[BGB] Fwd: Emailing: Collect-Me-Nots - New York Times

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>Subject: Emailing: Collect-Me-Nots - New York Times
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>May 17, 2007
>Op-Ed Contributor
>
>Collect-Me-Nots
>
>By JUDITH PASCOE
>
>Correction Appended
>
>Iowa City
>
>THE owner of Napoleon’s penis died last Thursday 
>in Englewood, N.J. John K. Lattimer, who’d been 
>a Columbia University professor and a collector 
>of military (and some macabre) relics, also 
>possessed Lincoln’s blood-stained collar and 
>Hermann Göring’s cyanide ampoule. But the penis, 
>which supposedly had been severed by a priest 
>who administered last rites to Napoleon and 
>overstepped clerical boundaries, stood out 
>(sorry) from the professor’s collection of 
>medieval armor, Civil War rifles and Hitler 
>drawings.
>
>The chances that Napoleon’s penis would be 
>excised so that it could become a souvenir were 
>improved by his having lived and died at a 
>moment when the physical remains of celebrities 
>held a strong attraction. Shakespeare didn’t 
>become Shakespeare until the dawn of the 
>romantic period, when his biography was written, 
>his plays annotated and his belongings sought 
>out and preserved. Trees that stood outside the 
>bard’s former homes were felled to provide 
>Shakespearean lumber for tea chests and tobacco 
>stoppers.
>
>After Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, his 
>possessions toured England. His carriage, filled 
>with enticing contents like a gold tongue 
>scraper, a flesh brush, “Cashimeer 
>small-clothes” and a chocolate pot, drew crowds 
>and inspired the poet Byron to covet a replica. 
>When Napoleon died, the trees that lined his 
>grave site at St. Helena were slivered into 
>souvenirs.
>
>The belief that objects are imbued with a 
>lasting essence of their owners, taken to its 
>logical extreme, led to the mind-set that caused 
>Mary Shelley to keep her husband’s heart, dried 
>to a powder, in her desk drawer. Of course, 
>relic collecting long predates the romantic 
>period; medieval pilgrims sought out fragments 
>of the True Cross. In the aftermath of the 
>Reformation, religious relics that had been 
>ejected from monasteries joined secular 
>collections that freely intermingled belemnites 
>with saints’ finger bones. When Keats died, his 
>hair took on the numinous appeal of a religious 
>artifact.
>
>Napoleon’s penis was not the only Napoleonic 
>body part that became grist for the relic mill. 
>Two pieces of Napoleon’s intestine, acquired by 
>the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of 
>England in 1841, provoked a long-simmering 
>debate beginning in 1883. That year, Sir James 
>Paget called the specimens’ authenticity into 
>question, contrasting their seemingly cancerous 
>protrusions to the sound tissue Napoleon’s 
>doctor had earlier described. In 1960, the 
>dispute continued in The Annals of the Royal 
>College of Surgeons of England, long after the 
>intestine pieces had been destroyed during a 
>World War II air raid.
>
>Dr. Lattimer, a urologist, could claim a 
>professional interest in Napoleon’s genitalia. 
>Not so its previous owner, the Philadelphia 
>bookseller and collector A. S. W. Rosenbach, who 
>took a “Rabelaisian delight” in the relic, 
>according to his biographer, Edwin Wolf. When 
>Rosenbach put the penis on display at the Museum 
>of French Art in New York, visitors peered into 
>a vitrine to see something that looked like a 
>maltreated shoelace, or a shriveled eel.
>
>Whether the object prized by Dr. Lattimer was 
>actually once attached to Napoleon may never be 
>resolved. Some historians doubt that the priest 
>could have managed the organ heist when so many 
>people were passing in and out of the emperor’s 
>death chamber. Others suggest he may have 
>removed only a partial sample. If enough people 
>believe in a possibly spurious penis, does it 
>become real?
>
>The pathos of Napoleon’s penis — bandied about 
>over the decades, barely recognizable as a human 
>body part — conjures up the seamier side of the 
>collecting impulse. If, as Freud suggested, the 
>collector is a sexually maladjusted misanthrope, 
>then the emperor’s phallus is a collector’s 
>object nonpareil, the epitome of male potency 
>and dominance. The ranks of Napoleon 
>enthusiasts, it should be noted, include many 
>alpha males: Bill Gates, Newt Gingrich, Stanley 
>Kubrick, Winston Churchill, Augusto Pinochet. 
>Nevertheless, the Freudian paradigm has never 
>accounted for women collectors, nor does it 
>explain the appeal of collections for artists 
>like Lisa Milroy, whose paintings of cabinet 
>handles or shoes, arrayed in series, animate 
>these common objects.
>
>It’s time to let Napoleon’s penis rest in peace. 
>Museums are quietly de-accessioning the human 
>remains of indigenous peoples so that body parts 
>can be given proper burial rites. Napoleon’s 
>penis, too, should be allowed to go home and 
>rejoin the rest of his captivating body.
>
>Judith Pascoe, a professor of English at the 
>University of Iowa, is the author of “The 
>Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare and Curious History 
>of Romantic Collectors.”
>
>Correction: May 18, 2007
>
>An Op-Ed article yesterday, about collecting 
>relics, misstated Napoleon’s fate at Waterloo. 
>He formally surrendered a month after the 
>battle; he was not captured there.
>
>
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