Profound Science and Elegant Literature. Stephanie P. Browner
of her face, and yet he finds her repulsive (102). The contradiction between body and character “made him ask anew what manner of mortal she might be,” and he asks, “beautiful, shall I call her?—or inexpressibly terrible?” (102, 103).
The reader, of course, is allowed to feel superior to the shallow Giovanni and his “uneasy suspicion” (112), and we might conclude, as Bensick suggests, that Giovanni fails because he insists that bodies signify something beyond the material. According to Bensick, Giovanni’s final betrayal of Beatrice comes from his inability to accept the idea that a pure spirit might inhabit a sick body.105 Bensick’s point is the same as Susan Sontag’s in her important work on illness and metaphors. For Sontag, illness is not a metaphor. Literary habits notwithstanding, illness tells us nothing about the ill; disease reveals nothing about the patient. According to Bensick, Giovanni’s failure lies in his inability to realize that Beatrice’s body tells him nothing about her character.
But I want to suggest that although Giovanni might be a kinder young man if he were not so quick to turn Beatrice’s body into a metaphor with secret signification about her character, Hawthorne is not recommending that we understand the body as mere matter. Baglioni’s antidote kills rather than cures Beatrice precisely because Baglioni has reduced her condition to a physical problem, like Georgiana’s birthmark, that can be cured with the right chemical brew. Giovanni should know better, but in an act of desperation, he accepts Baglioni’s diagnosis and takes the antidote to Beatrice because he wants to deny what he has learned. He wants to believe that what he smells in the garden and on Beatrice’s breath is a material problem that can be solved. But this is vain grasping after the fantasy of empirical solutions. Rappaccini, by contrast, knows better. His “inward disease” marks him as a man who has the complex interiority that comes with a real awareness of the deep tension between our desires for purity and immortality and the reality that we inhabit mortal, diseased bodies, between a fantasy of spiritual love and the realities of carnal desire.106
By imagining a body that is a strange mix of purity and carnality, the virginal and the violated, Hawthorne deploys both medical and gothic tropes to imagine an interiority—psychological and somatic—that is not idealized, but diseased, morbid, dark, smelly, thrilling, and horrible. Thus, although Renaissance anatomy and nineteenth-century pathology might be charged with stealing the body’s interior from religion and with colonizing and poisoning the body’s interior landscape, Hawthorne also found in the new pathology a deep, alluring, and profoundly untranscendent body that was a suitable house for an interiority more complicated than suggested by cliched notions of a “pure soul within.”
Written after Sophia’s first pregnancy ended in miscarriage and after the birth of a daughter, “Rappaccini’s Daughter” envisions bodily realities that may owe something to Hawthorne’s deepening sense of bodies, his own and others, as he encountered in the daily intimacies of domestic life the mysteries and truths—beautiful and terrible—of living bodies. Medicine’s eagerness to open the body and claim expertise about the body’s inner landscapes troubled Hawthorne, and he was inclined to resist its authority, but in the pathologized body he found a compelling image of a luxuriant and putrefying body that may well have spoken to a man who was now a father and a husband. In short, Hawthorne both shared medicine’s desire to know and write the body and was deeply troubled by the loss of somatic meaning with the rise of modern medicine.
Chapter 3
Carnival Bodies and Medical Professionalism in Melville’s Fiction
One of the effects of civilization (not to say one of the ingredients in it), is, that the spectacle, and even the very idea of pain, is kept more and more out of the sight of those classes who enjoy in their fullness the benefits of civilization. . . . All those necessary portions of the business of society that oblige any person to be the immediate agent or ocular witness of the infliction of pain, are delegated by common consent to peculiar and narrow classes: to the judge, the soldier, the surgeon, the butcher, and the executioner.
—John Stuart Mill, “Civilization,” 1836
Although Herman Melville did not write about medical men as often as Hawthorne, the fictional doctors that do appear in his works suggest a similar attentiveness to medicine’s ambitions, and resistance to professional discourses of somatic mastery. Melville was friends with some of the most eminent physicians of the day, including Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Wakefield Francis, and Augustus K. Gardner, and yet his representations of medical men are sharply satirical. In White-Jacket, a U.S. navy surgeon is a vicious butcher. In The Confidence-Man, the marketplace machinations of an herb-doctor reveal the profit motives behind medical sectarian squabbling. And in Billy Budd, Sailor, Melville ascribes narrow mechanistic thinking to another ship surgeon. In all three portraits, the medical man is oblivious to pain. The fleet surgeon in White-Jacket barely notices the death of a common sailor whose leg he has needlessly amputated, the herb-doctor’s sales pitch is a barrage of words that silences his customers, and the ship surgeon on the Bellipotent takes pride in a “scientifically conducted” hanging he directs.1 In other words, while witnessing or inflicting pain was, as John Stuart Mill noted in 1836, increasingly “delegated by common consent to peculiar and narrow classes,” Melville was committed to writing about pain and somatic spectacles, spectacles that Mill suggested were “kept more and more out of the sight of those classes who enjoy in their fullness the benefits of civilization.”
Critics have commented on Melville’s interest in the body. Sharon Cameron notes a brutal literalness about bodies in Moby-Dick, Robert K. Martin discovers homosocial desire in Melville’s passion for writing about male bodies, and Peter Bellis suggests that “bodily-identity” is central to Melville’s fiction. To these incisive readings, I hope to add an awareness of Melville’s interest in the body as a resistance to the management at the center of nineteenth-century professionalism. By writing about the body—its pleasures and its pains—Melville distances himself from and critiques an emerging professional class that, as Dana Nelson suggests, depended heavily upon Enlightenment notions of disembodied reason and physical self-management. Although by birth Melville had entree into the ruling elite of the nation, he preferred in his writing to sojourn in carnival worlds—Marquesan island, U.S. man-of-war, Mississippi steamboat—and to develop a politics responsive to the unmanaged body. To put this another way, although in the nineteenth century both physicians and authors increasingly claimed authority by standing “apart from and above the carnivalesque scene as a transcendent, single, unified subject,” Melville preferred to write about the body from the ground level and to immerse his readers in spectacular somatic worlds.2 To develop these suggestions more fully, I begin with a discussion of Melville’s first novel because in this early work he fashions a politics of embodiment central to his critique of medical professionalism.3
Melville’s interest in somatic spectacles is evident in the first pages of Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life. The opening chapter features two tales of public nakedness. The first tells of natives stripping a missionary woman. Initially, the natives are beguiled by her calico dress, and they believe she is “some new divinity.”4 As she becomes familiar to them, however, they seek “to pierce the sacred veil of calico” in which she is “enshrined.” Before long, their “idolatry was changed into contempt: and there was no end to the contumely showered upon her by the savages.” Finally, “to the horror of her affectionate spouse, she was stripped of her garments, and given to understand that she could no longer carry on her deceits with impunity.” The “gentle dame” is not “sufficiently evangelized” to endure the exposure. She demands that her husband “relinquish his undertaking” of “reclaiming these islands from heathenism,” and they flee (6-7).
In the second tale, exposure is voluntary: an Indian Queen admires the elaborate tattoos on a U.S. sailor’s chest and lifts her skirts in order to show her own decorated body. As the narrator explains, because the French colonial leaders pride “themselves upon the beneficial effects of their jurisdiction, as discernible in the deportment of the natives,” they are eager, when a U.S. man-of-war comes into port, to arrange for the King and Queen of Nukuheva to make a formal visit to the U.S. Commodore.