Literature and Medicine I

by Nadine Muller, University of Hull, UK

Introduction

1At the turn of the new millennium British fiction compulsively returns to and rewrites the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often to revisit, expose and critically comment on the dominant and shifting contemporary discourses of gender and sexuality. Neo-Victorian fiction in particular has become known for its almost obligatory illustrations of explicit sex, homosexuality, prostitution and female madness, but historical fiction concerned with the first half of the twentieth century (neo-Modernism, if one wants to follow the terminological pattern) has shown equal interest in representations of the historical development and legacy of nineteenth-century gendered discourses and narratives concerning the roles of patients, practitioners and institutions following Queen Victoria’s death and World War I.

2Scholarship of the last four decades has shown that throughout history medical narratives of mental illness, such as case histories, diagnoses or patient classifications, reveal as much, if not more, about the cultural politics of the society they were conceived in as about the patients and symptoms they are intended to describe.[1]See studies such as Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady (1985), Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1961), or Lisa Appignanesi’s Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present (2008). As is evident in the amount of cross-disciplinary studies concerned with nineteenth-century gendered concepts and theories of madness and its manifestations, the Victorians have become a particularly illustrative example of this phenomenon because of the ways in which their gender ideologies influenced and indeed determined their medical theories on women’s mental constitutions. What this article seeks to investigate are the possible reasons for and significance of British twenty-first century fiction’s return to periods in which the field of mental health came into being and developed into a splintered discipline, contested by neurologists, alienists, pathologists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts.

3All of the texts considered in this discussion engage, to different extents, in a voicing of the historically silenced narratives of the female insane and in feminist re-vision, performing what Adrienne Rich famously defined as “the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes” (35). Set for the most part in the fin de siècle, Sebastian Faulks’ Human Traces (2005) is concerned with misreadings of the female body and its symptoms and, through this, explores the power relations and manipulative narratives of the discipline which was, then, yet to become known as psychoanalysis. The Crimson Petal and the White (2002) by Michel Faber creates a more complex network of factors which create and contribute to the insanity of the novel’s madwoman, from strictly physical afflictions to traumatic experiences and oppressive gender constructions. With its juxtaposed settings of 1930s and late twentieth-century Scotland, Maggie O’Farrell’s The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (2006) demonstrates how medicine aids social norms and ideals by overwriting and hence eradicating the narrative and existence of Esme, a healthy girl who is incarcerated in an asylum for her adolescent rebellion against and struggle with the cultural expectations towards her sex.

4My textual analyses aim to situate twenty-first century fiction within an interdisciplinary critical framework of questions: if, as Freud feared in his Studies on Hysteria (1895), psychoanalytic case histories can “read like short stories” (231), can novels in turn read like case histories of the societies and cultures of which they are products? If texts such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1848), Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1860), or Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) were able to “put the many concerns Victorians had about insanity into dramatic perspective” (Appignanesi 87), then do their twenty-first century counterparts the same for issues surrounding women as practitioners and patients within the field of mental health in Britain at the turn of the new millennium? I will suggest that by returning to the nineteenth century, “the period when the predominance of women among the institutionalized insane first becomes a statistically verifiable phenomenon” (Showalter, The Female Malady 52), and to the post-war period, a time of “renewed conservatism about sex roles and gender issues” (The Female Malady 197), these novels participate in the writing of what Showalter has termed hystories, that is, the histories of hysteria, whilst also being aware that they are themselves conditioned by socio-cultural context, first and foremost by postmodern and feminist theories, which they set out to critically explore. Combining the theories of Showalter Hystories and of the genre Linda Hutcheon has coined historiographic metafiction, these novels thus “express the age as much as the disorders they analyse” (Mark Micale quoted in Showalter, Hystories 7).

Overwriting the Female Body: Psychoanalytic Practice in Human Traces

5The narrative of Faulks’ Human Traces follows the lives of Englishman Thomas Midwinter and the French Jacques Rebière. Both medical students, the young men discover their shared passion for the science of the mind when their ways cross at the age of twenty around 1880. Each of them is, initially, interested in the different theories and practices prevalent in the other’s country, but their intellectual paths soon divide as their careers progress. As Thomas explains, he and Jacques “are in the same room, but [...] looking out of different windows” (413), since Jacques’ “guiding light” (413) is Charcot and his Darwin. Throughout the plot, Thomas emerges as the contemporary voice of medicine as his theories are modelled on philosophical, humanistic and anthropological studies of more recent decades.[2]In his notes and acknowledgments Faulks cites Jaynes; Horribin, and the works of Professor T.J. Crow, Professor of Psychiatry at Oxford University, as the major influences for the theories Thomas develops and presents in the later parts of the novel. However, it is Jacques – the novel’s Sigmund Freud - on whom I would like to focus first and foremost. His desire to study the human mind is motivated by his determination to cure his older brother Olivier from a mental illness he developed in late adolescence. Olivier, who is forced by his father to live in chains in the stable, is important to the young doctor mainly because their mother, who died giving birth to Jacques, is metaphorically locked up with his brother, since Olivier’s memories of her are Jacques’ only access to information about her. Jealous of his brother’s recollections – however fragmented and incomplete – Jacques becomes obsessed with the search for a cure for Olivier’s mental disorder and, considering this desire for his absent mother, it is not surprising that towards the fin de siècle he is increasingly drawn to the then emerging discipline of psychoanalysis.