Introduction: Replicating Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Science and Culture

Abstract

This introductory article explores the myriad ways in which bodily replication was practised and imagined in the long nineteenth century, from efforts to artificially replicate human and animal bodies through anatomical models and taxidermy to psychological theories of mimicry and its place in human consciousness and evolution. It is contended that representations of bodies as objects and subjects of replication in literature, the arts, and popular culture interacted with wider concerns about authenticity, epistemology, identity, and animal/human, nature/culture binaries. Models, images, and stuffed specimens problematized the dichotomy between original and copy by seeking not only to replicate particular bodies but also to embody imagined ideal types. Such artificial bodily replications could sometimes be characterized by their strange unlikeness to the organic bodies that they referred to on account of their stasis, permanence, and recontextualization in the museum or cabinet. Artificial efforts to mimic organic bodies thus raised broader questions about the nature of representation. At the same time, the human body’s capacity for mimicry complicated notions of personality, suggesting that identities were relational and changeable rather than fixed and essential. Imitation could be seen as, at once, primitive and animal, and a crucial factor of mental development. Mimicry might both prop up the dichotomy between savagery and civilization, and undermine it.