For the modern, middle-class North American, “clean” means that you shower and
apply deodorant each and every day without fail. For the aristocratic
17th-century Frenchman, it meant that he changed his linen shirt daily and
dabbled his hands in water, but never touched the rest of his body with
water or soap. For the Roman in the first century, it involved two or more
hours of splashing, soaking and steaming the body in water of various
temperatures, raking off sweat and oil with a metal scraper, and giving
himself a final oiling - all done daily, in company and without soap.
Even more than in the eye or the nose, cleanliness exists in the mind of the
beholder. Every culture defines it for itself, choosing what it sees as the
perfect point between squalid and over-fastidious.
It follows that hygiene has always been a convenient stick with which to beat
other peoples, who never seem to get it right. The outsiders usually err on
the side of dirtiness. The ancient Egyptians thought that sitting a dusty
body in still water, as the Greeks did, was a foul idea. Late 19th-century
Americans were scandalised by the dirtiness of Europeans; the Nazis promoted
the idea of Jewish uncleanliness. At least since the Middle Ages, European
travellers have enjoyed nominating the continent's grubbiest country - the
laurels usually went to France or Spain. Sometimes the other is,
suspiciously, too clean, which is how the Muslims, who scoured their bodies
and washed their genitals, struck Europeans for centuries. The Muslims
returned the compliment, regarding Europeans as downright filthy.
Most modern people have a sense that not much washing was done until the 20th
century, and the question I was asked most often while writing this book
always came with a look of barely contained disgust: “But didn't they
smell?” As St Bernard said, where all stink, no one smells. The scent of one
another's bodies was the ocean our ancestors swam in, and they were used to
the everyday odour of dried sweat. It was part of their world, along with
the smells of cooking, roses, garbage, pine forests and manure. Twenty years
ago, aircraft, restaurants, hotel rooms and most other public indoor spaces
were thick with cigarette smoke. Most of us never noticed it. Now that these
places are usually smoke-free, we shrink back affronted when we enter a room
where someone has been smoking. The nose is adaptable, and teachable.
To modern Westerners, our definition of cleanliness seems inevitable,
universal and timeless. It is none of these things, being a complicated
cultural creation and a constant work in progress.
The most menacing aspect of the smells that came with poor-to-middling hygiene
was that, as we were constantly warned, we could be guilty of them without
even knowing it. There was no way we could ever rest assured that we were
clean enough. For me, the epitome of feminine daintiness was the model who
posed on the cover of a Kotex pamphlet about menstruation, titled: You're a
Young Lady Now. This paragon, a blue-eyed blonde wearing a pageboy hairdo
and a pale blue shirtwaist dress, had clearly never had a single extraneous
hair on her body and smelled permanently of baby powder. I knew I could
never live up to her immaculate blondness, but much of my world was telling
me I had to try.
While ads for men told them they would not advance at the office without soap
and deodorant, women fretted that no one would want to have sex with them
unless their bodies were impeccably clean. No doubt that's why the second
most frequent question I heard during the writing of this book - almost
always from women - was a rhetorical: “How could they bear to have sex with
each other?”
In fact, there's no evidence that the birth rate ever fell because people were
too smelly for copulation. And, although modern people have a hard time
accepting it, the relationship between sex and odourless cleanliness is
neither constant nor predictable. The ancient Egyptians went to great
lengths to be clean, but both sexes anointed their genitals with perfumes
designed to deepen and exaggerate their natural aroma.
Most ancient civilisations matter-of-factly acknowledged that, in the right
circumstances, a gamey, earthy body odour can be a powerful aphrodisiac.
Napoleon and Josephine were fastidious for their time in that they both took
a long, hot, daily bath. But Napoleon wrote to Josephine from a campaign: “I
will return to Paris tomorrow evening. Don't wash.” As I read about
cleanliness, people began taking me aside and confessing things: several
didn't use deodorant, just washed with soap and water; some didn't shower or
bathe daily. Two writers told me separately that they had a washing
superstition: as the end of a long project neared, they stopped washing
their hair and didn't shampoo until it was finished. One woman confided that
her husband of some 20 years takes long showers at least three times a day:
she would love, she said wistfully, to know what he “really” smells like.
The surreptitious way people revealed their deviations to me indicates how
thoroughly we have been conditioned: to risk smelling like a human is a
misdemeanour, and the goal is to smell like an exotic fruit or a cookie. The
standard we read about in magazines and see on television is a sterilised
and synthetic one.
What could be more routine and apparently banal than taking up soap and water
and washing yourself? Yet it echoes, and links us to, some of the most
profound feelings and impulses we know. In almost every religion, water and
cleansing are resonant symbols - of grace, of forgiveness, of regeneration.
Worshippers around the world wash themselves before prayer, whether
literally, as the Muslims do, or more metaphorically, as when Catholics dip
their fingers in holy-water fonts at the entrance to the church.
The archetypal link between dirt and guilt, and cleanliness and innocence, is
built into our language - perhaps into our psyches. We talk about dirty
jokes and laundering money. When we step too close to something morally
unsavoury at a business meeting or a party, we say: “I wanted to take a
shower.” Pontius Pilate washed his hands after condemning Jesus to death,
and Lady Macbeth claims, unconvincingly: “A little water clears us of this
deed,” after persuading her husband to kill Duncan. Baths and immersions
also have a natural kinship with rites of passage, the ceremonies that mark
the transition from one stage of life to the next - from being an anonymous
infant to a named member of the community, from singlehood to marriage, from
life to death.
One of the most widespread rites of passage involves bathing the dead, an
action that serves no practical purpose but meets deep, symbolic ones. The
final washing given to Jewish corpses is a solemn ceremony performed by the
burial society, in which the body is held upright while 24 quarts of water
are poured over it. Other groups - the Japanese, the Irish, the Javanese -
enlist the family and close neighbours to wash the dead. All have a sense
that respect for the dead means that he or she must be clean for the last
journey, to the last resting place. Climate, religion and attitudes to
privacy and individuality also affect the way we clean ourselves. For many
in the modern West, few activities demand more solitude than washing our
naked bodies. But for the ancient Romans, getting clean was a social
occasion, as it can still be for modern Japanese, Turks and Finns.
In cultures where group solidarity is more important than individual- ity,
nudity is less problematic and scrubbed, odourless bodies are less
necessary. As these values shift, so does the definition of “clean”.
©Katherine Ashenburg 2008
Extracted from Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing, by Katherine
Ashenburg, to be published on March 20 by Profile Books, £12.99.
Available for £11.69 from Times BooksFirst: 0870 1608080;
timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
