Syphilis and Sociability

This essay considers the stain on one’s position within civil society represented by venereal disease. Drawing on the diaries of Boswell – for whom regular doses of syphilis seem to have been regarded as an amatory hazard – and Neville, the essay explores the increasing prominence and importance of the sphere of sociable intercourse in the eighteenth century, which necessitates, for Boswell at least, a clear division between his private selfhood and conduct and his public demeanour. In contrast, Neville’s episodes of the pox seem to have exacerbated his incipient paranoia and annoyance with a world around him that refuses to acknowledge his gentlemanly qualities. Both men’s reaction to their condition as related through their diaries reveals for Leigh Wetherall-Dickson a shifting notion of private identity formed in response to the relatively new phenomenon of sociable intercourse.

‘Intellectual suicides’

In her essay Christine Crockett Sharp addresses the body as afflicted by a debilitating search for knowledge and truth, which runs against the doctrine of Victorian muscular masculinity. Masturbation, Sharp demonstrates, provoked horror in the nineteenth-century mind because of its association with a deliberate self-incapacitation. The weakness and impotence that it was believed to induce, allied to its suspiciousness as a solitary pursuit, runs counter to the imperatives underpinning imperial and commercial vigour. In Middlemarch, Casaubon is an etiolated husk of a man not primarily because of the impossibility of his intellectual task but because of his self-inflicted moral wound.

Miserrimus Dexter

This essay focuses on the ‘monstrous’ deformities of Miserrimus Dexter in Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady (1875) and their framing within the Victorian interest in teratology – the study of genital birth defects. Born without legs, Dexter is a taxonomical conundrum, positioned somewhere between subject and object and between madness and knowledge. His deformity is, as Katherine Angell makes clear, the object of scientific investigation, but it must also be interpreted in order to resolve the mystery at the heart of the novel’s plot. The dangerous knowledge that he possesses, which as much concerns his deformed body as the key to the novel’s mystery, threatens to exceed the symbolic order and thereby render questionable the ordering principles of science and medicine.

Introduction

With the dawn of modern medicine there emerged a complex range of languages and methodologies for portraying the male body as prone to illness, injury and dysfunction. Using a variety of historical and literary approaches, this collection explores how medicine has interacted with key moments in literature and culture. If any dominant vision of the male body can be drawn from this collection, it is a wounded body containing a deeply troubled consciousness that has retrenched to a form of immobile self-incertitude.

The Cacophony of Disaster

In this essay Inbar Kaminsky examines the physical dislocations that followed the emotional trauma of 9/11. Robbed of his ability to process the monumental collapse of meaning represented by the attack, DeLillo’s protagonist is projected into what Kaminsky terms a ‘metaphorical body of sound’ – a dissonant and omnipresent soundscape of memories whose refractions prevent him from accommodating his trauma both physically and mentally. Here the body becomes consumed by the sensorium, dispersed and fractured by the disconnect created by the possibility of survivorship in the midst of mass death. Kaminksy explores how the American nation, as much as its citizens, has become disembodied and is still searching for ways to reconnect to the physical weight of history.

The Black Male Body in Early African American Science Fiction

Marlene Allen’s essay explores the bodies of Belton Piedmont and Bernard Belgrave through the focus of late nineteenth-century debates about race determinism. Sutton Grigg’s Imperium in Imperio extrapolates the nature and nurture dichotomy into a fantastical counter-history of race war in America, refuting pseudo-scientific discourses of black intellectual inferiority.

The Male Wound in Fin-de-Siècle Poetry

This essay fixes on the figure of Saint Sebastian as the ‘icon for the literally and metaphorically penetrable male body in the late nineteenth century’. Sarah Parker regards him as a focus for the aesthetic and decadent impulses of the fin de siècle, particularly appealing to non-heteronormative sexualities, but also as a contrasting exemplum for degeneration discourse. Sebastian’s prevalence in the literature of the late nineteenth century, Parker argues, codifies a nascent aesthetics of homosexual suffering while at the same time offering a provocative metaphorisation of sodomitic activity. It further articulates same-sex relationships with the religious tradition of suffering, producing strikingly eroticised poetry that fantasises about penetrating the wounds not only of Sebastian but also of Christ.

The Poetics of Anatomy

Jamie McKinstry examines the early modern history of anatomical dissection as an exploratory process of formalising knowledge and of encountering the unexpected within. The sixteenth-century journey inside the body has parallels, McKinstry argues, with the contemporaneous exploration of the New World and in Donne’s poetry he sees reflected a linked throwing-off of ignorance and an embracing of new physical metaphors.

Southern Gothic and the Queer Male Body

The homosexual male body as a threatening transmitter of social and libidinal disquiet is addressed by Thomas Long in relation to writing of the American South. He argues that argues that in the post-1945 period, and particularly prior to the Stonewall riots of 1969, the gay male body has increasingly replaced the black body in Southern culture as the abject Other, drawing down on it homophobic violence as a consequence. Working with Eve Sedgwick’s premise that, as a genre, the gothic codifies a form of ‘homophobic thematics’, Long considers how the specific religious, geographical and political intensities of Southern culture are grafted onto that base. The tensions between normative moralities and reactive deviancies that characterise the gothic tradition are heightened by the historical fact of slavery in the American South, which creates a tradition of scapegoating the black body as symbolic of social fears. Underlying that, and more evident in the integrationist period of Civil Rights protest, is a deeply confused struggle between homosocial and homosexual relations. In a range of texts that straddle Stonewall, Long detects a quarrel between what he calls a ‘blazoning’ attitude towards self-expression and the repressive demonisation of the queer body through homophobic discourse.

‘’Tis My Father’s Fault’

Jenifer Buckley commences her analysis of Sterne from the notion, influenced by the findings of Leeuwenhoek, that the thoughts of a father at the point of ejaculation could positively affect the child that was produced. In contrast to the imaginative transit of the mother, which, it was believed, if negative or destructive during the period of pregnancy could result in birth defects, the male imagination bore the responsibility for producing hale and hearty offspring. Sterne’s satirical dismissal of such ‘imaginationist’ theories of reproduction proceeds through Tristram’s father, who bemoans his distraction at the moment of his son’s conception, which, he believes, was responsible for all his child’s failings. The comic calamities of this bullishness belies, for Buckley, a more serious debate about the relative male and female contributions to the domestic sphere, and about the workings of imaginative causation that would soon be more rigorously interrogated by the Romantic movement.