Embodiment As Discursive Strategy in Women's
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Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2003 Subversive bodies: embodiment as discursive strategy in women's popular literature of the long eighteenth century Phyllis Ann Thompson Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Thompson, Phyllis Ann, "Subversive bodies: embodiment as discursive strategy in women's popular literature of the long eighteenth century" (2003). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 2073. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/2073 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. SUBVERSIVE BODIES: EMBODIMENT AS DISCURSIVE STRATEGY IN WOMEN'S POPULAR LITERATURE IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College In partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy In The Department of English By Phyllis Ann Thompson B.A., University of North Carolina-Greensboro, 1983 M.A., Appalachian State University, 1992 May 2003 ©Copyright 2003 Phyllis Ann Thompson All rights reserved ii For Bob and Betty iii Table of Contents Dedication……….……………………………………………………………………iii List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………v Abstract……………………………………………………………………………….vi Chapter 1. Writing the Body: An Anatomy of Power…….………..…………………1 Chapter 2. The Pathologized Body……………………….………………………….37 Chapter 3. The Mutilated Body………………………………………………………74 Chapter 4. Medical Practice and the Body………………………………………….153 Chapter 5. The Criminalized Body………………………………………………….255 Chapter 6. Creating Sustainable Bodies…………………………………………….310 Bibliography………..…………………..……………………………………………316 Appendix. Letter of Permission……….…………………………………………….342 Vita…………………………………………………………………………………..343 iv List of Figures 1. Ms. 3740. Sarah Palmer and others. Early 18th century…………………………197 2. Ms. 3740. Sarah Palmer and others. Early 18th century…………………………198 3. Ms. 7391. English Recipe Book. 17th century.………………………………….205 4. Ms. 7391. English Recipe Book. 17th century…………………………………..213 5. Ms. 4338. Johanna St. John Her Booke. 1680…………………………………..215 v Abstract “Subversive Bodies: Embodiment as Discursive Strategy in Women’s Popular Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century” examines literary representations of the body as strategies of resistance. This study demonstrates that Manley's Secret Memoirs from the New Atalantis, Haywood's Female Spectator, and Burney's Journal and Letters, as well as unpublished receipt books for medicinal and cosmetic preparations, challenge the prevailing masculinist notion of a passive, distinct topography of womanhood and lay the groundwork for a feminist tradition of recognizing the body as an explicit part of experience. Tracing the origins of today's critical perspectives, my study draws on the insights of recent feminist theories of the body but remains historically contextualized through its focus on medical science and law. It demonstrates that the bodies in Manley, Haywood, Burney, and unpublished receipt books challenge the bodily constructions and associated gender meanings that the disciplines of medical science and law have traditionally reinforced. My analysis deepens our contemporary understanding of the complex relations between gender, bodies, and discourse in general. vi Chapter 1: Writing the Body: An Anatomy of Power I. Introduction Last year, on International Women's Day, I was teaching at the American University in Bulgaria and serving as the faculty co-sponsor of our women students' chapter of The Network of East-West Women, an international feminist organization. I attended a program that our student group had organized as part of the activities to celebrate the international diversity of our group of women on campus. Our membership included women from Romania, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Croatia, Bosnia, Albania, Montenegro, Turkey, France, England, Bulgaria, and the United States of America. Our viewpoints and our feminisms were markedly different in some ways, which was very probably influenced by our perspectives on nationalism, globalism, on whether or not we were seeking NATO or EU membership, on our politics related to communism and its recent fall, and on our personal experiences. However even given these distinct differences, on International Women's Day a common concern brought us together—the celebration of the recently published Bulgarian edition of Our Bodies Our Selves and a presentation by the Bulgarian activists and translators who brought this work to press. In spite of our communities' distinct and frequently debated differences, on this day we came together to focus on, educate others about, and advocate for women's health. As I listened to my students ask questions about the role of feminism in Eastern Europe, about the potential impact of 1 this book on women in Bulgaria, and about their own bodies, I was reminded of Boston 1969. I wondered about the possible similarities and differences between that moment in the States just over thirty years ago and this moment in Bulgaria in 2002. In 1969, I was eight years old. It would be another two years before Our Bodies Our Selves was published in the States and another twelve years before I found Our Bodies Our Selves for myself. However, sitting in the former communist party headquarters that currently serves as the campus of AUBG, I could not get the implications for this connection between 1969 and 2002 out of my mind. As I reflect on my experience of International Women's Day and consider my work in relation to the studies that have preceded it as well as to the larger project of feminism, I am reminded that the body is foundational not just to American feminism but to feminisms beyond our borders as well. The premise on which my project is grounded—the relevance of the body—is, then, an old one and locates my study in the historical and on-going concerns of global feminisms. Fundamental to my study is, therefore, the premise that bodies matter. My aim is to recover the relevance of the body to experience in women's popular literature written during the long eighteenth century. In this chapter, I introduce the focus of my study, suggest a feminist cartography of the body, discuss the theoretical stance that underlies this project, and lay out the chapter-by-chapter organization this study will follow. 2 II. Focus of Study In The Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Swift and Pope, Ellen Pollak argues that the myth of passive womanhood was the dominant discursive framework for knowing and assessing women's lives. Pollak argues that the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries mark a critical point in the codification of modern strategies for conceptualizing women. As patriarchal notions of divine-right monarchy were rejected by political theorists, as benevolist attitudes began to infiltrate religious thought, as empiricist philosophy increasingly designated the human subject as the locus both of psychic and of referential truth, new terms in keeping with these individualist traditions gradually evolved to accommodate the ongoing subordination of women to men in social, political, economic, intellectual, and domestic life. Fuller and more complex strategies began to emerge for resolving the inconsistency between the increasing autonomy of the masculine subject, in a culture which increasingly affirmed the prerogatives of individual desire, and the systematic denial of either desire or autonomy in women. (2) While Pollak focuses on the "codification of modern strategies for conceptualizing women" in the major works of Pope and Swift, I continue this line of inquiry but take as my focus the strategies for conceptualizing women as represented through the Enlightenment's scientific and legal constructions of women. My thesis is that an analysis of women's writing on the body demonstrates the relevance of the body to experience, dismantles Cartesian truths, and reveals an embodied knowledge, unaccounted for by Enlightenment science. I contend that an analysis of selected literature of the long eighteenth century (ranging specifically from 1652-1812), including the novel, periodical essay, journal, instruction manual, and receipt book, reveals that representations of embodiment were for women writers a central strategy for questioning what Pollak characterizes as the "systematic denial of either desire or 3 autonomy in women" (2). During this period, women writing literary works, such as Delariviere Manley, Eliza Haywood, and Fanny Burney, and women writing published and unpublished medicinal texts, such as Jane Sharp and countless housewives and daughters writing medical receipt books, addressed the significance of the physical consequences of the body. Their works demonstrate the role embodiment plays in the construction of subjectivity and the re-gendering of objectivity. In spite of a scientific tradition that suggested otherwise, their works demonstrate the centrality of embodiment to revisionary definitions of knowledge, subjectivity, and objectivity and lay the groundwork for a feminist theory