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Hairy Women and Naked Truths:
Gender and the Politics of Knowledge in Aristotle's Masterpiece
Mary E. Fissell
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IN
1744
, Jonathan Edwards heard that some of the young men in his Massachusetts
parish had been reading a "bad" book. He questioned them and the
young women whom they had teased in reference to it.
1
One of the women told Edwards that the book had a picture of a woman's
body in it, a detail that helps identify the work as Aristotle's
Masterpiece, first published in
1684
. Neither a masterpiece nor by Aristotle, this small book became
the best-selling guide to pregnancy and childbirth in the eighteenth
century, going into more editions than all other popular works on
the topic combined.
2
The book contained a startling frontispiece, perhaps the image to
which the young woman referred (see Figure I). |
1
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A close reading of this picture and
its subsequent variants suggests that the image and Masterpiece
itself could be interpreted in many ways by its audiences. The
frontispiece depicts two "monstrous" individuals, a hairy woman
and a black baby born to white parents. Each is monstrous because
each was deformed by the maternal imagination. The hairy woman's
mother, while pregnant, had looked at a picture of St. John the
Baptist in the desert, dressed in animal skins. The image imprinted
itself on her mind and thus on the body of her unborn baby. The
story emphasizes the frailty of women's understanding—the mother's
poor comprehension transformed an ascetic saint dressed in skins
into a hairy animal and produced a female monster from that distorted
impression.
3
Similarly, the black baby was born to a white couple who had a picture
of a black man hanging in their bedroom. At the moment of conception,
the woman looked at the painting, and the image supposedly imprinted
itself on the child-to-be. |
2
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This frontispiece is paradoxical.
Why would a book ostensibly intended for pregnant women include
such an image of monstrosity? After all, if the maternal imagination
functioned as these stories suggest it did, such a picture is the
last thing a pregnant woman should be looking at. The makers of
Aristotle's Masterpiece—by "makers" I mean writers, editors,
publishers, printers, booksellers, and woodblock engravers—chose
their frontispiece well. This curious image and its subsequent variants
spoke to tensions about maternity and paternity at the moment of
the book's first creation in the late seventeenth century and drew
on a variety of images circulating in cheap print, creating a rich
palimpsest of meanings.
4
These frontispieces also conveyed one of the Masterpiece's
most distinctive features, namely its implicit argument about knowledge
and secrecy. The text made an important intervention in the history
of what I call "vernacular epistemology"—how ordinary people understood
knowledge and knowledge claims. Unpacking the picture's paradoxes
helps us understand a particular intersection in the histories of
gender relations and natural knowledge. |
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