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“This Shattered Prison”: Bodily Dissolution, Wuthering Heights, and Joseph Maclise's Dissection Manuals

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 (1815–1880), 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 Brontë’s 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 Nineteenth-Century Contexts Vol. 33, No. 5, December 2011, pp. 415–436