Body Language: Medicine and the Eighteenth-Century Comic Novel

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.

KATHLEEN TAMAYO ALVES is an associate professor of English at Queensborough Community College of The City University of New York. Her research centers on eighteenth-century literature and culture, medicine, and literary history, and she has recently published in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Eighteenth-Century Studies, and The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation.