The Mansion of Happiness by Jill Lepore Read Free Book Online Page B

dates to the fifteenth century. Anatomy is a good place for the discussion—literally, the embodiment—of a political order. 25 Harvey’s
Generatione
was published the same year as Hobbes’s
Leviathan.
In
Leviathan
, Hobbes postulated the existence of a primordial state of nature—a place, very much like Jamestown, where life is poor, nasty, brutish, and short—against which the leviathan, artificial man, civil society, is formed. “Life is but a motion of Limbs,” Hobbes wrote, “the beginning whereof is in some
     principal partwithin.” The leviathan, the state, is “but an artificial man,” healthy in times of peace, sickened by treason, and felled by civil war. 26 In
Generatione
, Harvey attempted to deduce a state of nature, within the womb, out of which man was formed. In a state of nature, man is an egg.
    But Harvey had not found an egg. When he dissected does that had just mated, he never found anything in their uteruses. Not female seed, not male seed. Weeks later, he did find something; he found an embryo. But he thought he had found something else, and he called what he found, in Latin, an
ovum
, a word that, before then, had been used only to talk about birds’ eggs. 27 (Aubrey: “He wrote very bad Latin.”) 28 In 1653, Harvey’s Latin treatise was translated into English, and that
ovum
, the origins of life, an anatomical Eden, became an “egg.” But nothing inside the book made Harvey’s point so well as its frontispiece, which pictured Zeus opening an
     egg, out of which hatched all manner of creatures: a grasshopper, a lizard, a bird, a snake, a deer, a butterfly, a spider, and a baby. “
Ex ovus omnia
,” read the motto: Everything from an egg. 29
    “We shall call these vesicles
ova
, on account of the exact similitude which they exhibit to the eggs contained in theovaries of birds,” the Dutch anatomistRegnier de Graaf wrote, in 1672, when he finally found the egg Harvey was looking for—or, at least, when he thought he had found it, although what he had actually found is what is now called the ovarian follicle. 30 With de Graaf, what used to be called “female testicles” were renamed “ovaries.” Harvey appeared to be triumphing. But Harvey, who died of a stroke in 1657, was right to worry that people would think he was crack-brained.
    “Man comes not from an egg,”Antoni van Leeuwenhoek insisted in 1683, “but from an animalcule in the masculine seed.” 31 He had seen it himself. The microscope was invented in Holland between 1591 and 1608, and the Dutch Leeuwenhoek was the finest microscope maker in the world. He was not trained as an
     anatomist, but what he saw with his lenses led him, in letters to London’sRoyal Society, to challenge the authority of “your Harvey and our de Graaf.” 32 He reported on the eye of a bee and the nose of a louse. He made a particular subject of himself. He looked at “a hair taken from my eyelid”; he looked at his spit.
     “I have often viewed the
Sweat
of my face,” he wrote. 33 And then he looked atsemen (the product, he took pains to point out, not ofmasturbation but of intercourse) and reportedthat he’d found in it “animalcules,” tiny animals. 34 They could swim; they had heads and tails; they were microscopic men.
    After that, it took rather a long time for anatomists to work out what men and women contribute to generation. But from Harvey and Leeuwenhoek, for all their differences, emerged, eventually, a consensus: women aren’t men turned inside out, asGalen had thought. Women don’t have testicles, like men; they haveovaries, like hens. Women don’t make seeds; they make eggs. 35 Hobbes had argued that in a state of nature, there are no natural rulers—not a king over his people, not man over woman. Men enter a political state when they consent to be governed. But women don’t consent to a government of men; they aren’t even part of it. Women, therefore, must be not lesser men, not lesser members of thebody