| My dissertation seeks to understand why corpses were such a preoccupation for those living and writing in the 1800s. Romantic and Victorian societies were fascinated with death. Debates over possession of loved ones' body parts, the popularity of hair jewelry, and the pomp and ceremony associated with elaborate funerals of the rich exemplify the value that nineteenth-century culture attributed to the bodies of the dead. In the literature I examine, bodies---or fragments of bodies---often work to exhume the life and character of the deceased, ostensibly in the service of preserving their memories. More subtly, however, these works demonstrate a desire to know and understand the lives those bodies represented in order to gain scientific, spiritual, and secular knowledge that would enhance and shape the lives of the living. Texts about bodies, therefore, also represent a way of dealing imaginatively with the reality of death by pushing beyond its limits. By placing emphasis on the dead body, such writings explore whether obsessive perceptions, emotions, and attachments can lead us beyond the Enlightenment sense of rationality.;To this end, I examine the history of the nineteenth-century body as artifact, exploring the ways in which texts and bodies intersect: how actual bodies can be read as texts and how texts can be read as bodies. Mourners sometimes valued bodies as memento mori that led to emotional and/or spiritual (although solipsistic) knowledge, while anatomists used poor bodies as scientific resources leading to medical knowledge. In anatomy literature, though, what is really at stake is a kind of ethical, not scientific, knowledge, about the right and wrong ways of handling bodies. This work contributes to existing scholarship by drawing attention to the relationship between anatomy literature and nineteenth-century emotional and ethical concerns, class and gender issues, and the act of writing itself. I investigate what those in the nineteenth-century hoped to learn from dead bodies as artifacts and similarly, what we hope to learn today. In the process, I explore the question of how we come to know what we know through our connections with bodily artifacts, and what difference such knowledge makes. |
