| The Wound and the Weapon examines how shifting social attitudes, political practices, and technological developments transformed the staging of violence in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I argue that at the same moment in which violence and death were being increasingly removed from public view, displays of violence began to eschew many of the pedagogical purposes of religious and political culture in favor of overtly exhibitionist values.;My overarching argument suggests that sensationalized displays of violence present a historically constituted phenomenon resolutely grounded within the very civilizing processes of modernity. Where Old Regime society had been predicated on an understanding of self-in-relation, modernity has gravitated toward atomized experiences of self-in-difference. The unbridgeable gulf between one self and another---both acknowledged and elided in the momentary, ephemeral recognition of the violated body---offers a prominent site of meaning within modern culture, determined as it has been by the legacy of the Enlightenment.;I begin my dissertation by considering the practice of torture and execution alongside salon painting of the pre-revolutionary period. Key salon paintings depicting sacrifice negotiated cultural anxieties about the potentially alienating effects that graphic display might have on spectators. The French Revolution offered the testing grounds for these anxieties when the spectacle of the guillotine took center stage, and my second chapter addresses this fundamentally political technology. Placing both a conceptual and a literal frame around the scene of violence, the guillotine standardized the enactment of power while reconfiguring the relationship between witnesses and the condemned. I argue that the blade of the guillotine shifted the meaningful center of violent display from the suffering body of the victim to the imperceptibly swift cut of a machine, and moved violence into ever more individuated realms of experience. At the birth of modernity, I suggest, displays of violence took on a new aspect that openly acknowledged the bodily fascination previously veiled in the draperies of edification. My dissertation concludes with the analysis of an exemplary form of modern violent display that developed in the immediate wake of the French Revolution: the "Chamber of Horrors" at Madame Tussaud's waxworks exhibition. |
