ABSTRACT
In one of his Hypochondriack papers, James Boswell speculates somewhat wishfully, 'It would truly be very pretty and amusing if our bodies were transparent, so that we could see one anothers sentiments and passions as we see bees in a glass hive.'1 Boswell's reference to the glass hive suggests that he has taken the idea from Laurence Sterne - were there a 'glass in the human breast,' Tristram Shandy says, 'nothing more would have been wanting, in order to have taken a man's character, but to have taken a chair and gone softly, as you would to a dioptrical bee-hive, and looked in, - viewed the soul stark naked .. .'2 Alexander Pope, writing to Charles Jervas, indicates a similar desire for direct access to the heart: 'The old project of a Window on the bosom to render the Soul of Man visible, is what every honest friend has manifold reason to wish for.'3 Pope uses the same figure in a letter to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: 'If Momus his project had taken of having Windows in our breasts, I should be for carrying it further and making those windows
Casements: that while a man showd his Heart to all the world, he might do something more for his friends, e'en take it out, and trust it to their handling/4
Fusing the literal and metaphorical meanings of heart, the image of a window in the breast makes the soul, or interior being, anatomically accessible. This image for interior revelation originates in satire as an image for interior exposure. In Lucian's Hermotimus, Momus is reported to have criticized Hephaestus for creating man without 'a window in his chest, so that it could be opened and everybody could see his thoughts and intentions and whether he was telling the truth or not.'5 Sterne and Boswell combine Momus's window with a modern scientific contrivance (the dioptrical beehive) while Pope retains the architectural and anatomical suggestiveness of the image. But all three writers use the window-on-the-breast metaphor to convey a sense of predicament on account of the impossibility of direct access to thoughts and emotions. Transparency of body would figuratively solve the problem by transferring to mental and passional experience the sort of substantiality and visibility that belong to physical organs. The uses of this image are one indication of the eighteenth-century interest in interior discovery.
