Full Description
An Anatomical Venus - which gives this book its title - was an eighteenth-century anatomical wax sculpture of an idealised woman, a heady mix of eroticism, death and biological verisimilitude. Venus could be opened up and pulled apart by all the men who studied her. She would give up her secrets the first time of asking. Helen Ivory's new collection The Anatomical Venus examines how women have been portrayed as 'other'; as witches; as hysterics with wandering wombs and as beautiful corpses cast in wax, or on mortuary slabs in TV box sets. A hanged woman addresses the author of the Malleus Maleficarum, a woman diagnosed with 'Housewife Psychosis' recounts her dreams to Freud, and a sex robot has the ear of her keeper. The Anatomical Venus imagines the lives of women sketched in asylum notes and pictures others shut inside cabinets of curiosity.
Contents
9 Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Sorceress to Live
10 All the Suckling Imps
12 The Kept House
13 Curse
14 Wunderkammer with Weighing Scales and Hospital Bed
15 Beggar Dark
16 Wunderkammer with Black Coffee and Ghost Moth
17 Wunderkammer with Escher Stairs and Cheshire Cat
18 Housewife Psychosis
20 The Fainting Room
22 The Little Venus
23 Cunning
24 Dissecting Venus
25 Stripped
26 Baba Yaga No Longer Reads the News
27 Poppet
28 By Water
29 Female Casebook 6
30 Chair
31 The Parlour Maid
32 Labourer's Wife
33 The Elevation
34 Walking Backwards
35 Falling
36 Farmer's Wife
37 Stillborn
38 The Boatman's Wife
39 The Housekeeper
40 Wunderkammer with Needle Girl and Tool Kit
41 The Dolls' House Mysteries
43 Doll Hospital at the Top of the Hill
44 Wunderkammer with St Dymphna Tea Towel
45 The Reformed Woman
46 Wunderkammer with Homestead and Aeolian Harp
47 Ordeal by Water
48 Wunderkammer with Ophelia and Hospital Bath
49 Wunderkammer with Glass Plate Photograph
50 Besom
51 Selling the Wind
52 The Hanged Woman Addresses The Reverend Heinrich Kramer
53 Bitch
54 Scold's Bridle
55 Hellish Nell
56 Six Signs You Might Be a Slattern
57 The Goddess Gets Her Close-Up
58 Pygmalion
59 Anger in Ladies &c
60 Vessel
63 Notes
