Content area
Full Text
ABSTRACT: The politics and aesthetics of nakedness was, for Victorians, both complex and slippery, the result of ambivalent nineteenth-century attitudes toward the unclothed body. This essay argues that such vexed attitudes about nudity and nakedness in Victorian Britain cannot fully be comprehended without reference to the experience of empire. Colonialism's seemingly timeless fascination with indigenous undress provoked a number of questions about human difference, evolution, and the nature of civilization. Analyzing different readings of nakedness in the worlds of science (especially anthropology), high art, and popular culture, this essay examines the enduring association between savagery and the lack of clothing.
This essay was first presented as a plenary address at the 2007 NAVSA/VSAWC Conference.
When T. H. Huxley, that most consummate of nineteenthcentury scientists, wrote to the Colonial Office in 1869 requesting that colonial administrators supply him with naked photographs of the locals, his seemingly dispassionate request for scientific data was duly passed on to governors around the Empire. Administrators at the Colonial Office saw no problem with the request, sending it out to governors in a wide variety of British colonies. Certainly the response from the colonies was mixed. Some governors sent portfolios of indigenous people photographed without clothes. Others apologetically sent photos of clothed people, while another group explained that requests for naked modeling might prove tricky with the locals. The photos Huxley did receive were a pretty stock collection, unremarkable for the most part, more interesting for what they tell us about the politics of aesthetics and colonial practice than about their often anonymous subjects.
It is this politics I aim to explore here, the meaning and significance of colonialism's lengthy and seemingly timeless fascination with colonial nakedness. A lack of clothing among colonized individuals has connoted primitiveness and savagery since at least the seventeenth century. While the sculptures and the statuaries of ancient Greece that celebrated the heroic, naked male body were, and often continue to be, read as the pinnacle of a civilized aesthetic, the unclothed African, Australian, Aboriginal, or Pacific Islander signified rather an absence of civilization. This seeming paradox is worth our attention for what it tells us about colonial perspectives. The vexed and ambivalent state of nineteenth-century attitudes to the unclothed body makes the Victorian era...