Carnal Knowing
Ellsberg, Peggy R.
CARNAL KNOWING Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West Margaret R. Miles Beacon Press, $24.95, 250 pp. Peggy R. Ellsberg There is a sixth-century record of a Palestinian...
...Throughout the first half of Carnal Knowing, Miles focuses on the religious practices of Western Christians-particularly baptism, martyrdom, and asceticism-which require attention to the naked body...
...Political power entails the power of self-description,'" she says, quoting Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain...
...When St...
...In Carnal Knowing, Miles investigates the objectification of women's bodies in art and religious texts from earliest Christian times to the seventeenth century...
...She also documents the conflict between the Christian ideal of complete equality between the sexes ("In Christ there is neither male nor female...
...And yet, readings of female nudity-whether religious or erotic, whether third- or seventeenth-century-were invariably conducted by men...
...Francis in the thirteenth century wanted to make a statement about apostolic poverty, he stripped himself naked...
...That is, men did the looking and analyzing...
...men have always been the subjects, the active depictors or judges...
...The book also discusses current ideas about representation and women, calling on cutting-edge feminist theory...
...There is a shift, completed by the seventeenth century, toward interpreting nakedness from aesthetic and erotic rather than religious frameworks...
...Might not today's gender politics be anachronistic when applied to, say, third-century Carthage...
...He was halted, however, by an apparition of John the Baptist, who made the sign of the cross over his genitals-thus symbolically castrating him...
...Women were allowed into art schools only if they were naked...
...Christ himself is naked...
...A particularly interesting thesis of Carnal Knowing is that until the period of the Reformation, the naked female body was not seen as necessarily sexual...
...After this miracle, Conan was able to baptize the Persian and many other women without even noticing which sex they were...
...One day, when a gorgeous Persian woman presented herself for baptism, he was so disturbed that he fled the monastery...
...But Margaret Miles, who teaches historical theology at Harvard and writes frequently about the visual arts, describes in Carnal Knowing a different and more practical agenda-one in which women recognize and assert their own differences and their status as subjects, not objects...
...Carnal Knowing is a painstaking scholarly review of a hot subject...
...When the adult was finally prepared to enter the baptismal waters, she or he would remove all garments-symbolizing secular values and interests--and come forth stark naked, like a newborn baby entering a new world...
...The social practice of professional painting," writes Miles, "also insisted on the painter's maleness, as academies in which figure-drawing and painting from nude models were taught did not admit women...
...and the reality of classical misogyny...
...When Perpetua, a third-century Christian arrested and imprisoned with her nursing newborn child, dreamed of her own impending martyrdom, she imagined that her naked body became male, strong, and athletic...
...Neither was Original Sin construed as sexual desire...
...Adult baptism was the crucial rite of entry into Christian community, and it followed a lengthy period of fasting, exorcism, and instruction...
...After all, Augustine and Paul and Rembrandt and the monk Conan never intended all their hard work to be submitted to twentieth-century feminist analysis...
...But by the period of the Renaissance and Reformation, representations of female nakedness change-women are sensual and sinful, presented for the voyeur's assessment...
...And the feminine psyche is subjected to the experience of being an object, of being one who "poses...
...So, as we proceed through the Christian centuries we see human nudity at first as a sign of innocence and fragility...
...Some historians (the stick-to-the-text-only sort) might consider it cheating when Miles unearths certain gender assumptions from the sources she examines...
...People who do not represent themselves live under conditions in which their subjective lives-their feelings, concerns, and struggles-are marginalized from public interest...
...Conan, it turns out, was uncomfortable about baptizing (and anointing) naked women...
...From Manet's Dejeuner sur I' herbe to contemporary "men's" magazines, nudity becomes the condition of the female only...
...women are represented...
...Women's bodies have always been objects of consideration...
...Men present...
...Miles points out that nudity, associated with religious values, had plenty of positive meaning for early Christians...
...The male can be as naked as the female...
...The second half of the book considers textual and artistic representation of female nudity...
...She is ever the object-vulnerable, erotic, whatever the eye of the beholder can confer...
...It shows how the feminine body is assimilated to the male gaze...
...Peggy R. Ellsberg There is a sixth-century record of a Palestinian monk named Conan, who was in charge of performing baptisms...
...In the baptismal ceremony, nakedness meant innocence and new birth...
...And representations reinforce and perpetuate certain social norms...
...Miles states clearly, however, that her book attempts not to alter history, but to urge that the exploration of "female subjectivity is all the more pressing" once one has seen how abundantly historical sources illustrate its absence in the past...
...they also live in constant danger of misrepresentation...
...Fully clothed males enjoy her and fetishize her, disdain and abuse her, whichever they prefer...
...Perhaps the most accurate test of whether a social group has political power is to ask whether that group enjoys the power of self-representation...
...For at least the decade of the 1970s, it seemed that modern feminists were hoping for a miracle like Conan's, one that would eliminate sexual difference and usher in a just and serene social order...
...The ceremony was extremely powerful, and was often associated with miracles like the one that befell Conan...
...Miles points out that medieval (and some modern) women so internalized the image of their bodies as sinful that they engaged in severe and even fatal ascetic practices...
Vol. 117 • November 1990 • No. 19
