Other English intellectuals were more directly influenced by Descartes. And in terms of the presumed relationship between fat and intellect, they resolved to practice what they preached. Robert Boyle, for example, a contemporary of Charleton and a follower of Descartes’s life and work, was nearly as well known for his abstemious diet and delicate physique as for his theories. His body was believed to be a demonstration of his mental fortitude, as he was praised for his “depth of knowledge” and his refusal to allow the vagaries of appetite to derail him: “he neither ate, nor drank to gratify the varieties of appetite, but merely to support nature”; for these reasons, he was deemed “thin and fine”—with the latter term here serving as a synonym of refined—like a typical “hard student.”81
English philosophers, several of whom were influenced by Descartes, treated fatness as evidence of vapidity. Such was the case with the philosopher Henry More. More’s lean physique lent credibility to his intellectual pursuits. Early in his career, More maintained an avid love affair with Cartesianism, which came to an abrupt halt as he matured. But he never escaped the swirling cultural influence articulated perhaps most notably by Descartes on the relationship between sensuality and intellect. More was known to have “reduc’d himself … to almost Skin and Bones.”82 He was praised by his own biographer for his temperance and his “ethereal sort of body,” which served as evidence of his mastery over the animal nature within.83
Figure 2.6. Peter Lely, Portrait of the Honorable Robert Boyle, 1689. Image courtesy of Bridgeman Images.
This is where, unexpectedly, the artist and diplomat Peter Paul Rubens comes back into frame. Rubens never knew Charleton, who took the post as court physician one year after the artist’s death, but he had frequent dealings with the English. In the early 1620s, Rubens could count King Charles I among his high-class art patrons and protégés. An amateur painter and art collector, Charles I had pestered Rubens for a self-portrait, which the artist reluctantly provided.84
Rubens died before Cartesianism took off. But it is worth noting that Descartes was only an important proponent, and not the progenitor, of the relationship between abstemiousness and intellect. Renaissance artists and intellectuals in England and the Low Countries often harbored a romance for Neoplatonic austerity. Rubens was, surprisingly perhaps, counted in this number. For though he is remembered for painting round and fleshy women with skin “white as snow,” he himself observed a strict diet. Writing to his nephew, Rubens lamented the fatness of so-called modern men:
The chief cause of the difference between the ancients and men of our age is our laziness.… [We are] always eating, drinking and [have] no care to exercise our bodies. Therefore, our lower bellies, ever filled by a ceaseless voracity, bulge out overloaded, our legs are nerveless, and our arms show the signs.85
The strapping Peter Paul would have none of this “flabbiness” for himself. He was known to rise at 4:00 a.m. and eat little throughout the day so that his stomach and its digestion would not get in the way of his intellectual and artistic endeavors.
The affectations of these artists, philosophers, and scientists may not have represented those of the average seventeenth-century man, but they slowly came to represent those of the typical intellectual. By the mid-eighteenth century, the archetype of the thin and refined male student and thinker was widespread, particularly in England. Still, sentiments about male slimness were divided. While some people continued to believe that a lean physique was a laudable display of a man’s ambition and dedication to higher pursuits, others claimed that it represented a moribund seriousness and a complete abandonment of healthy living.86 Thus, during the seventeenth century, when fatness began its slow decline into disrepute, it was concerns over ascetics and not aesthetics that drove the distaste for fat male bodies.
* * *
At the tail end of the seventeenth century came another important innovation by a French intellectual: racial categorization. François Bernier developed the first racial classification scheme in the Western world. Like the ideas of Descartes, the ideas of Bernier were taken up swiftly and with relish among English intellectuals.
The creation of a racial classification system had a palpable impact on conceptions of whiteness and blackness. For while intellectual men had reserved for themselves the vaunted capacity of reason, the new and rapidly spreading ideas about race suggested that rationality was, in fact, an inherent quality of white persons. This rationality was now to apply to all aspects of life, including aesthetic ideals.
As we will see, it was from the late seventeenth century through the early nineteenth century that the inception and specification of ideas about white and black “races” changed yet again the understanding of the relative appearance of white and black women. For if black women were transformed from voluptuous bodily exemplars in the sixteenth century to little, low, and foul in the seventeenth century, in the eighteenth century their presumed racial proclivities (including that of irrational and unrestrained eating) would transform them into the unsightly—even “monstrously”—fat.
PART II
Race, Weight, God, and Country
3
The Rise of the Big Black Woman
François Bernier was the salt of the earth. His parents were tillers of the soil in a small farming town in northwestern France. From these humble origins, he would go on to make a significant contribution to Western intellectual history. He would be the first person in the world to create a system of human classification based on “race.”
The field of what is today known as “race science” took off during the long eighteenth century, a period that encompasses the High Enlightenment and the peak of the transatlantic slave trade.1 France and England were cultural and colonial powerhouses during the era. Learned men from these two nations generated a significant portion of the racial scientific theories.
Though Bernier was first to market, scholars have typically overlooked or diminished the significance of his racial theories. But Bernier’s intervention in the field of race science was consequential. His work reveals the centrality of concerns about feminine aesthetics to race-making projects since their inception. That is, integral to Bernier’s and many subsequent racial classification systems was the attempt to pin down fundamental physical differences between Europeans and non-Europeans, with an intense focus on the women in various categories. These differences were to serve as proof of European superiority. In this way, whereas women’s physicality had been largely outside the social distinctions that were made between Europeans and Africans in the Renaissance, by the eighteenth century it was treated as foundational to them. The racialized female body became legible, a form of “text”2 from which racial superiority and inferiority were read.
Bernier was born in 1625 in a small town in Anjou, France. Upon the death of his parents he came under the guardianship of his uncle, a priest.3 At the age of fifteen, he moved to Paris to attend the Collège de Clermont, and it was there that this son of a farmer encountered the high gloss of the French elite, inhabiting the same adolescent social world as the celebrated French playwright Molière. At the Collège, Bernier became most closely acquainted with the notorious opponent of Descartes, the priest and philosopher Pierre Gassendi.4 In the throbbing Parisian metropolis, Bernier trained under Gassendi in philosophy and physiology. Together, the two traveled to the south of France, where Bernier earned a medical degree from the University of Montpellier in just three months. The degree, however, carried the somewhat suspect stipulation that his fast-tracked medical knowledge was not to be exercised in the French commonwealth.
Bernier then set out for different pastures. In late 1658, by then in his early thirties, he landed in India, where he would remain for the next twelve years, serving as the private physician first for Prince Dara Shikoh and then for Dara’s brother and rival for the throne, Aurangzeb. The intimate details of these events and his role as a foreign witness are described