Victorian Strangeness: A gruesome end to an argument
Author Jeremy Clay tells the story of the woman who cut off her leg to spite her husband.
He wouldn't take no for an answer, that much was clear. The man had turned up unannounced at the London home of The Lancet with a mysterious package under his arm and an urgent look in his eyes. It was late. It was emitting a faint but disagreeable smell. But he demanded to be heard, and wasn't going to budge.
And so he was led to the editor's office, where events immediately took an unexpected turn. The visitor dumped the bundle on a desk and yanked out a human leg. "There!" he cried, brandishing the limb with the triumphant air of someone who had just proved a conclusive point in an ongoing row. "Is there anything the matter with that?"
The assembled staff of the medical journal gazed upon it. No, they were forced to conclude, drawing deep from their accumulated specialist knowledge, there was nothing outwardly wrong with it at all, save for the fact it was longer attached to a body.
"Did you ever see a handsomer one?" challenged the visitor. Perhaps they had, perhaps they hadn't, but it was certainly an attention-grabber. "A very fair symmetrical lower extremity," the Shields Daily Gazette noted in November 1862, "which had evidently belonged to a woman."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-27836559
jollyreaper2112
(1,941 posts)So she cut off her leg to spite her husband. What a nut.
Mnemosyne
(21,363 posts)politicat
(9,808 posts)This paragraph stands out:
Until relatively recently, he said, the leg was where he liked it best - on his wife. He was a great admirer of both the leg and the accompanying foot, he told them. She knew that all too well. But they'd had a fierce quarrel a few days before, and she'd stormed out of the house, vowing "she would be revenged upon him, and that he should never see the objects of his admiration again".
It's the great admirer phrase that catches my attention, combined with the quarrel. This didn't come out of a single quarrel. Fetishes exist, and always have. I can also see a Victorian woman being sufficiently uncomfortable with a foot fetish that she would rather not have it than have to live with being the object of the fetish. Given that she had no other out (in 1862, she had no ability to divorce, no right to property, no right to her children, and even if she could find someone willing to hire her, legally every cent belonged to her husband) it may have seemed less painful.
The morals of today's historical oddity: talk your shit out. Protect women's rights. Don't lie to doctors.