Reading the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (review)

This engaging study takes as its focus "contemporary discourses on the body that fed into fictional practice, especially those that produced codes of meaning in physical appearance" (xi), examining (as promised) a wide range of discourses channelled through texts on theories of the passions, physiognomics, pathognomics, actors' manuals, treatises on the depictions of bodies in painting, or medical theories of disease as manifest on bodies. McMaster's particular fascination throughout the book is "the body and what it can—and can't—tell us about the mind" with regard to both the characters created by authors, and the readers who responded to detailed fictional explorations of mind-body relationships (25). "A great deal of what we know about the inner workings of characters in eighteenth-century fiction is limited to what we can find out by tracking their bodily signs," observes McMaster; reference to "who blushes, sighs, turns pale, trembles, stammers, and faints is crucial for following psychological action, and often it is our only means of knowing who feels what" (136). McMaster's argument is that eighteenth-century literature is all about the reading of bodies, whether by characters within literary works, or by audiences who (according to McMaster) were expected by authors to "be as educated as a skilled physician in reading signs in the body to arrive at their conclusions about what goes on in the mind" (24).

McMaster examines select seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European theories of the body, and while she principally draws on British theoretical sources (Bulwer, Siddons, Reynolds, Hogarth), her reading of Lavater, della Porta, Descartes, and LeBrun enriches her contextualization of what is happening in English novels of the period. Some chapters in Reading the Body provide discussion of interrelated discourses around the legibility of facial expressions, gestures (such as those held most appropriate to accompany oratory and theatrical declamation), and the manifestation of the passions; other chapters offer targeted interpretations of particular novels as read through the lens of body-mind relationships. For example, chapter 4, "Facial Expression: The Mind's Construction in the Face," brings together pathognomics, Reynolds's Discourses on Painting, and Cartesian thinking on the external signs of the passions in an analysis of the ways in which conventions of painting, drama, and the novel cross-referenced one another and "gave the reading public a vocabulary and mode of discussion for aspects of experience and representation which were familiar, but which they had not hitherto found means to articulate" (83); while chapter 7, "Body Language Censored: Camilla " is dedicated to a reading of Frances Burney's novel as "a sustained meditation on the relation of mind to body, and the ways in which the one can be figured forth in the other" (148). The eight chapters of McMaster's study are illustrated by compelling eighteenth-century images that bolster the author's contentions.

Though her enthusiasm for the material is infectious, the author makes some unsupported assertions about what audiences might have believed during the period, and seems to work with a rather limited archive of resources. For example, in chapter 1, "The Body inside the Skin," McMaster briefly discusses metaphors of the crisis of disease, and claims that "the effective physician [in the eighteenth century] has needed to be skilled in ministering to the mind as well as to the body" (9). Yet this claim is unsupported by reference to any medical textbook, physician's correspondence, or physiological treatise. Given the rich European repertoire of eighteenth-century complaints about doctors, it is not self-evident that doctors would have been expected to have such skills; thus it would have been helpful to learn of the sources that McMaster might have drawn on in making such an assertion. In the chapter "Physiognomy: The Index of the Mind," McMaster notes "the contested nature of the doctrine [of physiognomics], as different authorities and novelists took up their positions" (51), but does not provide much evidence concerning the authorities...