Thomas Rowlandson's The Persevering Surgeon

Thomas Rowlandson's The Persevering Surgeon

In this early nineteenth-century watercolor painting depicting a woman's body being dissected, Thomas Rowlandson explores early nineteenth-century attitudes about "resurrection men," that is, people who stole cadavers for anatomical research. The prevailing idea at the time was that these people had sexual feelings about the bodies they worked upon. Thus, the surgeon's face in the drawing seems to convey lust for the dead. Victor Frankenstein would have been called a resurrection man, had his exploits to create the creature, like digging up the corpses and smuggling body parts been discovered.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which was published shortly after The Perservering Surgeon, plays with the same themes of lust or obsession with the grotesque as the painting. Many theorists studying the text point out how Victor Frankenstein's eerie fixation on his experiment can be compared to sexual obsession. To quote the article "The Queer and the Creepy: Homosexual Desire in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein," "The churchyard, a respectable site for burial, is acted upon in a perverse manner as Victor defies the law against exhuming corpses.  Victor’s pervasive action on the burial plots and rotting corpses serves as a violent and penetrative act that denotes the male sexual desire to penetrate a receptacle"(Goldman).

Mary Shelley's story would have been shaped by period-typical attitudes about resurrection men and much of the horror Frankenstein held for her readers came from the disturbing fixation Victor had on his corpses.

The Perservering Surgeon is part of the Ninteenth-Century Exhibit of this digital archive, but it also fits with other erotic works in the archive, as well as those that examine what it is to be a doctor and scientist.

Brooke Coon

Image from
Haslam, Fiona. From Hogarth to Rowlandson: Medicine in Art in Eighteenth- century Britain. Liverpool University Press, 1996.

Quotation from
Goldhammer, Elizabeth. "The Queer and the Creepy: Homosexual Desire in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein." Albeit. https://albeitjournal.com/the-queer-and-the-creepy-homosexual-desire-in-mary-shelleys-frankenstein/. Accessed 23 October 2018.

Early 1800s

Image

Painting