The meaning of clean, through the ages

"The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History"

by Katherine Ashenburg

North Point Press, 291 pp., $24

If cleanliness is next to godliness, Americans aspire to be closer to the God than most other humans on the planet.

With bathrooms becoming palaces of aquatic refuge, an ever-growing array of cleansers that make soap appear hopelessly outmoded and a fixation with exfoliation and teeth whitening, the nation's preoccupation with hygiene borders on obsession, author and journalist Katherine Ashenburg points out in "The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History."

But the modern, middle-class, North American definition of clean — to shower and apply deodorant each and every day without fail, Ashenburg states — is simply the latest standard of "clean" since humans first had the time or inclination to notice one another's accumulated dirt.

Science, religion, disease, xenophobia, the availability of water and even fashion all played roles in peoples' concepts of cleanliness over the centuries.

Hot, luxurious baths replete with wine, tasty nibbles, massages and other sensual pleasures were the norm for Romans, while the popular school of thought among Greeks was that hot water would render young men wimps. Crusading Europeans remained dirty to distinguish themselves from the Moors, who bathed regularly.

Depending on the understanding of contagion at the time, entire societies banned or required public baths based either on fear of spreading disease through communal bathing (the bubonic plague) or fear of spreading disease by not bathing (cholera). And even then, bathing could range from plunging the whole body into a copper tub to sponging off only the parts popular culture desired to be fresh at the time.

Along those same lines, Ashenburg notes, for many centuries European royalty may have gone as unwashed as field workers, under the theory that clogged pores repelled illness.

But didn't they smell? Well, sure, the book says. But like diners who all order garlic-infused appetizers, it wasn't until some groups washed and others didn't that anyone really noticed or cared, at work, in bed or elsewhere.

With an easy, conversational tone and sense of humor, Ashenburg carries us from ancient to modern times, peppering the text with fascinating factoids gleaned from texts that range from Homer's "Odyssey" to wartime letters to vintage soap advertisements. While it seems odd to skip over the vast bathing traditions of Asia and other regions beyond Europe, the author notes she focused on the history of Western cleanliness largely due to its lengthy hiatus from the close of the Middle Ages on through the Renaissance. Or, as Ashenburg puts it, "four hundred years without a bath."

The future definitions of "clean" will only continue to change, she asserts, with the availability of water, with our concern for the environment and with advertising's call to cover our natural scents with all manner of potions and lotions, so as not to offend anyone who might be watching or sniffing.

"Dignity and privacy are good things, but it looks as if America, especially, doesn't know where to stop. Perhaps above all, it's about control: to smell like a body, which alters on its own with time, physical exertion, anxiety, climatic and hormonal variations, demonstrates that we're not completely in charge, something we increasingly expect of ourselves. As more of the world spins out of control, it seems there is a greater drive to manage what we can, however pointless it may be."

Karen Gaudette is a food reporter for The Seattle Times