Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (review)

Book Reviews 241 George Eliot's Middlemarch, Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, and Sigmund Freud's Studies in Hysteria. In the process, other illnesses are addressed as well—for instance, "if gout is associated with the closure of writing in Bleak House, smallpox behaves analogously to gossip in its circulation" (p. 27). Gout thus centers a study that persuasively places a series of sicknesses into precise historical frames, suggesting that, "even as we 'treat' afflictions of the human body and regard illness as the invasion of microbes or baciUi, we must also read them as inextricably integrated into a specific culture at a specific time" (p. 28). Gordon shows how gout has both a literal and a Uterary history: as its medical profile shifts in the wake of political and class upheavals, so too does its significance as a trope marking social position undergo alteration. "Gout as Resistance" offers an admirable synthesis of literature, medicine, and cultural history. It is unfortunate that Gordon's superb essay languishes in a volume that otherwise has Uttle to recommend it. —Bruce Clarke Texas Tech University Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic. New York: Routledge, 1992. xvii + 460 pp. Paperback, $17.95. Over Her Dead Body is a highly original book that exposes the powerful and astonishingly pervasive conjunction of death, femininity, and the aesthetic in Western culture since the Enlightenment. It is no accident, Elisabeth Bronfen contends, that beautiful women, dead or dying, figure prominently in the literature, art, and cultural tropes of these past three hundred years, especially in the Romantic and Victorian eras. Indeed, from about 1750 on, the literary scene is a veritable parade of feminine corpses, fair revenants, and pale doubles for the dead. The visual arts are similarly preoccupied with dead brides, dying mistresses, and drowned OpheUas. For some actual women of the time, Ufe, death, and artifice commingle in such a way that the slow dying of the consumptive or neurasthenic invalid becomes an artful way of Ufe and suicide becomes one more chapter of autobiography. But what does this mean? What can all the dead beautiful women in fiction, poetry, painting, and sculpture since the eighteenth century reveal about Western culture's ways of seeing the world? Bronfen's anal- 242 BOOK REVIEWS ysis directs attention to a set of cultural structures, largely unconscious, that link and equate death, femininity, and the aesthetic in a multitude of powerful, sometimes contradictory ways. She makes visible some images of women, ideas of femininity, and the repressed omnipresence of death, especially in nineteenth-century culture, to which Western culture has been blind. It is as if the disturbing conjunction of femininity and death—expressed as idea, ideal, and image on the beautiful surface of art works—was simply too obvious, too customary to be remarkable. Gazing across the cultural landscape for points of access to deeper meaning , viewers have until recently overlooked these surface signs altogether and, with them, their significance. Bronfen explores the many meanings death and woman (both woman's body and the cultural construct of femininity) have come to have in Western culture since the eighteenth century and the ways that the arts have served to define, domesticate, and even deny these disturbing forces. Traditionally, death and the feminine in Western thought have signified the body, worldly mutability, impermanence, unpredictability , flux, weakness, decay, dissolution, and absence; at the same time, they are eternal, spiritual, sexless (castrating or castrated), anonymous , before or beyond language. Each is read as inaccessible, chaotic, uncontrollable, antisocial, potentially consuming of individuality, destructive of worldly achievement, and partaking of the primordial unity with the mother that is at once desired and feared. But, beginning in the age of Enlightenment, these two forces, death and woman, as conventionally read, seem to constitute a greater threat to the social and philosophical order. By their very presence they defy, mock, and subvert the dominant features of the masculine-dominated culture—rationalism, materialism, individualism, personality; energy disciplined into industry; and a belief in the social contract, economic gain, and scientific progress as good and potentially without limit. Additionally and most profoundly, death and woman both signify the Other to post-Enlightenment...