Now there are many people, especially urban residents, for whom bathing has become an indispensable part of daily life. Some people can scarcely imagine going three or five days in a row without bathing, let alone several months; to speak of people who do not bathe for months sounds almost like talking about aliens.
Various things, once they become part of everyday life, are endowed with one or another sort of legitimacy, and thus become things that ought to be. Bathing, for example, is closely linked to the concept of “hygiene”: on the one hand, bathing is a natural thing—after all, isn’t bathing the expression of the “desire for cleanliness” that all normal people ought to have? On the other hand, it is also a necessary thing—not bathing is not only impolite, but also unhealthy…
But if we pursue the matter further, the everydayness and legitimacy of bathing are quite recent things; these corresponding associations all appeared only fairly late.
First of all, the easiest thing to think of is the technical level of the problem—the technical conditions that make bathing “everyday” have only become widespread today—for example, the equipment and space for bathing, and especially the water supply and drainage systems that have entered ordinary households.
Not to go too far back, let me just speak of the old Shanghai lane house where I lived as a child—there are still quite a number of city residents living in even more rudimentary places now. A family of five crowded into a room of a little over ten square meters, plus a balcony and an attic. A bed, a table, a sofa, and a wardrobe in the room nearly filled it to the brim. Of course there was no bathroom; the toilet was generally kept on the balcony for use, and the balcony had no window. If there happened to be a tall building opposite, one could see everything clearly from above, though fortunately there was no tall building opposite. As for bathing, only when the table was pushed all the way to the edge would there just barely be room between the table and the bed for a small tub. At the time I, as a little brat, could still bathe there; how the adults managed it I do not know. Even for me, bathing was rather troublesome, and simply heating the water was already annoying enough. Later, among my relatives, my eldest aunt was the first to be assigned new public housing, so I remember my mother regularly taking me to my aunt’s place to bathe. Of course we would not go every day; the cycle was at least a week, I suppose.
In short, even for me personally, when I said “I’m going to take a bath” more than ten years ago, that was by no means a trivial little matter. Although we already regarded bathing as necessary for life, it still had not yet become thoroughly everyday. Imagine if my hometown had been even more rudimentary, and there had been no tap water or thermos bottles: how difficult it would have been to take a hot bath.
In some water-scarce and impoverished regions today, the difficulty of bathing may be even beyond imagination. I have heard that in some ethnic groups in western China people bathe only three times in a lifetime (birth, marriage, death); if one cuts off the beginning and the end, in fact there is only once. It is said that in certain times and places in medieval Europe people were like this as well. These groups often also treat bathing as a religious or cultural taboo. Here, the mutual construction of technology and the humanities seems to be on display—when, technically, it is difficult to make bathing widespread, people sometimes are unwilling to say: because conditions are insufficient, we cannot bathe; rather, they prefer to seek out some other, more universal and more human reason, explaining not bathing as something only natural, without bringing the technical elements into the open: they will not say that because of a lack of technical conditions one cannot bathe more often, but instead will say (invoking religion and the like, those lofty theories) that for a human being to be human means one ought not bathe more often, and so on; just as when bathing has been made technically widespread, people also consciously or unconsciously forget the technical aspect and directly endow bathing with more universal and more human reasons, for example by invoking science and such lofty theories, to say that for a human being to be human means one ought to bathe frequently, and so on.
Of course, human culture and custom also, in turn, influence the development of technology. The magnificent urban aqueduct projects and countless public baths of the Roman period were abandoned in the Middle Ages, probably because there was no longer sufficient demand for them.
Further, people’s ideas are constructed within the corresponding social and cultural environment; the history of bathing accompanies changes in people’s ideas and sensations about the body.
Taking a hot bath is something refreshing and delightful, while not bathing for a long time is something uncomfortable—are these bodily sensations not self-evident? Isn’t a person who can go through life without ever bathing while still feeling at ease an extreme oddity? Perhaps people’s sensations do in fact show a tendency toward convergence; however, sensations, like culture, are after all highly malleable. Take taste in food, for example: some people find eating chili peppers exhilarating and satisfying, while others feel that the spiciness is utterly unbearable; some people think the smell of cigarettes is wonderfully pleasant, while others feel that loving to smoke is simply incomprehensible. The same is true of bathing and body odor: some people feel that bathing is pleasurable and body odor intolerable, but perhaps others feel that bathing is uncomfortable and body odor natural. In fact, this is indeed so: even we, who have been deeply immersed in modern bathing culture, may still feel stuffy, weak, and other unpleasant reactions when bathing; let alone those who have strong preconceptions against bathing. For them, perhaps managing to take a bath only rarely would be like someone being forced, only rarely, to eat chili peppers or take a puff of a cigarette—they would absolutely not feel bathing’s benefits, and might instead deepen their original prejudice.
As for the so-called desire for cleanliness, perhaps people ancient and modern, Chinese and foreign, all have such a desire; but the forms of expression of this desire, especially its connection with concrete behaviors such as bathing, differ from place to place. When people see filthy refuse or smell putrid stench, they always want to keep away; this may be fine enough. Yet the very same desire to keep away from dirt and filth took the form, in the West several centuries ago, of refusing bathing—because water would open the pores of the skin and allow dirty air to invade the human body, and bathing was especially strictly prohibited when plague and other epidemics broke out. Europeans at the time maintained “cleanliness” merely by changing and washing their shirts every few weeks or even several months; earlier still, they did not even change their shirts at all. All this seems incredible by today’s standards.
When Europeans gradually began to accept bathing—first cold-water baths, and only much later hot-water baths—bathing still did not become linked with cleanliness and hygiene. Instead, it was more closely associated with elements such as sociability, etiquette, physical exercise, aristocratic enjoyment, and so on. Perhaps only after the discovery of “germs” at the end of the nineteenth century did bathing finally become associated with the newly emerging concept of “hygiene.”
The emergence of the “bathroom” as a private space within the home was not merely an engineering innovation; it also marked a transformation in people’s ideas about the body, etiquette, and privacy. Bathtubs resembling modern styles already have a history of five thousand years, but the bathroom becoming an ordinary and private space inside the household is a novel thing. The establishment of this spatial structure is of extraordinary significance; the historical transformations of culture, technology, and ideas intersect within it.
[French] Georges Vigarello, The History of Bathing, trans. Xu Ningshu, Guangxi Normal University Press, 2005, 978756335168
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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