Women in Medicine in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: From Poisoners to Doctors, Harriet Beecher Stowe to Theda Bara

267 Pages·2018·2.758 MB·English

by  Sara L. Crosby

PALGRAVE
STUDIES IN
LITERATURE,
SCIENCE AND
MEDICINE
Women in Medicine in
Nineteenth-Century
American Literature
From Poisoners to Doctors,
Harriet Beecher Stowe to Theda Bara
SARA L. CROSBY
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
Series Editors
Sharon Ruston
Department of English and Creative Writing
Lancaster University
Lancaster, UK
Alice Jenkins
School of Critical Studies
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, UK
Catherine Belling
Feinberg School of Medicine
Northwestern University
Chicago, IL, USA
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine is an exciting new
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literary studies: the intersection of literature, science and medicine.
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ing topics as well as established ones.
Editorial board:
Steven Connor, Professor of English, University of Cambridge, UK
Lisa Diedrich, Associate Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies, Stony
Brook University, USA
Kate Hayles, Professor of English, Duke University, USA
Peter Middleton, Professor of English, University of Southampton, UK
Sally Shuttleworth, Professorial Fellow in English, St Anne’s College,
University of Oxford, UK
Susan Squier, Professor of Women’s Studies and English, Pennsylvania
State University, USA
Martin Willis, Professor of English, University of Westminster, UK
More information about this series at
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Sara L. Crosby
Women in Medicine in
Nineteenth-Century
American Literature
From Poisoners to Doctors, Harriet Beecher
Stowe to Theda Bara
Sara L. Crosby
The Ohio State University at Marion
Marion, OH, USA
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
ISBN 978-3-319-96462-1 ISBN 978-3-319-96463-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96463-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018957135
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For Mom … and Simone and Cayla
who run the world
P
reface
The story of women in medicine is not just the tale of women breaking
into the medical profession. Similarly, the story of women in medicine in
literature is not just the account of authors representing women as care-
givers. Although this book bumps up against both stories and accompany-
ing areas of scholarship, it digs beneath them to expose another literary
and cultural narrative. It investigates the metaphors that shaped and
enabled the stories of women in medicine and women in medicine in lit-
erature. Specifically, it uncovers how the metaphors of poison and poison
women had to be reconceptualized before “women doctors” or other
kinds of publicly powerful New Women could be culturally acceptable or
even imaginable. It examines how, during the latter half of the nineteenth
century, American literature medicalized the poisonous woman—trans-
forming her from a monster or victim to a doctoring hero—and how that
medical reframing was used to facilitate women’s and minorities’ fuller
access to the public sphere and economic, political, and discursive agency
in it.
Since the Jacksonian Era, poison and the poisonous woman had served
as key metaphors in American popular culture and literature, helping
Americans debate the makeup of their public and the nature of their
democracy: who should and should not have access to full citizenship in
the public sphere—as discursive agents (i.e., writers and speakers), as
financial actors (i.e., particularly as educated professionals), and as political
leaders—and thus how egalitarian and inclusive the nation’s democracy
should be. In this debate, the association between women and poison did
not substantially stray from its ancient origin as a means of vilifying the
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viii PREFACE
power of women and the feminized oppressed and so excluding them
from full access to the public sphere—until 1852 when Harriet Beecher
Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In her bestselling novel, Stowe pre-
sented the world with Cassy, a mixed-race poisoner whom she insisted on
casting not as a monster or a victim to be excluded from public agency but
as a heroic healer meant to shape public discourse. As such, Cassy became
the first successful feminist reframing of the poisonous woman and a pro-
foundly influential model for female and minority citizenship and activism
in America.
Due in no small part to Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s unprecedented popularity
and political efficacy, the poisonous woman was remade in Cassy’s medi-
calized image and became a central figure in two competing visions of
American citizenship and democracy that would shape the latter half of
the nineteenth century and beyond. While the doctoring and heroic
female poisoner contributed to the figuration of America as an egalitarian
democracy based on an inclusive feminist and multi-racial public, the reac-
tionary response to Cassy—a newly pathologized female poisoner turned
pseudo-eugenicist vampire—justified the exclusion of women and minori-
ties and propped up the definition of the nation as white and male suprem-
acist or “Anglo-Saxon.”
The following book tracks this struggle over the medicinal poisoner,
across a wide spectrum of popular texts, from the publication of Uncle
Tom’s Cabin into the era of silent film, and analyzes a broad cultural debate
as it squeezed itself through multiple permutations of the poisonous
woman, from feminist and egalitarian constructs to reactionary revisions
and back again. This book examines, on the one hand, Stowe’s Cassy and
other Cassy-like concoctions alongside the character’s formidable por-
trayal by the mixed-race actress Mary Webb and the New Woman doctors
created from her by writers like Louisa May Alcott. On the other hand, the
book also investigates their interlocutors: the counterattacks and contain-
ments, from the so-called Tom shows’ enervated Cassy and the diseased
hybrid lamias of E. D. E. N. Southworth and Oliver Wendell Holmes to
D. W. Griffith’s and Thomas Dixon, Jr.’s monstrous “yellow vampire”—
with Theda Bara’s magnificent film vamp slithering back and forth across
the divide to capitalize on both positive and negative versions of the medi-
calized poisonous woman.
These poisonous woman texts, in Jane Tompkins’s useful phrase, do
important “cultural work.” They were not only incredibly popular, they
helped create fundamental literary and film language, shaping what
PREFAC E ix
Americans “know” and can imagine about women and people of color
and their public roles. These texts did this through a cagy manipulation
and reframing of a key metaphor. They shifted the world, and the medici-
nal poisoner was their lever. This book aims to recover the story of that
process.
Marion, OH, USA Sara L. Crosby
a
cknowledgments
This book owes its existence, first and foremost, to the American
Antiquarian Society and the National Endowment for the Humanities
(NEH) for the fellowship that supported my access to crucial archives.
The expertise and patience of the archivists and librarians, especially at the
AAS and the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center in Hartford, made this book
possible. My mentor at Notre Dame, Sandra Gustafson, as always, deserves
more thanks than I can give, as do Glenn Hendler, Barbara Green, Javier
Rodriguez, Susan Williams, Heidi O. Lee, Rebecca Sullivan, and Margaret
Sumner, who all critiqued earlier iterations of this manuscript. I would
also like to thank the deans and faculty at the Ohio State University at
Marion and the wonderful editors at Palgrave for their enthusiastic and
practical support. And, finally, my warmest thanks go out to my family:
Madeline and Russell Crosby, Aimee Crosby, Addy and Maggy Badinger,
Nathan Wallace, Simone Crosby-Wallace, and Cayla Weston.
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