Monday 4th July - Thursday 7th July 2005
Mansfield College, Oxford

Conference Programme, Abstracts & Papers

Session 8: The Myths and Metaphors of Illness (1)
Chair: Lisa Hollingsworth

Medicine and the Individual Patient in Nineteenth-Century British Realism
Louise Penner
Assistant Professor of English, University of Massachusetts, Boston, USA

Medical debates in England in the 1820s involved issues of professionalism, ethics, and the proper means of scientific research into pathological anatomy and fevers. These developments were influenced by eighteenth-century German and Scottish philosophy, particularly their focus on individuals, both as they exist within or belong to organisms or communities and in their particularity. Early nineteenth-century medical debates thus contain an ethical and scientific stress on the importance of studying patients and biological organisms, not just as generic cases or parts of an aggregate, but also as individuals. This paper traces these medical and philosophical debates through the nineteenth century, as the scientific and philosophical investment in the importance of studying individuals in their particularity begins to change. I connect these debates to fictional representations of the observation and care of patients in different novel genres of the nineteenth century.
I suggest that as the novel form develops in the nineteenth century toward the high realism of the 1870s, novelists increasingly incorporate the language of science and medicine into their narrative structure and style. The medical discourses that boom in the nineteenth century—among them first sanitary and then vital statistics-- were primarily focused on the study of aggregate populations. As novels increasingly engage the worlds of science and medicine, one result is that the novel’s narrative structure and style begin to reflect anxieties about the importance, place, and function of the individual patient; I argue that these anxieties are reflected in novels ranging from the early social problem novels of the 1840s, such as Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, to the high realist novels of the 1870s, including George Eliot’s Middlemarch, to later fin de siècle novels, such as Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science.

Wasting Women and Sound Citizens: Health and Debility as National Identity in Turn-of-the-Twentieth Century US Writing
Christine Leiren Mower
Department of English and Women Studies, University of Washington, USA

While theorists Linda Kerber, Nancy Cott and others have explored the shift to a more direct citizenship status for white woman at the end of the nineteenth century, what has not been adequately theorized is the centrality of health to this new citizenship status nor the particular global (and imperial) valence of this embodied citizenship status. This paper will examine both of these omissions within the context of US journalistic and fictional representations of the "sound citizen"--the term I apply to the modern new woman who lays claim to a healthful, embodied national identity at the turn of the twentieth century. First, this paper will examine Willa Cather's  The Song of the Lark (1915) and Hamlin Garland's The Rose of Dutcher's Coolly (1899) as well as the political writings of Mary Austin in order to highlight how representations of the modern new woman integrally depend on the circulation and spectacle of the white female body as a healthful, physically vigorous and genetically "pure" corporeality. Rather than enabling reproduction-a primary means for imagining US women's relation to nation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries-the robust healthful female body authorizes white women's reconfiguration of (male) liberal individualism as a function of the "mastery" of their own health and corporeality within the turn of the century marketplace. Integral to women's mastery is not only their participation within the hygiene, fitness and new thought movements during this time but also their strategic use of the robust bodies of "savage" others as a means of physically enabling their vigorous engagements as artists, as professionals, as laborers, as sound citizens within arenas exceeding the traditional confines of the domestic. Here I refer to how representations of the modern woman ironically turn to the bodies of "savage" others to legitimate the modern woman's "genius" as original and authentic, her body as "pure," healthful and physically able and her citizenship status as sound. The sound citizen emerges in racial and class opposition, however, to other imaginings of female identity such as those found in the activist journalism of Sui Sin Far and Zitkala-Å a, contemporaries of Austin and Cather. In opposing the symbolic power of the sound citizen, these writers use the physically debilitated female body-the wasting body-to indict the rhetoric of white racial "advancement" which enables the sound citizen's new national identity. As a sign of physical weakness and as racial, ethnic or class "impurity," the wasting body subversively constructs white US "civilization" as illness and as racial contagion infecting not-white and working-class cultures.
At the same time, this paper works to critically situate health and national identity within US imperialism at the turn of the century by exploring how journalistic representations of the modern new woman  establish a new global citizenship status for healthy, able-bodied, independent, white young women who can ostensibly embody US democracy. What I refer to here is the modern new woman's fantastic reconfiguration by US journalism in the 1910s as the paradigmatic "American" body to be exported to the "lesser-developed" countries in the "East." As the "microbe" (the term one journalist uses in The Overland Monthly) carrying democracy, individualism, good "hygiene" and "civilization" outside US borders, the modern new woman spreads the healthful "contagion" of US imperialism by enthusiastically assuming her role as the  presumptive mother of economic and democratic "health." In so doing, the global new woman solves two problems for white US culture. While functioning as the antidote for what was referred to as the "uncivilized" world, her exportation also symbolically relieves the fundamental paradox raised by the sound citizen's presence within US borders during this time: how her bodily health and celebrated individuality simultaneously raises and assuages the feared "race" decline of white America.

Imagining the Doctor: Reflecting on the Medical Fictions of Jacques Ferron
Betty Bednarski
Department of French, Dalhousie University, Canada

My paper will examine representations of the doctor in the fiction of Canadian physician-writer Jacques Ferron. I will pay particular attention to those of Ferron’s doctors who are seen engaging in the acts of reading and writing. Such fictional doctors can tell us a lot about how Ferron himself viewed literature and its relationship to medicine. Indeed, to read Ferron is to consider the place of literature in the lives of health professionals. It is to explore the many intersections of reading, writing and doctoring, and to reflect on the very nature of those three acts. I could present this as a 20-minute paper, AND/OR as a 1-hr. reading of the kind I gave at the conference last year. The subject matter I am suggesting lends itself particularly well to the reading format. I am open to suggestions from the committee.