Aberrational bodies: dramatic and literary representations of early modern humorality

Abstract

For early modern authors, the body and its many associated fluids, functions, and forms elicited anxiety concerning the body's purity and the threats that could change or harm an individual. Many early modern authors depicted characters with mutable bodies who express a desire to maintain physical solidity. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the many patriarchal strictures placed upon aberrational bodies. This thesis examines masculine anxiety concerning the many bodily possibilities available in early modern medical ideologies: including the possibility that a woman may direct own desires via her changeable body, that a male might become humorally saturated and feminized if he cross-dressed or, conversely, if he appropriated a woman's clothing for his own sexual satiation, and that a Native American and Jewish body could, on the early modern stage, become indistinguishable through their shared physical humiliations.