Sara Orning Dissertation REVISED
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ FLESHLY EMBODIMENTS: EARLY MODERN MONSTERS, VICTORIAN FREAKS, AND TWENTIETH-CENTURY AFFECTIVE SPECTATORSHIP A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in LITERATURE by Sara E. S. Orning June 2012 The Dissertation of Sara E. S. Orning is approved: _______________________________ Professor Carla Freccero, Chair _______________________________ Professor Wlad Godzich ______________________________ Professor Peter Limbrick _____________________________ Tyrus Miller Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Copyright © by Sara E. S. Orning 2012 Table of Contents List of Illustrations iv Abstract v Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Humanity, Monstrosity, and Embodying non-Cartesian Flesh 2 PART I: GENEALOGIES OF THE HUMAN Chapter 1: Humonstrous History: How the Monster Gave Us the Human 17 Chapter 2: Female Freaks: Embodiment, Dissection, and Challenging the "Man" in "Human" 85 PART II: FILMIC FLESH and PERMEABLE BOUNDARIES Chapter 3: The Embodied Spectator and the Uncomfortable Experience of Watching Romance and The Piano Teacher 161 Chapter 4: Merging With Flesh 211 Coda: Remains 263 Bibliography 266 Filmography 282 iii List of Illustrations 1.1. Conjoined twins from Jean Riolan's De monstro nato (1605) 65 1.2. "Muscle Man" from Vesalius's De Humanis Fabrica (1543) 75 2.1. Francisco Goya's The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (1797) 85 2.2. Anatomical drawing from Maclise's Surgical Anatomy (1859) 107 2.3. Dissection scene (c.1891) 109 2.4. Galerie de paléontologie et d’anatomie comparée, Paris 124 All images are used according to the "fair use" clause in current copyright legislation. iv ABSTRACT Sara E. S. Orning Fleshly Embodiments: Early Modern Monsters, Victorian Freaks, and Twentieth-Century Affective Spectatorship The primary theoretical concern in this dissertation is to put the embodied, non-Cartesian subject at the center of the emergence of the normative human body and the experience of affective spectatorship. My investigation is set against the backdrop of the ontological privileging of the human in Western culture since the Renaissance, and an aim of my analysis is to provide an account of how the human came to occupy this position. I draw in particular on Michel Foucault's genealogical method, which focuses on the emergence of phenomena instead of searching for their origins, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology to make a claim about the sustained effect of Descartes's cogito on how we conceive of our humanness and embodiment. In the first part of the dissertation, I examine the development of humanness by looking at its relationship with monstrosity in popular and scientific literature from the mid-1500s to the late-1800s, especially Ambroise Paré's On Monsters and Marvels (1543) and nineteenth-century medical literature. From existing on a continuum with a range of other agents – animals, gods, monsters, nature – in early v modern Europe, the human gradually became the advantaged being towards the end of the seventeenth century and other agents ceased to matter in any meaningful way. This shift occurs around the same time as the emergence of a systematic anatomical knowledge of the so-called normal and abnormal human body, based on dissection. I argue that the normative body is challenged and deconstructed by the lived experience of the female, literary freaks in Katherine Dunn's Geek Love (1983) and Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus (1984). They refuse the Cartesian split that enables the designation of normal or abnormal in the first place. In the second part of the dissertation, I draw on phenomenological approaches to film, especially Vivian Sobchack's Carnal Knowledge (2004), and my own experiences as a spectator to formulate a theory of spectatorship built on embodied knowledge. In my examination of recent uncomfortable French films, such as Romance (1999), The Piano Teacher (2001), and In My Skin (2001), I argue that the affective, affected subject is key to theorizing cinema because it opens up for considering the lived body as a site for generating and interpreting knowledge. In conclusion, this study offers a corporeal history of the emergence of humanness, focusing especially on the trajectory of the mind/body split and ending with a call to revise our Cartesian vocabulary. vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to my dissertation committee – Carla Freccero, Wlad Godzich, and Peter Limbrick – for reading my work so diligently and providing such thorough feedback. Special thanks goes to my chair, Carla Freccero, for challenging me to dig deeper, think clearer, and read more carefully. I thank Wlad Godzich for his ability to always know what is missing, for providing the big picture, and for innumerable delightful conversations. I am indebted to Peter Limbrick for graciously agreeing to come aboard this project at a crucial time, and for giving me his thoughtful comments. I also thank Amelie Hastie for productive discussions in the early phase of this project. I could not have completed this dissertation without the generous support of the Fulbright Foundation. I received additional financial support from the Norway- America Association, the UCSC Literature Department, the UC Institute for Humanities Research, and the University of California, all for which I am thankful. My interest in early modern monsters and monstrous bodies was awakened in Margaret Healy's course "The Renaissance Body" at the University of Sussex in 2005. This interest became part of my dissertation after taking Carla Freccero's class "Humanism in the Making: Animals before/after Descartes" at UCSC in 2007. The dynamic, interdisciplinary research environment at UCSC, especially as represented by the Center for Cultural Studies with its weekly colloquium, various research clusters, and reading groups, further inspired and nurtured my research. vii My gratitude goes to Allison Athens and Logan Walker, who, as my writing group, provided a weekly space for constructive feedback and overall support. They have seen this project through from brainstorming points to finished text. Nicky Falkof and Liz Sage have, as always, provided unfailing sustenance, both personal and academic. I am especially grateful to Erica Smeltzer for being a great friend and reading my work, and to Rakia Faber, Matthew Suazo, Martha Kenney, and Aliyah Khan for making my time in Santa Cruz so enjoyable. A heartfelt thanks goes to Lisa Lind, Erlend Blakstad Haffner, Martin Skar, and Ingunn Eriksen for never ceasing to urge me to come home. I thank Johanne Wernø for friendship and timely advice. Bonnie Rhee Andryeyev deserves a special debt of gratitude for her eternal optimism (she would call it realism), her faith in me, and academic and personal support. I thank my parents, Sissel Sellevold and Otto M Orning, who, even after years of not being quite sure how to describe my field of study to their friends, never stopped believing in me and unconditionally supporting me. A big thanks also goes to my siblings – Hans Jacob, Tanja, and Julie – and niece and nephews for always loving me and making me look forward to every trip home. Finally, I am deeply indebted to Espen, whose regular commute across the Atlantic ensured that we spent time together during these past five years. He gave innumerable pep talks and provided balance, calm, and humor in a sometimes arduous process. I thank him for being such a wonderful companion. viii As for what motivated me, it is quite simple; I would hope that in the eyes of some people it might be sufficient in itself. It was curiosity – the only kind of curiosity, in any case, that is worth acting upon with a degree of obstinacy: not the curiosity that seeks to assimilate what it is proper for one to know, but that which enables one to get free of oneself. After all, what would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one way or another and to the extent possible, in the knower's straying afield of himself? – Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Volume II 1 INTRODUCTION: Humanity, Monstrosity, and Embodying non-Cartesian Flesh Bodies have all the explanatory power of minds – Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies In this dissertation I formulate a genealogy of the constitution and experience of the subject that works against the binary structure of the Cartesian mind/body split. I do this by focusing on embodiment as a parallel domain to "the body" as inscribed, represented object. Embodiment can be understood as "neither a biological nor a sociological category but rather as a point of overlapping between the physical, the symbolic, and the sociological" (Rosi Braidotti 25). It is the condition of the lived body, which is experienced and made intelligible through its internal psychical life, embodied, knowledge, discursive formations, and social categories and imperatives. In order to be able to examine embodiment in its culturally interpretable instantiations, I focus on it as the domain through which we may ask questions about what underlies the symbolic and culturally interpretable body. This implies shifting the focus from how we interpret the body to how we live and experience the body.1 Despite Foucault's masterful contributions, to historicize the body as an object does not help us heal the Cartesian split. One of the quiet, unspoken assumptions in 1 My work is particularly indebted to the considerable work undertaken over the past three decades on the body and embodiment in cultural studies, sociology, and feminism. 2 the work on the body is that there is always an extra dimension to it that is not addressed through examination of signification practices only. There is something upon which we build all this knowledge of the body, something that is the very condition of our theorizing and meaning-making. In Adrienne Rich's words, the real difference lies between "the body" and "my body" in that the second takes into account the subjective notion of lived, embodied experience (215).