American Bodies: Cultural Histories of the Physique

An edited collection of essays examining changing interpretations of the human body within American culture, this volume spreads its coverage over a considerable expanse. In time, it moves only from the late eighteenth century to the present (though in one contribution the future figures largely). But in subject matter, the range opens up dramatically (and diffusely)—the fourteen chapters being paired up under seven topic headings that span seafaring, science fiction, film, and, inevitably, gender. The result is that only some of the contributions will interest historians of medicine (there is, in fact, more meat for students of literary and film criticism to chew on).

Louis Kern’s analysis of the reconceptualization of “the male sexual body” in the writings of Victorian-era free-love advocates deftly intertwines medical with moral and spiritual concerns. Physicians’ uneasiness about the physical effects of inordinate sexual activity—particularly as expressed by “alternative” practitioners such as Russell Trall and Thomas Low Nichols—was a critical link in the chain of reasoning that defined free love as the freedom of women not to love, as the liberation of wives from the too frequent sexual assaults of brutish husbands. Denouncing the institution of marriage as both exploitative and unnatural, free-love radicals strove to make sex safe (and at the same time more pleasurable) by calling men to a higher understanding of their bodies; the supposedly ungovernable lust of the male beast could indeed be mastered by a philosophy of willful renunciation, and both sexes be all the freer and healthier for it.

Margaret Jones examines the redefinition of women’s bodies in her discussion of the early-twentieth-century birth control movement. Women such as Elsie Clews Parsons and Margaret Sanger, she argues, were encouraged in their championing of reproductive rights by their desire to further the physical, not just social, evolution of womanhood and achieve female biological superiority. Female physical weakness is the subject of Barbara Will’s treatment of neurasthenia, in which she shows how the civilized body of the late nineteenth century, presumably enervated by the stresses and pressures of intensified mental activity, came to be regarded in distinctly feminine terms as sickly, passive, emotionally hypersensitive, and spiritually refined. The opposite of such bodies, the only-too-corporeal Horace Fletcher, draws the attention of the last of the medical history-related essays, Tim Armstrong’s consideration of the influence of Fletcherism on Henry James. The “Great Masticator” of the Progressive Era, Fletcher maintained that extraordinarily thorough chewing of every bite of food was essential to the enjoyment of full health. Armstrong suggests that James, who practiced Fletcherism for several years, absorbed the Fletcherite ideals of mastication, rumination, and efficient elimination, and employed them as metaphors in the great work of revising his literary corpus between 1905 and 1909.

There are two other historical articles in this collection. Simon Newman presents an interesting account of the use of tattoos by early American seamen, both to mark themselves as members of the seafaring fraternity and to establish an individual identity within that community through emblems that announced their personal interests, allegiances, or values (purely practical purposes were also commonly served, the tattooing of initials or names allowing drowned sailors to be identified when their bodies were recovered). Peter Thompson pursues an even more intriguing maritime theme: cannibalism in the face of shipboard famine. His consideration of how this extreme wrought by necessity affected distinctions between “civilized” and “savage” bodies is based almost entirely, however, on a single notorious incident in the 1770s, and lacks the analytical heft that a collection of cannibalism cases could provide.

A final point of criticism is that the editing of the volume was lax, allowing far too many typographical errors to remain in the text.