Monstrous Anatomies

V
Academic
Interfacing Science, Literature, and the Humanities /
ACUME 2
Volume 10
Edited by
Vita Fortunati, Università di Bologna
Elena Agazzi, Università di Bergamo
Scientific Board
Susan Bassnett (Warwick University), Andrea Battistini (Università di Bologna),
Andreas Blödorn (Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster), Wolfgang Braungart (Universität Bielefeld), Michele Cometa (Università di Palermo), Susan Fairweather-Tait (University of East Anglia), Vincenzo Ferrone (Università di Torino), Claudio Franceschi (Università di Bologna), Susan Friedman (University of
Wisconsin-Madison), Brian Hurwitz (King’s College), Giovanni Levi (Muséum
National D’Histoire Naturelle), Ansgar Nünning (Justus Liebig Universität
Giessen), Vera Nünning (Universität Heidelberg), Giuliano Pancaldi (Università
di Bologna), Stefano Poggi (Università di Firenze), Stanley Ulyaszeck (Oxford
University)
Editorial Board
Raul Calzoni (Università di Bergamo), Valeria Cammarata (Università di Palermo), Zelda Franceschi (Università di Bologna), Guglielmo Gabbiadini (Università
di Bergamo), Gilberta Golinelli (Università di Bologna), Andrea Grignolio
Università di Roma La Sapienza), Federica La Manna (Università della Calabria),
Micaela Latini (Università di Cassino), Alessandro Nannini (Università di
Bologna), Greta Perletti (Università di Bergamo), Massimo Salgaro (Università
di Verona), Aurelia Santoro (Università di Bologna)
Raul Calzoni / Greta Perletti (eds.)
Monstrous Anatomies
Literary and Scientific Imagination in Britain and Germany during
the Long Nineteenth Century
With 17 figures
This book is published with the support of the University of Bergamo, “Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature Straniere e Comunicazione”, Italy.
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Contents
The Body of the Monster between Science and Literature: An
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
7
Elisa Leonzio
Deformity and Monstrosity : Jean Paul between Embryogenesis and the
Concept of Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
25
Raul Calzoni
Liminal Figurations of the Vampire in the German Enlightenment, Sturm
und Drang and Romanticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
41
Lorella Bosco
A ‘Mosaic Work’: The Poison Mixer’s Body between Monstrosity and
Deception . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
61
Micaela Latini
Angels and Monsters: On Stifter’s Turmalin
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
81
Anna Cappellotto
Creating Life Artificially : Robert Hamerling’s Homunculus . . . . . . . .
95
Francesca Di Blasio
The Monstrous Gaze: Exotic/Subaltern/Female. Omai in
Eighteenth-Century Fin de Si{cle London . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
Sharon Ruston
Has Man “Paid Too Dear a Price for His Empire”? Monsters in
Romantic-Era Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
6
Flora de Giovanni
Displaying the Anomalous Body. Wilkie Collins’s Freak Show
Contents
. . . . . . 149
Alessandra Violi
Dead pro tem.: Suspended Animation and the Monstrosity of
Death-Counterfeits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
Laura Di Michele
Nineteenth-Century London as Monstrous Body . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
Maria Teresa Chialant
‘The Thing’. Unidentified Monstrous Objects in Victorian Fiction
. . . . 217
Francesca Guidotti
The Dis-Appearance of the Body in an Age of Science: H. G. Wells’s
Invisible Man . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235
Sara Damiani
Unthinkable Hybrids: The Somatic Unconscious of the Transplanted
Body . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255
Daniela Crocetti
Taming Gender : How Hermaphroditism Became Pseudo and Gender Fled
the Body . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273
Michele Cometa
The Survival of Ancient Monsters: Freud and Baubo . . . . . . . . . . . . 297
The Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311
The Body of the Monster between Science and Literature:
An Introduction
This book explores the significance and dissemination of ‘monstrous anatomies’
in British and German culture by investigating how and why scientific and
literary representations and descriptions of abnormal bodies were proposed in
the late Enlightenment, during the Romantic and the Victorian Age.
Since the late Enlightenment, the emphasis on reason and the desire to prevail
over nature have paradoxically brought to light the aspects of life that elude
categorization, thus paving the way for a new interest in the abnormal and the
monstrous.1 This is especially true in the light of the investigations of late
eighteenth-century natural sciences, when the interest in monstrous anatomies
becomes functional to scientifically understand the physiology and anatomy of
the human being, although this scientific approach to the abnormal body is often
mingled with the survival of alchemical, mystical and supernatural aspects.2 This
is part of the cultural movement that Terry Castle has famously described as the
‘turning inwards’ of the supernatural, when the mysteries of the human mind
1 On the monster as a natural and philosophical ‘error’ that had a decisive influence in revolutionary debates on political identity and national history during the Enlightenment, see
David William Bates, Enlightenment Aberrations: Error and Revolution in France (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2002). On the Enlightenment, its historical development and its
legacy in the following centuries, see Vincenzo Ferrone, The Enlightenment: History of an Idea
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).
2 As it is demonstrated, with reference to the influence of alchemical sources on literature, in
Eva Horn, ‘Abwege der Forschung. Zur literarischen Archäologie der wissenschaftlichen
Neugierde (Frankenstein, Faust, Moreau)’, in Literatur als Philosophie – Philosophie als Literatur, hrsg. von Eva Horn, Bettine Menke und Christoph Menke (München: Fink, 2006), pp.
153–171. On Paracelsus’ influence on European culture and science, see Die Alchemie in der
europäischen Kultur- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte, hrsg. von Christoph Meinel (Wiesbaden:
Harrassowitz Verlag, 1986), and on the two sides of his thought, i. e. speculative and theological as well as medical and scientific, see Andrew Weeks, Paracelsus. Speculative Theory and
the Crisis of the Early Reformation (Albany : State University of New York Press, 1997) and
Charles Webster, Paracelsus. Medicine, Magic and Mission at the End of Time (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2008).
8
Raul Calzoni / Greta Perletti
become increasingly more fascinating than the magical and the mystical intended as aspects coming from some kind of ‘other world’.3
Monstrous Anatomies in German Culture
The fascination with the monstrous demonstrated by the investigations of
natural philosophers found in the German culture of the 1770s a peculiar approach in Johann Caspar Lavater’s pathognomical and physiognomical studies
on physical ‘diversity’, published in his well-known Von der Physiognomik
(‘Physiognomy’, 1772) and Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der
Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe (‘Physiognomic Fragments for the Purpose of Promoting the Knowledge and Love of Mankind’, 1775–1778) rapidly
translated into the major European languages.4 Literary descriptions of monstrous bodies in the last decades of the eighteenth century were mostly influenced by Lavater’s analysis, whose final goal was to trace and describe the
physiognomy of the genius and of the criminal as well as the physiognomy of
Jesus. While it was scientifically impossible to delineate the latter, the former
were sketched out by Lavater, who would become influential for later theories of
degeneration, and in particular for Lombroso’s criminological studies.5
This was also the time when the rays of light of the Enlightenment began to be
obscured in Germany by the rising irrationality of Sturm und Drang that – to
refer to Tzvetan Todorov’s analysis of the ‘fantastic’ in literature – eventually
turned into the poetics of the ‘marvelous’ developed by the Frühromantiker in
Jena, of the ‘fantastic-marvelous’ in the Romantic circle of Heidelberg and,
finally, of the ‘fantastic-uncanny’ during the late Romanticism of Berlin.6 Such
authors as Georg Christoph Lichtenberg – an adversary of Lavater’s “physiognomical frenzy” –7 and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe were actually funda3 See Terry Castle, ‘Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie’, Critical
Inquiry, 15 (1988), pp. 26–61; Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer : Eighteenth-Century
Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
4 On the influence of Lavater’s works on European culture, see Physiognomy in Profile: Lavater’s
Impact on European Culture, ed. by Melissa Percival and Graeme Tytler (Newark: University of
Delaware Press, 2005).
5 See Carsten Zelle, ‘Physiognomie des Schreckens im achtzehnten Jahrhundert. Zu Johann
Caspar Lavater und Charles Lebru’, in Lessing Yearbook, XXI (1989), pp. 89–102 and Carsten
Zelle, ‘Soul-Semiology : On Lavater’s Physiognomic Principles’, in The Faces of Physiognomy,
ed. by Ellis Shookman (Columbia: Camden House 1993), pp. 40–63.
6 See Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. by
Richard Howard (London: Case Western Reserve University, 1973).
7 When the first book of Lavater’s Fragments appeared, Lichtenberg actually spoke of a “Raserei
für Physiognomik”, i. e. a “physiognomical frenzy […] which lasted until well into the following century”, see Melissa Percival, The Appearance of Character : Physiognomy and Facial
The Body of the Monster between Science and Literature
9
mental during the late Enlightenment (Spätaufkläung) for the sedimentation of a
scientific and epistemological method that influenced the perception of the
monstrous in both Romantic literature and aesthetics.8 Yet, the Romantic interest for the monstrous, the abnormal and the paranormal began under the
aegis of Lichtenberg’s epistemological theory (Wissenslehre),9 mainly contained
in his Südelbücher (‘Scrapbooks’), that is to say the author’s notebooks written
between 1765 and 1799. While it emphasises the importance of experimental
evidence in physics, Lichtenberg’s method reveals to be critical and analytical at
the same time, as the most famous Aphorism 1602 of the collection reveals:
Je mehr sich bei Erforschung der Natur die Erfahrungen und Versuche häufen, desto
schwankender werden die Theorien. Es ist aber immer gut sie nicht gleich deswegen
aufzugeben. Denn jede Hypothese die gut war, dient wenigstens die Erscheinungen bis
auf ihre Zeit gehörig zusammen zu denken und zu behalten. Man sollte die widersprechenden Erfahrungen besonders niederlegen, bis sie sich hinlänglich angehäuft
haben um es der Mühe wert zu machen ein neues Gebäude aufzuführen.10
The fundamental role played by Lichtenberg in the interfacing between science
and literature at the end of the eighteenth century is not by chance underlined by
Jean Paul Richter at the beginning of his Unsichtbare Loge (‘Invisible Lodge’,
1793). Published only three years after Lichtenberg wrote his theoretical
Aphorism 1602, this work represents in a sense the application of the physicist’s
Expression in Eighteenth-Century France (Leeds: Modern Humanities Research Association,
1999), p. 13. See further, on the debate on physiognomy, August Ohage, ‘Über “Raserei für
Physiognomik in Niedersachsen” im Jahre 1777. Zur frühen Rezeption von Lavaters Physiognomischen Fragmenten’, in Das Antlitz Gottes im Antlitz des Menschen: Zugänge zu
Johann Caspar Lavater, hrsg. von Karl Pestalozzi und Horst Weigelt (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994), pp. 233–242 and Federica La Manna, Sineddoche dell’anima. Il
volto nel dibattito tedesco del Settecento (Milan: Mimesis, 2012).
8 On Goethe’s experimental method and on its influence on Romanticism, see Raul Calzoni,
Greta Perletti, ‘Experiment and its Travelling in German and British Romanticism’, in Travelling Concepts, Metaphors, and Narratives: Literary and Cultural Studies in an Age of
Interdisciplinary Research, ed. by Sybille Baumbach, Beatrice Michaelis and Ansgar Nünning
(Trier : Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2011), pp. 69–94.
9 Elena Agazzi, ‘Die Blitzartigkeit der kleinen Form. Gedanken über die Metapher im Bezug
auf die Wissenslehre bei Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’, in Tropen und Metaphern im Gelehrtendiskurs des 18. Jahrhunderts, hrgs. von Elena Agazzi in Zusammenarbeit mit Ulrike
Zeuch unter Mitwirkung von Guglielmo Gabbiadini (= Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte, Sonderheft 10, Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2011), pp. 69–80.
10 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aph. 1602 (1790/91), in Sudelbücher II, in Schriften und Briefe,
hrsg. von Wolfgang Promies (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1971), vol. 2, Heft J, pp.
294–295: “The more experience and experiments are accumulated during the exploration of
nature, the more faltering its theories become. It is always good though not to abandon them
instantly. For every hypothesis which used to be good at least serves the purpose of duly
summarizing and keeping all phenomena until its own time. One should lay down the
conflicting experience separately, until it has accumulated sufficiently to justify the efforts
necessary to edifice a new theory”.
10
Raul Calzoni / Greta Perletti
experimental theory to literature and, at the same time, the impossibility to
apply it to the writing process without degenerating into the monstrous. Thus,
while Lichtenberg is explicitly named at the beginning of the Unsichtbare Loge as
a tutelary deity of Jean Paul’s novel, the author himself reveals with his words the
failure of his literary experiment. The transfer of Lichtenberg’s scientific method
from physics to literature and Jean Paul’s confrontation with it represent in this
instance a turning point for the author, i. e. the moment when he became a
‘Romantic’:
Der Verfasser der unsichtbaren Loge hatte von Lichtenberg so starke Bußpredigten
gegen die Menschenunkunde der deutschen Romanschreiber und Dichter gelesen und
gegen ihre so große Unwissenheit in Realien ebensowohl als in Personalien, daß er zum
Glück den Mut nicht hatte, wenigstens früher als im 28ten Jahre das romantische
Wagstück zu übernehmen. Er fürchtete immer, ein Dichter müsse so gut wie ein Maler
und Baumeister etwas wissen, wenn auch wenig; ja er müsse (die Sache noch höher
getrieben) sogar von Grenzwissenschaften (und freilich umgrenzen alle Wissenschaften die Poesie) manches verstehen, so wie der Maler von Anatomie, von Chemie,
Götterlehre und sonst.11
Significantly, it is five years before the outbreak of the Frühromantik in 1798 that
Jean Paul confessed his Romantic turn and insisted in a syncretic method of
knowlegde, stimulated by Lichtenberg, that eventually turned into the Symphilosophieren, the ‘philosophizing-together’ typical of the self-reflexive discourse
of the Jena Romantics. Thus, the confrontation with Lichtenberg was essential
for the sedimentaion of the early Romantic epistemology in Germany and for its
conception of poetry as ‘universal progressive’, according to the famous ‘Fragment 116’ from Athenaeum:
Die romantische Poesie ist eine progressive Universalpoesie. Ihre Bestimmung ist nicht
bloß, alle getrennte Gattungen der Poesie wieder zu vereinigen, und die Poesie mit der
Philosophie und Rhetorik in Berührung zu setzen. Sie will, und soll auch Poesie und
Prosa, Genialität und Kritik, Kunstpoesie und Naturpoesie bald mischen, bald verschmelzen, die Poesie lebendig und gesellig, und das Leben und die Gesellschaft
poetisch machen, den Witz poetisieren, und die Formen der Kunst mit gediegnem
Bildungsstoff jeder Art anfüllen und sättigen, und durch die Schwingungen des Humors beseelen. Sie umfaßt alles, was nur poetisch ist, vom größten wieder mehre
11 Jean Paul, Die unsichtbare Loge, in Jean Paul: Sämtliche Werke, 6 vols., hrsg. von Norbert
Miller and Gustav Lohmann (München: Hanser, 1959ff), vol. 1, Appendix I, p. 16: “The
author of the Invisible Lodge had read so many of Lichtenberg’s strong penitential sermons
against the lack of anthropological knowledge of most German novelists and poets and
against their ignorance in natural sciences and personal characters that luckily he didn’t dare
before his 28th birthday to undertake this Romantic feat. He always feared that a poet should
know something so well as a painter or a carpenter, although maybe not so many things like
them; yes, he even should (to go to the extreme) understand something of fringe-sciences
(and all sciences fringe poetry) like the painter of anatomy, chemistry, theology and so on”.
The Body of the Monster between Science and Literature
11
Systeme in sich enthaltenden Systeme der Kunst, bis zu dem Seufzer, dem Kuß, den das
dichtende Kind aushaucht in kunstlosen Gesang. Sie kann sich so in das Dargestellte
verlieren, daß man glauben möchte, poetische Individuen jeder Art zu charakterisieren, sei ihr eins und alles.12
The place where Romantic poetry loses itself is exactly the place where the
monstrous is generated in its different meanings and manifestations, as Jean
Paul demonstrates before the Romantic circle of Jena settled. In this sense, Elisa
Leonzio’s contribution to this book is telling, since it retraces the scientific
influences on Jean Paul’s literary works by focusing on his Philosophische Untersuchungen (‘Philosophical Inquires’), written between 1790 and 1821, and on
the Unsichtbare Loge in order to show how deformity and monstrosity in these
oeuvres can be read at both a philosopohical, i. e. aesthetical, and scientific level.
Leonzio actually traces back the philosophical and scientific background of the
novel, revealing how Paracelsus’ medicine, Frany Anton Mesmer’s magnetism,
Johann Christian Reil’s and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s physiology as well
as Lavater’s physiognomy converge with Immanuel Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft
(‘Critique of Judgement’, 1790) in the author’s handling of the monstrous.
Thanks to an embriogenetic perspective, the author reads Jean Paul’s works in
the wake of these influences and succeeds in legitimating the monster and its
manifestations with respect to Reil’s studies, since it was thanks to them that the
abnormal began to be no longer regarded as a disturbing element contradicting
an epistemological model, founded on the assumed perfection of God’s creation.
Thus the monster was considered by Jean Paul as the manifestation of the many
possible directions that nature can follow in its development.
The presence of the monster in nature and its legitimation would encourage
the growth of ‘monstrous’ figures and styles in Romantic literature, perceived as
uncanny, perverted and even fatal. Nevertheless, if the form of early Romantic
literature tended from an aesthetical point of view to become itself ‘monstrous’,
because of its universal and progressive inclination, it should not be forgotten
12 Friedrich Schlegel, ‘Fragment 116’, in Athenaeum, in Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe,
hrsg. von Ernst Behler (München/Paderborn/Wien: Schöningh, 1967), vol. 2, Friedrich
Schlegel. Charakteristiken und Kritiken I (1796–1801), pp. 182–183: “Romantic poetry is a
progressive universal poetry. Its destiny is not merely to reunite all of the different genres and
to put poetry in touch with philosophy and rhetoric. Romantic poetry wants to and should
combine and fuse poetry and prose, genius and criticism, art poetry and nature poetry. It
should make poetry lively and sociable, and make life and society poetic. It should poeticize
wit and fill all of art’s forms with sound material of every kind to form the human soul, to
animate it with flights of humor. Romantic poetry embraces everything that is purely poetic,
from the greatest art systems, which contain within them still more systems, all the way down
to the sigh, the kiss that a poeticizing child breathes out in an artless song. Romantic poetry
can lose itself in what is represented to the extent that one might believe that it exists solely to
characterize poetic individuals of all types”.
12
Raul Calzoni / Greta Perletti
that the appearance of monsters in German literature is not so common in the
works of the authors belonging to the circle of Jena: Novalis, the brothers August
Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, but even Friedrich Schleiermacher and August
Ludwig Hülsen did not actually offer literary representation of the monstrous.13
The inclination to magic and to the ‘marvelous’ – i. e. “the supernatural accepted” –14 of their poetry actually prevented them from representing monsters
and this differentiates the poetry of Fruhromantik from that one of the so-called
Spätromantik. In both Heidelberg and Berlin, the centres of German late Romanticism, the marvelous got respectively the traits of the ‘fantastic-marvelous’
and the ‘fantastic-uncanny’.15 In the first case, it is already the title of Achim von
Arnim and Clemens Brentano’s collection of Volkslieder (‘popular songs’)
published between 1805 and 1808 to vehiculate the importance of the ‘fantasticmarvelous’ for the Heidelberg Romantic circle: Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Alte
deutsche Lieder (‘The Boy’s Magic Horn: Old German Songs’). As far as the
monster is concerned, it is well known that it also was in Heidelberg that the
brothers Grimm profited from their philological and ethnographical researches
to write the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (‘Children’s and Household Tales’,
1812–1815). In this collection of fairy tales, directly influenced by Arnim and
Brentano’s Magic Horn, the brothers Grimm wanted to preserve from oblivion
an entire German oral tradition within the programme of the Romantic nationalism. Nevertheless, in the first edition of their anthology, the Grimms included Charles Perrault’s tales, published in Paris in 1697 and written for the
literary salons of an aristocratic French audience. It is incidentally in the different ‘use’ of the monster in the Grimms’ and Perrault’s tales that the Romantic
turning point from ‘fantastic-marvelous’ to ‘fantastic-uncanny’ took place, since
Perrault and his contemporary women writers keep a light touch throughout, even
when they delight in producing shivers and thrills. But in the Grimm Brothers’ later,
seminal anthology, the tally of blood-drinking, child-stealing, omophagous assailants
cannot be made, and the mood turns sinister. Besides the familiar stories ‘The Juniper
Tree’ and ‘Hansel and Gretel’, many more introduce ravening ogres and flesh-eating
witches; only occasionally will a Mother Holle perform an act of kindness.16
13 With respect to this point we can speak of a ‘physiology of poetry’, mainly developed by
Novalis in the Circle of Jena and based on John Brown’s Elementa medicinae (1780), as Ethel
Matala de Mazza does in Der verfaßte Körper : Zum Projekt einer organischen Gemeinschaft
in der Politischen Romantik (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 1999), p. 144.
14 Todorov, The Fantastic, p. 42.
15 Todorov, The Fantastic, p. 42.
16 Marina Warner, Monsters of Our Own Making: The Peculiar Pleasures of Fear (Lexington:
The University Press of Kentucky, 2007), p. 310.
The Body of the Monster between Science and Literature
13
This sinister imaginary was fundamental for the “development of the so-called
black Romanticism”17 and the disposition for the ‘fantastic-uncanny’ that
characterised it. It is not by chance that Tzvetan Todorov explicitly referred to
the ‘uncanny’ in order to understand the ‘fantastic’ as an aesthetic category, since
it was over the literary works of German late Romanticism that Sigmund Freud
elaborated psychoanalysis. It is in particular with regard to E.T.A. Hoffmann’s
Der Sandmann (‘The Sandman’, 1812) that Freud elaborated the theory of the
uncanny, because it is in the works of this German Romantic writer that the
monster manifests its liminal condition as an abnormal body able to interrogate
man on human nature and mind. It this book Raul Calzoni’s contribution focuses therefore on the figure of the vampire, its birth and its religious, social and
literary meanings between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Suspended
between life and death and therefore able to embody the innest fears of the
human soul, the vampire proves to be an abnormal body and, like many of the
monsters that feature in this book, it is
essentially a mixture […] of two realms, the animal and the human: the man with the
head of an ox, the man with a bird’s feet – monsters. It is the blending, the mixture of
two species: the pig with a sheep’s head is a monster. It is the mixture of two individuals: the person who has two heads and one body or two bodies and one head is a
monster. It is the mixture of two sexes: the person who is both male and female is a
monster. It is a mixture of life and death: the fetus born with a morphology that means
it will not be able to live but that nonetheless survives for some minutes or days is a
monster. Finally, it is a mixture of forms: the person who has neither arms nor legs, like
a snake, is a monster.18
But the monster is also a metaphor for the writing process itself, which like a
vampire takes nourishment from other corpora; thus Hoffmann has reenacted
with his tale Vampirismus (1821) an uncanny literary tradition, which began
with Bürger’s Lenore (‘Ellenore’, 1773) during the Sturm und Drang and then
with the contribution of Goethe’s Braut von Korinth (‘The Bride of Corinth’,
1798), the Brothers Grimm and Ludwig Tieck, ended up in the late Romanticism
with Tieck’s own works and Heinrich von Kleist’s theatre, novellas and journalism.19 Another suitable methaphor for the writer is therefore the monstrous
17 Monika Schmitz-Emans, ‘Theories of Romanticism: The First Two Hundred Years’, in
Nonfictional Romantic Prose: Expanding Borders, ed. by Steven P. Sondrup and Virgil Nemoianu (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004), p. 24.
18 Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collwge de France, 1974–1975, ed. by Valerio
Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni, trans. by Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2003),
p. 63.
19 On Ludwig Tieck’s importance for the Romantic ‘fantastic’ and its relapses on Hoffmann,
Freud and Todorov, see Marc Falkenberg, Rethinking the Uncanny in Hoffmann and Tieck
(Frankfurt am Main-Berlin: Peter Lang, 2005).
14
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‘poison mixer’ as it is portrayed in Kleist’s play Kätchen von Heilbronn oder Die
Feuerprobe (‘Katie of Heilbronn or The Trial by Fire’, 1807–1808) to which
Lorella Bosco devotes her contribution to this book. Kunegunde’s sexual desire
and the monster as a tempting and erotic body are the main topic of this play –
and all of these are incidentally features belonging to Hoffmann’s and Goethe’s
vampiric bodies as well. Allowedly based on the commixture between fact and
fiction typical of Kleist’s literary oeuvres, this play shows the body of the
monster as a manifestation of the moral decline, i. e. as a death process, in which
life becomes a mask, a mere simulacrum. Kunigunde is therefore a monstrous
conglomerate of body parts of different origins and she owes her beauty to well
applied concealment make-up and to costuming. She simulates life even though
her body is made out of anorganic, dead materials like metals. She is indeed a
combination of metal, flesh and humanoid prostheses, a sort of ‘female Golem’.
The reference to the Golem made by Bosco in her essay opens up a perspective
on the monster that leads to a literary handling of the monster as a tool to prove
the limits of human creative power and at the same time to overcome melancholia and eventually death. In her essay on Adalbert Stifter’s Turmalin
(‘Tourmaline’, 1853), Micaela Latini actually shows how the central theme of the
story is an obscure pain that infects mind and soul with melancholia and
manifests itself in the primitiveness of the protagonist of the tale. Tourmaline’s
enormous head represents the demonic power of imagination that cannot be
totally translated into form, and this confirms that poetry does not reproduce
the world, but produces it. During Realism, Stifter used the abnormal to criticize
the Romantic tendency to take distance from the real world that eventually
turned into insanity. Stifter’s criticism of the Romantic ‘fantastic’, which he
believed to be a degeneration of reason, is typical of the time when he produced
his works, i. e. a period when Positivism and empirical evidence prevailed over
Romanticism and imagination. And yet, in another Austrian author of the second half of the nineteenth century, the monster re-emerges as an aestethical,
ethical and even psychological device able to criticize the unilateral exercise of
empirical methods in science and to assert the human need for creative power
and imagination. As in the case of Mary Shelley’s modern Prometheus, Frankenstein (1818), Anna Cappellotto deals in her essay with the attempt to produce
human beings in a laboratory, which in German tradition dates at least back to
Paracelsus, who theorized in his treatise De generatione rerum naturalium
(1537) the receipt of his man-made man: a little creature having the appearance
of a newborn, the so-called Homunculus. Starting from Rudolf Steiner’s reading
of this figure, according to whom modern science intended the Humanities as
“fantasy and dreaming”,20 Cappellotto demonstrates that in such works as
20 Rudolf Steiner, Homunkulus, public lecture, Berlin, March 26, 1914, in Geisteswissenschaft
The Body of the Monster between Science and Literature
15
Goethe’s Faust (1831) and Robert Hamerling’s Homunculus. Moderne Epos in
zehn Gesängen (‘Homunculus. A Modern Epic in 10 Cantos’, 1888), this little
creature is “a symbol, presumably containing within himself multiple, if not
inexhaustible semantic ambiguities”.21 Rather than belonging to the ‘fantastic’,
this creature actually becomes in Goethe’s and Hamerling’s works an instrument
of criticism of the Positivistic attitude of the natural sciences, which purported
to have a complete comprehension of the human being. The Homunculus thus
confirms the belief that monstrosity has to do less with diversity in kind than
with the profusion of forms which qualifies nature itself.
Monstrous Anatomies in British Culture
Also in British culture, the years between the late eighteenth and the early
nineteenth century are widely recognized as pivotal for the emergence of new
epistemologies of monstrosity. This is the moment when the monster’s body
most fully foregrounds the importance of its anatomy, turning the monster into
an interesting specimen that invites the gaze of natural philosophers, anatomists
and practitioners of medicine. It is in this way that the body of the monster seems
a privileged site to observe the entrance of what Rosemarie Garland Thomson
calls the ‘extraordinary body’ into the domain of science:
By the eighteenth century the monster’s power to inspire terror, awe, wonder, and
divination was being eroded by science, which sought to classify and master rather
than revere the extraordinary body. The scientist’s and philosopher’s cabinets of curiosities were transformed into the medical man’s dissection table. The once marvelous
body that was taken as a map of human fate now began to be seen as an aberrant body
that marked the borders between the normal and the pathological.22
Garland traces here a familiar line of argument for the scholarly investigation of
monstrosity, one that turns monsters from prodigies – indicating or showing (as
in the etymology of the term ‘monstrum’, from ‘monstrare’, ‘to show’) the divine
will or prefiguring divine punishment – to wonders to be collected and shown in
the Wunderkammern of many European countries between the fifteenth and
sixteenth century, and then to the naturalized objects used for scientific inquiry.
While this linear narrative dominated Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park’s
als Lebensgut (Dornach: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1959), p. 12.
21 Latimer Dan, ‘Homunculus as Symbol: Semantic and Dramatic Functions of the Figure in
Goethe’s Faust’, MLN, 89, German Issue (1974), p. 812.
22 Rosemarie Garland Thompson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in
American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 57.
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Raul Calzoni / Greta Perletti
seminal work on monsters,23 which first sparked the interest of historians of
science, authors tend today to demystify what Daston and Park themselves call,
in their later masterpiece Wonders and the Order of Nature, a “teleological
model, organized as a progress toward rationalization and naturalization”.24
This is especially true for the period of time that is the focus of this volume; a
time which it has become established practice in Anglophone criticism to label
‘the long nineteenth century’, and which spans between the late eighteenth
century and the late nineteenth century, between the works of the first Romantic
generation and the Victorian age. As Stephen Pender notes, throughout the
eighteenth century, rather than being kept separated, “the marvelous and the
scientific coexisted in the reception and study of monsters and continued to do
so long after the monster’s absorption by legitimate science”.25 This is not
surprising, if we keep in mind that ‘the marvelous’ was by no means perceived to
be an antagonist of ‘the scientist’: as the title of Richard Holmes’s fine book
reminds us, the years that witnessed the encounter between the Romantics and
the new developments of what (from 1833 onwards) would be termed ‘science’
might be defined “the age of wonder”,26 thereby foregrounding the very aspect
connected to the monster’s body which, according to the linear and telic narrative describing the trajectory of monsters in the history of science, would be
supplanted by the desire for classification and naturalization.
While the effort to systematize knowledge about monsters and to debunk
their supposedly supernatural value can be traced as early as in Sir Francis
Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627), the taste for the ‘fantastic’ continued to thrive (as
was the case with German culture), albeit under different guises. If the supernatural as such was dismissed as a vestige of superstition, British culture displayed a fascination with the exotic, the grotesque, and the aberrant throughout
the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment years. As Francesca Di Blasio’s
contribution to this volume shows, the arrival of Omai on the British soil in the
1770s is an example of this fascination with what deviates from the norm: as the
‘noble savage’ is soon turned into an object of display, Omai becomes the
monstrous other, a freakish subaltern self that can be subjected to the dominant
white gaze. While novelist Fanny Burney provides a counter-narrative to the
23 Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, ‘Unnatural Conceptions: The Study of Monsters in
Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France and England’, Past and Present, 92 (1981),
pp. 20–54.
24 Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New
York: Zone Books, 1998).
25 Stephen Pender, ‘“No Monsters at the Resurrection”: Inside Some Conjoined Twins’, in
Monster Theory : Reading Culture, ed. by Jeoffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota, 1996), p. 150.
26 See Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder : How the Romantic Generation Discovered the
Beauty and Terror of Science (New York: Harper Collins, 2008).
The Body of the Monster between Science and Literature
17
objectifying attitude shown by many commentators who described the encounter with the Polynesian man, Di Blasio shows the extent to which also
contemporary exhibitions can replicate the colonial paradigm when dealing
with the display of the living ‘other’, coming from the most remote and exotic
places of the empire. In its refusal to acknowledge the reciprocity involved in the
process of viewing the other, the dominant white gaze assimilates the monstrosity of Omai’s body to the monstrosity of women’s bodies in patriarchal
society : like the exotic, freak ‘other’, also women are subjected to a similar
reifying process and are thus doomed to inhabit a similar marginality.
The closing decades of the eighteenth century display a markedly materialistic attitude towards the body of the monster. Paul Youngquist opens his book
on monstrosity and British Romanticism with the famous anatomist John
Hunter’s quest for the body of the man known as “the Irish giant”27 – whose
impressive bones can still be seen (or gazed at) at the Hunterian Museum in
London – while Stephen Asma in his historical and cultural exploration of
monsters focuses on the work by Hunter and William Lawrence in the UK and by
Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in France to trace the new epistemological significance of
monsters: aberrant bodies were now not only observed but also compared,
measured and in some cases manipulated, because monstrosity was now recognized to have the potential for improving knowledge in embryology and
developmental morphology.28 Sharon Ruston’s essay places in this context her
discussion of the changing definitions of the monstrous body, whose importance
is both physical and moral.
Thus, in the work of conservative thinkers like Edmund Burke and Hannah
More, the monstrous body functions as an instrument which, by foregrounding
the dangers of political and moral aberrations, establishes the need for the
‘natural’ system of British monarchy and for the ‘natural’ hierarchies of British
society. At the same time, Ruston also illustrates one of the most important
tenets of nineteenth-century conceptions of monstrosity : namely, the fact that
the monstrous body is increasingly conceived of as contiguous to rather than
radically different from the normal body. If the medical and philosophical debates of the Romantic age increasingly authorize the belief that between the
normal and the monstrous organism there is no ontological difference, Lawrence goes as far as to propose that monsters in nature have actually been created
by man. While this anticipates Darwin’s later view (to be found especially in The
Descent of Man, 1871) that in nature the most evidently monstrous species are
27 Paul Youngquist, Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. 3–7.
28 See Stephen T. Asma, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009), pp. 154–161.
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the result of human artificial selection, Lawrence’s ideas about the role of humans in creating monstrosity takes up the issue of responsibility, which will
continue to resonate throughout the century, most famously in Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein but also in fin-de-siwcle works such as H. G. Wells’s The Island of
Doctor Moreau (1896).
The question of the similarities between the healthy and the monstrous body
exerts a pervasive fascination also in Victorian culture, encouraging theorists
and writers alike to explore to the full the implications of the exchange between
the aberrant and the normal. This aspect is what qualifies, for Juliet Halberstam
in her influential book Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995), the new ‘monsters of modernity’ that emerge in Anglophone culture
in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century. The epistemological
novelty springing from the contiguity between monstrous and normal anatomies is re-read by Halberstam as the peculiarity of Gothic writing, the literary
genre that most typically hosts the ‘monsters of modernity’ in British and
American fiction:
Gothic, I argue, marks a peculiarly modern preoccupation with boundaries, and their
collapse. Gothic monsters, furthermore, differ from the monsters that came before the
nineteenth century in that the monsters of modernity are characterized by their
proximity to humans.29
This proximity encourages in Victorian imagination a continuous process of
probing the limits and the potentialities of boundaries, thereby questioning – if
not demystifying – accepted values and codes of behavior. This is especially
evident in sensation fiction, a literary sub-genre of Gothic fiction that receives its
name from a questioning of the boundaries that separate physiology and
pathology : receiving sensory impressions from reading this kind of fiction was
regarded (most famously by John Ruskin in his ‘Fiction Foul and Fair’, 1860) as a
process that could easily lead to nervous impairment.30 Moreover, as Flora De
Giovanni shows in her essay, sensation fiction engages a dialogue with current
medical theories and discourses by insistently staging impaired bodies and
29 Halberstam, Skin Shows, p. 23.
30 For a discussion of the medical and cultural discourses supporting the pathological effects of
sensation fiction from the 1850s to the 1890s see Angelique Richardson, Love and Eugenics in
the Late Nineteenth Century : Rational Reproduction and the New Woman (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 85–91. More generally on the relations between
sensation fiction and the medical context see D. A. Miller, ‘Cage aux folles: Sensation and
Gender in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White’, Representations, 14 (1986), pp. 107–136;
Sally Shuttleworth, ‘“Preaching to the Nerves”: Psychological Discourse in Sensation Fiction’, in A Question of Identity : Women, Science, and Literature, ed. by Marina Benjamin
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993), pp. 192–222; Pamela K. Gilbert, ‘Sensation
Fiction and the Medical Context’, in The Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction, ed. by
Andrew Mangham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 182–196.
The Body of the Monster between Science and Literature
19
mental illnesses. Adopting the critical perspective of disability studies, De
Giovanni focuses on Wilkie Collins’s writing in order to expose his complex
attitude towards the Victorian representations of the ‘otherness’ embodied by
the disabled or the deformed. If, on the one hand, Collins rejects a simplistic
acceptance of the binary oppositions that sustain the stereotypical depiction of
the freak, on the other hand his disabled characters are exhibited as spectacle,
and fail to elude the marginality to which abnormal bodies are confined within
Victorian culture. Despite the fascination with the possibility of exploring the
potential inherent in unsettling boundaries and problematizing the status of
monster-like characters, Collins’s narratives ultimately revert to the necessary
subjection of the abnormal body.
This is something akin to what Erin O’Connor argues in her exploration of
Victorian freak shows, when she shows that while the deformity of the freak is
recognized as the badge of unique individuality, “celebrating pathological formation as the ultimate mark of personal distinction”,31 yet this potentially empowering aspect is demystified by the endless repeatability of deformity. The
centrality of monsters and freak shows in Victorian imagination is thus more
apparent than real, as the deformed body is actually denied the possibility to
actively shape or modify the definition of the Victorian unique self:
With the exception of celebrities such as Tom Thumb, these figures were infinitely
renewable – the names and faces changed over time, but the basic configuration of the
show remained the same. The result was a sort of assembly-line individualism, an
endless procession of human oddities whose cumulative impact was to standardize
abnormality itself, to reduce the scene of nature’s bounty to a series of predictable,
replaceable originals.32
Alessandra Violi’s contribution further explores the process of crossing boundaries, focusing on the body that is suspended between death and life, one of the
most uncanny examples of the monstrous anatomies that inhabit Victorian
imagination. The uncertain separation of death from life, an idea deriving from
the scientific and medical studies in the physiology of dying and in the experiments with altered mental states,33 generates the irresistible fantasy of bodies
that remain stuck in suspended animation. Hibernated bodies, trance-like
states, vampires and mummies are all examples of a cultural obsession with
boundaries that fail to hold, blurring the distinction between consciousness and
31 Erin O’Connor, Raw Material: Producing Pathology in Victorian Culture (Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 189.
32 O’Connor, Raw Material, p. 195.
33 On the proliferation of the so-called Victorian mental sciences see the anthology edited by
Sally Shuttleworth and Jenny Bourne Taylor, Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological
Texts, 1830–1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). See also Martin Willis, Mesmerists, Monsters and Machines (Kent: The Kent State University Press, 2006).
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unconsciousness, life and death. If this uncertainty results in the proliferation of
cultural fears (most notably, the fear of premature burial), by analyzing the
discourses and fantasies circulating around these fears Violi shows that the
undead can be recognized as a monster whose body becomes the symbol of not
just the inevitable extinction of life, but also its indefinite extension. Thus, by
eliciting a deeply ambivalent feeling, this monstrous anatomy encourages the
experience of the uncanny, in which we feel both fascination with and horror at
what appears to be ‘strangely familiar’: as in Freud’s conception of ‘the double’,
who is regarded as both a harbinger of death and a guarantee of immortality,34
also nineteenth century monsters prove, to use the words of one of Jeffrey Jerome
Cohen’s ‘Seven Theses’ on monstrosity, that “Fear of the Monster is Really a Kind
of Desire”.35
This ambivalence affects also the representation of the monstrous body of
nineteenth-century London, as Laura Di Michele’s essay illustrates, with examples from, among others, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar
Wilde and Bram Stoker. A polymorphic and sickly organism, darkening and
poisoning not just the East End but also the respectable West End and the Crystal
Palace – which at mid–century had been the symbol of the technological and
commercial power of the British empire and had established London as the
thriving capital city of the European world – London is imagined as a place where
the rich and the poor, cleanliness and mud, white and black incessantly meet and
mix, enveloped in the all-pervading fog and moving on and around the filthy
waters of the Thames. Once again, what the monstrous anatomy foregrounds is
the impossibility of resorting to secure boundaries, protecting categories; uncertainty and proximity result in a process of relentless contamination.
Because of its non-ontological difference from the normal, as the century
progresses the monster becomes an instrument for unsettling and questioning
the definition of the human itself. As Kelly Hurley argues, after Darwinian ideas
spread the belief that change (and adaptation or resistance to change) is the
dominant process in the evolution of species, the boundaries of the human body
itself are put into question: “Matter is no longer subordinate to form […],
bodies are without integrity or stability ; they are instead composite and
changeful”.36 This is particularly evident in fin-de-siwcle fantasies of humans and
animals disturbingly shading into one another – a fascinating subject that has
34 See Sigmund Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, in Writings on Art and Literature, ed. by Werner
Hamacher and David E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 193–233.
35 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses)’, in Monster Theory : Reading Culture
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 16.
36 Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism and Degeneration at the ‘Fin de Siwcle’
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 9.
The Body of the Monster between Science and Literature
21
recently been explored by Virginia Richter’s study on Literature after Darwin.37
However, as illustrated by the contributions in this volume by Maria Teresa
Chialant and Francesca Guidotti, what Hurley calls “new models of the human as
abhuman, as bodily ambiguated or otherwise discontinuous in identity”38
emerge also through more unsettling associations, such as the association to the
world of formless things or to the realm of the invisible unseen. Chialant’s essay
addresses the relations between the monster and the formless or the indefinite;
through an analysis of works by Mary Shelley, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Rudyard
Kipling and H.G. Wells, Chialant explores the extent to which nineteenth-century writers imagine the monstrous by evoking undifferentiated beings or objects. Suspended between scientific and supernatural explanations, between the
genre of Gothic and science fiction, these works engage with the strange physicality of bodies that, lacking or refusing a definite shape, resist classification and
defy the usual categories of definition for identity and agency. Chialant’s essay
points to the importance of the relation human-thing that has recently been at
the core of Bill Brown’s ‘thing theory’.39 Within this theoretical framework, the
importance of things goes beyond their role as objects of consumption and
fetish; rather, things interact with the definition of identity, acting as mediators
between subjects and objects. Initially focused especially on eighteenth-century
culture,40 thing theory has recently spurred some interesting works also in
Victorian studies.41
Guidotti’s essay explores the unsettling effects of invisibility and the unseen
in the Victorian world, which is usually associated to a special interest in vision
and which seems to be obsessed with the fantasy of incessant display and with the
power of the scopic regime. Focusing on H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man, Guidotti shows how the unseen breaks into the everyday, generating a monstrous
anatomy that is all the more disturbing because of its paradoxical corporeality,
37 Virginia Richter, Literature After Darwin: Human Beasts in Western Fiction, 1859–1939
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
38 Hurley, The Gothic Body, p. 5.
39 See Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, Critical Inquiry, 28 (2001), pp. 1–16; Bill Brown, A Sense of
Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003).
40 To mention but few examples: Cynthia Wall, The Prose of Things: Transformation of Description in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006); The Secret Life
of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. by Mark
Blackwell (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007); Julie Park, The Self & It: Novel
Objects in Eighteenth-Century England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).
41 Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 2006); Katharina Boehm, Bodies and Things in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); John Plotz, ‘Materiality in Theory : What to Make of Victorian Things, Objects, and Commodities’, in The
Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture, ed. by Juliet John (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2015 [forthcoming]).
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problematically mixing together absence and presence, emptiness and materiality. The body that matters in spite of (and because of) its invisibility calls for
different interpretative systems, just as the concluding chapter of the novel
foregrounds the invisibility of Griffin’s notes to Marvel: by defying interpretation, also the text becomes a monstrous anatomy that calls for a different
paradigm of visibility and a different gaze.
The last three contributions of this volume, by Sara Damiani, Daniela Crocetti
and Michele Cometa, shed light on one particular figuration of monstrous
anatomy : the transplanted body and the hermaphrodite that fascinate nineteenth-century imagination, and, on the other hand, Baubo, a mythical figure
that surfaces in a number of writings by Sigmund Freud, in the early twentieth
century.
By introducing Bruno Latour’s concept of the seamless modern body that is
constructed through the elision or repression of unthinkable processes of
mixture and hybridization, Damiani’s essay explores the extent to which the
modern body is haunted by its unconscious, characterized by fantasies that
continuously threaten to disrupt the body’s integrity. This is especially true in
the context of nineteenth-century medical practices, which create new possibilities for the manipulation, fragmentation and recombination of bodies. The
transplanted body gives flesh to the blurring of boundaries which, as we have
seen, dominates the imagination of the monstrous anatomy in the nineteenth
century : the literary and cinematic explorations of organ transplants show that
when the parts of different bodies are grafted together personal identity is disrupted by the confusion between the human and the animal or by the juxtaposition of fragments that belong to social categories (most typically, the
criminal and the respectable person, or the black and the white) that should be
kept separated.
Crocetti’s essay traces the metamorphoses that have affected the cultural
representations of the hermaphrodite, one of the most pervasive figurations of
monstrous anatomies in the Western imagination. The story of the hermaphrodite across centuries illustrates the monster’s transformation from a beautiful
marvel (as in the famous Borghese Hermaphroditus, the seventeenth-century
copy of a Hellenistic statue) into an object of medical study, aimed at policing
normative codes of gender politics and behaviors and then, in Virginia Woolf ’s
writing, into a trope that allows her to explore and overcome gender restrictions.
By illustrating a number of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century medical theories
and case studies – including the story of Herculine Barbin, who features in
Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality42 and was made public by Foucault
42 See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. by Robert Hurley (London: Penguin,
1998), vol. 1, The Will to Knowledge.
The Body of the Monster between Science and Literature
23
himself, who published her memoirs and wrote a famous introduction for the
English edition –43 Crocetti reveals the full extent of the medically driven social
project that strived to prevent gender deviant and homosexual activity.
Concluding our journey through monstrous anatomies with an incursion into
the early twentieth century, Cometa’s essay uses the figure of Baubo in Freud’s
writings as an illustration of the extent to which the monster, together with
literature itself, properly becomes ‘the place of the other’, seeking to compensate
for the fear of what technology and professionalization – as well as the teleologically-oriented Positivistic philosophy that aimed to understand them – attempted to exorcise and remove. At that time, the monster was used not only to
foreground ancestral fears but also to tame the different other, so that it could be
named and represented. Thus Freud evoked in his fin-de-siwcle psychoanalysis a
complex mythological figure: the almost forgotten mythical wife of Disaule but
also the maid who welcomes Demeter in Eleusis when she is desperately seeking
for her daughter Persephone. Freud’s essay ‘Mythologische Parallel zu einer
plastischen Zwangsvorstellungen’ (‘A Mythological Parallel to a Visual Obsession’, 1916) is a perfect integration of psychoanalytic reasoning, teratological
and mythological evocation – the figure of Baubo herself – as well as a reflection
on the survival of this image in modernity, after Goethe’s evocation of the wife of
Disaule in his Faust. In order to integrate heterogeneous discourses, Freud’s text
deals with the phenomenological history of monsters across the centuries,
summoned up by Cometa as follows:
In the Middle Ages, monsters had found a place in the great theological theories; as a
result, they seem to have been fed less by literature than by theology. In later centuries,
monsters featured in the scientific domains of geographical explorations, zoology and
alchemy. While in the nineteenth century monsters became the domain of physiology
as well as of comparative anatomy and of the bizarre science of teratology, in the
twentieth century they come under the jurisdiction of the sciences of the psyche. These
sciences retain a double function: on the one hand, they come to account for the
workings of the soul; on the other, in the wake of the aesthetical quality that is typical of
early psychology, they explore the fantastic world that can be found in literature, which
taps into the depths of the psyche itself.44
By referring to Baubo’s phenomenology, Cometa demonstrates in his essay that
psychoanalysis and the literature inspired by it have hosted those monsters
which had been exiled by the unconscious in the scientific and pseudoscientific
literature of the past. And it is not by chance that to debate this thesis the author
43 See Michel Foucault, ‘Preface’, in Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of
a Nineteenth Century French Hermaphrodite, trans. by Richard McDougall (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1980), pp. vii–xvii.
44 See Michele Cometa’s essay in this book, p. 299.
24
Raul Calzoni / Greta Perletti
quotes a very telling passage taken from Todorov’s study on the ‘fantastic’, where
it is said that psychoanalysis
has replaced (and thereby made useless) the literature of the fantastic. There is no need
to resort to the devil in order to speak of an excessive sexual desire, and none to resort
to vampires in order to designate the attraction exerted by corpses: psychoanalysis,
and the literature which is directly or indirectly inspired by it, deal with these matters in
undisguised terms.45
Be this true or not, there is no doubt that the ‘fantastic’ in its different manifestations has been representing the very reason for the fascination and disgust
with monsters throughout the centuries. According to Michel Foucault, from the
Medieval period, throughout Renaissance till the nineteenth century, variations
or types of monsters share the property of being strange ‘mixtures’. Monsters
thus defy our categories of understanding, be they civil, scientific, religious,
ethical or aesthetical. Therefore monsters are “Antiphysis”, as Foucault defined
them in one of his lectures of the 1974–1975 year, that is to say “the kind of
natural irregularity that calls law into question and disables it”.46 Is this not also
true for the ‘fantastic’ in literature and science, which thanks to the liminal figure
of the monster has been able to put into question established categories, religions, laws, methods and eventually disable them?
Acknowledgments
The translation of Michele Cometa’s contribution is by Greta Perletti. We are
very grateful to the contributors of this book for their patience and for the
quality of their texts. We would also like to thanks Elena Agazzi and Vita Fortunati for the possibility of publishing this book in the series “ACUME 2 –
Interfacing Science, Literature, and the Humanities”.
Raul Calzoni
Greta Perletti
45 Todorov, The Fantastic, p. 160.
46 Foucault, Abnormal, p. 64.
Elisa Leonzio
Deformity and Monstrosity: Jean Paul between
Embryogenesis and the Concept of Life
Many monographs and articles explore the presence and relevance of the scientific discourse in Jean Paul’s literary and philosophical work.1 Many of these
studies offer large space to medicine, both as a practice (i. e. doctors and their
patients, descriptions of pathologies and treatments) and as a theoretical discipline (in its branches, in particular physiology and anatomy). Until now,
however, no scholar has considered the numerous ‘grotesque’, deformed and
monstrous bodies, which populate Jean Paul’s narrative, under the scope of
embryogenesis and eighteenth-century physiology and, in particular, with respect to Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s and Johann Christian Reil’s theories of
Bildungstrieb (‘formative drive’) and Lebenskraft (‘vital force’). Still, without
minimizing the influence which was wielded on Jean Paul by the medicine of
Paracelsus and, in his wake, the magnetism of Mesmer, as well as Stahl’s physiology, on the one hand, and Lavater’s physiognomy, on the other hand, only the
reflection on the ‘living organism’ offered by Blumenbach and Reil in their works
can cast light on Jean Paul’s literary representation of science and its poetological significance.
The first part of this paper is therefore devoted to a brief reconstruction of the
debate on monstrosity in eighteenth-century German physiology, paying particular attention to the works of Kant, Blumenbach and Reil.
In the second part, thanks to the analysis of some of Jean Paul’s narrative and
philosophical works – including the Philosophische Untersuchungen (‘Philo1 The most significant among these are: Maximilian Rankl, Jean Paul und die Naturwissenschaft
(Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1987); Werner Gerabek, Naturphilosophie und Dichtung bei
Jean Paul: das Problem des commercium mentis et corporis (Stuttgart: Heinz Akad. Verl.,
1988); Hans Esselborn, Das Universum der Bilder : die Naturwissenschaft in den Schriften Jean
Pauls (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1989); Alexander Košenina, Ernst Platners Anthropologie und
Philosophie (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1989); Maximilian Bergengruen, Schöne
Seelen, groteske Körper. Jean Pauls ästhetische Dynamisierung der Anthropologie (Hamburg:
Meiner, 2003); Sabine Eickenrodt, Augen-Spiel. Jean Pauls optische Metaphorik der Unsterblichkeit (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006).