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1 / Breasts on a Platter and the Bosom of Jesus The Parameters of Fantasy Where do fantasies of the breast begin? Where do they end? Since the eighteenth century, as Marilyn Yalom and other historians of the breast have shown, mainstream fantasies of the breast have turned on versions of the maternal and the erotic breast, respectively. By and large, two things are consistently present in these fantasies: the breast is feminine, and the breast is figured as abundance. In the introduction to this study, the rehearsal of the gender-bending stories of Bev Francis and Jeanette Apfel, of Jared Diamond’s lactating fathers, and of Simon Perelstein’s brief experience of having the breast was designed to call the first of these truisms into question. These stories readily and tellingly imagine men with breasts and women without. Yet the fairy-tale quality of the one and the body-technological assumptions of the other two may inadvertently have caused the question of the loss of the breast to be handled with flippant ease. The matter of the loss of the breast is especially urgent, however, precisely because our primary mode of experiencing and imagining such loss today is in terms of breast cancer. The parameters of fantasizing 21 the breast involve not only the dialectic of gender but also a dialectic of abundance and lack or loss. The purpose of the present chapter is to link these dialectics through a reflection on some unconventional moments in the history of the breast: Sebastiano del Piombo’s painting of St. Agatha and its reception by the German Romantic theorist Friedrich Schlegel; the fanciful etymology of the words breast and bosom peculiar to the nineteenth-century German lexicologist Jacob Grimm; two eighteenth-century German wet-nurse’s tales and their instantiation of a metonymics of the breast; and, finally, a consideration of St. Augustine’s fantasy of Jesus as a lactating mother. In eªect, the figures of Jesus and St. Agatha, virtual archetypes of men with breasts and women without, will serve to deepen the fantasies broached by the stories of Bev Francis and Simon Perelstein, while the interposed material on etymology and metonymy will allow us to begin to elaborate a sense of a language that originates from the breast and is based on lack. While the ultimate goal of this entire study is to specify a distinctly German, late-eighteenth-century fantasy of a breast-based culture, this chapter flirts with a notion of the breast that transcends historical specification, even if all the material adduced, with the exception of Augustine, can readily be bound into the period under consideration. In the final analysis , I would have to admit that my interpretation aims at both a historical and a transhistorical sense of what the breast means.1 St. Agatha A painting of St. Agatha by Sebastiano del Piombo illustrates the complexities of a patriarchally contained breast-based culture. As the first saint to have her breasts removed as part of her martyrdom, Agatha became the “the patron saint of nursing mothers and nursemaids, who prayed to her for healthy breasts and a good supply of milk.”2 Agatha, born in Sicily at the foot of Mt. Etna, is Sicily’s protector, “invoked against the eruption of Etna and other volcanoes, as well as against lightning, fires, and earthquakes. [ . . . ] She is also the patron saint of bell-founders apparently because of the resemblance in shape between bells and breasts.”3 In some representations, particularly after the Middle Ages, she appears bearing a plate on which her amputated breasts are placed. 22 According to Martha Easton, “Apparently such presentational scenes of holding her inverted breasts led to the tradition of blessing loaves of bread on February 5, Agatha’s feast day; the rounded lumps on Agatha’s proªered plate could certainly be mistaken for less gruesome fare.”4 While hagiographers regard the association of her breasts with bells and loaves of bread as a mistake, the result of a break in the detailed rehearsing of her narrative, I am inclined to see evidence of an associative logic at work. Such a logic may even take its cue from the breast, as we shall see below, in connection with Roman Jakobson’s theory of metonymy and metaphor. Legend has it that this third-century Sicilian saint caught the eye of the pagan governor Quintian, but when she continually rejected his advances, he determined to punish her, using her Christian faith...

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