Darwin's Flinch: Sensation Theatre and Scientific Looking in 1872

This article explores the relationship between Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (London: Murray, 1872) and the debates surrounding audiences of sensation theatre. It takes as its starting point a flinch performed by Darwin in a self-experiment at London Zoological Gardens. Darwin's flinch combined the act of scientific observation with a self-consciously staged emotional gesture. In the 1860s and early 1870s, the passionate and demonstrative audiences of sensation plays were similarly understood to watch themselves feeling. In this economy of emotional surfaces, actors and audience were caught up in unsettling relations between outwards expression and the remote landscape of interior feeling. Entangled in this theatrical instability, Darwin's scientific observation reflected broader cultural concerns about the reliability of the emotional body. Thus the article offers Darwin's Expression as an unusual but nonetheless suggestive artefact of theatrical spectatorship in 1872, while also contributing to recent debates about the history of objectivity and its supposedly unemotional and restrained scientific observer. It argues that the technique of self-conscious emotional spectatorship, shared by Darwin and theatre audiences, constituted a distinctive model of late Victorian emotion and visuality, in which communities of spectators were also spectators of themselves.     

Hospital Drama: Visual Theatres of the Medical Rendezvous from Asylum to Hospital with Reference to Specific Works by Anna Furse

Abstract

This paper is informed by Furse’s practice as a theatre maker in two fields of output that are connected by two factors: first, the presence of the woman patient — hysteric/subfertile respectively — within the clinical gaze; second, the significance of the womb to each pathology. In the treatment of each (explored in Furse’s theatre), lens based technologies play their part, whilst the cultural and medical can be seen to have overlapped to produce specific meaning with regard to Her body and its spectacularity. The article presents an overview of some of the key issues in precisely how the woman’s body becomes spectacular within this prosthetic medical gaze and how the medical — and theatrically designed spaces to represent these — become meaningful and potent proxemics that in turn inform medical/ theatrical spectatorship. Overarching nineteenth-century protocols at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris (where Furse’s Augustine (Big Hysteria) is set) to contemporary imaging technologies used in the treatment of subfertility with Assisted Reproduction Technologies (the topic of her Art of A.R.T. projects), it examines the way in which photography develops through cinema to X-Ray, ultrasound and then 3D/4D ultrasound to ‘capture’ the woman’s body in ways by which she becomes muted and exposed. These occular technologies that extend the gaze, first to an exterior subject and then, eventually, traversing the flesh without knife, lend specific performativity to the ‘patient’ women, within the context of hysterias and reproductive impairments respectively. Finally, issues of suspension of disbelief are addressed. The spectator’s faith in the screen-based image of Her spectacular body is interrupted in Furse’s work, which is also keenly interested in the effect of such imagery on the woman’s sense of Self. The historical and cultural leaps in this article argue that there is indeed a trajectory through the history of medical imaging since the first application of photography to anatomy to the more advanced scoping technologies of medical imaging today, and that in each era, the production of these images remain fraught with cultural implications.