that skin colour is both a political and representational problem in these portraits painted shortly after the French Revolution.

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Apocalypse Narrative, Chaotic System: Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne and Modern Ecology

Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net ◽

10.7202/1001095ar ◽

2011 ◽

pp. 0

Author(s):

Heidi Scott

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Natural History ◽

Gradual Change ◽

Non Fiction ◽

Contemporary Science ◽

New Findings ◽

History Of ◽

Modern Vision ◽

Century Science ◽

Ecological Methodology

The catastrophic worldview, which has been formalized into various scientific theories (punctuated equilibrium, chaos, tipping points), covets disaster as its aesthetic, with entropy and negentropy as vying principles. At the close of the eighteenth century, science centered around the new findings of Geology, and scientists like Cuvier, Lamarck, and Buffon debated the predominance of gradual change through time versus sudden, widespread calamities or ‘punctuations.’ This essay investigates Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne (1789), a non-fiction, late eighteenth century natural history chronicle of a single parish through decades of close environmental observation. Its epistolary form conveys an aesthetic of discrete, close readings of nature through time, and the chronicle breaks off with the catastrophic effects of the Laki volcanic eruption of 1783. I suggest ways in which White’s famous work is unusually precocious in ecological methodology, a particularly fruitful angle because my reading goes against the perennial critical reception of Selborne as a tome of Enlightenment balance and economy. Instead, I argue that White’s work is a distinctly modern vision of catastrophic change in nature that foregrounds the contemporary science of Chaos Ecology.

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Uprooting Kunta Kinte: On the Perils of Relying on Encyclopedic Informants

History in Africa ◽

10.2307/3171516 ◽

1981 ◽

Vol 8 ◽

pp. 205-217 ◽

Cited By ~ 8

Author(s):

Donald R. Wright

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Oral History ◽

North American ◽

Late Summer ◽

The Gambia ◽

Pulitzer Prize ◽

American Family ◽

American Colonies ◽

Non Fiction ◽

British North American

In the late summer of 1976, amid considerable publicity, Doubleday and Company published Alex Haley's Roots: The Saga of an American Family. Almost overnight author and book gained considerable fame. Americans and soon others accepted the essential validity of the story of Haley's maternal ancestors, which reached back to the Gambia River and to the eighteenth century. Within a few months of its publication Roots had been serialized for televison. Before a year had passed Doubleday had sold over 1,500,000 copies of the book, it had gone into translation in several dozen languages, and Haley had been awarded a special Pulitzer Prize, neither for fiction nor non-fiction, but for something in between felicitously denominated “faction.” The magnitude of Roots' impact makes criticism of the basis of its argument somewhat indivious but perhpas all the more necessary.One aspect of Roots that added considerably to its popularity was the apparent authenticity of the genealogy which Haley used to identify his African ancestor. Haley claimed that, largely through oral history, he had proved the existence of his ancestor, one Kunta Kinte, who had been kidnapped into slavery over two hundred years ago and brought directly to the British North American colonies. A decade of diligent searching had made it possible for Haley to piece together the basic outlines of his ancestry. To nearly everyone who read the book or heard the story of his quest, such success in locating his roots in Africa, after a century of slavery and another of difficult freedom, seemed to justify the endeavor.

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