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This Shattered Prison: Bodily

Dissolution, Wuthering Heights, and
Joseph Maclise's Dissection Manuals
Rebecca E. May

Carnegie Mellon University, Qatar

Version of record first published: 02 Nov 2011.

To cite this article: Rebecca E. May (2011): This Shattered Prison: Bodily Dissolution, Wuthering
Heights, and Joseph Maclise's Dissection Manuals, Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary
Journal, 33:5, 415-436
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2011.623841

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Nineteenth-Century Contexts
Vol. 33, No. 5, December 2011, pp. 415 436

This Shattered Prison: Bodily

Dissolution, Wuthering Heights, and
Joseph Maclises Dissection Manuals
Downloaded by [Mariela Burani] at 18:28 28 February 2013

Rebecca E. May
Carnegie Mellon University, Qatar

The nineteenth century marks a unique moment in the cultural life of the corpse.
This paper links gothic fiction with the practice of human dissection to show how literature provides models of morbid eroticism which offer cultural historians of this
period a framework to historicize constructions of desire, interpretation and power
in a range of anatomical and dissection narratives. Anatomists in the period embodied
both the best and worst in medicine. I read representations of corpses found in anatomical textbooks, especially the work of Joseph Maclise (18151880), to sketch a cultural portrait of the anatomist as both villain and seducer, and to discuss the fluid lines
between art and medicine, objectivity and aesthetics in the period. Emphasizing the
visual power of anatomical texts, I show that corpses mediated a contradictory construction of desire within the field of the medical. Dissection narratives are infused
with a scientific motivation to increase medical knowledge, but they also contain a
gothic intermingling of disgust and delight, violence and seduction, eroticism and
insight that, I will argue, is present in a subgenre of British gothic fiction, the
fierce romance, best represented by Emily Brontes Wuthering Heights. Fierce
romances demonstrate that mutual sexual gratification can be found in passionate
reinscriptions of gender imbalances, violence, and death. They also provide a model
of female sexual subjectivity that does not shy away from the intermingling of pleasure
and danger, empowerment and vulnerability in interpersonal erotic relationships and
a model of male sexual subjectivity that treasures its love object with a ferocity that
eclipses its moral failings. Both kinds of texts probe the pleasures and perils of feminine submission to masculine handling.
Fierce romances, especially Wuthering Heights, enable us to ask critical questions
about the exploration of pleasure, violence and sexual expression at a precise
moment in the history of anatomy and surgical medicine. Eighteenth-century
ISSN 0890-5495 (print)/ISSN 1477-2663 (online) # 2011 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2011.623841

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anatomists like John Hunter taught their nineteenth-century successors to see the
injury and indecency of dissection, but also to see the corpse as something arousing,
interesting, exciting and wonderful. Dissections could portray sublime acts of violence
and shockingly explicit acts of seduction.
My analysis hinges on images such as this one, Plate 10 The Male and Female Axillae
Compared, from Joseph Maclises 1856 Surgical Anatomy (see Figure 1). I would like to
linger over it for a moment by way of introduction. Dissections in the early nineteenth
century were largely experimental, rare procedures; because of this, they were practices
that were treasured by anatomists. Several important anatomists of the period made
large, expensive texts to memorialize their work and disseminate both the knowledge
gleaned from the dissection and the singular experience of working freely on a
cadaver at a time when obtaining cadavers was complicated and practicing on them
was culturally excoriated. Maclises corpses in Plate 10 are aesthetically pleasing and
blemish free. They are art-objects as much as they are instructional models. The plate
depicts a man and a woman, both vulnerable, naked, and given the same anatomizing
treatment, yet they retain a valence of vitality that honors the dead. Only their dissected
armpits bespeak the brutal hand of the dissector, which in this case is the same hand that
sketches them with such care and consideration. If it is possible to call a dissection a
seduction or a romance narrative, Maclise is the embodiment of such operations.
Anatomists, like the hero-villains of fierce romances (such as Clarissas Lovelace, The
Monks Ambrosio, Jane Eyres Rochester and Wuthering Heights Heathcliff) are

Figure 1 Joseph Maclise. Plate X. The Male and Female Axillae Compared. Surgical
Anatomy. 2nd ed. (London: John Churchill, 1856). Courtesy of Rare Books Collection,
Falk Library of the Health Sciences, University of Pittsburgh.

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aggressive, brooding, intelligent outcasts working hard to justify their practices. They
are culturally suspect, highly motivated and frequently loathed. Yet at the same time,
just as Rochester and Heathcliff can be redeemed by the changes that their heroines
bring about in them, the texts that anatomists like Joseph Maclise produce are painstakingly wrought aesthetic meditations on death, the corpse and the isolating and intimate nature of anatomical inquiry. The corpse can bring the anatomist to a state of
awe and admiration, a state of appreciation that figures so powerfully in gothic and
romantic aesthetics.
Sketching the contours of the fierce romance utilizing Wuthering Heights as the
primary case study will enable a full discussion of the gender and power dynamics
of dissection narratives, and the ways in which these particular dissection narratives
are timely. They coexist with Romanticism, with the gothic, and with the Brontes,
but just as those modes will transmutate into the dominant literary concerns of the
Victorian era, so in the medical arena, autonomous scientific fields, professionalism
and concerns with objectivity will push anatomists like Maclise out of the spotlight.
The seduction of corpses so harrowingly rendered in his anatomical illustrations
were incompatible with Victorian ideals of propriety and professionalism, so by the
late 1850s we witness a lasting shift in representations of dissection and the fundamental shape of the human body with the publication of Grays Anatomy (1858).
The Fierce Romance par excellence: Emily Brontes Wuthering Heights
But by what means can medical and literary representation exonerate a sexual-subject
positioning that beautifies violence and supports a feminine desire to submit to masculine handling and manipulation? In order to see the full expression of female subjectivity in relation to dangerous men and the fierce romance, we must turn to Emily
and Charlotte Bronte. Though Emilys text is most central to my argument, Charlottes
Jane Eyre will be discussed occasionally as a descant on the themes most vividly illustrated in Wuthering Heights. Some feminist critics have decried the ways in which love
stories teach women to rely on men for fullness or for senses of safety and completion,
but it is possible to examine, especially Emily and Charlottes work, ways in which
dangerous men can offer to heroines a space to explore desires deemed culturally
and sexually dangerous (Lutz 4, 12). Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights contain
morbid lovers whose energies are so resonant in part because they are dangerous,
unequal and unorthodox. The Brontes empower as viable subjectivities ones that
desire to be mastered, to be saucy, to be crushed, to be proud, to be angry, to be
yearned for to the point of madness. Following in the footsteps of the Byronic hero,
the Brontes male heroes play at positions of suffering and obsession and, like anatomists, take joy out of exploiting their positions of power and being consumed by
their love-objects (Miller 8).
Charlotte and Emily were accused of making monstrous characters who were shocking in their unconventional approaches to living. In fact, they both bore vicious attacks
to their reputations as a result of what they wrote (Barker 90 91, 534 42, 574 75,
60611). But their literary characters are compelling in their complexity, in their

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honesty and in their fallibility. Jane and Catherines rages are innovative. They challenge our notions of pleasure and safety, something critical for feminists to do in a
culture where women are too often conditioned to place pleasure and safety at odds
with each other (Vance 5). They invite us to consider the importance of communication when it comes to sexuality, desire and power. Jane is unprecedented in her
voice, her I. Her positioning is unfeminine and therein lies its revolutionary potential for reconsidering romance and sexual subjectivity (Boumehla 74 77; Davies 15;
Gilbert and Gubar 33738; Plasa 97).
The Brontes were a literary family. Fed by Byron, Wordsworth, Radcliffe, Coleridge
and Scott as well as Blackwoods, the Brontes are as much known for the darkness of
their elaborate and precocious juvenilia as they are for their novels, which owe a significant debt to the gothic and Romanticism (Gilbert and Gubar 312; Hoeveler 185;
B. Knapp 21; Polhemus 10304). Like certain gothic heroines before them, Jane
and Cathy are placed between two kinds of men: the fair hero and the dark villain.
Jane and Cathy both wilt under the romantic prospects of the fair hero. St. John
stifles Jane and robs her of passion; Edgar does the same for Cathy. The Brontes,
taken together, offer a powerful expression of desire and danger, affirming forms of
sexual and erotic interest that find empowerment in animalistic passions, in
moments of violence, cruelty and linguistic parry. The Brontes exalt dangerous love
stories; they craft attractive, powerful, dark men and heroines who can meet them
where they are, an impressive form of female subjectivity and desire (Newman
1032; Ostrov Weisser 61).
The Brontes explore dangerous terrain in imagining a mutual sexual gratification
entrenched in gender imbalances, violence and death. These narratives enable us to
ask important questions about sexual expression in history, about the exploration
of pleasure and the insistence of pleasure on its own terms. Jane and Cathy in their
own ways raise our consciousnesses; they illuminate for us the empowerment that
can be gleaned from complex heterosexual interactions that play with gender structures and meld fear and excitement. Their male characters are dark, violent, terrifying,
physical, powerful, gifted, admirable and deadly. They are kinds of male characters that
critics call gothic hero-villains, libertines, rakes, sadistic lovers, demon lovers, fatal
heroes and Byronic heroes (Frank; Lutz; Punter; Praz; Watt). The hero-villains in
gothic and later in the Brontes novels create a great deal of the narrative energy
and often eclipse the heroines (Lutz 31). In the same way, anatomists are men who
are both fascinating and frightening, and their texts glorify the anatomist rather
than his subject. These definitions ascribe to the male characters an apt magnanimity,
for their acts are grand; their ambitions, their drives, appetites, gifts and sins are all
larger than life. I would like to stress especially what Frank identifies as their colossal
contradictions (439), something evident in utilizing the term hero-villain, because it
enables us to see again the ambivalence of the gothic but also of love stories that are
pathological, mutually destructive, too wild for the world to endure, yet possessing an
undeniable allure.
The women, by contrast (and here I mean to draw a parallel to the anatomists
corpse who, though often male, takes on qualities that can be gendered feminine)

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are bewitching, thrust into annihilation, incapable of withstanding the full force of the
men they have so unwittingly bewitched. The heroine magnifies the hero as the
corpse magnifies the anatomist; she reflects his power. Just as Edmund Burke explains
that the sublimes hallmark affect is that of delightful terror, awe, reverence and astonishment, so we can see in fierce romances love stories that are defined by awe, magnitude, obsession and their counterparts shutting out everything else in existence (Burke
39). For Heathcliff, Cathy eclipses all else, and she feels the same about him. But these
stories are about a love, an eroticism, so intense that it causes injury, pain and death.
Jane and Rochester are indeed sublime morbid lovers, and Jane Eyre provides numerous examples where Janes deep subjectivity reveals to us her love of vexing and
soothing Rochester by turns, manipulating his emotions, testing his limits. She
tells us, beyond the verge of provocation I never ventured; on the extreme brink I
liked well to try my skill (183, emphasis added). She basks in his potential for violence.
She, ironically, finds wellness there. Surrender in the fierce romance of Jane Eyre is simultaneously unity with the beloved, a threat of annihilation and a paradoxical mastery
via submission. Jane is inexperienced, accustomed to sacrifice, settling and silence, yet
through Rochester, she finds her voice and it is one of courage, one that can fearlessly
withstand his threat.
The exhilaration of annihilation that will be so breathtakingly visually depicted in
Maclises images is taken to its furthest extreme in Wuthering Heights. Emily Bronte
perfects in Heathcliff the brooding sketch of a man driven to madness by love and
revenge. In Cathy she creates a woman who prefers self-destruction to normative heterosexual marital relations. While Cathy and Heathcliff s bond is in its own way
sublime, its pathology can be best thought of as illustrative of an unavoidable
mutual annihilation. They epitomize the consensual embracement of death as the
only way to sexual union (Polhemus 90). The body is an impediment to fulfillment;
their erotic energies eclipse, outstrip, supersede the body. Only in death is the body
useful; its dissolution brings about a co-mingling more permanent and utterly uninterruptable. Heathcliff wishes to rot in the earth with Cathy, and he looks on her
corpse with longing and with an awareness of the distance that is yet between them;
life for him is a sexual frustration. It was when Cathy lived and it continues to be
so while he lives.
Living at Wuthering Heights is compared to being buried alive, cut off from the rest
of the world, to ones detriment (45). The isolation can also be interpreted as a moral
vacuum, a space where characters can play by their own unconventional rules (Ostrov
Weisser 58). Image clusters of teeth and dogs so prevalent in the story magnify themes
of wildness, animalism, otherness, cruelty, sympathy and the fear of being attacked and
eaten (Davies 8485; Morse 18185). Heathcliff s characterization draws from
Emilys experiences with Keeper, her dog who could be both a loving companion
and brutal force to be reckoned with (Morse 182). Kreilkamp ventures into scientific
discourse and draws a double comparison, arguing that Heathcliff is figured as both
tortured animal and torturing vivisector (98100). These images and their presence
especially in the opening frame of the text melds with the isolated death-like life of
Wuthering Heights and the appearance of Cathys ghost to represent it as a liminal

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place, one hovering between worlds, between generations, legitimacy and illegitimacy,
the cultured and the savage, feral and domesticated, adoration and punishment, youth
and age, dynamism and stasis, home and wild. Dissection narratives will replicate
strings of ambivalences such as these, giving us a look into the instructional and the
aesthetic, the scalpel and the pen, the artist and the anatomist, the adorer and the
destroyer and most spectacularly in the image of the aesthetically pleasing dissected
corpse. Heathcliff is brash, craggy, massive: This very name, Heathcliff, suggests a
combination of elemental forces: heath (a tract of uncultivated land, rich in peat,
heather and small flowers and plants), and cliff (steep overhanging rock, precipice,
and indication of the dangers to be encountered by undirected and instinctive experience (B. Knapp 108). Moreover, Heathcliff is associated with the dead, having been
named after an Earnshaw child who died young. Considering that the appearance
of Cathys ghost, a child revenant cold and wailing on the moors, brings about
Nellys storytelling to Lockwood, we have from the beginning two characters framed
by death, each cut off from a sense of home. The coffin-like oak-paneled bed
appears several times in the novel, suggesting a further conflation between rest, protection, death and sex (Wiesenfarth 70 71). Catherine imagines herself in the oakpaneled bed before she succumbs to her final illness. It is where Lockwood is installed
to spend the night at the beginning of the novel, the place where he encounters Cathys
ghost and the place where Heathcliff cries out to her to come inside at last. It signifies
safety for Cathy and Heathcliff when they are permitted to share the bed as children; it
signifies a barrier against the world, against its prejudices and forced codes. It signifies
rest, as well, and home. It signifies sexuality, as once they begin to mature Cathy is no
longer permitted to share the bed with Heathcliff.
Eroticism for Cathy and Heathcliff is linked to a sense of being devoured or
annihilated. Cathy warns Isabella, Pray, dont imagine that he conceals depths of benevolence and affection beneath a stern exterior! Hes not a rough diamonda pearlcontaining oyster of a rustic: hes a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man . . . hed crush you like a
sparrows egg, Isabella, if he found you a troublesome charge (121). And she tells
Heathcliff of Isabella, I like her too well, my dear Heathcliff, to let you absolutely
seize and devour her up (125). Heathcliff is voracious, dangerous and sneering.
He threatens to blacken Isabellas eyes. He tells Cathy that Edgar is a lamb in
danger of splitting its skull against my knuckles . . . and that is the slavering, shivering
thing you preferred to me! I would not strike him with my fist, but Id kick him with
my foot, and experience considerable satisfaction. Is he weeping, or is he going to faint
for fear? (131, 132). Catherines rage can only be directed towards Edgar and Heathcliff via her own bodythe object that is in a way at the center of their quarrel. She tells
Nelly and Edgar that she will fall ill, deliberately, in order to express her rage to Edgar
and frighten him: Ill try to break their hearts by breaking my own (133). She either
feigns or induces fevered deathly trances: she stretched herself out stiff, and turned up
her eyes, while her cheeks, at once blanched and living, assumed the aspect of death
(134). She makes threats of suicide, threats of starvation. These fantasies of death and
violence reach their climax when Catherine is forced by Edgar to choose between him
and Heathcliff. Her only way of reaching an erotic fulfillment at this point in the novel

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(when she is pregnant with Edgars child) is by dying and by denying herself to Heathcliff. She makes herself available only as a perpetual absence, a longed-for death. In
perhaps the fiercest scene of the novel, Heathcliff visits Cathys deathbed. Cathy has
already become a liminal figure: dressed in white, gaunt, shorn of her hair. She
hovers between worlds: her eyes appear[ing] always to gaze beyond (134;
Newman 1038). Yet she retains a powerful beauty and has gained a kind of softness.
It is in this context that she shares with Heathcliff a powerful erotic and emotional
exchange, full of passion, cruelty, wasted effort and hunger:

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Heathcliff had knelt on one knee to embrace her; he attempted to rise, but she seized his
hair, and kept him down.
I wish I could hold you, she continued bitterly, till we were both dead! I shouldnt care
what you suffered. I care nothing for your sufferings. Why shouldnt you suffer? I do! Will
you forget me? Will you be happy when I am in the earth? . . .
Dont torture me till Im as mad as yourself, cried he, wrenching his head free, and
grinding his teeth. (168)

Cathy tears at Heathcliff s hair despite her weakness. Heathcliff bruises her unintentionally from holding her so closely. With ferocity and open confession they approach
Cathys death together. Heathcliff bemoans:
Are you possessed with a devil . . . to talk in that manner to me when you are dying? Do
you reflect that all those words will be branded into my memory, and eating deeper
eternally after you have left me? You know you lie to say that I have killed you: and,
Catherine, you know that I could sooner forget you as my existence! Is it not sufficient
for your infernal selfishness, that while you are at peace I shall writhe in the torments of
hell? (168)

Cathys death is an affirmation that they will forever be denied earthly, bodily sexual
fulfillment. Heathcliff will burn for Cathy forever; Cathy has tragically sacrificed
herself to this idea. They are a necessity to each other. At the same time, they are an
impossibility to each other. It is in her dying that Cathy can affirm Heathcliff s commitment to her; she can wring his heart for somehow not preventing her marriage to
Edgar; they can embrace and kiss each other only once Cathy has reached the threshold
of death.
Her illness and subsequent death is a morbid act of surrender to Heathcliff. It is
most certainly a rejection of Edgar, of a life with him, of a married intimacy with
him, and it is moreover a refusal to be a mother to their child. She stakes her claim
and moves on to a plane where she knows she can keep Heathcliff in perpetual
desire. She gains control by dying. She sets the terms of their romance and how it
will continue after her death. She exclaims, They may bury me twelve feet deep,
and throw the church down over me, but I wont rest until you are with me. I never
will! (141) A terrible transcendence and a perpetual denial mark their sexual
relationship. It is as if a normative sexual relationship would somehow cancel out
Cathy and Heathcliff. Ostrov Weisser claims, we are never allowed to forget that
the energy generated by the spring into full female sexuality is not a warm glow,

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but a self-consuming inferno (107). The power of Wuthering Heights is the acknowledgement of a female sexuality that is as wild and energetic as the masculine. Cathys
death, the necrophilia that will come to define Heathcliff s life of pining for her,
however, reduces Cathy to a waif, a slip of a ghost wandering the moors, helpless
and despairing. Heathcliff curses, mourns and invokes her all at once: Catherine
Earnshaw, may you not rest, as long as I am living! You said I killed youhaunt
me, then . . . take any formdrive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss,
where I cannot find you! (175). Moreover, that Cathy gives birth to her daughter
two hours before her death signifies her reaction to being initiated into a normative
sexual relationship that leaves her unhappy and unfulfilled. Only Heathcliff speaks
Cathys language of sexuality and vice versa. Cathy dies with a smile on her face,
transmitting to Nelly a profound peace and joy.
Heathcliff is left to play out his revenge story, even more embittered and enraged at
his loss of her and the continual reminder of her in Cathy the younger. He still longs
for union with Cathy the elder, and makes arrangements to rot with her in the earth:
I got the sexton, who was digging Lintons grave, to remove the earth off her coffin-lid,
and I opened it. I thought, once, I would have stayed there when I saw her face againit
is hers yethe had hard work to stir me; but he said it would change, if the air blew on it,
and so I struck one side of the coffin loose, and covered it up: not Lintons side, damn
him! I wish hed been soldered in leadand I bribed the sexton to pull it away, when
Im laid there, and slide mine out too. Ill have it made so, and then, by the time
Linton gets to us, hell not know which is which! (271)

It is eighteen years since Catherines death. Her corpse is undeniably desiccated. Yet
Heathcliff finds joy and love there (Davies 151 53). He finds a fantasy of restfulness,
wholeness and union: I dreamt I was sleeping the last sleep by that sleeper, with my
heart stopped and my cheek frozen against hers (271). That he waits for Edgars
death to make these arrangements speaks to his eternal jealousy. Not to be outmatched
by Edgar again, even in death, Heathcliff ensures that he will have the final say when it
comes to Catherine; he will mingle with her eternally. Only death can end his agony
(Praz 27; Wiesenfarth 72).
As Heathcliff nears death, he seems to amass an indescribable vitalityglittering
eyes, excited joy, accelerated breathingas well as the otherworldliness that marked
Catherine before her death. Nelly describes him as a goblin, ghoul and vampire
(305, 306). She hears him through the walls speaking to Catherine in terms of
endearment and suffering, moaning in raptures of ecstasy and anticipation. He
returns to the paneled bed to die, and Nelly finds him, his eyes open, his mouth
frozen in a sneer. They carry out his final burial wishes to the scandal of the whole
neighborhood (311).
The fierce romance in Wuthering Heights is a morbid form of idealization. The
energy of attraction, of union that Cathy and Heathcliff share, takes precedent over
any act of sexual fulfillment. They remain locked in the chemistry of attraction, in
the power of denial and imagination. It is also necessarily a tragedy because it is
only partially understood. Cathy and Heathcliff cannot articulate the necrophilic
cathexis that drives their passion.

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Fierce romances, then, contain a fatal form of heterosexual eroticism, and the men
and women involved are powerful characters whose romantic energies replicate the
violence, the indecency, the symbolic resonance, the fantasy and the exaggerated unbalanced gender structures that underpin the discrepancy of agency found in dissection
narratives. In fact, we see in surprising moments anatomization being used as a metaphor in the Brontes. In Jane Eyre, Rochester tells Ade`le to take her present off to a
corner to disembowel it . . . And . . . dont bother me with any details of the anatomical process, or any notice of the condition of the entrails (152). Why this metaphor?
It is wildly inappropriate in its violence. It is, however, also interesting because it
implicates Ade`les age in anatomization. Rochester does not wish to see Ade`le
descend upon her quarry with the selfish single-mindedness of the anatomist. It will
be a frenzy, a blood-bath, a one-way battle. And it associates Rochester not only
with not knowing, really, how to speak to a child; it characterizes Rochester as a
man whose thoughts lean to the dark, the extreme in their morbidity. It shows a sarcastic weariness and a world-view in which even golden children such as Ade`le are voracious and self-serving monsters.
Heathcliff also chooses the anatomist as a metaphor, though he specifically wishes to
vivisect two characters: Its odd what a savage feeling I have to anything that seems
afraid of me! Had I been born where laws are less strict, and tastes less dainty, I should
treat myself to a slow vivisection of [Catherine and Linton], as an evenings entertainment (256). Heathcliff s use of vivisection here underscores his cruelty and the pleasure he takes in manipulating human beings to his own ends. Vivisection in this
context is evacuated of all medical significance. It is purely a metaphor of violence,
abuse, control and selfishness. By this point in the novel, Heathcliff is amassing
control continually, over Wuthering Heights and soon over Thrushcross Grange. Isolated on the moors between the two estates, Heathcliff is becoming god-like, bending
the characters to his will. That Rochester and Heathcliff both use dissection as metaphors indicates, quite simply, that the Brontes had an awareness of the procedure, and
that awareness is one that links dissection with diabolical men exploiting privilege and
control for selfish ends.
A medical language for these morbid relationships does not exist in the period, or at
least it only exists in the sense that Cathy is seen by a doctor for her malady, which is
diagnosed as a bodily manifestation of mental distress. She plunges herself into anorexia, what we know as the territory of control and emotional pain, though that
language, again, is not available to Bronte. Fierce romances draw a language of
desire, passion, wellness and illness from cultural perceptions about dissection and
anatomists. Now we can turn to dissection narratives themselves, where we can see
the interpersonal gender dynamics of the hero-villain and the heroine playing out
in the dissecting room. In Wuthering Heights, romantic love entailed a kind of
injury and resulted in an acknowledgement that culturally accepted venues to selfknowledge and romance can and must be rejected by individuals too magnanimous
to operate within their parameters. In the same way, the anatomist, a man of magnitude, a man capable of seeing through the flesh and beyond into a world of transcendent knowledge and comparative anatomy, must operate beyond the purview of

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mainstream medical practice. Like the hero-villain, he is both blessed and cursed with
intelligence, skill and an uncommon vision.

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Joseph Maclises Dissection Narratives

Are we to put off the day of attempting this interpretation for three thousand years more,
in order to allow these dissectors time for knife-grinding, for hair-splitting, for sawing,
chopping, and hammering this pauper corpus mortuum till the studious air of our cloisters rings like a shambles? How long are they to lead us on this dull road, weed-gathering,
tracking out bloodvessels, tricking out nerves, and slicing the brain into still more delicate atoms than they have done hitherto, in order to coin more names, and swell the
dictionary? Is this the work that waits its culminating point? No! as well may they
count leaves in forests, pebbles on the sea shore. The work must now be retrospective,
if we would render true knowledge progressive.
Joseph Maclise, Surgical Anatomy (1856)

Through dissection narratives, we come to see anatomists as men capable of injury and
indecency, but also as men capable of seeing in the corpse something arousing, interesting, exciting and wonderful. The anatomist, in showing us his corpses, shows us
ourselves. This is terrible, humbling and uplifting. It also clinches the anatomist as
a man of magnanimity. The anatomist transforms the corpse from abject representation of death to a figure for subsequent anatomists to consume, appreciate, learn
from and, in their own way, make their own. Dissection is a form of interpretation
and a testament to the anatomists cultural liberty, his freedom and his sanction to
engage in acts unthinkable to others. It is also, obviously, physical. The intertwining
of logistical physicality (the transport of the body, its immobilization, its stripping,
its flipping, its opening and its sketching or preserving) with the abstract ideals of
medicine, characterize the unique form of eroticism that marks the anatomist.
What kind of knowledge is anatomy and how is dissection a part of it? What is dissections relationship to the practice of medicine? Joseph Maclise, an Irishman and the
brother of the well-known history painter Daniel Maclise, was a Victorian surgeon and
Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons whose skills in medicine were paired with a
remarkable talent for illustration. In his preface to Surgical Anatomy Maclise argues
that anatomy should be the foundation of all medical knowledge because, when practiced in a comparative manner, it has the potential to uncover the naked truth of the
human body. The anatomists gaze must reach beyond the human frame to encompass
all species in order to master the truth of the human. Maclises efforts to raise anatomy
to the level of a science indispensable to the study of medicine are important because
anatomists (and surgeons) in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were considered manual laborers, their practice analogous to butchery. Maclises Surgical
Anatomy encapsulates a deliberate effort to ameliorate anatomy as a course of study
and dissection as a practice. He claims that dissections should not be undertaken to
coin more names and swell the dictionary, meaning that dissection should not
only aim to expose and identify each part of the body or to develop further systems
of anatomical classification. Anatomical practice focused on naming the parts of the
body, which he calls descriptive anatomy, is in his view about hair-splitting,

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sawing, chopping . . . and slicing the brain into still more delicate atoms (n.p.). In
other words, if anatomy continues to be only about the sawing, chopping and
laying bare of every part of the human body, it is little more than a kind of manual
labor stuck in a rut, circling the same territory again and again.
Maclise instead posits that the key to progress in the field of anatomyand in
surgery as welllies in comparative anatomy. Comparative anatomy promises not
merely a surface knowledge of the human body, but the potential to understand the
relationships between the bodys parts and the cause and effects of disease through
the understanding of all species. The descriptive, the surgical, and the comparative
must be unified if medical men want to be able to understand and cure the body.
Here, Maclise holds up John Hunter (17281793) as a paragon:
But what, it may be asked by some, is the connexion between these remarks and the
subject-matter which concerns surgery? The surgeon Hunter has printed the answer on
the walls of his museum in types of flesh and bonea votive tablet of greater note,
and an offering more acceptable to Zeus than Ammons sword. Go there, you practical
men all you who ride with ever-trenchant operating steel, and you who run afoot in
gabardines of Pharmacy, so loose and long, and yet cant stop a hiccupgo there and
read the bottled marvels, and learn how mind, the demigod, being as the sun kissing
carrion, can make that carrion teem; proclaiming of itself the true resurgam to deathless
genius, whose mission it was, rather, by patient thought to unravel this Gordian knot of
life, than cut or physic it. (n.p.)

Maclise advises medical menanatomists, surgeons, and physiciansto visit

Hunters museum, to study his specimens and to learn to apply the mind, rather
than the scalpel or the pharmacy, to the body. Maclise demonstrates as well in this
passage his range of learning (to indicate perhaps that anatomy is part of learning),
referencing Hamlet II.ii.182, For if the sun breeds maggots in a dead dog, being a
/ good kissing carrion, and the Classical Gordian knot (a seemingly intractable
problem). Just as the sun shining on a dead dog will breed maggots there, so the anatomists mind, shining on the dead body, has the potential to create life from death and
unravel the knot of life. This is the goal of anatomy: to fully grasp the human by not
only dissecting other species, but by applying the mind to develop an understanding of
the relationships between parts and systems and by doing so, to understand physiological and pathological cause and effect to the end of curing and promoting life.
Maclises preface is part of a double folio atlas of fifty-two hand-colored lithographs
of dissections, all of which, Maclise assures us, have been made by myself from my
own dissections first planned at the London University College, and afterwards realized at the Ecole Practique and School of Anatomy adjoining the Hopital la Pitie,
Paris a few years since (n.p.). It is an astounding work of art. Surgical Anatomy,
which Maclise writes is intended to present to the student of medicine and to the
practitioner removed from the schools, a series of dissections demonstrating the
anatomy of the principal regions of the human body, revels in the potential for
anatomy to be elevated from manual labor to vital scientific profession (n.p.). It
pays homage to well-known anatomical atlases that came before itincluding ones
by William Hunter (17181783), William Cowper (16661709), and John and

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Charles Bell (17631820, 17741842, respectively)from 1737 through 1822 in its

visual composition, inclusion of certain instruments and technique. It does the
work that Maclise calls for in his preface by giving a richness to dissection, a depth
and a detail that does justice not only to the living whole of the human body, but
its ability to be illuminated by the anatomist in a way that reminds us of life even
as it depicts death.

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Maclise and the Anatomical Arts Tradition

The lush details of anatomical illustration from which Maclise draws differ greatly
from images that we see today like Muscles of the Head, Face and Neck, from
Grays Anatomy (see Figure 2). We have come to associate anatomy and depictions
of it with clinical distance. However, it is only with the publication of Henry Grays
Anatomy Descriptive and Surgical in 1858 that anatomical illustration takes this
turn. The text, which has come to be known as Grays Anatomy, has never been out
of print and is still widely used by students of medicine. Illustrations in Grays are

Figure 2 Henry Gray. Henry Vandyke Carter, illustrator. Fig. 148. Muscles of the Head,
Face and Neck. Anatomy Descriptive and Surgical. 3rd ed. (London, 1864). Courtesy of
Rare Books Collection, Falk Library of the Health Sciences, University of Pittsburgh.

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characterized by their sharp focus, clean lines and integral labeling (Richardson,
Making 100). Stripped of extraneous details, they are flattened and have come to
define what we consider to be the objective, clinical standard of anatomical illustration. They deliberately embrace an androgynous standard in order to evacuate sensuality from dissection. In the process, they de-personalize not only the corpse, but the
anatomist as well. His eye becomes not the admiring eye of the renegade connoisseur
but the every-eye of the anonymous professional.
Before the 1832 Anatomy Act enabled medical communities to have wider access to
corpses for dissection, students relied largely on reference texts and lectures supplemented by preserved specimens to aid them in their anatomical studies. The production of large, expensive anatomical atlases drops off significantly in England after
the passing of the Act. Roberts suggests that this is because students are granted access
to a greater number of corpses (483). Anatomical atlases created during the time in
England when bodies were scarce certainly testify to the value of corpses because
the atlases are large, expensive and laborious to make. They also represent fantasies
of dissection: plate after plate of the featured dissections makes it seem as if the anatomist had a proliferation of bodies. At the same time, these atlases pay tribute to a rich
and complicated European tradition of anatomical illustration.
Before he became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, Maclise executed
eighty-seven illustrations to accompany Richard Quains The Anatomy of the Arteries
of the Human Body (1844). Quain explains in his preface that Maclise is a friend
and former pupil and that, when practicable, the dissections featured in the folio
were preserved. Maclise, as mentioned above, also wrote and illustrated Surgical
Anatomy (1851, 1856). Maclise makes his indebtedness to earlier artist-anatomists
clear. For example, plate 66 from Anatomy of the Arteries of the Human Body features
a dissected human pelvis atop a book whose spine reads C. Bell (see Figure 4).
Though this is a reference to Charles Bell, Bronte scholars might find an irresistible
resonance in recalling that Charlottes pen name was Currer Bell.2
Maclises drawings are precise in detail and aesthetic composition. To him, corpses
are art-objects. Maclises debt to John Bell, Charless brother and another artistanatomist, can be found in the accessories that Maclise incorporates into his engravings: the very same tools which John Bell had praised Dutch anatomist Govard Bidloo
for using in his anatomical worksthings like blocks, ropes, pins, hooks, medical and
sketching tools and neoclassical sheet-draping (see Figure 3). It is possible, then, to
trace a chain of awareness and admiration back through the work of these artistanatomists, for whom each image is an instructive illustration, an artistic tribute
and an aesthetic meditation.
In Maclises The Arteries Distributed to the Female Pelvis (Figure 5), from
Anatomy of the Arteries of the Human Body (1844), we see a recumbent female form
from the side. Her left leg has been removed and her torso dissected to reveal the
arteries that supply blood to her digestive system and reproductive organs. The arteries
are hand-colored red. We can see two blocks of wood, one under the hand, and one
under the thigh. Notice the cadavers hand and postureshe appears relaxed, as if
she were leaning against the block of wood. Next to her buttock is a pair of dissection

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Figure 3 Govard Bidloo. Gerard de Lairesse, illustrator. William Cowper. Table 37. The
Superior Convex Surface of the Liver. The Anatomy of Humane Bodies with figures drawn
after life by some of the best masters in Europe. 2nd ed. (Leiden, 1737). Courtesy of Rare
Books Collection, Falk Library of the Health Sciences, University of Pittsburgh.

scissors. Maclises choice of posture, instrument and accessory probably would have
pleased his forerunner John Bell (Figure 6), though Maclises image doesnt have the
same sense of disorder and isolation found in John Bells work.
Maclises image is much more pleasing to look at, and his dissection seems cleaner.
The pleasing effect may also be attributed to the sheets connotation of modesty (Bells
cadaver is cover-less) and the hands relaxed shape (Bells cadavers hand is locked
almost in a fist). Bells cadaver also looks brutalized, since its feet are bound and it

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Figure 4 Joseph Maclise, illustrator. Detail from Plate 66. Various conditions of the
obturator artery. Anatomy of the Arteries of the Human Body. (Richard Quain. London,
1844). Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine. Note that the spine is labeled
C. Bell.

Figure 5 Joseph Maclise, illustrator. Plate 59. The Arteries Distributed to the Female
Pelvis. Anatomy of the Arteries of the Human Body. (Richard Quain. London, 1844).
Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine.

seems to be falling off the table. Maclises cadaver is well-supported, balanced. The
comparison may be reduced to Bells depiction of tension, brutality, and disrespect
and Maclises depiction of ease, support, and respect. This unique representation of
a relaxed dissection is a hallmark of Maclise, and the comparison with John Bell
helps us to see that dissected corpses can look like helpless victims or relaxed
participants.

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Figure 6 John Bell. Plate IV. Engravings of the bones, muscles and joints, illustrating the
first volume of the Anatomy of the Human Body. (London, 1794). Courtesy of the National
Library of Medicine.

Maclises many drawings can be divided into three categories: portraits, partials and
internals. The portraits feature the faces of corpses; partials feature a recognizable
external whole part of the body dissected to reveal whats under the skin, including
whole arms or torsos; and internals depict normally unseen parts of the body, such
as the pelvis on the book discussed earlier. The portraits are the most striking not
only because they connote ease in the same way as the Arteries Distributed to the
Female Pelvis, but because they strike a balance between vitality and brutality; their
emotional impact is undeniable. The portraits record exacting facial details, at times
at the expense of the anatomical details of the dissection, as with this plate from
The Anatomy of the Arteries of the Human Body, The Thoracic Aorta (Figure 7).
Note the way detail dissipates as ones eyes move down and away from the head,
which is rendered perfectly. Perhaps in tribute to Bidloo, extraneous details are
included: a pin sits on the block to the right of the head and a compass to the left.
No effort is visible to include the cadavers arms, even though its ribcage is sketched
in. The kidneys are given the same terse outline as the chair in which the cadaver
sits. This plates unfinished appearance makes it unique to Maclises work, but it is
not unique in that it demonstrates his investment in pleasing portraits and
anatomical accuracy.
Maclises goal is to map key areas of the human body to assist surgeons. He writes in
the preface to Surgical Anatomy that the surface of the living body is perused by the
surgeon as a map explanatory of the relative position of the organs beneath (n.p).
Even though Maclise is a mapmaker, what he maps are fantasy landscapes. At times,
the positions of the bodies contradict those they would have likely been placed in

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Figure 7 Joseph Maclise, illustrator. Plate 47. The Thoracic Aorta and the Intercostal
arteries, with the Intercostal Veins, Vena Azygos, the Thoracic duct, &c., seen in connexion
with the parietes of the thorax. Anatomy of the Arteries of the Human Body. (Richard
Quain. London, 1844). Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine.

for dissection. His specimens are youthful, fresh, lean and muscular. As fantasies,
Maclises images aestheticize the corpse in a way that is undeniably appreciative.
I would like to return to Plate 10 (Figure 8). The aesthetic symmetry is arresting, as
is the images blending of relaxation and restraint. We notice almost a post-mortem
modesty; the males bicep kindly occludes the females face. At the same time it
casts a shadow that throws the curve of her breast into high relief. The shadow is
especially curious, as it is unlikely that these two specimens were dissected in close
proximity to each other if the dissections were done in England. Yet the shadow visually insists that the images were not merely juxtaposed one atop the other. Maclises
care of detail is again exhausting, and both corpses appear tranquil and healthy.
Maclises atlases are residual, to borrow a term from Raymond Williams, in the way
they pay tribute to the masters before him (Williams 122). Maclise represents the form
of anatomical illustration that, while having exerted a significant influence on the
history of anatomy and surgery, will be phased out: one indebted to art and

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Figure 8 Joseph Maclise, illustrator. Plate X. The Male and Female Axillae Compared.
Surgical Anatomy. 2nd ed. (London: John Churchill, 1856). Courtesy of Rare Books
Collection, Falk Library of the Health Sciences, University of Pittsburgh.

portraiture, to the corpse as valuable, human subject. Gray is, to borrow another corresponding term from Williams, the emergent form of anatomical illustration. Grays
technical, textbook, student-friendly approach ushers in the standard for the rest of
the century (Richardson, Making 103). An aesthetic, affective approach to anatomical
illustration was incompatible with Victorian cultural narratives of the doctor as professional and the professional as embodiment of ethos and propriety; moreover
changes in the way students studied medicine and became licensed meant that their
needs had to be taken into consideration (Caldwell 343). Grays Anatomy, Surgical
and Descriptive can to this day be purchased in any bookstore in the United States.
We can set these two surgeons side by side as colliding at a critical moment in the
history of medical illustration: the moment when affect and art were phased out in
favor of scientific objectivity, standardization, order and flatness.
Buying into the ideals of medicine is part of seeing the anatomist as seducer. We
have to believe that dissection served a practical, positive end. Seduction and dissection both involve vulnerability. Seeing dissection as seduction also demands of us a
willingness to believe that the anatomist transforms the dead body into something
transcendent, abstract, and wonderful, something uniquely revelatory of an intimate
exchange between the corpse and the anatomist; it calls for us to see the anatomist
as giving the corpse a new life or a lasting memorial. We must believe that the anatomist believes that the human nervous system is amazing, beautiful, unique and
worth preserving to teach and to appreciate. We must also learn to see the inside of

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the human body as capable of expressing human complexity and we must appreciate
the anatomist as a man who can show us ourselves by showing us the inside of another.

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Conclusion
We have seen many explicit representations of bodies cut open to make visible what is
normally invisible. Opening the human body to make the unseen seen is a powerful
cultural process, one inflected by differentials in power and privilege, and one in
which gender figures prominently because anatomists are men. The images we have
seen help us understand that dissection in the early- to mid-nineteenth century in
England was a medical process infused with artistic traditions. Maclise was a man
whose work in the medical field was cerebral and sensual, scientific and aesthetic.
Fierce romances similarly provide experiences where the beautiful and the terrible
intermingle, where the bodys boundaries are dissolved or where the dissolution of
boundaries plays a primary role. These diverse textual groupings, occurring in the
same cultural period, draw aesthetic energy from each other, and reflect similar
systems of interpersonal knowledge, whereby knowing ones subjectwhether it be
the corpse or the loveris harrowing, delightful and transcendent.
Frederick Frank has called the gothic hero-villain a man of colossal contradictions
and the gothic a genre driven by ambivalence (439). We experience disgust and delight
when we explore the permutations of the gothic, including the fierce romance. Stepping outside the terrain of the literary and into the lived, we find that in the period
when the gothic was at its popular and influential height, the discourse of anatomical
study offers the same sort of contradictory experiences. In fierce romances, sexuality
and death, rape and seduction mesh and blur into each other; so in anatomical
atlases and textbooks, science and art, internal and external, affect and objectivity, sensuality and intellect collide. Gothic looking and medical looking reveal complex similarities; both explore internal landscapes, depth, and desire. Dissection is both violent
and seductive, a social problem and a cultural cure. In Maclises work, corpses become
oracles rather than places of putrefaction. The anatomists scalpels and hooks are
invested with a sublimity that inspires awe and appreciation; fierce romances, too,
offer us glimpses of deaths undeniable connection to life and human experience.
Notes
[1] At the end of the nineteenth century, predominant Victorian cultural narratives of professionalism alter these romantic dynamics and bring about texts in which a lesser male professional
is feminized and menaced by a more powerful male. Examples include Bram Stokers Dracula,
Richard Marshs The Beetle and H.G. Wells The Island of Dr. Moreau.
[2] Thanks to Deborah Morse for pointing out this uncanny repetition.

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