Flesh in the Age of Reason (37 page)

Cheyne’s views grew influential, and his correspondence with the printer and novelist Samuel Richardson shows his attempts to encourage moderation in his friends and patients by encouraging them to eat less, avoid fermented liquors and exercise more, for example through riding. A ‘staunch Epicure’ given to overwork, Richardson was urged by Cheyne to relax, diet and exercise – upon the ‘chamber horse’ if he would not go outdoors; he himself rode it ‘an Hour every Morning’, noted Cheyne, and found ‘great Benefit’. The contraption involved a long board supported on each end, with a chair in the middle which bounced up and down.

Cheyne’s books were extremely popular and many later medical thinkers echoed his calls to temperance, with added intensity. Moderation would overcome that classic Georgian disorder, the gout, proclaimed Dr William Cadogan. If the turn towards regulating the flesh was decidedly health-oriented, however, it also became part and parcel of a wider movement, expressive of preferred cultural ideals and personal identities. A sign of this lies in the rise of principled ethical vegetarianism in the second half of the eighteenth century (until then there were only vegetarians by necessity, only those who could not afford meat). Joseph Ritson, for example, held that because dead meat itself was corrupt, it would stir violent passions, whereas greens, milk, seeds and water would temper the appetite and produce a better disciplined individual. In
A Vindication of Natural Diet
(1813), Percy Bysshe Shelley argued that meat-eating turned people sanguinary. Vegetarianism also wore a humanitarian hue – it was cruel for humans to slaughter animals merely for food.

Fatness and thinness, as we have seen, had always raised questions of preferred or prescribed body image, personal and public. The truly obese had always been objects of literary and artistic satire – for grossness bespoke greed, lack of self-control and the vulgarity of temper associated with low life. But in traditional national, social and occupational stereotyping a certain stoutness was a positive
property, betokening not just healthiness but the rock-solid strength of the gentleman, yeoman farmer, magistrate or citizen. The able lawyer should be rotund, because he must have a solid grounding in reality and not be easily swayed. ‘Bottom’ was a desirable character trait, signifying guts, backbone or courage, sound fundamentals.

Other occupations, of course, might require a decorous thinness. The honest clergyman – witness Sterne’s Parson Yorick – was expected to be fleshless, because ascetically floating up heavenwards: the lard-tub friar or podgy parson had been, from time immemorial, a figure of fun and contempt. Academics, too, were expected to be somewhat emaciated, living as they did on pure thought, in their heads, aspiring to the purely intellectual. The great Sir Isaac Newton supposedly often went without his dinner, not descending to thinking about mere matters of the flesh. Yet the scholar’s thinness, that mark of mind, was also reputedly a source of melancholy, illness and discomfort – thus a highly ambiguous serio-comic conventional sign, respectful yet dismissive at the same time.

The years after 1750 were to bring a trend of profound importance for the future: thinness steadily became fashionable in a public arena in which fashion itself was acknowledged to be exerting an ever greater sway. For both males and females, the cut of sartorial styles had long been ample. In post-Restoration female fashions, a curvaceous softness at large, and specifically in the breasts – whose snowy, swelling amplitude was endlessly celebrated in erotic art, bawdy tales and medico-scientific writing on motherhood – dominated sartorial shapes. Petticoats and gowns proliferated, mirrored by various other forms of swollen display, for example, the preference in the age of Queen Anne for enormous wigs. The swagger portraits of the era of Kneller and Lely were meant to make people look big.

In the latter decades of the century, however, litheness became chic and fashion directed itself to the slim look. Breeches began to give way to trousers and trousers grew tighter; military uniforms became particularly thigh-hugging in the Napoleonic wars. And, in the 1790s, in the wake of the French Revolution, the old layered petticoats, hoops and corsets yielded to lighter fabrics, such as muslin,
for female attire, worn directly over the skin, revealing and emphasizing bodily contours. The new fashions were kind to the young, cruel to age.

The fashion for thinness, and all it implied about enslavement to fashion, was criticized by many, including the Bristol physician Thomas Beddoes, a sharp and radical social observer. It was, in his view, destructive of health. How bizarre that bright young things, seeking public attention, positively sought to look tubercular, as if delicacy and a tenuous grasp on life made them all the more appealing – indeed, sexy!

Through association with fine sensibility and the cult of youth, the tubercular look – indeed tuberculosis – was becoming positively
de rigueur
. ‘Writers of romance’, wrote Beddoes, ‘(whether from ignorance or because it suits the tone of their narrative) exhibit the slow decline of the consumptive, as a state on which the fancy may agreeably repose, and in which not much more misery is felt, than is expressed by a blossom, nipped by untimely frosts.’ The preposterous idea had taken root that ‘consumption must be a flattering complaint’, associated as it was with superior imagination, talents and discrimination.

Many doctors and critics accused trend-setting élites of pursuing pernicious lifestyles which sacrificed health to fashion. Mad for the mode, high society was decking itself out in the injurious ‘light dress’ that was all the rage in the Revolutionary 1790s. And such sartorial frivolity was just the tip of the iceberg. For the ‘method of education’ that was
à la mode
in polite circles aimed to turn children into weaklings. Seduced by the siren sensibility and neglecting the sound advice of Locke, parents made their progeny serve time as ‘poor prisoners’ in draughty boarding schools. Thereafter, adolescents, by then ‘weak, with excess of sensibility’, were allowed to lounge around at home on sofas, reading ‘melting love stories, related in novels’. All such diversions designed to ‘exercise the sensibility’ proved ‘highly enervating’. Not surprisingly, thanks to this ‘fatal indolence’, ‘the springs of their constitution have lost their force from disuse’. A further insidious danger to the flesh derived from sedentariness: the
solitary vice. Beddoes judged onanism the predictable outcome of the irresponsible cocktail of mollycoddling, absurdity and neglect which passed for a polite upbringing.

In the process whereby a girl was ‘manufactured into a lady’, parents positively delighted in delicacy. Thin being fashionable, such darlings were allowed to get away with finicky eating. Hoodwinked by pseudo-medical faddery – were they all reading Cheyne? – parents were encouraging vegetarianism, ‘believing that they thus render the constitution a signal service’. All such foibles had to be abandoned, insisted Beddoes, looking to medieval forebears as models. They hunted, fought, hawked, and did without ‘effeminate’ carriages. ‘The general diet of former centuries was more invigorating’, for the ‘opulent of both sexes, appear to have participated rather more largely of animal food’, often breakfasting ‘upon a fine beef steak broiled’. By contrast with the preciosities of the fastidious – ‘it is upon the lilies of the land, that neither toil nor spin, that the blight of consumption principally falls’ – far healthier were labourers who pursued heavy physical exercise, drank with gusto and, above all, were lusty carnivores.

The vitiated taste for the slimline and slender which Beddoes deplored is indeed a lifestyle watershed. It marks the moment when fashion began that infatuation with youth, with its innocence, spontaneity and unspoilt beauty, which has grown (admittedly unevenly) ever more marked over the last two centuries. Increasingly, the fascinating personality was youthful rather than mature, spirited rather than wise, sensitive rather than sober, budding rather than formed: ‘Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven’: the youth cult is evident, not just in Wordsworth but in many of the writings of the time, for example in William Blake’s
Songs of Innocence
, in the broader Romantic idealization of the child, and (as we shall see in
Chapter 25
) in Byron’s dread of ageing. Flesh was acceptable only so long as it did not yet bear the signs of decay.

This attests a great transformation. Traditional religion professed a profound and principled ascetic suspicion of and revulsion against the flesh. These precepts coexisted with arguments in favour of the
healthiness and social eligibility of bulk: weight carried weight. That whole congeries of values was now in question. The Christian distrust of the flesh was undermined, but only to be transvalued and reborn in the guise of fashion’s horror at excessive ponderousness, especially when associated with ageing and decline. In the process there arose a new cult of the lithe, limber, slim body indicative of delicacy and fineness of sensibility. Through the modern cult of youth, the body was becoming an object of worship through its initiation into a disappearing act. No longer despised, the body was becoming a tyrant in a new puritanism.

Ask a toad what beauty is, the supreme beauty, the
to kalon
. He will tell you it is his lady toad with her two big round eyes coming out of her little head, her large flat snout, yellow belly, brown back. Interrogate a Negro from Guinea; for him beauty is a black, oily skin, sunken eyes, and flat nose.

VOLTAIRE

L
ooks, so the previous chapter suggested, obviously count in the creation of identity. Appearances are insignia of reality, expressions speak louder than words, a person’s mind or soul can be read from their expression – such views are perhaps coterminous with social experience itself, one of those sign-systems indispensable for communication and coherence.

A multiplicity of disciplines has attempted to codify such commonplaces. Stressing the parallels between microcosm and macrocosm, Greek thinkers held that the human form corresponded systematically to the ideal forms and hidden geometrical harmonies of the cosmos at large: man was in some sense the measure of all things, a kind of natural ruler. In a chapter of his
De Architectura
dealing with temple design, the Roman architect Vitruvius (first century
BC
) commended the use of certain archetypal shapes and natural proportions in building. Declaring it the measure of perfection, he inscribed the body of a male with limbs outstretched within the primary geometrical shapes of the square and circle. This perfectly circumscribed figure (‘Vitruvian Man’) in turn generated various further sets of proportions. It provided, for example, a guide for
column design – columns being the closest architectural analogue to the body. There were, according to Vitruvius, nine head-heights in the total height of the well-proportioned figure; the height of a column should therefore be the equivalent of its ‘capital’ (Latin:
caput
= head) multiplied by nine. Different column types (Doric, Corinthian, and so on) were to be read as expressive of human diversity, male and female, young and old, plain and fancy. Such ideas were elaborated in the Renaissance: Filarete, for example, treated doors and windows as ‘orifices’. As man was patterned on the heavens, so the city and its buildings should be reflections of the human. Traditions were thus inaugurated which were to exercise sway over artistic imaginations and practices long beyond the Renaissance. It was this body classical which bore the
imprimatur
of art, defining the golden and the ideal world as proposed by Michelangelo and enshrined in later centuries in the academic tradition of the canons of beauty.

The Greeks had also outlined a science of physiognomy, later often but wrongly given the authority of Aristotle. Particular facial features and their characteristic expressions – the chin, brow, smile, lips, eyes – vouchsafed evidence of inner states within the mind or soul. Likenesses between human and animal features provided further clues: did not some faces bear close resemblance to wolves, lions, tigers, asses, apes, cats and curs? Did not the animal kingdom in general imitate the human? The Aesopian inference was evident. Committed as it was to humoralism, as discussed in
Chapter 3
, classical medicine also saw ‘complexion’, the outward quality imprinted on the skin, as indicative of inner humoral balance and hence of temperament. Overall, one’s fortune lay in one’s face: physiognomy was destiny.

Christianity, for its part, upheld broadly similar doctrines as to natural signs and the inner and outer. Nature was the book of God, and appearances spoke truth – did not the Bible teach that man was made in God’s image? The doctrine of signatures elaborated in Renaissance botany and natural history likewise provided keys to the reading of signs planted in creation – the meaning, use and purpose
of a plant or mineral were visible in the signatures that it bore, a natural hieroglyphics stamped upon it by God: there were sermons in stones.

Popular folklore and learned medicine alike furthermore held that ‘monsters’ or ‘freaks’ – babies born with blemishes or supernumerary limbs – revealed the secret sin or crime which had marked their conception. If a baby was born with feral features, was it not because, in the throes of passion, the woman was fantasizing about copulating with an ape? The power of the unruly and lurid female imagination to imprint itself upon the foetus amounted to another way in which the inner inscribed itself upon the flesh.

Acting theory, likewise, held that specific gestures and postures adopted on the stage naturally conveyed precise dramatic emotions or meanings. By way of parallel to theatrical rhetoric, it was also held that signing formed a natural language of the deaf, universally intelligible, transcending the arbitrary particularities of national tongues. The deaf and dumb worldwide could thus speak effortlessly to each other, through natural expressiveness, in a way impossible at a meeting of English, French and Germans who could hear.