TY - JOUR
T1 - George Colman's The Iron Chest and Blue-Beard and the pseudoscience of curiosity cabinets
AU - Purinton, Marjean D.
PY - 2007
Y1 - 2007
N2 - By the mid-eighteenth century, curiosity cabinets were evolving from private, amateur collections into public, professional demonstrations that were at once scientific, commercial, educational, and sensational. The "quack" sexologist Dr. James Graham's Temple of Health and Hymen offers one example of the curiosity cabinet as public demonstration. The Temple whetted spectators' curiosity and theatricalized peeping in the same way that two contemporary plays by George Colman the Younger, The Iron Chest and Blue-Beard; or, Female Curiosity!, do. Like Graham's pseudoscientific performance, Colman's plays foreground the satisfaction of curiosity through visual inspection, making a theatrical display of the mysterious or the forbidden a type of curiosity cabinet in itself.
AB - By the mid-eighteenth century, curiosity cabinets were evolving from private, amateur collections into public, professional demonstrations that were at once scientific, commercial, educational, and sensational. The "quack" sexologist Dr. James Graham's Temple of Health and Hymen offers one example of the curiosity cabinet as public demonstration. The Temple whetted spectators' curiosity and theatricalized peeping in the same way that two contemporary plays by George Colman the Younger, The Iron Chest and Blue-Beard; or, Female Curiosity!, do. Like Graham's pseudoscientific performance, Colman's plays foreground the satisfaction of curiosity through visual inspection, making a theatrical display of the mysterious or the forbidden a type of curiosity cabinet in itself.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=76849101959&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.2979/VIC.2007.49.2.250
DO - 10.2979/VIC.2007.49.2.250
M3 - Review article
AN - SCOPUS:76849101959
SN - 0042-5222
VL - 49
SP - 250
EP - 257
JO - Victorian Studies
JF - Victorian Studies
IS - 2
ER -