DismembermentDismemberment
Page designed by Gloria Morrissey. |
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Dreaming that you are dismembered, suggests that some situation or circumstance is falling apart in your waking life. You are feeling disempowered and experiencing some great and significant loss. (From the Dream Dictionary |
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Thoughts on DismembermentThe issues created by the occurrence of dismemberment are rooted in a deep anxiety about the purpose of the body. Anxiety about the body repudiates religious emphases on the ascendancy of the soul over body. In a social reality that truly accepted the existence of the soul, physical deformation would never be a consideration. In truth, social structures are invested in the ideal of corpo sano, mens sano. The physically deformed are automatically assumed to be mentally deficient as well. Research suggests that natal physical deformation only accounts for 15% of physical anomalies. The remainder of physical abnormalities are a result of events. War creates a population of individuals whose bodies are no longer complete, at the same time that medical advances ensure that deficient bodies retain viability. WW I created a new area of anxiety concerning bodies. Whether natal or incidental, physical deformity creates a zone of discomfort for the “able-bodied.”
Dismemberment engenders a variety of emotional and visceral responses. These responses range from horror, pity, disgust and fear to humor. There is a conflation of emotions surrounding dismemberment that run the gamut from nausea to laughter. The systematic dismemberment of the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail is at once, disgusting and hilarious. Poe’s story, “The Man That Was Used Up”, similarly amuses with its tale of a perfect man reduced to spare parts. By the same token, anti-abortionist use images of dissected fetuses to control popular reactions.
The body emerges as a contested site. The word itself, “body,” functions as a metaphor for a variety of social enterprises; the body politic, a body of literature, a body of works. The human intellect continually refers to the body, a physical entity, as a metaphor for a variety of social and intellectual activities. There are frequent referents to the dismemberment of countries that serve to posit a country as a living entity.
Therefore, dismemberment in the arts serves as a complicated referent. Dismemberment functions as a constant in Western literature. Grendel wreaks havoc by dismemberment, knights carry their heads under one arm, a headless horseman holds sway in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Elizabeth I punished a detractor by chopping off his hand while unpopular heads of state all over Europe lost their heads. Numerous authors use deformity as a psychological literary device, such as The physical body persists as a site of power which could only be tamed or punished by acts of dismemberment. Gloria Morrissey |
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Conferring with the Dead: Necrophilia and Nostalgia in the 17th Century |
"To profane a dead body by cutting it to pieces has always seemed, at least to our Western eyes, an act of bestial brutality. It is one thing to do murder. It is quite another to destroy the murder victim's identity, and this is the effect of dismemberment." -- Dr. William R. Maples, forensic anthropologist, in Dead Men Do Tell Tales, pg. 61.
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“…The disabled body provides insight into the fact that all bodies are socially constructed…” ----- Tobin Siebers
“…The only way for the body to survive in the military-industrial epoch of capitalism was for it to be already dead, in fact, deader than dead.” ----- Hal Foster |
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The tooth fairy teaches children that they can sell body parts for money. David Richerby
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Thoughts on the Shape of the Human BodyHow can we find? how can we rest? how can We, being gods, win joy, or peace, being man? We, the gaunt zanies of a witless Fate, Who love the unloving and lover hate, Forget the moment ere the moment slips, Kiss with blind lips that seek beyond the lips, Who want, and know not what we want, and cry With crooked mouths for Heaven, and throw it by. Love's for completeness! No perfection grows 'Twixt leg, and arm, elbow, and ear, and nose, And joint, and socket; but unsatisfied Sprawling desires, shapeless, perverse, denied. Finger with finger wreathes; we love, and gape, Fantastic shape to mazed fantastic shape, Straggling, irregular, perplexed, embossed, Grotesquely twined, extravagantly lost By crescive paths and strange protuberant ways From sanity and from wholeness and from grace. How can love triumph, how can solace be, Where fever turns toward fever, knee toward knee? Could we but fill to harmony, and dwell Simple as our thought and as perfectible, Rise disentangled from humanity Strange whole and new into simplicity, Grow to a radiant round love, and bear Unfluctuant passion for some perfect sphere, Love moon to moon unquestioning, and be Like the star Lunisequa, steadfastly Following the round clear orb of her delight, Patiently ever, through the eternal night! ------- Rupert Brooke |
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