PRESENCE: A Hidden History of the Female Body, by Erin Maglaque
“Woman must write her self,” the French critic Hélène Cixous mandated in 1975: As with childbirth, the ultimate act of authorship, she must render her actual being in text. And yet Cixous also argued that a woman inevitably “writes in white ink.” Her medium, Erin Maglaque explains in “Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body,” is milk.
“It is a stunning image,” the historian writes in this soulful, moving, sometimes cacophonous account of European women’s experiences and interior lives from about 1500 to 1800. “White ink on white paper: What is there to read?” So goes what Maglaque calls “the paradox of the history of the female body.” Despite the obvious ubiquity and necessity of womanhood for all time, the Western archive leaves scant and fragmentary evidence of what it felt like to be a woman in early modernity.
“Cixous’s écriture feminine is both present and invisible,” Maglaque writes. “Of the body, but illegible; soaking the page, but leaving no visible trace.”
So she sets out to gather the remnants, reading into them to fashion “a more expansive, deeper, more contradictory, surprising history of ourselves.” She seeks out the voices of women — a 17th-century English midwife, a nun in Perugia who kept a book of recipes she made for the convent, a teenage servant who slept on a pillow on the floor beside her master’s bed — in diaries, letters, cookbook inscriptions and trial testimonies. Resisting the urge to extrapolate or generalize from each individual story she examines, Maglaque chases the particular shadows, as she puts it, that these women have left behind, and makes rich meaning of their contours. She reads into the silences and parses word choices, turns of phrase and metaphors.
She illuminates the historical context using the vast set of primary sources she manages to unearth (she traces the course of her research in “bibliographical essays” at the end of the book): medical treatises on gestation, botanical catalogs that women turned to for pharmaceutical guidance, printed pamphlets, funeral sermons, epic poems, household advice books and a wealth of existing but disparate scholarship.
For Maglaque, the early modern era “occupies an uneasy place between the strangeness of the medieval past and the familiarity of the late modern.” It was a juncture of profound change, as reason won out over superstition and revolutions toppled both longstanding monarchies and much of European conventional wisdom. But she questions the assumption that greater knowledge necessarily results in greater empathy, let alone freedom.
Her riveting survey reveals just how much of what the modern Western world accepts as given, even natural, was created in this period: from female beauty ideals (which swung from a shape of “abundance, fertility” to “one of refinement and self-control” by the late 18th century) to our notions of personhood, orgasm, gender.
In writing as visceral as Cixous demands, Maglaque also uses these revelations to help make sense of her own life, whisking the reader nimbly between this distant past and her present, personal encounters with desire, abortion, birth, ambition. She describes her grandmother’s cooking and self-deprivation, reconstructs the violence of her own labor and delivery. So much of the world her female sources recount is recognizable to her today: the care and feeding of children, the sleeplessness, work, hunger, death.
But there are also witch trials, bad science and bloodletting. It was widely thought that a pregnant woman’s cravings, even her emotions, might mar her fetus for life. Expectant mothers were instructed to place their hands on their buttocks when craving a specific fruit or meat “so as to direct the birthmark to an inconspicuous place on the child’s body.” And German town councils forced beggars to hide their disease-ridden limbs lest they startle pregnant women passing by. The “inchoate” desire felt by teenage girls was termed “the greensickness,” she writes. “A disease of ripeness without anywhere to go.”
Of course, in attempting to reconstruct and honor the texture of women’s lives and bodies, from their bones and bellies to their breasts and blood, Maglaque must confront the limits of this “fragmentary archive.” She cannot quote women who lacked the tools to write down their own experiences, nor those whose accounts were tossed or lost. She can’t conjure up the confessions of individuals who deemed their emotions and desires too taboo to name.
“Presence” doesn’t suffer from that lack. Maglaque makes the most of her material, and the pointed absences of certain voices only underscore her larger argument about how much history remains unknowable to us. But reading about aspects of her own autobiography, I felt the same pull she must have felt in her research: I wanted more. Details of the endings of relationships she introduces. The nature of her postpartum haze. The particulars of her understanding of motherhood and work.
Perhaps I’m not entitled to know. Like the premodern women who wrote in riddles and metaphors of their titillating dreams and unlawful fantasies, Maglaque too holds her reader at a distance. But who can blame those of us who, encountering scraps, keep turning the pages in search of revelation?
PRESENCE: A Hidden History of the Female Body | By Erin Maglaque | Astra House | 310 pp. | $30
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