Two of the most visually striking figures in nineteenth-century American literature are Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne and Herman Melville’s Queequeg. Both stand out primarily for their marked bodies, for the ways in which their personal and communal histories are, in one way or another, physically inscribed on them. The scarlet A on Hester’s bosom, for example, signifies her transgression of the laws of the Puritan fathers and is intended to be a reminder of the wages of sin. Hester’s marked body thus functions as her personal punishment yet also as a threat to others who may be tempted to follow...

Claiming to have 365 designs tattooed onto her body, Nora Hildebrandt was employed by Bunnell’s Museum in New York City in 1882 as a “tattooed lady,” one of the first in U.S. history. Her tattoos and the narrative behind them attracted curious audiences to her performance. Whether the tale was told to appease the inevitable critics of a woman who would allow her body to be thus marked and displayed or simply to increase interest in (and revenue from) her show, Hildebrandt claimed that her father, tattoo artist Martin Hildebrandt, had been forced to tattoo her while both were being...

In George Thompson’s sensational novel City Crimes; or Life in New York and Boston (1849), the sensual libertine Josephine Franklin is punished for denying her sexual favors to the villainous Dead Man, a criminal who murders, mutilates, and blackmails indiscriminately throughout the novel. Armed with the knowledge of Josephine’s responsibility for her own father’s murder, the Dead Man attempts to blackmail her into having sex with him. When she refuses—out of disgust at his hideous appearance rather than any qualms of virtue—he responds with an act of vengeance planned to rob her of any power within her world...

The erasure of disfiguration from the female body, enacted rhetorically in Herman Melville’s Typee and in the memoirs of Susan Thompson Lewis Parrish, became a reality in the late nineteenth century with advancements in medicine and, especially, aesthetic surgery.¹ Women no longer needed to rely exclusively on the veil, as did Olive Oatman and the fictional Josephine Franklin, to divert the public gaze from their marked faces. Essential to the presentation of these innovative surgical methods to the public, however, was an assumed relationship between bodily modification, class, and gender. Appealing to readers’ reverence for “high art,” religion, and domesticity,...

When the Civil War began in April 1861, African American men attempted in vain to volunteer for military service. As historian Jim Cullen writes, “The efforts of abolitionists to the contrary, secession, not slavery, was the pretext for the outbreak of hostilities, and the Lincoln administration assiduously courted slaveholding states still in the Union by avoiding any appearance of restructuring existing race relations” (78). For all their differences, most northern and southern white men agreed that this was, indeed, a whiteman’s war and objected to the idea that black men, slave or free, should occupy a role formerly reserved only...

In the preface to her novel, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900), Pauline Hopkins claims that she writes in order to “raise the stigma of degradation from [her] race” (13). The use of the word “stigma” here in Hopkins’s declaration of her commitment to racial uplift is anything but incidental. As I demonstrated in chapter 4, the physical stigmata of slavery resulting from brutal abuse and debilitating labor were used not only to attract support for the abolitionist cause in antebellum America but also, paradoxically, to support racist beliefs about the physical, mental, and...

Irene Woodward, the “tattooed lady” who appeared on stage just weeks after the debut of Nora Hildebrandt, told the New York Times that she had decided to exhibit herself after seeing Captain Costentenus, the man who claimed he had been forcibly tattooed by indigenous women while being held captive. While it is not clear exactly what it was about Costentenus’s performance that inspired Woodward, it is likely that his one thousand dollar a week salary had something to do with it. As Margot Mifflin, author of Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo, observes, “As the popularity...