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Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Veronica Kelly and Dorothea E. von Mücke. Stanford, CA: Stanford U. P., 1994.

The very existence of this specialized work is predicated on over a decade of scholarly research and writing on the body. Not only is it specialized through its limitation to the eighteenth century and to Western Europe, but also by its exclusive focus on the interaction of body and text. The twelve essays will perhaps prove challenging to those not already conversant with critical works on the body; the essays presuppose familiarity not only with eighteenth-century cultural studies but also with basic texts on the body, such as The Female Body in Western Culture edited by Susan Suleiman and Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, on which they build. Readers who are not eighteenth-century specialists and for whom this is an initiation to the topic will encounter, especially in the first essays, a technical "insider" language that borders on jargon (e.g. from the introduction: "This absolute body is a phantasmatic construct that cancels the Enlightenment model of semiosis as substitution and establishes instead a model of originary metaphorization."). In my own reading of this book, I found the essays of varying accessibility depending not only on prior knowledge of these sub-fields but also on familiarity with the individual works discussed.

In their introduction Kelly and Mücke offset the potentially limited accessibility of the essays by providing succinct summaries which highlight comparative aspects. This is preceded by a most helpful overview discussion of some major texts/theorists of the body, including Starobinski ("The Natural and Literary History of Bodily Sensation"), Lacan ("The Mirror State as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psycholanalytic Experience"), Kristeva ("L’abjet d’amour"), Butler (Gender Trouble), Foucault (Discipline and Punish, History of Sexuality), Stallybrass and White (The Politics and Poetics of Transgression), and Scarry (The Body in Pain). The introductory essay also discusses the recognition among eighteenth-century studies scholars of the invigorating input into the field from "the application of poststructuralist, feminist, new historical, and cultural materialist questions to this historical period" (10). The editors distinguish their volume from these developments by observing that while it is "informed" by these studies, they assume neither an unbroken continuity nor a "clean and simple difference" between Enlightenment culture and our own (11). Actually the volume stands midway, in its focus, between the two poles. I cannot improve upon the editors’ own summary of the book’s basic premise: "that the human body stands in a multiple and complex relation to the limits and centers of the cultural production of meaning. The body provides the ‘raw material’ in the ordering, cathecting, and processing of sensory data, drives, and affects into symbolic systems, but it can also serve as a medium for the transmission of information. Finally, the body becomes a privileged model or model object for the definition and organization of such semiotic events as the distinction between sign and symptom, textual whole and fragment, surface and depth, natural and conventional or artificial, literal and figural, real and imagined. It is primarily in this last function that we understand the human body by calling our anthology Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century" (9).

The twelve essays, representing English, French and German cultures and literatures, treat most extensively English topics (six essays), whereas there are four essays on German texts, and only two on French. The essays have been divided into four categories based on topic, althought the first and last also seem to have temporal justifications (first half of the 18th century, later 18th century) for their grouping. Although some readers may disagree with the common denominators envisioned by the editors ( I. Discursive Shifts and Realignments, II. Technologies of Seeing, III.The Limits of the Body, IV. Unnatural Bodies), I found them useful--at the very least they obliged me to question whether I agreed with the groupings, and they clearly draw attention to underlying shared attributes that might be less evident had the twelve essays been undifferentiated.

The first three essays deal with philosophers and works from the first half of the 18th century, a period in which the body metaphor was used "to establish paradigms . . . associated with the centers of eighteenth-century culture: republican politics and its ‘individual,’ neoclassicism, and biography" (11). Through an analysis of Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes, Elizabeth Cook shows that the body metaphor reflects the (new) relationship among author, text, and reading public: the despot’s body, around which culture was organized, has been replaced by the writer’s body. Going in another direction, Neil Saccamano looks at the link of wit to representations of "the body that can enact and suffer violence," by reading Addison’s series on wit in The Spectator in relation to Locke’s Essay; at times this essay seemed to focus more on wit per se than on its problematic connections to the body. Veronica Kelly concludes this section with an essay on Johnson, Locke and Swift, in which she compares Johnson’s investigation of Swift’s madness in The Life of Swift with Locke’s theory of "consciousness as a perspectival visual technology troubled by the failure of memory and language" to maintain distinctions between bodies and identitites (13). This essay on eyes, spectacles, and seeing provides a nice segue into the second grouping of essays, which deal with the interpretation of vision as cognition and the 18th-century belief that sight was the most important sense. Peter de Bolla shows how William Shenstone’s garden was designed to teach people how to look, and Deidre Lynch "reads" the human face in works by Locke, Hogarth’s portraits, and in David Garrick’s theatrical "grimaces." Tassie Gwilliam’s essay, also on the face, investigates issues of race and cosmetics in two non-canonical works. The inter-art dimension to the essays in this section is thought provoking and encourages many new connections, as for example in de Bolla’s thesis: "for the eighteenth century the facts of sight can only be known through the metaphorics of the eye, which is to say that the ‘truth’ of vision is precisely worked out in visuality, in the social and cultural domains, not in the anatomic. On account of this, visuality is the ground upon which vision is mapped, not vice versa" (90).

The essays in the third section on overcoming bodily limitations investigate willful denials of Enlightenment physical "truths." Quite unlike the second section, the essays here all treat literary texts, and all treat German writers: Lessing, Goethe, and Kleist. Dorothea von Mücke provides a reinterpretation of Lessing’s well-known "Laokoon," focussing on its concluding chapters about ugliness and disgust and their invocation of the human body. David Wellberry continues with a rereading of the passages in Goethe’s Werther, in which Werther experiences physical "crises"-- metamorphoses to the "phastasmatic body." According to Wellberry’s interesting thesis, the body in Werther is actually created through excess of desire, or, as he summarizes the points in the essay: "the morphism of the absolute body, the liquid maternal economy, primordial orality, [and] the intermittent rhythm of voice and writing" (207). Concluding this section is Helmut Schneider’s study of Kleist’s essay "Über das Marionettentheater," which Schneider claims, "turns the value hierarchy of the classical discourse upside down, or more exactly, inside out. It questions the priority of the interior over the exterior, the spiritual over the corporeal, the meaningful over the accidental, the metaphor over the literal, the signified over the signifier, the soul or mind over the body" (212).

The final section of the book looks at the later 18th century, a period in which the body has become a "fundamentally ambiguous phenomenon" (18). Susan Gustafson reads the body as an (un)orthographic sign in another, later work by Goethe, Clavigo. Her interest lies with "the tension between the characters’ attempts to treat the body as an orthographic sign and the inevitably unorthographic results of those attempts" (229). The female body as the site where "significant social antagonism" plays itself out is the thesis of Thomas Dipiero’s essay on Sade’s Justine. While noting the "textualization" of pain and violence and the regenerative powers of Justine’s body, he takes the repetition of scenes of violent abuse to represent the potential destruction of the subject and a concomitant "desire for the end of meaning" (249). The final essay by Chris Cullens moves back to English literature and to popular literature in its investigation of parallels between Mary Robinson’s life and her four-volume novel Walsingham, Or the Pupil of Nature. This is a fitting concluding chapter to the volume because Walsingham was published very late in the century (1796) and because the essay itself weaves in a number of themes explored in earlier essays: nature, masks, masqurade, sexual ambiguity, and transvestism.

By now myriad critical works on the body exist, including many specifically on "body and text" (e.g. Cixous, Cranny-Francis, Clarke and Aycock, Brooks, and Foster, Siegel and Berry). The contribution of this volume to the existing literature rests, first, in its focus on a single period which provides depth and particularly invites essays to be read "against" one another, and secondly, in its broad interpretation of the concept of "text." The volume thus includes discussions not only of novels and dramas but also of beauty manuals, landscape gardens, the human face, cosmetics, and pornography. It is precisely this breadth of (con)text and simultaneous depth in a period that moves these essays into the realm of cultural studies and gives them their special interest.

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Dr. Elaine Martin, emartin@woodsquad.as.ua.edu