The most pervasive way in which bod

The most pervasive way in which bodies are sorted is of course by gender. It is a critical commonplace today that in the nineteenth-century novel, women are marked as frail, private, and interior in order to define men as public and active. The semantic use of this kind of gender distinction is nicely exemplified at the end of Barchester Towers, where Trollope describes the relationship between wife and husband using the metaphor of ivy clinging to a wall: “When the ivy has found its tower, when the delicate creeper has found its strong wall, we know how the parasite plants grow and prosper. They were not created to stretch forth their branches alone, and endure without protection the summer’s sun and the winter’s storm. Alone they but spread themselves on the ground and cower unseen in the dingy shade. But when they have found their firm supporters, how wonderful is their beauty; how all-pervading and victorious!”20 Here an image of physical frailty becomes an essential part of the semantics of this novel—the contrast between weak but beautiful women and supporting men—which in turn provides the basis for the plot’s movement from tribulation to resolution and stability. Obviously, gender differences can be endowed with semantic meaning within individual narratives in many other ways.