Imre Györgyi szerk.: A modell, Női akt a 19. századi magyar művészetben (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 2004/2)

Tanulmányok / Studies - Sascha Renner: Hatalmi anatómia / Anatomy of Power

Anatomy of Power SASCHA RENNER "...Yet is all love's joy denied me For my black and ugly face. " (Monostatos, in The Magie Flute by W. A. Mozart) Actually, they should have been buried in Paris's Clamart Cemetery: so it is stated in a section of an 1813 ordinance on human remains. But this never came about. Instead, the "Hottentot Venus", to use her derogatory nickname, embarked upon her posthumous destiny as a scientific trophy that was to assert the claim of Europeans to racial superiority for decades to come. Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), France's most renowned scientist, took the body of the woman, who died in 1815, into his care. He made anatomical specimens of her genitals and brain and neatly cleaned her skeleton. As recently as thirty years ago, this skeleton was exhibited in the Musée de l'Homme in Paris, alongside a painted plaster cast of the young woman. Even before she was transformed into an ethnographic sculpture, Sarah Bartmann, for this was her European name,

1 was certainly exposed to voyeuristic scrutiny. In her lifetime, Londoners and Parisians queued up to witness her unfamiliar anatomy, including her protruding buttocks, known in the medical jargon as "steatopygia". Quite a few Khoi women have these, the Khoi being Sarah Bartmann's people who, along with their relatives the San, or Bushmen, are South Africa's oldest inhabitants. However, the stimulus to scientific inquiry stemmed from what the buttocks concealed, namely the genitalia. Travel accounts had described women of the region as having pudenda as long as a turkey's wattle.

2 For the gawking spectators as well as for researchers, whose minds were shaped by the physiognomical teachings of their time, the genitalia were manifestations of an uncontrollable libido and constituted conspicuous evidence of racial difference. (III. 1)'' In my essay I intend to show how in every respect, in anthropological as well as aesthetic discourse, Sarah Bartmann embodied the antithesis of European values. Her divergent anatomy earned her a double stigma: as an icon of racial primitiveness and as the allegoric personification of ugliness, the antithesis of the Medici Venus. Sarah Bartmann was the visible proof that legitimized the system of bourgeois ideology with its norms and values. Her brief life reads like a tragic farce. Sarah Bartmann was, it is said, born in 1789, the year that has come to signify liberty and equality. Of course, in the colonies there blew a different wind. In South Africa, the Dutch settlers had destroyed much of the indigenous population and had driven survivors into barren outer areas. Some indigenous people were employed as household helps, Sarah Bartmann among them. At the age of 21, she left for far-away England, but whether she did so of her own free will is debatable. Nevertheless, Hendrick Caezar, her master's brother and the man who accompanied her, was offering a more stimulating life as a dancer, and this must have appeared attractive for the unsuspecting young woman. This impresario was sure to make a fortune exhibiting the exotic woman. At a time when television had not yet brought the world into the living room, it was a profitable business to exhibit people who diverged from the European norm. Next to distorted and misshapen humans, "wild people" from distant lands were the main attraction of freak shows during the 19th century, making guest appearances in zoos, fairs and theatres all over Europe. Sarah Bartmann had her premiere in 1810 at 225, Piccadilly in London.

4 She was brought on stage "like a wild beast".

5 For many people in a country that had taken a leading role in fighting slavery, this vulgar spectacle was unacceptable. A fierce controversy broke out about the production's ethical and legal justification. Members of charities claimed that the woman was being forced into the humiliating performances against her will. However, the ensuing lawsuit was unable to prove anything, because Sarah Bartmann testified in clearly understandable Dutch that she was content in her present situation and was receiving half the profits in accordance with a prior agreement. Even so, Bartmann and Caezar were forced to leave London, since they had the press and public against them. A three-year tour through the northern towns of England followed. The southern counties came next, until finally Caezar decided to end the increasingly unprofitable venture and sold his rights to the performances. His successor, an animal tamer, took the young woman to Paris, and here, too, the woman with the protruding buttocks was known all over town in a matter of days. It was not only amusement-hungry audiences that were keen on Sarah Bartmann, but also science. A look at the philosophy of natural science that prevailed at this time explains why. Scholars were eager to gather the seemingly chaotic array of natural phenomena into an orderly system. They believed they could lend meaning to nature only by classifying it. Before the theory of evolution gained acceptance in the course of the 19th century, order rested on the grand idea of "the Great Chain of Being" that hierarchically ranked all living beings as though on the rungs of a ladder, each at the spot that God assigned it for all eternity. At the top of the chain stood Man as the highest earthly creature. The theory demanded links between the main