Review

Author(s): Lisa Rosner

Review by: Lisa Rosner
Source: Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2
(Summer, 1998), pp. 312-314
Published by: The North American Conference on British Studies
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4053565
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312 Albion

Marcia Pointon. Strategiesfor Showing: Women, Possession, and Representation in English

Visual Culture, 1665-1800. New York: Oxford University Press. 1997. Pp. xiii, 439. $85.00.
ISBN 0-19-81741 1-X.

What do the seventeenth-century letters between Elizabeth and Robert Harley, late eight-
eenth-century portraits of Emma Hamilton, the tour books of Dorothy Richardson, and
eighty-five pages of abstracts from women's wills probated in the Prerogative Court of
Canterbury have to do with one another? They all appear in Strategies for Showing, and the
author believes (p. 2) these "disparate cases" where "women are representers and represented
makes it possible to scrutinize the contradictions within which women were caught as
subjects and as individuals in eighteenth-century culture."
Not surprisingly, Pointon, a prominent art historian, is most informative in the three
chapters dealing with the A-list painters of the last half of the eighteenth century. Studies of
Reynolds' "The Montgomery Sisters Adorning a Term of Hymen," various renderings of
"Mary Hale, Emma Hamilton and Others...in Bacchante," and Georgian representations of
St. Cecilia all examine the way male artists used imagery from classical myths and Christian
hagiography to enhance the meaning of their portraits and highlight the sexual charms of
their female subjects, usually famous beauties whose admirers had commissioned the work.
The chapter on two little-known London artists of the late eighteenth century, Mary Grace
and the flower painter, Mary Moser, concerns women as representers. But the subject matter
they represent is never related to the analysis in other chapters of women being represented
by men. Why another chapter on a travel writer pops up in what the blurb calls "this unusual
and original study" of English visual culture also remains obscure.
The volume ends abruptly-no conclusion. Instead, a lengthy appendix contains an
assortment of wills written by women, none of whom are discussed in the text.
The problem with using these materials to study contradictions in women's lives is that
the female representers-dowager testators, a flower painter, a Yorkshire travel writer-and
the represented-the young glamour girls of Georgian cafe society-pass through the 439
pages like ships in the night. About the only thing they seem to share in common is two x
chromosomes.
If interested in one of the specific works or artists mentioned above, this book is worth
consulting. Pointon knows the secondary art history literature. Otherwise, look elsewhere
for an analysis of women and visual representation in eighteenth century Britain.

University of Southern California CAROLE SHAMMAS

Linda E. Merians, ed. The Secret Malady: Venereal Disease in Eighteenth-Century Britain
and France. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. 1996. Pp. viii, 269. $39.95. ISBN
0-8131-1989-8.

The history and representation of venereal disease from a variety of perspectives is the
subject of this excellent collection of essays. In the late seventeenth century, although
venereal disease certainly was a malady, it was not especially secret. Instead, it was viewed
as a necessary rite of passage for young men and was a frequent source of jokes in comedy
and satire. By the late eighteenth century, changes in social mores and a new emphasis on
domesticity and the family as essential for the prosperous state drove venereal disease
underground. Venereal disease became less a disease and more a symptom of moral

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 Reviews ofBooks 313

turpitude, even, on occasion, an extended metaphor for the moral degeneracy threatening
the health of the entire body politic.
Linda Merian's introduction effectively sets the stage for the articles that follow, remind-
ing twentieth-century scholars,judging by the few books on the subject, that they have tended
to honor the secrecy imposed by eighteenth-century values. The articles in part one discuss
the historical and medical contexts of venereal disease. Susan P. Connor, in "The Pox in
Eighteenth-Century France," describes the often horrific treatment dispensed to prostitutes
with venereal disease. Although more humane treatment was advocated in some quarters by
the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was part of social hygiene measures that included
mandatory gynecological examinations for all suspected prostitutes: "issues of social
disease," Connor notes, "had ultimately become issues of social control" (p. 30). Kathryn
Norberg, in "From Courtesan to Prostitute: Mercenary Sex and Venereal Disease,
1730-1802," also describes a shift over time. Whereas the early eighteenth-century courte-
san depicted in popular literature might get venereal disease, she quickly recovered with no
loss of attraction. By the end of the century, however, infected prostitutes were depicted as
loathsome, diseased objects "who threaten to corrupt the very core of bourgeois society" (p.
46). Roy Porter, in "Laying Aside any Private Advantage: John Marten and Venereal
Disease," describes one physician specialist who professed to be "laying aside any private
Advantage" (p. 61) in marketing his own cures through his many books, although they were
clearly replete with self-promotion. Philip K. Wilson, in "Exposing the Secret Disease:
Recognising and Treating Syphilis in Daniel Turner's London," looks at the patients and
treatment for venereal disease by examining Turner's casebook. In response to the harsh
effects of the orthodox medical treatment, alternatives arose, as Marie E. McAllister
describes in "John Burrows and the Vegetable Wars." All three practitioners stress the
secrecy and convenience of their treatments, which could be taken without the male patient
having to confide his ailment to his wife or friends.
One sad result of this impulse to secrecy was that there were many "innocent" victims of
venereal disease. Mary Margaret Stewart takes up the issue of wives who contracted it from
their husbands in "'And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse': Syphilis and Wives."
Frances Williams, for example, caught syphilis from her husband specifically because he
tried to conceal his disease from her. She was highly indignant that "that monster husband
never told her what ail'd her" and later successfully obtained a separation from him. But
"such husbands and such wretched wives abound" (p. 1 10), according to one contemporary,
and few women had the same recourse. Barbara J. Dunlap takes up "The Problem of
Syphilitic Children in Eighteenth-Century France and England." Children could get venereal
disease from their mothers, but the greatest public concern came from their being infected
by wet-nurses. Sadly, no reform programs in England or France were successful in prevent-
ing children from contracting venereal disease from wet-nurses or in caring for diseased
children.
The second part of the book deals with representations of venereal disease in art and
literature. Betty Rizzo's "Decorums" discusses the different modes of discourse for dealing
with the subject: as she notes, they strongly tended to "privilege male aristocratic sexual
license" (p. 163). N. F. Lowe, in "The Meaning of Venereal Disease in Hogarth's Graphic
Art," shows that Hogarth incorporated a subversive theme into the apparently conventional
depiction of venereal disease as the wages of sin. "In the unofficial text," Lowe notes,
"venereal disease is used as a symbol of a greater social corruption, and those inflicted with
it are to be seen as pitiful victims of a cruel and exploitative element in society" (p. 168).

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314 Albion

Rose A. Zimbardo, in "Satiric Representations of Venereal Disease: The Restoration versus

the Eighteenth-Century Model," argues that there was a shift from the presentation of the
disease in satire from "public and comic...a sign of our common human frailty" to private,
secret, and a sign of "the personal immorality and...degeneracy of the marginalized 'other"'
(p. 184). Leon Guilhamet picks up the theme of satiric representations of disease in "Pox
and Malice," arguing that the scurrilous use of venereal disease in Restoration political satire
was tied to its image as the particular affliction of Tory aristocrats. April London's "Avoiding
the Subject: The Presence and Absence of Venereal Disease in the Eighteenth-Century
English Novel" charts the "characteristic ambivalences" revealed in the "suggestive cluster-
ings of women, power, money and venereal disease" (p. 213). No such ambivalence, but
outright fear of the "sexually diseased body" (p. 240), is described in Diane Fomey's "Job's
Curse and Social Degneracy in Retif de la Bretonne's Le Paysan Perverti." And the final
article, "Contagion and Containment. Sade and the Republic of Letters," by Julie Candler
Hayes, relates the issues raised by Sade's writing to the reactions of the modem anti-por-
nography activist Catharine MacKinnon.
This excellent, handsomely produced collection will be of interest to literary scholars and
historians alike.

Richard Stockton College LISA ROSNER

Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace. Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the

Eighteenth Century. New York: Columbia University Press. 1997. Pp. ix, 185. $18.00 paper.
ISBN 0-231-10579-9.

Consumerism is one of those subjects that exemplifies the familiar dictum that historians
look to the past to say something about the present. Searching for the roots of present
consumer behavior in the United States has aroused the interests of many, and in this case
the author has sought to locate the phenomenon in the emergence of a consumer society in
that most commercial of countries in the eighteenth century, England. This alone is rather
curious, particularly in light of the fact that recent accounts of American colonial consum-
erism, which must surely provide the foundation for what develops thereafter in the United
States, suggest some subtly different motives and patterns of consumer behavior to those
observed in England.
Drawing on feminist-literary approaches and a familiar spectrum of new historicist theory,
the over-arching theme is the commodification of female bodies from the eighteenth century
to the present. This is explored through three broad cultural movements, roughly equivalent
to the three main sections, that "can be said to belong thoroughly to the eighteenth century"-
these are the development of the tea table; the development of shops and the feminized
activity of "shopping"; and the defining of business as a naturally male phenomenon. A
curiously eclectic conclusion, bringing us into the present, ranges from the gross aspirational
fantasies of a Harlem transsexual called Venus Xtravaganza to nineteenth-century depart-
mental stores and also embraces Betty Friedan's ideas about female subjugation and an
extended analysis of the precise cultural meaning of a new toy product in America,
"historical" dolls for the daughters of the wealthy, educated elite. These, we are to assume,
all have their foundations in women and shopping in England in the eighteenth century.
The central themes are worthy and intrinsically interesting, but, sadly, the book falls short
of its ambitions because some of the premises on which the analysis is based are fundamen-

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