Reading the Body in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (review)

At first glance, the title of Juliet McMaster's new book seems to proclaim allegiance to a vast and growing field of contemporary scholarship. In the last decades, numerous researchers and critics have attempted to "read" the human body —that is, to seek meaning in the myriad ways it has been understood, theorized, experienced and imagined over history. Eighteenth-century studies, their literary branch included, have shared this fascination; the result has been an impressive series of books, articles and dissertations devoted to the question of the body. The richness of this ongoing debate is perhaps best reflected in collections such as Veronica Kelly and Dorothea E. von Mücke's Body & Text in the Eighteenth Century (1994) or in the articles on the eighteenth century included in Angela Keane and Avril Horner's Body Matters (2000). The body's place in the writing of particular authors has also been studied in depth —for example, in Carol Houlihan Flynn's The Body in Swift and Defoe (1990) and in Tristanne J. Connolly's William Blake and the Body (2002). All of these works can be said to share the goal of "reading" the eighteenth-century body, although they vary in their methodological approach to it and examine it in a wide range of contexts.

Yet, as Juliet McMaster's introduction immediately makes clear, "reading the body" is not so much her task as it is, quite literally, her subject. McMaster —an Austen specialist who has published widely on nineteenth-century fiction —has chosen to look back in time at what she considers a distinctive phenomenon of the preceding century. Eighteenth-century Britain, she argues, was intrigued by the body's potential legibility —specifically, by the notion that a correspondence of mind and body allowed the former to be "read" in the latter. Theorists and laypeople alike pondered the relation between the shape of a brow, the flutter of a hand, or the tint of a cheek and such internal phenomena as character, morals, and emotions.

The theories in circulation were, in some cases, centuries old —physiognomy, for example, harks back to Aristotle —but, McMaster claims, at that particular moment in Western history they suddenly gained currency and relevance. Widely disseminated and debated, they found their way into art, nourishing its theory and practice and informing the exchange between artist and audience. Although McMaster touches on painting and theater, her main focus is fiction. Eighteenth-century readers, she argues, "were trained to be intensely conscious of the process of reading bodies" (xi); novelists, in turn, had a "growing awareness . . . that they were catering to a readership that was becoming increasingly sophisticated in the theories of physical and mental correspondences, increasingly alert to the possibility of interpreting character from body" (xiv). McMaster's goal, therefore, is "in some measure to recover the reading experience of the contemporary readers of eighteenth-century novels, by focusing on discourses on the expressive body that they knew very well, and following through the ways the novelists made use of them" (xii).

McMaster begins with medical theories of the body's internal workings. In the medical understanding of the period, mind and body were assumed to be tightly connected. This bond found expression in the "medical myth" of healing through catharsis, which held a strong appeal for novelists. Because disease was believed to occur when the internal fluids grew excessive or infected, doctors relied largely on procedures of extraction, such as purges, induced vomiting, and bloodletting. Using examples from Smollett, Burney, Richardson, Sterne, and Wollstonecraft, McMaster demonstrates how fiction appropriated the medical paradigm of corruption and cleansing. Thus, for example, the turning point in Richardson's Pamela is a case of "moral purgation that coincides with a physical one" (10). Bloated with lust and unrequited love, Mr. B. falls ill and has himself "blooded"; when, shortly afterwards, he sends for Pamela and begs her to marry him, physical convalescence and moral reversal are clearly linked.

But it is the body's exterior and the theories of its legibility...