Greta Perletti

Victorian negatives: literary culture and the dark side of photography in the nineteenth century, by Susan E. Cook, SUNY Press, Albany, 2019, 218 pp, $ 95.00 (hardcover), ISBN 9781438475370 (hardcover)
Book Review

free eprint: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/BXCXDZWAF5CYQUYA8RAE/full?target=10.1080/17460654.2020.1857952
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Early Popular Visual Culture in December 2020, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/17460654.2020.1857952

This essay investigates the pervasiveness, in Victorian culture, of narratives and images striving to bring to light the invisible interiors of the body. Although the 19th century precedes the advent of medical imaging, it is in this period that the possibility to turn the inner body into an image of transparency begins to be invested with the power of generating a superior form of knowledge. The essay traces the existence of such narratives and images in both medical investigation and detective stories, as medical doctors and detectives alike are endowed with a similarly powerful gaze, empowered by specialist knowledge and mediated by technologically advanced devices like the stethoscope and the camera lens. After illustrating the similarities between medical and literary narratives of ‘detection’, the essay focuses on two examples of transparent bodies in Victorian imagination: the (mainly female) body consumed by tuberculosis and the body of the criminal. Both instances trigger a sort of hermeneutical task in the expert observer, and this task requires the making of a transparent picture of the body. While consumptive fallen women invite the expert gaze to investigate the life of the sufferer in order to locate the moral spot that phthisis will cleanse with death, literary detectives, like criminal anthropologists, diagnose the criminal nature by unveiling deceptive surfaces and appearances with the aid of the camera. By creating a transparent image of the individual as well as the social body, these narratives spread the fascination with (but also the horror at) the possibility of exposing one’s inner life to the gaze.

This chapter relates the statue-like bodies of some Elizabethan and early Jacobean plays to the theories about memory and forgetting that were circulating in late sixteenth-century philosophical and medical discourse. In particular, the chapter shows how memory images, which in antiquity played a pivotal role for the art of memory, were represented as inducing a paralysing, statue-like state in living bodies. Shakespeare’s work partakes in this re-assessment of memory images, as words are more powerful memory triggers and carriers than monuments and statues. Moreover, while Shakespeare’s tragedies stage bodies turning into stone because of the destructive fixedness of the past, his late plays manage to set in motion the images produced by memory and by so doing resist death-like paralysis.

Keywords: cultural representation of memory; memory images; lethargy; pathological memory; statue-like bodies

... reasons why the fascination with Keats's genius was so persistent in the Victorian age may have to do with the peculiarly angelic look that ... If the representation of Keats as an exceptionally gifted and doomed young poet was so enduring, this is because, I would argue, his bodily ...

While the hysterical ailments of women in Shakespeare’s works have often been read from psychoanalytical standpoints, early modern medicine may provide new insights into the ‘frozen’, seemingly dead bodies of some of his heroines, such as Desdemona, Thaisa, and Hermione. In the wake of recent critical work (Peterson, Slights, Pettigrew), this paper will shed fresh light on the ‘excess’ of female physiology and on Shakespeare’s creative redeployment of some medical concepts and narratives.