Gender, Neutrality, and the Nursing Father in Pratt’s Emma Corbett
This article examines Samuel Jackson Pratt’s 1780 epistolary novel Emma Corbett; or the Miseries of Civil War, a text which represents familial relations in terms of the American Revolutionary War, as well as how this war divided families, such as the novel’s Corbett and the Hammond families, based on their national affiliation. This essay considers family in Emma Corbett by discussing representations of motherhood and masculinity. I argue that Pratt represents figurative and actual mothers in the novel as problematic in a number of ways, and he figures maternal subversiveness as in need of eradication. Instead, the neutral patriarch, who exemplifies the proper balance of sensibility and reason, is worthy of supplanting women in the text, and he is to be preferred even to sensible, poetic men and to dutiful, soldierly ones. Representations of masculinity in the novel demonstrate that to show emotion was a sensible, manly quality, but sensibility needed to be tempered lest a man become too emotional, too patriotic, or even effeminate. By critiquing masculinity as well as motherhood as they are embodied by characters like Emma Corbett, Charless Corbett, and Henry Hammond, Pratt offers Robert Raymond as the “solution” to these problems of motherhood and masculinity: he becomes a neutral, hybridized masculine and feminine patriarchal example who, as a kind of Lockean nursing father figure, repairs the Corbett and Hammond families’ damaged relationship, one instigated by their divisive national alliances.
Printing Emma Corbett: Revolutionary Violence and the Prosthetics of Typography
ABSTRACT:This essay examines Samuel Jackson Pratt’s, Emma Corbett: Or, the Miseries of Civil War (1780), a popular novel about the American Revolution that mounted an argument against the violence of the war. Pratt’s critique of the transatlantic conflict between the colonies and the mother country arises from his depiction of suffering veterans with injuries and missing limbs. In an interpolated tale that he titles “A Military Fragment,” he uses what I call a “typographical prosthetics” to represent their absent body parts. Through a creative typography that includes extended dashes and multiple asterisks, he creates an architecture of the page that visually describes the placement and displacement of limbs. He thus criticizes and remediates discourses of national conflict by making the disabled bodies of injured soldiers discernible on the page.
The Legacy of Art in Plastic Surgery
Summary The consistent relationship between surgery and art has been very well documented since 2000 BC. The close relationship between plastic surgery and art is historical and is still expected by the public and our patients. This article emphasizes the many links plastic surgery has with art, and presents a few practical examples of its reverberation in aesthetic and reconstructive plastic surgery procedures. Based on his surgical and actual sculpting activities in the realm of contemporary art, the author elaborates on 7 contributions art education affords the plastic surgery praxis, as an incentive and a reflection of its value to the plastic surgeon’s life.