Files
Download Full Text (1.9 MB)
Publication Date
11-11-2025
Description
Body Language examines the complex intersections of British eighteenth-century comic fiction and medical discourse. By engaging medical writings of renowned and widely-read physicians of the Enlightenment such as John Freind, Thomas Sydenham, Albrecht von Haller, John Whytt, and William Cullen, with novels of humor by Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne, and Charlotte Lennox, Alves explains how medicine shaped comic language by dramatizing female-specific phenomena like menstruation, hysteria, nervous disorders, and pregnancy. In these novels, the medical belief that women are incapable of bodily self-regulation becomes an imperative for policing women’s bodies and highlights the enduring shortcomings of patriarchal systems. Ultimately, these comic representations offer a counternarrative of women’s bodies, agency, and selfhood, exposing masculine anxieties about the effectiveness of marriage to regulate women’s sexuality.
Keywords
Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Charlotte Lennox, Shamela, Pamela, Humphrey Clinker, Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy, Peregrine Pickle, The Female Quixote, eighteenth-century fiction, eighteenth-century medicine, leaky women, somatic society, epistolary, feminist, feminism, female excess, Amelia, medical discourse, The Female Husband, masculinity, Lady Booby, Lady Bellaston, social hierarchy, gender binary, Enlightenment literature, fertility, the grotesque body, pregnancy in the eighteenth century, female agency, patriarchal fear, masculine anxiety, eighteenth-century obstetrics, hysteria theory, womb, satire, Walter Shandy, William Harvey, John Locke, Sally Pickle, marriage, motherhood, midwifery, Arabella, Mr. Glanville, physiology, Don Quixote, vitalism, patriarchal, Winifred Jenkins, Mrs. Trunnion, Poor Things, Bella Baxter, Godwin Baxter, Alfie Blessington, Thomas Laycock, Anne Finch, Lady Wortley Montagu, Simon Dickie, Eliza Haywood, Thomas Hobbes, Ludmilla Jordanova, Thomas Lockwood, Ruth Perry, Roy Porter, G.S. Rousseau, Robert Whytt, Gautier d'Agoty, Venus in the Cloister, history of medicine, Hardwicke Marriage Act, surgical violence, Libertine, history of gynecology, history of obstetrics, Herman Boerhaave, Thomas Laqueur, Sheridan, Bakhtin, Defoe, Barbauld, Kant, Lukacs, Pope, Dryden, Leake, iatromechanist, Dr. John Friend, Thomas Sydenham, Albrecht von Haller, John Whytt, William Cullen, nervous disorder, menstruation theory, menstruation, Emmenologia, emmenology, catamenia, women's studies, womens studies, medical history
Rights
© 2026 by Kathleen Tamayo Alves
Language
eng
ISBN
9781684485703