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  • Reviews/Comptes rendus
  • Richard Nash (bio)
Felicity A. Nussbaum. The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 336pp. Hbk US$75; Pbk US$27. Pbk ISBN-10: 0521016428; ISBN-13: 9780521016421

Felicity Nussbaum's The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century introduces the term "anomaly" to the now familiar triad of "race, class, and gender" that is central to so much recent work in early modern cultural studies. For this reviewer, this addition is a welcome innovation, one that might be asked to carry even more weight than it does in the analysis she develops.

Beginning with a discussion of the fictions of Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood, and continuing through to an examination of the theatrical performance of racial identity on the late eighteenth-century stage, Nussbaum's argument divides into two parts: "Anomaly and Gender" and "Race and Gender." Implicit in that organization is a suggestion that, somewhere in the middle of the eighteenth century, an emergent process of racialist thinking began replacing earlier models that stressed anomaly and defect. Nussbaum does not argue that case explicitly, but she does assert the importance of a mid-century transformation:

The middle of the eighteenth century is a critical turning point in the argument I am weaving for several reasons: it marks women's alleged retreat into the private sphere and the ascendance of domesticity; in 1745 the question of the Protestant succession (which had dominated English politics for seventy years) is finally put to rest; the Seven Years War beginning in 1757 radically changed the outlines of Britain's empire; and the category of "monster" was first introduced by Linnaeus as a scientific classification in 1758. All of these developments [End Page 264] relate to the constellation of factors I am considering, and they demonstrate both the superficiality of difference and its immutability.

(60)

For this reader, it is the suggestion here that is at once the most intriguing and frustrating feature of Nussbaum's argument. The continuity and coherence of argument provided by deploying the analytic of gender stands in stark contrast to the divide suggested at mid-century between "anomaly" as an appropriate cognate term of analysis for the early half of the century, and "race" for the latter half. When one reflects that the very binomial nomenclature introduced by Linnaeus at roughly mid-century offered to systematize the world in a naming practice that effectively minimized (if not erased) anomaly, while at the same time offering a means for reifying racialist categorization, such a suggestion exercises significant appeal. Yet, repeatedly, Nussbaum backs away from arguing any strong case for historical change, ultimately resting content merely to pair her terms of analysis without precise articulation of their relation: "racial categories, closely aligned with anomaly, are highly adaptable within England in the eighteenth century" (254).

Opening with a discussion of Behn's The Dumb Virgin and The Unfortunate Bride, Nussbaum focuses on those fictions by Behn and Haywood that complicate and realign expectations that femininity will prove defective. In her analysis, these "fictions of defect" "celebrate, refine, and counter the prevailing construction of femininity as deformity" (24). Through such fictions, women writers deploy a counter-narrative of femininity as "perfect difference, an inferior perfection" in competition with a misogynist tradition that identified femininity as defect. By mid-century, feminized and effeminized bodies are perceived as corporeal indicators of national values, interests, and anxieties. Sarah Fielding's satire escapes predictable attacks "against Amazons and macaronis," and instead becomes "a vehicle for imagining a nation strengthened by an interlacing of affective communities" (67). Elizabeth Montagu's defence of Shakespeare from the criticisms of Voltaire becomes the focus of a supple analysis of the gendered terms of that debate, in which "it is [Samuel] Johnson, not Shakespeare, who becomes monstrous" (81). In the intellectual conversations of the Bluestockings and the curious sentimental sociability of Tristram Shandy, oddity and singularity come to articulate national anxieties of degeneracy and defect. And, particularly in the writings of women, the disfiguring scars of smallpox hint at alternative constructions of femininity and masculinity. Especially...

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