Invalid Women: Figuring Feminine Illness in American Fiction and Culture, 1840-1940"A fine example of politically engaged literary criticism.--Belles Lettres "Price Herndl's compelling individual readings of works by major writers (Harriet Beecher Stowe, Hawthorne, Wharton, James, Fitzgerald) and minor ones complement her examination of germ theory, psychic and somatic cures, medicine's place in the rise of capitalism, and the cultural forms in which men and women used the trope of female illness.--Choice "A rich and provocative study of female illnesses and their textual representations. . . . A major contribution to the feminist agenda of literature and medicine.--Medical Humanities Review "[An] important book.--Nineteenth-Century Literature "[This] sophisticated new study . . . brings the best current strategies of a thoroughly historicized feminist literary criticism to bear on textual representations of female invalidism.--Feminist Studies "An outstanding study of the representation of female invalidism in American culture and literature. There emerges from this work a striking sense of the changing meanings of female invalidism even as the conjunction of these terms has remained a constant in American cultural history. . . . Moreover, Invalid Women provides fascinating readings of female illness in a variety of texts.--Gillian Brown, University of Utah "A provocative study based on imaginative historical research and very fine close readings. The book provides a useful American complement to Helena Michie's The Flesh Made Word and Margaret Homans's Bearing the World. It should prove enlightening and otherwise useful not just to scholars of American literature, but also to those engaged in American studies, feminist criticism and theory, women's studies, the sociology of medicine and illness, and the history of science and medicine.--Cynthia S. Jordan, Indiana University |
Contents
1 | |
Women and Medicine in the MidNineteenth Century | 20 |
Responsibility and Reward in Domestic and Feminist Fiction | 43 |
Male Writers and the MindBody Problem | 75 |
Women Writers and the Art of Illness | 110 |
Success and the Invalid Woman | 150 |
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Common terms and phrases
aesthetic Alice James American argues artistic Barren Ground Beatrice beautiful becomes Blithedale Blithedale Romance body Bullard century chapter Charlotte Perkins Gilman Christine claims culture Dark Victory death Densher describes Dick discourse disease doctor domestic fiction Dorinda economy Edith Wharton Ethan Frome female feminine feminism feminist feminist critics figure Fitzgerald gender Gilman and Wharton Gubar happy ending Hawthorne Hawthorne's Henry James Hester House of Mirth husband ideology invalid woman James's Jason Juliette Ligeia Lily literary lives male marriage Mary medicine Milly's mind cure moral mother narrative narrator nature Nicole nineteenth nineteenth-century novel offers physicians Poe's political question R. W. B. Lewis Rappaccini's Rappaccini's Daughter reader represents resistance Retribution role romance sexual sick sickly social society Southworth story success suffer texts theory tion University Press Victorian weakness women's fiction women's health women's illnesses writing Yellow Wallpaper York Zeena Zenobia