HISTORY: Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America, By Kathleen M Brown, Yale University Press, 450pp. £25
FILTH, AS Kathleen Brown notes in this fascinating (and only intermittently revolting) book, is mostly the fault of others. Jonathan Swift lifted the soiled edge of its social significance in his Instructions to Servants. "When you get water on for tea," he wrote sarcastically, "pour it into the tea-kettle from the pot where cabbage or fish have been boiling, which will make it much wholesomer." Swift's inkling that the domestic help was sticking sweaty fingers in the salt cellar and sneezing on his silverware was hardly unusual. The grubby ways of servants are a constant theme in Foul Bodies: a rigorous history of rank persons, their odious habits and efforts to disavow their own dirt.
Brown’s suspiciously flecked subject is the Puritan body in colonial America, gradually sloughing European standards of cleanliness for a regime that was more vigilant, if scarcely less foul by modern standards. Colonists inherited an ambiguous attitude to bathing – in the wake of the Revolution, total immersion seemed an effeminate remnant of old-world luxury – while stressing the moral proximity of hygiene and holiness. Cotton Mather had railed against “a filthiness of flesh and spirit” in the 17th century; in the 18th and 19th Americans still conceived of the sinful body as “a grotesque container of noxious air, fluids and solids that were always threatening to escape”.
How to enfold these fetid emanations and immoral vapours? In the absence of regular washing, early-modern America relied on the shirt or shift as guarantor of bodily and spiritual sweetness. There arose, argues Brown, a kind of “linen-laundry complex” – however stained and malodorous the body underneath, clean clothes denoted civic as well as physical propriety. Linen became almost a second skin; persons stripped to their undergarments were conventionally described as “naked”.
Pious and prosperous Americans aspired to change their linen at least twice a day, so that even in hot and dusty extremis they might resemble the English dandy Beau Brummell, who advocated “no perfumes, but very fine linen, plenty of it, and country washing”.
Predictably, it was wives and mothers who ensured that the puritanical frame appeared to its freshest advantage: "behind every refined body was the labour of a woman". This fact did not stop aspirant gentlemen complaining of the steam and smell of the regular washday. Nor did women's increasing ethical responsibility for domestic hygiene put an end to the notion (long a feature of European moralism) that their bodies were precisely the source of much of the threatening fetor. Foul Bodiesis full of fastidious patriarchs, no doubt themselves humming to high heaven, for whom the female body was a leaky and stinking affront.
Thomas Jefferson, for example, wrote to his daughter Martha in 1783: “Nothing is so disgusting to our sex as a want of cleanliness and delicacy in yours.” A Virginian physician even conjectured that a woman’s body odour was a natural deterrent to potential rapists.
It was only in the 19th century, with the renewed popularity of immersion in water, that Americans began to shift their ingrained ideology of dirt. Even then, the motivations for bathing were not always clear. Whether warm or cold – experts differed on which was the more hygienic and health-giving – water was more likely conceived of as morally invigorating than physically refreshing.
By the mid-19th century, however, seaside resorts and hydropathic clinics catered to the new craze for inundation with water. Brown cites the case of the aptly named Elizabeth Drinker, who remained uneasy about bathing, preferring to down pints of emetic seawater while her husband ducked beneath the waves.
Foul Bodiesrecounts this telling micro-history of cultural change with commendable thoroughness. Brown occasionally scours her subject a little too clean, as when she asserts needlessly that the home was required to be neater than, say, the surrounding fields. But the book is especially revealing of the racial and national stereotypes that attached to hygiene. Americans were ambivalent about the bodies of their African slaves: at times, they were figured as inherently rank, at others as admirably vigorous and apparently impervious to disease. It is no surprise to read that the English found the Irish intolerably foul, but the imperial body was in turn disparaged by newly scrubbed Americans, for whom the Dutch were paragons of propriety, the English and French slovenly in the extreme.
Brown leaves off her tale of dirt and its attendant desires in the late 19th century. But the book’s contemporary implications are obvious: hygiene is a matter as much of constantly shifting cultural assumptions as of prophylaxis against discomfort and disease.
In the 1950s, Roland Barthes revealed as pure mythology the notion that washing powder penetrated clothes at some unprecedented molecular level; nobody had ever thought their sheets were as “deep” as they appeared in Persil adverts.
Cleanliness is a spiritual fantasy, and dirt (as Lord Palmerston put it) is merely "matter in the wrong place". Still, after reading Foul Bodies, one may be thankful not to have dined with the man who told a Maryland doctor, Alexander Hamilton, that he was "troubled with the open piles and, from his breeches, pulled out a linen handkerchief all stained with blood".
Brian Dillon is the author of a memoir,
In the Dark Room
(Penguin, 2005) and UK editor of
Cabinet
, a quarterly of art and culture based in New York. His
Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives
will be published in September
