Free and Natural: Nudity and the American Cult of the Body (Nature and Culture in America) - Hardcover

Schrank, Sarah

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812251423 ISBN 13: 9780812251425

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019

Synopsis

From Naked Juice® to nude yoga, contemporary society is steeped in language that draws a connection from nudity to nature, wellness, and liberation. This branding promotes a "free and natural" lifestyle to mostly white and middle-class Americans intent on protecting their own bodies—and those of society at large—from overwork, environmental toxins, illness, conformity to body standards, and the hyper-sexualization of the consumer economy. How did the naked body come to be associated with "naturalness," and how has this notion influenced American culture?

Free and Natural explores the cultural history of nudity and its impact on ideas about the body and the environment from the early twentieth century to the present. Sarah Schrank traces the history of nudity, especially public nudity, across the unusual eras and locations where it thrived—including the California desert, Depression-era collectives, and 1950s suburban nudist communities—as well as the more predictable beaches and resorts. She also highlights the many tensions it produced. For example, the blurry line between wholesome nudity and sexuality became impossible to sustain when confronted by the cultural challenges of the sexual revolution. Many longtime free and natural lifestyle enthusiasts, fatigued by decades of legal battles, retreated to private homes and resorts while the politics of gay rights, sexual liberation, environmentalism, and racial equality of the 1970s inspired a new generation of radical advocates of public nudity.

By the dawn of the twenty-first century, Schrank demonstrates, a free and natural lifestyle that started with antimaterialist, back-to-the-land rural retreats had evolved into a billion-dollar wellness marketplace where "Naked™" sells endless products promising natural health, sexual fulfilment, organic food, and hip authenticity. Free and Natural provides an in-depth account of how our bodies have become tethered so closely to modern ideas about nature and identity and yet have been consistently subjected to the excesses of capitalism.

About this title

About the Author

Sarah Schrank is Professor of History at California State University, Long Beach and author of Art and the City: Civic Imagination and Cultural Authority in Los Angeles, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction
On Being Free and Natural

In 1916, the prolific journalist George Wharton James, famous for his colorful accounts of Native American life in the Southwest and florid Southern California boosterism, self-published a memoir entitled Living the Radiant Life: A Personal Narrative. Featuring a swirl of modern Christian thought, praise for Whitman's and Twain's portrayals of America, shameless name-dropping, and references to his own Western adventuring, the book is most remarkable for James's extolling the body beautiful and his quest for a liberated experience in nature. From his opening line, "Everything in Nature is radiant," James explored his theory that if human beings could just marry mind, body, and soul through encounters with nature, we all could achieve longevity and vigorous health. Living the Radiant Life developed contemplations on the physical self that James had introduced in his earlier writing, including his conviction that it would be far better to "know the sanctity of nudity, rather than to cover the body."

In prose startlingly reminiscent of today's New Age lingo, James described ideal health as emanating from the body in straight, parallel lines, invisible to everyone but the occultist's eye, but experienced personally as charisma, vigor, and joy. The healthy body was a radiant body full of energy and "life-force." This life-force might also be described as a series of auras that in a healthy body were experienced as strong pulsing waves. In a sick body, however, the auras lost power, pulsed weakly, and created a "confused direction." For James, such feelings of malaise were evidence that mind and body were deeply connected and optimal health meant lining up one's psyche with one's corporeal being. Unlike medical practitioners of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who understood the body as a battleground upon which to fight illness, James believed the body to be a container of experiences, some good, some bad, but with infinite possibility for happiness. As he asked his readers, "I want to radiate spiritual health. Do you?"

The key to the radiant health James held dear was the life lived outdoors, and so he instructed his readers first to emulate the American Indian: "Learn of him and be wise. He is a believer in the virtue of the outdoor life, not as an occasional thing, but as his regular, uniform habit. He lives out of doors; and not only does his body remain in the open, but his mind, his soul, are ever also there." Native Americans, however, were not the only guides to radiance. In extolling the physicality of the outdoor life, James also exposed a profound, and possibly homoerotic, fetishism of the working man's body: Fishermen had "brawny arms and shoulders and backs"; sea captains were "brave, powerful, massive men"; and loggers "[swung] their axes or handled the huge logs with an ease and power that stagger the ordinary city man." Three weeks spent riding with real cowboys turned James from a "dyspeptic, sleepless, and anemic" mess into a radiant being full of vim and vigor.

For James, the radiant life of the outdoors trumped the modern industrial urban world which, despite its "pleasures in the ballroom," were accompanied by "languor the next day, ennui, jealousy, heart-burnings, gossiping, cruel slandering, [and] ruination of health." The city was not just full of emotional pitfalls and vulnerability hangovers caused by the overstimulation of the senses, it was inherently unnatural, with the "artificial never equal to the real," as electricity turned night into day and reversed the "natural order of things." Fashionable dress, too, received James's derision as it invited flattery that was "hollow, insincere, and corrupting." To succumb to urban pleasures, many of which were pleasures of the flesh, was to sully the body and weaken the spirit. Though this censoriousness reflects the Christian ideology James expounded upon in his collected writing, his meticulous effort to separate the denigration of the clothed body indoors from the virtues of the naked body out-of-doors also reflected a keen desire to display the very body he shaped. It may have been nature's challenges that whittled away fat, tanned the skin, and hardened muscle but it was in the city where the radiant body had intrinsic value.

For all of James's clear directives for achieving a blissful life, his own was marked by conflict and contradiction. A British Methodist minister, James immigrated to the United States in the 1880s with his wife, first settling in Long Beach, California, only to have her sue him for divorce for adultery and to be defrocked by the church for fraud and sexual misconduct. Smeared in the Los Angeles Times for tales of "revolting domestic crimes" and sexual deviance too "filthy" to print, James was all but run out of town. While he would eventually be reinstated, James left his ministry behind and instead pursued a career as a journalist, photographer, editor, booster, and health fanatic, often contributing to Physical Culture magazine, pet project of tabloid publisher and body cultist extraordinaire, Bernarr Macfadden. Littered with pseudoscience, radical diet regimens, sex advice, vanity shots of Macfadden in a variety of athletic poses, celebrity exposés, and lots of advertising for beauty-enhancing commodities promising success in the emergent urban industrial world, Physical Culture, first published in 1899, represented the height of early twentieth-century body cultism. James's enthusiasm for corporeal and spiritual experiences outside the city, in nature, might seem out of place in Physical Culture and yet it was there that the original chapters of Living the Radiant Life first appeared and it was to Macfadden that James gave heartfelt thanks in his foreword.

While neither the first nor the only proponent of the modern life lived out-of-doors, James serves as a sublimely articulate advocate of what became the free and natural lifestyle in the United States. In his tastes for nudity, vegetarianism, sexual exploration, primitivism, Southern California leisure culture, mind-body ideology, "God is everywhere" New Thought philosophy, health fads, and physical exercise, James literally embodied the modern impulse to be liberated from the stresses of an urban capitalist life by channeling his energies into one lived "naturally." To be free and natural was not simply to retreat to the wilderness and never to return to civilization. To be free and natural in the modern age was to select carefully from a range of spiritual ideologies, body practices, health philosophies, sexual identities, and commodities to shape a "lifestyle" of free and natural living. The naked body, laden as it has been with conflicted meanings and representations, often served, both in James's time and today, as the key signifier of authentic experience in modern urban environments.

Over a hundred years after James fixated on the body as both the site of toxic moral corruption and the key to robust natural health, Americans continue to pursue a wide range of body practices as a means to achieve optimal well-being and reconnect with the natural world. While some of these practices may be subcultural, the ideas behind the free and natural lifestyle pervade many aspects of American culture, affecting everything from the interior design of domestic space to the marketing of everyday commodities. Free and Natural: Nudity and the American Cult of the Body thus explores the origins, evolution, and cultural practice of a modern lifestyle that privileged nature, nakedness, and a quest for authenticity in tandem with, and in reaction to, the rise of twentieth-century consumer capitalism. By calling it a "lifestyle," Free and Natural evokes and retains the complex relationship proponents of natural living had with consumer culture, often absorbing it into their daily lives at the same time that they tried to free themselves of it. The free and natural lifestyle has taken many forms in the United States, ebbing and flowing in popularity while sometimes exhibiting conflicting philosophies, but its practitioners have consistently invested the body, nudity, nature, sex, and their concomitant spatial contexts, with heightened social and cultural significance. These five integrated themes, and their shifting relationship to one another, serve as the foundational framework of this book.

***

James's quest for authenticity and natural living through the body became a prominent feature of the American modern age as other middle-class urbanites also grew fascinated with the upkeep, cleansing, and general fitness of their bodies, producing a new cult of the body when they ascribed attributes of character development and health to physical culture regimens and diets. Purposive exercise, bodybuilding, weight loss, and cosmetic use became both therapeutic and consumer habits of a social class in search of self-identity and status in the midst of urban industrialism and as part of an economy of leisure. Concern with personal physical appearance was intertwined with the anonymity, physical mobility, increased visuality, and consumer practices that characterized daily life in early twentieth-century cities. How one looked and how one was perceived from the outside became critical factors in the successful navigation of urban capitalism. In Macfadden's Physical Culture magazine, advertisements for elocution and posture lessons ran alongside the essays on bodybuilding, fitness regimens, and mail-order forms for new health and beauty products like mouthwash and hair cream. For the native-born middle-class aspirant, or the newly arrived immigrant, the message was clear: how you looked, sounded, and smelled on the outside was far more important than anything happening on the inside. In the city, no one knew who you were so the impression you made on the senses, and especially how you looked and carried yourself, mattered. A well-formed body became a highly desired quality in a modern urban culture that increasingly fetishized fitness while the industrial economy, through the use of machines, increasingly relied less upon human strength. Fitness practices and character-building exercises became heralded as antidotes to the male impotence and effeminacy that presumably followed the corporate restructuring of labor into white-collar classes and gray flannel suits.

Molding the body into an acceptable shape and then using it to assimilate into American culture as an acceptable middle-class citizen meant that one was either white or white enough to do so. One of the many crises facing modern urban industrial America was how to reconcile xenophobia and eugenics-based social science with Progressive-Era goals to absorb the millions of immigrants passing through Ellis Island, across the United States-Mexico border, or arriving on San Francisco's Angel Island, as well as the internal migration of African Americans out of the rural South into Northern industrial cities. One way to navigate the pressures of assimilation and urban racial politics was to exert white privilege as soon as one could. Constructing a fit white body while dropping one's accent and ethnic name was a strategy available to those whose bodies were not racially marked. For women, however, such strategies were hindered by the sexualization of their presence in public, especially for women of color. White women were never subject to the same type of surveillance but the combination of late-Victorian gender ideologies about separate spheres and sexual purity (especially for wealthy women), and a lack of political power, burdened their public presence at the turn of the twentieth century with sexual overtones. The objectification of working-class women was further complicated by new patterns of courtship, especially dating, that mingled sexual possibility with the treats of the consumer economy. How these women's bodies looked and were fashioned by clothing and makeup was closely scrutinized by reformers concerned about working women's safety, but also about their threat to the social pecking order.

Anxieties also grew among the emerging middle class that their health was being compromised by exposure to pollution, crowded cities, impoverished immigrant populations, and a denatured living experience that shut out the sun and left them vulnerable to illness. Progressive reformers responded to these concerns with calls for more parks, regulations to clean up the tenements, and health programs for the urban poor. Some of the wealthiest moved to suburbs well outside the cities and traveled along the American "health belt," a route of sanitaria and resorts running through the Southwest, on new rail lines that promised access to healing climates and a return to preindustrial calm and physical revitalization. As the twentieth century unfolded, many urban dwellers began to see a tension between their corporeal health and wellness pursuits and the heightened visuality and commercial sexuality of the body in American popular culture. In other words, what started as a way to feel good in one's skin was beginning to feel like an odious pressure as the body and its fitness were becoming closely monitored status signifiers of the modern industrial age.

Along with this pressure to reshape their bodies came a new self-consciousness about the environment in which such physical exertion should take place and how much effort ought to go into producing the desired effect. Too much effort, and one could be seen as vain. Too little, and one might be perceived as lazy. Physical culture practiced outside the city, and away from neighbors and colleagues, became a sought-after ideal that included visits to health sanitaria, camping, and out-of-doors adventures permitting exposure to the sun and fresh air. Once rejuvenated, modern Americans could then return to their city life taking some of their free and natural experience back with them. Early twentieth-century celebrities such as Pierre Bernard, the "Mighty Oom," who popularized the physical practice of yoga in the United States, soon capitalized on what they rightly perceived as a market for professionalized body culture, selling wealthy urban dwellers weekend retreats for physical and spiritual nourishment as part of a general regimen of rigorous dieting and exercise. If nature was the place where the body could rejuvenate, it was in the city where the reinvigorated body could be displayed.

***

While quests for perfect health, physical fitness, and youthful beauty were consumer routes to addressing our body's flaws and fundamental impermanence, another strategy was to intentionally leave the body as bare as legally possible. This, too, has a history. Nudism as both a social activity and a means to organize one's daily life and living space emerged in the United States at the same time that modern urban industrialism reshaped American society and the American body. An effort to restore a natural experience to modern life while challenging social pressures to conform to body norms, nudism offered an opportunity to sidestep so much corporeal anxiety. Nudism can also be interpreted as an early alternative health and wellness movement because its proponents have long claimed that sustained...

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0812251423
• ISBN 13: 9780812251425
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 288