What we know of the marked body in nineteenth-century American
literature and culture often begins with "The Scarlet Letter"'s
Hester Prynne and ends with Moby Dick's "Queequeg." This study
looks at the presence of marked men and women in a more challenging
array of canonical and lesser-known works, including exploration
narratives, romances, and frontier novels. Jennifer Putzi shows how
tattoos, scars, and brands can function both as stigma and as
emblem of healing and survival, thus blurring the borderline
between the biological and social, the corporeal and spiritual.
Examining such texts as "Typee," "Uncle Tom's Cabin," "Captivity
of the Oatman Girls," "The Morgesons," "Iola Leroy," and
"Contending Forces," Putzi relates the representation of the marked
body to significant events, beliefs, or cultural shifts, including
tattooing and captivity, romantic love, the patriarchal family, and
abolition and slavery. Her particular focus is on both men and
women of color, as well as white women-in other words, bodies that
did not signify personhood in the nineteenth century and thus by
their very nature were grotesque. Complicating the discourse on
agency, power, and identity, these texts reveal a surprisingly
complex array of representations of and responses to the marked
body--some that are a product of essentialist thinking about race
and gender identities and some that complicate, critique, or even
rebel against conventional thought.
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