Spontaneous Combustion and the Sectioning of Female Bodies
Sheila Shaw
From: Literature and Medicine
Volume 14, Number 1, Spring 1995
pp. 1-22 | 10.1353/lm.1995.0012
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Literature and Medicine 14.1 (1995) 1-22
Humanity has never been kind to the climacteric female. In the early years of the twentieth century, scholars claim, menopause was often "portrayed in the medical literature as a terminal illness -- the 'death of the woman in the woman.'" Among the Victorians, "menopausal women were more harshly discussed, more openly ridiculed, and more punitively treated than any other female group." During the Enlightenment, medical literature foretold dire consequences for these women. Dr. William Buchan (1729-1805), of the prestigious Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh, warned that the cessation of the menses "is sufficient to disorder the whole frame, and often to destroy life itself. Hence it comes to pass, that so many women either fall into chronic disorders, or die about this time." If being old and female in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries was difficult, it was extremely dangerous in the seventeenth century. The idea that "bodies of aged persons are impure," as William Fulbeck wrote in 1618, was directed primarily at old women, who were frequently associated with witchcraft. Reginald Scot, author of Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), connected witchcraft with menopause, and because it was agreed that the primary characteristics of a witch were those of an old woman, any old woman might be suspect. Poverty was regarded as another likely trait, thus making old women from the lower socio-economic classes even more vulnerable to charges of witchcraft. This stereotype prevailed into the early years of the eighteenth century.

Such attitudes contaminated literature as well, and the misogyny of Augustan satirists is well-known. It is ironic that, among men famous for their nasty infighting, there was total harmony on the subject of Woman. Her vanity, her loquaciousness, her pride, her frivolities, and her mental vacuity are satirized in many of Steele and Addison's periodical essays (1709-1712); Pope's "The Rape of the Lock" (1712-1714); Colley Cibber's "The Refusal" (1721); Edward Young's "Love of Fame, the Universal Passion" (1725); Swift's "The Furniture of a Woman's Mind" (1727); and countless other works. Attacks on the female body are more savage, reducing it to its parts, by Restoration and eighteenth-century poets like John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester; William Wycherley; John Oldham; and Jonathan Swift.

Much less well-known are writings published in England, France, and elsewhere in eighteenth-century Europe that focused on working-class women who, it was said, had perished by spontaneous combustion. Described as elderly, sedentary, corpulent, and addicted to the "vice" of drunkenness -- in short, indolent and morally lax -- these women were just as despised as those of the preceding century who were executed as witches. They too were punished for their sins (chiefly intemperance) by burning. Reports of these incidents were carried in The Annual Register, Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Journal de médecine, and other respectable publications. Judging from the many subsequent references to these reports by doctors, the medical community accepted the phenomenon. In fact, spontaneous combustion of the human body was to remain a "more or less accepted fact of pathology and legal medicine in the nineteenth century." As we shall see, certain factors contributed to the conceptualization of this theory, among them eighteenth-century anatomical studies of the female body, dehumanization of the female body by literary satirists, and a fear of witchcraft.

In 1800, the Frenchman Pierre-Aimé Lair collected these descriptions of spontaneous combustion, carefully citing his original sources, in a paper published in the Journal de Physique entitled "Essai sur les combustions humaines produits par un long abus des liqueures spiritueuses." He also included excerpts from an essay on spontaneous combustion by Monsieur Le Cât (1700-1768), a famous French surgeon. Lair's paper was immediately translated into English and appeared in Tilloch's Philosophical Magazine (London) as "Combustion of the Human Body, Produced by the long and immoderate use of Spirituous Liquors." Twelve cases are presented by Lair, all involving intoxicated, superannuated, obese women who burned to death without apparent cause. Certain lurid similarities -- notably, images of dismemberment and disgusting odors -- appear in all accounts.

art and the body

Since ancient times, artists have visually recreated and re-evaluated the human body. Consequently, it has been used for medical and scientific investigations, as an educational tool and as an allegory for something other than itself. Representations of the body are not merely works of art but can also be read as social documents; paintings and sculptures are direct vehicles of history. To a certain degree all art embodies crystallized history, allowing its cultural values to be portrayed through the iconography of art. For example, cultural attitudes and a society's understanding of sexuality can often be seen through the depictions of the human figure.

The ancient Greeks and the Italian Renaissance artists held the view that the human body should personify ‘perfect’ forms of balance and symmetry, culminating in equal proportions. Once such a harmony had been understood then the ideal construct of beauty in the form of the body could be achieved. The Renaissance artists were influenced by statements they read at the beginning of the third book The Planning of Temples of Marcus Vitruvius' Vitruvius on Architecture, which set out rules of the correct human proportions, stating that man's body is a model of proportion because with arms and legs extended it fits into those ‘perfect’ geometrical forms, the square and the circle. Artists of the Renaissance used this model as a basis for their whole artistic philosophy. Artists were taking an interest in the accurate representation of the human form, and because of this naturalism in art was revived (c.1450-1550). The Naturalistic movement, combined with access to Greek sources and the revival of learning, produced fundamental changes in the anatomical outlook which found their most natural and forceful expression through artists such as Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Michelangelo (1475-1564), and Raphael (1483-1521). Da Vinci, in particular, treated the human body as an instrument of movement governed by mechanical laws — he thought even the expressions of emotions were controlled in this way. No longer during this period was the body regarded as a sinful instrument which must be hidden or as something sacred that must not be anatomically investigated. Classical ideals were returning and artists were the first heralds of the new age.

In the seventeenth century, distorted, exaggerated poses of the nudes were given the title Mannerism. Painters such as Bronzino, Giambologna, and Correggio produced highly polished and formalized nudes which all had a similar look about them. Mannerism became very popular in France during this period, partly because of its cultivation of the chic female nude in the form of the goddess and in Venus-like postures. Art historian Kenneth Clark states in The Nude (1980): ‘The goddess of mannerism is the eternal feminine of the fashion-plate.’ Mannerist art treated the body as a collection of parts, which could be enlarged and exaggerated at will. Many of the art-anatomy folios also employed this type of visual selecting of anatomical parts. In a drawing by anatomist Govard Bidloo (1649-1713), pinned-back flaps of skin revealed the organs of a female cadaver. However, when the nineteenth-century painter Gustave Courbet later made a similar painting revealing only female genitalia, isolating this part of the anatomy, it prompted a viewer to remark:

By some inconceivable forgetfulness, the artist, who copied his model from nature, had neglected to represent the feet, the legs, the thighs, the stomach, the hips, the chest, the hands, the arms, the shoulders, the neck, and the head …

Although the Mannerist body was very elegant, with its finely tapered neck, wrists, and ankles, the female shape became far removed from real life. Incorrect proportions of this type were to be challenged in the eighteenth century by the principles of the Enlightenment.

The pursuit of aesthetics for those educated in the eighteenth century did not belong to art academies and paintings alone, but was a way of life. The body increasingly became a visible and tangible medium through which artists could transmit codes of aesthetics that were also interpreted as codes of ethics. Twentieth-century writers interpreted the aesthetics of this period as being politically active in shaping individual taste, knowledge, and moral behaviour, the cultivation of which was considered important to an aesthetic lifestyle. As Eagleton points out in The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990): ‘The beautiful is just political order lived out on the body, the way it strikes the eye and stirs the heart’. Cultural ideologies harnessing scientific exactness to artistic beauty were the canons on which paintings and sculptures were produced. Like the reading of text, the reading of art also had its own language and could be deciphered and translated accordingly. In The Analysis of Beauty (1753), the artist William Hogarth centres his argument around the ‘line of beauty’, purporting that figurative art could be regulated by a specific principle which could be expressed by a particular line. The beauty of different physical types is a theme that Hogarth deals with in Chapter XI, entitled ‘Of Proportion’. Here he distinguishes between purely formal beauty and the beauty of fitness: the first is governed by the serpentine line; the second arises ‘chiefly from a fitness of some design'd purpose of use’. The pictorial distinctions made by Hogarth are an essential part of his language as an artist, making his characters and caricatures easily legible.

Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-92), a renowned artist and socialite, became the first president of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768. Reynolds, like many of his contemporaries, was a man of the Enlightenment and believed in the harmony of nature, art, science, and medicine, each component relying upon the other. There was very little division for him between art and science. For Reynolds, beauty is not something beyond reach, but tangible and attainable. In one of his lectures to the students and dilettanti, Discourse III (1770), he states: ‘For perfect beauty in any species must combine all the characters which are beautiful’. The human body was seen by eighteenth-century artists as a tool from which to learn. The body whether real or artificial, dead or alive, took on many guises as a physical being to be scientifically explored and artistically rendered.

While life classes involving a nude female were restricted to married men, there was no shortage of ‘anatomized’ females adorning the medical folios of this period. Many of the truncated and finely engraved images show female anatomy in all shapes and sizes. The lack of open access to the life class at the Royal Academy of Arts for single men and women artists necessitated their learning anatomy from such folios; consequently, there was a growing medical interest in biological sex and sexual differences, and a growing market for publications of this kind. Anatomical folios used in the teaching of art had a scientific influence on artists in their studies. In addition to the rules of proportion as laid down by the Renaissance architect Vitruvius, classical ideals of beauty, and the slavish adherence to anatomical accuracy, artists were beginning to address new scientific theories concerning female anatomy and biology. Perhaps for the first time, a serious attempt was being made by artists and anatomists to link geometry and the biology of sex together. According to Kenneth Clark:

‘The fact that we can base our argument either way on this unexpected union of sex and biology is a proof of how deeply the concept of the nude is linked with our most elementary notions of order and design.’ (The Nude, 1980.)

The study of the nude figure and its physiology was being re-addressed not only by scientists and anatomists but also by artists. Medical inquiry into a woman's biological state began influencing art-anatomy depictions of both her inner and outer physiological structure.

The eighteenth century was culturally redesigning the body, for despite analytical, scientific, and medical mechanization of the human form, art constantly reminds us that we are more than just the sum of our parts. Art-anatomy practices increasingly became multifaceted as both artists and anatomists assimilated a new ‘look’ and design to the human figure. The shape of the body is both physiologically determined and artificially recreated. This is most noticeable during the Enlightenment, when fashionable dress, masks and masquerading, corsetry, and the wearing of beauty patches were part of everyday life. Science and art were not alone in measuring the body, for the wearing of stays and the emergence of the fashionable, measured body became part of society's image. William Hogarth's Line of Beauty, and Joshua Reynolds' call for harmony, beauty, and proportion, had one thing in common: measurement.

The female body was moulded, measured, masqueraded, and medicalized. Fashion and physique went hand in hand, and consequently anatomists noticed how the slenderness of shoes and the tightness of stays were physically altering the shape of women. Joshua Reynolds urged his students not to disguise the human form or ‘disguise nature’ by means of ‘hair-dressers, and tailors, in their various schools of deformity’ (Discourse III, 1770). Hogarth, however, encouraged females to change their physical appearance and wear the ‘line of beauty’, which became a tradename for the corset. The wearing of a corset truncated and fragmented the body, and divided it in two. It covered just enough to reveal parts of the anatomy that were decidedly ‘female’ — breasts and sexual organs. Thus, the female's anatomy was being reshaped not only by artists but by the means of the fashions that women chose. The process of sectioning, fragmenting, and splitting the female anatomy, therefore, was not peculiar to the realm of man-made art-anatomy images.

The eighteenth-century woman was constantly having something done to her: the man-midwife inspected her, the stay-maker measured her, the scientist demystified her biology, the anatomist dissected her, and finally the artist painted her. Biological and hierarchal divisions between the sexes in terms of their skeletons were explored during the twentieth century by writers such as Londa Schiebinger, whose research found that it was not until 1759 that the ‘female skeleton make her debut’ (The Mind Has No Sex, 1989). Up to this time all depictions of skeletons were of males, even those representing children and females, and it was not until the latter half of the eighteenth century that women were viewed as physiologically different from men. Anatomical understanding of the skeleton, the representation of the human figure and the disfiguring brought about by the wearing of stays had an impact on artistic development. Artists, especially those trained by anatomists at the Royal Academy of Arts, saw dissecting classes as a natural part of art education. Artists and medical men followed iconographic systems resulting in anatomic arithmetic where classical ideals were promoted by using such images as Apollo and the Venus de Medici.

Cultural iconography of the human figure usually denotes the promise of something ‘more’. It can arouse unfulfilled sexual fantasies, commodity-ownership relations or paternal feelings, or question the very existence of ‘being’ as did the images of life and death during the eighteenth century. Representations of the naked and the nude portray body images as cultural commodities. For modern writers such as John Berger, Carol Pateman, Dorinda Outram, and Simone de Beauvoir, the body (especially the female) becomes a sign and cultural symbol for external reality, both political and gendered. The ‘political culture of the body’ that Dorinda Outram speaks of can therefore be seen through images showing types of dress, posture, chosen medium (oil or otherwise), the scale of canvas, and physiology. The body image as a cultural, political, scientific, erotic, and fashionable statement is most evident through visual representation; real, allegorical or symbolic. Part of eighteenth-century understanding of the body was by means of identifying self with images of life and death. The body, in particular, provoked feelings of enquiry and curiosity of self, both external and internal.

By the nineteenth century, the nude and semi-naked female form could be seen as an ever-recurring topic, for, despite the Victorian values of prudity and chastity, the nude survived. French artists such as Ingres, Renoir, Manet, Degas, and Courbet are readily called to mind for their renderings of the body. The British artist William Etty (1787-1849) became wholly absorbed in the study of the nude, and could often be found at the life class housed in the Royal Academy of Art, making copious drawings of his model. The draped and partially-wrapped life models and classical statues located at the Royal Academy, the Government Schools, and the Slade School of Art direct the viewer's attention to the relevant parts of the body by revealing and concealing. Pictorially, the severing of head from body does not always take the form of decapitation and a fine line around the neck, dividing physical space, is sometimes enough. The pearls around the neck of a wax model draw attention to her face; likewise, the black ribbon around the neck of the woman in Edouard Manet's painting Olympia (1862-3) draws attention to her social status.

Much discussion has centred around theories of the body, especially since the late nineteenth century. Discourse surrounding the naked and the nude, Freudian psychoanalysis, the decline of beauty, and the onslaught of feminism have all helped to shape and define what art and the body are, and what they is not. Early twentieth-century artists including Henri Matisse, Auguste Renoir, Pablo Picasso, and George Braque launched new visions of the human figure as each struggled with ideas of form and content. The fragmentation of subject matter, which became the hallmark of Cubism, meant that representations of the body were seen as small fractions of picture-planes, all positioned at irregular angles. Ideas of figurative and abstract art are thought to have been born at this time, especially in the works of Paul Cezanne, a pre-Cubist painter. After 1945, post-war Britain saw artists such as Stanley Spencer, Lucien Freud, Euan Uglow, Allen Jones, Francis Bacon, and Henry Moore extending the boundaries of figurative and abstract renderings of both the male and female body. In America during the 1950s the American Abstract Expressionists also began to reassess the impact of figurative/abstract art, leading Willem de Kooning to paint a series of ‘pink nudes’, and Pop artist Andy Warhol to make icons of leading Hollywood stars. By the 1960s and 1970s, art was undergoing another metamorphosis, and alternative conventions were being found to re-construct the body in the guise of photo-montage, body-prints, life-size sculpture, concept art, happenings, and performance art. By this time, feminist ideology, the decline of easel painting, and new forms of art were affecting the type of ‘body art’ made.

Representations of the body have survived the most rigorous tests executed by late twentieth-century artists; interestingly, not unlike in the eighteenth century, art, anatomy, and the body are once again being given centre stage.

Generously and variously illustrated, this volume gathers together the work of literary critics and artists, classicists, art historians, and specialists on the history of the body, who survey the strangeness and variety with which the body has given human beings form. Richard Leppert traces how the representation of little girls responds directly to the cultural anxieties of modernity. René Girard plots how starvation becomes an art form, while Eric Gans surveys the contemporary phenomenon of body modification. Sander Gilman explores aesthetic surgery as a response to human unhappiness. Simon Goldhill discovers in the Roman empire the initial stirrings of institutions that focus on the spectacle of the body, and Cynthia S. Greig provides a glimpse of what the history of photography would look like if male nudes replaced female ones. Marion Jackson details how the different physical existence of the Inuit guides the way they make art. Joseph Grigely transforms aesthetics as usual by focusing on the disabled body, while Tobin Siebers describes the traumatic appeal in both fine art and the media of wounded flesh, whether human or animal.

(source) 

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the human body in greek art and thought

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfWd9QZfils