Illuminating Gender II

Works Cited

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Burney, Frances. "'A Mastectomy' [of September 1811] — To Esther Burney." Frances Burney: Journals and Letters. Vol. 6. Ed. Joyce Hemlow. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. 596-616.

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_____. "Signifying Bodies." Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. Ed. Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. New York: MLA, 2002. 109-117.

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Diedrich, Lisa. "Doing Things with Ideas and Affects in the Illness Narratives of Susan Sontag and Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick." The Voice of Breast Cancer in Medicine and Bioethics. Ed. Mary C. Rawlinson, and Shannon Lundeen. Dordrecht: Springer, 2006. 53-68.

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Hartung, Heike. "Mitleid und Geschlecht im sentimentalen Diskurs: Das Subjekt als Aggressor und als Opfer bei Frances Burney." Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 55.3 (2005): 309-332.

_____. "Frances Burneys Mastectomy Letter: Die Krankengeschichte als Syntax der Schmerzerfahrung." Schmerzdifferenzen: Physisches Leid und Gender in kultur- und literaturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive. Ed. Iris Hermann, and Anne-Rose Meyer. Königstein: Ulrike Helmer, 2006. 23-42.

Hawkins, Anne Hunsaker.Reconstucting Illness: Studies in Pathography West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 1999.

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Sherwin, Susan. "Personalizing the Political: Negotiating Feminist, Medical, Scientific, and Commercial Discourses Surrounding Breast Cancer." The Voice of Breast Cancer in Medicine and Bioethics. Ed. Mary C. Rawlinson, and Shannon Lundeen. Dordrecht: Springer, 2006. 3-19.

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Notes

• 1) In her book on patient narratives, Reconstructing Illness, Studies in Pathography (1993), Anne Hunsaker Hawkins describes warship metaphors as belonging to one of the possible myths of illness around which patient narratives are organized — and as one that is very much in tune with Western medicine. This connection between war and the rise of modern medicine is also established in medical histories, see Daniel de Moulin, A Short History of Breast Cancer (51) and Peter Stanley, For Fear of Pain (97-129).
• 2) Lisa Diedrich, too, has read Sontag's essay as "paradoxically, a depersonalized personal narrative of illness" (54). In comparing Sontag's rationalist and depersonalized approach with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's performative and affective engagement with breast cancer, she gives preference to Sedgwick's relational strategy as the one more adequate to a postmodern illness experience that "queer[s] the experience of patienthood" (65). While Sontag's work does not challenge the binaries of health and illness, her approach is, however, seen as "effective in challenging the normalizing judgements attached to the experience of illness" (64). Since Diedrich's article has focused on criticism for Sontag's complicity with the dominant "biomedical approach," I will put my emphasis instead on the (mis)readings and rewritings of her essay, including her own in AIDS and its Metaphors, that have proved productive of new/adapted metaphors as well as providing dialogic positions for illness experience.
• 3) Code argues for a shift in emphasis towards communality rather than for a rejection of the idea of autonomy, since "[t]heorists who start from communality and interdependence can accommodate the requirements of autonomy better than theorists for whom autonomous existence is the 'original position' can accommodate the requirements of community" (79).
• 4) Sherwin, in her analysis of public discourses on breast cancer, also introduces her concept of "relational autonomy" which measures "the social and political conditions" under which a woman's choices for treatment can be made. Even more pointedly, in the context of mental illness relational subjectivity becomes an issue. In the application of performance theory to dementia care this has been explored by Anne Davis Basting 2000 and 2005, see also Annette Leibing 2006.
• 5) For a more detailed analysis of the gendered discourse on pity and the strategic uses of subject positions related to it in Burney's work see my "Mitleid und Geschlecht im sentimentalen Diskurs: Das Subjekt als Aggressor und als Opfer bei Frances Burney."
• 6) Julia Epstein has drawn attention to the divided narrative voice between "social self/proper lady" and "private self/angry lady" in Burney's writing; a detailed analysis of the divisions between the public and the private in the mastectomy letter is provided in her The Iron Pen, 53-83, see also my "Frances Burneys Mastectomy Letter: Die Krankengeschichte als Syntax der Schmerzerfahrung."
• 7) In his recent history of British surgery before the advent of anaesthesia, Peter Stanley uses Brown's story to highlight his motivation of gaining insights into "the depths of our common nature": "Victorian sentimentality and Presbyterian piety cannot mask the profound feeling of Brown's description of Allie's last hours, and of James's grief" (8). Regarding the gendered aspect of this "common nature" which Brown's story reveals and the perceptions it focuses on (namely, the surgeon's and the dog Rab's), Stanley's invoking this particular tale at the beginning of his study is revealing for the very "unsuspicious" approach he chooses for his subject.
• 8) In keeping with the novel's reception history, which has favoured the unconventional Lady Delacour over "that stick and stone Belinda," in Maria Edgeworth's own words (qtd. in Montwieler 347), her recovery of a domestic character remains related to her public image, and her domestication is never complete, she is allowed to stage the novel's ending and is given literally the last word.
• 9) Sontag concedes these distinctions in her rereading of Illness as Metaphor at the beginning of AIDS and its Metaphors: "Of course, one cannot think without metaphors. But that does not mean there aren't some metaphors we might well abstain from or try to retire. As, of course, all thinking is interpretation. But that does not mean it isn't sometimes correct to be 'against' interpretation" (93).