Editorial
1 This thematic issue of gender forum is part II of a collection of essays focusing on the intersections of medicine, literature, and gender. In contrast to the first issue with its contributions on the representation of women in the medical profession from historical and literary points of view, in this second part personal narratives take center stage. Here, all contributions emphasize the healing power of grief and illness narratives in their various sub-genres, such as written testimonies, diaries, blogs, and artists’ books, thus in a multiplicity of autobiographical or auto-ethnographical writings. Some of the authors interweave theoretical discussions or analyses of other people’s narratives and their own illness narratives. In doing so, they all demonstrate that they share a belief in the illness narrative as a new space of communication between readers and artists and, ultimately, doctors and patients.
2 More than part I, part II foregrounds the structures and functions of narrative for both writers and readers. Translating personal experiences—which have shattered the “reliance on the orderly functioning of [people’s] books” (Becker 12)—into narrative—and thus overcoming “the resistance of a collapsing body to verbalization” (Rimmon-Kenan 245)—gives voice to its author and structure and coherence to often traumatic events in someone’s life. Such a narrative also reaches out to its readers and establishes a community or continuum between author and reader. The healing powers of narrative, which allow the patients to regain (at least partial) control over their bodies, is complemented by the insights doctors can gain: “[…] through the study of narrative, the physician can better understand patients’ stories of sickness and his or her own personal stake in medical practice […]” (Charon et al. 599).
3 Bärbel Höttges’s contribution on blogging the pain not only is a discussion of the most recent form of grief narrative, namely blogs, but also lays the theoretical foundation for a distinction between more traditional grief narratives told from hindsight and the immediacy of blogging. As Höttges finds, the more traditional form allows for a narrativization of the events, i.e., the author attempts to make sense of the past through the narrative, to give order and coherence to the experiences, and thus to come to terms with the events. In these narrativizations, the healing power of narrative as well as the successful formation of a new identity after the experiences of pain, suffering, and death (of a loved one) can unfold. In contrast, blogging as a form of emplotment tries to shape the future since the outcome of the events is open-ended. Thus, blogs do not convey a sense of order, coherence or closure. As Höttges shows, the mode of publication strongly influences the writing process.
4 Katie Ellis’s article equally embraces the healing power of illness narratives and intertwines a theoretical discussion of these narratives with her own illness narrative since she suffered from a stroke when she was only 18 years old. For Ellis, this stroke has changed her life, and over the years she has attempted to make sense out of these changes. Writing as a critical disability theorist, Ellis uses Arthur Frank’s narrative structures and uses his three categories of chaos, restitution, and quest narratives. A lack of reflection and understanding in the first type of narrative is replaced by the desire for a restoration of health in the second, and finally by a critical reflection on a changing identity in a culture of health in the third type of narrative. Joseph Campbell’s concept of the hero’s journey helps her to read this narrative development as constituted by a departure from a familiar life (first stage), a process of initiation into illness and suffering (second stage), and, finally, a moment of return as a changed person with new perspectives (third stage).
5 Elizabeth J. Donaldson’s essay demonstrates how illness writing and autobiographical or life writing intersect. She shows how Lauren Slater, a psychologist and patient herself, plays with the genre of memoir and the contract of writing truthfully which writers of a memoir are expected to have with their readers. In contrast to her Prozac Diary (1998)—Slater’s auto-pathography, which documents her life with major depression and her cure with the drug Prozac—Lying (2001) is “a metaphorical memoir,” as Slater herself terms it. Here, the lines between fact and fiction are thin, and readers perceive a parody of the illness narrative highly critically. As Elizabeth Donaldson suggests, Lying is a “complex hysterical conversion” which describes epilepsy as engendered by Slater’s mother. It is the mother figure whom the daughter makes responsible for her epileptic seizures. In this sense, this epilepsy is “a real metaphorical illness.” Playing with the genre conventions of both medical and memoir discourses, Slater’s memoir, as Donaldson finally argues, resists the pathologization and categorization that societies impose on their members with the latter’s complicity in this process. Slater’s “life writing” also questions how strongly psychiatric diagnoses and the reading of an autobiography / memoir depend upon narratives and their pre-given categories and conventions. It is thus that a sane person can easily be pronounced insane and vice versa. But Slater, as disability studies scholars warn, also undermines the necessary credibility of illness narratives and their potential healing powers.