The Anxiety of Effluence: Resituating Bodily Fluids in Nineteenth-Century Cultural History

On the eve of the nineteenth century, William Blake wrote in his contradictory and provocative "Proverbs of Hell" that while "the cistern contains, the fountain overflows" (199). This principle is manifested in few places as aptly as the human body. The body is both cistern and fountain: it holds back as much as it divulges; it is as watertight as it is porous; it admits, circulates, and emits by a series of reflexes that operate at varying degrees of autonomy and mental awareness (see figs. 1 and 2). While blood, hormones, bile, and its related digestive fluids are secretive—only emerging

Fig 1.

Cistern and Fountain. "Demarest's Patent Cisterns for Water Closets." 1888, Science, Industry and Business Library: General Collection, The New York Public Library. The New York Public Library Digital Collections.

Fig 2.

R. Mutt (Marcel Duchamp). Fountain. 1917, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The Blind Man, edited by M. Duchamp and Man Ray, H.P. Roché, p. 4.

from containment in the event of sickness or injury—tears, sweat, mucus, effluvia, semen, and menses, by their nature, are secreted into the world as an anticipated part of normative life. But, while our skin contains and restrains the movement of the former set of fluids, a second, intangible, "skin" of cultural and social practices and conventions serves to hide the latter. While we may accept the biological fact that these fluids exist in our species, to explore their cultural and intellectual significance during any particular period is, by contrast, to try to prise open a secret history: it is to attempt to reconstruct, then analyze, the kind of mores that tend not to exist actively in the public arena and that may even be articulated only euphemistically in private. At first glance, the supposedly squeamish culture of the nineteenth century seems to be more cistern than fountain—containing more than it let overflow, at least with regard to the seamier examples of such fluids. Alternatively, perhaps the discourse of a specific historical period simply vacillates between withholding and disclosing pertinent information in a manner that we have lost the power to process.

What follows is an exploration of the problem of exposing and rehabilitating historical conceptions of a largely unspoken topic: in this case, bodily fluids in the nineteenth century. Ironically, reanimating particular episodes from the course of intellectual history is a challenge that the nineteenth century itself laid down, a challenge that, in our terms at least, it failed to meet. In Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Friedrich Nietzsche writes with typical mordancy that

the historical sense (or the ability to guess quickly the hierarchy of value judgements by which a people, a society, or an individual has lived) …, has come to us as a result of the enchanting, mad semi-barbarity into which Europe has been plunged by the democratic intermingling of classes and races—only the nineteenth century knows this sense.

(114–15)

Yet, Nietzsche continues, this modern power to infer "every form and way of life" means we can "go our way enchanted and docile with our senses intact, no matter how much the sewers of the rabble's quarter are in the air" (115). The fact that Nietzsche, the historical relativist par excellence, imagines that human effluvia is something against which the senses must be kept "intact" rather than something to acknowledge or even investigate illustrates the difficulty we have in overcoming our historical prejudices in resuscitating past minds; he therefore provides us with an introduction to the very nineteenth-century psyche we are trying to reproduce.

We are not conducting a history of material culture, nor are we questioning awareness of biological processes across history. We know from studying material culture that for most of history, urination and defecation, for example, were not treated with the same avoidance seen today: human urine and feces were quotidian necessities for the tanning, dyeing, and farming industries, and, before indoor...