Anatomies: A Cultural History of the Human Body (12 page)

Noses have also drawn the more serious attentions of men with rulers and protractors. The physician and traveller François Bernier was the first to attempt to classify the human population into races, long before the project got into its stride in the nineteenth century. He made a twelve-year voyage to Egypt, the Middle East and India, and wrote an account of his journey called
Travels in the Mogul Empire
. He returned to the salons of Paris dubbed Bernier Grand Mogol, although when Louis XIV asked him which of the countries he had visited he liked best, he apparently replied: ‘Switzerland’. In 1684, he anonymously published his scientific ideas in
A New Division of the Earth by the Different Species or Races which Inhabit It
. He divided the world’s peoples into four groups: Lapps, Sub-Saharan Africans, Central and East Asians, and a large remainder group including Europeans along with North Africans, people of the Middle East and South Asia and Native Americans. His classification is noteworthy for largely ignoring skin colour and relying instead on physiognomic features, and in particular the shape of the nose. The nose featured in most systematic anthropometric projects thereafter, its casual role in defining race gaining new scientific respectability. That data is useful today in planning nasal surgery, but it never said much about race. The fact is that real people’s noses so often fail to conform to the parameters of their supposed racial type that they were always a useless measure of anything at all. It is perhaps odd that Bernier was not alerted to this early on since, as a student in Paris, he had made friends with Cyrano de Bergerac, whose nose seems to have deserved a category of its own.

From such categorization it is but a short step to impute distinctive character to various nose shapes. Inevitably, the phrenologists and physiognomists who inferred human traits from bumps on the skull and facial features had their nasal counterpart. The eighteenth-century Dutch anatomist Petrus Camper tried to gauge intellect from the slope of the nose, a notion based on the fact that this angle changes from infancy into adulthood. ‘The idea of stupidity is associated, even by the vulgar, with the elongation of the snout,’ Camper wrote. According to his measurements, Classical busts had the most vertical noses, with modern Europeans, Asians and Africans following in that order. To the race anthropologists who followed in his wake, Camper’s metric implied a ranking of races, although Camper himself stated his belief that both black and white shared the same descent from Adam and Eve.

The American publisher Samuel Wells itemized four nose profiles in his popular phrenological annuals (four being a reminder of earlier schemes that linked facial types with the four humours). His ideas were expanded with unpleasant gusto by John Orlando Roe, an ear, nose and throat surgeon in Rochester, New York. In 1887, Roe published a paper defining five nose types: Roman (indicative of ‘executiveness or strength’), Greek (‘refinement’), Jewish (‘commercialism or desire for gain’), Snub or Pug (‘weakness and lack of development’), and Celestial. Roe’s anti-Semitism is striking – Wells had characterized the ‘Jewish or Syrian nose’ more kindly as denoting ‘shrewdness, insight into character, worldly forecast, and dominant spirit of commercialism’. ‘Celestial’ was Roe’s own addition. I have absolutely no idea what shape a celestial nose is, although Google Images helpfully informs me that the actress Carey Mulligan has one. Roe says it has the same unattractive attributes as the snub nose, with the addition of ‘inquisitiveness’.

Roe’s interest in promoting such a typology is all too clear: his speciality was ‘correcting’ snub noses, to which end he introduced the innovation of operating from within the nostrils so as to leave no visible scar. In late nineteenth-century America, a snub nose was thought undesirable because it was identified with the nose of the degenerate Irish immigrant. Fifty years later, in Nazi Germany, it was the supposedly large nose of the degenerate Jew that was anathema. The nose is seen according to the prejudices of the times.

Laurence Sterne anticipates much of the nonsense that would flow from the scientific measurement of noses and their subsequent organization into ‘types’. Tristram Shandy finds in his father’s library a treatise by one (fictional) Prignitz, and quotes with approval his findings that ‘the osseous or boney parts of human noses . . . are much nearer alike, than the world imagines’, and ‘the size and jollity of every individual nose, and by which one nose ranks above another, and bears a higher price, is owing to the cartilagenous and muscular parts of it’. He concludes satirically that ‘the excellency of the nose is in a direct arithmetical proportion to the excellency of the wearer’s fancy’.

The nose features abundantly among the many idioms we use that are based on parts of the body. We nose around in other people’s business or keep our nose clean, we follow our nose or pay through the nose, we put somebody’s nose out of joint or cut off our own nose to spite our face, we stick our nose in the air or keep it to the grindstone. But most parts of the body, both external and internal, get their turn. We have a nose for trouble, but a head for business and an eye for detail. We could, for instance, rework Shakespeare’s ‘seven ages of man’ speech from
As You Like It
entirely in terms of body idioms associated with those ages. The infant has skin as smooth as a baby’s bottom. In childhood, we cut our teeth and dip our toe in the water. The young man may fall head over heels in love and wear his heart on his sleeve. The soldier goes armed to the teeth and, if he has the stomach for it, fights tooth and nail. The justice may be even-handed or he may put his thumb on the scales. Then, in retirement, we take the weight off our feet until, growing long in the tooth, we are on our last legs. Alternatively, we could proceed from head to toe to characterize the ideal man or woman we met earlier, who might have a stiff upper lip, take it on the chin, speak straight from the shoulder, and always get off on the right foot. His or her less fortunate counterpart might be a misery guts who’s all fingers and thumbs and has two left feet.

An idiom is defined as a form of words peculiar to a given language or culture. However, many idioms to do with the body have literal translations in other languages. The French, for example, have direct equivalents of our elbow grease, butterflies in the stomach and fleas in the ear; they too learn things by heart, set tongues wagging, and find that things get on their nerves. Like us, the Italians play footsie (
far piedino
) under the table. Other linguistic pairs are more approximate: a sweet tooth is
une bouche sucrée
, a sugared mouth; we feel something in the gut, whereas Germans feel it in the kidneys (
Das geht mir an die Nieren
). Often, a hypernym or hyponym is used, an alternative that encompasses more, or makes do with less, of a given region of the body. We speak of the long arm of the law; the Czechs merely have long fingers. We fall flat on our face; Germans fall, with more precision, on their nose. The synecdoche is total when a single body part stands for the whole person, as it does when we call somebody a great brain or a helping hand, or a prick or an arsehole. Sometimes, languages wander off round the body in search of new inspiration: something that costs us an arm and a leg will cost a Frenchman the skin off his backside or the eyes in his head; and a rule of thumb becomes
une vue de nez
. The same universal bodily action, meanwhile, such as bearing a child, may generate a multiplicity of idioms: to be wet behind the ears has an exact translation in German, but a French naïf is
encore bleu
, while an Italian still has a drip on the nose. In short, few of these sayings are unique to their language as idioms are supposed to be.

There are some exceptions. The Germans seem to favour internal organs.
Ihm ist eine Laus über die Leber gelaufen
(a louse ran across his liver) means he is in a bad mood.
Der hat einen Spleen
, on the other hand, refers to somebody overly obsessed by something. In Hebrew, a person who is not to be trifled with is one who was ‘not made with a finger’. Close friends in Spanish are as nail and flesh (
uña y carne
). And in all languages, these phrases are being added to all the time: we now speak of eye candy, a bad hair day, and the arse end of nowhere. There are a few red herrings in the barrel, too. To kick against the pricks is not a modern vulgarism, as you might suppose, suggesting resistance to the idiots who are keeping you down, but a direct biblical quotation referring to the futility of plough oxen kicking against the sticks used to prod them.

Although a few of these idioms are inventive and entertaining, we notice more their sheer obviousness. The body is our most immediate and familiar source of linguistic inspiration. Its parts and our words for them are, quite simply, to hand, at our fingertips, within our grasp, or at least on the tip of our tongue. These examples haven’t sprung from famous pens, although many more imaginative ones have, and have often gone on to find their place in the language, as we saw when looking at the body in Shakespeare’s works. They are vernacular concoctions, most of them barely similes, merely slight extensions from casual observation. They are obvious, and yet also irresistible in their obviousness. Body idioms tend to be, as Rabelais, Cervantes and Shakespeare were all happy to repeat, ‘as plain as the nose on your face’.

We are all, as it happens, ‘hairy as an ape’. Humans have just as much hair as chimpanzees. It is only the fact that ours is finer, shorter and generally paler than the chimpanzee’s that leaves us free to call ourselves the naked ape. Nevertheless, we make the most of what we’ve got. Many species spend so many hours grooming themselves and one another that we should never again complain about the time our partner spends at the hairdresser, yet we are the only creatures to have conceived the idea of hairstyle.

Our hair is cultural as much as natural: nothing dates a period film like its actors’ voguish hairstyles. What hair we cut, shave or extract and what hair we allow to grow and how we shape it is our decision, but it is a decision strongly guided both by long-standing cultural traditions and by the short-term vagaries of fashion. This applies to body hair, where fashions for shaving armpits, legs and pubic hair come and go. But it applies most obviously to the displayed hair on our head.

Our body hair, and its odd thickets where the limbs join the trunk of the body, are easily explained as residual fur. But our crowning glory confuses evolutionary biologists. It may be chiefly functional, a layer of thatch to insulate our big brains. Or it may simply be what we all feel it is anyway, an evolutionary extravagance like the peacock’s tail that provides a basis for sexual selection. Certainly, this is the spirit in which we generally consider the hair. Even the Protestant reformer Martin Luther, whom one would hardly suspect of making such a remark, declared: ‘The hair is the richest ornament of women.’

An abundance of hair indicates strength in the male and beauty in the female – and therefore generative potential in both. Hair acquires great narrative value – think of Samson, Rapunzel, Sinéad O’Connor, Britney Spears – from the fact that it may be cut off and, at length, regrown. Its going and coming is an index of these abstract virtues. So it is usually a mistake for the characters in morality tales to grow too fond of their hair. ‘God, when he gave me strength, to shew withal / How slight the gift was, hung it in my hair’, wails Samson Agonistes in John Milton’s poem.

Abundant hair takes the form of shagginess in men, covering large areas of skin, and sinuous length in women. When hidden, women’s hair is equated with chastity. Putting the hair up indicates eligibility for marriage. Long, flowing hair is an indication of wantonness – our guilty culture’s imaginative extrapolation from nature’s gift of hair at puberty. Botticelli’s
Venus
, the Lorelei, Rusalka, Mélisande, Mary Magdalene and La Belle Dame Sans Merci all have long hair. The allegorical figure of Opportunity has a lock of hair falling over her eye.
Cherchez la femme
. A tangle of hair is still more troubling. The hair is a trap, like a spider’s web, made to entangle men. Belinda in Alexander Pope’s mock-heroic poem ‘The Rape of the Lock’ has her hair in ‘mazy ringlets’. And as Simone de Beauvoir observed of Brigitte Bardot: ‘The long voluptuous tresses of Mélisande flow down to her shoulders, but her hair-do is that of a negligent waif.’

Strange things happen to hair when it is cut. This dead and yet undead outgrowth from our bodies becomes both fetish and phobia. Trichophobia, a disgust of loose hairs, for example on clothes or clogging the plughole in the bath, is one of the commonest human dreads. It encapsulates the fear of entanglement, but also the sense that cut hair is abject, like nail clippings, spittle and faeces, because it has parted from the body that produced it. And yet we cherish a lock of a lover’s hair, and, increasingly, it seems, even wear other people’s hair. The singer Jamelia used to wear hair extensions, in order to transform herself, like a cartoon strip heroine, from ‘busy mum of two into my alter ego, Jamelia the pop star’, until she went in search of their source for a BBC television documentary. DNA analysis of her extensions led her to India, where she found women’s and young children’s heads being shaved, ostensibly as part of a religious ceremony, except that the hair was then kept for sale to Western buyers. Though it has gone global, the trade in hair is a long-established business. Jo March in
Little Women
and Marty South in
The Woodlanders
are among the characters in fiction who sell their hair, while poor Fantine in
Les Misérables
is forced to sell her two front teeth as well. Jo raises twenty-five dollars, Marty two sovereigns and Fantine forty francs – good money.

The women’s various reactions to their sudden loss cover the range of evolutionary theories that seek to explain the presence of hair on our head. Jo, as her mother tactlessly points out when the deed is done, has now lost what we have been told several times before is her ‘one beauty’. Jo says it will do her vanity good, she was getting too proud of her hair anyway. All four of the sisters are duly wed (as their creator, Louisa May Alcott, never was). However, Jo secures for herself not the conventional good-looker, but the stout, foreign, middle-aged Professor Bhaer – the rules of sexual selection redux. Having lost her hair, the peasant girl Marty South also loses her marriage prospect, Giles Winterborne, who dies, in true Hardy fashion, of exposure. Ironically, he had earlier responded to the shorn Marty’s complaining of headaches by saying that it must be because her head is cold. Fantine, meanwhile, consoles herself that she has at least gained her child’s warmth in exchange for her own hair.