This project explores early modern conceptualizations of the body, offering a cultural history of the belly. I apply the tools of literary, historico-cultural, and discourse analysis to textual depictions of the digestive organs and the processes of digestion they perform. Concentrating particularly on the nexus of body, culture, and language, and continuously foregrounding the material underpinnings of linguistic expression, I argue that representations of the digestive organs serve to naturalize ideology and that digestion is itself an apt metaphor for the processes by which ideology is internalized. In my first chapter, I argue that the stomach is a central site through which hierarchies of gender are expressed and assimilated. I analyze Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew in the context of early modern cultural metaphors associated with the stomach and in the context of medical theories of digestion, according to which hotter male digestion is superior to colder female digestion. Drawing upon Marx’s economic theory and his less-noted physiological rhetoric, in Chapter Two I trace how increasing commodity exchange and concomitant changes to social relations are reflected in, and promoted by, a paradigm shift in medical interpretations of the physiological functions of the liver. Chapter Three offers a more detailed and literary analysis of this process, demonstrating how Spenser’s allegory of the body in Book Two of The Faerie Queene participates directly in the ideological work necessary for the transition to capitalism by naturalizing the consumption and production of commodities driving it. The focus of Chapter Four is on the use of bodily metaphors of excretion in colonialist propaganda to legitimate the enforced migration of those described as England’s “excrements” to the colonies. Influenced by Norbert Elias’s theory of the “civilizing process,” I read these metaphors in light of altering social attitudes towards literal excrement, and I demonstrate how representations of the body’s excretory organs in Phineas Fletcher’s The Purple Island mirror the social processes of the “civilization” and discipline of self, nation, and Other.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:OTU.1807/33822 |
| Date | 05 December 2012 |
| Creators | Purnis, Jan |
| Contributors | Nyquist, Mary |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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