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Body in Cultural Studies

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 23, 2018 • ( 0 )

Until recently, the body has been either ignored or made marginal in philosophical, political and cultural theory. Thus, in philosophy, human agency and the identity of the person were traditionally seen to lie in the mind. The mind (or soul) was permanent and, in its rationality, was the source of all our knowledge. A key philosophical problem (for example from the writings of Descartes in the seventeenth century onwards) was the relationship of the mind to the body. A few thinkers, especially within the seventeenth- and eighteenth- century empiricist tradition of British philosophy (such as David Hume ), could be seen to be making something of the human body by recognising that our experience of the world entirely depends upon our bodily sense organs. However, even this potential was stifled by emphasising sight and hearing as the sources of knowledge. The more obviously bodily senses of smell, taste and touch are sidelined, and so too are the implications that they have for our practical engagement with the world through our bodies. At the end of the eighteenth century, Kant demonstrates the problematic status of the senses in his Critique of Judgement (1987). On the one hand he argues that it is only as both rational and sensual (or embodied) creatures that we can experience the pleasure of beauty (as opposed to the purely rational delight in the morally good, or the purely physical agreeableness of food and drink). On the other hand, beauty rests in sight and hearing, not in touch, smell and taste.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Marx ’s view of human beings as fundamentally beings that transform and create their own environment through labour offers some awareness of embodiment. It is perhaps only in American pragmatism, at the end of the nineteenth century, that the importance of the embodied, practical experience of the world is given thorough and rigorous treatment in philosophy. It is here that the importance of taken-for-granted knowledge of the world, carried in the habitual skill and competence with which we use our bodies to manipulate and test the world, comes to the fore. In the twentieth century, this perspective is developed in Heidegger ’s work, for example in his concepts of ‘ready–to–hand’ and ‘present–at–hand’ (1962:102–7). Normally, objects are used unthinkingly. While a tool works, we do not worry about it. When it fails, we step back and question and examine it. Thus, we acquire conscious, theoretical knowledge of the world, only when the world trips us up practically. Against Descartes’s assumptions, we cannot gain knowledge through merely reflecting on the world. We need a reason to reflect upon it, and that reason comes only through a bodily engagement. Thus Heidegger, like the pragmatists and even David Hume, introduces the body into philosophical thought by directly criticising the way in which Descartes does philosophy. Heidegger further emphasises the necessity of the body—along with all its contingencies—to our selfunderstanding as human beings in the demand that we must accept that we are mortal. The Heideggerian approach was influential on the development of French phenomenology, particularly in the analysis of ‘flesh’ by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (again beginning from the argument that consciousness is embodied in a particular world) (1962), and Jean-Paul Sartre (not least in his spectacular analysis of torture, as the attempt to capture and possess the freedom of the victim within his or her flesh) (1958:303–59).

In Western political theory, the body is again ignored until recently. Liberalism, for example, adopts a model of human being that stresses rationality. As such, it is the human intellect that matters. Indeed, the unrestrained pursuit of bodily desires may be theorised as a threat to political order. In addition, liberalism tends to assume a series of more or less implicit dichotomies. Reason is set against unreason, mind against body, and male against female. Liberalism’s traditional blindness to gender difference, and to the exclusion of women from politics, may in part be understood through this association of reason, mind and masculinity.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, with the revival of liberal theory through the work of John Rawls (1972), there also came a new criticism of liberalism from the communitarians. In this line of argument, Michael Sandel (1982) is critical of Rawls (and thus contemporary liberalism) precisely because the Rawlsian model of human beings is disembodied and disembedded. That is to say that Rawls artificially abstracts human beings from the bodily and cultural experiences that form them as the particular beings they are. In effect, Rawls is accused of assuming that the human being, as a rational personality capable of choice, exists prior to its embodied life in a particular community. Sandel argues that the very ability to choose and to hold values, and to be aware of ourselves as individuals, comes only from bodily experience, and cannot exist prior to it.

In cultural theory, there is a significant literature on the nude as a core subject matter of Western art. In part, this literature comes from the orthodox approach of a cultural historian, such as Clarke’s analysis of the idealisation of the body according to historically varying cultural norms (1956). More recently feminists and others (such as John Berger (1972)) have placed the nude in a political context, in order to question the ascription of intrinsic aesthetic value to it as part of the patriarchal or ideological structure of power in Western culture (Diprose 1994; Grosz 1994; Irigaray 1985a).

The understanding of the body develops in cultural studies through the recognition of the body as a site of meaning. A semiotic approach may be taken to the body Umberto Eco ’s characterisation of the body as a ‘communication machine’ is telling (1986). The body is not simply there, as a brute fact of nature, but is incorporated into culture. The body is indeed a key site at which culture and cultural identity is expressed and articulated, through clothing, jewellery and other decoration and through the shaping of the body itself (through tattoos, hair styles, body-building and dieting, for example). It is through the body that individuals can conform to or resist the cultural expectations imposed upon them. Sociology has thus been able to turn to the analysis of ‘body-centred practices’ (see Turner 1984). Foucaul t’s analysis of the development of the prison system and state punishment focuses on the body as the subject of discipline (1977a). Crucially, the body is shaped and disciplined through systems of surveillance, either actual surveillance or surveillance that is imagined to be occurring. Analysis of the body can therefore increasingly see it as a product of social constraint and construction (which is a theme also found in Goffman ’s work), or of the languages and discourses within which it is discussed and analysed (as, for example, in the languages of medical science, psychiatry and criminology).

Source: Edgar, Andrew, and Peter R Sedgwick. Cultural Theory The Key Concepts . London: Routledge, 2008. Print.

Gender politics and Victorian literary representation of the body: a distant reading of the body in Charles Dickens’s works

Houliang Chen 1 &
Qianwen Xu 1

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume 11 , Article number: 815 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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Language and linguistics

This paper analyses the nineteenth-century discourse around the human body. It examines two corpora: Charles Dickens’s works and contemporary writings. In both contexts, the body is observed through a detailed focus on its individual parts. This study employs a corpus-driven approach to investigate the vocabulary used to describe the body in these two corpora, providing complementary explanations to traditional close reading methods. The findings indicate that Victorian authors, including Dickens, tend to use nouns associated with time and space when representing the body, while also placing significant emphasis on codes of etiquette in the depiction of its physical actions. In Dickens’s corpus, nouns related to the body are influenced by gender ideology. Furthermore, a gender-based sub-corpus analysis, particularly focusing on verbs, highlights the disparities in agency between male and female bodies.

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During the nineteenth century, the Victorian preoccupation with the body extended beyond mere physical appearance, delving into the realms of etiquette, class, and gender. As John Tosh observes, “Victorian middle-class culture was constructed around a heavily polarized understanding of gender. Both character and sexuality were seen in more sharply gendered terms than ever before or since” (Tosh, 1999 , p. 46). During this period, lower- and middle-class bodies were depicted as fundamentally distinct in various medical and popular discussions, reflecting a period of “hyperbolic gender difference” (Michie, 1999 , p. 409). The body, serving as a “confluence of sensate and cultural processes” (Lewis, 2008 , p. 248), assumed a notably significant role in the Victorian notion of subjectivity, being extensively debated due to its emphasis on gender antagonisms. Given the abstract nature of the body as a conceptual entity, its scholarly examination frequently adopts a fragmentary approach, delineating “physically perceptible parts” (Mann and Gavin, 2019 , p. 681), such as hands, feet, eyes, and so forth. Owning to the development of the study of anatomy, the individual exploration of body parts not only allowed for a more detailed explanation of the body, but also put “the body back together at a more abstract level of representation” (Cregan, 2009 , p. 24). Charles Dickens (1812–1870), as “Shakespeare’s only rival as a worldwide influence” (Bloom, 1994 , p. 320), provides readers with a significant window into the embodiment of the Victorian human body through his literary works.

Undoubtedly, the body is composed of various parts, and traditional textual scrutiny often excels in delving deeply into specific bodily details Footnote 1 . However, such an approach often does not simultaneously address other parts of the body. Therefore, employing distant reading, which possesses the significant benefit of being vivid, becomes a complementary choice for studying the portrayal of the body by a given author. To present interpretations of body discourse distinct from the close-reading approach, this paper employs digital methods to focus on a vast amount of text, aiming to attain what Franco Moretti refers to as “‘the explanation of general structures’ rather than ‘interpretation of individual texts’” (Moretti, 2005 , p. 91). Distant reading, with the aid of computational methods, offers significant advantages in handling extensive amounts of text that close reading lacks. As Raymond Williams notes, “one can say with confidence, for example, that nobody really knows the nineteenth-century novel; nobody has read, or could have read, all its examples, over the whole range from printed volumes to penny serials” (Williams, 1965 , p. 66). Nevertheless, it is true that not all distant reading approaches fully harness these advantages. John Unsworth has developed a set of evaluative criteria for assessing the value of computational methods in the humanities. Among them, he underscores the importance of demonstrating “interactivity” (Unsworth, 2013 , p. 37) in research. He also mentions that studies involving keyword searching, structured searching, new models, or even new algorithms can be considered valuable. Therefore, this study is dedicated to using diverse computational methodologies based on the distinctive characteristics of word usage, identifying Dickens’s conscious or unconscious representation of the body at the lexical level, thus achieving such “interactivity.” The primary innovations of this study are its meticulous classification of body-related vocabulary based on the respective parts of speech as well as the subsequent application of research tools corresponding to the unique attributes of each word category, thus facilitating the attainment of more targeted analytical outcomes.

Focusing on the discourse around the human body in the nineteenth-century Britain, this study is conducted through two main corpora—one comprises a collection of writings by Charles Dickens and the other consists of contemporary literature. The research is divided into two stages. First, a comparison is made between the nouns used by Dickens to describe the body and those in the reference corpus to identify the similarities and differences between the two corpora, as well as their underlying implications. Second, this study further classifies verbs from the observed corpus and reference corpus based on gender to examine the different agencies manifested by Dickens when writing about bodies of different genders.

Data and corpora

This study focuses on the portrayal of the body in Dickens’s novels. Therefore, the observed corpus Footnote 2 consists of the texts of 33 of his literary works, which are provided in the Appendix . Regarding the reference corpus Footnote 3 , not all retrieval results that met the time interval were available for download or in a plain text file format that could then be analysed. Consequently, these unobtainable texts were discarded during the data selection process, resulting in a final reference corpus consisting of 356 novels from the Victorian era, excluding Dickens’s works. When establishing the corpora, discarding some data is typical. As Moretti puts it, “if we want to understand the system in its entirety, we must accept losing something” (Moretti, 2000 , p. 57). The selection of the final reference corpus was not without its challenges. However, the rigorous data processing and cleansing procedures, including data collection, text standardisation, tokenisation, stopword removal, stemming and lemmatisation, noise removal, annotation and named entity recognition, and the building bags of words, ensured that the corpus remained representative of the Victorian era. This approach is aligned with Moretti’s assertion that comprehending the entirety of a system may require making sacrifices along the way. Exploring these carefully selected corpora, the study aims to uncover nuanced patterns in and insights into how Dickens and his contemporaries depict the human body in their narratives. Through the lens of distant reading and computational analysis, underlying structures and themes that might have eluded traditional close reading methods are thus revealed.

Using the standard corpus tool AntConc, the observed corpus, consisting of 33 works, was imported. A search was conducted within this corpus to identify the most commonly mentioned body parts, with the following ten having the highest frequency: hand (9003 times), head (5709 times), eye (6007 times), arm (2849 times), foot (1781 times), shoulder (959 times), ear (940 times), finger (765 times), breast (739 times), and mouth (685 times). Except for head , mouth , and breast , all other body parts are represented by the combined count of singular and plural forms. As the central word is a noun, striking a balance in terms of the number of surrounding words is crucial. Including too many words will introduce modifiers such as adjectives and adverbs that are less relevant, while including too few cannot provide enough context to present a comprehensive picture. After multiple experiments, a context size of five was chosen, meaning that each retrieval result consists of the ten words preceding and following the central word. After data cleansing, ten separate sub-corpora in these two corpora were created, classified according to body part.

As Norman Fairclough posits, “how ideological differences between texts in their representations of the world are coded in their vocabulary” (Fairclough, 2001 , p. 94). Consequently, this study is grounded in the realm of vocabulary, aiming to scrutinise the outcomes of lexical collocations related to various body parts in order to unveil the underlying ideology behind these representation of body. This essay focuses on observing words related to body parts, and further subdivides the two corpora based on parts of speech, mainly nouns and verbs. The Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) library in Python was used to perform text processing and tokenisation on the twenty separate sub-corpus obtained from the two corpora, each corresponding to a specific body part. Special characters, garbled information, and other irrelevant data were removed during this process. Subsequently, each body sub-corpus was further segmented into two separate lexical bundles, comprised of nouns and verbs.

Erin Goss notes that the body can reflect varying epistemological structures, including “the literary and social discourse of sensibility and sentiment” (Goss, 2012 , p. 26). At the lexical level, the emotions implied by the body can be glimpsed through the vocabulary used to describe it, a phenomenon known as semantic prosodies, as proposed by John Sinclair Footnote 4 . This phenomenon can reveal aspects beyond the reach of conscious intuition, thus exposing the author’s unconscious, even “where s/he is at pains to conceal it” (Louw, 1993 , p. 157). The following chapter conducts a lexical analysis of semantic prosodies from two corpora, focusing on nouns and verbs. Nouns related to body parts can visually represent objects that play a role in the functioning of body parts, while verbs can demonstrate the agency or capability of the body.

Methodology

This section outlines the application of digital methods to analyse nouns associated with different parts of the body. First, Python was used to a cluster of ten of Dickens’s noun corpora of body parts and evaluate the performance metrics for different numbers of clusters to determine the optimal number. The process begins by vectorising the text using TF-IDF (Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency) Footnote 5 . This involves transforming the text data into a vector representation wherein the features are the TF-IDF values of the words. The features are generated by calculating the term frequency (TF) and inverse document frequency (IDF). Then, the K-means clustering algorithm is applied to cluster the text data, whose principle is to share high similarity among data points within the same cluster and low similarity between data points across different clusters. Since there are ten texts in each corpus, the number of clusters ( K value) was selected to be between two and nine, representing the desired number of categories into which the data should be divided. Subsequently, the silhouette score Footnote 6 and Calinski–Harabasz index Footnote 7 were computed for each clustering result to observe the performance metrics; the results were plotted as line graphs (Figs. 1 and 2 ) with the number of clusters on the horizontal axis and the performance metrics on the vertical axis.

Cluster performance of Dickens’s corpus.

Cluster performance of nineteenth century writers’ corpus.

As Fig. 1 shows, when the Calinski–Harabasz score curve fluctuates around 2, it signifies relatively higher compactness and separation of clusters at that specific number of clusters. The data points within each cluster are closely intertwined, and there is significant distinction between the clusters, indicating a favorable clustering outcome. On the other hand, the Silhouette Score curve remains relatively stable around 0.1 as the number of clusters changes from 2 to 6, which suggests that with an increasing number of clusters, both the stability within clusters and the separation between clusters remain relatively consistent. However, when the number of clusters changes from 7 to 9, the Silhouette Score gradually decreases and approaches 0. This indicates a diminishing clustering effect, as the sample points gradually lose clear association with any specific cluster. Taking these factors into consideration, this study prioritises the clustering quantity that yielded a higher Calinski–Harabasz score, as it provides superior clustering outcomes. The declining Silhouette Score implies an irrational subdivision during the clustering process, which cannot be ideal for practical applications. Therefore, the optimal number of clusters for the observed corpus was determined as 7 (Fig. 1 ). Likewise, the most favorable clustering for the reference corpus was also identified as 7 (Fig. 2 ).

After ascertaining that the prime number of clusters is 7, in order to showcase the internal details of each cluster and the interconnectedness between clusters, this study utilised the network visualisation software Gephi, which applies nodes and edges, to present the composition of and relationships within each cluster. First, the value of resolution in the modularity was adjusted to 1.2, which yielded the previously mentioned 7 cluster quantities. Next, a filtering function was applied to obtain the top 30 nodes with the highest weights. Then, the “Force Atlas” algorithm is used to adjust the node layout, followed by layout optimisation of the nodes using the elastic model “Fruchterman Reingold.” This process ultimately yielded the visualisation shown in Figs. 3 and 4 . Circles of the same color represent nodes belonging to the same cluster, while the size of each circle is determined by the ranking of Weighted Degree; Footnote 8 larger circles correspond to higher weight values.

The noun network of Dickens’s corpus.

The noun network of nineteenth century writers’ corpus.

During the nineteenth century, the divergence between bodies contributes to gender antagonism, whereby men were perceived as robust, decisive, and rational, while women were regarded as gentle, submissive, and the embodiments of emotions. These ingrained body stereotypes gave rise to societal trends such as masculine anxiety and the pressure for women to embody the role of “domestic angels” (Langland, 1992 , p. 295) within households. Scholars have maintained a fervent interest in the study of gender opposition during this period, but, as Motschenbacher observes, “linguistic discussions of the body and its relation to gender, by contrast, are relatively rare” (Motschenbacher, 2009 , p. 1). Verbs play a particularly vital role in the study of the body, as they depict how body parts engage in actions. Analysing verbs allows readers to comprehend the actions, behaviors, or states of different body parts in the text, such as activities, pain, movement, and more. Moreover, distinguishing between actions attributed to males and females aids in deciphering the gender politics associated with the characters’ bodies in Dickens’s writings.

Accordingly, in this section, linguistic analysis is applied to the different body representations of the male and the female characters in the two corpora. The observed corpus and the reference corpus were further divided into smaller corpora based on two different pronouns—his and her. Then, all the verbs in the corpora were extracted, and their frequencies were counted. To ensure research coherence, a context size of ten was aptly set. Subsequently, applying the NLTK library in Python, a systematic verb tagging procedure was executed for each text, and the outcomes were exported. This process generated a total of twenty sets of verb texts distinguishing between male and female, serving as the new observed corpora. The same steps were replicated for nineteenth-century authors’ literary works, leading to the curation of twenty sets of new reference corpora. The verb proportions for different body descriptions were calculated separately for both Dickens’s corpus and the reference corpus.

Utilising the “pandas” library in Python, an analysis of word frequency was conducted for each verb text. The occurrence rate of each verb in a given document was calculated by dividing its number by the total number of words in the document. Subsequently, a list of the ten most frequently used verbs for the body parts, hand , head and eye , was compiled from both corpora. Notably, hand , head , and eye emerged as the three most prevalent body parts in Dickens’s corpus, significantly surpassing others and rendering them exceptionally invaluable for research purposes. Additionally, this study also tallyed the frequency of pronouns his , her , as well as all other pronouns in ten texts in the observed corpus, then calculates the male-to-female ratio for each body part by dividing the occurrences of his or her by the total occurrences of the corresponding pronouns. Employing the same methodology, the male-to-female ratio for different body parts in nineteenth-century authors’ works were determined. The findings are illustrated using bar charts (Fig. 5 ).

Comparison of pronouns between Dickens’s corpus and nineteenth century writers’ corpus.

Due to the subsequent focus on gender differences in the descriptions of the body parts hand , head , and eye , this paper counts the gender representations of these three body parts in Dickens’s works. Based on the statistics, Dickens portrays male hands 4907 times, whereas female hands are mentioned 2181 times. Similarly, male heads are depicted 3260 times, whereas female heads are mentioned 1467 times. Regarding eyes, male eyes are described 2769 times, while female eyes are mentioned 1512 times. After a simple calculation, the ratios of male to female mentions for these three body parts are approximately 69:31 for hands, 69:31 for heads, and 65:35 for eyes. According to the results, descriptions of these three body parts consistently favor the male, indicating a higher prevalence of male characters in Dickens’s works; moreover, the author tends to provide more detailed descriptions of male bodies. Given this uneven distribution, if there are instances where female characters have more body descriptions than males, it proves that there is sufficient evidence to suggest clear gender politics associated with a particular action.

Results and analysis

There are a total of 22 repeated nodes between Figs. 3 and 4 : hand , head , eye , arm , foot, shoulder, ear, finger, breast, mouth, face, eyes, right, round, hands, hair, time, side, tears, left, ground and neck . Excluding terms related to body parts, the recurring words in both corpora are: right, left, round, time, side , and tears . This indicates a preference among nineteenth-century authors, including Dickens, for employing words associated with time or space when describing body themes, as these types of words can aid in constructing scenes or advancing plot development. Moreover, tears can be interpreted as an expression of various emotional states such as joy, sadness, or anger, highlighting Victorian-era authors’ tendency to delve into characters’ inner worlds or emotional experiences. Unique nodes found in the observed corpus include the following: chair, gentleman, door, pockets, child, hat, fire, lady . Unique nodes specific to other Victorian writers are heart, moment, feet, lips, way, back, voice, water . Among the 30 most important noun nodes, 73% are repeated from the reference corpus, including words related to body parts such as face, eyes, hands, hair, tears , and neck . This author is thus more in line with the nineteenth-century conventions of physical description. Special attention is given to the unique nodes found in Dickens’s works.

First, the presence of nodes such as gentleman and lady indicates his tendency to cultivate a refined gentlemanly appearance and ladylike demeanor through physical descriptions. Second, The presence of the node child in the network reveals Dickens’s attention to the physical well-being of children. This can be attributed to his own tragic childhood experiences on Bayham Street, which infuses his works with a genuine sense of “quite unstudied pathos” (Foster, 1892 , p. 6) and a continuous empathy for children. Dickens made numerous public speeches advocating for the public awareness of concern for the welfare children. During a charity event held to raise donations for a children’s hospital, he openly stated, “it is one of my rules in life not to believe a man who may happen to tell me that he feels no interest in children” (Fielding, 1960 , p. 248), showcasing his extraordinary humanitarian spirit. On the other hand, the unique nodes in the reference corpus, such as heart , feet, lips, back , and voice predominantly focus on various body parts and sensory experiences. It is worth noting that the nineteenth-century writings commonly emphasises water , which is an aspect not extensively explored in Dickens’s writings on the human body. Third, the inclusion of household-related nouns like chair and door , along with the use of arm and hand to interact with these nouns, suggests that he pays meticulous attention to the objects of action—household items—when describing these body parts. As Andrew H. Miller points out, the objects “within these homes were shaped according to the dictates of Dickens’ sovereign will” (Miller, 1995 , p. 11). Miller’s observation emphasizes not only the significance of household items in Dickens’s works but also the crucial role of the body, as it interacts with these items.

Additionally, Dickens’s exclusive nodes include clothing and accessories such as pockets and hat , demonstrating the inseparable connection between the physical body and attire in his portrayal of characters embodying gender politics. His attention given to clothing items like hats and pockets affirms the unique “sartorial iconology” (Finch, 1991 , p. 339) prevalent in Victorian-era England. Indeed, the intricacies of dress and attire were of paramount importance to individuals in the Victorian England. It echoes “the sociological body” (Lewis, 2008 , p. 251) summarised by Jeff Lewis, suggesting that the human body serves as the spectacle.

Take pockets as an example, “the concern with pockets in male dress has been one of the most striking differences that has arisen between male and female clothing since the end of the eighteenth century” (Connor, 2002 , p. 267). The gender politics conceals within pockets can also be quantitatively revealed through a database Footnote 9 . A search for the co-occurrence of pocket(s) with his and her in Dickens’s corpus in Antconc revealed a significant disparity: 664 instances for males versus 74 for females—nearly ten times more for his than her . This study further indexed clusters with the central word pocket(s) set at a size of 4 in Antconc (the choice of size 4 aims to adequately display effective collocations of the term pocket without excessive or insufficient representation, as illustrated in Fig. 6 ). This approach was employed to unveil more intricate details and unearth intriguing findings. Firstly, it is noteworthy that almost all results pertains to his pocket(s) , thereby corroborating the nineteenth-century phenomenon highlighted by Steven Connor: “men have pockets because women are pockets” (Connor, 2002 , p. 267). Second, according to the cluster results (Fig. 6 ), the variety of items found in male pockets is extensive, including keys , money , papers , letters , etc., as illustrated in Major Bagstock’s pocket description in Dombey and Son :

“The Native had previously packed, in all possible and impossible parts of Mr. Dombey’s chariot, which was in waiting, an unusual quantity of carpet-bags and small portmanteaus, no less apoplectic in appearance than the Major himself: and having filled his own pockets with Seltzer water, East India sherry, sandwiches, shawls, telescopes, maps, and newspapers, any or all of which light baggage the Major might require at any instant of the journey, he announced that everything was ready”(Dickens, 2010 , p. 276).

The results of the 4-gram for “pocket(s)” in Dickens’s corpus.

In this novel, the contents of the pockets of various male characters vary considerably: for instance, Solomon consistently carries a great chronometer, which holds significant importance for him; Captain Cuttle’s pockets contain a teaspoon and sugar-tongs, and even a smoky tongue for breakfast; Rob’s pocket harbors reluctant fumbling; Mr. Perch keeps letters in his pocket. This indicates that men can effortlessly access items and property through their pockets to “confirm their subjecthood” (Connor, 2002 , p. 267). Simultaneously, the absence of pockets in women’s attire highlights “the frustrations and limitations of women’s access to money and ownership of property” (Burman, 2002 , p. 458). Thirdly, it is clear that there is a considerable variety in the types of pockets for men, such as the waistcoat pocket , coat pocket , breast pocket, side pocket , and so forth. This diversity reflects the different needs for pockets among men from various social classes.

The actions exerted by men on their pockets, such as take out, take from, draw from, carry in , can also reveal information. In fact, the interaction between hands and pockets can manifest a distinctive advantage unique to men, where the expression hand in his pocket often conveys a sense of arrogance and disdain. Using the example in Dombey and Son , in the limited descriptions of Mr. Chick, he is frequently portrayed with “his hands in his pockets” (Dickens, 2010 , p. 11, p. 53, p. 60). His first appearance in the novel is described as follows: “Mr. Chick, who was a stout bald gentleman, with a very large face, and his hands continually in his pockets, and who had a tendency in his nature to whistle and hum tunes, which, sensible of the indecorum of such sounds in a house of grief, he was at some pains to repress at present” (Dickens, 2010 , p. 11). His attitude towards Mr. Dombey, his brother-in-law, is consistently dismissive, revealing his disdain and impatience when interacting with Mr. Dombey.

Not only pocket , but other nouns employed by Dickens to describe bodily functions also exhibit a strong gender ideology. For instance, hat holds crucial significance for individuals during the Victorian era. Many scholars have discussed the codes of gender politics of the hat etiquette (Paterson, 2008 ; Beaujot, 2014 ; Chen, 2023 ): Paterson ( 2008 ) believes that for Victorians, being seen without a hat in the street would be considered eccentric or even insane; Beaujot ( 2014 ) posits that the hats worn by men serve as a means to express and perform masculinity; Chen ( 2023 ) further elucidates that wearing hats played a significant role in how people in the Victorian era performed gender, created respectability, and delineated identity. In conclusion, Dickens goes beyond the explicit consideration of pocket to delve into a broader exploration of gender ideology through various nouns associated with bodily functions. Among these, the hat emerges as a particularly noteworthy symbol in the context of the Victorian era. Dickens’s nuanced portrayal of these objects reflects and reinforces the intricate interplay between gender, societal norms, and personal identity at that time.

Table 1 lists the top ten verbs with the highest frequency in relation to hand in both corpora. Overall, including Dickens, the Victorian-era authors’ top five verbs most frequently associated with hand are put, say, lay, take , and hold . Unlike other writers, when depicting hand, Dickens, regardless of gender, tends to use give, clasp, look , and press . It is worth noting that Dickens exhibits a similar tendency to his contemporaries when depicting characters’ hands: when describing female hands, nineteenth-century writers including Dickens do not employ the word kiss , while for male hands, they use kiss . This illustrates that Dickens, like other nineteenth-century writers, pays great attention to middle-class male hand etiquette. Further searching in observed corpus for kiss yields 845 occurrences, with hand ranking third in the collocate function with a likelihood value of 296.713. As mentioned in the book The Habits of Good Society: A Handbook of Etiquette for Ladies and Gentlemen , “the kiss of mere respect was made on the hand, a good old custom still retained in Germany, and among a few old beaux at home” (Aster, 1865 , p. 323). In keeping with this, Dickens uses the actions associated with hand to construct the image of a respectable gentleman.

The phrase fold hands appears 42 times for females and 34 times for males in Dickens’s novels, indicating a greater occurrence among female characters. According to search results in Antconc, in the novel Nicholas Nickleby , all five instances involve fold his hands (3 times) or with his hands folded (2 times). However, in another novel, David Copperfield , 10 out of 11 instances depict female actions. Notably, five of them describe David Copperfield’s aunt, Betsy Trotwood, folding her hands. This includes the scene of Betsy’s first appearance through the eyes of David’s mother: “In a short pause which ensued, she had a fancy that she felt Miss Betsey touch her hair, and that with no ungentle hand; but, looking at her, in her timid hope, she found that lady sitting with the skirt of her dress tucked up, her hands folded on one knee, and her feet upon the fender, frowning at the fire” (Dickens, 2012 , p. 7). Betsy’s dominant role is vividly portrayed through the description of a few simple gestures. Subsequently, after David’s mother recovers from a fainting spell, Betsy’s gestures remain consistent: “having issued this mandate with as much potentiality as if she had been a recognised authority in the house ever since it had been a house, and having looked out to confront the amazed Peggotty coming along the passage with a candle at the sound of a strange voice, Miss Betsey shut the door again, and sat down as before: with her feet on the fender, the skirt of her dress tucked up, and her hands folded on one knee” (Dickens, 2012 , p. 9). At this point, Betsy’s commanding and eccentric character comes to life on the pages. In Chapter 14, as Betsy confronts David’s stepfather and stepsister to seek justice for the orphaned David, she sits “perfectly upright, with her hands folded on one knee, and looking grimly on the speaker” (Dickens, 2012 , p. 238). As one of the characters in the novel described as “the most astonishing variety, vividness and originality” (Maugham, 1954 , p. 146), readers gradually discover that she is a woman with a cold exterior but a warm heart. Despite often displaying a challenging and stern demeanor, she is far more complex. In shaping this character, the gesture fold hands plays a crucial role, helping to create a tension-filled character.

Regarding head (Table 2 ), the verbs shake , say , turn , look , raise , and put appear in all four corpora, and their rankings are consistent in the top three. This indicates that for the body part head , including Dickens and other nineteenth-century authors, there is no significant difference between the actions associated with male and female characters. In other words, the body part head is not used to differentiate or highlight gender disparities. However, based on the frequency values, the characters in the observed corpus exhibit more head actions compared to Dickens’s contemporaries, conveying more complex information. Additionally, compared to the reference corpus, when describing the head of female characters, Dickens specifically uses the verbs toss and bend . This indicates that he tends to employ the action of tossing the head to emphasize feminine qualities in female characters.

According to the search results for the phrase toss head in AntConc, there were a total of 67 hits, with 54 instances involving actions by female characters. This suggests a strong association between this gesture and female characteristics. The phrase tossing her head is used to describe a specific physical gesture or movement made by the characters in various situations. This action typically involves a quick upward or sideward movement of the head, often accompanied by a certain attitude or expression. In the search results, entries related to Nicholas Nickleby dominate the corpus, as shown in Fig. 7 . In the context of these passages, when characters like Madame Mantalini, Mrs. Nickleby, Miss Squeers, and others toss heads , it conveys a sense of defiance, pride, disdain, or slyness, depending on the character and the specific situation. The gesture serves as a non-verbal way for the characters to express their emotions or reactions. Additionally, the repetition of this action by different characters throughout the novel suggests a certain theme or pattern in their behavior. This can be interpreted as a stylistic choice by Dickens to emphasise the characters’ personalities or to highlight certain social dynamics within the narrative.

The results of the phrase “toss head” in Nicholas Nickleby .

In terms of eye , first, it is not difficult to notice that say, raise, look, fix, turn, see , and have are commonly used verbs in Victorian writing (Table 3 ). Second, compared to female characters, Dickens uses specific verbs related to eyes like keep and open when describing male eye . Interestingly, his contemporary writers also frequently associate both male and female eyes with verbs like open , close , and keep . However, actions of opening and closing the eyes are relatively absent when depicting female characters in his works. On the contrary, the utilisation of verbs like dry and wipe in his novels suggests that female characters often shed tears, rendering them more emotionally expressive compared to their male counterparts. In the expression dry eyes , the ratio of descriptions by women to men is 43:13, indicating that dry eyes is more commonly used when describing female actions.

Many women shed tears in Dickens’s works, and according to the AntConc search results, one noteworthy depiction is in Dombey and Son . Most entries involve Mrs. Chick drying her eyes , revealing details not easily noticed upon close reading. This action enriches Mrs. Chick’s character, as she hypocritically pities Florence for not being favored by her father due to her gender, simultaneously “drying her eyes and shaking her head” (Dickens, 2010 , p. 49). However, she declares, “Florence will never, never, never be a Dombey, not if she lives to be a thousand years old” (Dickens, 2010 , p. 48). After Paul’s death, as Mrs. Chick consoles Florence in Mr. Dombey’s home, she absentmindedly seeks her pocket handkerchief:

“ ‘In short, Florence’, resumed her aunt, ‘literally nothing has passed between your poor Papa and myself until to-day when I mentioned to your Papa that Sir Barnet and Lady Skettles had written exceedingly kind notes—our sweet boy! Lady Skettles loved him like a—where’s my pocket handkerchief’?[……]‘Why then, child’, said Mrs. Chick, ‘you can. It’s a strange choice, I must say. But you always were strange. Anybody else at your time of life, and after what has passed—my dear Miss Tox, I have lost my pocket handkerchief again—would be glad to leave here, one would suppose’ ” (Dickens, 2010 , p. 244).

Finally, she found the handkerchief and “drying both her eyes at once with great care on opposite corners of Miss Tox’ s handkerchief” (Dickens, 2010 , p. 245). In this way, the action of dry eyes naturally becomes Mrs. Chick’s representative action, rendering her character more vivid and complete. Furthermore, it is vital to acknowledge that such portrayals inadvertently reinforce the stereotype of women being more emotionally inclined than men. Through manual counting, although the expression wipe eyes is more commonly used for women, it is sometimes employed in describing certain male characters. Dickens often depicts the miserable experiences of children in his works. For example, in Oliver Twist , young Oliver undergoes terror and abuse in the workhouse. After Mr. Bumble decides to sell him to Mr. Gamfield, he is given a bowl of porridge as a reward, and Mr. Bumble reprimands him: “‘Come, Oliver! Wipe your eyes with the cuffs of your jacket, and don’t cry into your gruel; that’s a very foolish action, Oliver’. It certainly was, for there was quite enough in it already” (Dickens, 2005 , p. 19). Moreover, it is also worth noting that unlike in works by other authors, both male and female characters’ eyes are frequently paired with the verb cast in Dickens’s works, indicating that he places a stronger emphasis on characters’ eye communication during conversations.

Comparing the lexical choices of Dickens and his contemporaries when writing about the body provides an effective approach to understand Victorian gender politics and literary conventions. The similarities between the two corpora reveal the general imagination of the body by nineteenth-century authors, including Dickens, while the differences illustrate Dickens’s unique perspective on depicting characters’ bodies. Regarding the similarities, the nineteenth-century authors tend to employ nouns associated with time or space when describing the body while placing significant emphasis on codes of etiquette in the depiction of its physical actions. According to the verb data, they frequently use the verb kiss to describe the male characters’ hands, but less so for the female hands, underscoring the prevalent hand etiquette for men in that society.

Compared to his contemporaries, Dickens’s depiction of the body is characterized by a more explicit manifestation of gender politics in his lexical choices. On the one hand, compared to his contemporaries, Dickens recurrently mentions nouns like gentlemen and lady when portraying the body, indicating a close association between body representation and gender identity in his works. Additionally, Dickens’s mentions of clothing items like pockets and hat confirm his usage of the body to develop notions of a gentleman’s temperament and lady’s grace. On the other hand, the verb list for different body parts related to gender provides more nuanced details about the underlying gender politics of the body. For example, the expression fold hands occurs more frequently in Dickens’s descriptions of female characters. Additionally, Dickens tends to employ the action toss the head to enhance female qualities. Furthermore, in his works, male eyes are described with verbs like open and close , while female eyes are associated with verbs like dry and wipe . This not only reinforces stereotypical impressions of women as more fragile and emotional than men but also helps shape vivid characterisations.

In conclusion, this study conducts qualitative and quantitative analysis of Dickens’s novels and those of his contemporaries at the lexical level. Analysing words of different parts of speech offers a multi-dimensional perspective on the portrayal of the body in Victorian novels, enabling the study to draw more unique conclusions. This extensive linguistic approach provides a valuable framework for understanding how Victorian authors employ language to depict the intricate relationship between characters and their bodies throughout their works. In the nineteenth century, the outward manifestation of a person’s body became emblematic of their social standing and status, while societal norms imposed distinct demands on bodies based on gender. This emphasis and differentiation regarding the body, in turn, intensified gender antagonism. As for future studies, employing the entirety of the nineteenth century as the observed corpus and the eighteenth or twentieth century as the reference corpus may yield further insights into the distinctive features and transformations of the Victorian era.

Data availability

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

For example, see Capuano ( 2015 ).

Observed corpus involves 33 works by Dickens, encompassing various genres such as travel writing, novels, novellas and short stories. The decision to broaden the focus beyond novel genres to other texts from two reasons. First, this study concentrates on the lexical level rather than the plot development specific to novels. Works in genres like children’s story inevitably reveal the author’s ideology through word choice, which aligns with the goals of this research. Second, the reference corpus also encompasses a diverse range of genres, making this selection method conducive to achieving comparability in the thematic choices between the two corpora.

The data is sourced from the Oxford Text Archive ( http://ota.ox.ac.uk/tcp/ ) and covers the time period from 1800 to 1899. All of Dickens’s works have been excluded, and the remaining text files available for analysis (text files in TXT format provided by the website) have been downloaded. After removing duplicates and performing data cleansing, a total of 356 works contemporaneous with Dickens have been obtained. The thematic scope in the reference corpus is not limited to novels, it also includes travel writing, novellas, and short stories.

John Sinclair is known as the “father of semantic prosody”, he defines semantic prosody as “the semantic prosodies express attitudinal and pragmatic meaning; they are the junction of form and function. The reason why we choose to express ourselves in one way rather than another is coded in the prosody, which is an obligatory component of a lexical item.” See Sinclair ( 2000 ).

TF (Term Frequency) refers to the frequency of a specific word appearing in a document, representing the significance or importance of that word within the document. IDF (Inverse Document Frequency) is a measure of the general importance of a word. It is obtained by calculating the inverse of the document frequency, which is the frequency of the word appearing in the entire document collection. TF-IDF multiplies the term frequency and inverse document frequency, resulting in the TF-IDF value of a word in a document. Words with high TF-IDF values appear frequently in the current document and are rare in the entire document collection, thus exhibiting a higher discriminatory power.

The silhouette score is a metric used to measure the compactness and separation of clustering results. It assesses the compactness of each data point with other data points within its own cluster and the separation with the nearest neighboring cluster. The silhouette score ranges from −1 to 1, where a value closer to 1 indicates better clustering results, while a value closer to −1 suggests poorer clustering results.

The Calinski–Harabasz index is another evaluation metric used to measure the compactness and separation of clustering results. It is calculated based on the ratio of between-cluster variance to within-cluster variance. A higher value of the Calinski–Harabasz index indicates better clustering results, indicating smaller within-cluster variance and larger between-cluster variance.

In Gephi, Weighted Degree extends the traditional notion of degree by considering the weights of edges. Since this study employs a directed graph for creating the network visualisation, each edge in the graph possesses a weight. Consequently, when evaluating the importance of nodes, both weighted in-degree and weighted out-degree, which are two directed indicators, need to be considered. The weighted degree is calculated as the sum of the weighted in-degree and weighted out-degree. By utilising the weighted degree dimension, this study aims to showcase the importance and centrality of different nodes representing body parts while simultaneously presenting the strength of relationships among the nodes.

Children’s stories likewise exemplify gender differences in the presence of pockets: a young boy wakes up transformed into a girl, spending a day at school dressed in a pink dress. He is surprised by the absence of pockets and questions himself, “How was a person in a frock like this supposed to survive? How were they expected to get along without any pockets?” (see Fine, 2017 , p. 52) This also corroborates the need to include children’s stories when selecting the observed corpus.

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Chen, H., Xu, Q. Gender politics and Victorian literary representation of the body: a distant reading of the body in Charles Dickens’s works. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 11 , 815 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03366-x

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THE BODY IN LITERATURE

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New book explores the body in literature.

Image from the cover of The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature

Luca Signorelli (1441-1523) 'Nude Man from the Back Carrying a Corpse on His Shoulders', Louvre, from the cover of 'The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature' ©Scala, Florence

Press release issued: 27 May 2015

The first systematic analysis of the representation of the body in literature, edited by Dr Ulrika Maude of the University of Bristol and Dr David Hillman of the University of Cambridge, has just been published.

The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature charts our evolving understanding of the body from the Middle Ages to the present day.

It addresses such questions as sensory perception, technology, language and affect; maternal bodies, disability and the representation of ageing; eating and obesity, pain, death and dying; and racialized and posthuman bodies.

The book also considers science and its construction of the body through disciplines such as obstetrics, sexology and neurology.

With contributions from sixteen leading scholars in the field, the book devotes special attention to poetry, prose, drama and film, and charts a variety of theoretical understandings of the body.

Contributors

Bill Burgwinkle (University of Cambridge); Jonathan Hsy (George Washington University); David Hillman (University of Cambridge); Maud Ellmann (University of Chicago); Andrew Bennett (University of Bristol); Clare Hanson (University of Southampton); Heike Bauer (Birkbeck, University of London); Peter Fifield (Birkbeck, University of London); Elizabeth Barry (University of Warwick); Sander L. Gilman (Emory); David Marriott (University of California, Santa Cruz); Steven Connor (University of Cambridge); Ulrika Maude (University of Bristol); Josh Cohen (Goldsmith’s, University of London); Jean-Michel Rabaté (University of Pennsylvania); Paul Sheehan (Macquarie University, Sydney)

About the editors

David Hillman is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow and Director of Studies at King's College, Cambridge. He is the author of Shakespeare's Entrails: Belief, Scepticism and the Interior of the Body and Marx and Freud: Great Shakespeareans . He is the co-editor of The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe and of The Book of Interruptions . He is currently working on a monograph, Greetings and Partings in Shakespeare and Early Modern England .

Ulrika Maude is a Senior Lecturer in Modernism and Twentieth-Century Literature at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Beckett, Technology and the Body , and co-editor of The Body and the Arts and Beckett and Phenomenology . She has recently co-edited Beckett, Medicine and the Brain , a special issue of the Journal of Medical Humanities (forthcoming, 2015). Dr Maude is also a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Beckett Studies and has contributed to such journals as Modernism/Modernity and European Joyce Studies.

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The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature edited by David Hillman and Ulrika Maude is published by Cambridge University Press £17.99

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The Editors: Sabine Coelsch-Foisner is Professor of English Literature and Cultural Theory at the University of Salzburg and Head of the Interdisciplinary Research Centre Metamorphic Changes in the Arts. She is the author of several books. Current projects include the literary fantastic, life-course models in literature, and cultural infrastructures. Marta Fernández Morales, Ph.D., teaches North American Literature and 20th-century Theatre at the University of the Balearic Islands (Spain). She is the author of four books and has published articles on gender issues in theatre, film, and television.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section The Body

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The Body by Peter J. Capuano LAST REVIEWED: 22 February 2018 LAST MODIFIED: 22 February 2018 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199799558-0148

The 19th century is extremely important for the study of embodiment because it is the period in which the modern body, as we currently understand it, was most thoroughly explored. This was the era when modern medical models of the body were developed and disseminated, when modern political relations to the body were instantiated, and when modern identities in relation to class, race, and gender were inscribed. While questions about the distinctions between personhood and the body were studied by the ancients, 19th-century developments in technology, economics, medicine, and science rendered such categories newly important for Britons who were the first to experience a fully industrialized society. This entry is designed to outline the changing experiences of embodiment in the Victorian period and is therefore divided into the following sections: anatomy, gender, femininity, masculinity, health and sickness, industrialized and technologized bodies, physiology and reading, evolution and race, disability, adolescence, and old age.

General introductions to the emerging understanding of the Victorian body began to appear at the end of the first decade of the 21st century. This “turn to the body” was most definitely influenced by a renewed interest in historicism, materiality, and the mind. Taylor 2010 demonstrates how representations of the body the social and cultural world of the period more legible. Gilbert 2015 offers a brief but important account of how “body studies” more generally cohered around studies into gender and bio-politics. Zemka 2015 is a more thorough explication of how materialist scholarship of all kinds impacted studies of the Victorian body.

Gilbert, Pamela K. “The Body.” Victorian Network 6.1 (Summer 2015): 1–6.

A brief sketch of how “body studies” was initiated by inquiries into gender and bio-politics, but how the field has grown through materialist concerns ranging from the ergonomic and the economic, evolution and industrialism, disease and health, medical and legal history, sexuality, and very recent “neuro-humanities.”

Taylor, Jenny Bourne. “Body and Mind.” In The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1830–1914 . Edited by Joanne Shattock, 184–204. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

DOI: 10.1017/CCOL9780521882880.011

A succinct account of how representations of the body rendered the dense social world of the Victorian period legible. Includes sections devoted to the visible codes of phrenology and physiognomy; the subtle internal processes linking nerves to the mind and the brain; the power of reflex and instinctive response, and the embodiment of memory.

Zemka, Sue. “The Body.” In The Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature . Edited by Dino Felluga, Pamela K. Gilbert, and Linda K. Hughes, 147–160. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2015.

A longer appraisal of the ways in which materialist scholarship has impacted studies of the Victorian body. By analyzing topics such as industrial and political economics, evolution and neurology, disease and disability, and technology and race, this introduction shows how emotional, psychological, and even spiritual experience in the Victorian period was imagined—if not explained—in terms of physiological processes.

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Writing the Body in Literature and Culture

Key information, module code:, credit value:, module description.

Until recently, the physical body has been a much-neglected subject of contemporary women's writing, whether fictional or autobiographical. Theoretical writings that emerged from contemporary feminist debates in the latter part of the twentieth century tended to privilege more psychoanalytic or abstract considerations of the corporeal. Feminist thought's differentiation of sex and gender, and consequent drive to dissociate biology from determinism and to emphasise the power of the rational female mind may further account for the only recent emergence of the body as a subject worthy of critical and literary analysis. How can language capture the physiological changes and states undergone by the body? Is the 'unspeakable' nature of certain physiological experiences compounded by their unspoken nature, their taboo status? This module seeks to redress that imbalance by focusing more on the materiality of bodies (principally female or non-binary) as they evolve through a series of life events or experiences: abortion; motherhood; transition and ageing. It locates the body in different epochs and national contexts in order to examine the relationship between subjectivity, corporeality and identity more broadly. The content of this module will also be supplemented with audiovisual and filmic representations of the body as part of its secondary corpus. All texts on this module are available in translation.

Assessment details

one 4000-word essay (100%)

Educational aims & objectives

To introduce students to the literary, historicaland cultural contexts of twentieth-century and twenty-first century women's writing
To deepen students' knowledge of different genres dealing withrepresentations of the body: theory, fiction(including the short story), autobiography, and the essay
To introduce students to (or to consolidate their prior knowledge of) theories of corporeality and the body in relation to women's writing in particular

Learning outcomes

By the end of this module, students will:

demonstrate sound knowledge of the various contexts of the twentieth- and twenty-first century writing dealing with representations of the body
be able to analyse a generically diverse selection of texts dealing with corporeality by placing them in their context and by adopting different theoretical approaches
have developed a series of transferable skills (essay writing, textual analysis, individual or group presentations)
have gained an insight into the specificities of writing the body from a female and feminist

Teaching pattern

two hour seminar, weekly

Subject areas

Arts & Humanities
Languages, Literatures and Cultures

Module description disclaimer

King’s College London reviews the modules offered on a regular basis to provide up-to-date, innovative and relevant programmes of study. Therefore, modules offered may change. We suggest you keep an eye on the course finder on our website for updates.

Please note that modules with a practical component will be capped due to educational requirements, which may mean that we cannot guarantee a place to all students who elect to study this module.

Please note that the module descriptions above are related to the current academic year and are subject to change.

ENGL 3820 The Body in Literature and Culture

Catalog Description: Prerequisites: Completion of Blocks A and B4, an additional course from Block B, and at least one course each from Blocks C and D. Analysis of the body and its representation in literary, aesthetic, philosophical, religious, political, and other discourses. UD GE C (cl)

Course Description: This course examines the social construction of the human body in a range of texts, and in contexts ranging from antiquity to modernity. It explores the various ways in which the human body is made culturally meaningful, by exploring how various technologies of representation – literature, especially, but also photography, painting, film, dance, and architecture – engage in the production of that meaning, and isolate the body as a site of both aesthetic pleasure and social power. The course will consider the various ways in which texts present the body as dressed and undressed, able and disabled, manipulable and resistant, colonized, fetishized, surveilled and policed, and how it becomes a site of desire. Such representations, as is clear in the case of legal, political, medical, and architectural discourse about bodies, ultimately not only represent its physicality but also determine and inform it.

The interdisciplinary nature of the course enables faculty to include course content suiting their particular expertise and interest. One might imagine a course focusing on specifically modern literary representations of corporeality. The course might also be broadened in its disciplinary range to explore such issues as the following: the construction of the body in medical and scientific discourses; the semiotics of fashion and dress; practices of body modification; political positings of race, class, ability, orientation, and gender; the aesthetics of dance, performance, and body art; economic discourses of bodily fatigue and efficiency; and beyond.

English 3820 includes a civic learning/civic engagement component.

Learning Outcomes

Upon completion of this course, students will be able to:

demonstrate familiarity with continuities and discontinuities in literary and cultural representations of the body
recognize the political, psychological, and ideological stakes of such representations
assess the differences implied between distinct technologies of representation and conventions of genre
apply tools of critical thinking and cultural and literary analysis to textual materials from various historical and cultural contexts
demonstrate the ability to present questions and ideas in both written and verbal form, and to respond to the ideas of others in discussions

Course Outline

This course may lend itself to various designs, depending on faculty interest and expertise. An interdisciplinary design is included here to exemplify how the course materials might be organized.

Interdisciplinary Readings of the Body

Part I. Reading the body and its meaning: Sites, Sights, Signs

Part II. Science, Institutions, and Power Images from Rembrandt and anatomical illustration by Vesalius and Ruysch Readings from Schiebinger (CL component: Identify human rights campaign)

Part III. Discipline and Anatomo-Politics Architectural analysis of prisons and other institutions Readings in Kafka, Foucault, Rabinbach (CL component: Connecting the global human rights campaign to local issues)

Part IV. Fashion, Adornment, Modification Film: Pumping Iron Readings in Barthes, Silverman (CL component: Engaging the local community in the global human rights campaign)

Part VI. Movement, Gesture, Civilization Readings in Theweleit, Corbin, Elias

Part V. Representing the Bodies of Others Paintings from Manet, Titian, Vermeer Readings in Gilman, Leppert (CL symposia and workshops for dissemination)

Course assignments include considerable hands-on explication of texts, short in-class writings, two small papers analyzing cultural texts and requiring engagement with the course readings, a final exam, and the civic learning component. In this particular course example, the latter might be conducted in concert with Amnesty International. Students would undertake research on the body as an object of torture or state discipline, and then write letters and educational materials on specific cases, and help plan and participate in one event (a media outreach event, a teach-in, a symposium presentation) in which their knowledge would be manifested in civic action.

About the Banner: Detail from Laocoön and his sons , Vatican Collection, ca 200 BCE (image from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laoco%C3%B6n#/media/File:Laocoon_Pio-Clementino_Inv1059-1064-1067.jpg)

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The Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Culture

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Taking as its chronological starting-point the female body of late medieval devotional literature, the volume moves on to a consideration of the representation of gendered bodies in later literature. It then proceeds to examine sixteenth-century occupational orderings of the (male) body in education, the civil service and the army, and involves explorations into a variety of rituals for the purification, ordering and disciplining of the flesh. It includes enquiries into the miraculous royal body, demon bodies, the 'virtual' body of satire, and ends the late seventeenth century with dramatic representations of the diseased body, and the grotesque bodies of travellers’ tales as signifiers of racial difference. It pushes forward post-modern notions of the body as a site for competing discourses. It provides new dimensions to fantasies, rituals and regulations in narratives ('fictions') of the body as identifications of forms of knowledge unique to the early modern period. Each of the essays sheds new light on how these late medieval and early modern narratives function to produce specialized and discrete languages of the body that cannot be understood simply in terms, say, of religion, philosophy or physiology, but produce their own discrete forms of knowledge. Thus the essays materially contribute to an understanding of the relationship between the body and spatial knowledge by giving new bearings on epistemologies built upon pre-modern perceptions about bodily spaces and boundaries. They address these issues by analysing forms of knowledge constructed through regulations of the body, fantasies about extensions to the body and creations of bodily, psychic, intellectual and spiritual space. The essays pose important questions about how these epistemologies offer different investments of knowledge into structures of power. What constitutes these knowledges? What are the politics of corporeal spaces? In what forms of knowledge about spatial and bodily perceptions and p

Chapter 1 | 10 pages, introduction, chapter 2 | 12 pages, the politics of self-mutilation: forms of female devotion in the late middle ages, chapter 3 | 10 pages, the constructions and deconstructions of gendered bodies in selected plays of christopher marlowe, chapter 4 | 18 pages, armour, flows and bliss: liquefactions of gender in the faerie queene book ii, chapter 5 | 14 pages, 'o hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain': violence and the mother's body in elizabethan drama, chapter 6 | 18 pages, the body archival: re-reading the trial of the earl of somerset, chapter 7 | 14 pages, a camp 'well planted': encamped bodies in 1590s military discourses and chapman's caesar and pompey, chapter 8 | 16 pages, 'a bodie of presence': early modern education and the elite body in the writings of richard mulcaster, chapter 9 | 18 pages, regimen animarum et corporum: the body and spatial practice in medieval and renaissance magic, chapter 10 | 12 pages, the bodies of demons, chapter 11 | 14 pages, the miraculous royal body in james vi and i, jonson and shakespeare, 1590-1609, chapter 12 | 12 pages, 'seeing' contagious bodies in early modern london, chapter 13 | 18 pages, 'all protean forms in venery': the textual and apparitional body in john marston's verse satires, chapter 14 | 16 pages, travellers' tails: bodily fictions in early modern narratives of cultural difference.

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Bodily structure and body representation

Published: 05 April 2019
Volume 198 , pages 2193–2222, ( 2021 )

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Adrian J. T. Alsmith ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1557-4133 1

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This paper is concerned with representational explanations of how one experiences and acts with one’s body as an integrated whole. On the standard view, accounts of bodily experience and action must posit a corresponding representational structure: a representation of the body as an integrated whole. The aim of this paper is to show why we should instead favour the minimal view: given the nature of the body, and representation of its parts, accounts of the structure of bodily experience and action need not appeal to a representation of the body as an integrated whole. The argument proceeds by distinguishing two kinds of explanatory roles for representations: standing-in for absent targets and structuring ambiguous sensory information concerning a target. Representations of body-parts are suited to fulfil both kinds of explanatory role, whereas a representation of the body as an integrated whole is only suited to fulfil the latter, as a means of coordinating representations of body-parts. It is then argued that the structure of the body can itself serve as a means of coordinating body-part representations, rendering representation of the body as an integrated whole explanatorily superfluous.

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Bodily skill and internal representation in sensorimotor perception

Is the body represented in everyday bodily activities.

Multisensory Integration in Body Representation

It should be noted that this distinction is also orthogonal to the short-term versus long-term distinction made by some (following O'Shaughnessy 1980 /2008) to contrast kinds of represented spatial properties by their temporal variability.

The standard view is also assumed by neuroscientists (Berlucchi and Aglioti 1997 , p. 560; Blanke 2012 , p. 557; Brecht 2017 , p. 991; Melzack 1990 , p. 91; Petkova et al. 2011 , p. 4; Serino et al. 2015 , p. 11), and philosophers and neuroscientists in collaboration (Blanke and Metzinger 2009 , p. 7 ff.; de Vignemont et al. 2006 , p. 148). Though, of course, the degree to which non-philosophical authors are committed to what philosophers consider a viable notion of a representation is notoriously unclear.

See also the discussion of boundedness and connectedness in Bermúdez ( 2017 , pp. 124–128). I should note that whilst Bermúdez has done more than most to illustrate the phenomena which would form the explanandum for the standard view, it is not at all clear whether his accounts of these require the notion of an integrated representation of the body (see Bermúdez 1998 , Ch. 6; 2005 ). Bermúdez is not unique in this regard, rather it is typical of theoretical discussion concerning body representation that notion of a representation of body as an integrated whole is often, at best, implicit. Suffice to say that if theorists are tempted to endorse such a notion, I hope that my arguments will rid them of that temptation.

Indeed, with the exception of Gadsby and Williams ( 2018 ), theorists in this literature (such as Bermúdez 2005 ; de Vignemont 2018 ; Metzinger 2003 ; and O'Shaughnessy 1980 /2008) have not provided arguments specifically designed to show that ‘body representations’ do indeed meet standard criteria for representations—let alone representations of the body as an integrated whole, which also go unmentioned in Gadsby and Williams’ ( 2018 ) discussion.

See also the discussion of metaphysical and epistemological anti-representationalist claims in Chemero ( 2009 , pp. 67–68).

See Cummins ( 1989 , pp. 27–34) for a discussion of why unconstrained resemblance is implausible as the basis for any general account of representation.

Thanks to a reviewer for pointing out that this assumption is rarely considered in much detail. For more on this point, see note 10 below.

I am grateful to two anonymous reviewers for noting this point.

It is, of course, rather more plausible for accounts of what figures in an individual’s understanding of the concept human body . But that is beyond the scope of the present discussion.

In addition, I would note that psychologists and neuroscientists working in this area do not typically care about whether, and, if so, how some central process of interest ought to be thought of as a representation. Rather, what they care about is whether causally intervening upon that thing’s activity affords manipulation of behaviour, and does so in a systematic fashion that reveals something about the role of that thing in generating a particular phenomenon (see e.g. Romo et al. 1998 ). Thus it might be plausible to say that, notwithstanding incidental use of terms such as ‘model’, many researchers in this area are not committed a structural notion of representation—what Ramsey ( 2007 ) calls ‘S-representation’—rather, they are committed to what Ramsey calls a ‘receptor’ notion of representation. This latter notion is motivated by the fact that anything sufficiently reliably correlated with (or indeed, nomically dependent upon) a specific cause can serve to represent that cause (Dretske 1981 , pp. 63–82). But for many who operate with that notion, the distinction between representation and causal relay may be one without a difference, raising the question of whether the former notion is really doing explanatory work that could not be achieved in terms of the latter (Ramsey 2007 , p. 142). See also Morgan ( 2014 ) for discussion.

For discussion of more sophisticated forms of this objection, and responses, see Shea ( 2014 , pp. 132–136) and Ramsey ( 2007 , pp. 93–96).

For an overview of these approaches, see Desmurget and Grafton ( 2000 ).

In recent years, a significant split has emerged between approaches which posit models that implement a mapping from sensory to motor signals (so called inverse models, see, e.g., Wolpert and Kawato ( 1998 )) and those that do not, in more strict accordance with a general ‘predictive coding’ account of neural architecture (see, e.g., Shipp et al. ( 2013 )). This difference is immaterial for the present purposes, but see Pickering and Clark ( 2014 ) for discussion.

See also the methodological variant of what Cantwell Smith ( 1996 , pp. 50–54) refers to as an ‘inscription error’ and McDermott ( 1976 ) on ‘wishful mnemonics’.

Cf. also the discussion of ‘minimal memory strategies’ in Ballard et al. ( 1997 , p. 732).

Henrik Ehrsson’s lab uses a similar multisensory stimulation protocol to generate a body swap illusion , see Ehrsson ( 2007 ), Petkova and Ehrsson ( 2008 ). See Blanke ( 2012 ); Serino et al. ( 2013 ) for reviews. In recent work, Andrea Serino and colleagues have pursued the hypothesis that there is a “general representation of the space around the body [to] which other smaller body-part centered representations are referenced” (Serino et al. 2015 , p. 11). Though this might not be, strictly speaking, a version of the standard view, there are similar issues to be worked out here, for which see (Alsmith forthcoming).

See also Longo’s ( 2017 , p. 86 ff.) discussion of body representations being biased towards prototypical representations of the body.

See Chemero ( 2009 ) for a notable exception.

Though, there is some variance amongst duplex theorists as to when representational explanations are explanatorily potent: cf. Hutto and Myin ( 2012 , 2017 ) and Clark ( 1997 ).

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Acknowledgements

I gratefully acknowledge the direct support of a grant from the Volkswagen Foundation (No. 89429) and the support of the French National Research Agency to the Jean Nicod Institute (ANR-16-CE28-0015, ANR-10-LABX-0087 IEC and ANR-10-IDEX-0001-02 PSL). This article develops ideas mentioned in passing in article in the wonderful (but now deceased) journal Psyche , published under my previous name during my graduate studies (Smith 2009 ). One of the reviewers pressed me to at least mention this origin—given how far departed the current treatment is, this seems like the most appropriate place. I am also grateful to the editor, Catarina Dutilh Novaes, for so professionally managing a rather unusual set of circumstances compromising blind review and arranging a further three blinded reviewers for the journal, all of whom offered supportive and useful remarks. Versions of this material have been presented at various events in Berlin, Copenhagen, Düsseldorf, London, Marseilles and Tübingen. I am grateful to the organisers and members of the audience on each occasion, especially Chiara Brozzo, Glenn Carruthers, Sascha Fink, Thor Grunbaum, Patrick Haggard, Bigna Lenggenhager, Matt Longo, Thomas Metzinger and Hong Yu Wong. Especial thanks are due to Bernard Hommel for a usefully aggressive set of objections in Düsseldorf. Finally, my heartfelt thanks to Frédérique de Vignemont for her persistent encouragement and characteristic generosity in her countless insightful comments on previous versions of this material.

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Alsmith, A.J.T. Bodily structure and body representation. Synthese 198 , 2193–2222 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02200-1

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The experience and representation of the disabled body in literature and the arts

This international conference will explore the experience and representation of disability in literature and the arts. Whether we think of paralyzed or amputated limbs, visual or mental impairments, war cripples or traffic accident victims, the disabled body has always been an object of fascination in the arts and in the popular imagination. Since it is outside the norm and literally extraordinary, it seems to resist both representation and interpretation. Consequently, what is stake in the disabled body has often been ignored, for it has been perceived as a diminished or dysfunctional version of the " normal body ". Besides, since the ideal of a " sound mind in a sound body " has long prevailed, the disabled body has often been presented as a symptom of a moral wrong or the physical manifestation of an ontological failure, an approach which has confined it to a metaphorical or allegorical reading. It is only with the emergence of disability studies as an autonomous disciplinary field in the 1980s, essentially in North America, that the question experienced a renewed interest. In France, it has gained momentum only recently. Intersecting with notions of gender, race and class, disability studies became fully engaged in an interdisciplinary dialogue on identity. This newly acquired visibility has led artists and critics to change our perception of the impaired body as they stopped considering it only in terms of deficiency, incapacity or lack. Disability studies have indeed put the disabled body at the center and helped it discard the stigma it had long been bearing. The relationship between normalcy and pathology was thus radically challenged as some other ways of relating to the world and the self were exposed. Focus has particularly been put on the enabling strategies allowing the disabled subject to transcend the limitations imposed by his/her afflicted body, whether in daily life or artistic practice. In that perspective, the conference invites contributors to reflect on this recent shift and welcomes papers that explore the disabled body in literary productions, movies and the arts.

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Disability has been portrayed in cinema for many years and is still a sensitive topic open for discourse on how it objectifies and exploits a ‘different’ body. The release of Tod Browning’s film Freaks in 1930 and its subsequent 30-year-ban perfectly illustrate what intense feelings and perceptions our society had of the notion of disability at that time. The 1930s Victorian audience was outraged by the depiction of the ‘real’ disabled actors’ bodies. It was equally unprepared for the fact that the film follows the everyday backstage life of the circus show’s disabled performers and their relationships. Furthermore, in the movie ‘freaks’ collectively disfigure the only ‘able-bodied’ star amongst them, which had only intensified the adverse reaction (Larsen and Haller, 2002). Works by Michel Foucault, a 20th-century French philosopher, allow interpreting the representation of a disabled body and how it became an ‘object and target of power’ (Rabinow, 1984). His concepts of sexuality and medicine, alongside with works by other critics, will be used to analyse the approach to disability in such films like The Elephant Man (1980) by David Lynch and I Don’t Want to Talk About It (1993) by María Luisa Bemberg.

Julia Miele Rodas

DRAFT syllabus for team-taught Doctoral Seminar in Interdisciplinary Disability Studies. Course description. Like the fictions of gender and race, disability is a cultural and social formation that sorts bodies and minds into desirable (normal) and undesirable (abnormal, sick) categories. Regimes of representation in literature, art, music, theater, film, and popular culture—the ways that bodies and minds constructed as disabled are depicted—both reflect and shape cultural understandings of nonconforming identities and extraordinary bodies, affecting the lived experience of people understood as disabled, often in negative ways. Drawing on examples from the arts and popular culture, this course will interrogate the many ways disability identity has been confined to rigid and unproductive social, political, and aesthetic categories. It will also explore a significant counter-tradition in which disability is seen as a significant artistic resource and a desirable way of being in the world. Topics will include: the medical and social models of disability; narratives of disability; disability and performance; disability writing (memoir and fiction); narratives of overcoming; the histories and cultures of autism, deafness, blindness, intellectual disability, and madness. We will pay particular attention to the intersection of disability with other more familiar tropes of human disqualification, including race, gender, and sexuality.

Claire Edwards

This article considers the relevance of Pierre Bourdieu's conceptions of the body to the development of disability theory. We begin by discussing the limitations of reductive conceptions of disability. In so doing, we consider how far Bourdieu's (1990) concept of habitus offers a way of bringing an analysis of the body to bear upon an understanding of the social inequalities which are core to the lives of disabled people. Through focus groups with disabled people, the article explores aspects of disabled people's corporeal identities, feelings and (embodied) encounters in a range of social settings. The research shows that disabled people's lives are connected to different `valuations' attributed to corporeal forms, and to systems of signification and representation, which underpin them. We conclude by reaffirming the need to consider Bourdieu's ideas in helping in the development of disability theory.

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Fernando Matos de Oliveira

Disability has been represented on stage in various ways, including theatre, dance and performance art. One of the main critical issues explored within the field of disability studies involves distinguishing between performative practices that are social and inclusive, and those that mobilise the alterity of the disabled body. Based on recent performances in Portugal and abroad, this paper surveys and analyses both representational strategies, not so much to highlight differences between identity politics and aesthetic pronouncements/experiments, but rather to observe how disability itself constitutes a category that embraces both corporality and discourse, aesthetics and identity.

Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik

Anita Wohlmann

This introduction to the special issue attempts to map the intersections between disability studies on the one hand and literature and cultural studies on the other hand. We discuss concepts of disability as a social construction before we turn to literary and cultural approaches to disability, which involve controversies and questions about genre, narrative frames, recurring themes, and form. The last section gives an overview of how literary representations of disability resonate with life writing and identity theories.

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'Hillbilly Elegy' is back in the spotlight. These Appalachians write a different tale

Clayton Kincade

A photograph of Hillbilly Elegy by author JD Vance on October 8, 2013, in New York City.

A photograph of Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance. Bill Tompkins/Getty Images/Michael Ochs Archives hide caption

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis , the 2016 memoir from Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance, once again began flying off the shelves after former President Donald Trump named Vance as his running mate. Many have turned to the memoir to find out the story of Vance’s upbringing, a core part of why he’s on the Republican ticket to begin with. But the book also brings along a host of assumptions that many authors still find not to be true.

Pulitzer-winning author Barbara Kingsolver said she felt that it was her duty to tell a different story of Appalachian life than the one that Vance presented in the book.

“It used the same old victim-blaming trope. It was like a hero story: ‘I got out of here, I went to Yale,’” Kingsolver said of Vance. “‘But those lazy people, you know, just don't have ambitions. They don’t have brains. That’s why they’re stuck where they are.’ I disagree. And that’s my job, to tell a different story.”

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Vance’s has been mired in controversy since its 2016 publication, especially by authors who cover the region. Vance, who writes that Appalachian culture “encourages social decay instead of counteracting it,” says this upbringing is central to his political ideology and thinking.

Many Appalachian authors, like Kingsolver, have worked tirelessly to combat what they feel is a misleading and even harmful depiction of the region. Her novel Demon Copperhead , a fictional window into the same communities, was named one of the New York Times ’ best books of the century just days ahead of the Republican National Convention. Last year, it won a Pulitzer Prize.

As hundreds of thousands more read about the plights of the Appalachian region, these authors are fighting back against what they describe as Vance’s assumed norms.

Overcoming “Hillbilly Elegy”

Vance writes in Hillbilly Elegy that he grew up most of his life in Middletown, Ohio, but spent summers and his free time until the age of 12 in Jackson, Ky. Vance adds that Jackson “was the one place that belonged to me.”

Vance’s first stop after the RNC was to a rally in Middletown, where he declared, “I love every one of you, and I love this town, and I'm so grateful to have been formed by it, because I wouldn't be who I was without it.”

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But Vance’s claim to the area has created a cultural rift between him and those from Appalachia.

Kingsolver said that when she saw Vance’s recently resurfaced interview calling several Democrats “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made,” it reaffirmed her disappointments with Hillbilly Elegy .

“When I read JD Vance’s memoir, I resented it all the way through. There was just something about it that kept telling me, he’s not from here, he doesn’t get us,” Kingsolver told NPR. “I thought, OK, you are not from here because when I think about my childhood, many of the most important women in my life who saved me, who took care of me, were childless women. It’s not just blood that defines community here.”

Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance speaks at a campaign rally at VFW Post 92 on Aug. 15 in New Kensington, Pa.

Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) speaks at a campaign rally at VFW Post 92 on August 15, 2024 in New Kensington, Pennsylvania. Jeff Swensen/Getty Images hide caption

It’s not just Kingsolver who has an alternate narrative.

Meredith McCarroll and Anthony Harkins co-edited Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy, a blend of scholarly, poetic and narrative rebuttals to Vance’s tale published in 2019.

Harkins, a professor of history at Western Kentucky University, said that Hillbilly Elegy loses its footing by generalizing one person’s narrative into a definitive account of the entire region.

“It’s totally legitimate for anybody to tell their own story and how they see it,” Harkins told NPR. “But to then present it as the story of Appalachia, to speak of a memoir of a culture, is problematic particularly because that region has so often been stereotyped and misrepresented through recent history.”

McCarroll, author of Unwhite: Appalachia, Race, and Film and an Appalachian native of Waynesville, N.C., said that the duo’s goal with the book was to spotlight a chorus of Appalachian voices in response to Elegy’s immense popularity, both existing on their own and in opposition to the text.

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“My inclination was to gather a lot of different voices, both that are challenging him but not speaking to him at all,” McCarroll told NPR. “It’s this weaving together of a lot of different authentic perspectives that can give a sense of how layered and complex this 13 state region is.”

McCarroll added that beyond Hillbilly Elegy, she wanted Appalachian Reckoning to counter the idea of Appalachia as a monolithic place.

“The back half of the book moved beyond Hillbilly Elegy, and really is just a collection of narratives from the region that you can’t read and come away thinking you understand Appalachia,” McCarroll said. “No one should say, ‘I read one book, and so I understand this region.’”

Writing the full truth

For these writers, telling the honest story of Appalachia is tantamount–even if they start difficult conversations.

Elizabeth Catte, historian and author of What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, published in 2018, said that books about Appalachia fall short for her when authors lean on inauthentic stereotypes in pursuit of authenticity.

“Sometimes people try to make up for personal knowledge or experience or study of a region by laying a bunch of tropes on a book and calling it authentic,” Catte told NPR. “Sometimes you don’t get a sense that Appalachia has a history, that it’s just a place full of problems, but none of those problems have an origin, or the origin is uninteresting to the author.”

Vance’s story has resonated with conservatives and non-Appalachians alike. In the wake of the 2016 election, the book became an explanation of sorts for some liberals as to who Trump’s supporters were and how he managed to win the presidency. One op-ed described Bostonians as “ lapping up ” the tale.

JD Vance autographs a book after a rally in July 2021 in Middletown, Ohio.

JD Vance autographs a book after a rally on July 1, 2021, in Middletown, Ohio. Jeffrey Dean/AP hide caption

The book became a best-seller and later was adapted into a movie. But for those from the region, crucial pieces of the puzzle that Vance painted are missing.

Harkins said that when discussing Appalachian history, texts must keep economic context in mind, like Appalachia’s political and cultural history with coal , when thinking about how the past has turned into the present.

“You can’t speak about the experience of Appalachia in the last hundred years without thinking about the massive effects that economic change have brought to it, in a place that is often the product of extractive industry, whether it’s lumbering or coal or fracking,” Harkins said. “One of the concerns I have with seeing it through the prism of Hillbilly Elegy is often that most of that stuff is not part of the story.”

Vance’s politics might not land with all readers, but he focused much of his Republican National Convention speech, which he gave just two days after being named to the ticket, on his relationship with his mom and grandma. These relationships are where these authors have found a common ground. For Kingsolver’s fictional quest, it was similarly important to keep Demon’s humanity front and center, both for the reader and for herself.

“I was kind of scared to write this novel for several years because you can’t bludgeon people with sadness or with truths that are hard to bear,” Kingsolver said. “Unless you give it a really delicious package. You have to give people a reason to turn the page. You have to give people characters that they love and believe in, that they honestly start to care about as their friend.”

The power of representation

Kingsolver said that when Demon Copperhead won the Pulitzer Prize last year, Appalachia rejoiced like Appalachia does.

“It was like fireworks all up and down the mountain,” Kingsolver said. “So many people from here, even my mail carrier and the cashier at the grocery store, said, ‘This is amazing. We won.’”

The novel has appealed to more than Appalachians: It unanimously won the 2023’s Women Prize, and more recently, it ranked No. 1 on the New York Times ’ readers’ “Best Books of the Century” list–and No. 61 on the critics’ list.

McCarroll said that with novels coming out today like Demon Copperhead, it is hard to stay upset at the negative aspects of Hillbilly Elegy.

“What’s so exciting is that there are so many really diverse, beautiful stories that are really offering complicated perspectives, and so it’s like I don’t feel like I have to stay mad at Hillbilly Elegy ,” McCarroll said. “There’s a long history of Appalachian literature, too.”

McCarroll added that a variety of stories is important because they add texture to a region too often boxed into one corner.

“What a Black Appalachian coal miner in Pennsylvania is experiencing might be very different from a Mexican migrant worker in Western North Carolina is experiencing, which might be really different than what a third- or fourth-generation farmer who is white in Kentucky is experiencing,” McCarroll said.

Kingsolver said that when writing Demon Copperhead, it was important to combat assumptions made by mainstream media outlets about Appalachia.

“I think they miss our diversity. They think we’re all white, and we’re not. It was important for me to reflect that in this novel,” Kingsolver said. “I wanted it to be the great Appalachian novel that kind of puts our whole region in a context. We didn’t choose to have poverty and [high] unemployment. We didn’t ask for that. This came to us.”

Kingsolver added that it has been especially gratifying hearing from people whose perspective on Appalachia changed after reading her novel.

“I have heard from lots and lots and lots of people in other parts of the country who said, ‘This book asked me to evaluate my prejudices, and I thank you for that,’ ” Kingsolver said. “It’s amazing.”

When Kingsolver received news that she was at the top of the Times’ readers’ list last month, she said she had to “lie down on the floor” and think about its weight. Kingsolver said that a less obvious reward, though, was readers celebrating a story of an imperfect, wholly Appalachian character.

“I can’t even tell you how many people have written to tell me I’m still worried about Demon, I wake up at night worrying about him,” Kingsolver said. “As if he’s become their kid. He’s the world’s kid. That’s how you navigate it, that’s how you have to.”

Though Hillbilly Elegy might loom large once again, Appalachian authors, whether through fictional tales like Demon Copperhead or nonfiction deep dives like What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, are finding strength in their resistance and dissent.

Reacting to news of being on the New York Times' list, Kingsolver wrote in an Instagram post:

“With a certain other ‘hillbilly’ book suddenly ascendant, my duty. No elegies here. Thank you.”

Correction Aug. 18, 2024

A previous version of this story mistakenly identified Anthony Harkins as an assistant professor in history at Western Kentucky University. Harkins is a professor of history. Additionally, an earlier version of this story incorrectly said Meredith McCarroll is a director at Bowdoin College. She no longer works there.

Barbara Kingsolver

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The Body by Peter J. Capuano LAST REVIEWED: 22 February 2018 LAST MODIFIED: 22 February 2018 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199799558-0148

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