Missing the Breast

Again and again in the medical, social, and more explicitly fictional narratives of the English Renaissance, representations of the female breast reify the logic that puts women in their place. Presented in a causal relationship to domestic convention, breasts demonstrate the processes through which social constructions of the feminine and physical qualities of the female become precisely coextensive. The breast identifies women, distinguishing them from men both visually and functionally: men, too, have “paps,” but women's breasts impose a necessarily gendered performance. Thomas Vicary, in The Anatomie of the Bodie of Man, writes, “But I fynde certayne profitablenes in the creation of the Paps, aswel in man as in woman: for in man it defendeth the spirituals from annoyannce outwardly: and another, by their thicknes they comfort the natural heate in defience of the spirites. And in women there is the generation of milke.” ¹ Accounts of generation that define woman as matter, man as spirit, find material proof in the production of milk, in the image of the woman acting as a vessel in the most literal possible sense. And even if, as in the Galenic model, women's genitals are imagined to mirror those of men, producing some degree of reproductive mutuality, the maternal breast is an inescapable site of difference: whatever may be said of the genitals—or, for that matter, of the arms, legs, hands, or feet—women's breasts neither look nor act like those of men. ²