Abstract
This chapter analyzes the way nineteenth-century novels characterize women physicians who inhabit what the author calls a queer literary space. Nineteenth-century American women physicians represent a queer, transgressive, and liminal space between the physical and ideological female-inhabited domestic space and the male-dominated professional space. The author analyzes novels by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Annie Nathan Meyers, arguing that they struggle to contain their women physician characters generically just as dominant gender categories struggled to contain women physicians’ transgression. Novels of realism create liminal spaces that the women physician characters must sacrifice to escape. The characters are liminal generically as they often become either sentimentally sacrificial or unrealistically not quite human. Thus the novels of realism manage to depict generically the very struggle they represent thematically.
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Notes
- 1.
According to the Oxford Companion to English Literature, “Social Problem Novel” is “a phrase used (alongside terms such as ‘the industrial novel’, or the ‘condition of England’ novel) to describe mid-nineteenth-century fiction which examines abuses and hardships affecting the working classes. These included many of the topics which were simultaneously being exposed by non-fictional writers, such as poor housing and sanitation; conditions in factories; child labour; the exploitation of seamstresses; and the exhausting nature of agricultural work. Largely written from a middleclass perspective, it sometimes sought to stimulate legislation, or (as in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, 1854–5) to promote understanding between masters and men on the basis of shared humanity, and shared material interests, as a way forward.”
- 2.
The term “third sex” is often associated with either biological intersexuality or notions of queer genders found throughout queer theory. Examples of the biological analysis can be found in such works as Michael G. Peletz’s anthropological analyses or Morgan Holmes’s scholarly analysis of the simplicity of considering biological third sexes as an “other” of binary sex. For the most comprehensive analysis of how queer theory has used the concept, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick’s Epistomology of the Closet (University of California Press, 1990).
- 3.
Jean Carwile Masteller claims “a close examination of the conclusion reveals that it is not nearly so triumphant a victory for women in a new role as the rest of the novel appears to foreshadow” (139). While Morris claims that the ending justifies her character’s religious, moral virtues and that this is Phelps’s goal with the final chapter, there seems to be little textual evidence for this. In no way does Phelps ever seem to claim that marriage is a woman’s only way to enact virtue. Her ending, then, offers no clear victory for Doctor Zay; Phelps has her heroine stripped of her agency by a man.
- 4.
See Karen Weingarten’s Abortion in the American Imagination (Rutgers University Press, 2014) and Janet Farrell Brodie’s Contraception and Abortion in 19th-Century America (Cornell University Press, 1994) for comprehensive lists of douching procedures and abortifacients.
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Jessee, M.J. (2018). “The Third Sex”: Nineteenth-Century Women Physicians in Queer, Liminal Literary Spaces. In: Jacobson, K., Allukian, K., Legleitner, RA., Allison, L. (eds) Liminality, Hybridity, and American Women's Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73851-2_11
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