Andrew's Wiki
Taking Waters

Typical Water Associations

• Female power (Aphrodite’s birth; sirens)
• Birth (water = birth fluid of world)
• Baptism (new identity)
• Purification (cleansing)
• Magic
  • Wells and springs as connection with underworld
• Great Flood (destruction of world, creation of new one)
• Fountain of youth
• Healing
  • Hydrotherapy
  • High blood pressure, kidney stones, gout, infertility, arthritis, heart problems, respiratory problems, obesity, tropical illnesses, digestive problems
• Sensuality
• Holistic health

Some History and Details

• Famous baths: Bath, England (class mixing); Evian (Anna de Noailles, Proust w/super-swank hotel), Vichy, France; Baden-Baden, (summer capital of Europe during 19th c, most “glamorous” one in Europe), Wiesbaden, Germany (lots of royals, incl Romanovs; and Hitler and Himmler); Spa, Belgium (Twain, Freud, Gogol, Nietz); Montecatini, Salsomaggiore, San Pellegrino (“pilgrim,” da Vinci), Italy; Bad Ragatz, Baden, Switzerland; Marienbad, Czech Republic (Wagner inspired to write Lohengrin here)
• At first, taking baths were ritualistic and/or religious
  • Celebrating coming spring
  • Celebrating St. John the Baptist’s feast day
  • Church disapproved (naked fun! no!)
• Then, seen as therapeutic—> year-round (78)
• Could take up to a whole day to go through the baths
• Muslim world: spiritual
  • Hamams: poetic, spiritual, secluded (contrast with public and social Roman baths)
  • Silent contemplation, not Roman conversation; meditation, not Roman athletics)
  • Leave the city behind (“asphyxia of city life” 93)
  • Separated by sex, so each gender gets to associate
  • Mary Wortley Montagu called them the “women’s club houses”
• Greek world: health
• Roman world: social, religious, and therapeutic
  • Free public bathhouses to keep masses clean, not just the rich
  • Nero: “Sanitas per aquas” = “healing through water”
    • Could have been source for word “spa”
  • Some included gyms, libraries, indoor stadia, temples, gardens…!
  • Schedule: Visit dressing room, tepid waters, hot waters, hot air sauna, massaging, cold baths, out to other socializing areas (some to eat and drink as well, or even sex/find prostitutes)
  • Assoc. with decadence but also w/thirst for sport and education and socializing
  • Lots of intellectual conversation and athletics
• In Judaism, religious and purification only
• Christian Europe
  • Until Crusades, bathing seen as unnecessary, dirtiness seen as religious
  • But word of Islamic hamams brings back the baths: rebuilt over the old Roman ruins
  • Then, they’re closed w/outbreak of plagues, sometimes b/c of its immorality
  • 18th century, baths start to become popular again
    • John Wesley, cleanliness next to godliness
    • Health elements now stressed (hydrotherapy)
    • Industrialization and urbanization create need for sanitation and plumbing technologies, so the infrastructure and tech for the baths now being (re)created
• Reformation
  • Spas no longer mystical and spiritual powers, but instead scientific
  • Doctors replace the nuns and priests: “spas became hospitals” (111)
  • Mineral content of waters now seen as responsible for cures (not some spiritual force in them)
• Modern Spa: 1850s-1930s
  • By 1850s, they’re a “playpen” for the rich, complete with impressive architecture, theatres, casinos, balls, etc
    • They want to find cures from their years of indulgence (gout, dyspepsia, etc)
  • Railroads make it easier to get there
  • Crazy salad of architectural styles: Renaissance, Egyptian, Flemish, Venetian, Byzantine, Moorish….
  • Bath schedule, since Beau Nash (begun 1705): bathe at springs, drink water at pumps, breakfast at pump room; free time; dinner, stroll, water at pumps; free time; tea, entertainment
• Decline
  • Between the two wars
• Revival: since 1980s (part of environmentalism and fitness fads)

Baths’ Significance

• A society’s bathing habits reveal attitudes towards “bodies, sin, nudity, relaxation, and religion,”
• and also has a few elements:
  • “Spiritual,
  • hygienic,
  • therapeutic,
  • and social” (77)
• “Integrate mind, body, and spirit” (107)
  • Pleasure seeking: “water society” (114)
    • Claims that intimacy could easy arise when you’re in an atmosphere of “rejuvenation, transcendence, and rebirth” (114)
  • Creativity apparently released by them
    • Mind and body satisfied
    • Release from usual daily round
    • Slow movement of time
• Early spas: “wells, pools, or mineral springs thought to be endowed with magical healing abilities” (108) both phys and mental
  • Waters held divine forces in them
  • As more people came, commercialized, more involved
• Roman spas later become significant European ones when they’re back into vogue thousands of years later: Vichy in France established by Caesar as Vicus Calidus; Bath in England was Aquae Sulis; Baden-Baden in Germany was Aqua Aureliae
• Varieties:
  • Saline, chalybeate carbonate (iron salts), or sulfur springs
  • Having more or less degree of effervescence
  • Different temperatures
  • Types of bathing procedures (from Victorian age onwards)
    • Cartoons show them as torture devices
  • Some more elegant, others about class mixing

Sexuality and Courting

• Fountains and baths perennially associated with sex
  • From the ancient Roman habits of procurers hanging around to the new baths created after Crusades being hotbeds of free sex…
• Admirers following woman around called “bath shadows”

Health

• Renaissance poems said it could cure “leprye, scabs and sores” and “scurfes, and botche, and humors,” gout, leprosy, pox, dry itch, and cleans out your stomach, guts, and kidneys
• Different types of springs yield different effects
  • Saline waters (dissolved salts) for purgative effects; Chalybeate carbonate springs have tonic/restorative powers; sulfur waters are drunk or bathed in to help skin (109)
• Not only physical health, but mental health
  • Psychotherapy: nootherapeia, mind healing, introduced in 3rd century BC

Famous Adherents

• Michaelangelo (who would clean and drink only spa water) (kidney stones)
• Montaigne (kidney stones)
• Royalty
  • Elizabeth I
  • Mary Queen of Scots (rheumatism)
  • Charles II took his wives there for fertility
• Caesar, Casanova, Napoleon and Josephine (infertility), Queen Victoria (Aix-le-bains), Handel, Nijinsky, Stravinsky, Cartier, Guggenheims, Isadora Duncan, Greta Garbo
• Kaiser Wilhelm and Czar Nicholas II meet there in 1903 (wanted German help for Russo-Japanese war)
• Montecatini: Mary Pickford, Clark Gable, Grace Kelly, Katharine Hepburn, the Kennedys, Christian Dior; Strauss, Puccini
• Authors: Victor Hugo, Flaubert, Goethe (Carlsbad), Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Dickens, James, Agatha Christie, Anna de Noailles (grew up around Evian), Proust (visited Evian a lot), Diaghilev, Twain, Freud, Gogol, Nietzsche, Dumas fils
  • Turgenev snubbed Dostoyevsky at Baden-Baden! D was hurt!
  • Alexander Pope (letter): “slid…into the Amusements of this Place: My whole day is shar’d by the Pump-Assemblies, the Walkes, the Chocolate houses, Raffling Shops, Plays, Medleys, &c.” (121)
  • Dickens: thought that people with robust constitutions could truly be cured (he went for cold water cures at Malvern, but not drinking water)
• Famous Haters
  • Daniel Defoe: he hated them, compared the scene of people up to their necks in water to a picture of Purgatory
    • Smoky, slimy, promiscuous
• Madame de Sevigne
  • Also compared it to purgatory
• Elizabeth I didn’t like Bath
• Samuel Pepys: so many people in water can’t be sanitary
• Smollett noted the intermingling of social classes in 1771 (121) at Bath: “men of low birth, and no breeding…without taste or conduct….all of them hurry to Bath, because here, without any further qualification, they can mingle with the princes and nobles.”

Some Quotes

• 1830, from Julia Pardoe’s Beauties of the Bosphorus
  • Notes stifling atmosphere of the baths with their shockingly half-naked servants, the playing of children there, and the indulgence (candy, sherbet, lemonade), and the clothes (you could see the figure once it gets wet from the steam)
  • “the illusory semblance of a phantasmagoria, almost leaving me in doubt whether that on which I looked were indeed a reality, or the creation of a distempered dream” (92)
• “The role that bathing plays within a culture reveals the culture’s attitude towards human relaxation. It is a measure of how far individual well-being is regarded as an indispensable part of community life.” (79)
  • Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command
• Historical texts:
  • Julia Pardoe’s Beauties of the Bosphorus (1830)
  • Celia Fiennes 1697: guidebook for English spas
  • Lodwick Rowsee, Queenes Wells (1632), a doctor’s advice for using them
  • Abbe le Blanc, Lettres d’un Francais
    • “a water cure that was as primitive in fact as in appearance—by artfully calculated deception—to was made to look civilized” (121)
  • Jacob Grimm, on his hometown, Wiesbaden,
    • “wholly modern yet singular city of tranquility and enjoyment of life, out of which you need not venture to see the first green or spring and the trees blossoming. The lilac’s sweet scent floats to the farthest lane.” (132)
    • A pastoral wonderland
  • Anonymous English traveler, Bubbles from the Brunnens of Nassau
  • Publicity for Wiesbaden:
    • “Who cares for the power of rank and of name? / At Mattium springs we are all just the same. / Who cares for the honor of class and of wealth? / Compared with this fountain of bliss and of health?” (134)
• Literary texts:
  • A genre of poetry called “water poets”
    • Including some doggerel (“If we had stuck to Epsom salts, / We shouldn’t be lying in these cold vaults.” 111)
  • Shakespeare, Sonnet 154
    • “The brand she quenched in a cool well by / Which from Love’s fire took heat perpetual / Growing a bath and helpful remedy”
    • Narrator also tries to go to spa to cure love, but “water cools not love”
  • Maupassant, Mont-Oriol: A Spa Romance
    • “Incredible these halls of water. They are the only fairy lands which subsist on earth. In two months, more happens there than in the rest of the universe during the rest of the year. One could truly say that the sources are not mineralized, but sourcerized.”
  • Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time
    • Its insipid social world
    • Generally, Russians like visiting European spas, says author
  • Robert Frost, “Directive”
    • “Here are your waters and your watering places / Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.”
  • Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1818); also cf Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion
    • Begins at Bath
    • Sexual display
  • Dostoyevsky, The Gambler
    • Written in Wiesbad, which he calls “Roulettenburg”
  • Joyce, Finnegans Wake (the Liffey)
  • Kundera, The Farewell Party
  • Films
    • Mikhalkov’s Dark Eyes
    • Fellini’s 8 1/2 and _Juliet of the Spirits
    • Zweig’s The Burning Secret
    • Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad

Water Themes in Art

• Venus, Echo and Narcissus, the Sirens; Lady of Shalott, Elaine, Ophelia
• Water imagery reaches a peak in 19th c with “neo-classical, Orientalist, and Pre-Raphaelite artists” (187)
  • Relationship between water and supernatural/mythological
  • Tennyson’s Idylls of the King starts the craze
• Drowning women: Tennyson, Dore, Julia Margaret Cameron, Millais, Rossetti, Waterhouse,
• Bathing women: Picasso, Ingres, Cezanne, Courbet, Rodin, Degas
• Death by water: Chopin’s The Awakening, Woolf

My Theory

• The complicated maps of bathing process given in German spas during my historical period and also now, attempt to MAP rationality, science, and method onto the traditionally wild, fertile, and sexual impulses of bathing (tradition of leisure, excess, indulgence, and sexuality assoc with baths) so as to make it respectable