Masculine Uses of the Womb in the Renaissance
Şebnem Nazlı Karalı
PhD Student, Dept. of English Literature, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul
[email protected]
ABSTRACT
The uterus seems to have a more important place than other visceral organs in terms of its
power to define femininity both in dissection in the anatomy theatres, in the images and in the
literary blazons of the Renaissance. My object of inquiry is how the uterus is approached by
the masculine perceptionin Renaissance and my project is to survey the masculine
interpretation of the womb in early modern period. I will suggest that the uterus having been
thought as an identification of femininity can reach an ordinariness of any organ with the
deletion of gender-based perspectives and perceptions. Before the suggestion, with the
presence of a specifically masculine perspective, I will look at the masculine division of
women‟s bodies, masculine desires for the female body- alive or dead, and masculine function
of the womb for masculine purposes in literature in the Renaissance.
Keywords: English Renaissance, Anatomical Renaissance, Blazons, Patriarchy, Dissection,
Courts, Eroticized poetic texts, Sexualized Culture, Uterus/Womb
Masculine division of the female body through dissection
In her book “Secrets of Women” Katherine Park points out that “The precarious nature of
fatherhood, and thus of the family itself, centered on the uterus, the dark, inaccessible place
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where the child‟s tie with its father was created, its sex determined, and its body shaped”
(Park 25). What attracted my attention is the relationship between the use of the uterus and
fatherhood in this sentence. The uterus is depicted as a place where fatherhood fulfills its
function and is determined over the uterus as, to use Park‟s words, “men could never know
for certain if their children were in fact their own; paternity, constructed this way, was fragile,
dependent on the sexual fidelity of women, whose untrustworthiness was the stuff of a
thousand fables, jokes, and songs” (Park 25). This sentence suggests that men need to get to
know the secret place of the female body to understand their own position in the society.
Both Park and Jonathan Sawday in his book “The Body Emblazoned” stress out that
dissection is necessary to know the internal parts of human body, through which illnesses can
be located and cured. Park makes a further step asserting that the female body with “a hidden
and secret interior” (Park 81) is the ideal type of body for dissection because the uterus is
inside the female body and it stands for the interior of the human body in general, as stated
above. Therefore, women‟s interiors are investigated in order to learn more about the human
body. Park claims that “in this connection, women appeared primarily not as possessor of a
particular form of knowledge about the body but as the objects of knowledge itself” (Park 91).
To create a better and more comprehensive epistemology of anatomy, the female body is used
as an apparatus. The female body is understood through the uterus. Therefore, to get to know
the uterus, division of the female body is necessary because of the location of the uterus. The
problem is that both authors while defining the importance of the uterus and the female body
which carries the uterus inside and describing the functions of them do not seem to closely
interrogate the place of the women before and in the Renaissance. They mention about the
women‟s place but howwomen were regarded by males in the society and how this could have
affected the understanding, construction, reconstruction, and spread of knowledge about the
uterus and the female body are not the focus of the authors.
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Going back the quotation from Park, it seems that the uterus has many connotations than
being just an internal organ of the female body which would be its denotation. Restricting
herself to the period between the late thirteenth and mid-sixteenth century in northern Italy,
Park focuses on the functions of the uterus, which dissection attempts to shed light on and
understand. One of the functions of the uterus is to identify the woman as shown in the image
“On Woman” in Fasciculus medicine attributed to Johannes de Ketham in 1491 (Park 27). In
this book, there are male figures to show the locations of diseases, and all these figures show
the outer parts of the male body. However, the female figure illustrates the disease with the
uterus. The other function appears with male physicians dissecting a female body and
focusing on the uterus to find out the hidden truths of a human body in general. Through
dissecting the female bodies, men came to know theirs, as well. Therefore, the female body
being “reduced to and identified with its interior” (Park 33) paves the way for men through
dissection, to understand their own bodiesand the human bodies in general.
With these functions, the uterus detaches itself from being a simply visceral organ but takes
on the responsibilities such as preparing the way for the male to know their own anatomy and
human anatomy or identifying the female body as a whole. However, it is problematic that
just because the uterus is vital to the female‟s health, it “appears as a- arguably the- privileged
object of dissection in medical images and texts” (Park 26). There seems to be more to that
because it is the male physicians and the students in universities or colleges that dissected the
female body and interpreted it. My question would be this: Was there an impartiality of those
male eyes in a patriarchal Italian society having in mind that their bodies are the generic
bodies and women‟s bodies were supplementary to know their own bodies.
At this point to provide a feasible answer to my question, I would like to pay attention to the
anatomy and science as patriarchal concepts as Thomas Laqueur points out in his book
“Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud” with the one-sex/flesh model. Just
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like Katherine Park accepts the fact that the male body is the standard, Laqueur, casting doubt
on the impartiality of biology, claims that women with their uterus “seem to have „“gender”‟
since the category itself is defined as that aspect of social relations based on the difference
between sexes in which the standard has always been man” (Laqueur 22). In the one-sex/flesh
model, women are thought to have the same genitals as men, for example vagina is an
involuted penis and this idea was valid until the eighteenth century. Therefore in the
Renaissance, women appeared as a lesser form of men as women have a lack of heat, which
makes their reproductive organs invisible as Laqueur demonstrates in his book.
Overlapping with Laqueur, LondaSchiebinger in her book “The Mind Has No Sex”, asserts
that “the Renaissance inherited from the ancient world two dominant cosmologies accounting
for women‟s place in nature and society: the Aristotelian-Galenic theory of humors and the
Judeo-Christian account of creation… In the ancient world, woman was viewed as a unique
sexual and moral creature, distinct from and inferior to man” (Schiebinger 161). The four
humors, namely blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile are divided into two categories:
hotness or coldness; or moisture and dryness. The heat is vital to the understanding of
masculine and feminine, as “things hot and dry were considered masculine, while things cold
and moist were thought of as effeminate” (Schiebinger 161). To state the obvious, the womb
was assumed as cold and moist. Moreover, “from the time of Galen until late into the
sixteenth century, woman was thought to have a “spermatic vessel” (a polite word for penis)
similar to man‟s… Even the womb was nothing special. As Galen pictured it, the neck of the
womb was nothing other than the penis turned inward, and the bottom of the womb nothing
but the scrotum inverted” (Schiebinger 163).Schiebinger also specifically provides ancient
views and understanding of the womb: “Since ancient times the uterus had been much
maligned. Plato thought it an animal with independent powers of movement. Democritus cited
the uterus as the cause of a thousand sicknesses. Galen and even (for a time) Vesalius reported
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that horns bud from the sides of the womb” (Schiebinger 178). Through Schiebinger‟s
explanation which supports Laqueur‟s one-sex/flesh model, we can create the link between
the understanding of the womb, or the femininity in ancient times and the Renaissance
understanding of both.
My question is then, did the male physicians in the northern Italy between late-thirteenth and
mid-sixteenth centuries succeed to look at the female body irrespective of one-sex/flesh
model and ongoing masculine discourse on the reproductive organ of the women in their
minds?As Laqueur claims, even biology itself seems to be prescriptive rather than descriptive
in terms of social hierarchy. If “to be man or a woman was to hold a social rank, a place in
society, to assume a cultural role, not to be organically one or the other of two
incommensurable sexes” (Laqueur8), how the male physicians could have been objective
about the female body on the dissection table is of my concern.
In order to indicate the ongoing male discourse on female body both in late-thirteenth and
early fourteenth century and sixteenth-century, I want to juxtapose Park‟s and Jonathan
Sawday‟s arguments. Park argues that the knowledge of the interior of the female body
“based on anatomy and dissection” was represented in late thirteenth- and early fourteenthcentury Italian learned discourse as male and public” (Park 80). In “The Body Emblazoned”,
Sawday asserts that “the patrilineal diagram of understanding, with medical knowledge
passed from father to son in a line of descent, was roughly the diagram with which sixteenthcentury commentators and investigators worked” (Sawday 40). They both claim that the
knowledge of human body, gained through anatomy and dissection is male oriented and it
mirrors to the literary works and images of the sixteenth century as Sawday claims. Thus, the
knowledge of the female body is produced by male physicians among male audience or male
students. Whether the male physicians or literary figures have certain desires while dissecting
a female body or not is the subject of inquiry of the next chapter.
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Masculine secret desires mirrored in images and poetry
“Anatomia was a woman… Anatomia was also a mistress of erotic reduction- a fantasy
expression of male surrender- whose chief attribute was the power to divide” (Sawday 184).
The reason that I start with this quotation of Sawday is to show that males have certain desires
while penetrating into the dead female body with a knife, the eye, or a pen. To trace those
desires in the Renaissance, I would like to pay attention to the Renaissance courts. The reason
that I want to focus on the courts is to understand how the anatomical, biological, hard science
of “culture of dissection under such a different guise” (Sawday 189), i.e. courts.
The literary blazons of the sixteenth and seventeenth century are the apparatuses through
which we can observe the transformation of male desires from the anatomy theatres to the
courts. Sawday describes the poetic blazon as such: “the blazon as a poetic form- usually
understood as a richly ornate and mannered evocation of idealized female beauty rendered
into its constituent parts…” (Sawday 191). Even following the description of the poetic
blazon by Sawday, it can be inferred that blazons represent female body and show the
partitioning of specifically that body.
Both Laquer and Sawday emphasize the fact that it is the male desirethat produce those poetic
blazons of the female body especially in “the court of lascivious Francis I” (Laqueur 130).
Sawday:
The blazon as a shield – a meaning which was to be appropriated for heraldic purposes
– allowed man to vie with another in the production or art. Female body parts – eyes,
eyebrows, breasts – could be bandied about in poetic blazons and contreblazons. More
often than not, this poetic contest, in which the competitors traded their mistresses‟ (real
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or imagined) bodies with one another, disguised what Thomas Laqueur has described as
„a powerful homoerotic quality as women seemed to mediate and create bonds between
men‟ (Sawday 192).
In this quotation, it is observed that male poets write about female bodies and exchange their
poems in male environments. The female body and its parts circulate in this male homosocial
environment, however “male desire was the true subject of these verses. But desire for what?
Men read each other‟s blasons in order to become hot and rigid. The emblazoned female body
was the locus of desire” (Sawday 193).
Concentrating on the womb, John Donne‟s blazons whose topoi are “gold and womb”can
exemplify the place of the womb in masculine desires. Sawday asserts that in Donne‟s Poems
106 “displayed for other men, the woman lies with her vagina and her anus available… To
perform anal intercourse with her, the poem advises, the man must go in the same direction
„which that Exchequer looks‟ – i.e. from behind. The female body has become a receptacle
into which (literally) the male can deposit his treasure” (Sawday 206). For the purposes of this
paper, I will focus on two ways Renaissance men received pleasure: Firstly, in the anatomy
theatres the female body is partitioned and the womb is taken out of the female body and “recreated as a new body” (Sawday 211). This is the male desire to know and understand the
female body through the uterus. Secondly, the womb is „brought to the court‟ as the
identification of the whole female body and “constructed as a fantasy of male consumption
and pleasure” (Sawday 211). Therefore, there is a very close link between anatomy theatres
and poetry. Both cut up the female body either physically in anatomy theatres or
metaphorically in the poems and stampmale authority of knowledge and erotic pleasure onto
them.
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At this point I want to show the overlaps between Katherine Park and Jonathan Sawday in
terms of images showing the uterus and the close relationship between the late-thirteenth and
the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Park claims that “it is notable that the first two specific
references to dissections in an Italian academic context – Taddeo‟s mention of the anatomy he
had never seen and Mondino‟s mention of two dissections performed in January and March
1316 – both involved not only women‟s bodies but the uterus in particular” (Park 106).
Likewise, Sawday asserts that “the womb or uterus was an object sought after with an almost
ferocious intensity in Renaissance anatomy theatres. Here was not only the principle of life,
but the source of all loss of rational (male) intellect. Once the uterus was seen, however, it had
to be mastered in a complex process of representation” (Sawday 222). These two quotations
suggest that the focus on the uterus has never been shifted for at least three centuries. The
excised vagina from Vesalius‟ De Humani Corpus Fabricain 1543 (Sawday 221) or the
dissected female figure from Spigelius‟ De FormatoFoetoin 1627 (Sawday 222) show that the
images are certain ways of representing the female body, through which it can be claimed that
they represent the uterus „or‟ the female body. Neither in 1543 nor in 1627 – i.e. two different
centuries, the female body is represented over any other viscera. As I have attempted to show
in the first part, there is a masculine curiosity and desire to get to know the female body. Here
what needs attention is the masculine erotic desire to penetrate into the female corpse with a
knife and control it with the knowledge gained from the corpse itself. At this point, I strongly
believe that the images help male scientists control the female body in whatever way they like
as the images show the dissected inner parts- the abdominal region, the womb, the vagina of
the female body- with which the male want to identify the female body. Also, Sawday points
out that “in those images, too, we can see the ways in which the female body could be
reconstructed (as the blasonneurs had reconstructed it) as something both fetishistically
adored, and violently suppressed” (Sawday 222). The word “reconstruction” shows the
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significant role that the images and the poems play in the process of re-creating the female
body after a certain amount of knowledge about the female body through dissection has been
constructed in the anatomy theatres. This reconstruction mirrors the masculine secret desires
to penetrate into the female body and to have a control over it.
However, it should be taken into consideration that “such images where female grotesques …
displayed their splayed vaginas were reminders of the dangerous power of female sexual
organs” (Sawday 223). Attempting to control the uterus, the male anatomists are aware of the
power that the uterus has over them and “it was only through controlling this reproductive
process that the male‟s name and property could be transferred from one generation to the
next” (Sawday 223). Therefore, the desires to know and to master the uterus mirror the
patriarchal desire to continue living in a patriarchal fashion.
Exploring the masculine desire in penetrating to the female body, Sawday gives a more
comprehensive analysis than Park who is mainly involved in the medical history of the uterus.
He gives the reader the masculine desire of penetration, knowledge, and suppression and the
fact that this desire has a certain place in interpreting the female body and the feminine
matrix. However, Sawday does not seem to question the positive or the negative nature of the
masculine desire which appears as a significant element in the construction of the knowledge
of the uterus. He seems to be engaged in the consequences rather than the reasons or sources
of this desire.
Not going far away from the masculine desire, men in the Renaissance take the female
reproductivity for their own creation of texts, which are quite visible in the Renaissance
poetry. The next chapter will explore the adaptation of feminine matrix to the masculine brain
and the possible reasons and consequences of this adaptation in the Renaissance.
Masculine incorporation of the function of the womb for masculine purposes
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In her article “The Masculine Matrix: Male Births and the Scientific Imagination in EarlyModern England”, Ruth Gilbert says that “early modern men appropriated images of birth to
describe both their textual production and their intellectual, technological and mystical
aspirations and achievements. Writing, in particular, represented a form of production that
negotiated male impulses towards creation” (Gilbert 160). The reproductive organ of the
female body, which is the womb, is replaced with the brain of the male body. It is the
appropriation of the female birth, which is found in the male creation of literary works. In
other terms the male brains give birth to, as Gilbert called, “a brainchild” (Gilbert 160).
There are exemplifications of such a male creation of literary texts in sixteenth and and earlyseventeenth century English literature: In the first sonnet of “Astrophel and Stella” by Sidney,
the persona claims that he is “great with childe to speak” (12) “associating the creative
imagination with the female body” (Maus 182). Another example would be Ben Jonson‟s
elegy to his son who is depicted as his “best piece of poetry” as Gilbert reminds us. The
biological reproduction is replaced with the literary production by the male poets. However,
what are the reasons and results of such an equation?
Likening the reproduction of a female body to the creation of a literary work of art, “he was
potentially a monstrous aberration, hermaphroditically effeminized by his engagement with
the creative process. But he was also an absolute ideal: a superman whose hyper-masculinity
was so impermeable that he could reproduce without the mediation of a female body” (Gilbert
162). For a male to have the idea of giving birth to a brainchild seems the weakening of the
female body in its biological capability of giving birth. There appears a preference of the
brain to the uterus. However, as Gilbert puts forwards “the reproductive man occupied a
strangely paradoxical position” (Gilbert 161). Even though, Gilbert draws attention to the
slippery notion of gender with which early modern male creation is involved, she does not
give any explanation of the gender issue.
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I would also like to talk about the heat which constructs femininity and masculinity in
Aristotelian-Galenic medicineis assumed to construct intellectual capability. In her chapter “A
Womb of His Own: Male Renaissance Poets in the Female Body”, Katharine EisamanMaus
claims that “sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century medical authorities explain women‟s
unfitness for serious intellectual pursuits on physiological grounds… What makes women
fertile-what makes them women – also renders them stupid. Their bodies disable their minds”
(Maus 183).
In this respect, „the male reproduction‟ suggests a dilemma. Maus gives one of the reasons of
masculine incorporation of the womb‟s function in the Renaissance: “the easiest explanation
for the poet‟s counterintuitive claims is that men envy women‟s ability to give birth” (Maus
186). Replacing female reproductivity with male literary production can imply, to use
Sawday‟s words, a “fetishistic adoration”, however, as Maus has already suggested, there is a
female intellectual incompetency incorporated in and caused by the very presence of the
uterus. Therefore, the suppression of the female body in the male-domineered society which
creates the male-domineered ideology is at stake. Very related to the masculine power in the
society and literature, the early modern scientific discourse in seventeenth century is also
ruled by male discourse, which both Gilbert and Sawday agree on. Gilbert claims that “one of
the implicit aims of the seventeenth-century scientific programme was to reinstate the
supremacy of male creation (Gilbert 169) and Sawday asserts that “indeed, it is possible to
think of the new science of the later seventeenth century as a determinedly „masculine‟
creation” (Sawday 231). Consequently, autogenesis of the male body or “the masculine
matrix had recreated itself, in stories and in science, as a reproductive machine” (Gilbert 172).
So far, what is problematic about the womb is that the womb almost never appears as an
ordinary visceral organ due to the gender-based, specifically male-based assumptions,
constructions, and reconstructions. Beginning with Park‟s interrogation of late-thirteenth
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century and ending with the male creation of literary works and science in seventeenthcentury, I want to point out the biggest „problem‟: The womb is the female. What we have
observed that the womb is both adored and scared by the male scientists, anatomists, and
poets. The male discourse describes or depicts the womb in medical treatises or images.
However, the study of the womb does not show itself where it started to investigate, i.e. the
womb itself, it also incorporates the female body and the woman by default. Pointing out that
“if anatomy was a science of seeing, and thus knowing and controlling the body, in order to
harness its appetites and desires…” (Sawday 219), Sawday portrays the masculine authority
in society and medicine. Park finishes her book “Secrets of Women” with such a sentence:
“She exists not for herself but for others: the curious reader and the fetus by her side” (Park
267). Both authors focus on the female body as a whole while describing the functions of the
uterus and the partial re-construction of the uterus. Their examination of the uterus stems from
the pervading male discourse on the female body. The ongoing patriarchal discourse or the
assimilation of the views of femininity into the patriarchal world have already created a
biased, prejudiced discourse through which the authors in this study create the understanding
of the womb, and/or the female body which has already been recreated by the male
investigation and discourse. This seems to be a vicious circle out of which it is hard to get and
construct a fully impartial assumptionsand spread objective knowledge about the female
body.
Thomas Laqueur says that “I hope this book will persuade the reader that there is no “correct”
representation of women in relation to men and that the whole science of difference is thus
misconceived … the claim that woman is what she is because of her uterus is no more or less
true than the subsequent claim that she is what she is because of her ovaries” (Laqueur 22).
This makes me think that there can be a solution or the beginning of a solution related to the
representation of the women and the uterus when „genderlessness‟ starts to create and
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shapethe understanding. As I have said before, the overall study of the uterus is based on the
assumption that “the uterus, in effect, is the women” (Sawday 215) which Jonathan Sawday
clearly summarizes in his book “The Body Emblazoned”.However, the female body is not
directly the uterus and it should not be assumed so. How the whole female body is identified
with and determined over the existence of the uterus has been at stake. The uterus is carried
by the female body just like any other organ carried by the same body.
My suggestion is to take a look at the “cyborg imagery” which seems to delete all partiality on
both male and female sides. DonnaHaraway in her article “A Cyborg Manifesto” asserts that
“there is nothing about being „female‟ that naturally binds women. Thereis not even such a
state as „being‟ female, itself a highly complex category structured in contested sexual
scientific discourses and other social practices” (Haraway 295). As we have seen so far, very
simply it is the patriarchy that creates a certain understanding of the woman and the female
body. As a solution to the masculine incorporation of the womb and masculine appropriation
and reconstruction of the female body, Haraway‟s “cyborg imagery” can provide an
alternative way to revise the understanding and the interpretation of the female
representations presented by men.She describes the cyborg imagery as such: “By the late
twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated
hybrids of machine and organism. In short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it
gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material
reality…” (Haraway 292). If we apply the cyborg imagery to the maledomineeredunderstanding of the female body and the uterus, there would be neither male nor
female dualism as the cyborg imagery calls into question the world set upon gender
differentiations and domination of one gender over the other. Posing our skepticism on what
has already been established about the female body, the uterus, the femininity, and the woman
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we start to question the tradition and questioning the tradition is the first way to diagnose the
„problem‟ and to treat it.
WORKS CITED
Gilbert, Ruth. “The Masculine Matrix.” The Arts of 17th Century Science. Claire Jowitt and
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Diane Watt. Brodmin: Ashgate, 2002. 160-176. Print.
Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto.” The Cybercultures Reader. Ed. David Bell and
Barbara M. Kennedy. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. 291-324. Print.
Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1990. Print.
Maus, Katharine Eisaman. “A Womb of His Own: Male Renaissance Poets in the Female
Body.” Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1995. Print.
Park, Katherine. Women’s Secrets. New York: Zone Books, 2006. Print.
Sawday, Jonathan. The Body Emblazoned. London: Routledge, 1995. Print.
Schiebinger, Londa. The Mind Has No Sex: Women in the Origins of Modern Science.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989. Print.
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