Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England

1999 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 280
Author(s):  
Mary Thomas Crane ◽  
Jonathan Gil Harris
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Foreign Bodies ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Pathology

“The Body of This Death”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith H. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Sustained Attention ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
The Body ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Physical Constitution

In Romans 7:24, Paul utters a cry that has echoed down the centuries: “O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” Paul’s moving outcry attracted the sustained attention of poets in early modern England, among them Spenser, Donne, and Milton, not only because of Paul’s anguish but also because of his unusual phrasing and figuration. The Bible carefully specifies “this death,” which suggests that the death at issue is spiritual and that it results from sin, not simply from the physical constitution of humankind. Yet physical death is implicit in the Adamic sin that human beings inherit and is thus embedded in their fallen nature. Donne’s sermons, Spenser’s Maleger, and Milton’s figures of Sin and Death explore the inextricability of spirit and flesh in the body that is this death.

Diseases of the Body Politic: White Slavery in Jane Addams' A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil and Selected Short Stories by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

1999 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
JANET BEER ◽  
KATHERINE JOSLIN
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Charlotte Perkins Gilman ◽  
White Slavery ◽  
Social Pathology ◽  
Jane Addams ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
North Side ◽  
Hull House ◽  
The City

Charlotte Perkins Gilman travelled from California to Chicago in 1896, spending three months at Hull House with her friend Jane Addams. Their discussions that summer resulted in a curious cross-pollination, each woman borrowing from the other, although neither, as it turns out, finding the exchange quite comfortable. Gilman, gratified by the intellectual audience at Hull House, was repelled by the day-to-day visceral contact with the poor. When Addams arranged for her to run a settlement on Chicago's North Side, known as “Little Hell,” Gilman eyed the grim prospect: “The loathly river flowed sluggishly near by, thick and ill-smelling; Goose Island lay black in the slow stream. Everywhere a heavy dinginess; low, dark brick factories and gloomy wooden dwellings often below the level of the street; foul plank sidewalks, rotten and full of holes; black mud underfoot, damp soot drifting steadily down over everything.” Poverty, in her description, infects both nature and culture, fouling the city and infesting it with literal and metaphorical disease. She soon handed her job over to Helen Campbell and moved on to write her theoretical analysis of the disease of middle-class marriage, Women and Economics (1899); “my interest was in all humanity, not merely the under side of it,” she mused, “in sociology, not social pathology.”

The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England

1995 ◽  
Vol 90 (1) ◽  
pp. 138
Author(s):  
Kathleen McLuskie ◽  
Gail Kern Paster ◽  
Henk Gras
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
The Body

Expanding the Boundaries of Female Honour in Early Modern England

1996 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 235-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Garthine Walker
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Professional Competence ◽  
Gender Ideology ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
The Body ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Personal Conflict ◽  
Social Code ◽  
Active Individual ◽  
Selection Of

Within the historiography of gender and reputation in early modern Europe, female and male honour are usually presented as being incommensurable; yet they are constantly compared. Female honour has been discussed primarily in the context of sexual reputation. Male honour is commonly imagined as ‘more complex’, involving matters of deference, physical prowess, economic and professional competence and die avoidance of public ridicule. Thus the predominant model of gendered honour has been oppositional—female to male, private to public, passive to active, individual to collective and, by extension, chastity to deeds. Such a model, however, is misconceived. Just as the honour of men could be bound up with sexuality and the body, so these constituted merely one—albeit powerful—concomitant of feminine honour. Sexual probity was indeed central to the dominant discourse of early modern gender ideology, and historians have quite properly noted the significance of a social code of female honour ‘which was overwhelmingly seen in sexual terms’. But the potency of this discourse has itself frequently led to the selection of sources in which sexual conduct and reputation are central issues, and in which sexual constructions of female dishonour are immediately visible Because women's honour has effectively been imagined in terms of dishonour, constructions of shame—especially those associated with sexuality and sexual behaviour—have been privileged over, or compounded with, those of affront. Even when it has been noted that sexual insult could be a mundane response ‘in every sort of local and personal conflict’, conceptualisations of women's honour have been defined overwhelmingly by the nature of such responses rather than the conflicts themselves.

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