Literature and Medicine I

Conclusion

26Like the critical studies of Showalter and Appignanesi, Faulks’ Human Traces, Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White and O’Farrell’s The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox are concerned with the exposure and criticism of Victorian and Edwardian male practitioners’ misreadings of their female patients’ symptoms. That is, they seek to demonstrate the ways in which women and their stories – physical and oral – were interpreted and rewritten by doctors and therapists as medical narratives and theories which complemented and conformed to dominant discourses of gender. In these texts, doctors and the dominant cultures they represent are therefore authors rather than scientists and their reports fictions rather than scientific observations, indicating the practitioners’ rather than the patients’ anxieties and becoming, thus, as Lisa Appignanesi puts it, “expressions of the culture’s malaise, symptoms and disorders [which mirror] time’s order – its worries, limits border problems, fears” (5). Whilst Ursula Link-Heer has argued that studies concerned with the ways in which “women are constituted historically and discursively” tend to treat the history of hysteria either as “a patriarchal defamation and violation of real women who in truth were not hysterics, or one that uncovered supposedly genuine feminine characteristics behind the label ‘hysteria’ and identified with them” (192), the novels I have discussed here go far beyond this dichotomy. Instead they propose, like Showalter, a variety of different hystories, that is, “cultural narratives of hysteria [... which] multiply rapidly” (Hystories 5). Their authors, then, can confidently be counted towards the community of critics who Showalter calls “The New Hysterians” (7) and are concerned just as much with “questions about the self, sexual and gender identity, cultural meaning and political behaviour” (7).

27 Hystoriographic metafiction, then, does not simply criticise gendered medical discourses of the past, but reflects on the ways in which gendered issues still surround the theory and practice of mental health. As studies such as Klonoff and Landrine’s Preventing Misdiagnosis in Women (1997) and Russell’s Women, Gender & Madness (1995) have shown, despite modern scientific advances, there are still illnesses and disorders which if not diagnosed and treated properly can lead to “a woman’s being confined to a mental hospital for her entire life or even result in her untimely death” (Klonoff and Landrine, xix). Similarly, it is worth noting here that other examples of the genre not discussed here, such as Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1997), Claire Dudman’s 98 Reasons For Being (2004) or Jane Harris’ The Observations (2006), also reflect the fact that race and social class are still factors which influence the treatments of women’s mental illnesses in Britain and that female autonomy as well as power relations are still serious and complex issues in contemporary mental health practices.[6]For an illuminating overview of contemporary issues surrounding women and/ in mental health, see Liz Bondi and Erica Burman. If traditional psychotherapies, as Appignanesi puts it, “attempt an understanding of the self that marries past with present” (481), then hystoriographic metafiction which critically investigates women’s mental health in the present by revisiting the past certainly hast the potential to reflect and help us understand  circumstances and issues which define women’s current positions as patients and practitioners in the medical profession.