This medical view of an ideal male who was insulated from pathogens was inextricably bound up with a parallel discourse about the maintenance of strong ego boundaries, a psychic investment in one’s bodily peripheries that effected a gradual closing (and, one might say, a closing off) of the male body, at once from the outer world of dangerous stimuli and from the inner world of threatening passions. Without a doubt, as Norbert Elias has shown, in the western world both men and women experienced a shift in their sense of personal boundaries during the early modern era where, amid changing social circumstances, rising thresholds of repugnance and shame were manifested among the upper-classes as a growing aversion to their own bodily functions and to the bodies of others. The changes wrought by new developments in table manners and etiquette were extended by the introduction of hygienic practices in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that endeavored to maximise the order and cleanliness of the social body while futher compartmentalising the bourgeois self as a discrete bodily unit.
Christopher Forth
fin-de-siècle, france, french, gender, masculinity