Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism

by Paul Youngquist
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2003
264 pp., illus. 36 b/w. Trade, $54.95; Paper, $19.95
ISBN: 0-8166-3979-5; ISBN: 0-8166-3980-9.

Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool Gent
Jan Delvinlaan 115, 9000 Gent, Belgium

stefaan.vanryssen@pandora.be

British Romanticism (Shelley, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, Coleridge, De Quincey, Byron... ) has been a crucial element in the building of British national identity and liberal society, alongside with economic development and imperialist politics. An important question in understanding this process remains how these macro-developments are translated or transferred into daily life, into the acts and minds of the lower and the middle classes, and vice versa: How the changing norms and values, the evolving self-image of the populace is expressed in social, political and economic institutions. This is, of course, the old historical and sociological problem of how the political becomes personal and how the economic becomes moral.

Paul Youngquist tackles one side of the issue by analysing a wide and surprising range of phenomena in the Romantic era. Under the generic name of 'monstrosities' he looks at a variance of deviant bodies and excentric behaviours and tries to explain how the very fact of identifying, exposing, and studying the un-normal, turning it into monstrous and repulsive, helped create normality. More specific, he starts from the writings of the authors mentioned above to 'show how the norm came to take hold of British bodies and how particular Romantic writers responded to its force. [...] So the aims here are twofold: first to examine further the emergence of the proper body as a regulatory norm, and, second, to show how monstrosities of various kinds become occasions for advancing, resisting, or transferring the operations of the social project of proper embodiment in liberal society in British culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.' In doing so, he implicitly acknowledges the theory that liberal society has a need for normalised, 'civilised' or even standardised individuals——for whatever reason——and that the normalisation processes involved in the creation of that society took place through a number of different processes, one of which was the Romantic movement.

First, Youngquist turns to the role medicine and anatomy played in incorporating and legitimating a cultural norm of embodiment through the development of a discourse of physiology. He, then, examines a range of practices showing how monstrosities occasion the production and subversion of human values in liberal society. Humanitarian treatments of singular bodies and the annual festivities of Bartholomew Fair (an 'exhibition' of deviant bodies) are some of these practices. Here, he points at the roles of the American freak shows and the British monstrosity fairs, unfortunately not making clear why their social function seems to differ. The final chapter of the first section focuses on the aspect of race and how whiteness becomes the norm in an increasingly powerful association between aesthetics and medicine.

The second section of the book investigates the relationship between drugs and proper embodiment. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey, both lifelong opium addicts, are the main characters in this part.

In the third and final section, the ways in which abject body parts incorporate power relations are examined. The parts in question, the placenta in one case and a deformed foot in the other, expose bodies to the operations of a medicine that appropriates what it treats. One woman and one man in particular are treated: Mary Wollstonecraft and her liberal feminist politics and Lord Byron and his deformed foot.

Overall Youngquist's prose is rather dense, and the reader who is not used to the styles of Foucault, Derrida and the like will certainly develop a monstrous headache. But do not despair: There is hope for you yet because the chapter on De Quicey is a real tour de force, showing how the Confessions of an English Opium Eater are a test of philosophical idealism and how the critique of pure reason turns out to be a high-flown apology for the proper body. Kant against drug addiction: nil to one.