Medical Women And Victorian Fiction

Medical Women and Victorian Fiction 6d8 This page intentionally left blank Medical Women and Victorian Fiction 6d...

Author: Kristine Swenson

64 downloads 1694 Views 596KB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

Medical Women and Victorian Fiction

6d8

This page intentionally left blank


6d8 Kristine Swenson

University of Missouri Press

d

Columbia and LondonIIIIII

Copyright © 2005 by The Curators of the University of Missouri University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201 Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved 5 4 3 2 1 09 08 07 06 05

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Swenson, Kristine, 1966– Medical women and Victorian fiction / Kristine Swenson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8262-1566-1 (alk. paper) 1. English fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Literature and medicine—Great Britain—History—19th century. 3. Women and literature—Great Britain—History—19th century. 4. Women physicians in literature. 5. Physicians in literature. 6. Medicine in literature. I. Title. PR878.M42.S94 2004 823'.8093561—dc22 2004023018

™

This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984. Designer: Jennifer Cropp Typesetter: Phoenix Type, Inc. Printer and binder: The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group Typefaces: Berkeley Book, Apple Chancery, and Golden Cockerel

6 For Jack, my Friday’s child 8


Contents

6d8 Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Medical Women Old and New 1

Chapter One Angels of Mercy 13

Chapter Two Nightmare Figures: Backlash against the New Nurse 52

Chapter Three Sex and Fair Play: Establishing the Woman Doctor 85

Chapter Four The New Woman Doctor Novel 123

Chapter Five Medical Women and Imperial Fiction 161 Conclusion 198 Bibliography 205 Index 221


d Acknowledgments d

Because this book developed in several stages over more time than I like to think about, I owe thanks to many people for their help along the way. Florence Boos and Teresa Mangum both provided careful reading and unflagging support from the very earliest stages, when this was less than a dissertation. Jeff Cox brought a much-appreciated historical perspective to my project, and I also profited from the critiques of my then-fellow graduate students: Pat Murphy, Dal Liddle, Anne Flammang, Heidi Johnson, and Kathleen Anderson. Much of my early research on this book was supported by the English Department and the College of Arts and Science at the University of Iowa. A semester-long University of Missouri Research Board Grant allowed me to focus on revision and to expand the manuscript in new directions. My deans at the University of Missouri–Rolla, Russ Buhite and Paula Lutz, were instrumental in finding me time and money when I needed it. Many of my colleagues at UMR helped push this project along.Trent Watts, Linda Bergmann, and Larry Vonalt were particularly persistent in their encouragement, and Jack Morgan was a model for me of scholarly perseverance. Cheryl Espinosa, Sharon Parks, and Alan Kelsay all provided important research and editorial assistance. I owe special thanks to my parents and my sisters, who keep coming to my rescue. Parts of chapter 4 appeared in Women’s Writing 10, no. 1 (2003) and a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 14, no. 2 (Winter 1999). Parts of chapter 5 appeared in the Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 8, no. 2 (Spring 2001).

ix



6d8


d Introduction d Medical Women Old and New

This project on the cultural and literary impact of Victorian medical women began with the recognition that in Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Ruth (1853) the heroine’s fallenness is intimately bound up with, and eventually redeemed by, the “social disease” that she, as a nurse, helps to quell. As a twentieth-century reader and viewer, I was accustomed to equations involving medical care and sexuality, the erotic and perverse potential of the access to bodily intimacy that nurses and doctors have with their patients. But as I began to trace the connections between mid-Victorian medical and social reforms, feminism, and fiction, I realized just how anomalous Ruth Hilton was in England and the English novel before the Crimean War. To mid-Victorians, Dickens’s immoral, slovenly, and alcoholic Mrs. Gamp was a more recognizable “nurse” than the martyred Ruth. That Mrs. Gamp has little cultural resonance in the late twentieth century while Ruth Hilton seems natural implies that a major shift in representations of women and medicine had occurred during the second half of the nineteenth century. What was the representational history of this new sexualized nurse? And, what, I asked myself later, was her relationship to the woman doctor, a new figure in the late nineteenth century? In trying to answer these questions, I was first struck by the lasting impact of Victorian representations of medical women down to the present. In a London phone booth outside the Florence Nightingale Museum I became conscious of the ubiquitous notes advertising the services of “nasty” nurses, which were pasted beside those of dominatrix schoolmistresses and submissive postcolonials. These advertisements did not strike me at first because my experience within twentieth-century popular culture had taught me to consider the nurse as “naturally”

1

2


sexualized and even “perverse.” For instance, as reputable an author as P. D. James wrote A Shroud for a Nightingale (1971), whose back-cover description runs thus: “Two student nurses lay dead, the great hospital nursing school of Nightingale House was shadowed with terror, and a secret medical world of sex, shame, and scandal was about to be exposed. It was the job of Adam Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard to probe even deeper into the macabre mystery—and unmask the killer who operated as skillfully as a surgeon before the epidemic of evil got completely out of hand.” This novel assumes the reading public’s quick recognition of “Nightingale” and its association of that word with oldfashioned but potentially (and perhaps secretly) sexual student nurses. As in Victorian sensation fiction, the world of nursing is portrayed as hiding a “secret world” of “sex, shame, and scandal,” which only the masculine police inspector can expose by “deep probing.” Medical Women and Victorian Fiction explores the origins of the nurse and woman doctor in twentieth-century and contemporary culture by examining the cultural intersections of fiction, feminism, and medicine during the second half of the nineteenth century in Britain and her colonies. These related discourses came together most persistently around the figure of the prostitute, who embodied her culture’s anxieties over sexuality, disease, and moral corruption. I take as my focus an opposing figure, the medical woman, whom Victorians deployed to combat these social ills, and who signals better than any other female figure the inherent contradictions of “woman” in a “scientific” culture. As tokens of traditional female morality informed and transformed by the “new” social and medical sciences, representations of medical women (and many of the women themselves) influenced public debates surrounding women’s education and employment, the Contagious Diseases Acts, and the “health” of the empire. At the same time, the presence of these educated and independent women who receive payment for performing tasks traditionally assigned to the domestic woman or the servant inevitably alters the meaning of “womanhood” and the positions of other women in Victorian culture. Building especially upon the work of Michel Foucault, recent scholarship has done much to illuminate how “woman” supplied the material with which Western medical discourse and institutions produced the sciences of sex and race through which were effected control of individual and social bodies. As important as it is, a limitation of much of

Introduction

3

this work is that women are viewed almost exclusively as the objects upon which medical men and their patriarchal conspirators operate. In this book, I assert a much more complicated and reciprocal relationship between women and medicine in Victorian culture by examining two distinct though related figures that have been strangely neglected by mainstream Victorianist scholars: the reformed, or Nightingale, nurse and the New Woman doctor. The project complicates more conventional histories of the rise of the (real) nurse and woman doctor by treating as equally important the development of cultural representations of the figures. Although I consider representations of medical women in nonfictional texts such as newspapers, medical journals, nursing tracts, and biographies, my principal focus is how Victorian fiction figured the medical woman and, through her, the debates that she betokens. According to Nancy Armstrong, nineteenth-century fiction functioned as a cultural agent by translating “political information into the discourse of sexuality.”1 It is no surprise, then, that fictions of medical women tend to reduce the political to the personal, the feminist to the sexual, in order to “manage” the radical implications of a woman with the medical knowledge and professional legitimacy to control human bodies. The discursive strategies of these fictional deployments, in turn, structured the figure of the medical woman—and thus, independent women generally—within the broader culture. Most strikingly, the Victorian medical woman could not escape from the shadow of her cultural “other,” the fallen woman; in fact, the medical woman’s legitimacy depended upon her ability to protect women from male sexual danger with her “unsexing” knowledge of sex. This project works in two directions and thus contains a dual argument. On one hand, I am interested in the construction of medical women in Victorian domestic and imperial culture that, I argue, helped to shape women’s relation to medicine and science down to the present. On the other hand, I argue that the nurse and woman doctor not only partook of, but contributed to, their culture, forcing a shift in Victorian perceptions of the “womanly” and creating literal and literary space for women in medicine and employments that required education. Like 1. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 21.

4


Frankenstein’s monster, the Nightingale nurse and the New Woman doctor were created from available cultural bodies such as the domestic woman, the androgyne, and the prostitute. But also like the monster, they assumed lives of their own which transcended and transformed their constitutive parts. In this way, my project reveals the influence of these figures upon a range of Victorian discourses, most particularly those of gender and literary genre, and the interrelations of Victorian feminism and medicine with social class and imperialism. Manifested as literary representations, the Nightingale nurse and the New Woman doctor derive their power and particular shapes from the genres in which they appear. Thus, the medical woman appears as an angel of mercy in wartime romances, a sadist in sensation fiction, and a woman-loving doctor in New Woman novels. But this malleable character also carries with her from genre to genre traces of her fictional and nonfictional selves that act upon and alter the texts’ formal conventions, bridging the generic gaps between medical discourse, journalism, and realist and nonrealist fiction. This iconographic power enabled the medical woman to play a critical role in the history of Victorian feminism and in the expansion of the empire. Neither the campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts nor the fight for women’s higher education can be properly understood apart from the medical woman movement, whose goals and assumptions reveal the inherent class bias of those progressive campaigns. At the same time, medical work provided Western women with a powerful role out in the empire. Medical women not only introduced Western medicine to many of the empire’s female subjects, they actively spread a Western Christian culture among Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists. Both activities sought to displace traditional medical, domestic, and religious customs in the interests of Western “progress.” The book is organized around the fragmenting figure of the medical woman. As she evolves from the Nightingale nurse to the New Woman doctor, the medical woman moves through both a literal landscape of Victorian cities and colonies and a literary landscape of diverse genres. By reading through the figure of the medical woman, I produce new analyses of well-known texts such as Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860). However, I also introduce the reader to fascinating novels such as Dr. Margaret Todd’s Mona Maclean,

Introduction

5

Medical Student (1892) and Hilda Gregg’s imperial adventure, Peace with Honour (1897). To begin my investigation into the ways in which medical women betoken more general Victorian attitudes toward women, I trace the metaphorical relationship between social ills and literal disease through works by the mid-century social problem novelists Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Kingsley. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the figure of the new nurse who grew out of Victorian medical and public health reforms and became institutionalized after Florence Nightingale’s performance in the Crimean War. In these chapters I examine the cultural emergence of the new nurse in medical romances and sensation fiction. The “nurse,” I will argue, becomes the first line of defense in combating both the literal and metaphorical (moral and social) disease in Ruth and Two Years Ago. The forms she takes in them illustrate the texts’ very different attitudes toward the role that women should play in the larger Victorian culture. Moreover, just as Dickens’s Sairey Gamp helped to solidify public opinion about the need to reform the “old nurse” and the old health system she represented, these novelists’ depictions of “new nurses” helped to set the agenda for social reform and shape a new health system. Ironically, it is neither Dickens nor Kingsley, two of the more prolific voices of health reform, who provided the most progressive vision of the new nurse in novel form. Rather, it was “Mrs.” Gaskell, who, after causing a scandal with her sympathetic treatment of the poor and their labor movement in Mary Barton (1848), scandalized the public again with Ruth (1853), a novel about a “fallen woman” sanctified by her nursing of typhus victims. In chapter 1 I begin with a reading of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853), the first effort in Victorian fiction to portray nursing as a respectable career for women who might otherwise labor in sweatshops or turn to prostitution. Contrary to theories of culture which read fiction as textualizing real events, I suggest that Ruth influenced Florence Nightingale’s conception of the ideal nurse and thus the Victorian public’s reception of women within reformed medicine. Gaskell and Nightingale each hoped that nursing would provide respectable and remunerative work for both working- and middle-class women. Yet, I argue, both the fictional and actual nursing projects falter because of the tenacious cultural link between the nurse and the working-class prostitute. The novel’s attempt

6


to reform nursing is tangled ambiguously with its narrative of Christian redemption which forces the martyrdom of its fallen-woman heroine. Analogously, the discipline and order of Nightingale’s plan is frustrated by class tensions and the imperfect morality of the women and men with whom she worked. Though I follow such critics as Martha Vicinus and Mary Poovey in decentering Nightingale’s place in the history of nursing and health reform, I nevertheless argue that as a cultural icon, the Nightingale nurse contributed significantly to cultural debates over women’s involvement in public life and the empire. Nightingale’s reputation as the “Lady with the Lamp”—an image created by Crimean War press coverage and fiction—bolstered the empire and made nursing a respectable occupation for British women. But the chapter further demonstrates how the Lady with the Lamp overshadowed and displaced more progressive versions of the nurse envisioned by feminists and health reformers. I use Charles Kingsley’s Two Years Ago (1857), a wartime medical romance which glorifies reformed medicine, to show how the rhetoric of empire saturated the dominant vision of the angelic Nightingale nurse. Unfortunately for feminists, after the war even this icon of heroic Victorian womanhood proved too large for daily life. What had been a romantic and uplifting figure during imperial crisis now threatened to disrupt the domestic and social orders. Chapter 2 examines this postCrimean backlash in Victorian culture against the newly trained nurse. Because she threatened the status of medical men and the traditional role of the Victorian woman, the nurse was professionally subjugated to her “superior,” the doctor, and culturally redomesticated in the press and in fiction. While romance novels such as Rhoda Broughton’s Second Thoughts (1880) trivialized the professional nurse, sensation fiction such as Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) and Charles Reade’s Hard Cash (1863) demonstrated the postwar sexualization and demonization of the nurse. It is to these processes, I argue, that we owe contemporary representations of sadistic and hypersexualized nurses in popular culture and pornography. In particular, Hard Cash—much read by Victorians but now nearly forgotten—features a cast of “sensation nurses” at the center of a plot which is thinly veiled pornography. When Alfred Hardy’s father traps him in an insane asylum in order to steal his inheritance, the young man finds himself the love interest of both an

Introduction

7

“amorous crocodile” of a matron and a “muscular virgin” of a nurse who fight over him and kiss him while he is chained to his bed at night. Considering such representations of nurses, it is perhaps not surprising that many serious-minded women wished instead to study to become doctors. The pioneering British woman doctor, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, offered yet another reason when she explained why she was not satisfied to remain a nurse: “I prefer to earn a thousand rather than twenty pounds a year.”2 In chapters 3 and 4, then, I shift my focus to the figure of the woman doctor, best represented in journalism and fiction concerning the New Woman. Because of her professional status, the woman doctor drew enthusiastic support from feminists and violent antipathy from social conservatives and from many medical men who claimed that medical study would “unsex” her. Chapter 3 lays out the arguments for and against women doctors as expressed by the medical establishment, the press, feminists, and the women medics themselves. Most simply, these arguments can be reduced to questions of sexuality and educational/professional “fair play.” The medical-woman fictions I discuss in this chapter, from Charles Reade’s A Woman-Hater (1877) to G. G. Alexander’s Dr. Victoria (1888) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Doctors of Hoyland” (1895), limit their treatments of women doctors almost exclusively to these two questions. These texts aided opponents of the medical woman movement by defining the New Woman doctor primarily in terms of her (deviant) sexuality. While the Victorian nurse acquired the dual associations with the prostitute and the nun—sexuality fully expressed and fully repressed— critics of the woman doctor argued that medical knowledge would “unsex” her, make her a “neuter,” biologically incapable of the conventional womanly duties of marriage and motherhood. For this reason, I argue, Victorian fiction represents the New Woman doctor in homosocial and homoerotic terms, providing rare examples of nineteenthcentury protolesbian figures. Ironically, much of the public feared these “neutered” women less than the sexual danger which male doctors posed to Victorian womanhood, and thus women won the right to become doctors in order to “treat their sex.” 2. Louisa Garrett Anderson, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (London: Faber, 1939), 50.

8


Chapter 4 considers the responses made to earlier medical-woman fiction by doctors Arabella Kenealy and Margaret Todd. Like the fiction of chapter 3, their two novels consider the woman physician’s relation to sexuality and “fair play.” But Dr. Janet of Harley Street (1893) and Mona Maclean, Medical Student (1892), as self-conscious examples of the New Woman novel, explore those questions in distinctly feminist ways. Dr. Janet features a strong and successful woman doctor who rescues young women from manipulative husbands and expounds upon feminist theories of sexuality at dinner parties. Mona Maclean, on the other hand, charms the reader with its noble young heroine, who struggles to balance professional ambition with feminist causes and personal relationships. Perhaps most important, both novels (as their titles suggest) define their heroines in relation to their profession rather than their sex, unusual even among feminist writings. These texts not only make radical assertions for women’s equality within the medical profession but also, like other New Woman fiction, subvert the conventions of the heterosexual marriage-plot novel and redefine masculine readings of female sexuality, including late-century representations of the hysteric and the lesbian. My readings of the novels suggest that because Todd and Kenealy, like their New Woman heroines, are doctors who speak from positions within established medicine, they lend their novels special cultural authority from which to speak for the New Woman and her condition. Yet the radically different approaches to questions of women’s (medical) education, marriage, and sexuality taken up by Todd’s Mona Maclean, Medical Student and Kenealy’s Dr. Janet of Harley Street (1893) provide a sense of the shift that occurred in feminist thought at the turn of the century. Todd’s text is a solid example of well-crafted feminist realism in the tradition of George Eliot, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Sarah Grand. Todd identified herself with the goals and methods of pioneering feminists such as Sophia Jex-Blake, Elizabeth Blackwell, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, and Josephine Butler. In contrast, Kenealy’s novel is more clearly identified as consciously polemical sensation fiction. A eugenicist and follower of sexological and racial theorists such as Karl Pearson and Havelock Ellis, Kenealy is an early example of the “maternalist” thinkers who dominated feminist issues in the first half of the twentieth century. Her central concern is not the emancipation of women but woman’s role in the betterment of the race.

Introduction

9

This focus on race and eugenics ties Kenealy’s fiction to the concerns of the final chapter, which places the Western medical woman within the context of empire. “Out” in the empire, many of the distinctions so carefully built up in Europe and the U.S.—between nurses and doctors, men and women, American and British—disappear in the face of the overwhelming question of race. Autobiographies, periodicals, and fiction of the period such as Kipling’s The Naulahka (1892) and Hilda Gregg’s Peace with Honour demonstrate that however medical women were thwarted at home, they could become heroines—in life as well as in novels—in the empire. Just as medical training enabled the Nightingale nurse’s imperial adventure during the Crimean War, medicine was one of the few activities that allowed women to contribute actively to imperial expansion and maintenance. In return, imperial medicine boosted the Cause at home by providing a justification for women’s medical education that did not compete with male interests. Ironically, Western medical women, who had broken free of their own domestic sphere, flourished in Hindu and Muslim cultures where gender segregation prevented contact between male doctors and female patients. But these women, who epitomized the New Woman and who ran hospitals and clinics independent of men, derived their power from and subjected their patients to the same medical “science” which upheld the sexual and racial hierarchies of Victorian patriarchy and the empire. I use textual representations of the medical woman in the empire to provide explicit, concrete examples of this fundamental theoretical connection between Victorian feminism and imperialism. Looking at autobiographies, missionary tracts, and fiction such as Kipling’s The Naulahka, Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1886), and Hilda Gregg’s Peace with Honour, I demonstrate the ideologically complex role that these advanced women played in the empire. Through readings of Haggard’s and Kipling’s novels, I establish the possibilities for Eastern and Western “femaleness” in male-dominated imperial discourse from which women writers such as Hilda Gregg, Krupabai Satthianandhan, and Dr. Mary Scharlieb were forced to draw when figuring the medical woman in the East. If most medical women worked conscientiously to support the British Empire, they also undermined certain of its fundamental ideas. Medical women represented a severe blow to the imperialist project’s ideology of gender complementarity, which posited women as biologically inferior to men, incapable of the very mental and

10


physical acts that women were actually performing in the colonies. Far from wishing to claim innocence, ignorance, or passivity, Scharlieb’s autobiography and Gregg’s medical-woman adventure novel, Peace with Honour, assert the female imperialist’s knowledge, competence, and agency, all of which grow from the legitimating power of her medical study and degree. This chapter on the imperial medical woman provides a fitting conclusion to the entire project. Many Victorian assumptions about health, medicine, sex, and morality that I trace through previous chapters as subtexts requiring elucidation become “exteriorized,” as Edward Said would say, in the Orientalist medical project and the literature that supported it. The “manifest destiny” of British militarism and imperialism sustained by the new medicine which I first examined in relation to the Crimean War, achieves its fullest flowering in British India and Africa. Again, we see the confluence of the medical and the religious in the medical missions that dominated health care in the colonies. Moreover, the elitism of Victorian medicine and middle-class feminism toward the working classes in Britain appears in an extreme, racialized form in the interactions between Western medics and Eastern patients. My project has been informed by recent work on women and medicine from several fields. Perhaps most important to the initial formulation of the project were Judith Walkowitz’s Prostitution and Victorian Society (1980) and chapters in Mary Poovey’s Uneven Developments (1988) and Martha Vicinus’s Independent Women (1985), all of which treated the cultural influence of Florence Nightingale. Like Poovey and Vicinus, I find Nightingale to be an ambiguous and baffling character. But though I agree that Nightingale must be deconstructed and removed from the center of nursing history, I do not try to diminish her importance to Victorian culture. On the contrary, I argue that Nightingale’s influence upon Victorian culture was much greater than most critics following Lytton Strachey would like to admit. Since the publication of these important works, other Victorianist and feminist scholars have taken up related issues in books that have also influenced the direction of this project. The collection Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science (1990), edited by Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sally Shuttleworth, contains important essays on women and science in nineteenth- and twentieth-century AngloAmerican culture. Susan Kingsley Kent’s Sex and Suffrage (1987) builds

Introduction

11

on Walkowitz to argue for the conceptual importance of Victorian women doctors to the campaign for women’s suffrage. Kent’s book is important for the way that it extends Walkowitz’s work on the Contagious Diseases Acts and brings in women doctors as agents of culture. However, I find Kent’s treatment of women doctors and their relation to feminism and the Contagious Diseases Acts too limited. By using fiction, especially, I am able to treat women doctors as a less homogeneous group with complicated and conflicting beliefs. Like critics such as Nancy Armstrong and Jane Tompkins, I am interested principally in the cultural work of fiction, though I do not dismiss formal and aesthetic considerations in my readings of texts. Recent studies which analyze representations of health issues in Victorian literature include Athena Vrettos’s Somatic Fictions (1995) and Miriam Bailin’s The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction (1994). Like my project, both of these treat the pervasive topic of illness in Victorian literature, though neither has much to say about trained or professional women who care for the sick. Catherine Judd’s Bedside Seductions (1998), which came out as I was revising this manuscript, does a fine job of reading the eroticism of the “pure” nurse in Victorian literature. Although I use some of the same texts, my project has a stronger focus on the sensationalism of the nurse; nevertheless, the publication of Judd’s book caused me to scrap a good deal of my original manuscript that shared common ground and—happily, I think—place greater emphasis upon the New Woman doctor. I am most indebted to Ann Ardis’s New Women, New Novels (1990), Lyn Pykett’s The “Improper” Feminine (1992), Sally Ledger’s The New Woman (1997), and Elaine Showalter’s Sexual Anarchy (1990) for helping me to read the woman doctor as a New Woman and in relation to late-century cultural politics. These studies have omitted the notable figure of the New Woman doctor, however, despite the significant role she played in the shaping late-century medical and sexual discourse. My treatment of medical women in the empire is informed by the work of postcolonial critics such as Anne McClintock (Imperial Leather, 1995), Antoinette Burton (Burdens of History, 1994), and Kumari Jayawardena (The White Woman’s Other Burden, 1995), all of whom consider the relationship between British feminism and the Orientalisms of empire. While many works of postcolonial criticism consider alternately the significance of women or medicine to British imperialism, few acknowledge as I do how bound together the two are

12


within the imperial project and the literature that supported it. My use of fiction extends the work of literary critics such as Deirdre David (Rule Britannia, 1995) and Parama Roy (Indian Traffic, 1998) and connects the study of imperial fiction to the historical issues surrounding women and medicine in the empire. In recent years a great deal of Victorianist scholarship has shown how the medically defined question of sex in the Victorian period underlay issues as wide-ranging as the “health” of the empire, women’s education and entry into the professions, dress reform, maternity, woman suffrage, and the campaigns against vivisection and the Contagious Diseases Acts. The Victorian nurse and woman doctor, then, as medical practitioners who enforced or subverted the sciences of sex and race, offer important evidence of women’s participation in the discourses that determined the limitations and opportunities of their own lives.

Chapter One

6d8 Angels of Mercy

Lytton Strachey’s famous description of Florence Nightingale in Eminent Victorians (1918) exposes the duality and duplicity of this Victorian nursing icon: Everyone knows the popular conception of Florence Nightingale. The saintly, self sacrificing woman, the delicate maiden of high degree who threw aside the pleasures of a life of ease to succor the afflicted, the Lady with the Lamp, gliding through the horrors of the hospital at Scutari, and consecrating with the radiance of her goodness the dying soldier’s couch—the vision is familiar to all. But the truth was different. The Miss Nightingale of fact was not as facile fancy painted her. . . . [S]he moved under the stress of an impetus which finds no place in the popular imagination. A Demon possessed her. . . . [I]n the real Miss Nightingale there was more that was interesting than in the legendary one; there was also less that was agreeable.1

Strachey’s analysis discovers in the figure of Nightingale a text and a subtext, a conscious and an unconscious self, with the latter producing a demonic sexual desire that the former represses and channels into work. In psychoanalytic, as in Victorian, terms, Nightingale can be no welladjusted (“natural”) woman because her biological function remains 1. Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians, 135.

13

14


unfulfilled. Instead, she verges on the insane, psychoanalysis’s substitute for the demonic. Strachey also implies that the Victorians were blind to the psychological complexities of their heroine, that to them she was merely the Lady with the Lamp. But Strachey, like Freud, does not uncover the truth about nineteenth-century culture so much as observe and reinterpret what the Victorians themselves had constructed and deployed. By asserting that a woman who was not an angel must surely be a demon in disguise, Strachey replicates one of the most basic dichotomies of the Victorian cultural imagination. Strachey’s Nightingale is, in fact, the Nightingale nurse of Victorian fiction and the press, resembling in her duality other doubles of nineteenth-century literature. She is the angel and the demon or fallen woman: Becky Sharpe and Amelia Sedley, Lady Dedlock and Esther Summerson, Bertha Mason and Jane Eyre, Ruth Hilton fallen and reformed. Strachey’s portrait of Nightingale signals the essentially fragmentary status of the historical Nightingale and of the figure of the nurse. Nightingale emerged as the most prominent national hero of the confidenceshaking Crimean War; the impression that she made upon the nation and, indeed, the world, shaped not only Victorian views of nursing and health care but of female heroism and the proper role of women in public life. It is not surprising, then, that Florence Nightingale’s reputation became an important battleground for various warring factions in Victorian culture. Reformers, feminists, and traditionalists all had a stake in determining how the public would view her: was she an aristocratic Lady Bountiful? a sweet, self-sacrificing maiden? a nurturing and capable domestic manager? a conniving, competitive shrew? or an ambitious and professional administrator? To some extent, the battle continues in twentieth-century historiography—and the lines are essentially those drawn by the Victorians.2 2. For analyses of Nightingale that are critical and yet seek to place her within the positive framework of Victorian feminism, see Vicinus, Independent Women, and Poovey, Uneven Developments. F. B. Smith, Florence Nightingale: Reputation and Power is distinctly critical of Nightingale the woman (as opposed to her reformed medical project). Recently, Hugh Small has attempted to explain the seeming contradictions of Nightingale’s behavior after the Crimean War as guilt for her inability to see that thousands of men were dying from improper sanitation in her hospital at Scutari (Florence Nightingale, Avenging Angel).

Angels of Mercy

15

At various times, Nightingale appeared as each of these characters, whose dissimilarities only increased the culture’s difficulty of imagining a single, stable persona for her and for the reformed nurse. As much as anything she actually did, Nightingale’s presence in British army hospitals during the Crimean War gave modern nursing its fragmented character. The old nurse disappeared from public view in the Crimean War (though, ironically, it was she who did most of the actual labor) as new representations of the nurse emerged. Chief among these was the romanticized “Lady with the Lamp,” as Strachey describes Nightingale. But, because of the many versions of Nightingale circulating within Victorian culture, the Lady with the Lamp is shadowed by several other figures that have been captured in Victorian literature. Many of these less popular (though no more true) versions of the new nurse did reach the twentieth century—as the romantic heroines of war films, the dominatrices of pornography, or the still feminine career women of TV medical shows. Most Victorians, as Strachey rightly notes, preferred the Lady with the Lamp, “that gentle vision of female virtue,” as he calls her elsewhere.3 But I will argue that, contrary to Strachey’s assertion, “other,” threatening or sexualized versions of Nightingale did more than “find a place” in the “popular imagination” of the Victorian period; in fact, Victorian culture reveals a great fascination with the nurse’s possibilities. In this chapter and the one that follows, I will examine some of those “other” nurses and how the image of the nurse as the Lady with the Lamp came to dominate in Victorian culture. Victorian fiction and journalism are particularly important to such an examination because of their attempts to create stable images of Nightingale and, later, the nurse. But, more than this, my purpose is to insist on the inherent fictionality of the historical “Florence Nightingales” who still live in the popular imagination. The logical place to begin to explore the Victorian nurse is with Gaskell’s 1853 novel, Ruth, which portrays the modern nurse as fractured by issues of class and sexuality even before she became associated with Nightingale and certainly long before Strachey’s characterization. Victorians deployed actual and fictional medical women in 3. Strachey, Eminent Victorians, 164.

16


order to stand in female opposition to the prostitute and to treat the cultural ills that she signaled. Ruth condenses and thereby complicates this relationship—which in other contexts has been labeled one of the virgin to the whore or the angel to the demon—by containing the fallen woman and her nurse-savior in one body.4 Ruth Hilton plays a range of seemingly contradictory womanly roles whose coming together in one body implies their connectedness not only in her novelistic world but also within Victorian culture. Ruth’s history as a seduced seamstress recalls Victorian reformers’ tracts on prostitution: she is an abandoned woman and single mother who transgresses class boundaries and disrupts social expectations. Yet Ruth is also a pious Christian, a beloved friend, and respected governess. Finally, she is a nurse. As we shall see, though the nurse of Victorian culture can reform, she cannot separate herself entirely from the figure of the working-class prostitute. “Ruth is a story of seduction—” wrote G. H. Lewes in his 1853 review of Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel. From the first, Ruth has been read as a polemic on the plight of the fallen woman in Victorian England, a sermon of Christian charity and rehabilitation.5 Ruth is not simply about a fallen woman’s Christian redemption. The novel enmeshes the fallen woman’s story within a larger social narrative of reform and responsibility, of sickness and health both moral and physical, both personal and public. If one reads Ruth as merely a Christian narrative, Ruth’s nursing among the poor and then in a fever hospital becomes simply the final and necessary sacrifice that enables her to transcend sinfulness and to reside among the saints in heaven. I would argue, however, that by contextualizing the novel and by looking beyond the Christian narrative to a social narrative equally important to the text, nursing is rendered not a punishment or a sign of sin but a potential solution for several social ills. Sanitary reformers and medical professionals of the period considered nursing reform central to general public health reform, and many young Victorian women saw in nursing a possible outlet for their ardor and untapped energy.6 Florence Nightingale, who in 1852 demanded, 4. See, for instance, Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon; and Michael Slater, Dickens and Women. 5. George Henry Lewes, “Ruth: A Novel,” 476, 483, 479. 6. Among them were Gaskell’s daughter, Meta, and Christina Rossetti, who volunteered to accompany Nightingale to the Crimea, but the two were turned

Angels of Mercy

17

“Why cannot we make use of the noble rising heroisms of our own day, instead of leaving them to rust?” would in the next decades help to refashion nursing for just this purpose.7 Nursing provided for both Gaskell and Nightingale a means of occupying Victorian England’s “superfluous” women because it satisfied (after some renovation) middle-class standards of female modesty and decorum while fulfilling a social need. The idea of reformed nursing, which emerged at midcentury, and to which Gaskell and Nightingale contributed significantly, relied heavily upon two areas of public life within which women had already entrenched themselves: religious orders and philanthropy.8 These vocations, which had long involved “nursing,” conformed to Victorian notions of woman’s innate nurturing and domestic skills, and to the biblical prescription of charity toward the poor and unfortunate. They also had the advantage of providing free (and therefore respectable) labor for needy social causes. Before reforms after midcentury, the paid nurse not only suffered from the stigma of pay, but was perceived as a “monster-evil,” unqualified and immoral.9 Gaskell’s project in Ruth and Nightingale’s in life thus required the reformation of nursing’s image and the reconciliation of pay with propriety. These goals were aided by mid-Victorian medicine and social activism, both of which found valuable commodities in the domestic skills and moral rectitude of the middle-class woman. And yet, creating an occupation for superfluous women on the model of the middle-class wife involved tremendous difficulties and ideological contradictions that surface in both Gaskell’s novel and Nightingale’s nursing project. Elizabeth Gaskell met Florence Nightingale while visiting the Nightingale estate, Lea Hurst, in October of 1854. Scholars tend to assume, perhaps because of the reputation Nightingale would enjoy in coming years, that admiration was all on Gaskell’s side. In her Mrs. Gaskell and Her Friends, for instance, Elizabeth Haldane writes: “One sees from [Gaskell’s] letters the enormous influence that Florence Nightingale exerted on those with whom she came into contact, even before she down from lack of experience. See, Gaskell, The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, Oct. 27, 1854, 217; and Lionel Stevenson, The Pre-Raphaelite Poets, 94. 7. Nightingale, Cassandra, 36. 8. Poovey, Uneven Developments, 177. 9. Francis Power Cobbe, from “Workhouse Sketches,” 156.

18


reached the distinguished position she held through her work for the benefit of the fighting Forces.” It is true that, in her letters from Lea Hurst, Gaskell makes characteristically generous comments about Nightingale (“She is so like a saint”), but she also criticizes Nightingale’s “want of love for individuals” and her extreme enthusiasm for “institutions, sisterhoods and associations.”10 Moreover, at least one of Nightingale’s own nursing anecdotes suggests Gaskell’s influence upon her and her nursing project. The story that Gaskell reported to her friend Emily Shaen renders Nightingale’s ideal nurse remarkably like Gaskell’s own angel of mercy, Ruth Hilton: Speaking of the cholera in the Middlesex Hospital, [Nightingale] said, “The prostitutes come in perpetually-poor creatures staggering off their beat! It took worse hold of them then of any. One poor girl, loathsomely filthy, came in, and was dead in four hours. I held her in my arms and I heard her saying something. I bent down to hear. ‘Pray God, that you may never be in the despair I am in at this time.’ I said, ‘Oh, my girl, are you not now more merciful than the God you think you are going to? Yet the real God is far more merciful than any human creature ever was, or can ever imagine.’”11

Like so many other anecdotes about Nightingale, this one is apparently not supported by fact. The hospital’s records do not mention Nightingale among the workers at the time she specifies, and prostitutes were not likely to have been admitted. In any case, Nightingale’s anecdote, fabricated or simply embellished, remains very like Gaskell’s fiction. Seemingly, Nightingale created a Ruthlike fiction of her own behavior for Gaskell’s benefit. This anecdote raises a number of questions about the relationship between the “Nightingale nurse,” who would grow out of Nightingale’s experiences in the Crimean War, and Gaskell’s nurse, created at least two years earlier. For one thing, it suggests what so many of Nightingale’s critics have asserted: that she used her great “powers as titillating fabulist” and her connections in the British press to invent the “Lady with the Lamp”—a version of the nurse that would not only be palatable but even heroic in the eyes of the 10. Haldane, Mrs. Gaskell and Her Friends, 89–90; Gaskell, Letters, Oct. 11–14, 1854, 211; Oct. 27, 1854, 217. 11. Gaskell, Letters, Oct. 27, 1854, 217.

Angels of Mercy

19

British public. Nightingale’s anecdote also illustrates the extent to which Victorians associated immorality—and especially sexual immorality— with disease and contagion, a notion which both Gaskell and Nightingale found rhetorically useful in their respective social campaigns. Nightingale’s young Magdalene embodies not only personal but also social sin; she is the receptacle of both moral and physical corruption, disease, and contagion. And yet, she may be redeemed, if only for heaven, at the hands of the nurse, a female savior with Christlike power to cure the body as well as the soul.12 The likeness of Nightingale’s ideal nurse to Gaskell’s Ruth and the association of both with fallen women suggest that if Nightingale did not find a model for the Lady with the Lamp in Gaskell’s novel, which she had read in 1853, the two women at least held similar views about nursing, prostitution, and reform. Nightingale had praised Ruth as a “beautiful work” and was particularly pleased that Gaskell had taken her heroine’s career seriously, having “not made Ruth start at once as a hospital nurse, but arrive at it after much other nursing that came first.”13 Though it is entirely possible that Gaskell’s novel did influence Nightingale’s nursing project and “self projections,” what is more important to note is that both women were speaking confidently from within a discourse about reformed nursing which was established before Nightingale’s adventures in the Crimean War. Nightingale did not have a clean slate upon which to sketch the new nurse, even if she can be credited with having shaped certain contours of that figure. That such a discourse preceded Nightingale has become a standard line in recent revisionist nursing history, which has sought to abandon the 12. Smith, Florence Nightingale: Reputation and Power, 16–17. I say “seems to be unsupported” because the details surrounding this anecdote are unclear. Smith places the letter in August of 1854 rather than in October, and designates Catherine Winkworth rather than Emily Shaen as its recipient. On Nightingale’s influence, see Smith, Florence Nightingale: Reputation and Power, 17; Poovey, Uneven Developments, 166. See also Lois A. Monteiro, “Nightingale and Her Correspondents: Portrait of the Era,” 40–59, for a discussion particularly of Nightingale’s correspondence with Harriet Martineau, writer for the Daily News, as a means to push for army reforms. Nightingale worked “‘from offstage,’ anonymously supplying political facts and information while Martineau communicated this knowledge to the public” (57). 13. Anna Rubenius, The Woman Question in Mrs. Gaskell’s Life and Works, 131, n. 2.

20


“great woman” theory of modern nursing.14 The real origins of reformed nursing are less important here than that its main proponents at midcentury came from an evangelical-reformist sector of British society, which included Gaskell and Nightingale. In their study on the rise of the medical professions, Noel and José Parry have noted that evangelical groups were concerned with the “decline of employment opportunities for women . . . as early as 1804.” By midcentury, reformers such as Gaskell and Nightingale assumed the “relationship between the magnitude of prostitution . . . and the lack of suitable work for women.”15 One of the purposes of this chapter, then, is to construct through a reading of Ruth at least a partial picture of the pre-Crimean discourse of reformed nursing whose assumptions would continue to echo in debates over medical women throughout the Victorian period. The chapters that follow will trace the manner in which the Nightingale nurse and her near-relation, the woman doctor, took shape within the Victorian imagination, and how they were deployed as central figures in discursive battles over the Woman Question, the social order, and the empire. Through medicine, Victorian culture did finally “make use,” as Nightingale had wished, of its ambitious young women. But the contradictions inherent in the figure of the medical woman—the instability of her social and economic status, her proximity to and intimate knowledge of strangers’ bodies, and above all her dubious relation to the fallen woman whom it was her special mission to serve—continued to haunt her long after the death of Florence Nightingale.

Redeeming the Superfluous Woman To fully appreciate the risks that Gaskell takes with Ruth, it is necessary to have a fuller picture of the state of Victorian medicine and health care before the reforms during and after the Crimean War. Until the 14. Not surprisingly, Nightingale plays a central role in both traditional and revisionist histories of nursing. For revisionist discussions of Nightingale, see Philip Kalisch and Beatrice Kalisch, “‘The Birth of Modern Nursing.’ Florence Nightingale: Pioneer,” 129–39; Charles E. Rosenberg, “Florence Nightingale on Contagion: The Hospital as Moral Universe,” 116–36; Anne Summers, “Pride and Prejudice: Ladies and Nurses in the Crimean War,” 32–56. 15. Noel Parry and José Parry, The Rise of the Medical Profession. A Study of Collective Social Mobility, 169.

Angels of Mercy

21

development of the germ theory in the 1870s, physicians had no clear idea of the causes, the propagation, or the proper treatment of most diseases. Particularly pernicious and elusive were the several diseases— typhus, typhoid fever, cholera, yellow fever, etc. — that they yoked together under the term fever. Observation had taught them that “[i]t is among the poor and uncleanly that epidemic pestilence principally spreads, and always begins,” and that the fever “will continue to spread . . . as long as poverty and vice continue to render the abodes of the great portion of the community receptacles for everything that is unwholesome.” Thus, health care officials and reformers did recognize that social conditions affected disease and that public health was a moral issue insofar as poverty and poor nutrition were moral issues for Victorians.16 At the beginning of the century the British believed, generally, that disease was contagious—passed through direct contact or through the air. But then an interesting shift in medical thought occurred. The inability to prove contagion scientifically for diseases other than smallpox and venereal disease allowed the hypothesis of “anticontagionism,” or the “so-called filth theory of the generation of epidemic diseases,” to gain credence in the European medical community. Anticontagionism took hold in Britain during the cholera epidemic of 1831–1832, and gained official support during the epidemic of 1848–1849. Like the older theory of contagion, anticontagionism located disease in the homes of the poor. But unlike that older theory, anticontagionism posited that disease was actually generated in (not simply carried or propagated by) the “filth” of the working-class home. Further, one caught the disease directly from the filth or the filth-infested air (which meant that disease remained localized in poor areas) and according to certain nebulous predispositions that included mental and moral factors such as sexual excess, intemperance, and fear of catching the disease.17 16. Margaret Pelling, Cholera, Fever, and English Medicine, 1825–65, 6; quotation in Thomas Bateman, A succinct account of the contagious fever of this country, exemplified in the epidemic now prevailing in London; with the appropriate method of treatment as practised in the House of recovery, 157. 17. Erwin H. Ackerknecht, “Anticontagionism between 1821–1867,” 566; quotation in W. H. Welch, Public Health in Theory and Practice, 27; Ackerknecht, “Anticontagionism,” 576; Rosenberg, “The Cause of Cholera: Aspects of Etiological Thought in Nineteenth-Century America,” 333–34.

22


Disease, and particularly fever, had long been associated with immorality. But anticontagionism asserted a direct causal link between the two: the “filth” of immorality not only generated fever, but “immoral” persons were predisposed to it; “moral” persons were largely immune to it and could treat it in others. Medical historian Charles Rosenberg assures us that nineteenth-century medical thinkers did not actually consider disease to be a direct punishment from God, simply that its “onset was an inevitable result . . . of transgressing His physical and moral laws.” Conversely, an “active exercise of faith in God and His justice would protect one from fear and thus from cholera.”18 The empirically observed link between disease and poor neighborhoods thus led to the conflation of poverty and immorality. If medical thinkers believed this theory, it is not hard to imagine how popular it must have been among social reformers. For one thing, the ability to localize disease within tangible filth gave health-care reformers control over it: like good housekeepers, they could simply clean it up. Just as important, anticontagionism allowed reformers (and later, nurses), with their sense of moral superiority, to feel relatively immune from the diseases they fought among the working classes. By privileging woman’s innate moral superiority and domestic skills, anticontagionism opened a space for women within medicine. In short, anticontagionism upheld middle-class notions of a stable moral and social order and of woman as naturally domestic and moral. Nightingale’s “moral sanitarianism,” which created monumental reforms in nursing and hospital care, grew directly from this same anticontagionist theory of disease and the social activism that accompanied it.19 18. Rosenberg, “Cause of Cholera,” 333. 19. See Rosenberg, “Florence Nightingale on Contagion,” 128, 127. Ackerknecht also ties anticontagionism to the rising bourgeoisie by suggesting that the theory gained official sanction because quarantines (the principle method of limiting contagion) adversely affected international trade (“Anticontagionism,” 567). Another interesting hypothesis is that anticontagionism sprang up around cholera treatment in India, a likely birthplace for a theory of disease which locates disease among socially inferior classes of people, minimizing the possibility of direct contamination of the superior classes. Anna Jameson coined the term moral sanitary reform to describe the role she desired women to take in social reform efforts (Vicinus, Independent Women, 316, n. 9).

Angels of Mercy

23

With this context of medical thought and practice in mind, the twentieth-century reader must modify what might otherwise be a misguided reading of the typhus epidemic in Ruth and the heroine’s role as angel of mercy. The novel signals Ruth’s forgiveness through a typical Victorian melodrama of reformation, complete with a heart-wrenching deathbed scene and a funeral. For this reason, it is tempting to read the typhus episode merely as a convenient way to contrive Ruth’s martyrdom. However, the typhus epidemic allows another, more constructive reading of Ruth’s role in the novel. Through it, the novel enacts a powerful and succinct message of shared social responsibility and culpability. It redeems Ruth spiritually and socially by creating a valued space for her within the public domain.20 In the terms of mid-Victorian medicine, Gaskell’s typhus can function as an agent of social morality because it is anticontagionist in nature, having an environmental cause and means of propagation. In several respects, the fever in Ruth operates precisely as a Victorian anticontagionist would expect it to. The typhus “begins” among the poor, “in the low Irish lodging-houses” where “it was so common it excited little attention,” and arises like a biblical plague from the poverty which the text associates with vice (424). Into Eccleston “there came creeping, creeping, in hidden, slimy courses, the terrible fever—that fever which is never utterly banished from the sad haunts of vice and misery, but lives in such darkness, like a wild beast in the recesses of his den” (424). The anticontagionist notions that fear will predispose a subject to fever and that faith will protect her from it also play central roles in the novel. 20. Catherine Judd makes a similar argument about Ruth when she asserts that nursing “leads directly to [Ruth’s] death, but also to her social and spiritual salvation” (Bedside Seductions, 82). Judd’s argument depends upon her contrast between the “morally dangerous labor” of Ruth’s early work as a seamstress and the “morally pure labor” of her nursing (88, 91). When Ruth dies after nursing her ex-lover, therefore, Judd is critical of “Gaskell’s evocation of nursing as atonement [that] cannot erase the images of nursing as social punishment and self-flagellation” (99). I would argue, though, that Judd’s initial formulation of sewing vs. nursing, which ignores Ruth’s more respectable work as a governess and which forces this reading of nursing’s undermined purity, places too much emphasis upon the Magdalenian resonance of nursing and too little upon the Victorian social context of the occupation. By emphasizing that context, I find Ruth to be a much more progressive novel than Judd allows.

24


In the face of the town’s panic over the epidemic, Ruth volunteers to serve as matron in the fever ward. Benson (who visits the sick but will not catch fever because of his piety), warns her, “if you cannot still this agony of fear as to what will become of [your son], you ought not to go. Such tremulous passion will predispose you to take the fever” (426). But Ruth insists, “I believe I have no fear. That is a great preservative, they say. At any rate . . . it is quite gone when I remember that I am in God’s hands!” (425). Ruth’s trust that her faith will inoculate her against typhus is not mere naiveté. Eyewitness accounts from the Crimea record that Florence Nightingale and her nursing corps trusted in the same protection. “[Nightingale] has an utter disregard of contagion,” reported S. G. Osborne, “I have known her [to] spend hours over men dying of cholera or fever . . . administering to his ease in every way in her power, and seldom quitting his side till death released him.” “True nursing,” Nightingale wrote after the war, “ignores infection, except to prevent it.” The belief in the anticontagious nature of disease was absolutely necessary for the success of reformed nursing. Rosenberg comments, “If chance alone” determined disease, “then sickness was bereft of meaning; it could play no monitory role in a world of moral order.” And, on a more practical level, he adds, “[I]f prudence, proper regimen, and good general health could not protect one against contagion, then nursing must be a perilous trade indeed.”21 But this clinically sanctioned belief that kept the middle-class lady safe also depended upon a distinct class bias and generated explicitly class-based repercussions. Mary Poovey calls Nightingale’s plan “panoptical”: “Nightingale’s vision of a classless . . . society is actually a vision of society as a network of middle-class families dominated if not run by women, penetrated and linked by nurses who emanate from the central hospital—homes where they are disciplined and trained.”22 In her plan for a system of “district nurses” who would visit the poor in their homes, Nightingale writes of the need to “reform and re-create” the homes of the sick poor: 21. Sidney Godolphin Osborne, “An Eye-Witness Account,” 91; Nightingale, Notes on Nursing, 142; Rosenberg, “Florence Nightingale on Contagion,” 127. 22. Uneven Developments, 192.

Angels of Mercy

25

The very thing that we find in these sick poor is, that they lose the feeling of what it is to be clean. The district nurse has to show them their room clean for once; in other words, to do it herself, to sweep and dust away, to empty and wash out all the appalling dirt and foulness. . . . Every home she has thus cleaned has always been kept so. This is her glory. She found it a pig-sty; she left it a tidy, airy room.23

Though Gaskell, too, ultimately reinscribes middle-class morality in the novel, her more democratic vision allowed her to see what medical research and Nightingale’s moral sanitarianism would not: that all classes of society were equally culpable for and equally vulnerable to fever. This is not to deny that living conditions affect vulnerability to disease. Nor do I mean to imply that Gaskell understood germ theory or even looked at disease in biological terms. Her Christian morality taught her to believe that all human beings are equally God’s children just as they are all equally born into sin; her reformism taught her to believe that social conditions caused the inequalities among the classes that others blamed upon innate differences, moral and biological. Rather like an Old Testament plague, the typhus in Ruth does not spread from person to person through individual contact but erupts from the moral pestilence and hypocrisy of the entire community, and particularly from the corruption of society’s leaders. Ironically, the anticontagionist belief in the environmental nature of disease that, in other contexts, condemned the poor as immoral becomes the means by which Gaskell criticizes the moral hypocrisy of the upper classes. The narration of the fever’s attack follows directly the narrator’s comparison of the citizens of Eccleston to the subjects of the biblical King Belshazzar, who were punished by God for their materialism and lack of faith. Throughout the novel, Gaskell contrasts Ruth’s “sin” (which is hardly blamable, even in Gaskell’s terms) to the true sins of the more prosperous in society. Reverend Benson, who pitied the fallen Ruth immediately, condemns the hypocrisies of the wealthy. When Bradshaw—who had dismissed Ruth from her post as his children’s governess when he discovered that she was a fallen woman—attempts to buy himself a seat in Parliament, Benson delivers a sermon denouncing political bribery as “in plain terms a sin” however “disguised by names and words” (260–61). Rev. 23. Nightingale, “On Trained Nursing for the Sick Poor,” 312.

26


Benson is likewise “shocked” by the “want of moral courage” and the “overt act of guilt” of Bradshaw’s son Richard, who had forged Benson’s name on an insurance policy and embezzled its value (406, 411). Appropriately, though, Benson’s greatest wrath is reserved for Ruth’s seducer, Bellingham/Donne: “Men may call such actions as yours, youthful follies! There is another name for them with God,” he tells him, “I thank God, you have no right, legal or otherwise, over the child. And for her sake, I will spare him the shame of ever hearing your name as his father” (454). By such denunciations, the burden of guilt is shifted from Ruth and the unconscious or desperate sins of the poor to the conscious and careless sins of the prosperous. Gaskell’s harsh criticism of Bellingham’s actions toward Ruth corresponds to evangelical reformers’ “crisis of conscience” over the “sexual exploitation of working-class girls by their social superiors.” Not only were these reformers ashamed of the large number of middle-class men who, they believed, seduced and betrayed working-class women, but they felt that “[p]ublic officials and merchants were also implicated in this deadly traffic” by underpaying their female workers and refusing “outdoor relief to widows and unmarried mothers.”24 Gaskell’s use of the epidemic as social critique becomes even more explicit when Ruth, a fallen woman, absorbs the symbolic sin of her community serving as matron of the local typhus ward. Here, Gaskell reverses a popular expectation, for many Victorians considered fallen women a public health threat as spreaders of venereal diseases. For instance, Dickens’s Esther Summerson absorbs the smallpox that at once binds together and threatens her society and, by doing so, protects her fallen-woman mother, Lady Dedlock. Dickens’s use of disease in Bleak House makes a nice contrast to Gaskell’s in Ruth: whereas Gaskell chooses a disease considered environmental and noncontagious, Dickens uses the directly contagious smallpox to demonstrate connections of personal responsibility and guilt among his characters. Considering the themes of the novel, it is easy to think that one contagious disease stands for another—that syphilis (the Great Social Evil associated with female sexuality) is the pox that scars Esther. 24. Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State, 34.

Angels of Mercy

27

In the 1860s, advocates of the Contagious Diseases Acts would apply the same moral sanitarianism that Nightingale used so effectively in the Crimea and among the urban poor to the “unrestrained moral contagion” of that “Great Social Evil,” prostitution. However, as Ruth suggests, Gaskell and Nightingale advocated not the “sanitary supervision” of the Contagious Diseases Acts — with their forced gynecological examinations and confinement in lock hospitals—but rehabilitation and economic aid, especially in the form of employment. Both women, writes Cora Lansbury, regarded prostitution not as “a symptom of moral depravity but as the glaring example of society’s reluctance to provide women with employment at a living wage.” Ruth’s position as savior of the community that had cast her out, as nurse to those who had succumbed to a social disease from which her goodness keeps her safe, effects a recuperation of Ruth that motherhood, governessing, and religious self-repression could not.25 Gaskell’s recuperation of Ruth succeeds because it is not merely a matter of the heroine emanating personal goodness; it also involves valued work, which renders Ruth no longer superfluous to her community. Gaskell’s most explicit treatment of female superfluity is in Cranford, the novel whose serial publication she interrupted to write Ruth. What Cranford makes explicit is implicit in Ruth: the anxiety that all Victorians, but especially Victorian women, felt over the national census figures that, decade after decade, reported an “excess” of thousands of British women.26 Because she believed that prostitution resulted from low wages and unemployment rather than from moral depravity, Gaskell treats the fallen woman as a superfluous woman of a particularly needy sort; alienating these women would only compound the problem of superfluity. Indeed, as in Mary Barton (1848), the outcast prostitute is the specter that haunts the working woman in Ruth. Unlike in that earlier novel, however, socially ostracizing fallen women is here treated as misguided prejudice. Though the reader knows that Ruth is leading a productive Christian life, a dressmaker who knew her 25. Walkowitz, Prostitution, 41, 32; Cora Lansbury, Elizabeth Gaskell: The Novel of Social Crisis, 51. 26. Pauline Nestor, Female Friendships and Communities: Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, 3.

28


before her seduction assumes that she has become a prostitute since “one knows they can but go from bad to worse, poor creatures!” (321). And though Ruth’s work as the Bradshaws’ governess is more than satisfactory, and though she behaves more modestly and correctly than Bradshaw’s own daughter, Ruth is dismissed from her position as soon as her story is known. The revelation of Ruth’s history forces Bradshaw’s daughter Jemima to realize the environmental and social causes of what she had likened to “some strange, ghastly, lidless-eyed monster” (323): “With a father and mother, and home and careful friends, I am not likely to be tempted like Ruth; but . . . I might have been just like Ruth, or rather, worse than she ever was, because I am more headstrong and passionate by nature” (365). The fallen woman is superfluous, then, merely because Victorian society labels her as such. Ruth’s heroism during the typhus epidemic demonstrates how ultimately self-defeating it is for society to refuse the talents and energies of its women. Training and employing middle-class women to be paid nurses must have seemed a logical step to Gaskell who, like most Victorians, felt the need for qualified nurses as well as for occupations for superfluous women.27 The popular stereotype of nurses as drunken, promiscuous, uneducated, and often brutal and dishonest reflected badly, of course, upon working women who might want or need to earn a living in this manner.28 Thus, Jemima is at first horrified when Ruth becomes a nurse: “Why, Ruth, you are better educated than I am! . . . all your taste and refinement will be in your way, and will unfit you” (388–89). And, indeed, the duties of nursing entailed “disagreeable and painful work” and required “enough self-command to control herself from expressing any sign of repugnance” (390). However, as Ruth predicts to Jemima, the very qualities that would seem to overqualify her for nursing become 27. Winifred Gérin, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Biography, traces Gaskell’s understanding of the inadequacy of the nursing of her day to the personal experiences of the Rev. William Turner with whom she was staying in Newcastle at the outbreak of the cholera epidemic of 1831–1832; though Turner sent the young Gaskell to Edinburgh during the epidemic, he stayed to organize relief efforts (134). Appropriately, Turner is considered the model for Thurston Benson in Ruth (133). 28. For the Victorians’ popular conception of the nursing profession see Richard H. Shryock, The History of Nursing: An Interpretation of the Social and Medical Factors Involved, 219, 228; and Elspeth Huxley, Florence Nightingale, 30.

Angels of Mercy

29

her greatest strengths: “As she had foretold, she found a use for all her powers. The poor patients themselves were unconsciously gratified and soothed by her harmony and refinement of manner, voice, and gesture” (390–91). In order to separate Ruth from the image of the immoral workingclass nurse, the novel emphasizes her genteel qualities, and forces her to conform to middle-class notions of feminine propriety. This includes, for a woman who works of necessity, a rather incongruous relation to money. Though Ruth nurses not from charity but to support herself and her son, she accepts payment for her work as if it were a necessary sacrifice: Whatever remuneration was offered to her, she took it simply and without comment: for she felt that it was not hers to refuse; that it was, in fact, owing to the Bensons for her and her child’s subsistence . . . and sometimes she would ask for a little money from Mr. Benson to give to such in their time of need. But it was astonishing how much she was able to do without money. (391)

Ruth does not want money, she hardly needs money, and she gives what she can back to the same patients who employ her, as if she were a charity worker. But, of course, Ruth can only do without much money because she can rely upon the charity of the Bensons, which is given happily but with the assumption that Ruth will conform to the image of a respectable, middle-class widow. Her position as an independent working woman is therefore a false one. Nor is Ruth finally a tenable model for the Victorian woman who needed to support herself and perhaps a child, and who could not afford to refuse wages for her labor. What the text does accomplish is to move the paid nurse toward the realm of respectability by painting her as essentially middle class. Appropriately, having transformed paid nursing to meet the standards of the middle- or upper-class home, Ruth is soon sought by those “who could well afford to pay” for her services, implying a rise in her own social standing (391). Finally, during the typhus epidemic, Ruth not only recovers status (for “matron,” even during the “dark years” of nursing was a position of relative importance), but her new style of nursing is praised as well. Because, in anticontagionist terms, fear itself spreads typhus, Ruth literally curbs the epidemic: “[T]o her it was owing that the overwrought fear of the town was subdued; it was she who had

30


gone voluntarily, and, with no thought of greed or gain, right into the very jaws of the fierce disease” (430). Most important for Gaskell’s redemption plot, by her nursing Ruth is absolved of past sin in the eyes of the community, and the shame of Leonard’s illegitimacy is wiped away: “From that day forward Leonard walked erect in the streets of Eccleston, where ‘many arose and called her blessed’” (430). Just how embedded the purified Ruth is in a middle-class domestic ideology is revealed by Gaskell’s choice of Bible passage here. Proverbs 31 is highly appropriate to Gaskell’s text in that it describes the virtuous woman as one who is “open-handed to the wretched and generous to the poor,” and whose “labours bring her honour in the city gate.” But, rather ironically, the passage clearly refers to the good wife who keeps her household in order and is subject to her husband and her sons.29 In effect, the novel’s progressive social narrative is complete when Ruth is reintegrated into the Bensons’ domestic sphere after the epidemic is over: “Miss Benson would insist upon making Ruth lie down on the sofa. Ruth longed to do many things; to be much more active; but she submitted . . . as if she were really an invalid” (431). It is as if Ruth’s nursing has won for her the right to be an idle, middle-class woman with the luxury to act the part of an invalid. Had the novel ended here with her redomestication, Ruth could have lived to old age, a happy mother and a local heroine. But the text’s Christian narrative of redemption remains incomplete. Though Ruth’s self-sacrificing nursing enables her to reenter the human community, it is unable to “cure” her sexuality, which remains the problem, the sin (though not a willed one) for which she must still suffer and die. Feminist readers have long complained about the cloak of selfsacrifice that Gaskell’s Ruth Hilton wears. Charlotte Brontë wrote to Gaskell before Ruth was published: “hear my protest! Why should she die? Why are we to shut up the book weeping? My heart fails me already at the thought of the pang it will have to undergo. . . . I hold you a stern priestess in these matters.”30 Perhaps, though, it is more accurate to say that discomfort arises not so much from Ruth’s religiosity as 29. Proverbs 31:20, 31; 31:27–28, 11. 30. Gérin, Elizabeth Gaskell, 132. Gérin asserts that Ruth remains unpopular with modern readers because “the deep religiosity of its tone is too emphatic” (130).

Angels of Mercy

31

from the discrepancy between its progressive text of rehabilitation and the conservative Christian text of its heroine’s penitence and death. Though the Bensons “rescue” Ruth and bring her into their home, they force upon this beautiful, lively, and surprisingly innocent woman the identity of an ascetic and celibate widow. Sally, the Bensons’ maid, is harsher yet with Ruth. Seeking to protect the respectable Bensons from the taint of Ruth’s impurity, Sally ruthlessly cuts off the young woman’s luxurious hair, signaling the enforced repression of her sexuality: “Sally produced the formidable pair of scissors . . . and began to cut in a merciless manner . . . shearing [Ruth’s] beautiful hair into the clipped shortness of a boy’s” (145). Living with the Bensons, Ruth internalizes society’s judgment of her sexual sinfulness. When Bellingham rediscovers Ruth and wishes to marry her, she refuses. Ruth denies this easy path to respectability for herself and legitimacy for her son because she will not bring Leonard “into contact” with his sinful father, even though she desires the marriage for herself (303). The text is quite explicit about Ruth’s continuing passion for her ex-lover. “Oh, my God!” Ruth cries upon seeing him again, “I do believe Leonard’s father is a bad man, and yet, oh! pitiful God, I love him; I cannot forget—I cannot!” (274). This is a difficult point for Gaskell. She wants us to believe in the fallen woman as the victim of male seduction but, according to Victorian notions of female sexuality, Ruth would hardly seem innocent if she did not love her lover with lasting fervor.31 Feeling detached from him at this point would undermine the reader’s belief in her initial attachment; when women fall in love, they fall for good. That Ruth believes herself irrevocably bound to her lover is demonstrated dramatically by her final act of nursing, which reveals as well that despite every effort of the text, the nurse remains a sexually suspect figure. Ruth chooses, against all advice, to nurse “the wild, raging figure” of her seducer. She does so without his recognition and, significantly, without pay (443). Ruth nurses Bellingham/Donne not from a sense of professional duty, not because she is the most skilled nurse 31. Portrayals of fallen women as victims were, according to Lyn Pykett, part of the “counter-discourse” of prostitution that reformers such as Gaskell put forth in the 1850s and 1860s (The “Improper” Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing, 64).

32


available, not even because she loves him, but because of their sexual bond — “he is Leonard’s father!” (441). Having nursed hundreds of townspeople through the epidemic without falling ill, Ruth contracts a fatal dose of typhus from this one man. Along these same lines, Patsy Stoneman has argued that “the ‘fever’ that [Ruth] ‘catches’ from Bellingham/Donne, and which finally overwhelms her, is not only typhus but, metaphorically, sexual desire.” Interestingly enough, what Stoneman treats as metaphorical subtext may in fact have been quite consciously and literally intended by Gaskell. In anticontagionist terms, Ruth’s death from this single patient might be explained partly by her fatigue from working in the typhus ward. But the emphasis the novel places upon emotion as a predisposing factor of fever, coupled with the passion that Ruth had to suppress when she met Bellingham/Donne earlier at Abermouth, imply that Gaskell understands this explicitly sexual passion to have predisposed Ruth to the typhus in her old lover’s fever-infested room. Moreover, Ruth’s delirium, which Stoneman calls “ideological incoherence and madness,” is an accurately drawn symptom of typhus, however much it also serves to reveal her disturbed psyche. Of delirium in cases of typhus, Thomas Bateman’s influential medical text of 1818 states, “Though but few instances of considerable delirium or great confusion may present themselves; yet the dulness, deafness, depraved sensations, complaints of disturbances of mind, frightful dreams, and innumerable distressing feelings and noises in the head, manifest the morbid condition of the sensorium.” That Ruth’s death has a clinical explanation makes it hardly more palatable, particularly since that explanation tends to confirm that sexual feeling causes her death. Yet in the context of both anticontagionist theory and the structure of the novel, ultimate responsibility for Ruth’s death, as for her seduction, lies not with herself but with Bellingham/Donne. It is his immorality which produces the filth to which her passion makes her susceptible, just as it was his lust that seduced and ruined her when economic and familial hardships rendered her similarly susceptible.32 While acknowledging that Ruth Hilton is mercilessly humbled and martyred by her sanctification, we should also recognize how neatly 32. Stoneman, Elizabeth Gaskell, 113, 100, 115; Bateman, Succinct account of the contagious fever, 28.

Angels of Mercy

33

Gaskell’s fiction solves two social problems at once by transforming a fallen working girl into an angel of mercy who rewrites the vocation of nursing. However, the Nightingale nurse, whose popular image outshone in virtue even Gaskell’s heroine, could not so easily reconcile those contradictions upon which she, like Ruth, rested.

Maintaining the Moral Order The same problems of class status and sexual passion that plague Ruth also trouble the Nightingale nurse. Like Gaskell, Florence Nightingale argued that the promotion of the “honest employment” of hospital nursing with “decent maintenance and provision” could ameliorate the problem of prostitution: In England the channels of female labour are few, narrow, and overcrowded . . . there are accordingly a large number of women who avowedly live by their shame; a larger number who occupy a hideous borderland, working by day and sinning by night; and a large number . . . who preserve their chastity, and struggle through their lives . . . on precarious work and insufficient wages.33

Despite Nightingale’s concern for working women, however, her prescription for the ideal paid nurse, like Gaskell’s, conformed paradoxically to an image of middle-class domesticity and respectability. Because disease arose from filth, it must be fought not with (male) medicines but with (female) cleanliness. The Nightingale nurse’s duties thus resembled those of an efficient middle-class housekeeper. Nursing, writes Nightingale, “ought to signify the proper use of fresh air, light, warmth, cleanliness, quiet, and the proper selection and administration of diet.” And because a patient’s spiritual well-being was at least as important as his or her physical health, Nightingale considered the nurse’s role, like that of the middle-class woman, to be “fundamentally moral.” “[A] good nurse,” she writes, “should be the Sermon on the Mount in herself.”34 33. Nightingale, Subsidiary Notes as to the Introduction of Female Nursing into Military Hospitals, 6. 34. Ibid.; Rosenberg, “Florence Nightingale on Contagion,” 126; Florence Nightingale, “Nursing the Sick,” 350.

34


Not content that the new nurse be a reformed Magdalene as in Ruth, Nightingale insists that she must be a “female Christ,” a common figure in the rhetoric of midcentury female reformers, and one that Nightingale saw in herself. Nightingale was, herself, the principal model for the new nurse, and worked to project a saintly image through the press. M. W. McDonald, Nightingale’s unofficial spokesman from the Crimea, reported to the Times in 1855: Wherever there is disease in its most dangerous form, and the hand of the despoiler distressingly nigh, there is this incomparable woman (Florence Nightingale) sure to be seen; her benignant presence is an influence for good comfort, even amid the struggles of expiring nature. She is a “ministering angel,” without exaggeration, in these hospitals; and as her slender form glides quietly along each corridor, every poor fellow’s face softens with gratitude at the sight of her. . . . [S]he may be observed alone, with a little lamp in her hand, making her solitary rounds.35

The ideological rationale behind Nightingale’s class prescription is not difficult to fathom. If the old nurse’s working-class status alone rendered her suspect in the eyes of the middle-class public—placed her in league with prostitutes, thieves, and drunkards—then a respectable, reformed, and new nurse who could work efficiently within a reformed medical system must necessarily appear middle class. But elevating the class status of the nurse was no simple matter; nor would such an elevation alone be enough to secure the new nurse’s respectability. Victorian class status was often a tenuous and vulnerable thing, particularly for women and even more for women who worked. Though reformed nursing did much to ensure greater employment opportunities for women, the paid nurse was unable to escape her metaphorical relation to her sexualized and working-class others. Nightingale’s letters imply that the sexual dangers of the Crimean front were also present in the most modern hospitals in London. As late as 1872 she wrote of Richard Whitfield, resident medical officer at her nurses’ training school at St. Thomas’s Hospital: “For 7 years he has been in habits of intoxication . . . for 5 years or more he has been in habits of intercourse with our women to the verge (& beyond) of impropriety.” That Nightingale would endure such behavior by the chief medical 35. Kalisch, “The Birth of Modern Nursing,” 135.

Angels of Mercy

35

officer of her training school implies how little real power she had over the men who controlled the medical profession, and explains, in part, why she required strict control over the nurses.36 Nightingale’s stringent moral guidelines, then, reveal not only the fear of improper behavior among the nurses, but also a recognition of the more general difficulties facing even the most proper women who worked alongside men and with such an intimate connection to male bodies. Besides diminishing the immediate danger of sexual harassment, a repressed female sexuality, even to the point of celibacy, helped single women to gain professional acceptance in their male-dominated world. “[T]he price of independence,” comments Martha Vicinus, “was the reinforcement of sexual stereotyping. [A single woman’s] personal ambition had to be hidden from herself and society under a cloak of self-sacrifice.”37 Nightingale accepted the repression of her own sexuality as the necessary price of her professional ambition. After many proposals over a number of years, Nightingale finally refused to marry the social reformer Richard Monckton Milnes. Nightingale’s analysis of her own situation explains why she believed work and marriage to be incompatible goals and demonstrates how this incompatibility forced her to sacrifice twothirds of her “self” and her desires: I have an intellectual nature which requires satisfaction and that would find it in him. I have a passionate nature which requires satisfaction and that would find it in him. I have a moral, an active, nature which requires satisfaction and that would not find it in his life. . . . [V]oluntarily 36. Regarding status, Mary Poovey and Jeanne Peterson, for instance, have written about the difficulties of mid-Victorian governesses who, though almost always technically middle class, risked falling below the line of respectability because they worked for money (Poovey, Uneven Developments, 127; Peterson, “The Victorian Governess: Status Incongruence in Family and Society”). Poovey notes that representations of the governess in the 1840s signaled “not just the middleclass ideal she was meant to reproduce, but the sexualized and often working-class women against whom she was expected to defend” (131). Poovey also suggests that the “unevenness” that the governess’s position brought to the Victorian domestic ideal—the ability to read her independence as productive “capability” or threatening sexuality—was exploited by Nightingale’s nursing project to expand “women’s sphere” (163). Quotation in Nightingale, Ever Yours, Florence Nightingale: Selected Letters, Oct. 15, 1872, 120. 37. Vicinus, Independent Women, 16.

36


to put it out of my power ever to be able to seize the chance of forming for myself a true and rich life would seem to me like suicide.38

Gaskell and Nightingale shared the hope that nursing would provide a respectable profession for socially superfluous or otherwise ambitious women as it alleviated the atrocious living conditions of the sick and poor. Yet they were forced to work within and make concessions to the prevailing ideology about women. Ruth’s death, which lifts her out of the world through Christian transcendence, reveals how truly difficult it was to reintegrate the fallen, or sexualized, woman into the rigid moral order of Victorian society. In a world so entrenched in morality that hidden passions, however repressed, could induce deadly disease, it is little wonder that Florence Nightingale drowned her passion in work, and that Ruth Hilton chose martyrdom.

The Nightingale Nurse and the Medical Romance Though Gaskell’s novel portrays a nurse with many of the same traits and complexities of the new nurse, it took the crisis of the Crimean War for the Lady with the Lamp and her troupe of Nightingale nurses to emerge in all of their imagined heroic purity. Florence Nightingale’s eminence rests upon the months she spent working in British hospitals during the war. But Nightingale did not become a national heroine, and the Lady with the Lamp a cultural icon, because she and her nurses saved lives in the Crimea.39 Rather, Nightingale’s status as heroine grew out of a complex of discourses that came together around the war and its rhetoric: the powerful voices of reform—particularly of public health and the army; the unprecedented power that new technology and an immense readership gave the daily press to shape public opinion and the cultural imagination; and the Victorian belief in woman as upholder and purveyor of social morality, which allowed for the possibility of female heroism on a national scale. 38. Cecil Woodham-Smith, Florence Nightingale: 1820–1910, 51–52. 39. Though Nightingale did make improvements in sanitation and comfort, death rates did not decrease markedly until mid-1855, after the governmentappointed Sanitary Commission had discovered and ordered the removal of a giant cesspool beneath the Scutari hospitals. See Sue M. Goldie, “I have done my duty”: Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War, 1854–56, 288.

Angels of Mercy

37

Nightingale, and particularly in her role as the Lady with the Lamp, became a national heroine because the crisis of the Crimean War was, fundamentally, a moral crisis. England entered the war in March of 1854 believing its cause just, and that “to fight a just and necessary war would purify and elevate” the nation. Victoria’s poet-laureate captured this sentiment in his poem Maud (1854), in which the hero seeks to purge his soul of insanity and “Mammon” in the “pure and true” cause of the Crimean War. Even the Christian Socialist writer and reformer, Charles Kingsley, put aside his lectures on sanitary reform to support the war with his highly successful novel Westward Ho! (1855). Kingsley, like Tennyson, espoused the widely held belief that material wealth had infected Britain with a debilitating disease which required purgation by a national crisis such as war. When, in early 1855, Britain’s most important leadership institutions — the government, the Parliament, and the military—seemed to falter, Nightingale’s presence allowed the nation to fall back upon English womanhood for moral support. Nor was she just any woman. To a nation appalled that more of her soldiers died of disease in hospitals than of wounds on the battlefield, a woman of Nightingale’s social position who was also trained in the latest methods of sanitary medicine seemed a literal godsend.40 Nightingale’s expedition to the East was covered exhaustively by all manner of British and foreign publications. But if one source deserves credit for creating Nightingale’s image, it is certainly the Times—and it did so in a very calculated, self-interested way. The newspaper was particularly adept at reading the mood of the nation, and capitalizing upon a “temporarily paying line.”41 Its response to the Crimean War fluctuated wildly, from jingoistic calls to arms in early 1854 to bitter and sarcastic accusations against the army and government by 1855. Nightingale proved a particularly malleable heroine, suited to each of these national moods: when she left England for the East, she was portrayed in the Times as a traditional Lady Bountiful, a noblewoman whose self-sacrifice and generosity would inspire heroism and moral virtue in others. Here is clearly the origin of “the Lady with the Lamp.” But later, the Times used Nightingale as a weapon against the very government 40. Olive Anderson, A Liberal State at War, 20; Alfred Lord Tennyson, Maud, Part I:I:xii:1; Part III:VI:iii:3. 41. Anderson, A Liberal State at War, 78.

38


that employed her. Against the inefficiencies of the government and army systems, it placed the portrait of a highly efficient female administrator. Because of her sex and civilian status, Nightingale was deemed a virtuous outsider; whatever she seemed to oppose was corrupt, whatever she supported, just. During the war, Nightingale neither promoted nor condoned the particular images of herself that the press propagated. While a host of observers—journalists, soldiers, and medical personnel — published accounts of her exploits, Nightingale remained publicly silent. She was, however, quite aware of the power of both the Lady with the Lamp and the new nurse, and she used it willingly to advance her own ambitions during and after the war. Despite the influence of the Times upon Nightingale’s public persona, the Lady with the Lamp received her most memorable and lasting press not in the Times, but in the literary efforts of the period. If the newspaper represented the nation’s conscience, literature was its moral imagination, the site upon which it reconsidered and refashioned itself, and the site upon which, during and after crisis, identity could be regenerated. If the Times chose to assault the army and the government with the picture of a more efficient, serious nurse, most poetry and fiction preferred to support British institutions and, for that purpose, the Lady with the Lamp, embodiment of the feminine virtues of English womanhood, was far preferable. Nightingale inspired a great outpouring of patriotic and romantic poetry. Longfellow’s “Santa Filomena” is perhaps the most popularly known, but the English sisters L. and A. Shore dedicated several of their War Lyrics (1855) to Nightingale’s exploits, and even Punch ran the respectful if humorous “The Nightingale’s Song to the Sick Soldier.”42 Fiction too, played an influential role in popularizing the Lady with the Lamp. If the blind patriotism of Tennyson’s lyrics characterized the public mood in the early months of the war, the less illusioned months after December ’54 are better represented by the “medical romance.” Though still highly patriotic, the medical romance displays a new awareness of the realities of war, surely a product of the eyewitness accounts that deluged the press during the period. But although these fictions build upon the portrayal of Nightingale in newspapers, they adapted 42. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Santa Filomena,” 1857; A. Shore and L. Shore, War Lyrics; “The Nightingale’s Song to the Sick Soldier,” 184.

Angels of Mercy

39

her to their own distinct literary forms and conventions. The heroism of these romances is no longer even the common soldier’s valor in battle but the nurse’s ability to comfort him in his suffering and loss. “An Episode of the War,” which appeared in the December 1854 issue of Harper’s Magazine, demonstrates how the Crimean medical romance was both dependent upon newspaper accounts of Nightingale and how it refashioned her according to certain Victorian narrative conventions.43 On one hand, the story presents almost verbatim the arguments that appeared in the Times about lady nurses volunteering for service in the Crimea. At the center of the story is the notion that to nurse is to answer the call of a moral duty to the nation. But, in accordance with Victorian romance, the story’s protagonist must be a romantic heroine with typical feminine virtues; her desire to serve her country is entangled with her desire for love. Paradoxically, the femininity that endows the lady nurse with the power of moral regeneration also renders her mission vulnerable and ensures the sexualization of the angel of mercy. The story begins with a debate between George and his sister-in-law, Sara, who wishes to volunteer to nurse in the Crimea. George’s “common sense view of the matter” mimics the points argued by an early detractor of Nightingale’s mission in a letter to the Times signed “Common Sense.”44 Although George appreciates the “generous devotion and unselfish enthusiasm” of her mission, he is afraid Sara will witness sights and sounds to “shock a woman’s delicacy. . . scenes which never ought to pass before her eyes . . . wickedness and ribald conversation” (509). “[P]roper hospital nurses” possess more “physical and mental strength” than English ladies, and are preferred by the common soldier who “will only feel awkward” under the nursing of women of a higher class (509). In short, ladies, he argues, will be a nuisance in the East, requiring special accommodations and servants. Sara answers George point for point, and in the process outlines the qualities of a proper Nightingale nurse (i.e., a Lady with a Lamp). She has nursed during a cholera epidemic at home and therefore does have some practical experience. The true lady uplifts the moral behavior of her patients, as Nightingale was said to do with her teahouses and 43. “An Episode of the War,” 508–11. 44. “Common Sense,” Times, Nov. 13, 1854.

40


education lectures at Scutari. If Sara finds the soldiers’ behavior shocking, “it will,” she says, “only make me feel that it would have been worse” without women there to “check it by their presence” (509). As for servants, she will take her own, who will prove useful “preparing little remedies for the sick” (509). Most important, she insists that she should “never for a moment” have thought of volunteering had enough “qualified” hospital nurses been available. Of course, what Sara means by “qualified” is precisely what a paid nurse in 1854 could not, by definition, be—a lady with bourgeois sensibilities and virtues. As all Victorians knew, hospital nurses were “persons accustomed to drown disgust in brandy” (509). The Lady with the Lamp, on the other hand, has no professional ambitions. She is simply a volunteer answering the call of duty. As a lady, she refuses all pay, finances her own expedition, and probably even contributes to the patients’ supply of food and medicines from her own purse.45 Sara’s patriotism, of course, triumphs over George’s skepticism, and next we see Sara at work at Scutari where the nurses stand in for the soldiers’ wives and sisters at home in England, and their duties are portrayed not as medical but rather as moral and womanly: “A deaf ear was never turned . . . to the sufferer’s entreaties. . . . The same sympathy, care, and attention was bestowed upon all” (510). At this point, the romance genre veers away from news reports and shapes the Nightingale nurse in an entirely fanciful way. In the story’s penultimate scene, Sara discovers a man she knows from home dying in a hospital bed: “[T]he sobs of the kneeling woman were not needed to reveal the secret of a long-cherished but hopeless love” (511). Such an ending implies that Sara’s true motives for nursing have more to do with romantic love and domestic ambition than with either love of country or vocational ambition. And this, the story implies, is as it should be, for the function of ladies like Sara in wartime hospitals is to create around them an atmosphere of English domestic morality that will uphold the troops in the face of official debacles, defeat, and death. In this way, the war 45. In a letter of Oct. 24, 1855, Nightingale asks Richard Dawes, dean of Hereford, to send out educational supplies—copy books, text books, and diagrams—as “remedies against drunkenness” for the Scutari patients. She ends the letter, “If you can do anything for us will you send the account to my Father . . . & he will settle it for me” (Goldie, “I have done my duty,” 168–69).

Angels of Mercy

41

valorized the innate morality of the Englishwoman, embodied in the lady nurse of fictions such as “An Episode of the War,” just as the nurse, in turn, upheld British national honor. If this romanticization of the nurse succeeded in upholding Victorian notions of English womanhood during national crisis, it tended also to undermine Nightingale’s long-term nursing project. One of Nightingale’s principal concerns as superintendent of nurses was to prevent romances between nurses and patients or doctors. Such intimacies could damage the reputation not only of the individual nurse but of the whole group. Nightingale hoped to establish a permanent army nursing corps to replace the group of soldiers’ wives and prostitutes who had traditionally nursed the British army. She also planned to build a new profession for respectable women in England’s hospitals from the experience at Scutari. If army officials and medical men at home believed Nightingale’s nurses were only seeking husbands (or worse), both enterprises would be jeopardized. Nightingale has been accused of overreacting to this possibility. It appears, however, that the danger was real. Though in the press, popular ballads, and children’s books, Nightingale’s nurses became patriotic and romantic heroines, in reality the Nightingale nurses—in the Crimea and in British hospitals—rarely met the professional or moral standards that Nightingale set. Indeed, the contradictions built into the description of the Nightingale nurse made her nearly an impossibility. Nightingale detested that for many young ladies nursing seemed “a fashion, an amusement” and, though her concern for working-class women did not match Gaskell’s, she did push for professional training for all classes of nurses. However, at midcentury, the only women trained in nursing and accustomed to the difficult work were working-class women; the only women who could meet middle-class standards of respectability were (with a few exceptions) untrained middle-class ladies. Thus, the Nightingale plan duplicated in hospitals the class hierarchy of Victorian society: nurses of the upper classes (often unpaid volunteers) assumed supervisory and administrative roles over those of the working classes who performed most of the drudge work. Indeed, Summers’s descriptions of the working women who went with Nightingale to the Crimea renders Gaskell’s portrait of Ruth’s sacrifice less sentimental and more realistic than one might suppose: “[M]any were widows, struggling to

42


support large families; they were willing to risk death from contagious diseases, cholera in particular, in the hope that the government would then make proper provision for their children.”46 If Nightingale found “lady superintendents” indispensable to professional nursing, it was because she felt the same pressures as Gaskell to distance the new nurse from the old immoral one who was “too old, too weak, too drunken, too dirty, too stolid, or too bad to do anything else.” Chief among Nightingale’s worries was her nurses’ sexuality. She would accept “[n]one but women of unblemished character,” and “any departure from chastity should be visited with instant final dismission.”47 Doubtless, Nightingale’s concern over her nurses’ chastity was influenced by the same stereotype of working-class promiscuity that she wished to erase from the minds of the British public. Her writings show, however, that her strict regulations also aimed to protect nurses from the advances of male orderlies and doctors. She fought for the female superintendent’s absolute control over her nurses, for instance, because of the lack of privacy and consideration afforded them by male doctors and officials. “It has continually happened to me,” she reports to a friend from the Crimea, to be asked for a Nurse to attend an Officer where there was no possibility for the woman to retire day or night for even a moment . . . the house was crowded with men . . . & there was not a cranny where a woman could go unseen. . . . These are the things which deaden women’s feeling of morality & make them take to drinking & worse.48

Here, Nightingale assumes that given the ability to “retire unseen”— presumably to rest, maintain their “proper” appearances, and escape from any male improprieties—her nurses would not revert or succumb to “working-class” habits. The men they serve, and not the women themselves, are to blame. On the other hand, Nightingale reported that the 46. Vicinus, “What Makes a Heroine? Girls’ Biographies of Florence Nightingale,” 94; Nightingale, Ever Yours, Aug. 16, 1893, 169; Monica E. Baly, “Florence Nightingale and the Establishment of the First School at St. Thomas’s —Myth v. Reality,” 7; Summers, “Pride and Prejudice,” 44, 39. 47. Nightingale, “Suggestions on the Subject of Providing, Training, and Organizing Nurses for the Sick Poor in Workhouse Infirmaries,” 274; Nightingale, Subsidiary Notes, 10. 48. Nightingale, Ever Yours, 42, Sept. 9, 1855.

Angels of Mercy

43

“ladies” at the two Eastern hospitals that had rejected Nightingale’s authority became notorious as flirts and husband-seekers in the wards, while their working-class nurses found parallel distractions. Writing to her family in April 1855, Nightingale lamented that she had to stay at Scutari, “otherwise this Hospital will become the bear-garden which Kullali & Smyrna are—where the ladies come out to get married— where the nurses come out to get drunk.” Nightingale fought both real and imagined episodes of romance and drunkenness with draconian rules of surveillance and discipline for her nurses: “No woman’s virtue has been wrecked through me,” she asserted, “At the Barrack Hospital we have had not one flirtation, not one drinker—not one quarrel. And many a sinner has said to me, If I had been with you, this would not have happened.”49 Had Sara actually served in Nightingale’s corps, she might well have been sent home, or at least severely reprimanded, for her show of unseemly emotion in the hospital ward. However, the romantic potential of the Nightingale nurse proved more powerful than the facts or Nightingale’s wishes. Medical romances with their brave and patriotic heroes nursed by courageous but thoroughly feminine heroines flourished during and immediately after the Crimean War. The novel perhaps most influential in this regard is Charles Kingsley’s highly popular Two Years Ago (1857), which recounts the romance and eventual marriage of a man of the world British doctor and his pious nurse. Kingsley’s novel is a retrospective of the war and, as such, attempts to demonstrate how the British recovered from that national crisis, and what lessons they learned. Before the war begins, Dr. Tom Thurnall is shipwrecked at Aberalva, off the Devon coast where he falls in love with the local schoolteacher, Grace Harvey. After a cholera epidemic, during which Grace works as Thurnall’s nurse, Thurnall leaves for the Crimea. She volunteers for duty at Scutari in hopes of finding him. As in Ruth, an outbreak of disease creates an important crisis in Two Years Ago; and as in that earlier novel, the disease is, at once, literally itself and a metaphor for other forms of social crisis. Without pushing the significance of individual diseases too far (their distinctiveness was fuzzy at best for the average Victorian), it is interesting that Gaskell 49. Nightingale to her family, Apr. 22, 1855, in Goldie, “I have done my duty,” 113.

44


should choose typhus, which is endemic to England, while Kingsley’s cholera is epidemic. In other words, Gaskell chooses a disease appropriate as a metaphor for domestic social ills, existing conditions that erupt periodically, while Kingsley’s choice is much better suited as a metaphor for war—an unpredictable external crisis. The relationship between the war and the cholera epidemic in the novel is a complicated one. Because the literal disease is more central to Kingsley’s novel, his cholera lends itself less willingly to the shape of social metaphor than does the more figurative “typhus” of Ruth. Almost all the action of the novel, including the epidemic, occurs in England during and immediately after the war. Though nearly every main character in Two Years Ago eventually goes to the Crimea, Kingsley relies upon the cholera chapters to establish their probable behavior in the war. The epidemic, in short, becomes a training ground and metaphorical equivalent for the heroisms that characters will perform in the Crimea. In particular, the epidemic allows the central female characters of the novel, Grace Harvey and Valentia St. Just, to gain nursing experience on their home soil before they venture to the Crimea to nurse during the war. The epidemic enabled these “angels in the house” to move out into the larger community and, from there, into the world as “angels of mercy.” This conflation of a cholera epidemic and the war would likely have seemed quite natural to a Victorian looking back upon 1854–1855, for a cholera epidemic did, in fact, plague England during the summer months of 1854, just as in the novel. Through most of September, the pages of the Times were concerned not with the Crimea but with cholera. When the paper ran lead articles on the war, the public still wrote in with remedies for cholera or advice for the sewer commissions, and when attention finally did shift to the East, the public’s greatest concern was the amount of cholera among British soldiers there. On September 6, 1854, for instance, the Times ran a lead story that urged the army to take Sebastopol quickly, the cholera having abated somewhat among the soldiers. The rest of the paper is taken up with the “Metropolitan Commission of Sewers” (4d f), “The Public Health” report (5e), the “Board of Health” (5f), and many letters from readers all concerned with cholera. As represented in Two Years Ago and “An Episode of the War,” this epidemic did, in fact, provide nursing experience for many of the women who would join Nightingale’s corps in the Crimea.

Angels of Mercy

45

As it did in Ruth, disease in Two Years Ago exposes the inner workings of society, the social ties, responsibilities, and negligence that normally remain hidden. In some respects, Kingsley’s message, like Gaskell’s in Ruth is one of shared social responsibility. But Kingsley is much more focused on health and sanitation issues and, therefore, his social criticism cuts across class lines in a way that Gaskell’s does not. Because of the desire to deflect blame for sickness and squalor away from the poor, Gaskell’s novel emphasizes the negligence and corruption of the upper classes and the poverty they enforce upon the lower. In contrast, Two Years Ago does not hesitate to blame high and low: the drunken local aristocrat, Trebooze, and the equally drunken old-style doctor, Heale, are certainly corrupt and harmful citizens. But the working people— ignorant, dirty, and unwilling to sanitize—are equally dangerous to the town. With a vehemence that would have been appreciated more by Dickens than Gaskell, Kingsley attacks dissenting clergy as the greatest purveyors of disease throughout the community. They encourage the traditional belief already held by the townspeople that epidemics are the scourge of God, a punishment for sin that neither can nor should be avoided. Kingsley’s narrator as well as his hero, Thurnall, rail against this belief for the apathy it creates about sanitary prevention and current medical treatment. The people should realize, Thurnall tells Grace, that “if the cholera was God’s judgment at all . . . it was His judgment of the sin of dirt, and that the repentance which He required was to wash and be clean in literal earnest” (I.387). Nightingale asserted a similar doctrine about cleanliness and Godliness even before leaving for the war. To her sister, Parthe, about the cholera epidemic in London Nightingale wrote, “You . . . pray against ‘plague, pestilence, and famine,’ when God has been saying more loudly every day this week that those who live ten feet above a pestilential river will die, and those who live forty feet above will live.”50 For Nightingale, the nurse would be the figure to enforce God’s rules of sanitation. The character of Grace Harvey is the epitome of the Nightingale nurse in cultural representations during and immediately after the war. Grace is carefully constructed to be suitably heroic and romantic while offending no one and thus helps to solidify the qualities of the Lady 50. Quoted in Small, Florence Nightingale, Avenging Angel, 129.

46


with the Lamp. She is, of course, young and beautiful. She is modest and chaste, despite being revered by the men around her, particularly the common sailors and soldiers. Because, as a schoolmistress, Grace is used to working for her living and is not too high bred, she is qualified to do the actual work of nursing that would be inappropriate for ladies. At the same time, Grace’s solid middle-class position and her education raise her well above the old working-class nurse. Grace is a “medical heroine,” a proper reflection of the Nightingale nurse, because she desires to be of use to Thurnall, and plays with him the appropriately subordinate role of nurse to doctor. “Oh, what could I do?” Grace asks Thurnall when she first hears of the cholera. “‘A great deal, Miss Harvey,’ said Tom. . . . What a help she might be to him! . . . [S]he entered into his plans with all her wild enthusiasm, but also with sound practical common sense; and Tom began to respect her intellect as well as her heart” (I.387–88). Grace works diligently and efficiently, both during the epidemic in Aberalva and at the hospital in Scutari. Her devotion to her nursing duty even causes her to lose her one chance of speaking to Thurnall in the East. She sees him across the Scutari hospital ward but cannot go to him because “she was assisting at an operation” (II.391). After the operation he is gone, but “[w]ithout a word she came back to her work, and possessed her soul in patience” (II.391). Although, thanks to Thurnall’s instruction, Grace believes in the physical cause of disease and in modern methods of combating it, she also remains very much a minister to her patients’ spiritual needs. As in Ruth, the nurse’s duties are as much moral as medical. In this Grace reflects a larger feeling within the culture about woman’s power to heal and, more specifically, the conflation that occurred around the Crimean War nurse of the medical and the religious heroine. The religious controversy surrounding Nightingale’s duty in the Crimea is now not often discussed, but it was the single greatest threat to her nursing project, and was nearly the only complaint against Nightingale in the press. At midcentury, qualified nurses of the upper classes tended to come from existing Roman Catholic or high-church Anglican sisterhoods. Sisters of both denominations were thus well represented in the Crimean nursing corps. But the 1850s also saw the renewed vehemence in anti-Catholic feeling in England, the Pope having reinstated the Roman Catholic hierarchy there in 1850. On one hand, Britons naturally associated qualified nurses with sisterhoods; on the other,

Angels of Mercy

47

however, they were frightened of the potential intimacy between such papists and their Protestant soldiers. Nightingale was alternately accused in both private and in the press of discriminating in favor of and against the Roman Catholics in her service. She was accused of being herself both a secret Roman Catholic and a Protestant enthusiast. Britons wanted to believe in the uplifting morality of the Englishwoman, but the type of morality they preferred was quite specific. Kingsley is appropriately cautious about Grace’s religious affiliation. At the beginning of the novel she is a dissenter, attending the Brianite chapel in town. But under Thurnall’s guidance she prudently converts to broad-church Anglicanism. Though this conversion is necessary to her heroism, so was her original religious enthusiasm, for it explains the zeal with which she enters into nursing the sick. Presumably, an average, sensible, broad-church Anglican girl would have been less likely to feel the sense of mission that Grace does. The narrator asserts that all of Aberalva looks upon Grace as a living saint, or even a female Christ: “She was believed to spend whole nights in prayer; to speak with visitors from the other world; even to have the power of seeing into futurity. . . . [H]er exquisite sensibility, it was whispered, made her feel every bodily suffering she witnessed . . . and it was sometimes said in Aberalva—‘Don’t do that, for poor Grace’s sake. She bears the sin of all the parish’” (I.72). Like many other religiously minded Victorian women, Florence Nightingale subscribed to this version of female religious heroism. Whatever sort of heroine the press might have thought her, Nightingale’s personal letters show that she envisioned herself as a savior or female Christ: “The ‘baptism of fire’” she wrote to her family, “must baptize all those who would be ‘Saviours’ of mankind, whether from intellectual, physical, but most of all from moral error.”51 Just as Nightingale’s supporters felt obliged to prevaricate about her religious beliefs—she was “rather low church” wrote Mrs. Sidney Herbert about the Unitarian Anglican Nightingale—Kingsley is careful to temper Grace’s enthusiasm. “Happy for her that she was in Protestant and common sense England,” comments the patriotic narrator, “Had she been an American, she might have become one of the most lucrative ‘mediums;’ had she been born in a Romish country. . . [t]here is no reason why she should not have equalled, or surpassed, the ecstasies of 51. June 18, 1855, in Goldie, “I have done my duty,” 131.

48


St. Theresa. . . . [B]ut her innate self respect and modesty had preserved her from [such] snares” (I.287). Proper English womanhood is supported by proper English religion. Ultimately, however, all female heroisms in Kingsley’s novel must bend to the will of the Victorian marriage plot and domesticity, both of which transcend even the importance of religion. The crisis now over, Grace’s roles as medical and religious heroine, however much they support English patriotism, must find redefinition and resolution in the role of wife. The identity of the Victorian woman, the novel insists, is primarily determined by her domestic duties rather than by any actions outside the home—which are, in any case, extensions of her domestic role. Besides undercutting the very idea of nursing (or any other occupation) as a suitable career for middle-class women, this submission to the marriage plot requires and determines that the relationship between the nurse and the doctor conform to Victorian conventions of courtship and romance. As a romantic heroine, the nurse submits absolutely to the intellectual and medical direction of her superior doctor beloved. She, in turn, provides him with humanizing moral guidance and her loving sympathy and adoration. The relationship is not merely personal; it determines the shape of the professional relationship. The significance of this relationship, central to Two Years Ago, should not be underestimated. It is standard fare, patterned and perverted repeatedly in nineteenthand twentieth-century medical fiction, Hollywood films, television dramas, pornographic movies, and literature. Moreover, the nursedoctor romance and its concomitant power hierarchy spilled into the real-life professional relationships of nurses and doctors. In one of his “lay sermons” in the Times, S. G. Osborne urged that the modern nurse must possess “a spirit of perfect obedience to her superiors.” Even professional nursing literature of the present day is as preoccupied with relations between nurses and doctors as are Florence Nightingale’s letters and official reports.52 Perhaps because she can avoid the complications of such professional relationships, and because she adapts more easily to the require52. Nov. 17, 1855, quoted in Osborne, 164; Nightingale goes into great detail about nursing regulations and her feelings about subordination to medical officials in a letter to Lady Canning of Sept. 9, 1855 (Goldie, “I have done my duty,” 151–56).

Angels of Mercy

49

ments of the Victorian marriage plot, the typical heroine of the medical romances which flourished after the Crimean War resembles the “other” nurse in Two Years Ago more than Grace Harvey. Valentia St. Just had been a flighty, beautiful, young aristocrat before the cholera epidemic hit Aberalva. But she fell in love with Frank Headley and was matured by his heroism during the epidemic. Major Campbell predicts that with the sorrows and hardships of the coming war “Queen Whims [her nickname] herself will become what Queen Whims might be!” (II.31). Valentia remains at home to nurse her dying sister while all the men she loves go to war. But when “the news of Inkerman arrived” that her brother had been “severely wounded by a musket ball,” she “hurried out to Scutari, to nurse” him (II.387). When he recovered, Valentia “sent Scoutbush back to the Crimea, to try his chance once more; and then came home to be a mother to those three orphan children” (II.387). Valentia’s story is interesting in several respects. Most obviously, it offers an alternate model of female heroism through nursing—one that is more conventional than Grace’s but also more attainable. She is, of course, a traditional Lady Bountiful figure, but the duties she accepts during the war domesticate and discipline Valentia (II.388). Even her service at Scutari fits seamlessly between nursing her dying sister and mothering the orphaned children. The Scutari episode is entirely determined by the novel’s domestic ideology, for even Kingsley must have known that Valentia’s experience there was impossible. At least with Grace, certain forms were observed: she had nursing experience, she applied through proper channels, and she did not conveniently find Thurnall as soon as she arrived. Valentia, however, travels across Europe at will, nurses her brother exclusively, and then returns home when she likes. Had this been common practice in the Eastern hospitals the confusion would have been overwhelming; Nightingale would never have sanctioned it. Kingsley is reticent about the details of the war throughout the novel, but he takes special care not to sully this newly domestic heroine, saying only that Valentia “had seen there many a sight—she best knows what she saw” (II.387). Valentia is typical of the nurse represented in polite fiction after the war. She has the advantage of being more fashionable than either a Ruth or a Grace; nor is she burdened by their sense of mission or extreme religiosity. The novels that I will discuss in the next chapter, such as Rhoda Broughton’s Second Thoughts (1880) and Mrs. Humphrey Ward’s

50


Marcella (1894), follow Kingsley in using nursing as a plot device for domesticating and disciplining a young woman rather than as an end in itself or as a vehicle for heroism. Generally, this taming occurs as a precursor to a proper marriage. Such characterizations influenced readers’ images of nursing and affected the sort of recruit who applied to training schools such as St. Thomas’s. Nightingale found this development particularly odious. As early as 1855, she bemoaned the romanceand glory-seeking notions of the lady nurses most recently sent to her. In 1892, she complained that because of its romanticization, “Nursing has become the fashion; and it brings in all sorts of amateur alloy.”53 She had some cause: in fictions well into the twentieth century, a nurse might receive a salary and be professionally trained, but if she is young and beautiful, she is sure to prefer romantic love to nursing. As we shall see, Nightingale herself contributed, however unwittingly, to this image of the nurse through her published writings, particularly Notes on Nursing. The image of the nurse as romantic heroine held such allure that although the serious nurse did find a place in Victorian culture after 1860, many intellectually ambitious women turned away from nursing and sought the greater prestige and professional power of doctoring. Still, for women these two professions were closely allied: women entering any medical field could not escape the Nightingale image. And though this created certain difficulties, particularly for women who wanted to enter the medical profession dominated by men, Nightingale’s reputation also opened many professional doors that would otherwise have remained closed to women. Some seventy years later, Virginia Woolf recognized this contribution, a side of Nightingale’s heroism that her contemporary Lytton Strachey did not. Speaking to the young women of Newnham and Girton Colleges, Woolf asserted: Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. . . . And women have always been poor. . . . However, thanks to the toils of those obscure women in the past . . . thanks, curiously enough, to two wars, the Crimean which let Florence Nightingale out of her drawing room, and the European War which opened the doors to the average woman some sixty years later, these evils are in the way to be bettered. Otherwise you 53. Florence Nightingale, unpublished letter to Catherine Marsh, Mar. 24, 1892, in Vicinus, Independent Women, 102.

Angels of Mercy

51

would not be here tonight, and your chance of earning five hundred pounds a year, precarious as I am afraid that it still is, would be minute in the extreme.54

Woolf’s analysis here supports the assertion that British women’s opportunities in the public sphere depended not only upon Nightingale’s domestic nursing project but, by extension, upon the imperial crisis that made Nightingale’s project necessary. Just how far Nightingale’s efforts allowed Victorian women to advance out of their drawing rooms, and what reactions that emergence inspired, will be explored in the next chapter.

54. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 108.

Chapter Two

6d8 Nightmare Figures The Backlash against the New Nurse

During late February and early March of 1861 newspapers all over Britain reported detailed, daily accounts of a Dublin trial, the “Yelverton Marriage Case.” With its tales of seduction, abandonment, and bigamy, the Yelverton case was among the most important news stories to excite a taste for and to influence the direction of sensation fiction of the 1860s. The case concerned a Crimean War nurse suing for financial support from a Major Yelverton with whom she had become involved at Balaklava and whom she later married in a “Scotch marriage” ceremony and a Roman Catholic “renewal of consent.” Major Yelverton had abandoned the woman, then pregnant, and married another; he asserted that no marriage with the claimant had taken place. The trial focused much attention on Yelverton’s alleged seduction of the nurse in the Crimea. “Mrs. Yelverton” claimed that she and her husband did not “cohabit” until after the Roman Catholic ceremony, but Major Yelverton testified that he “attempted her virtue” on a transport ship to Constantinople, after which she became “a slave of her passion for him,” engaging in “illicit intercourse” in the Crimea and after their return to Britain. Whether or not Mrs. Yelverton had, in truth, remained chaste until marriage, the fact remained that nursing in public made her sus-

52

Nightmare Figures

53

ceptible to improper advances—even attempted rape—and perhaps unleashed her own hidden passions.1 The same year that the Yelverton trial shocked Victorians with tales of a promiscuous nurse, the Nightingale School of Nursing, Britain’s first secular training facility, was founded at St. Thomas’s Hospital. Nightingale’s popular success and the importance of her nurses within the new system of reformed medicine meant that the trained nurse carried considerable weight in the Victorian imagination of the 1850s and 1860s. She became, in fact, the newest example of the independent woman, that disturbing figure who had already produced extensive cultural anxiety, but who gained here unprecedented power through Nightingale’s advocacy. Still, mainstream Britons found it easier to swallow the idea of a small band of female nursing “soldiers” performing unseemly chores in far-off lands than of growing numbers of their sisters, wives, and daughters performing similar tasks in the hospitals or streets of their hometowns. As Kingsley’s Two Years Ago (1857) demonstrates, female forays into the public world—acceptable and even morally necessary during national crisis — were quickly suppressed once life returned to normal. Many years would pass before nursing became, in any real sense, an accepted profession for “respectable” young women.2 1. Richard Altick, Deadly Encounters: Two Victorian Sensations, 150, suggests a connection between the Yelverton case and Lady Audley’s Secret and Collins’s No Name, both of which feature bigamy. The proceedings of the Yelverton case also resemble remarkably the seduction and abandonment plot of Isabel Vane and Major Francis Levison in Mrs. Henry Wood’s East Lynne (1861). Details of the case from the Times, Mar. 5, 1861: 10d. Eventually, the court found in favor of Mrs. Yelverton (who received enormous public sympathy), and Major Yelverton was court-martialed for conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman. Times, Mar. 8, 1861: 12c. 2. Vicinus and Nergaard, introduction to Ever Yours, 5. For a succinct summary of the nature of the Nightingale training program at St. Thomas’s, see Celia Davies, “A Constant Casualty: Nurse Education in Britain and the USA to 1939,” 103–4. One way to measure Nightingale’s success with the public is by the size of the “Nightingale Fund,” amassed by public subscription for the founding of her school at St. Thomas’s. Toward the end of the war, the Times reported the fund to be £40,000; by 1860, the total had reached £59,000 (Blake, The Charge of the Parasols, 78). For the Nightingale nurse’s importance to reformed medicine, and especially the new hospital system, see Mitchell Dean and Gail Bolton, “The Administration of Poverty and the Development of Nursing Practice in NineteenthCentury England,” 76–101. For a reading of the cultural significance of Victorian female independence, including that of the nurse, see Vicinus, Independent Women.

54


The public fear of the nurse is illuminated when read against contemporary debates over prostitution. Though it was published nearly a decade earlier, W. R. Greg’s “Prostitution” (1850) did much to determine the terms of the prostitution debate at least through the 1860s. Greg assumes that prostitution degrades women who are “innately moral,” even on a par with the “virtuous middle-class woman”; what causes a woman to “fall,” is “the same emotion that characterizes all women: a ‘positive love of self-sacrifice.’” Greg thus asserts a latent but dangerous sexuality in women of all classes. According to Greg’s thinking, the new nurse would be a particularly dangerous sort of woman. The Nightingale nurse was characterized chiefly in Victorian culture by the “selfsacrifice” Greg describes, while her proximity to male bodies and her freedom from normal social restraints rendered her as potentially susceptible to her emotions as fallen women of “weak generosity” who yield to the “passionate entreaties of the man they love.”3 Not only does Greg’s analysis implicitly bind the prostitute and the nurse (paid or unpaid alike) by their “self-sacrifice,” but his solution to prostitution—that women be protected within a “home”—is identical to the arguments of Victorians who wished to redomesticate the middleclass nurse after her Crimean War adventures. Like Gaskell’s Ruth Hilton and Kingsley’s Grace Harvey, the nurse had to be reintegrated into Victorian society after the period of crisis that allowed her to step beyond conventional boundaries. Though Nightingale had demonstrated the lady nurse’s value to empire and society, respectability—indeed, morality—demanded that she limit herself to occasional philanthropic work among the sick and needy. Better yet, the young lady with a desire to nurse should take up her natural role of nursing family members. Accompanying assertions of the Englishwoman’s natural ability to nurse her family were arguments that suggest, paradoxically, that paid nursing would “denature” women. As late as 1879, George Barraclough tried to discourage ladies from hospital nursing: “They who enter on the career of a nurse . . . can hardly fail . . . to degenerate socially and intellectually. The sphere of a woman’s life is so bounded by. . . the domestic hearth, that it is not surprising when separated from these she should 3. Walkowitz, Prostitution, 42; Poovey, “Speaking of the Body: Mid-Victorian Constructions of Female Desire,” 33, 34; W. R. Greg, “Prostitution,” Westminster Review 53 (July 1850): 244.

Nightmare Figures

55

become hard, egotistical, and even given to drink.”4 Such characterizations imply that the link between the medical woman and the prostitute, which I first discussed in relation to Gaskell’s Ruth, does not disappear with Nightingale’s heroism in the Crimea. On the contrary, texts of the 1860s heavily underscore the unspoken connections and conflations that Victorian culture made between these women—that is, between infecting and curing, sexuality and independence, and the power to control and corrupt bodies. Though women of all classes who supported themselves outside the home risked identification with prostitutes, the medical woman was linked to her by the common signifier of disease. Victorian fiction contributed to the culture of anxiety over female independence and sexuality which not only suppressed professional medical women but supported the Contagious Diseases Acts— in effect, the legislation of that anxiety in 1860s Britain.5 I would argue that this link with the prostitute explains why the Nightingale nurse inspired a heated, decades-long debate over the merits and vices of women working in medical fields, specifically, and outside the home, generally. Periodicals contain the most overt evidence of the arguments of this debate, but fiction of the period expresses its more subtle contours with nearly equal vehemence. Just as it had helped to create the heroic Lady with the Lamp during the war, fiction participates in the nurse’s redomestication, encoding and propagating the culture’s anxiety over this newly independent woman. This chapter will investigate the narrative strategies by which Victorian fiction sought to redomesticate the newly independent nurse. The popularity and romance of the nurse after the Crimean War meant that novels often represented young and beautiful heroines as amateur or “natural” nurses, though just as often the word “nurse” is not used.6 4. George Barraclough, “On Nursing as a Career for Ladies,” 468–70, 471–72. 5. I am not asserting that the novels in this chapter consciously engage in the debates about prostitutes, military men, and venereal disease which led to the Contagious Diseases Acts; rather, I would argue alongside Jonathon Loesberg that narratives are often “shaped by a prior, ambiguously held attitude” toward a cultural phenomenon; the “debate is thus not the political context itself but an occasion for the materialization of a particular ideological narrative” (“The Ideology of Narrative Form in Sensation Fiction,” 116). 6. An obvious example of such a novel is Dinah Craik’s post-Crimean medical romance, A Life for a Life (1859). Less obvious, perhaps, is George Eliot’s Romola (1862–1863).

56


Appropriately, when it did confront the new nurse as such, realist and polite fiction worked to redomesticate her by trivializing her training and lauding ingénue heroines who nurse by instinct or who, at best, endure nurse’s training as a preparation for married life. At the same time, sensation fiction intensified the call for redomestication by exploiting the threatening aspects of trained medical women through its representations of deviant and criminally sexual “sensation nurses.” Ironically, the trivialization and the perversion of nursing (and, by extension, of all women’s paid employment) were bolstered by nothing less than Nightingale’s own Notes on Nursing (1859), an incredibly popular but misread domestic nursing manual.

Notes on Nursing and the Natural Nurse Though read in nursing schools and still considered a seminal text of modern nursing, Notes on Nursing was originally “meant simply to give hints for thought to “every woman,” because “Every woman, or at least almost every woman, in England has, at one time or another of her life, charge of the personal health of somebody, whether child or invalid,—in other words, every woman is a nurse” (1). In effect, this is a public health document aimed not at officials, as are Nightingale’s other health documents, but at the public who supported her so admiringly during and after the war. Nightingale exploits her popularity in the noble cause of domestic sanitation and health. In the process, though, Notes on Nursing undermined Nightingale’s initial aspirations for nursing by linking it to housekeeping and by asserting that “every woman” is a nurse.7 Nightingale’s moral qualifications for her nurse are nearly synonymous with the Victorian definition of the woman who guards the middle-class domestic hearth. Besides being “confidential,” and a “sound, and close, and quick observer,” a nurse must be “strictly 7. Dean and Bolton point out that in 1854 (while Nightingale was in the Crimea) nurses were being used to combat the cholera epidemic at home; they did so “at the level of the individual and family”—of the poor, mostly—and were successful to a degree that this domesticity became integral to the nurse’s image (“The Administration of Poverty and the Development of Nursing Practice in Nineteenth-Century England,” 92–93).

Nightmare Figures

57

sober and honest . . . a religious and devoted woman . . . because God’s precious gift of life is often literally placed in her hands; she must be a sound, and close, and quick observer; and she must be a woman of delicate and decent feeling” (71). Not only does Notes require from the nurse the qualities of proper English womanhood, but it implies (despite Nightingale’s adamant assertions to the contrary) that professional training for nurses is not essential. In the conclusion to Notes, Nightingale offers a “caution” to those who assume that nursing comes to a woman as if “by inspiration.” “It seems a commonly received idea,” she writes, “that it requires nothing but a disappointment in love, the want of an object, a general disgust, or incapacity for other things, to turn a woman into a good nurse” (75). From this general critique of the trivialization of the nurse, Nightingale turns to attack fiction in particular for distorting the public’s views on nursing: “[P]opular novelists of recent days have invented ladies disappointed in love or fresh out of the drawing-room turning into the war-hospitals to find their wounded lovers, and when found, forthwith abandoning their sick-ward for their lover, as might be expected” (75). Nightingale refers here to Crimean-era medical romances such as Two Years Ago (1857). Unfortunately for Nightingale’s cause, this tendency of popular novelists to romanticize the nurse did not decrease as the century wore on; if anything, Nightingale’s attempt to define the proper nurse in Notes on Nursing provided popularizers with a convenient pattern from which to work. The journal articles of Charles Dickens, popularizer par excellence of social causes in Victorian England, illuminate the disparity between Nightingale’s intentions for Notes on Nursing and how it was actually received and interpreted by most of her Victorian audience. Dickens’s essay “Bedside Experiments,” in the March 31, 1860, edition of All the Year Round, is an excellent example of popularizing the nurse from Nightingale’s own pattern. To Dickens’s credit, he summarizes the major prescriptions of Notes on Nursing faithfully and calls it “The most sensible book ever written on the subject.” But when it comes to describing the character of the nurse, Dickens allows his novelistic imagination to take over, personifying the text’s qualities of nursing as characters one might find in his novels. Improper or irritating nursing characteristics are personified as “Elephant” and her sister “Muff,” “Grimbones” (“usually

58


your mother-in-law”), and “Aunt Grewsome.” The Nightingale nurse, embodiment of the best qualities of nursing, Dickens names “the dear fairy nurse,” under whose “delightful ministrations, it is almost a pleasure to be ill.” On the issues of nurses’ training and professionalism, Dickens goes so far as to hope that nursing “may be made a matter of scientific training and teaching, and that all professional nurses . . . may be obliged to go through a regular system of instruction.” But he gives little indication that the “dear fairy nurse” might require such training; she is, he insists, “like the poet, ‘born, not made.’” 8 Nightingale’s very serious notions of what a nurse should be thus become under Dickens’s hand the infantilized “dear fairy nurse,” a domesticated version of the wartime Lady with the Lamp, an Agnes Wickfield or a Little Dorrit. It would be misleading to assert that Dickens’s portrait of the Nightingale nurse was the only version that existed in the Victorian imagination. On the other hand, in 1860 Dickens was at the height of his popularity, the circulation of All the Year Round was enormous and, as Dickens’s biographer Peter Ackroyd notes, “[T]here was a large public . . . ready to take its attitudes from articles in a journal conducted by Charles Dickens.”9 One could say as well that a large public in Victorian England was ready to take its attitudes from the novels of Charles Dickens and many of his fellow novelists. And Victorian fiction writers, with few exceptions, urged young women to marry rather than embark on a career in nursing or, for that matter, any “public” employment. One such novelist was Anthony Trollope, who, ever vigilant against threats to domesticity, placed the heroic but threatening icon of Florence Nightingale under humorous attack in his 1861–1862 novel Orley Farm. Besides the Crimean-era fiction to which Nightingale refers, Trollope may well have had in mind the events of the Yelverton Marriage Case, 8. Dickens, “Bedside Experiments,” 539, 538, 539, 541. Sanitary reform, public health, and hospitals had been among Dickens’s keenest social interests since the 1840s, and during the Crimean War he came out as a strong advocate of Florence Nightingale and her plan to train nurses in England (Philip Arthur Kalisch, The Changing Image of the Nurse, 16). 9. Ackroyd, Dickens, 855, estimates that while the circulation of Household Words was between 36,000 and 40,000 copies, All the Year Round remained consistently above 100,000 (852).

Nightmare Figures

59

much in the news when the novel’s first number came out, when writing his critique of new nursing. Madeline Staveley, an heiress as “perfect in her beauty” as in her goodness, falls in love with the poor but clever Felix Graham when he is injured on her father’s estate (164). Here, Trollope brings the lovers together with the romance-plot convention of uniting injured men and their nurses in romantic, bedside intimacy. But though Madeline and Felix do eventually marry, Trollope amends the conventional medical romance with a warning about that bedside intimacy: “Felix Graham had plenty of nurses, but Madeline was not one of them” (265). Madeline’s mother, Lady Staveley, recognizes her daughter’s susceptibility to the patient, keeps her away from his room, and posts there as his nurse Mrs. Baker, “a very old servant . . .” (276). What the watchful Lady Staveley believes is that caring for the injured body and low spirits of a man will render even the purest young women emotionally sympathetic and thus sexually vulnerable. Not coincidentally, what Lady Staveley portends for her daughter is the same sexual susceptibility which afflicted Teresa Longworth Yelverton in the Crimea and which, according to W. R. Greg, explains why otherwise respectable women fall into prostitution. Whatever the dangers of romantic intimacy between a beautiful nurse and her patient, Lady Staveley and Trollope’s narrator find another aspect of Nightingale’s legacy equally, perhaps more, frightening. When Madeline is not allowed to hope to marry the “quite ineligible” Felix, “she began to read a paper about sick people written by Florence Nightingale” (470, 525). Observing her daughter preparing to “withdraw herself from the world, and give up to sick women what was meant for mankind.” Lady Staveley determines that Felix Graham is better than no son-in-law at all (526). For, comments the narrator with approval, “When someone had once very strongly praised Florence Nightingale in Lady Staveley’s presence, she had stoutly declared her opinion that it was a young woman’s duty to get married” (526). This fear that the “monastic” lives of Nightingale nurses rendered them unwomanly—and rather too popish—lacked the sensationalism of its opposite fear of a sexualized nurse, but it also appeared more likely (526). What, in piety, could be said against a young woman devoting her life to Christian charity? And yet, of course, Madeline Staveley’s determination to become a nursing Sister is no less threatening to the domestic order—to

60


her mother’s notion that womanly duty “comprehended the birth, bringing up, education and settlement in life of children, also due attendance upon a husband”—than is the seduction of Theresa Longworth by a British officer on an army transport ship (526). Marriage is the prescription for both possibilities. Rhoda Broughton’s Second Thoughts (1880) demonstrates how little the nurse’s reputation had changed since Trollope’s caution against her in 1861. Broughton’s heroine, Gillian, like Madeline of Orley Farm, is not a nurse at all, but a beautiful young heiress who, while nursing a relative and visiting the poor in her neighborhood, finds that she possesses naturally the traits of the Nightingale nurse. The novel centers upon a romance between Gillian and a young doctor who attends her father. When Gillian’s father is dying, their mutual attendance upon him produces a sexual attraction. Here, Gillian displays spontaneously the more romantic and ladylike qualities of a Nightingale nurse as laid out in Notes, comforting her dying father with her soothing presence while attracting the doctor with her fine sensibility. Like Trollope, Broughton understands the risks of bedside intimacy, but she is more willing to explore its intriguing complications: “There is nothing that conduces so much to intimacy as perpetually meeting in a sick-room, is there?” asks Gillian.10 Needless to say, the romance ends in marriage, and Gillian never becomes a career nurse. Trained nurses are present, almost by necessity, in quasi-medical novels such as Broughton’s, but they are very much in the background, often acting as foils or warnings to an idealistic and overly ambitious heroine. Again, this nurse’s qualities fit the Nightingale model: she is neat and trim, quiet, ladylike though professional, obedient to doctors, polite to patients and their families, and extremely concerned with fresh air and hygiene. She is, in short, no “real” physical, sexual woman and certainly not a fit subject of romance. Not surprisingly, then, the majority of novels in which the “new” trained nurse plays a positive central role were written for girls late in the century.11 10. Rhoda Broughton, Second Thoughts, 229. 11. Beginning in the 1880s there was, in fact, a whole group of such fiction both in serial and novel form: Evelyn Everett Green, Barbara’s Brothers; L. T. Meade, A Sister of the Red Cross: A Tale of South Africa, and The Doctor’s Children; “Sister Joan,” The Wards of St. Margaret’s.

Nightmare Figures

61

Even when nurses do appear as heroines in adult fiction, they almost invariably endure training as a form of discipline and preparation for marriage or other work.12 Mary Ward’s Marcella (1894) is a particularly frustrating example of a novel which follows this pattern. Although the novel portrays district nursing in London’s East End as a genuinely noble career, and Marcella Boyce is most heroic when engaged in that work, the heroine throws up her profession to care for her dying father and then marries a local nobleman. Nor does the narrative deny assertions made by several characters that Marcella is wasting her life “masquerading,” or escaping from a bad love affair through nursing: “It is what all women do nowadays,” says the worldly Lady Selina Farrell, “‘who can’t get on with their relations or their lovers.” The position of nursing in the novel suggests that its narrative function is simply to prepare Marcella, who had flirted with the tenets of socialism, for her role as lady of the manor. Critic Philip Kalisch comments that this is her “real work . . . the chastened and now informed deployment of wealth in the service of good,” and that “Marcella can do even more good when she combines the talents she uses in nursing with the wealth and power she inherits from her father and shares with her husband.” Surely, though, Kalisch is wrong to suggest that “None of this diminishes the positive image of nursing in the novel . . .” when nursing is simply dismissed in favor of marriage. The ending of Marcella reinscribes its adventurous heroine, who had worked successfully in a progressive public career, back within the domestic sphere, performing traditional upperclass female duties.13 Polite fiction of the second half of the century thus perpetuated the dominant image of the nurse which came out of Crimean War romance. Indeed, if anything, postwar culture preferred a less heroic and more domesticated image of the Nightingale nurse than the original “Lady with the Lamp” representations. “Other” nurses — the ambitious career woman, the nunlike Sister, the incompetent “old nurse”—exist as threats or shadowy figures that illuminate the heroine’s “natural” nursing qualifications (grace, sensitivity, intelligence) and reveal the wisdom of marriage over a nursing career. 12. Mary Ward’s Marcella, Grant Allen’s Hilda Wade, and Hall Caine’s The Christian all follow this basic pattern—as does Wilkie Collins’s The New Magdalen. 13. Mary Ward, Marcella, 314; Kalisch, The Changing Image of the Nurse, 23.

62


Sensationalizing the Nurse Victorians who sought to impose a marriage plot upon the professional nurse were abetted by the midcentury mania for sensationalism in the press and fiction. The nurse of sensationalism serves a dual function: as in “polite” fiction of the period, she engages the troubling “Woman Question,” but she also exploits specifically medical fears—disease itself, and the growing discomfort of the British public over the expanding power of medical science and its practitioners to define bodies and social behavior. Mid-Victorians believed that murder was becoming increasingly unpredictable and undetectable and was occurring more often within the respectable domestic sphere of the middle and upper classes. “Violent deaths from blunt instruments” were giving way to private and often clandestine murders of family members or medical patients. Poison was particularly well-suited to the latter trend. And although Victorians found “proof” for their suspicions more often in cases involving male poisoners (most notoriously, those of Drs. Palmer, Smethurst, and Pritchard), women were increasingly suspected of secretly administering poison “during the normal round of domestic care” as they cooked or cared for the sick.14 In the summer of 1862, the Times followed the trial and conviction of Catherine Wilson, a nurse who had poisoned at least seven of her patients in America and Britain in order to steal their money and valuables. Although the Wilson story was not as wildly popular as the Yelverton case had been, it did receive an inordinate amount of serious as well as sensationalistic attention. That a nurse in the post-Nightingale era should be a poisoner shocked Victorian sensibilities, since the nurse’s duties explicitly excluded an independent use of drugs. In Notes on Nursing Florence Nightingale had blithely asserted that her nurses would protect patients against poisoning because of their keen powers of observation: “[W]hat,” Nightingale asks, “should the medical man do if he suspected poisoning? The answer seems a very simple one—insist on a confidential nurse being placed with the patient, or give up the case” (73).15 14. Beth Kalikoff, Murder and Moral Decay in Victorian Popular Literature 59. 15. Nightingale appears to have been as struck as most Victorians by the poisoning trials of the late fifties: several times she mentions with some amazement

Nightmare Figures

63

Although the number of Victorian women poisoners—at least of those apprehended —did not match the public’s fear and fascination with them, literature of the 1850s and 1860s shows an unprecedented interest in poisoning and in women criminals. Beth Kalikoff notes that “The emphasis on poisoning in mid-Victorian middle-class journals illustrates the general fear of danger from within. . . . Doctors, because of their access to drugs and their medical knowledge, and women, because of the positions of love and trust which define their lives, are the most suspect.” The woman poisoner, Kalikoff adds, is a “nightmare figure” who is “abetted by her good looks. . . . Suspicion of women’s sexuality mingles with the fear of being murdered by a loved one while she pretends to nurse and care.” The new nurse, then, who combined an access to drugs and medical knowledge with a volatile “female nature,” must have been a particularly threatening figure to Victorians. And yet, the sensation nurse of the 1860s is distinctly not a poisoner herself, but the accomplice of poisoning medical men. It is as if these fictions at once posit and defuse the dangers of the female poisoner by containing her within the circumscribed and subordinate role of the nurse.16 As part of the reforms that followed the Crimean War, Parliament passed the Medical Act of 1858, which excluded women from professional registration as doctors as well as subjugating the nurse to the male physician. With this act, the male medical community in Britain attempted to regulate their profession and consolidate their power. During the middle decades of the century, medical men gained social and political power by advocating state interventionist sanitary reform dictated and controlled by themselves. Still, physicians of the nineteenth century lacked the prestige of, for example, lawyers and clerics, and despite their professional consolidation they continued to feel keenly any threats to their tenuous position. One of the largest threats they faced came from women. The 1860s saw the rise of the women’s higher education and employment movements, campaigns for legislative reform,

(and a certain amount of smug satisfaction) a “recent celebrated trial” during which several prominent doctors admitted that they were either unable or unwilling to distinguish between symptoms of poisoning and dysentery or cholera (Notes on Nursing, 62, 72). 16. See Kalikoff, Murder and Moral Decay, 76–77; and Thomas Boyle, Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead: Beneath the Surface of Victorian Sensationalism.

64


and the first real push to win suffrage for women. Feminists vocally supported an array of causes which directly and indirectly threatened medical men: “new” nurses, women doctors, antivivisection, and the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts. Though they did not receive feminist backing, female midwives were also besieging the medical profession during the 1860s with a registration campaign that would have placed them on an equal footing with doctors.17 The backlash against medical women that I discuss in this and later chapters, therefore, must be seen not only as coming from traditionalists within the broader Victorian culture, but more specifically and for different reasons from medical men. The existence of campaigns during the late fifties and sixties to admit women to the medical professions helps explain the grudging acceptance of the Nightingale nurse. The medical man’s animosity toward the new nurse—unlike his ani17. The 1858 Medical Registration Act “was a major landmark in the rise of the apothecary and of the surgeon from their lowly status of tradesmen and craftsmen and their assimilation into a unified medical profession with the higher status physicians.” But a unified, regulated profession required higher entrance standards controlled by the newly formed General Medical Council (Parry and Parry, The Rise of the Medical Profession, 131), and an 1859 addendum excluded foreign degree holders. Because British universities and medical schools refused to grant degrees to women until 1877, the new standards kept women off the Medical Register; however, practicing without official registration was not difficult, and many British women with foreign degrees did so. Again, the movements can be linked to the Crimean War period: inspired by Anna Jameson’s lectures on women’s labor, for instance, a group of women led by Barbara Leigh Smith (Bodichon), Florence Nightingale’s first cousin, formed in 1855 the “first regular feminist committee,” which would become the Langham Place Group. The group created opportunities for women’s education, increased employment in the next decades, and brought women together on issues that would concern them well into the twentieth century (Strachey, The Cause, 71). Historian Judith Walkowitz has demonstrated the importance of the acts as an intersection of major social and political issues of mid-Victorian England — changing social and sexual mores, the “institutional” state and its intervention into private life, and the rise of feminism (Prostitution, vii-viii). Professionally, female midwives were caught between the nurse and the woman doctor, sharing the disadvantage of being women threatening men’s jobs but neither fulfilling the nurse’s “complementary” role nor possessing the woman doctor’s full medical credentials; see Anne Witz, Professions and Patriarchy, 118. The reputation of the midwife at midcentury was no better than that of the “old nurse”; nor was she lucky enough to be “reformed” as was the nurse by feminist ambition and medical need (Blake, The Charge of the Parasols, 18).

Nightmare Figures

65

mosity toward the woman doctor or the midwife—is tempered by a recognition that she could, if strictly disciplined, support his own fight for social status and professional power. Above all else, Notes on Nursing outlines the standard (if contested) role for the Victorian nurse in relation to doctor and patient. As if anticipating not only the professional jealousies of doctors but also the public fear of medical women, Nightingale carefully dictates a role for the nurse separate from the medical duties of the doctor. One objection to women learning the “laws of health” is “reckless physicking by amateur females” (73). “But,” says Nightingale, “this is just what the really experienced and observing nurse does not do; she neither physics herself nor others” (74). According to Nightingale’s vision then, the doctor prescribes medicines which the nurse administers with unwavering obedience to his instructions; in turn, she provides him with observations of facts rather than opinions about the patient’s condition. Her sphere of independent action consists of providing a comfortable and sanitary environment for the patient.18 Although this professional separatism and the gender propriety it enforced did, in fact, create greater acceptance for the Nightingale nurse within the medical community and public opinion, it also harmed the fledgling profession in a more lasting way by institutionalizing the “natural” link between “woman” and “nurse.” Later feminists would recognize the ideological trap of the “complementarity of the sexes” argument used often by women of Nightingale’s generation; for, while it created protected female space in the public realm for women, it also made arguments for integrated gender equality in the professions difficult to justify. The “Nightingale compromise,” as Celia Davies terms it, rendered nurses (at least in theory) a “strictly disciplined labour force of probationers” which “neither challenged the doctors’ status nor made demands on hospital administrators for resources.” And yet, the new nurse, despite her hard work and self-denial, was not assimilated into the medical system or into Victorian culture as easily as Davies implies. Despite their separate and supposedly complementary spheres of authority, 18. Dean and Bolton imply that whatever disadvantages complementarity may have had for the nurse, it was ultimately a positive system for the patient since it enabled “different interventions to be interwoven in the complementary practices of ‘cure and treatment’ and ‘care and prevention’” (“The Administration of Poverty,” 90).

66


doctors and their new Nightingale nurses did participate in power struggles in post-Crimea hospitals and sickrooms.19 An 1880 exchange in the Nineteenth Century between nurse Margaret Lonsdale and doctor Sir William Gull illustrates graphically the sort of status conflict that erupted in reformed hospitals. In April, Lonsdale presented an exposé of a general lack of respect by male physicians and “uncouth” medical students for the Nightingale-style nurses at Guy’s Hospital, London.20 Lonsdale suggests that medical men at Guy’s preferred the “old” nurses because those uneducated, servantlike women did not complain of the men’s lack of “moral restraint,” or of their unethical experimentation on hospital patients. But the real issue for Lonsdale was status: “A doctor is no more necessarily a judge of the details of nursing than a nurse is acquainted with the properties and effects of the administration of certain drugs.” In May, Gull, consulting physician of Guy’s, attacked the nurses’ claims to innate female superiority and fitness for the career: “The [medical] profession can never sanction a nursing system which claims for itself not to be under their control and direction.” Lonsdale responded with a sarcastic, falsely apologetic letter, stating that she must have been misunderstood: “I am universally credited with having made the monstrous assertion that in some ways the nurse knows better than the doctor. . . . [T]he doctor must remain absolutely supreme.” Such exchanges reveal the imperfect subordination of the nurse to the doctor—an imperfection so unacceptable to medical men and public opinion as to require almost entire suppression in cultural representations of the 1850s and 1860s. In even the most sensationalist literature of the period, the nurse’s dependence upon the professional will of a doctor remains central to her role. The specific desire of the male medical community to preserve its authority 19. Davies, “A Constant Casualty,” 104. In Nightingale’s efforts to establish the nurse’s “vital importance,” she criticizes doctors for their overreliance upon drugs: “[I]t is surprising how many men (some women do it too), practically behave as if . . . the sick body were but a reservoir for stowing medicines into” (Notes on Nursing, 70). 20. Guy’s only began to reform its nursing along Nightingalean lines in 1871 after great pressure to admit Protestant sisterhoods (Smith, The People’s Health, 261). Some of the doctors’ animosity toward the new nurses may have been produced by the nurses’ high expectations about working conditions—“Effectively, the hospitals were sustaining the sisterhoods”—and by their medical knowledge which threatened low-status doctors (Smith, The People’s Health, 261).

Nightmare Figures

67

against encroaching nurses therefore reinforces the broader cultural desire to repress the growing independence of all middle-class women.21 The sensation novel of the 1860s, with its domesticated gothicism and its concern over the growing independence—social, economic, and therefore sexual—of middle-class women, provides a fruitful site for exploring how the Victorian fears of medicine and independent women first come together in a backlash against the medical woman. Two in particular, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) and Charles Reade’s Hard Cash (1863), present provocative examples of the “sensation nurse,” one perversion of the professional Nightingale nurse which took shape in the Victorian cultural imagination after the Crimean War. Both Collins’s and Reade’s novels use the sensation nurse to exploit the fear of the independent woman’s power to harm male or “innocent” female bodies, and to spread corruption. In this sense, the novels do indeed partake of and contribute to the same attitudes about female nature which supported the Contagious Diseases Acts with their forced examinations and lock hospitals. These novels are gendered by their authors in such a way as to domesticate transgressive female characters. It is hardly a coincidence that the most prominent “sensation nurses” appear in novels written by men whose texts reveal a distinct authorial discomfort with female independence and sexuality. The nurses of these novels, with their aggressive, unchecked sexuality and the power of their medical training and position, encoded and exacerbated Victorian fears about the new trained nurse and, by implication, about the independent woman generally. They are Lady Audleys with special skills and access to their victims. As the first of its kind, The Woman in White established certain themes and narrative structures for the sensation novel. Hard Cash, for one, owes much to the earlier work. In both novels main characters are wrongfully incarcerated in insane asylums by avaricious male relatives. Both of these financially motivated incarcerations prevent love marriages. And in both novels the villains steal the identities of their victims along with their money, forcing the victims to lose themselves in the working world of London before regaining their class status in the 21. Margaret Lonsdale, “The Present Crisis at Guy’s Hospital,” 682, 683; Sir William Gull, “The Nursing Crisis at Guy’s Hospital,” Nineteenth Century, 887; Margaret Lonsdale, “Doctors and Nurses,” Nineteenth Century, 1105.

68


denouement.22 The Woman in White and Hard Cash, then, could be said to be “about” abuses of English property laws and how those abuses are supported by the inadequacies of English medicine. The Woman in White features several medical representatives: the kindly but inept Dr. Dawson who can’t diagnose typhus; the asylum doctor who “keeps” both Anne Catherick and Laura Fairlie Glyde but cannot tell them apart; the asylum nurse whom Marian bribes to violate medical ethics; Count Fosco, a self-taught medical chemist; and Mme. Rubelle, the trained nurse (and international spy) whom Fosco places over the typhus-stricken Marian. With so many medical characters, one might argue that Nurse Rubelle’s role in the novel is too minor to be of significance or to establish any patterns about “sensation nurses.” Indeed, she is structurally unnecessary to the plot since either the obedient Mme. Fosco or the villainous maid, Margaret Porcher, could have performed nearly all of her tasks. But if Rubelle is structurally unnecessary, then she serves an important thematic function that neither of those women could. Not thinking of Mme. Rubelle, D. A. Miller remarks rather whimsically in The Novel and the Police: “As a child . . . I thought The Woman in White must be the story of a nurse: it at least proves to be the story of various women’s subservience to ‘the doctor,’ to medical domination.”23 In fact, I would argue, The Woman in White is at least in part the story of a nurse whose role in the novel structures the dependence of the other female characters. The paid nurse here, as in Reade’s Hard Cash, is an intermediary figure who embodies the subservient relation of the novel’s women to male “masters” and institutions, while she illuminates the connections between the respectable middle-class woman and social “degenerates”—the female criminal and prostitute. Their independence and the admiration of Fosco link Rubelle and the novel’s heroic Marian Halcombe, without whose assertiveness the forces for good could not have triumphed. Yet this association is more to Marian’s detriment than to Rubelle’s credit. Nurse Rubelle is the 22. Loesberg claims that it is this theft of identity—specifically, class status— which ties sensation fiction together as a genre (“The Ideology of Narrative Form in Sensation Fiction,” 119). 23. D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police, 168.

Nightmare Figures

69

extreme manifestation—the “nightmare figure”—of the novel’s general dis-ease with the independent woman. This anxiety is played out in many ways other than through Marian and Rubelle: the threatening figure of female insanity on the loose (Anne Catherick); the need to infantilize Laura before Hartright can appropriate her; the dangerously dependent Mme. Fosco. Women are dangerous both when left to their own devices and when they submit to the will of evil men. They apparently become “safe” only once made the domestic partners (Laura) or servants (Marian) of good men such as Walter Hartright. The Woman in White expresses female independence in order to manage or repress it. Marian Halcombe, whose independence is strictly curtailed by the novel’s end, is the object of narrative anxiety through which this disease is eventually expunged. Nurse Rubelle, above all, calls attention to the need for Marian’s domestication. Marian and Mme. Rubelle are brought together through Marian’s illness which, as one might expect, has implications beyond the merely physical or medical. As in Ruth and Two Years Ago where illnesses carry moral or social meanings, Marian’s illness in The Woman in White is the site at which the narrative works through problems that her character signals—i.e., ambiguities of gender and the opposing fears of female oppression and female aggression. The novel allows for two contradictory readings of the generation of this disease, one of which paints Marian as a victim of the evil oppression of Blackwater and its inhabitants, the other of which implies that Marian herself is to blame for her illness. In either case, her typhus allows the narrative and its characters to defuse this loose cannon of a woman. In support of the first reading of Marian’s illness, Blackwater Park, home of Percival Glyde and scene of the conspiracy against Laura, Anne Catherick, and Marian, is described in terms of decay and disease. Marian comments that Blackwater Park is the “exact opposite” of the Fairlie estate, Limmeridge, which is situated on the sunny, airy, northern seacoast (220). She notes that the house at Blackwater is “suffocated” by too many trees which render Blackwater Lake “black and poisonous” (220, 228). The lake itself, with its “still, stagnant waters . . . wasted and dried up to less than a third of its original size,” is a perfect carrier of the typhoid fever which Marian will catch (227). A common walk for Marian—particularly when she and Laura are trying to contact Anne

70


Catherick—is around this lake, on its “damp and marshy” banks, “overgrown with rank grass and dismal willows” (227–28). Such descriptions recall Notes on Nursing which calls for air and light and warns against all that is “miasmic.” Marian’s typhus might thus have an entirely environmental origin. Or, on a less literal level, she might have been infected by the human evil for which the environs of Blackwater are merely metaphors. Both Percival Glyde and Mme. Fosco, for instance, repress a passionate malignance which erupts under pressure. And Count Fosco, who kisses Marian’s hand with “poisonous lips,” is perhaps the true human equivalent of the disease of Blackwater (327). In a rare moment of insight, Frederick Fairlie describes the Count as “too yellow to be believed . . . like a walking-West-Indian-epidemic. He was big enough to carry typhus by the ton, and to dye the very carpet he walked on with scarlet fever” (373). Because Marian’s typhus allows for Laura’s kidnapping and incarceration, blaming it upon the poisonous nature of Blackwater Park or the conspirators supports the novel’s larger theme of the victimization of women and Marian’s role as heroine. The novel nevertheless takes pains to support the second reading of the illness, suggesting its cause is actually Marian’s spying adventure when she sits on the roof in the rainy dark to hear the schemes of Fosco and Sir Percival. In this reading, the illness functions as a punishment for Marian’s transgressions of proper gender boundaries—specifically, for the protolesbian overtones of her character and behavior. Marian, as both Walter Hartright and Count Fosco note, is a man trapped within a woman’s body.24 Her resolution (which Fosco calls the “resolution of a man”) to risk all for “Laura’s honour, Laura’s happiness—Laura’s life itself . . .” is compromised by her womanly body (346, 340). Because, she says, her “courage was only a woman’s courage after all” Marian recoils from a manly face-to-face confrontation with Fosco and Sir Percival on the ground floor and decides instead to eavesdrop—literally—from a safer, womanly distance 24. Critic Tamar Heller notes that Blackwater is Collins’s “nod to Radcliffe’s Udolpho” and to her “figuration of domesticity as nightmare” (Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic, 113). D. A. Miller writes that Marian’s “inversion,” no less than the “woman-in-man” motif which dominates the sexual politics of the novel, “is a function of the novel’s anxious male imperatives (‘Cherchez, cachez, couchez la femme’) that, even as a configuration of resistance, it rationalizes, flatters, and positively encourages” (The Novel and the Police, 176).

Nightmare Figures

71

(341–42). But in order to crawl out onto the rooftop she must shed the vestiges of restraining femininity and assume an androgynous guise: I took off my silk gown to begin with. . . . I next removed the white and cumbersome parts of my underclothing, and replaced them by a petticoat of dark flannel. Over this I put my dark travelling cloak . . . In my ordinary evening costume I took up the room of three men at least. In my present dress . . . no man could have passed through the narrowest spaces more easily than I. (342)

Though Marian carries out her plan with admirable fortitude, the “unnatural” effort costs her physically: she collapses, womanlike, on her bedroom floor, writing in her journal the next morning, “How short a time, and yet how long to me—since I sank down in the darkness, here, on the floor—drenched to the skin, cramped in every limb, cold to the bones, a useless, helpless, panic-stricken creature” (356). After this, she is bedridden and largely delirious for over a month, during which Fosco hides her under Rubelle’s supervision in an unused part of the house and sequesters Laura in the asylum as the now-dead Anne Catherick. On one level, of course, Marian’s illness simply complicates and prolongs the plot while raising sensationalist tension. But the particulars of the illness and its apparent cause—Marian’s greatest act of self-assertion—imply that it has much to do with her “emasculation” and domestication. The presence of Rubelle during Marian’s illness reinforces the need for what D. A. Miller calls Marian’s conversion “into the castrated, heterosexualized ‘good angel’ (646) of the Victorian household at the end.”25 Rubelle’s place within the novel also reproduces cultural notions about the nurse’s role within the “surveillance system” of the Victorian “clinic,” whose emphasis upon observation (as in Notes on Nursing) calls to mind Foucault’s “medical gaze” while its concern for order and discipline resembles his analysis of the panoptical penal institutions of the period. Nursing historian Mick Carpenter finds the nurse a “functionary of the [Foucauldian medical] ‘gaze,’ an agent of the patient’s objectification, herself subordinated on the ground of the doctor’s more privileged ‘vision.’” Because the victim of sensation fiction is often a “patient” (and nearly as often a single female), the nurse figure becomes 25. Miller, Novel and Police, 176.

72


an important accomplice for those who wish to gain access to her. Thus, Marian frees Laura from the asylum by bribing her nurse, and Fosco gains access to Marian’s sickroom through his wife (who had been nursing her niece) whose presence assures Mrs. Michelson that there is “no impropriety” in Fosco’s intrusion (390).26 Nurse Rubelle is an admirable accomplice for Fosco, fulfilling the role of intermediary between male persecutor and female victim. Her medical knowledge allows him to dismiss Dr. Dawson without risking Marian’s life, and her discretion and loyalty mean that he can trust her with his secrets. Rubelle demonstrates how easily the sort of independent action and strength of mind that Marian uses in the interests of good can be turned to criminal activity. Two traits predominate in Mrs. Michelson’s description of Mme. Rubelle: her foreignness and her quiet independence of “everyone in the house”—“the result of strength of mind . . . and not of brazen self-assurance, by any means” (399, 387). Rubelle’s malicious foreignness links her to Dickens’s Hortense and Mme. Defarge, who in turn were modeled upon the infamous Victorian poisoner Maria Manning.27 Ironically, Rubelle’s independence, a quality which arouses Mrs. Michelson’s suspicions, also renders her an admirable nurse and links her to Marian Halcombe whose “male brain” resembles Rubelle’s “strength of mind.” Although Rubelle helps Fosco to imprison Marian Halcombe in her sickroom and to hide Laura Fairleigh in an asylum, as a nurse she is above reproach. Fosco describes Rubelle as “a respectable matron” and “[o]ne of the most eminently confidential and capable women in existence”; Mrs. Michelson, who resents Rubelle’s presence, nevertheless admits that she “certainly under26. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception and Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Mary Poovey makes the connection between Foucault and nineteenth-century nursing when she writes of Nightingale’s “panoptical plan”: “Nightingale’s vision of a classless . . . society is actually a vision of society as a network of middle-class families dominated if not run by women, penetrated and linked by nurses who emanate from the central hospitalhomes where they are disciplined and trained” (Uneven Developments, 192). Carpenter, “The subordination of nurses in health care,” 102. 27. Richard Altick comments, “It is generally accepted that [Dickens] drew Hortense in Bleak House . . . from Maria Manning” (Victorian Studies in Scarlet, 128). Considering Dickens’s great influence on Collins (and, some would argue, vice versa), it doesn’t seem unlikely that Mme. Rubelle was consciously modeled upon Hortense, Mme. Defarge, or both.

Nightmare Figures

73

stood her business,” “managed Miss Halcombe with unquestionable care and discretion,” and never tampered with the medicine bottles (623, 387). Even the illicit tasks that she performs on Fosco’s orders— complete and independent care (feeding, bathing, and medicating) of the typhus-stricken Marian for several days and changing the drugged Laura out of her own clothes into Anne Catherick’s —are duties specific to the trained nurse. The same qualities, then, that make this “respectable matron” a proper Nightingale-type nurse—her medical knowledge or “capability” and her “confidentiality”—also make her frightening and dangerous. Paradoxically, among the most dangerous attributes of this frighteningly independent woman is her unwavering obedience to her doctor. As Nightingale explains in Notes on Nursing, the nurse’s sphere of independent action is checked by her subservience to and dependence upon the doctor who supervises her work. Acting under Fosco’s orders, Rubelle impedes Marian’s freedom to act in Laura’s defense, thereby participating in the project to restrain the independence of women like herself. This complicity against her own sex is a fundamental difference between the sensation nurse and the fictional New Woman doctor who emerges in the 1870s to defend powerless women. Florence Nightingale herself warned that the powerful responsibilities of the nurse made her potentially dangerous: because “nursing is the only calling in the world where a woman is really in charge” of life-and-death matters, “Even if you can be sure that a woman has learnt her trade of nurse, you cannot . . . send her out . . . till you have trained and tested her as a woman in moral and mental qualities.”28 In other words, the “strength of mind” that both Rubelle and Marian exhibit and which is necessary to learn nursing skills must yet be accompanied by an appropriately feminine mindset and morality. The novel foils the independent woman not only through Rubelle’s ultimate defeat (via Fosco’s defeat) but symbolically through the redomestication of her “patient” and fellow independent, Marian. Marian’s fate resembles that of Crimean War nurses such as Grace Harvey: though her independence works for good, and though it proved valuable during a crisis, it is too volatile to allow to run loose after the crisis is over. The Woman in White literally ends with Marian installed at 28. Constance B. Schuyler, introduction to Notes on Nursing, 11.

74


Limmeridge as the invalid Laura’s “nurse,” the godmother (i.e., babysitter) of Laura and Walter’s son, and as the “good angel” of all their lives (646). The novel, which begins by protesting so vehemently the wrongful incarceration of women in insane asylums, ultimately confines them within the asylum of the domestic sphere. While The Woman in White emphasizes the professional nurse’s potential criminality, Reade’s Hard Cash concentrates on the other form of female degeneracy, aggressive sexuality, in its sensation nurse. There can be little doubt that The Woman in White influenced Hard Cash. Two significant twists that Reade makes to Collins’s plot affect directly the “sensation nurse” and the larger issue of female independence. First, whereas Collins has women wrongfully committed to insane asylums, Reade commits his hero, Alfred Hardie, and spends a proportionally larger space of the narrative within the asylums. The sensation nurse, therefore, has under her control not just women, but a handsome young man. Second, in Hard Cash the nurse’s heroic doppelgänger is not an androgynous spinster but the hero’s beautiful fiancée. These changes mean that the frightening independence that in The Woman in White was a manly “strength of mind” becomes in Hard Cash a decidedly female but immodest sexuality. To return to Orley Farm’s dual fears about the Nightingale nurse, Collins’s novel reflects the fear of her desexing professionalism and Reade’s of her hypersexualizing intimacy with male bodies. Hard Cash revolves around two families, the Hardies and the Dodds. Alfred Hardie, a young “Apollo,” is anxious to marry the beautiful and impetuous Julia Dodd. However, Alfred’s father has his son committed to an insane asylum to cover his own theft of his children’s trust funds and Mr. Dodd’s life savings. Before he finally regains his freedom, Alfred is in a total of three asylums, allowing Reade to show a range, from the only moderately corrupt Silverton Grove to Dr. Wycherley’s “modern” asylum in London and finally to the “old system” asylum, Drayton House, run by Dr. Wolf. These depictions of asylums incensed certain readers of the medical profession, one of whom charged Reade with “offences against decency, good taste, and truth.”29 In response, Reade cited the 1851 case, “Mathew v. Harty,” which was widely covered in the press and upon 29. J. S. Bushnan, “Private Asylums,” 6.

Nightmare Figures

75

which his novel is loosely based (I.9–11). Hard Cash, he wrote, is “a fiction built on truths . . . gathered . . . from a multitude of volumes, pamphlets, journals, reports, blue-books, manuscript narratives, letters, and living people . . .”; for the “madhouse scenes” in particular, “the best evidence has been ransacked . . .” (I.3–4). Reade’s writing is characterized by this meticulous “fact gathering” and a pride in exposing the “truth” of social issues. His notebooks reveal that he employed “hacks” to dig up facts and news stories which would be laboriously recorded onto a system of cards or into notebooks before Reade wove them into his novels.30 His plots and characters are thus highly intertextual productions that integrate press reports, written histories, oral testimonies, and conventions of Victorian fiction. One such intertextual production in Hard Cash is the figure of the corrupt female asylum nurse. Reade paints asylum nurses as embodiments of sadism and perversion, especially in their treatment of female patients: In the absence of male critics they showed their real selves, and how wise it is to trust that gentle sex in the dark with irresponsible power over females. With unflagging patience they applied the hourly torture of petty insolence, [and] needless humiliation. . . . [T]hey had got a large tank in a flagged room, nominally for cleanliness and cure, but really for bane and torture. For the least offence, or out of mere wantonness, they would drag a patient stark naked across the yard, and thrust her bodily under water again and again, keeping her down till almost gone with suffocation, and dismissing her more dead than alive with obscene and insulting comments ringing in her ears. . . . Finally, these keeperesses, with diabolical insolence and cruelty, would bathe twenty patients in this tank, and then make them drink that foul water for their meals. (II.101–2)

Like many other public-sphere institutions, the Victorian asylum had been consciously reorganized upon a domestic model, with the doctor and matron acting as “parents” and the attendants as “elder siblings” of the patients.31 But Reade portrays madhouses as perversions of the middle-class home: what should be a safe haven from the terrors of the 30. Elton E. Smith, Charles Reade, 106. 31. Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980, 28.

76


world, presided over by a benevolent father and a good-angel mother, becomes instead a prison of terror itself whose figures of authority must be feared. As the above passage makes clear, the narrative is particularly fascinated by the perversions of women — produced, it asserts, by the unleashing of their “real selves” in the absence of “male critics.” Given “irresponsible power,” the nurses themselves degenerate and then abuse their “children,” thus causing the degeneration of the asylum/ home. Though one detects here a general anxiety about female power— perhaps even within the domestic sphere—the text implies that the real dangers of female perversions lie within pseudodomestic arenas of the public sphere where women work with a degree of independence: asylums, hospitals, schools, etc. Outside of their natural sphere of home, women cannot be trusted even with their traditional tasks—feeding, bathing, nursing—or their traditional charges—the sick, the childlike, and fellow women. Nor, of course, are these women represented as proper nurses whose duties grow out of the wife’s and mother’s. Mme. Rubelle was a good nurse though a bad woman, but the asylum nurses dishonor their profession by using the tank, a tool of “cleanliness and cure,” for “bane and torture” and then by feeding their patients the “foul” water (II.101). Though the tanking scene, with its woman-on-woman abuse, represents the novel’s most horrific exposure of asylum and nursing corruptions, much more attention is paid to the relationship between the head nurse, Edith Archbold, and her male patient, Alfred Hardie. Archbold is a caricature of the independent woman who resembles Marian Halcombe: “The mind of Edith Archbold corresponded with her powerful frame, and bushy brows. Inside this woman all was vigour; strong passions, strong good-sense to check or hide them; strong will to carry them out” (I.543). Like the women who work under her, Archbold shows little sympathy for female patients—she “had a way of addressing her own sex that crushed them” (I.524). But the handsome male patient, Alfred Hardie, “broke through her guard, and pierced at once to her depths” (I.543). Significantly, the narrator insists that Archbold would probably have been impervious to Alfred’s charms in a quiet country house; his imprisonment and her position of power over him are what render him attractive to her (I.543). Nor does he attract only her: Archbold must vie for his affection with her underling, Nurse

Nightmare Figures

77

Hannah, a “muscular young virgin” whose “gentle timidity” toward Alfred “contrasted prettily with her biceps muscle and prowess against her own sex” (I.544). When Alfred kisses Hannah for a kindness she has done, Archbold (who has been “feasting her eyes upon him through an aperture in the door”) explodes: “‘if you kiss her before me, I shall kill her before you’” (I.550, 553). Archbold’s jealousy drives her to the extreme of entering Alfred’s cell while he sleeps and kissing him, an act that is juxtaposed to the description of a female “erotic maniac” who “had obtained access—with marvellous cunning—to the men’s side” of the hospital (II.550). These layered examples of eroticized women imply that the “irresponsible power” of the asylum unleashes in women not only violence but a degenerate sexuality; Archbold’s perversions are not unique. Alfred escapes Archbold’s power when he is transferred from Silverton Grove to Dr. Wycherly’s humane asylum. But when he is moved for a third time, to Dr. Wolf’s establishment at Drayton House, Archbold follows him and, emboldened by her passion, renews her efforts to seduce him. Because Dr. Wolf is the most corrupt keeper, knowingly incarcerating sane patients for the fees they bring, Archbold enjoys here the most freedom to act upon her perverse passions. The unnatural sexual aggression of the nurse is thus in direct proportion to the corruption of the male head of the institution in which she works. As in The Woman in White, the ultimate fear in the novel is the power of male avarice to ruin the lives of the powerless: women, children, the wrongly accused. Dr. Wolf and the patriarchal institution he represents abet Richard Hardie in the theft of his son’s money, freedom and legal sanity. Once again, subordinate female power—a less pervasive but equally dangerous evil—acts as an accomplice to male avarice, though in this case it erupts in the form of “unnatural” sexual passion. That Archbold’s advances are perversions of proper womanly behavior is clear from her actions at Drayton House. David Dodd happens to be a patient at this asylum, and his wife and daughter naturally visit him there. Knowing of Alfred’s engagement to Julia, however, Archbold ensures that Alfred is never present during the visits. She becomes as jealous of Julia as she had been of Nurse Hannah, and tells Alfred that his fiancée has found another beau. In a scene of mock courtship, Archbold takes Alfred out for a Sunday afternoon walk in the country — closely followed by a male attendant with a mastiff — and under a

78


“young chestnut-tree” attempts to seduce him in the stereotypical language of the self-sacrificing woman or nurse: Let me be your housekeeper, your servant, your slave. . . . O Alfred, my heart burns for you, bleeds for you, yearns for you, sickens for you, dies for you. . . . Say the word, dearest, and I will bribe the servants, and get the keys, and sacrifice my profession forever to give you liberty. . . and all I ask is a little, little of your heart in return. (II.119–20)

Alfred, of course, rejects this proposition, prompting Archbold—who has just offered to sacrifice her profession—to threaten to use her position of authority to get what she wants: You couldn’t love me like a man; you shall love me like a dog . . . You shall see now what an insulted woman can do. A lunatic you shall be ere long, and then I’ll make you love me, dote on me, follow me about for a smile . . . you shall be my property, my brain-sick, love-sick slave. (II.122)

The narrator notes that with this strategy of taunting Alfred about Julia’s new lover and torturing him toward madness, Archbold “had done what no man had as yet succeeded in; she had broken [Alfred’s] spirit” (II.125). Thus, although male financial and institutional power can hide Alfred’s sanity, wealth, rights, and identity, it is only perverse female passion that can actually destroy these things. Just as Mme. Rubelle acts as a warning against Marian’s overassertiveness in The Woman in White, one of Edith Archbold’s central tasks in Hard Cash is to serve as doppelgänger to the woman whom Alfred will eventually marry, Julia Dodd. The novel establishes a parallel between Archbold’s illicit and perverse passion for Alfred and Julia’s “impetuosity” and inappropriate passion for him. Reade signals as important the fact that Julia and Alfred speak together unchaperoned (once) and so fall in love without anyone else’s knowledge. Julia’s reaction when Alfred kisses her palm anticipates that of Archbold to the young “Apollo”: though Julia’s “virginal instinct and self-defence carried her off swiftly,” once in the house her composure “fell from her like a veil, and she fluttered up the stairs to her own room with hot cheeks, and panted there like some wild thing that has been grasped at and grazed” (I.166). Julia’s passion for Alfred makes her ill, prompting her mother to put her through medical examinations by a battery of doctors, none of

Nightmare Figures

79

whom can diagnose her illness. Speaking to her mother, Julia describes the change in herself: “I do feel so depressed and hysterical, or else in violent spirits. . . . [I am] a dreamy, wandering, vain, egotistical, hysterical, abominable girl” (I.72–73). In a provocative but isolated moment in the novel, Julia suggests that a “doctress” might prove more effective at diagnosing her problem—presumably because of the romantic or “female” nature of the complaint (I.81). The narrator declines to comment on this suggestion, but Mrs. Dodd registers strong disapproval and asserts, “There is no such thing” (I.81).32 Finally, a wily Scot, Dr. Sampson, recognizes the symptoms of hidden passion, at which point Julia confides in her mother, and her constitution returns to normal. Even after this illness, however, Julia is still not properly repressed; her passion and the passion she elicits from Alfred remain dangerous forces within the novel. Their attachment and impending marriage without parental approval precipitate Alfred’s incarceration and exposure to the uncontrolled female passion of Archbold—an intensification and perversion of Julia’s. Therefore, while Alfred is subjected to the “amorous crocodile,” Julia experiences a chastening of her own (II.112). The Dodd family’s “fall” into misfortune and the lower middle-class teaches them to restrain passion and to place other concerns (of charity, religion, and economy) before romance. At the start of the novel Julia had laughed at Alfred’s sister, Jane, for her religiosity and for giving up “balls, concerts . . . charades, and whatever else amuses society without perceptibly sanctifying it” (I.23). The climax of Julia’s denunciation of Jane Hardie is, “And, you know, she is a district visitor” (I.23). Now Julia becomes a district visitor herself, distributing to the poor and sick of London the excess of what her mother and brother earn. The narrator notes that the “grim, heart-breaking sights she saw arrayed Julia’s conscience against her own grief”; armed with her mother’s profits, 32. Technically, Mrs. Dodd is correct that there were no women doctors in England in 1863. Elizabeth Blackwell’s name had made it onto the Medical Register in 1858, but she was practicing in the United States during this time. And Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, whose name would become the second woman’s on the register in 1865, was still undergoing medical training. If Reade was aware of Blackwell and Garrett Anderson—and one would think that he must have been— then this episode might be read as a backhanded call for women physicians, particularly in light of his later novel A Woman-Hater.

80


“She carried a good honest basket [a sign of a respectable middle-class woman], and there you might see her Bible wedged in with wine and meat, and tea and sugar. . . . Thus by degrees she was attaining, not earthly happiness, but a grave and pensive composure” (II.134). Julia’s mother and brother think her now “kinder, sweeter, and dearer” than ever and look on her “as a saint,” to which Julia responds: “‘Love me as if I was an angel, but do not praise me . . .’” (II.134). The distinction between district nursing and district visiting is crucial here; though district visitors after the Crimean War did operate upon Nightingalean principles, they were an adamantly voluntary force of “ladies” performing charity work. The principal (though not the only) outward distinction between Julia’s nursing and Archbold’s, then, is that the latter underwent training and receives pay for her services. In the second half of the century, medical reformers saw the district nurse as “an insurance” against the “unclean promiscuity. . . of pauperism” and the “moral disorder of bodies” which “facilitated the dissolution of the family.” As a district visitor then, Julia regulates the sexuality and moral order of the families whom she attends just as she will regulate the moral order of her own home as a wife and mother.33 Julia’s volunteer nursing not only purifies her but prepares her for marriage. After his escape from the asylum, Alfred sprains an ankle eluding recapture, and Julia “bared her lovely arms, and blushed like a rose” preparing to dress it (II.213). When Alfred suggests that the servant should do this, Julia replies contemptuously: “[S]he is too heavyhanded. . . . I am a district visitor: I nurse all manner of strangers, and he says I must leave his poor suffering leg to the servants” (II.213). In contrast to the coarse and unsympathetic asylum nurses, Julia handles Alfred’s ankle “with a tenderness so exquisite, and pressing it with the full sponge so softly, that her divine touch soothed him as much or more than the water” (II.213). Finally, the novel validates volunteer 33. Vicinus, Independent Women, separates “hospital nursing” from religious “sisterhoods,” devoting a chapter to each. Yet the district nurse and the hospital nurse both result from the cooperation of the Nightingale training school with St. John’s House: from 1862 to 1888, “applicants to the St. John’s school and the Nightingale school were divided into two batches, those judged more suitable for hospital nursing being sent to St. Thomas’s, those better suited to the special conditions of district nursing being sent to King’s” (F. F. Cartwright, A Social History of Medicine, 157). Dean and Bolton, “The Administration of Poverty,” 95.

Nightmare Figures

81

district visiting not only by its contrast to paid nursing, but by the monetary reward that Julia receives from an old miser whom she visited. With this inheritance Julia and Alfred can marry comfortably and, we assume, live happily ever after. The ultimate signal of the virtues of domestic life for women comes in the novel’s epilogue when we learn that the perverse Edith Archbold marries a weak-minded but kindhearted patient from the asylum who turns “that black-browed jade” into “one of the best wives and mothers in England” (II.332). What began as a sensation novel, fascinated by female passion and power, concludes—by the repression of that passion and the abdication of that power—as a domestic comedy: “So you see,” comments the narrator, “a female rake can be ameliorated by a loving husband, as well as a male rake by a loving wife” (II.332). Once again, marriage provides the solution to the problem of the dangerously independent and sexualized nurse.

Contexts The discourses surrounding the “new” nurse—the obsession with sanitation and disease which allowed her appearance in the public arena, the fears of female independence and power, and the desire to contain sexuality within the normative structure of heterosexual domesticity—come together with the implementation of the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, ’66, and ’69. Under the Contagious Diseases Acts, the “moral sanitarianism” which Florence Nightingale used so effectively in the Crimea and later among the urban poor also aided those who sought to stem the “unrestrained moral contagion” of that “Great Social Evil,” prostitution. Convinced that venereal disease was “sweeping the nation,” and that prostitutes were to blame, medical and military authorities attempted to regulate prostitution with “medical police” who picked up and submitted to internal examination women appearing to be prostitutes. If found to be infected with venereal disease, the women were incarcerated in lock hospitals for a period of up to nine months. Among the many problems of this scheme was that the category of “prostitute” was hardly fixed; as many Victorians understood, women moved in and out of prostitution, or performed sex acts for money only occasionally, often according to other employment

82


opportunities. In practice, then, because distinguishing a “prostitute” from other working women was often impossible, virtually all working women risked being arrested and incarcerated. Not until the repeal campaign of the 1870s and 1880s did arguments concerned with overpolicing and women’s civil liberties arise.34 Although also a “sanitarian,” Nightingale vigorously opposed the Contagious Diseases Acts as “morally disgusting, unworkable . . . and unsuccessful.”35 On one hand, Nightingale’s opposition to the male medical community on this issue typifies the combative relationship that developed between “the nurse” and “the doctor”—the moral environmentalist versus the medical internist—after midcentury. But it also demonstrates the extent to which cultural representations of the “Nightingale nurse” had become independent of Nightingale herself; for not only were actual nurses deeply implicated in the administration of the Acts, but the figure of the nurse, by her status as a “public” woman, became associated with the very women she helped to police. Thus, Nurse Rubelle both represses and resembles the independent Marian, and the “perverse” Edith Archbold holds the keys to the cells of female “erotic maniacs.” Most of the “nursing” novels of this chapter cannot, of course, comment directly upon the Acts which were legislated after their publications. Novels such as Hard Cash or even the relatively innocuous Orley Farm do, however, reveal, defend, and reproduce a culture ripe for the injustices inherent in the Contagious Diseases Acts. These nursing novels also show why, ultimately, the nurse proved ineffective as a guardian for women and as a feminist role model. Because mainstream Victorian culture constructed the “nurse” with discursive strategies that also defined the “prostitute” and female “criminal,” 34. Walkowitz, Prostitution, 41, 32, 50. An excerpt from Nightingale’s “Introduction of Female Nursing” demonstrates this point aptly: “In England the channels of female labour are few, narrow, and over-crowded . . . there are accordingly a large number of women who avowedly live by their shame; a larger number who occupy a hideous border-land, working by day and sinning by night; and a large number . . . who preserve their chastity, and struggle through their lives . . . on precarious work and insufficient wages” (6). Walkowitz, Prostitution, 82. 35. Woodham-Smith, Florence Nightingale, 267. During the debates over the acts, she wrote to members of Parliament, contradicted the opinions of the Army Medical Department, and even caused the War Office to form a committee (whose instructions she determined) to investigate the effectiveness of policing prostitutes (Woodham-Smith, Florence Nightingale, 268).

Nightmare Figures

83

and because nursing leaders such as Nightingale chose a professional role built upon gender complementarity, the nurse was unable to negotiate effectively for equality with men in the public sphere. This difficulty for the nurse becomes clear in the fight over the state-sponsored registration of British nurses that was waged between 1889 and 1919. In an attempt to solidify professional status, to gain greater autonomy from doctors, and to bring more educated women into nursing, the Royal British Nursing Association, led by Ethel Bedford-Fenwick, fought for state registration against the powerful London hospitals—who wished to maintain control of their own nurses and training programs. The specter of the sensation nurse haunted this debate; Bedford-Fenwick, for instance, argued that state registration of nurses would “protect the sick against ignorant and untrustworthy, and even dangerous, women, who term themselves Nurses.”36 Appropriately, nursing fiction during this period tends to focus on this question of the nurse’s autonomy. She is thus portrayed either as heroically independent—as in Grant Allen’s serial, Hilda Wade (1900)— or, more often, as perverted by her illegitimate power. One such example, “The Wrong Prescription,” (1895) a detective story by L. T. Meade and Clifford Halifax, recalls the Catherine Wilson poisoning trial of 1862. In the story, a male doctor-detective must fight with a mysterious “new” nurse for the life of a wealthy young woman whom the nurse has addicted to morphine in order to extort money and jewels. While this “Nurse Collins” lacks professional ethics just as Mme. Rubelle or Edith Archbold, her sin is her independence from medical men, despite the inferiority of her medical knowledge. She, in fact, nearly kills her patient accidentally by giving her a prescription for strychnine rather than morphine. The dangers of this independent nurse are clear: she wins the confidence of her unsuspecting patient by usurping the doctor’s role as medical consultant. Her power over the patient is absolute, sinister, and subtly erotic. She possesses the credentials to administer dangerous drugs, but she lacks the doctor’s care in prescribing and his ability to discover an antidote to counteract her mistake. Though one might argue that Nurse Collins acts as another Lady Audley, venting her rage against patriarchal institutions by asserting her power and 36. Witz, Professions and Patriarchy, 133; Ethel Bedford-Fenwick, Nursing Record (1892): 270, quoted in Witz, Professions and Patriarchy, 134.

84


breaking their laws, her ultimate repentance and subjugation at the hands of the doctor-detective marks her as a representation of the incompetence and criminal ambition of the newly professional woman asserting herself in a man’s world. Fiction such as “The Wrong Prescription” demonstrates that the nurse remained a nexus for fears concerning the independent woman and medicine into the 1890s and, indeed, well into the twentieth century. Despite the professionalization that registration eventually brought to nursing, this fight did not significantly alter the subordinate position of the nurse to the doctor. The conflict over registration was concerned not with questioning the nurse’s position within the medical professions but with “definitions of nursing within an unquestioned hierarchical mode of work and authority distribution between nursing and medicine.”37 In other words, both anti- and pro-registrationists assumed a gendered (and biological) division of labor within medicine that was not significantly different from the one established by Nightingale. For this reason, this study will move in the next chapter to an examination of the woman doctor who, because of her more equal status with male medics, more successfully brings feminist concerns to medicine.

37. Eva Gamarnikow, “Sexual Division of Labour: The Case of Nursing,” 101.

Chapter Three

6d8 Sex and Fair Play Establishing the Woman Doctor

When the young heroine of Radclyffe Hall’s 1924 novel, The Unlit Lamp, announces to her father that she wishes to study medicine, he responds in a tirade: It’s positively indecent — an unsexing, indecent profession for any woman, and any woman who takes it up is indecent and unsexed. . . . Not one penny will I spend on any education that is likely to unsex a daughter of mine. I’ll have none of these new-fangled woman’s rights ideas in my house. . . . A sawbones indeed! Do you think you’re a boy? Have you gone stark, staring mad?1

Colonel Ogden’s objections to women doctors typify those voiced throughout the Victorian period and down to his own; that medical study would unsex women was the trump card played by all opponents. However, the career’s power — implicit in antifeminists’ fierce resistance — made medical education particularly appealing to the most ambitious, intellectual, or feminist women. Despite unabated protests of their indecency, women doctors began to threaten the medical establishment in Britain as early as the 1860s. 1. Radclyffe Hall, The Unlit Lamp, 110–11.

85

86


To view the complete page image, please refer to the printed version of this work.

Sophia Jex-Blake, by Margaret Todd

The British medical-woman movement began in earnest in 1869 when Sophia Jex-Blake and four other women enrolled as medical students at the only British university that would take them—the University of Edinburgh. As the women were soon to learn, however, enrollment did not guarantee equal education or the right to graduate. The male medical establishment, represented by the Royal Colleges, fought the education, certification, and employment of women doctors at every step. As Sophia Jex-Blake remarked, the Medical Registration Act of 1858 effectively allowed protectionist British medical schools to keep women out of the established profession by denying registration to any doctor holding a foreign degree.2 Even those men who supported medical women did so more in the spirit of fair play than from belief in woman’s abilities. The medical establishment’s most powerful weapon 2. Sophia Jex-Blake, “Medical Education for Women,” Medical Women: A Thesis and a History, 65.

Sex and Fair Play

87

against this threat came from its own “scientific” findings that suggested that women were unsuited for the intellectual and physical work involved. Medical study and practice would harm women’s health—particularly their reproductive health—and unsex them. One male physician, writing in 1879, neatly summarized the arguments that filled the pages of the Lancet and other establishment publications: Many of the most estimable members of our profession perceive in the medical education and destination of women a horrible and vicious attempt deliberately to unsex themselves—in the acquisition of anatomical and physiological knowledge the gratification of a prurient and morbid curiosity and thirst after forbidden information — and in the performance of routine medical and surgical duties the assumption of offices which Nature intended entirely for the sterner sex.3

Such arguments demonstrate that, even as a fully certified physician, the Victorian medical woman could not completely dissociate herself from her cultural other, the prostitute. For instance, responding to calls for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, medical officials of the 1870s insisted that prostitutes were not the soiled doves that repealers painted them, but were unsexed and without womanly feeling. This charge carried particular physiological connotations that physicians, especially, would understand. The term unsexed was used in the medical community both to describe a woman who had undergone gynecological surgery such as a hysterectomy or ovariotomy and to describe women who suffered from gynecological diseases.4 Eventually, as sexual identity became increasingly psychologized at the end of the century, sexologists applied this term to “sexual inverts” as well. At the same time, the broader moral connotations of the word entered general discourse, 3. Walter Rivington, The Medical Profession, 135–36. 4. For response of officials, see Frank Mort, Dangerous Sexualities: MedicoMoral Politics in England since 1830, 81–82. Regina Morantz-Sanchez, Conduct Unbecoming a Woman: Medicine on Trial in Turn-of-the-Century Brooklyn, 108, explains that the term unsexed was used by both conservatives and radicals within the medical profession to debate gynecological surgeries. Gynecological conservatives such as Elizabeth Blackwell (and the majority of women physicians, at least in the U.S.) argued that women were unsexed by the surgeries, whereas radicals, including Mary Dixon-Jones and Mary Putnam Jacobi, argued that these patients were, in fact, “unsexed by disease” and made “more perfect” by the surgery which allowed them to attend to their womanly duties (108).

88


as implied by Colonel Ogden’s rant against his daughter: knowledge of bodies and, presumably, sex would make women unwomanly. Thus, the same language used to define the prostitute and the lesbian as sexual deviants was applied to the women who threatened male medical hegemony. The conflation of these three figures—the prostitute, the lesbian, and the medical woman—goes far toward explaining the moral outrage of cultural conservatives such as Colonel Ogden over the medicalwoman movement in Britain. Two highly publicized events of Jex-Blake’s Edinburgh campaign secured a great deal of public support for medical women in Britain and defined the battle along the lines of fair play and sex. In the class examinations of early 1870, Edith Pechey placed third in chemistry, entitling her to a prestigious Hope Scholarship. University officials, however, stripped Pechey of “the very name Hope Scholar” and gave the award to the next student in line who, as Jex-Blake remarked, “had the good fortune to be a man.” This injustice, and the irony that the Hope Scholarship was founded from proceeds of lectures given to women years earlier, did not escape the women students or the press. Henry Kingsley’s Daily Review ridiculed the university about this “very absurd matter”: “If Miss Edith Pechey chooses to come in facile princeps at the head of the Chemistry class of her year, we . . . must have a bill for the protection of the superior sex.” The Spectator termed the situation a “very odd and very gross injustice,” and even the British Medical Journal admitted, “Whatever may be our views regarding the advisability of ladies studying medicine . . . the University has done no less an injustice to itself than to one of its most distinguished students.” In the Hope Scholarship controversy, opponents of medical women within the university had violated Britons’ sense of fair play and had engaged the interest of journalists and writers such as Charles Reade who were on the look-out for social causes to support.5 In November of the same year, the press reported the “Riot at Surgeons’ Hall” in Edinburgh, when Jex-Blake and the other women students faced a mob of two hundred male students who were “howling” 5. Jex-Blake, “Medical Education for Women,” 82; Daily Review, Apr. 1, 1870; quoted in Jex-Blake, Medical Women, appendix, 59; Spectator, Apr. 9, 1870; British Medical Journal, Apr. 16, 1870; both quoted in Jex-Blake, Medical Women, appendix, 60, 61.

Sex and Fair Play

89

and singing “with more spirit than good taste” and barring their way to an anatomy lecture. Once the women pushed through to class, many of the mob crowded in, disrupting the lecture and unleashing there “Poor ‘Mailie,” the pet sheep of the college. Following this event, which received tacit support from several medical professors, the women were regularly harassed and pelted with mud and garbage on the streets of Edinburgh. Though a few papers carried articles defending the male students, most deplored the “unbecoming” and “undignified” behavior of the rioters.6 As one of the women students explained in a letter to the Scotsman, the rioters had provided the medical-woman movement with a righteous cause: I began the study of medicine merely from personal motives; now I am also impelled by the desire to remove women from the care of such young ruffians. . . . I should be very sorry to see any poor girl under the care (!) of such men as those, for instance, who the other night followed me through the street, using medical terms to make the disgusting purport of their language more intelligible to me. When a man can put his scientific knowledge to such degraded use, it seems to me he cannot sink much lower.7

From this point, the interests of “unprotected servants and shop-girls” became central to arguments supporting women physicians.8 That this rhetoric of protection against male sexuality resembles strongly the arguments surrounding the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts and the later purity campaigns is no accident. The medical woman campaign did not occur in isolation, but was highly dependent upon (and contributed to) other movements and social forces that were occurring at the same time in Victorian Britain. For one, medical women derived strong support and basic strategies from other prominent feminists and, clearly, the campaign for medical women fits within the larger campaigns for increased education and 6. Courant, Nov. 19, 1870; quoted in Margaret Todd, The Life of Sophia JexBlake, 291–92. 7. Mary Edith Pechey, letter to the Scotsman, July 13, 1871; quoted in Todd, Life, 318–19. 8. Alison Bashford notes, in fact, that “the issue of harassing male medical students” became “almost commonplace” as a justification for women’s hospitals (staffed by women) in both Britain and Australia (“Separatist Health: Changing Meanings of Women’s Hospitals in Australia and England, c. 1870–1920,” 204.)

90


employment opportunities for women. Women doctors and their supporters consciously built upon the work of Florence Nightingale and nursing reformers when constructing a public image for the female physician and arguing for society’s need of her. The shift from nurses to women doctors parallels the shift within the women’s movement from the separate-spheres feminism of the first-generation pioneers to the more directly competitive feminism represented by the suffragists and the “New Women.” The nurse was merely an independent rather than a “New” woman because she endorsed “traditional sex, gender, and class distinctions”; she had been co-opted by orthodoxy to the degree that she now embodied the proper middle-class woman (albeit at work in the world) rather than a threat to domesticity. The figure of the woman doctor, who competed directly with male physicians, could not claim the nurse’s subordinate and complementary role, and so became the new subversive/disruptive medical woman. At the same time, the woman doctor came to represent for many that side of late-nineteenthand early-twentieth-century feminism which was highly separatist and critical of male sexuality, science, and politics.9 Nonmedical feminists lent greater support to the cause of medical education and employment than to that of nursing because physicians held more personal, professional, social, and economic power than nurses.10 Pioneering woman doctor Elizabeth Garrett Anderson voiced an opinion about nursing that was typical of feminists and early women physicians. Though her family hoped that she might become a Nightingale-type “lady nurse,” she rejected nursing because of its “sentimental, rather patronizing, approval” in the press and public opinion and its subordination to doctors. “I prefer,” Garrett Anderson con9. Josephine Butler, Harriet Martineau, Frances Power Cobbe, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Barbara Bodichon, Bessie Rayner Parkes, Jessie Boucherett, and Emily Davies were among the prominent feminists who lent their support to the cause of women doctors. Ann L. Ardis, New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism, 16. 10. Ray Strachey suggests, rightly I think, that feminists were reluctant to embrace nursing as the feminist profession because it was Florence Nightingale’s particular cause. Not only must women such as Barbara Bodichon have thought that nursing needed no other advocate than her enormously popular and richly endowed cousin, but Nightingale’s cool attitude toward the larger feminist movement after the Crimea undoubtedly affected the place of nursing within the woman’s employment movement (The Cause, 98).

Sex and Fair Play

91

cluded succinctly, “to earn a thousand rather than twenty pounds a year.” That the nurse — no matter how competent — was essentially subordinate to the will of her supervising physician, became crucial to feminist thinking with the advent of the “sexual science.” Women doctors became “a source of scientific legitimacy” for suffragists who “sought a redefinition of sexual identity for women that would justify their political inclusion.”11 Unlike most other feminists, women doctors could make arguments about sex from within the medical profession and with the language and authority of science. Michel Foucault, among others, has credited nineteenth-century medicine with the power to shape definitions of sexuality and, thus, to order behavior. The particular province of nineteenth-century medicine was the “sexual physiology peculiar to women,” and although men such as Havelock Ellis and Karl Pearson held sway on the topic, contributions by medical women are significant for their opposition to male medical opinion.12 Women doctors lent their medical expertise to the cause of women’s education—denying that intellectual work would damage a woman’s health — and supported medically related feminist drives such as dress reform and physical exercise for girls. Finally, the fight for women doctors fed into and from late-century obsessions with male medical vice and sexual danger epitomized by the campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts. Occurring almost simultaneously, these two campaigns supported one another (often unintentionally) with their common concern over the Victorian sexual double-standard and the women exploited under it. Josephine Butler’s volume of feminist essays, Women’s Work and Women’s Culture (1869), includes an important contribution by Sophia Jex-Blake, “Medicine as a Profession for Women.” Though neither the repeal campaign nor the medical-woman move11. Jo Manton, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, 77; Louisa Garrett Anderson, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, 50; Kent, Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860–1914, 115. 12. Foucault, History of Sexuality: Volume I, An Introduction, 116. Elizabeth Blackwell asserted a theory of female sexuality which revised radically the medical orthodoxy of passionless women: “Physical sex is a larger factor in the life of the woman, married or unmarried, than in the life of the man. . . . Those who deny sexual feeling to women . . . quite lose sight of . . . [the] immense spiritual force of attraction which exists in so very large a proportion in their nature” (Blackwell, The Human Element in Sex: being a medical enquiry into the relation of sexual physiology to Christian morality [London: J. and A. Churchill, 1884], quoted in Mort, Dangerous Sexualities, 116.)

92


ment was fully developed at this time, Women’s Work, and specifically Jex-Blake’s essay, establish the agenda and rhetorical strategies of both. Sounding much like Butler calling for women of all classes to band together against the immorality of the Contagious Diseases Acts and male doctors, Jex-Blake argues that “some of our saddest social problems” may be solved “when educated and pure-minded women are brought more constantly in contact with their sinning and suffering sisters, in other relations as well as those of missionary effort.”13 Thus, the relative success of Victorian women who sought to practice medicine (as opposed to those who might have wished to practice law, to preach, or even to vote) resulted from a combination of professional and cultural conditions in late Victorian Britain, as well as the efforts of the pioneers themselves. While the medical community and most female medics were principally concerned with the question of integrating women into the profession, feminists and the general public were most interested in women doctors as New Women, and as protectors of other women against the sexual dangers of late-Victorian culture. These two interests were often opposed, since women doctors felt extreme pressure to conform to political and medical positions— on vivisection and the Contagious Diseases Acts, for instance—which were at odds with those of nonmedical feminists. As contradictory as these two interests often seemed, however, they ultimately complemented each other in the public image which emerged of women doctors as appropriate practitioners for women and children. The final three chapters of this project attempt to explicate and complicate our understanding of the conditions which created acceptance for the woman doctor in Victorian Britain and how, in turn, the woman doctor is emblematic of the “New” women of her period. Central to the creation of this image were contributions made by fiction: with the belief that fictional representations shape public thought and action, both advocates and opponents of women doctors employed fiction to support their positions. From Charles Reade’s A Woman-Hater (1877) through Margaret Todd’s Mona Maclean, Medical Student (1892) and 13. At the request of feminist educators, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson bravely responded to Dr. Henry Maudsley’s scientist attack on women’s education with her article, “Sex in Mind and Education: A Reply.” EGA was responding to Maudsley’s “Sex in Mind and Education.” Jex-Blake, “Medicine as a Profession for Women,” 44.

Sex and Fair Play

93

Kipling’s The Naulahka (1891–1892), fiction assumed a self-consciously polemical attitude toward women and medicine. Regardless of their politics, however, nearly every piece of medical-woman fiction of the period covers similar ideological ground and consciously participates in a variety of debates related to the physical and sexual dangers of Victorian culture. My readings of these texts, however, will focus upon what I see to be the main work of fictional representations of the woman doctor: her undeniable status as a New Woman, and the tension that arises between that role and her equally undeniable status as a professional competitor with men. Medical-woman fiction tends to reduce the arguments for and against women doctors expressed by the medical establishment, the press, feminists, and the women medics themselves, to questions of sexuality and educational/professional fair play. Whether feminist or traditionalist in bent, medical-woman fiction portrays the female doctor as the exemplar of the New Woman, the representative of her sex most at home with the forces of modernity infiltrating Victorian culture. Indeed, with her initiation into a traditionally male profession and the “new religion” of science, the woman doctor holds a unique cultural position from which to explore the lateVictorian female condition. Of the first women doctors in Britain, Sophia Jex-Blake is particularly important not only because of the material changes effected by her fight against the University of Edinburgh, but because through that fight she became “the pioneer woman doctor” in the public imagination.14 The Jex-Blake with whom the public became familiar was less the measured, logical writer of “Medicine as a Profession for Women,” than the “lion-hearted” heroine represented in press reports and later in Charles Reade’s novelistic response to the Edinburgh campaign, A Woman-Hater (1877). Inspired by what he had read of Jex-Blake and her medical education campaign, Charles Reade determined in 1876 to champion the cause of women doctors in a novel that would run in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine—“within the very gates, so to speak, of the enemy’s citadel.”15 14. Manton, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, 240. 15. Todd, Life, 435. In his article on the publication of the novel, David Finkelstein asserts that Reade wished to publish A Woman-Hater in the unsympathetic and conservative Blackwood’s for less money than he could have earned

94


Like the male doctors and journalists who supported Jex-Blake’s Edinburgh campaign, Reade seems to have been motivated primarily by his Victorian sense of fair play. His rather patronizing attitude toward Jex-Blake and her cause is perhaps best voiced by the woman-hater of his novel, Harrington Vizard, who champions the fictional woman doctor, Rhoda Gale: Really, when she told me that fable of learning maltreated, honorable ambition punished, justice baffled by trickery, and virtue vilified . . . I forgave the poor girl her petticoats—indeed I lost sight of them: she seemed to me a very brave little fellow, damnably ill used. (247)16

A Woman-Hater does consciously set out to redress the wrongs done to medical women and to popularize their cause; in this sense, it is very much a “novel with a purpose.” But Reade did not write novels of unalloyed social commentary: “The reader of fiction is narrow and selfindulgent,” he told a friend, “He will read no story the basis of which is not sexual.” A Woman-Hater, then, embeds the plea for women doctors within a sensationalistic narrative of seduction and sex.17 Sex is as much the concern of Rhoda Gale as is medicine. And yet, though Reade’s publisher feared that a woman doctor was too revolutionary for his magazine, she is not the romantic interest of the novel.18 As the most distinctive if not the most important character of the novel, Dr. Rhoda Gale acts as a guardian of female purity against the licentiousness of male sexuality. The novel flirts with the fallen woman plot but, as Dr. Gale is first to discover, locates sexual danger instead in the figure of the male bigamist. After Reade’s extraordinarily negative por-

elsewhere because it allowed him to “strike at the heart of the enemy” with his argument (“A Woman Hater and Women Healers: John Blackwood, Charles Reade, and the Victorian Women’s Medical Movement,” 338). Not incidentally, Finkelstein remarks, “There is nothing like public controversy to improve sale” (340). 16. Charles Reade, A Woman-Hater. 17. Reade’s reading audience would have been, by all accounts, large. Critic Walter Phillips goes so far as to assert that after “the death of Thackeray and Dickens,” Reade “divided with George Eliot the reputation of being the greatest living novelist” (Dickens, Reade, and Collins, Sensation Novelists, 20). Quotation in Wayne Burns, Charles Reade: A Study in Victorian Authorship, 284. 18. Finkelstein, “A Woman Hater and Women Healers,” 340.

Sex and Fair Play

95

trait of the nurse, Edith Archbold, in Hard Cash, the heroism of feminist Rhoda Gale is rather surprising. Critic Elton Smith casts Reade as an advocate of women, commenting that he “wrote not only a number of studies of women but at least one and possibly two works on feminism.” It would be more accurate to say that although Reade wrote a number of studies of women, only one or two concerned themselves with feminism. Jex-Blake, who understood quite well that Rhoda Gale was at least a partial portrait of her, commented with characteristic spirit: “The sketch of Rhoda Gale is altogether kindly, and is drawn with a good deal of power; that it has at some points a touch of burlesque is certainly not due to any want of goodwill on the part of the author; for, to a woman’s eye, this defect seems common to the great majority of Mr. Reade’s female characters.”19 Rather than crediting Reade with a feminist awakening in A Woman-Hater, I would attribute this change in his portraits of medical women to the larger shift within Victorian culture away from an anxiety over female sexuality, which supported the Contagious Diseases Acts, to an anxiety over male sexuality, which was integral to the rhetoric which opposed them. Not only were reform-minded Victorians such as Reade more likely to sympathize with the prostitute (and the nurse) by the 1870s, some were coming to believe that women doctors, as morally female but professionally legitimate medical practitioners, could protect English womanhood from the sexual dangers that seemed to be multiplying in Victorian society. Finally, however, the novel’s very form undermines its potential radicalism: although Reade made an apparently sincere attempt to campaign for women doctors, because he does so within a novel that maintains sensation-fiction conventions and traditional romance morality, the New Woman doctor is rendered a socially marginal and morally ambiguous figure. Rhoda Gale is an Anglo-American physician whom the self-proclaimed woman-hater, Harrington Vizard, discovers starving in Leicester Square. Rhoda tells Vizard the story of her life—a modified version of Jex19. Smith, Charles Reade, 70. The Bloomer (1857), which Smith counts as a work on feminism, seems more interested in the possible titillations of dress reform and apparent transvestism of women in bloomers than in making any serious statement about feminism. Jex-Blake, “Medical Women in Fiction” 263.

96


Blake’s medical education, including the siege of Edinburgh University and an eventual foreign medical degree.20 Angered by the “tradesunionism” of the British medical profession, Vizard offers Rhoda the practice at Barfordshire, though it is technically illegal for her to practice in Britain with her foreign degree. Vizard is guardian or protector of a cast of female characters whom Rhoda is now positioned to help him protect. This conventional story, crowded with types of women, affords the unconventional Rhoda Gale little room. Vizard explains the role he intends for Rhoda: “for her to play the woman would be an abominable breach of faith. We have got our gusher, likewise our flirt; and it was understood from the first that this was to be a new dramatis persona . . . the third grace, a virago; solidified vinegar” (290). Though Jex-Blake felt flattered by subsequent references to her as the “Happy Warrior,” a “virago” who is not really a woman is hardly the most desirable female role in a Victorian marriageplot romance. Nor is Rhoda allowed to be the sole or even the preferred “exceptional” female of the cast. Despite all of Rhoda’s talents and misfortunes, Reade’s narrator calls the opera singer, Ina Klosking, “the noblest figure in this story, and the most to be pitied” (304). Thus, though the narrator insists that Rhoda is not “a mere excrescence” (193), her structural position reflects her social status as an odd or superfluous woman. What Rhoda’s character does contribute to the novel is the social commentary for which the reform-minded Reade had become famous. Once she’s placed in Barfordshire, Rhoda becomes a mouthpiece for sanitary and medical reform. Vizard calls her a “female detective” because she inspects the health conditions—the water, diet, and housing—of his tenants and then uses womanly persuasion to force him to make reforms (301). “For heaven’s sake,” Vizard tells her, “don’t add woman’s weakness to your artillery, or you will be irresistible; and I shall have to divide Vizard Court amongst the villagers. At present I get off cheap . . . only a granary—a well—and six cows” (339). The text makes clear that Rhoda is successful in this setting precisely because 20. In order to make Rhoda an M.D. at the time of writing A Woman-Hater, Reade models her degree upon that of Jex-Blake’s friend Agnes M’Laren, who studied at Montpellier after the women reached a dead end at the University of Edinburgh. Jex-Blake received her M.D. from the Irish College of Physicians and the Queen’s University of Ireland in 1877.

Sex and Fair Play

97

she is a woman exercising “domestic vigilance” and pleading in appropriate tones to the men in power: when local medical men tried to keep Rhoda from visiting the infirmary, “she went almost crying to Vizard” who “exploded with wrath” and threatened to withdraw his support of the hospital (526). Again, Vizard’s “manly” defense of his woman doctor mimics Reade’s of Jex-Blake. Though more concerned with medicine’s trades-unionism than with the rights of women, per se, Reade apparently felt an honest sympathy for the medical-woman movement after reading of the “battle of Edinburgh” in the press. He consulted Jex-Blake personally about the Cause and wove into Rhoda’s lengthy story flattering biographical sketches of Elizabeth Blackwell, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Jex-Blake, and Mary Putnam Jacobi. The novel implies that women doctors have a special mission in Victorian society; unfortunately, it often portrays that mission as that of a glorified housewife or, at best, a nurse. Sounding much like Florence Nightingale, Rhoda asserts that “Medical women are wanted to moderate” male physicians’ reliance upon drugs, and “to prevent disease by domestic vigilance” (336). At the novel’s close, the narrator does assign a “grander” role for women doctors. Medical study, he says, will give women “an honourable ambition, and an honourable pursuit . . . to elevate this whole sex, and its young children, male as well as female, and so will advance the civilization of the world” (533). Such statements hint at the coercive, classbiased nature of Reade’s role for women doctors and the reformism that would, in coming decades, feed into a nationalist eugenics. If the poor are the beneficiaries of health reform, they are also its targets. Rhoda requests six milk cows of Vizard for the villagers of Islip whose boys have “no calves to their legs . . . a sure sign of a deteriorating species” since the “lower type of savage has next to no calf” (337). Commenting on the poor’s resistance to “improvements,” Rhoda tells Vizard: “with monarchical power we can trample on them for their good. . . . [A]s their superior in intelligence and power, you might do something to put down indecency, immorality, and disease” (334–35). Such sentiments, which were at the heart of late-century British and colonial public health efforts, imply that statist and secular reformism retained much of the moral charge of earlier evangelical movements. Doctors and scientists found no difficulty in translating the Christian reformers’ equation of cleanliness and godliness into “scientific” language with

98


terms such as environment and degeneration. And just as the nurse, with her traditional ties to Christian charity, was the fitting minister to the sick under evangelical reformism, the woman doctor better suited an era requiring scientific knowledge in its health-care providers. In this respect, Rhoda Gale resembles many fictional and journalistic representations of Victorian women doctors whose “scientific” natures distinguished them from other emancipated women.21 Because she is tough and forthright, Rhoda Gale is trusted and obeyed—if not always liked—by the novel’s well-meaning characters. Vizard admiringly names her “my virago” and appoints her “viceroy” of his estate in his absence. But between Rhoda and the duplicitous Ned Severne there springs up a mutual antipathy which reveals the potential danger of Rhoda’s powerful nature. Severne, who can master any woman (and most men), fears Rhoda Gale: He had deluded . . . several ladies that were no fools; but here was one who staggered and puzzled him. Bright and keen as steel, quick and spirited, yet controlled by judgment, and always mistress of herself, she seemed to him a new species. The worst of it was, he felt himself in the power of this new woman, and indeed he saw no limit to the mischief she might possibly do him if she and Zoë compared notes. (279, emphasis added)

If the term New Woman was not coined officially until 1894, Reade anticipates its later usage with some precision here in his 1877 text.22 Not only is Rhoda an unconventional woman, she is empowered rather than weakened by that unconventionality. But despite the woman doctor’s apparent superiority to all in the novel save Ina Klosking, the text reveals a distinct unease about Rhoda: ambiguity about the New Woman is expressed as moral and sexual 21. Henry James’s The Bostonians, for example, shows unreserved asperity toward “hysterical, chattering” women’s rights workers but portrays Dr. Mary J. Prance as “tough and technical,” “impatient of the general question [of women], and bored with being reminded, even for the sake of her rights, that she was a woman—a detail she was in the habit of forgetting, having as many rights as she had time for” (112). It is interesting that in “Medical Women in Fiction” Jex-Blake comments that James’s Dr. Prance has been “sketched with . . . a masterly hand” and that she “enable[s] medical readers to imagine more correctly even the standard of professional ability” of women physicians (268). 22. Ardis, New Women, New Novels, 10.

Sex and Fair Play

99

ambiguity about Rhoda Gale. Severne, the dissolute womanizer, fears Rhoda because she combines the most potent traits of both sexes— quickness tempered by judgment, for instance — in a “new species” with “no limit” of agency. Reade is careful not to “unsex” his heroine entirely, compensating for her “masculine” traits with a feminine sensibility and an enthusiasm for beautiful landscapes (285). Even so, this androgynous doctor remains ambiguously strange and frightening. When Severne attempts to mollify Rhoda for instance, she retorts: “I’m not so very cruel; I’m only a little vindictive, and cat-like. If people offend me, I like to play with them a bit, and amuse myself, and then kill them—kill them—kill them; that is all” (282). Spoken by a physician, such sentences are particularly disturbing; but they are also quite untrue since Rhoda saves Severne’s life twice before he finally dies. On another occasion she confides to Vizard that had she lived when her ancestors emigrated “in search of liberty,” she would have stayed in England and “killed a hundred tyrants. But I wouldn’t have chopped their heads off. . . . I’d have poisoned ’em” (286). Here again, Rhoda appears more a power-hungry, man-hating sensation nurse than a levelheaded woman physician. But Rhoda’s sensationalistic speeches are at odds with her sensible actions: far from poisoning anyone, Rhoda effects changes in the townspeople’s diets and living conditions which stop their being poisoned. Caught between realism and romance, Reade creates in Rhoda a prototypical New Woman who nevertheless retains a strong measure of sensationalism and projects male ambivalence about emancipated women. Like Collins’s Marian Halcombe, Rhoda Gale is intended as a progressive figure, but finally seems unsympathetically cobbled together out of ideological and gendered pieces, the effect of which is occasionally grotesque. As part of her “ambiguity,” Rhoda Gale exhibits the female homoeroticism that male writers such as Reade, Collins, and Dickens tended to incorporate into their representations of emancipated women.23 In a twist upon the “sick-room romance,” Rhoda Gale falls in love with her injured patient, Ina Klosking. Rhoda explains to Vizard that this is not an unusual occurrence for her and that she is “very unfortunate” in her 23. Collins’s Marian Halcombe from The Woman in White, Reade’s Edith Archbold from Hard Cash, and Dickens’s Miss Wade from Little Dorrit, would be examples of such characters.

100


“attachments”: “If I fall in love with a woman, she is sure to hate me, or else die, or else fly away. I love this one to distraction, so she is sure to desert me” (415). Ina accepts Rhoda’s affection to the point that the doctor “cooked for her, nursed her, lighted fires, aired her bed, and these two friends slept together in each other’s arms” (475). Later, when Ina agrees to marry Vizard, Rhoda complains, “I must give up loving women. Besides, they throw me over the moment a man comes, if it happens to be the right one.” (510). Such language was not, in itself, uncommon among Victorian women, particularly among those who lived and worked with other women. Lesbian historiography has been particularly sensitive to the difficulties of interpreting the language of homoerotic friendships in order to determine sexual awareness.24 Yet, whether or not Reade consciously intends to portray Rhoda as a lesbian is difficult to say. Though some critics simply assume Rhoda a lesbian, the text’s uneasiness may not be directed at female homosexuality per se, but at displays of female sexuality more generally.25 In this novel, for instance, the apparently heterosexual Zoë and Fanny make up after a quarrel in the following manner: “‘Come, cuddle me quick!’ Zoë was all round her neck in a moment, like a lace scarf, and there was violent kissing, with a tear or two. Then they put an arm around each other’s waist, and went all about the premises intertwined like snakes” (59). The question is further complicated by the unconventionality of Sophia Jex-Blake, Reade’s principal model for Rhoda. Though the press made her “the” British medical woman of the period, Jex-Blake was unusual even among this group of exceptional women, and many, including Garrett Anderson and Jex-Blake’s protégée Margaret Todd, feared that her reputation injured the medical-woman cause. Though “lionhearted” and generous, Jex-Blake lacked “judgment” and good “tem24. Martha Vicinus judges that “surely some were [sexually aware], while others were not,” but that the “strong emphasis on the power of the emotions suggests an understanding of what we would now label as sexual desire” (“Distance and Desire: English Boarding School Friendships, 1870–1920,” 213). 25. Wayne Burns says flatly that in order to please his publisher Reade revised his manuscript and “either glosses over or treats with apologetic discretion” Rhoda’s “Lesbian attachments” (Charles Reade, 292). David Finkelstein refers matter-offactly to Rhoda’s “lesbian tendencies” (“A Woman Hater and Women Healers,” 346). Elton Smith remarks, Reade’s young women often “kiss [each other] with a violence only Reade seems to have noted and cringed at” (Charles Reade, 92).

Sex and Fair Play

101

per” and rarely yielded in arguments—all of which made her friends as well as her enemies subject to passionate, sometimes public, tirades. Moreover, Jex-Blake did not cultivate a “feminine” appearance: she was large, demonstrative, and had, as one friend told her, “very peculiar, and . . . generally bad taste” in dress. “It is clear,” writes Todd, “that there was about her a doggedness, a high-handedness, a disregard of tradition, an actual—if superficial—roughness, which are not common qualities among the highly-educated of either sex, and which were never admired in her own.” A casual acquaintance with Jex-Blake, such as Reade had, would be enough to convince one that she lacked conventional femininity. Probably, latent prejudice against the possible sexual implications of “unfeminine” behavior underlies the unease of Reade’s portrait; however, Jex-Blake’s behavior would not necessarily imply to Reade or to most Victorians in 1877, that she was sexually attracted to women. At the same time, Jex-Blake was, without a doubt, a woman whose closest personal and professional relationships were with other women; she lived in intimate companionship with at least three over the course of her life, and commonly used language such as Rhoda Gale’s to describe her emotional attachments. Reade, who “spent many mornings at [Jex-Blake’s] house” studying her personal chronicle and “asking information about this happening and that,” would have discerned this aspect of her life as he constructed his woman doctor. Whatever Jex-Blake’s sexual orientation, and regardless of what Reade intended, the text does make female homoeroticism central to the character of the woman doctor. Within two decades of the novel’s publication, the physically and emotionally hybridized “types” that Rhoda Gale and Jex-Blake represent would become pathologized by sexologists as congenital “inverts” or “lesbians.” Though Rhoda’s love for Ina Klosking almost surely did not signal a sexual attachment to most of the novel’s initial audience (otherwise, it would not have passed the “Grundyish” Blackwood censors) it did establish the woman doctor as one who loved women more than men and who did not care to marry.26 26. “Lion-hearted” is a phrase Reade applied to her (as Rhoda Gale) in A WomanHater; Garrett Anderson upbraided her for her “want of judgment” and “temper” in a personal letter (Todd, Life, 423). Todd, Life, 75, 104–5, 435. Freud, following the earlier work of sexologists, including Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, and Bloch, describes the female invert succinctly in his 1905 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality: “among [women] the active inverts exhibit masculine characteristics,

102


On a more literal level, Rhoda’s attachment to Ina, as well as to her “lesser” love, Zoë, establishes a protector’s role for the woman doctor. Indeed, if Rhoda ultimately loses in love to the men of the novel, she supersedes them in their traditional role as guardians of women and female honor. Again, Rhoda’s “androgynous” nature is largely responsible for her ability to play this role. It is precisely because she recognizes Zoë’s attractions that she can also perceive Severne’s dishonorable plans and act as his rival to spoil them. At one point, Rhoda has Severne follow her on her rounds to give Lord Uxmoor time to propose marriage to Zoë. Rhoda tells him, “Unless I see Zoë Vizard in danger, you have nothing to fear from me. But I love her, you understand” (357, 358). In a parallel episode, when Severne throws Ina across a room and she lies “senseless, with the blood spurting in jets from her white temple,” only Rhoda’s “keen, but self-possessed” dressing of the wound keeps Ina from bleeding to death (365, 366). The contrast here between Rhoda and the manly Vizard is particularly (and, I think, unintentionally) comic. While the woman-hater sits on the floor and moans helplessly over his beloved’s inert body, Rhoda performs a complicated operation, which the admiring narrator describes in tedious detail (366–67). It is the woman doctor, then, who saves one heroine’s life and the other’s honor. This sort of skillful operation recurs in several other woman doctor fictions. As in A Woman-Hater, such an operation is evidence of “masculine” professional skill that renders the woman doctor sexually ambiguous.27 At the novel’s close, Rhoda remains an “odd” woman—she has not been paired with a man. But her heroic services to Ina and Zoë render her no longer superfluous, for she has supplanted male characters in essential roles they were unable to fill. Nor, we are told, does Rhoda remain entirely socially marginal. The tenants of Barfordshire were at both physical and mental, with peculiar frequency and look for femininity in their sexual objects” (245). 27. Regina Morantz-Sanchez notes that a woman doctor’s ability to perform difficult surgical operations was an increasingly important status marker within the profession at the end of the nineteenth century (Conduct Unbecoming a Woman). Some women doctor fictions are Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Doctor Zay (1882), Sarah Orne Jewett, A Country Doctor (1884), Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Doctors of Hoyland,” Dr. Edith Romney (1883).

Sex and Fair Play

103

first skeptical of this anomalous woman, but now she visits the Taddington infirmary regularly and “[a] few mothers are coming to their senses, and sending for her to their unmarried daughters” (526). Ultimately, however, the novel’s paternalism toward women doctors cannot be denied: Rhoda remains just what Vizard named her—“my virago”— dependent upon the goodwill and beneficence of a powerful man. In this sense, A Woman-Hater unintentionally recreates the position of early women physicians within their profession and their culture. Charles Reade enticed John Blackwood into publishing A WomanHater by promising a story with a doctress, a character “entirely new in fiction, yet . . . of the day” who would “lead to profitable discussion.” Reade’s novel not only contributed to the immediate discussion surrounding women’s admission to medical programs and practice in Britain, it began a literary fad. The woman doctor was a featured character in fiction of the 1880s and 1890s in both Britain and the U.S., after which she retains a distinctive if minor role or stock figure among women characters in fiction. Like much fiction written by and about women in the eighties and nineties, medical-woman fiction has been too easily lumped together as a “curiosity” with a single theme. Or, as Lilian Furst has done, critics treat the “best known” medical-woman novels by canonical American writers as interesting slices of life while deriding their British counterparts as overly melodramatic and romantic. Though Furst provides an instructive overview of “doctresses” in American fiction, she devotes a single paragraph to British “counterparts” of the same period, implying that while their concerns are the same they are inferior in literary quality: “the lengthy narratives have a rather more marked proclivity to the melodramatic than the American examples in their highly involved, at times frankly creaking plots and substantial romance elements.”28 Though I don’t disagree with Furst’s assessments of individual works, I would like to recast her generalizations so as to place the British texts within their own cultural framework without segregating them too strictly from the American novels. The medical-woman movement, as I indicated earlier, was a self-consciously international campaign that 28. Reade quoted in Finkelstein, “A Woman Hater and Women Healers,” 337; Lilian Furst, “Halfway up the Hill: Doctresses in Late Nineteenth-Century American Fiction,” 235.

104


shared rhetorical and narrative strategies across the Atlantic. Contemporary readers and reviewers of medical-woman fiction did not make clear national distinctions among the works but, rather, saw them as participating in a common discussion about the social and professional validity of this particular sort of New Woman. American editions of British texts and British of American were published both quickly and regularly. This meant that, for instance, A Woman-Hater was introduced to American readers in 1877 in the Atlantic Monthly. The editor of the Atlantic, W. D. Howells, and his acquaintance Elizabeth Stuart Phelps would both write their own woman doctor novels in the next few years. In their review essays of medical-woman fiction, both Jex-Blake and Hilda Gregg move easily between British and American novels, as if assuming a transatlantic readership and literary influence.29 It is appropriate, then, to read the British woman doctor novels which followed the publication of A Woman-Hater in relation to those published in America. At the same time, though, the British variety does possess a distinct “flavor” which I would argue is a matter of cultural context rather than of intrinsic literary merit. First, the educational and professional opportunities were greater for women in the U.S. When the London School of Medicine for Women opened its doors in 1874, seven comparable institutions were already operating in the eastern and midwestern U.S. By the time British women were admitted to medical examinations and degrees at the Irish College of Physicians and the Queen’s University of Ireland in 1876 to all degrees at the University of London in 1878, over a hundred women were practicing medicine in the Boston area alone.30 Though American medical professionalization at the end of the century increasingly ostracized women, British medicine was even more organized and centralized, which meant fewer opportunities to “break into” the existing system. And with a less dense and still expanding population, the U.S. simply had more room and greater need of women physicians. Rural and frontier America offered the work space for doctors that British women would have to find out in the empire. That American women doctors were, according to Alison Bashford, “much caricatured” in 29. Review of A Woman-Hater, Atlantic Monthly 40 (1877): 507; Jex-Blake, “Medical Women in Fiction”; Hilda Gregg, “The Medical Woman in Fiction.” 30. Furst, “Halfway,” 223, 224.

Sex and Fair Play

105

England as too radical and strident implies, too, that Americans were simply more advanced in their thinking about women practicing medicine.31 All of these social factors influenced the differences between British and American medical-woman fiction. In keeping with their relatively smoother integration into latenineteenth-century culture, women doctors in American fiction tend to be both professionally and personally stable and fulfilled. The notable exception here is W. D. Howell’s Grace Breen—Dr. Breen’s Practice (1881)—who studies medicine “in the spirit in which other women enter convents, or go out to heathen lands” after an “unhappy love affair” when “she was not yet out of her teens” (11). Grace is “not fit to be a doctor,” being at once “too nervous,” and “too conscientious” (208). She is, a male rival tells her, “like the rest [of ‘advanced’ womanhood],— a thing of hysterical impulses, without conscience or reason!” (225). Grace’s defeat by her male rival and ultimate marriage to a man who does not make her happy allows Howells to psychopathologize and belittle all advanced women. But Dr. Breen is more than adequately countered in American fiction by the noble and lovely female physicians in works by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Sarah Orne Jewett, Annie Nathan Meyer, and Louisa May Alcott.32 And though The Bostonians could hardly be called a feminist novel, James’s Dr. Prance is competent, stable, and successful. In fact, Jex-Blake asserts that with James’s medical woman the reader feels for “almost the first time” in medical-woman fiction that she is “standing face to face with a real person” (267). In contrast to these relatively positive American texts, the tone of British medical-woman fiction tends to be darker and more sensationalistic. British fiction containing women doctors — and even paid nurses—was much more often written by men who, even when supportive of the Cause, highlighted the ambiguities, oddities, or eccentricities of their characters. The British stories show greater concern with the public conflicts surrounding medical women—professional ethics or the struggle of education and passing examinations, for instance—as opposed to the conflicts of “the heart” that dominate the 31. Bashford, “Separatist Health,” 201. 32. William D. Howells, Dr. Breen’s Practice. A Novel; Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Doctor Zay (1882), Sarah Orne Jewett, A Country Doctor (1884), Louisa May Alcott, Jo’s Boys (1886), Annie Nathan Meyer, Helen Brent, M.D. (1891).

106


American texts. The British texts also concern themselves to a much greater degree with problems of sexuality as opposed to those of courtship and romance. For a variety of reasons, women doctors fostered more cultural anxiety in Britain than in the U.S. The British campaign for medical education and registration drew stronger resistance and its figureheads and supporters were proportionately more militant. Just as the sensationalism of the “Battle of Edinburgh” and its heroine, Sophia Jex-Blake, politicized Reade’s novel, A Woman-Hater, with its sexually ambiguous and unconventional heroine, “queered” the subgenre of medical-woman fiction in Britain. Much of the Victorian public derived its formative impressions of women doctors from the representations of Sophia Jex-Blake in the press and in A Woman-Hater. The woman doctor of Victorian culture, therefore, differed significantly from the nurse: she defied traditional gender roles and feminine behavior; she confronted and bested male competitors; she vigorously and tyrannically protected public health and especially the well-being of women; and if she was not unsexed, her sexuality was certainly ambiguous. Representations of women doctors after A Woman-Hater work from and often alter this rather uncomfortable model. Rhoda Gale differs most obviously from most of the fictional women doctors who follow her by lacking beauty: “A tongue and a memory” are all that Rhoda needs. Her younger medical sisters, however, require more traditionally feminine aids. As the Victorian critic Hilda Gregg commented, “in view of the professional antagonism aroused by later [medical] heroines in the breasts of their male acquaintance, it is as well that the strength of their arguments should be reinforced by that of their personal charms.”33 In fact, most medical-woman fiction after A Woman-Hater derives its principal conflict from this tension between professional antagonism and personal charm — or, as I put it earlier, fair play and sex. The woman doctor’s role, in other words, shifts from the “virago” to the romantic heroine. This was perhaps inevitable considering, as Reade put it, the necessity of “sex” to book sales and the difficulty with which Reade integrated Doctress Gale into his romance plot. The romanticization of the woman doctor also fits Nancy Armstrong’s claims that the nineteenth-century novel “turned political information into the 33. Gregg, “The Medical Woman in Fiction,” 97–98.

Sex and Fair Play

107

discourse of sexuality” and with “strategies that distinguished private from social life . . . thus detached sexuality from political history.”34 Women doctors, then, become romantic heroines in fiction because of formal but also ideological imperatives. By subsuming the identity of the woman doctor within her professional role and then reducing that role to conflicts with potential suitors, these texts finally define her by her (defective) sexuality alone, rendering her less threatening professionally. Whereas Reade accommodates the unconventional Rhoda Gale with some difficulty, these later writers show remarkable ingenuity in adapting romance fiction for beautiful women doctors. In fact, many of these plots resemble those surrounding romanticized nurses that have become commonplace in twentieth-century Western culture. The greatest difference is that women doctors are more committed to their profession and therefore relinquish it less willingly than nurses; as opposed to fictional nurses who happily marry and discard their work, the woman doctor must almost always either reject her suitor or have her career forcibly taken away. George Gardiner Alexander’s Dr. Victoria (1881) exemplifies both the tendency to write women doctors as sexually defective and the sensationalism that is more typical of British than American treatments of women doctors. Like Reade’s A Woman-Hater, the novel borrows heavily from the conventions of sensation fiction, especially the effects of degenerate and excessive sexuality upon the innocent. Here, too, the woman doctor figures as the champion of victimized innocents—partly because of her inherent nobility but also because she is absolutely alienated from the normal womanhood of marriage and maternity. The beautiful and noble Victoria becomes an eye specialist in order to restore vision to her young cousin Madge. Madge’s (and, thus, Victoria’s) family is a eugenic nightmare of which she is the innocent victim. Her blindness results from a “curse in the blood,” presumably venereal disease or the more nebulous moral and physical traits that predispose the family to the disease. Madge’s father is described as profligate and dissolute. Having degenerated significantly since his youth, his face is now bloated and covered with boils, again perhaps visible signs of the syphilis pox. Nor is Madge’s maternal line clean. Her mother deteriorates 34. Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, 21, 24.

108


slowly throughout the first two volumes of the novel before she dies. Her disease is never specified, but Madge finds her repulsive to touch and is told by her uncle that the illness is, again, caused by “the curse”: “She has caught it from him [her husband]—the curse. It is in his blood—the curse” (II.188). As his part in this curse, the uncle suffers from dementia and eventually dies by throwing himself in the river. Dr. Victoria acts as the personal savior of this seemingly doomed girl, restoring her sight and eventually adopting her. In this act of charity, however, Victoria is motivated as much by a sense of affinity with Madge as she is by altruism. Though her branch of their family is not as excessively degenerate as Madge’s, it nevertheless causes Victoria to become a doctor. Like Dickens’s Esther Summerson, Victoria was born out of wedlock and compensates for the burden of her illegitimacy by good works and self-denial. Knowing of her illegitimacy, she rejects the marriage proposal of Sir Francis, an eligible and liberal M.P., and instead bestows upon him her look-alike (and legitimate) half-sister, Geraldine. Ironically, besides the question of her parentage, Geraldine is hardly Victoria’s equal and must make herself worthy of Sir Francis by emulating Victoria. In this way, Victoria is typical of woman-doctor figures not only because she saves the victimized Madge but because she serves as a guide to proper womanhood for younger women such as Geraldine. Initially, Sir Francis can’t love Geraldine, despite her Victorian beauty, because of her “mannish” and immodest manners: she smokes with men and loves hunting too enthusiastically. After several failed attempts to blatantly imitate Victoria, though, she finally gets it right and is awarded her place at his side. The stain of her birth, her mother’s untempered sexuality, ruins the possibility of conventional womanhood for Victoria. But that same stain also allows her to become a successful woman doctor. The text thus unites the fallen woman and the woman doctor by their irregular sexuality. Finally, by restoring her cousin’s sight, Victoria makes amends for the “taint” within her family, and, like Rhoda Gale, establishes herself as a defender of women against the dangers of unbridled sexuality. Like Reade, Alexander is something of a champion of the medical-woman movement: he acknowledges the prejudices against women doctors, but paints an optimistic picture of their ultimate acceptance once the public—especially women and young girls—realize the advantages of engaging a competent woman doctor.

Sex and Fair Play

109

Less optimistic and far less serious on this issue of women doctors was Wilkie Collins, whose short story, “Fie! Fie! the Fair Physician” (1882), associates women doctors and deviant sexuality not through melodrama or romance but burlesque comedy. The central conflict of this story involves a beautiful woman doctor named Sophia Pillico who, contrary to popular and medical expectations, is not in the least “unsexed.” The lady doctor uses her charms to make regular patients of otherwise healthy men, and finally attempts to steal the fiancé of an innocent young woman named Salomé by telling him that he is not healthy enough to marry. Ideologically, “Fie! Fie!” moves in contrary directions. It reverses the stock literary convention of handsome male doctors who drum up business by flirting with—or otherwise “addicting”—their female patients; and Salomé’s name, if nothing else, hints at the text’s playfulness. Yet the story makes another point that was taken very seriously by opponents and supporters of medical women alike: women doctors must not practice on male patients. Though they privately recognized its hypocrisy, early women doctors publicly supported this marginalized professional role. In part, they did so to avoid conflict with jealous male medics and the public cries of “indecency.” But women doctors also understood that their acceptance within Victorian culture depended upon arguments for same-sex medical care for women; they could not undercut their position by suggesting that a physician’s sex did not matter. For this reason, even the most radically supportive statements for women doctors rarely suggested that they might practice on men. An exception is Doctor Zay (1882), written by the American feminist Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. Doctor Zay was an important novel for establishing how the woman doctor could be portrayed as both heroic and womanly—for how, in other words, she might be accommodated by fictional Realism and what would eventually be called the New Woman Novel. It was also read as a rebuttal to Howells’s Dr. Breen’s Practice.35 In Phelps’s novel, Dr. Zaidee Atalanta Lloyd nurses/doctors Waldo Yorke back to life after the Bostonian lawyer drives into a river in the backwoods of Maine. In some senses, Zay is quite a conventional heroine of romance: beautiful, graceful and, above all, “womanly,” she works from a sense of mission rather than ambition, channeling all 35. Jex-Blake, “Medical Women in Fiction,” 266.

110


her energies into the cause of doctoring poor women who need her. Yet, from the beginning of the novel, the gender roles of Zay and Yorke are reversed. Zay has an active and successful medical practice that takes her out at all hours; she is strong, independent, and competent. In contrast, Yorke lies on his invalid couch, dependent upon Zay for his well-being and awaiting her return. He spends much of his time speculating about her, allowing himself to fall in love with her, and so disturbing his “nerves.” The introspective Yorke is quite aware that his illness and his doctor have “unmanned” him: “I shall make rather a superior woman by the time I get well,” he tells Zay (134). While he is in this “feminine” state, Zay feels no danger from him. But as he regains strength and health, she distances herself from him. As a physician, cognizant of Victorian theories of sexuality, she would have understood all too well that a real man would always conquer a woman and that, therefore, her heart and profession are in jeopardy. And, of course, Yorke does win her. Though she puts him off twice, his manly perseverance is finally stronger than her power to resist him. When her feminine nature predictably, inevitably, exhausts itself from overwork, Yorke is there to pick up the pieces. What is not predictable, however, is that Yorke’s experience as a feminized invalid has transformed his masculinity. For instance, he insists that she continue her work: “It would make another woman of you. I want you just as you are” (246). When, in the midst of giving in to him, Zay criticizes Yorke’s driving and pulls the reins from him, he replies easily, “I don’t care who has the reins . . . as long as I have the driver!” (257). In this way, the New Womanly doctress not only cures but recreates her male patient. Under Zay’s medical and moral guidance, Yorke emerges as a New Man sympathetic to feminist causes. Phelps hangs her romance upon the story of Atalanta (Dr. Zay’s middle name), who escapes marriage by outrunning her suitors, until she is finally tricked into slowing down by Hippomenes, who rolls three golden apples in her way. Dr. Edith Romney (1883), which provides an instructive British counterexample to the more optimistic Doctor Zay, also uses Greek myth to frame the woman doctor’s romance. In this case, however, it is the Trojan War battle in which Achilles “tackled” Penthesilea, “that famous Amazon,” and “slew her” (II.227, 229). Whereas Atalanta’s conquering leads to marriage, Penthesilea’s brings death and tragic love, for after Achilles “had given the mortal blow he took off

Sex and Fair Play

111

her helmet and saw her face. . . . He fell in love — and so did she” (II.229). As this myth foretells, the battle between sex and fair play turns out rather differently for the English Dr. Romney than it did for the American Dr. Zay. Edith is set upon by the young and handsome Dr. Fane who first destroys her practice through slander and then falls in love with her. After she has succumbed to and recovered from brainfever — brought on by Fane’s destruction of her practice and good name—Edith, unbelievably, agrees to marry her rival. At the end of the novel, her professional status as well as her happiness are uncertain. In that the main action of the novel depends upon a professional man first falling in love with and then winning a woman doctor, Edith Romney strongly resembles Doctor Zay. And the heroines themselves are remarkably similar: disarmingly beautiful and noble, each brings a keen intelligence and a strong yet “womanly” nature to her profession.36 But, as I suggested above, the British version of this New Woman/New Man medical romance is much more social in orientation and less progressive politically. Doctor Zay is set in rural Maine, isolating Yorke and Zay from the influences of public opinion and allowing their romance to run its natural course. In contrast, Dr. Edith Romney has a huge cast of characters who populate the bustling and gossip-driven midlands town of Wanningster. Whereas Dr. Zay succeeds professionally because of her superior skill as a doctor, we’re told that Edith Romney displaces the old-fashioned Dr. Fullagher in Wanningster simply because the town chases after “every new fashion—women’s rights, aestheticism, cookery and ambulance classes” (I.12). Fullagher recruits the young and handsome Austin Fane to avenge the loss of his practice, which the new doctor manages to do within six months. In keeping with the greater concern of British fiction for the public ramifications of women doctors, professional etiquette and loyalty are important themes in the novel. The public’s taste for “fashion” over solid medical care encourages doctors to pander to patients’ whims. In this way, blame for Fane’s destruction of Edith’s practice is shifted onto a fickle and ignorant public and then, even more pointedly, upon the working classes who remain immovably biased against women doctors. 36. This ideal of the womanly woman doctor, so unlike the popular image of Sophia Jex-Blake, is essentially that of Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, the Anglo-American pioneer who argued that “womanliness” was essential to the medical-woman cause.

112


The cruel vengeance of the male doctors is displaced by the slanderous accusation of poisoning that an alcoholic, wife-beating grocer makes against Edith. These questions of professional etiquette and honor are woven into several parallel subplots that concern couples negotiating courtships and marriages, all of which contribute to the reduction of the professional plot to one of romance. For instance, before he falls in love with Edith, Fane engages himself to a young heiress named Violet. Whether he should break the engagement to marry Edith becomes a major moral dilemma at the end of the novel. At the same time, once Fane loves Edith—indeed, once he sees her—his professional concerns are set aside and he becomes her chivalrous defender. Edith’s friend, Miss Jacques, informs her of her triumph over Fane’s heart: “I want you to know that the man we thought your enemy, who derided you in the lump with strong-minded fanatics before he saw you, has made complete atonement. . . . [H]e loves you, in short. Why, my dear Edith, do you suppose his behaviour is to be set down to benevolent compassion? Do you suppose if you were plain and insignificant he would have taken your part so warmly? Never!” (III.141). In other words, Fane has not changed his mind about women doctors nor is he sorry for his unprofessional behavior toward a colleague. Edith has “triumphed” by her beauty, though she has not won a husband who will respect her choice of profession. When Edith tries to explain that they should not marry because her work as a physician “is part of me,” Fane misunderstands her meaning: “I have never been influenced by your profession,” he tells her, “I cannot say I have altered my former opinions . . . and sometimes I have blamed your calling as the cause of all the misery it has brought upon me . . . [but] I don’t regard it as a part of you” (III.234–35). The multiple marriage plots that parallel the central “medical” one underscore the degree to which this novel is “about” fair play in relations between the sexes. In every case in the novel, marriage brings both men and women into line with conventional gender roles. Perhaps the novel’s most interesting character, for instance, is the “aesthetic” Mona Milward. Outspoken, angular, and modish before her marriage, she fills out to a matchmaking “lady” with lapdogs and brightly colored dresses once she’s wed, even though her husband is clearly not her equal in spirit or intelligence. Indeed, much like A Woman-Hater, Dr. Edith Romney is full of types of women, all of whom are more or less

Sex and Fair Play

113

domesticated or discredited by the novel’s end. In this way, the novel tests and subdues advanced women with traditional gender roles as well as the facts of their biological natures. Edith Romney—all come to agree—is a paragon of female virtue, intelligence, and industriousness. Her male rivals learn that “she felt a true and honest conviction of her vocation” and that she was “well qualified . . . firm, gentle, sure and capable” in it (II.218, 273). Yet, she literally, physically, cannot bear the strain of “normal” male competition for patients. Her clergyman brother, Hugh, upbraids her for not taking the loss of her practice as a medical man would have: “All this hyper-sensitiveness, this prostration of spirit at your defeat, this unpractical putting off of a decision, prove the unfitness of your sex for the work you undertook” (III.71). Thus, although the novel toys with and, at times, seems to advocate women’s rights to education, employment, and self-determined happiness, its feminism is of a sad, masochistic sort. Oddly, Edith’s illness itself provides her with an awakened feminist consciousness. She hadn’t cared about women’s issues before, largely because she’d been so successful with so little effort. She didn’t share “strong-minded” and “odious” or “grim” views. But, ironically, after she’s been beaten by Fane and has nearly died, she begins to understand the disadvantages that women face: “I see that our lot is a hard one—hard by nature, because we are physically weaker, and trebly hard on account of the burdens and restrictions put upon us by custom” (III.166). She complains that her lot had not been “fair”: she wasn’t allowed to compete as a professional; rather, she had been judged by her sex, ensuring that she would always lose (III.107). Between the vacillation of an ignorant public and the self-justifying animosity of male physicians, the woman doctor has little chance of success. Though the novel repudiates the idea that doctoring is unsexing to women and that all women doctors are necessarily man-hating viragoes, it upholds the belief that woman’s nature would not bear the physical or emotional strain of such a taxing profession for long. Edith learns of her true place in the world only through humiliation and defeat: “[The g]reater part . . . of the world declared women to be unfitted, physically and mentally [to practice medicine]; and Edith, in her new, unusual weakness, almost bowed to the hard sentence. . . . It seemed as if what she had already done had paralysed both brain and energies— surely this also was a sign that she had gone beyond her woman’s

114


strength” (II.284–85). All those around her seem to agree. Dr. Fullagher tells her that the “unnatural wish” to work in the professions is “taking away from us our ideal of womanhood, with all its grace and loveliness, and giving us in its place only a weaker man” (III.163). Even Miss Jacques, staunch supporter of Edith’s work and women’s rights, encourages Edith to marry Fane. Edith can continue to practice medicine— Fullagher has found her a job in an urban children’s hospital—but it would mean the further loss of health, beauty, energy, and mental stability. Marriage to the chastened Fane seems the least self-destructive course open to Edith who, less than a year earlier, had been the model New Woman-independent, noble, strong, and healthy. Reviewing the novel, Sophia Jex-Blake agrees that Edith Romney is ill-fitted “for the ordinary buffets of life” as a physician but implies that this hardly reflects upon the question of actual medical women since “all the conditions pre-supposed [in the novel] are so utterly foreign to those of everyday life and experience, that, if they prevailed at all . . . it must have been upon another planet” (263). Realistic or not, perhaps the most devastating effect of romanticizing the woman doctor was that by making her more “womanly” than Reade’s prototype, Rhoda Gale, writers rendered her liable to collapse under the pressure of medical practice. Besides Edith Romney and Howells’s Grace Breene, for instance, the heroine of Henry Curwen’s Dr. Hermione (1890) possesses feminine “nerves” which cannot stand the strain of medical work. Despite an M.D. from Paris and a commitment to serve the poor of London, Hermione throws over her profession to marry a soldier of little worth. As a contemporary reviewer complained, “Tom has no good points beyond physical courage . . . yet Hermione loses all interest in life for his sake, and finally follows him out to Egypt, where she shows her fitness for her duties by going into hysterics when she sees him wounded.”37 Nurses and women doctors who fall into “hysterics” like this are favorite characters in antifeminist medical literature. By the end of the century “hysteria” had become medical and literary shorthand for the behavior of New Women who aspired to university educations, professional work, and the vote. Hysterics—as opposed to the more conventionally ladylike neuraesthenics—were described by physicians as women more rebellious than “normal” who “expressed 37. Gregg, “The Medical Woman in Fiction,” 104.

Sex and Fair Play

115

‘unnatural’ desires for privacy and independence,” and showed other signs of “moral degeneration.” Writers and critics helped to popularize the equation of “hysterical” with “feminist” and its application to women doctors. Elaine Showalter comments that Victorian and Edwardian physicians “perceived hysterical women as their powerful antagonists”; it is hardly surprising, then, that the medical establishment should reverse this formula and apply its label for female deviance to the upstart women in its own midst.38 Ironically, one of the most tolerant and good-natured portrayals of a Victorian woman doctor came from Arthur Conan Doyle, a trained and qualified physician, in his short story “The Doctors of Hoyland” (1894). Though Dr. Verrinder Smith is no great beauty, she is sufficiently attractive in mind and body to convert a vehement opponent of medical women, Dr. James Ripley, and to make him fall desperately in love with her, even after she has stolen most of his patients through her medical expertise. When Dr. Ripley proposes marital and professional partnership, Dr. Smith declines, responding: “I intend to devote my life entirely to science. There are many women with a capacity for marriage, but few with a taste for biology.” Lilian Furst calls “The Doctors of Hoyland” the “most jovial” example of English woman doctor fiction; indeed, at first glance, it reads as a happy reversal of the competition and romance plots of Dr. Edith Romney.39 In fact, though, this economical story is richer than that: it satirizes nearly every major woman doctor novel — English and American — to date, incorporating not only common themes such as romance and “fair play” between women doctors and skeptical men but quite distinctive plot elements as well. Verrinder Smith, with “plain, palish face” and her “pince-nez” (275) strongly resembles the androgynous Dr. Prance of The Bostonians, “a plain, spare young woman, with short hair and an eye-glass” (31). But whereas James’s description of Mary Prance places her beyond the possibility of romance, Doyle’s use of the androgynous woman doctor as love interest makes for unexpected comedy. If Verrinder Smith’s personal charms are minimal, her professional credentials are “superb”: 38. Showalter, The Female Malady, 145, 134, 133. 39. Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Doctors of Hoyland,” 238; Furst, “A Shocking Discovery! An Introduction to Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Doctors of Hoyland,’” 268.

116


she holds degrees from “Edinburgh, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna” and had been “awarded a gold medal and the Lee Hopkins scholarship for original research” (274). Clinically, she’s innovative, calm, and skillful, performing operations that Dr. Ripley cannot. The gendered traits which ensured that Edith Romney would fail in competition with her male rival are here reversed: “For all his knowledge” Ripley “lacked nerve as an operator, and usually sent his worst cases up to London. The lady, however, had no weakness of the sort, and took everything that came in her way” (278). Finally, like Waldo Yorke in Doctor Zay, this opponent of women doctors finds himself under one’s care after breaking a leg in a carriage accident. Under the daily care and influence of Verrinder Smith for two months, Ripley discovers that “under all her learning and her firmness ran a sweet, womanly nature” (281). His invalidism feminizes Ripley, causing him to romanticize his doctor: “Her short presence during the long, weary day was like a flower in a sand waste. . . . [S]he had become the one woman” with her “dainty skill, her gentle touch, her sweet presence” (281). Quite unexpectedly, however, Dr. Smith does not melt as her predecessors had at the realization that a man loves her. Rather, she asks sarcastically if he proposes to marry her in order to “unite the practices” (since his is now lost) and announces her departure of the Paris Physiological Laboratory (282). After so many examples in which women doctors sacrifice, compromise, or submit to marriage, Conan Doyle’s story is amazingly refreshing. In her introduction to the story, however, Furst rightly asks whether “The Doctors of Hoyland” is really as “wrily comic” as it appears on “the surface” and whether the inversion of its fairytale plot might not “undermine its interest as a reflection of social reality.”40 I would suggest, first, that the story bears very little relation to social reality, nor was that Conan Doyle’s intention. Rather, “Hoyland” is a conscious satire upon the literary conventions of woman doctor fiction which, as Jex-Blake points out, are often quite removed from the “real” lives of Victorian women doctors. Conan Doyle’s satire is meant to emphasize that distance rather than, I think, to make any particular comment upon the value of women doctors or the medical-woman movement. And although the story does seem to sympathize with women doctors— at least in so far as it satirizes their opponents as “prigs and pedants” 40. Furst, “Shocking Discovery!” 271, 272.

Sex and Fair Play

117

who don’t know their own minds (281)—the comedy renders the “real” politics of the movement completely beside the point. However sympathetic, this story does little toward altering the stereotypes of women doctors that had grown up in Victorian culture. Fiction perpetuated the stereotype of the New Woman doctor as unsexed or sexually abnormal long after she had won the rights to education and registered practice and even after the established profession had granted her a grudging acceptance. For instance, Elsa Nettles argues that Sophia Jex-Blake and, more broadly, the woman doctor is Virginia Woolf’s “representative figure” of the professional woman who fights patriarchal oppression (242). For Woolf, as for Jex-Blake, this conflict is one of daughter against father, of the pioneering woman physician against a corrupt male medical establishment (242). Woolf’s one fictional woman doctor, Peggy Pargiter from The Years, has inherited Victorian feminist politics and a social and professional system that remained prejudiced against women professionals as late as the Second World War.41 My discussion of Jex-Blake and Reade’s figuration of her in A Woman-Hater suggests that Peggy has novelistic ancestors as well. Like Rhoda Gale, Peggy is at once exceptional and odd, of central importance to the narrative and yet always occupying the marginal positions in the text. For instance, Peggy is a “brilliant” physician with a keen analytical skill, but this skill forces her to see too clearly the faults of humanity. “Pain must outbalance pleasure by two parts to one . . . in all social relations,” she thinks (354). Medicine provides a professional outlet for Peggy and allows her to excel in ways that her Victorian aunts could not; yet Peggy feels ostracized from her family and the human community. She sees herself as “atrophied; withered; cold as steel” (361). Others mark her as not only marginal but, because of her profession, unsexed. Her Uncle Martin, for instance, assumes that because Peggy is a doctor and unmarried at thirty seven, she is a lesbian: “But you . . . your generation I mean—you miss a great deal . . . [l]oving only your own sex” (356). Just as Charles Reade unwittingly aided adversaries of women doctors by figuring Rhoda Gale as a manly competitor of men and lover of women, later authors who supported the Cause often continued to 41. Elsa Nettles, “ ‘Leaving the Private House’: Women Doctors in Virginia Woolf’s Life and Art,” 251.

118


focus on the woman doctor’s odd physical appearance and aggressive, unwomanly behavior. This lingering, seemingly outdated, obsession with the woman doctor’s lack of femininity is the logical result of the history of her representation in Victorian culture. Both advocates and opponents of women doctors at the height of the battle for medical education in the 1870s defined the woman doctor primarily in terms of her own sexuality and in relation to external sexual threat. While the medical establishment warned that medical knowledge of sex would unsex women, feminists argued that that same knowledge would give women doctors the power to prevent male doctors’ “medical lust of indecently handling women.”42 That women doctors came to be defined by their (deviant) sexuality helps to explain the example from Radclyffe Hall’s 1924 novel with which I began this piece. Colonel Ogden’s animosity toward his daughter’s desire to study medicine, in particular, rather than toward the abstract idea of a professional education for her, implies that medicine was thought worse than other careers open to women. In other words, British culture retained the impression of women doctors as indecent and unsexed long after the social conditions that had produced those characterizations had changed.

42. Josephine Butler, “A Few Words Addressed to True-Hearted Women,” Mar. 18, 1872 (draft), Butler Collection, quoted in Kent, Sex and Suffrage, 122.

d Evolution of the Public Image of the Woman Doctor d


Lady-Physicians. “Who is this interesting invalid? It is young Reginald de Braces, who has succeeded in catching a bad cold, in order that he might send for that rising practitioner, Dr. Arabella Bolus!” Punch, 1865

119

120

Evolution of the Public Image of the Woman Doctor


Our Pretty Doctor. Dr. Arabella “Well, my good friends, what can I do for you?” Bill “Well, Miss, it’s all along o’ me and my mates bein’ out o’ work, yer see, and wantin’ to turn an honest penny hanyways we can; so ’avin ’eard tell as you was a risin’ young medical practitioner, we thought as p’raps you wouldn’t mind just a recommendin’ of hus as nurses.” Punch, 1870


121


First Lady Doctor “He is sleeping now, and is certainly recovering. He proposed to me this morning.” Second Lady Doctor “Indeed! He was probably delirious.” Punch, 1907

122



Eminent Woman Surgeon, who is also an ardent Suffragist (to wounded Guardsman) “Do you know, your face is singularly familiar to me. I’ve been trying to remember where we’ve met before.” Guardsman “Well, Mum, bygones be bygones. I was a police constable.” Punch, 1915

Chapter Four

6d8 The New Woman Doctor Novel

Though women doctors had responded in print to their critics from the beginning of the medical-woman movement, by the 1890s the women’s medical schools of London and Edinburgh had produced two graduates who contributed to the Cause by writing novels. Margaret Todd’s Mona Maclean, Medical Student (1892) and Arabella Kenealy’s Dr. Janet of Harley Street (1893) acted as correctives to the male-authored medical fiction of the period and attempted to redefine the limited, sexist stereotypes of the woman doctor in Victorian culture. Mona Maclean, in particular, received positive reviews in the press, but both novels were assailed with the same charge of “hysteria” that was ascribed to other women doctors of Victorian fact and fiction. Of Dr. Janet of Harley Street a reviewer for the Dial remarked: “Everything about it is, of course, in the highest degree absurd, while a hysterical method and . . . much dismally irrelevant matter deprive the book of its last hope of arousing the interest.” Mona Maclean, “the pet aversion in literature of the male medical student,” was denounced in a debate over medical women as “‘the hysterical work of a sentimental female.’ In other words, these reviewers used against Todd and Kenealy “the hysterical cultural script” that “dictates . . . the necessity of silencing

123

124


women’s speech when it threatens the father’s power.”1 The presumed hysteria of the authors, it was charged, had infected the texts. Such charges of hysterical method distinguish Dr. Janet and Mona Maclean from the principally male-authored medical-woman fiction discussed earlier. For while the texts of Charles Reade, W. D. Howells, and Henry Curwen represented a figure culturally defined as “hysterical,” the texts themselves were not considered “ill.” That the authors of Dr. Janet and Mona Maclean were known or supposed to be women doctors no doubt influenced critics’ responses to the texts. But these critical charges of hysteria also mark the two novels as New Woman fiction, which was consistently defined by late-Victorian critics as hysterical or erotomaniacal.2 Interestingly, Arabella Kenealy and Margaret Todd would have been unlikely to dispute the hysterical tendencies of intellectual young women of their period, even if they did object to the charge being leveled at their novels. As physicians trained especially to treat women, Kenealy and Todd would have been well-versed in medical theories that linked intellectual activity in women to ill-health, sickly offspring, and hysteria. Indeed, their writings display prominently many a “neurotic specimen” of the New (young) Woman. But, like other New Woman writers such as Sarah Grand and George Egerton, who also present such female characters, Kenealy and Todd subvert and redefine male scientific readings of the hysteric. As Lyn Pykett notes, these New Woman writers prefigure contemporary theorists such as Cixous and Irigaray in seeking “to appropriate the culturally ascribed role of hysteric and to use it actively, rather than merely to bear it as the mark of the wounded victim.” I would argue that because they speak from positions within established medicine, Kenealy and Todd possess spe1. Review of Dr. Janet of Harley Street, Dial (Nov. 1, 1894): 266; Gregg, “The Medical Woman in Fiction,” 108; Christine Froula, “The Daughter’s Seduction: Sexual Violence and Literary History,” 621. 2. However, contemporary literary critics such as Lyn Pykett would argue that more popular genres such as sensation fiction were thought feminine even when written by men (The Improper Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing, 31). It would be difficult to consider Conan Doyle a writer of feminine texts, but Reade might be a border case. Pykett, The Improper Feminine, 142; Ardis, New Women, New Novels, 84.

The New Woman Doctor Novel

125

cial cultural authority to speak of and for the New Woman and her condition.3 In contrast to the pioneering women doctors who devoted all of their energies to medicine, Todd and Kenealy, as second-generation doctors, pursued medical study principally because it represented the most challenging and prestigious option for educated women of their day. Both women had artistic ambitions before they studied medicine and continued to publish non-medical New Woman fiction after earning M.D. degrees. Mona Maclean and Dr. Janet, therefore, are more properly viewed as a particular sort of New Woman fiction than merely polemics or the literary by-products of two women doctors. The difference between “woman doctor novels” such as A WomanHater and Dr. Hermione and “New Woman doctor novels” such as those by Todd and Kenealy is that whereas the former seek to fit the irregular woman doctor into existing social and gender roles, the latter actively question the roles themselves. Like other New Woman fiction, they critique “prevailing forms of femininity” and marriage “by way of editorial analysis and alternative plots.” More particularly, they assert “truthclaims” about human and female sexuality that “delineated an expertise.” In much New Woman fiction, the novelist pits this expertise against that of physicians ands sexologists, guardians of a scientifically legitimized patriarchy. For instance, although fin de siècle medicine is integral to the lives of Sarah Grand’s New Woman heroines in both The Heavenly Twins and The Beth Book, the male doctor serves at best an ambivalent role in both novels. If, as in The Heavenly Twins, he is “sympathetic” to advanced womanhood, he also fails to help her live happily. In The Beth Book, the heroine’s physician-husband works in a lock hospital enforcing the Contagious Diseases Acts with their “whole horrible apparatus for the special degradation of women” (398). The same issues of medicine’s relation to sex and professional ethics (or, “fair play”) that figure in most medical woman fiction are cast in a particularly sinister light in Grand’s novel: “Medical etiquette would not stop where it does, at the degradation of those unfortunate women, if you were honestly attempting to put a stop to that disease,” Beth exclaims to her husband, “It is not contrary to etiquette to break your peculiar 3. Margaret Todd, “After Many Days,” 5; Pykett, The Improper Feminine, 169.

126


professional secrecy in the case of a woman, but it would be in the case of a man; so you punish the women, and let the men go free to spread the evil from generation to another as they like” (442–43).4 Medical-woman fiction has the potential to address such issues with equal power, to protest male sexual abuses with medical authority. However, woman doctor novels such as Edith Romney or even Phelps’s feminist Doctor Zay surrender this authority when they reduce questions of medical ethics to those of personal romance. In contrast, the more activist New Woman doctor novels such as Todd’s, Kenealy’s, and those by Americans Sarah Orne Jewett and Annie Nathan Meyer foreground debates about gender and sexuality in self-consciously political ways. Moreover, Todd and Kenealy not only carry the New Woman novelist’s authority of female experience and artistic vision but, as early women physicians, would have been assumed medical experts of female sexuality as well. Writing from within organized medicine, both Todd and Kenealy construct novels that demonstrate how women might use medicine in their own interests to redefine traditional attitudes toward education, marriage, and motherhood.5 The second half of my argument in this chapter, then, is that these two novels are more than mere responses to hostile or patronizing representations of women doctors in other medical-woman fiction. Rather, Dr. Janet and Mona Maclean represent interesting examples of the New Woman fiction of the late eighties and nineties and are thus part of the long and rich tradition of nineteenth-century women’s literature. By devoting an entire chapter to these two writer-physicians, I intend not only to distinguish their work from the medical-woman fiction of 4. Teresa Mangum, Married, Middlebrow, and Militant: Sarah Grand and the New Woman, 2; Ardis, New Women, New Novels, 37; Mangum, Married, Middlebrow, and Militant, 123. Mangum asserts that by substituting the word etiquette for ethics in this passage, Grand “weakens the usual claim of medical ‘ethics’” and “suggests that the medical community’s method is social practice rather than scientific necessity” (Married, Middlebrow, and Militant, 170). 5. Sarah Orne Jewett, A Country Doctor; Annie Nathan Meyer, Helen Brent, M.D. Jewett’s Nan Prince is an unconventional young woman who chooses to remain unmarried and practice medicine. Helen Brent is one of the strongest and most ideal of the New Woman doctors in fiction. Alison Bashford writes, “Ovariotomies were a fast route to mainstream medical and public acceptance” for early women doctors (“Separatist Health,” 203). See also Morantz-Sanchez, Conduct Unbecoming a Woman.


127

chapter three, but to place them within the broader context of New Woman writers. A principal goal of recent scholarship on New Woman writers has been to correct the tendency of critics to simplify their aesthetic accomplishments and political agendas in order to dismiss them. Recent criticism by Ardis, Sally Ledger and others demonstrates the ideological, thematic, and formal diversity of writing by and about the New Woman.6 In this same spirit, one reason that I focus on novels by Todd and Kenealy is to show how surprisingly different they are. Though written from the “inside” by “New Women” of the same generation and with roughly the same education and social background, Mona Maclean and Dr. Janet are quite distinct both formally and ideologically. Moreover, each represents a significant departure from the fiction that I discussed in chapter three, which fell easily into seemingly predetermined patterns and categories—sex and fair play, marriage or career. Mona Maclean and Dr. Janet of Harley Street possess original, distinctive plots that restructure those earlier debates about women, medicine, and marriage while demonstrating the impossibility of treating New Woman fiction or the history of fin de siècle feminists as monolithic categories.

Mona Maclean, Medical Student Most Victorian as well as twentieth-century critics have traced the phenomenon of the New Woman in literature to Olive Schreiner’s Lyndall in The Story of an African Farm (1883). In this semi-autobiographical work, Schreiner causes her heroine to voice her own early ambition to become a professional woman: “‘When we ask to be doctors, lawyers, law-makers, anything but ill-paid drudges, they say,—No; but you have men’s chivalrous attention; now, think of that and be satisfied! What 6. Ardis describes how Elaine Showalter and other feminists of the late 1970s lumped together New Woman writers as minor writers who “had only one story to tell, and exhausted themselves in telling it” (New Women, New Novels, 6). Ardis explains that these critics in fact reinscribed earlier Victorian diatribes against New Woman writing, which became more violent in proportion to the radicalism of the texts. Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and feminism at the fin de siècle; Sally Mitchell, The New Girl; Patricia Murphy, Time Is of the Essence: Temporality, Gender, and the New Woman.

128


would you do without it?’” (190). Limited to a life in an underdeveloped colony, Lyndall, for all of her genius and ambition, would not have had the opportunity to study Western medicine. Schreiner, herself, did not fare much better in accomplishing what she came to recognize as an “old daydream.” Her attempt to study medicine after she arrived in England in 1881 was spoiled by her lack of money and sketchy education.7 Despite its author’s ambition, then, The Story of an African Farm is not a “New Woman doctor novel.” However, I raise it here not only because it is among the first and most influential New Woman novels, but because Lyndall is a prototype for the New Woman doctors Mona Maclean and Dr. Janet who answer her rhetorical question, “What would women do without male chivalry?” More specifically, Lyndall’s struggle to reconcile her femaleness with her intellectual and worldly ambitions is fundamental to Victorian women doctors in both fiction and “fact.” Whereas the male writers of chapter three assumed that femaleness and ambition could not be properly or comfortably reconciled, women writers—who, whether doctors or not, felt this tension in their own lives and careers —understood this reconciliation as necessary to healthy, balanced lives. Margaret Todd, born only four years after Olive Schreiner into a Glasgow family with military and mercantile ties to India, had a surprising amount in common with her fellow New Woman writer. Both women experienced and wrote about childhoods repressed by puritanical religion that they later rebelled against. Both were intensely intellectual and desired a “man’s” education and career. Both were also intensely aware of themselves as unconventional women, which caused them mental and physical suffering. Schreiner did not become a doctor or the productive writer she could have been, but she found a degree of happiness as a prominent figure in South African politics before dying in her sleep in 1920. Margaret Todd, with her university education and 7. First and Scott, Olive Schreiner, 114. Any organized nursing in the colony was at that period affiliated with religious orders and unpaid. Medical education was expensive for all students and required a preliminary examination in Latin, algebra, geometry, physics and chemistry (113). As Jex-Blake’s and Garret Anderson’s stories attest, becoming a doctor required of women no less education and rather more money than it did of men. For these reasons, the first British women doctors generally came from well-off clerical and professional families — a fact that shaped the attitudes and contributions they brought to the profession.


129

wealthy family, earned an M.D. degree in 1894, and published several novels and a biography of her mentor and intimate companion, Sophia Jex-Blake. In the 1890s Schreiner had argued with the sexologists, Havelock Ellis and Karl Pearson, who prescribed for women a passionlessness that she did not feel. Todd, whose most intimate relationships were with women, and who lived with Jex-Blake for nearly twenty-five years, must also have wrestled with the dictates of the sexologists— her medical colleagues—before taking her own life in 1918. Only with great difficulty could the reader of Todd’s first novel anticipate the author’s death or even the dark turn of her later fiction. The very title of Mona Maclean, Medical Student, with its lilting alliteration, reveals the novel’s essentially optimistic treatment of the New Woman: “Do you remember Prof. [Edward] Caird’s remark,” Todd wrote to her publisher in 1895, “that I showed ‘too great a tendency in “Mona Maclean” to make things end pleasantly for everybody’?” Besides its upbeat tone and happy-marriage-plot ending, Mona Maclean differs from much New Woman fiction, including Todd’s later work, by retaining a traditional omniscient narration and realist form. Yet Mona Maclean’s cheerful tone and triumphant plot are part of what makes it so intriguing. For a novel to assert in 1892 that a woman might find personal happiness and professional fulfillment without compromising herself or her ideals is in itself a radical—if overly sanguine—proposition. In contrast to Todd’s comic stance, one might consider Hardy’s “tragic view of sexuality” which “reproduce[s] in form and content the conservative sexual ideologies against which they seem to rebel.” Mona Maclean, unfallen and happily married at the end of her story, surmounts obstacles that crush Tess Darbeyville and Sue Bridehead.8 Mona Maclean, Medical Student, provides several examples of ambitious young women who succeed where Schreiner’s Lyndall failed. 8. Letter from Margaret Todd to Blackwood, Feb. 7, 1895; manuscript letter in The National Library of Scotland’s The Blackwood Collection. Though Ann Ardis remarks that a revolt “against the paternalistic authority of an omniscient narrator is not something that every New Woman novelist will be willing to endorse” (New Women, New Novels, 68), narrative and formal innovations are typical traits of New Woman fiction. Lyn Pykett discusses the narrative experimentation of writers such as George Egerton and Sarah Grand (The Improper Feminine, 195). Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm is an even earlier example of a text whose innovative form can be linked to its feminist ideology. Joseph Boone, Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism, 129, 130.

130


Although it is a very different sort of New Woman novel from Schreiner’s, Mona Maclean is nevertheless a marked success aesthetically as well as ideologically. As critics of her own day noted, Mona Maclean sparkles with intelligence and wit; Todd’s characters are complex and well developed. And though the story is in many ways predictable, its innovations upon the Victorian marriage plot are significant without seeming forced or strident. As this description suggests, Mona Maclean is an unabashed example of Victorian realism. Though twentieth-century critics have often dismissed realism as insufficiently feminist, I would argue along with Sally Ledger and Rita Felski that there is no “automatic correlation between a particular aesthetic (for example modernism) and a specific politics (for example feminism)” and that to valorize a modernist aesthetic at the expense of realism is “counter-productive, in terms of both feminist politics and a feminist critical practice.”9 Certainly for Victorians, Todd’s realism was read as decidedly feminist, though of an unusually “charming” sort. Unlike the critics I cited earlier who accused the novel of hysteria, most reviewers praised Mona Maclean, noting especially its currency and its “cleverness.” The reviewer for the Academy wrote, “It stands forth by itself as one of the freshest and brightest novels of the time,” while the Daily Telegraph called it “distinctly an up-to-date novel . . . clever and charming.” The novel’s heroine was described in similar terms—she is both a “strongly marked modern type” (Blake and White) and, according to Punch, “a bright, fearless, clever girl . . . refreshing to all admitted to her company.”10 Though early reviewers did see Mona as “somewhat unduly perfect,” Todd was praised for her skill as well as her charm.11 Most significant in establishing Mona as a “realistic” view of female medical students and doctors was “Medical Women in Fiction,” an essay by Sophia JexBlake which appeared in the Nineteenth Century shortly after Mona’s publication. Because, as she rightly notes, fictional representations were “likely to influence [public] judgment or action” on the question of medical women, Jex-Blake reviews a “half-dozen romances of the last 9. Ledger, The New Woman, 193. 10. William Wallace, “New Novels,” Academy 42 (Dec. 22, 1892): 504. The reviews of Todd’s novel that I quote here are all from the “Press Opinions” advertising it in her short story collection, Fellow Travellers (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood and Sons, 1896) 347. 11. Gregg, “The Medical Woman in Fiction,” 109.


131

twenty years” that “dealt more or less seriously with the genus medical woman.” Though Jex-Blake purports not to consider the literary value of the works in question, that she calls most of them romances signals her realist aesthetic as well as her feminist politics. Jex-Blake judges their “preliminary study of facts” and the degree to which the medical woman characters seem a “real person, whom we might have met in the street any day.” The very best medical-woman novels, she asserts, are those “manifestly written from the inside.”12 With such criteria, it is hardly surprising that Jex-Blake singles out Todd’s novel — the only one at that time written by a woman doctor—as the best of the lot. “[N]o doctor of either sex,” says Jex-Blake, “can read the conversations relating to medical education . . . without feeling sure that the pen is held by a brother, or sister, of the healing art, and one who loves his or her profession” (269). At the same time, she finds “plenty in the book to interest those who care nothing about medical women” (269). Todd’s skill at painting character “reminds one of George Eliot,” and the novel as a whole “has all the charm and freshness of reality. . . the sparkling wit and wisdom” to make it “delightful” (269, 270–71). Jex-Blake’s high praise becomes less surprising, if no less accurate, when we realize what is not mentioned in the article—that Todd was Jex-Blake’s student and companion and that Jex-Blake had even negotiated the publication of Mona Maclean with Blackwood. By 1892, Margaret Todd had been studying medicine at the Edinburgh Medical School for Women and living with its founder, Jex-Blake, for four years. Although very much Todd’s own work, Mona Maclean shows the influence of Jex-Blake on her student’s ideas about women and medicine. The novel is also a conscious response to the characterization of Jex-Blake and “the” woman doctor in A Woman-Hater. Like Rhoda Gale, Mona Maclean is in many ways obviously modeled upon Jex-Blake, but Mona—at times an autobiographical character—is also a woman of Todd’s own younger, softer generation. Having earned the right to study and practice medicine, the goal now becomes public and professional acceptance and the right to lead otherwise fulfilling lives—to enjoy art and the theater, to travel, to fall in love. In this way, Mona Maclean renders the woman doctor with a “roundness”—a realism— that was, of course, idealized, but that was also necessary for persuading 12. Sophia Jex-Blake, “Medical Women in Fiction,” 261–72, 261, 267, 268.

132


the reading public of the value as well as the need of women doctors in the present. Finally, in keeping with the heroines of other New Woman novels, Mona is an ideal, utopian character, a hopeful figuration of the modern woman doctor and the modern woman. The overt sexual politics of Mona Maclean are egalitarian and heterosexual: the admirable men of the novel all come to support women doctors wholeheartedly, and the romantic heroes prefer wives who act as their social and professional partners. The women of the novel assume more varied positions on questions of marriage and work: some combine the two, some choose work over their suitors, still others eschew the company of men altogether. Such a variety of female attitudes is an important subversive element of New Woman fiction: the “diversity of ideas about sexuality promulgated” in New Woman novels, argues Ardis, demonstrates that “these writers are producing or constructing a sexuality” rather than representing an established one. In this sense, Todd’s New Woman doctor novel mirrors the efforts of women doctors such as Blackwell and Jex-Blake to wrest the power to define female sexuality away from men. The most radical New Woman novels are those that subvert the “heterosexual orientation” of the marriage plot by placing women’s friendships at their emotional centers. Novels that, regardless of their heterosexual marriages, present women “supporting other women’s ‘monstrous’ ambitions” and bonding more intensely with other women than with men, “lie somewhere along what Adrienne Rich terms ‘the lesbian continuum.’”13 Despite its apparently cheerful heterosexuality, Mona Maclean —with its portrayals of life-long female friendships and the supportive atmosphere of the women’s medical school—is just this sort of novel. And, in fact, if one allows a certain amount of biographical criticism into the reading of the novel, Mona Maclean becomes a work of lesbian fiction, camouflaged very much in the manner of, for instance, Willa Cather’s My Antonia. Finally however, Mona Maclean stands out among New Woman novels because of the educational and professional successes of its women doctors. It advocacy of full equality for women within the medical profession and, indeed, its assertion of the superiority of women such as Mona over the average male doctor, are its most radical statements. As a medical woman novel it treats the same sexual and profes13. Ardis, New Women, New Novels, 85, 135, 138.


133

sional questions as does the fiction discussed in chapter three; sex and fair play are handled here in a distinctly feminist manner, however. As its title implies, Mona Maclean, Medical Student is a novel of education, a fact that accounts for its “round,” evolving characters. The reader first encounters Mona after she has failed her Intermediate Examination for the second time—much to the dismay of all her acquaintances who consider her among the brightest students at the London School of Medicine for Women. At first, we are led to believe that the cause of Mona’s failure is her love of “frivolling”—going to the theater, rowing on the Thames, and window-shopping. But as Mona’s character unfolds over the course of the novel, a rather different explanation emerges. As her studious classmate, Miss Lascelles, diagnoses the case, Mona perceives very quickly where to hammer in the “nails” of a subject but “she fits in a great many more than there is any necessity for, [and] she does not drive them home,” (III.92). This statement describes more than Mona’s attitude toward her examinations; late in the novel she realizes that her medical studies had lacked the conviction needed to “drive them home” because she cared more for studying medicine than becoming a doctor. In other words, Mona must discover a humanitarian—or in this case, a feminist—“cause” toward which to apply her great intellect and ambition. At the same time, Mona also discovers romantic love and familial responsibility, both of which teach her about human sympathy and compromise. In a moment of depression over being “ploughed” in her exam, Mona—who is an orphan with £300 a year—agrees to keep shop for her poor cousin, Rachel, in a tiny Scottish village for six months. Out of deference for her cousin Rachel’s conservatism and pride, Mona promises to tell no one in Borrowness that she is either well-off or a medical student. Though she could have introductions to the best houses of the county, she determines to make Rachel’s friends her own and to make the best of working in the shop. Mona’s “masquerade” provides the romantic conflict of the novel, for Mona cannot reveal herself to Dr. Ralph Dudley, who is disconcerted about falling in love with a shop girl. Readers and theater-goers of the 1890s would have recognized Mona’s masquerade as the standard fare of musical comedy. In popular comedies such as The Shop Girl and Our Miss Gibbs, the shop girl is a romantic heroine and “skilled consumer” who “usually changes places

134


with an upper-class shopper” and who captures the hearts of upperclass men. However, the “radical potential of social inversion” in such a plot is undermined when the shop girl is revealed to be upper or middle class by birth. In Todd’s novel, this plot device serves several functions. As its relation to musical comedy would imply, it promises (and delivers) the pleasures of romance complicated by social obstacles. On a more serious level, Mona’s move from West End shopper to provincial shop girl is essential to her development as a character. The sort of “frivolling” that Mona enjoys at the beginning of the novel identifies her as a bourgeois woman of wealth, a public “pleasure seeker, defined by her longing for goods, sights, and public life.”14 At the same time, one of the greatest obstacles that professional and independent women faced negotiating urban spaces in their work was their association with “other” streetwalkers. To become a respectable and effective professional woman, Mona must learn a more critical response to the economic and sexual politics of public space and a more sympathetic response to the other women who live and work there. Ironically, working as a shop girl is at once a penance for frivolling and a reaffirmation of Mona’s moral fitness to minister to the needs of other women—a fitness that had been called into question by her desire to become a woman doctor, that unwomanly, unsexed, and déclassé professional. For, when Victorian women unsexed themselves through unladylike behavior, they lost “both gender and class status.”15 It is in this capacity as shop girl that Mona first recognizes her calling to guide and advise younger, less experienced women. When a pretty scullery maid comes in to buy a new hat, Mona suggests—against local custom and the girl’s own inclinations—a well-made but simple and unadorned cap: “A common servant buys cheap satins, and flowers and laces that look shabby in a week,” Mona explains, “A really first-class maid . . . gets a few good simple things, that wear a long time, and she looks — well — a great deal more like a lady than the other does!” (I.170). Mona wins her point, and within days, the mothers of the 14. Erika Diane Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End, 198, 194, 5. 15. Besides Rappaport, see Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City; Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London; Ardis, New Women, New Novels, 26.


135

female servants of the town are sending their daughters to Mona for advice. On one hand, this episode—which typifies Mona’s experience at Borrowness—demonstrates just how blatantly class-biased Mona and her narrator are. As in the musical comedies of the day, any potential cross-class identification that Mona experiences is undercut by the text’s insistence that she is essentially different from actual shop girls and from her working-class patients. Mona plays at crossing class boundaries, it seems, in order to underscore her own respectability and taste. But it is also neatly foreshadows Mona’s professional feminism and reflects accurately a prominent argument behind the medical woman movement. Upper- and middle-class employers controlled their servants’ dress and appearance for many reasons, but middle-class reformers such as Todd or Elizabeth Gaskell censured visual display among workingclass women as a form of protection as well.16 When Mona and the scullery maid debate whether to purchase a “neat bonnet” or a hat covered with worn ostrich feathers and paper roses, they are really discussing questions that late-Victorian women of all classes faced: how they would be perceived and treated, especially by men, as they walked down the street. Women encountered contradictions in the new freedom of late-Victorian consumer culture: though the buying, selling, and window-shopping now open to them may have “served as a vehicle of individualistic expression, expanding the female imagination . . . ,” it also rendered them “suspect” and subjected them to “the intrusive gaze” of men and to sexual harassment.17 As an independent woman, a medical student, and a West End shopper, Mona would have been more sensitive to the sexual connotations and dangers of public display than would a young girl in a provincial village. Simple bonnets, she knew, were not only more economical but also safer than showy hats. This point and the connection between Mona’s shop-keeping and her doctoring are underscored by an incident involving another local servant-girl who dislikes Mona’s ascetic taste in dress and who later becomes pregnant by her employer. Far from admonishing the girl, however, Mona acts as nurse to Maggie and her premature baby and 16. I argue this point in “Protection or Restriction? Women and Labor in Mary Barton.” 17. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 48–50.

136


intervenes on their behalf with Maggie’s angry mother. Finally, Mona installs Maggie as a cook’s assistant with her friend Doris who, Mona suspects, “spoils” the young woman and her baby. It is when he sees her compassion and competence as Maggie’s nurse that Dudley puts aside his class bias and acts upon his growing love for Mona. Dudley insists on driving Mona home from Maggie’s home on a stormy night; feeling bold, he puts his arm around her to protect her from the weather. Mona, much to the surprise of both, does not resist: “Dudley’s eye had gauged well the promise of that folded bud,” the narrator comments, “and now, in the sunshine of his touch, on that wild and wintry night, behold a glowing crimson streak!” (III.51). It is no coincidence that Mona first becomes aware of passion after her act of charity; heroines of Victorian fiction quite frequently discover the two together.18 This episode, however, goes far beyond the conventional sickroom romance in which the hero falls in love with the feminine virtues of the nursing woman. Radically revising the custom of Victorian fiction by which passion produced a flowering of traditional femininity in the heroine, Mona suddenly finds new inspiration in her medical studies after this revelation of human emotion. Not only does she determine to return to medical school with renewed effort, but she breaks her promise to Rachel and ministers to local women who have avoided consulting male doctors about their “female complaints.” After Mona prescribes a helpful tonic to a farm servant, she receives an appeal from a second woman whose situation is more grave. “I’ve niver been able tae bring mysel’ tae speak o’t,” she tells Mona, “an’ noo doot it’s ower late; but they do say ye’re no’ canny, an’ I thocht maybe ye culd help me,” (III.65–66). Mona decides quickly that not only is the woman’s condition beyond her own limited powers, but beyond any help. She persuades the woman to see a local male doctor by assuring her, “I will tell him all about it, so he won’t have to worry you or ask you questions,” and then comments to herself: “Thank God, I am going back to work! . . . It is awful to be buried alive in the coffin of one’s own ignorance and helplessness” (III.66, 67). 18. Consider, for instance, Jane Eyre assisting Rochester onto his horse, or Dorothea Brooke’s charity-driven passion for Will Ladislaw. A situation parallel to Mona and Dudley’s occurs in Dinah Craik’s A Life for a Life (1859) where a male doctor and the daughter of one of his patients fall in love during their mutual care of her father.


137

Mona also learns in Borrowness the satisfaction of influencing middleclass but limited young women. Mathilda Cookson, who was at first inclined to snub Mona as a mere shop girl, comes to appreciate the learning and wisdom of the older woman. Under Mona’s unconscious influence, Mathilda, whose provincial life had been limited to schoolgirl studies and playing the piano badly, is inspired to learn German and begins quoting poetry. Though she does not intend to compliment herself, Mona assesses her influence correctly when she comments on the situation to Dudley, “I believe there are thousands of girls like that who only want some large-souled woman to take them by the hand, and draw out their own womanhood. How can they help it if their life has been barren of ideals?” (I.220). At the end of the novel, Mathilda has “carried her point” with her father, and is studying medicine at Jex-Blake’s Edinburgh School. When she exiles herself to Borrowness, Mona leaves behind two important friends: Lucy Reynolds, a very pretty medical student over whom she has a steadying influence, and Doris Colquhoun, an heiress with feminist politics and an overbearing father who will not allow her to study medicine. By novel’s end, pretty Lucy gives up flirting and determines to be an “advanced” woman and leading professional; Doris marries “the Sahib” and will help the medical-woman movement by campaigning for British women doctors in India. Both before and after the Borrowness adventure, Mona and these two female friends provide one another with unflagging emotional and material support. Their relationships stand as models for other professional, familial, and romantic relationships in the novel and, in this sense, resemble passionate female friendships in other New Woman novels and in the lives of many Victorian women. Reading Mona Maclean against Todd’s biography of Jex-Blake reveals, in fact, that Mona’s friendships are loose representations of Jex-Blake’s. Doris Colquhoun, for instance, resembles closely Ursula Du Pre, a wealthy and gifted woman whose family refused to allow to study medicine and who, like Doris, studied it “vicariously” through her friend. But Doris, who has “the enthusiasm of a martyr” for “animals, and poor women, and the cause of the oppressed generally,” also suggests the philanthropic Octavia Hill, with whom Jex-Blake shared a stormy relationship early in adulthood. Lucy Reynolds is a collage of several other of Jex-Blake’s friends. Most obviously, Lucy is meant to represent

138


the American woman doctor, Lucy Sewell, whom Todd describes as “singularly girlish in appearance,” and through whom Jex-Blake was “introduced primarily to the world of Medicine, and, secondarily, to the wide question of Feminism.”19 But the red-haired Dr. Agnes M’Laren, who studied and worked with Jex-Blake in Edinburgh, and who, like Lucy, is associated with the Riviera, forms part of Lucy’s character. Todd perhaps even had herself in mind when creating Mona’s impressionable and adoring younger friend who expresses jealousy of Doris. In a recent history of the medical-woman movement, Catriona Blake has tackled the question of Jex-Blake’s sexuality with less reticence than Todd could have in her 1918 biography. Though, Blake admits, “there are problems . . . with describing Sophia Jex-Blake as a lesbian,” she asserts unequivocally that Jex-Blake’s relationships with Ursula Du Pre, Octavia Hill, and perhaps Lucy Sewell were “of a more intimate nature” than mere friendships.20 Todd’s descriptions of these relationships, which she carefully but unmistakably characterizes as more than simple friendships, are equally revealing and more emotionally satisfying than Blake’s. In particular, Todd treats the rupture between Jex-Blake and Octavia Hill as one might a broken engagement or even a death: Til the close of her life the friendship on [Jex-Blake’s] side remained unbroken . . . in repeated wills she left the whole of her little property to Miss Hill, and, although other friends came in time to fill the empty place—although she even wrote playfully in her diary some twenty years later of her “fanciful faithfulness”—until the eve of her last illness she would not extinguish the hope that ‘even in this life’ the friendship might be renewed. . . . Octavia Hill became to S. J.-B. a pure ideal—something of what the subject of the In Memoriam was to the author of that wonderful threnody.

Todd notes that Jex-Blake only continued to will her property to Hill until “circumstances rendered Miss Hill independent of such aid.”21 In Jex-Blake’s final will, Todd herself was the legatee, just as she had been one of the friends who had come “to fill the empty place” in Jex-Blake’s heart. 19. Todd, Life, 222. Christine Thompson notes Doris’s similarity to Du Pre as well in her article, “Disruptive Desire: Medical Careers for Victorian Women in Fact and Fiction.” Todd, Life, 162, 163. 20. Catriona Blake, The Charge of the Parasols, 196–97. 21. Todd, Life, 94.


139

As in Reade’s A Woman-Hater, women’s romantic friendships are accepted as commonplace in Mona Maclean, though Todd’s treatment shows much less anxiety and a greater understanding of their nature. Mona, Doris tells her, is a “woman’s woman”: “If you could be turned into a man to-morrow, half the girls of your acquaintance would marry you” (II.47). Doris, herself, states twice that she wishes she could marry Mona, and Lucy admits that she feels jealous of Doris. In contrast to Reade’s Rhoda Gale who alarms the men of her novel, “women’s women” in Mona Maclean are quite attractive to men despite their lack of conventional beauty or feminine charm. Mona dazzles no fewer than five male characters; and as for Doris, Mona comments, “I have yet to meet the man in any rank of life who knows you and is not attached to you. . . . They little dream of the contempt and scorn that lie behind that daisy face.” (II.46). Though two of the three friends end their stories with heterosexual marriages, their marital expectations — and, indeed, the behavior of their husbands—have been shaped by their earlier relationships with women. Doris and the Sahib are brought together through their mutual love for Mona and establish a marital relationship of mutuality that would have been impossible had Mona not influenced their notions of love and loyalty.22 Mona’s own marriage is likewise influenced by her previous ties to other women; she expects (and receives) from Dudley the sort of mutual respect and openness that she shared with Doris and Lucy. More interesting, perhaps, is that one might easily read Mona’s equitable partnership with Dudley as an analog for Todd’s relationship with Jex-Blake. Like Mona and Dudley, Todd and Jex-Blake were partners in both their personal and professional lives. In 1887, Todd bought partial ownership of the building that housed Jex-Blake’s medical school in Edinburgh, and when she earned her M.D. in 1894, Todd became assistant physician under Jex-Blake at Edinburgh’s Hospital and Dispensary for Women and Children. Like Mona and Dudley on their honeymoon, Todd and Jex-Blake traveled around Britain and on the Continent together and spent much of their time discussing literature, religion, and feminist politics. One Victorian reviewer perhaps 22. This is an interesting reversal of the homoerotic triangle that Eve Sedgwick has identified in many literary texts (Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire).

140


revealed more than he knew when he complained that, in contrast to the manly Sir Douglas, Dudley was “essentially a feminine creation.” A second remarks similarly that the Sahib is “much more of a man in most respects than Dudley.”23 Lucy’s decision not to marry is equally influenced by her female friendships. While Mona is away in Borrowness, Lucy gives her heart to a young rake who treats her badly. Though hardly crushed by the incident, she admits to Mona that she had acted foolishly in allowing a man “to get the best of it” with her (III.114). Mona, who has been questioning her own relationship with Dudley, responds to her friend with a touching speech about life’s compensations for emancipated women: They say we women of this generation have sacrificed a good deal of our birthright; don’t let us throw away the grand compensation, the power to light our candles when our sun goes down. Do you remember Werther’s description of the country lass whose sweetheart forsakes her, taking with him all the interests of her life? We at least have other interests, Lucy, and we can, if we try hard enough, turn the key on the suite of enchanted rooms, and live in the rest of the house. (III.116)

Following Mona’s advice, Lucy dedicates herself with unaccustomed vigor to her profession and the cause of women: “When you and Doris are lost in your nurseries,” she tells Mona, “I shall be posing as a martyr, or leading a forlorn-hope” (III.260). Again, the sheer variety of positive and even heroic female “types” distinguishes Mona Maclean from other medical-woman fiction and makes it an important contribution to New Woman fiction. Mona’s intimate relationships with Doris and Lucy are supplemented by an outer circle of supportive female acquaintances at the medical school. Through large group scenes in the dissecting laboratory and Mona’s encounters with her fellow students, Todd develops a believable portrait of a female community that, despite personal differences among its various members, works toward common educational and professional goals. All in the school, for instance, understand when Lucy is 23. Shirley Roberts, Sophia Jex-Blake: A Woman Pioneer in Nineteenth-Century Medical Reform, 180; review of Mona Maclean, Medical Student, by Graham Travers, Athenaeum (Dec. 3, 1892): 774; William Wallace, “New Novels,” Academy 42, no. 1074 (1992): 504.


141

hiding a troubled heart behind the pretense of hard work. Miss Lascelles openly criticizes Mona’s poor study habits, but also recognizes her breadth of knowledge and admires her person. And another student who admits that she hadn’t liked Mona, nevertheless testifies to her generosity when Mona lends her some much-needed money. When pressed by Doris, Mona admits that some of the women medical students would be better suited to other work; but most, she asserts, are “happy, healthy, sensible, hard-working girls,” and some are “really remarkable women” (II.60). In her review of the novel, Jex-Blake praises the realism of these characters who are “familiar enough to those whose work lies in the women’s medical schools,” and yet are not represented “all as clever, or even as good” (271). Also praised is Todd’s “admirable study” of Dr. Alice Bateson, the maternal figure who hovers over the women students, providing them with free medical care and healthy advice. Like Rhoda Gale and Sophia Jex-Blake, Dr. Bateson is shockingly unconventional. When Doris suggests that the doctor might help the Cause if she wore gloves and a bonnet, Mona defends her: “the prophets of great causes always have a thorn in the flesh that they themselves are conscious of, and half-a-dozen other thorns that other people are conscious of; but the cause survives notwithstanding” (II.50). In Alice Bateson, Todd pays tribute to Jex-Blake’s motherly role at the Edinburgh School where Todd studied.24 Mona consults Dr. Bateson when, after not having heard from Dudley for many months, she believes him to have misled her. The otherwise remarkably stable Mona admits, “‘I can’t sleep much, and things get on my nerves” (III.183). Once she has determined the cause of Mona’s depression, Dr. Bateson advises Mona to take a holiday at the sea-side: “Live on the cliffs the whole day long, read what will rest you, and take a tonic that will make you eat in spite of yourself,” (III.186). This scene between the older and younger medical woman suggests in many respects the relationship between Jex-Blake and her sensitive and highly strung student, Margaret Todd. Todd’s letters and her later fiction imply that Jex-Blake 24. In her recent biography of Jex-Blake, Shirley Roberts notes that Jex-Blake’s “Mother-knows-best” attitude, though appreciated by Todd, was resented by some of her women students, who desired more personal freedom and who eventually rebelled against her (Sophia Jex-Blake, 176).

142


“grounded” Todd and provided sensible, practical advice when the young woman felt herself losing emotional balance. Throughout Todd’s literary career, for instance, Jex-Blake acted as her agent, settling terms with publishers and pushing Todd to submit manuscripts about which the writer felt insecure. Even when Todd wrote to her publisher herself, Jex-Blake often prefaced Todd’s personal and self-effacing letters with notes of her own, summarizing and strengthening Todd’s points.25 Todd again pays tribute to Jex-Blake’s care of her in a short story, “After Many Days,” published a few years after Mona Maclean.26 In this short story, a gruff but kindly country doctor (a man in this case) encounters on a train a young woman whom he perceives to be either “on the eve of an illness, or . . . in a state of almost unbearable nerve strain” (7). The woman admits to him that she fears she is going mad from anxiety over her desire to be a great painter. The doctor recognizes her as a cultured, intellectual woman of the age: “Another neurotic specimen! . . . white lips, and muscles all on the strain! What is the race coming to?” (5). He counters her assertion that she is not a “silly girl” but a “working woman” with the observation that “one class shades imperceptibly into the other nowadays”: “Little goose!” he adds to himself, “overwrought and underfed to such an extent that she is scarcely responsible for her actions” (7, 11). He advises her to eat and, rather than worrying about greatness, to step back and “find a bit of work at hand that you can do well” (21). Many years later, the two meet again, and the doctor is surprised to find that although he has practically forgotten the woman, his advice had enabled her to become a famous and successful painter. The similarity of this situation to Mona’s time in Borrowness, and to periodic breaks in Todd’s own work, is unmistakable. It is interesting as well to see in these two episodes of “neurotic” modern young women Todd’s acceptance of orthodox medical theories about the fragility of the female system that were generally used in arguments against women’s higher education and professional work. Such theories, which would 25. I derived this information about Todd’s literary career from letters between the Blackwood publishing firm and Todd and Jex-Blake which are held at the National Library of Scotland. Thanks to David Finkelstein for alerting me to the existence of the letters. 26. Todd, “After Many Days,” 1–54.


143

be taken up by eugenicists and antifeminists alike, figure more prominently in the work of Arabella Kenealy and so will be treated more fully later in this chapter. Todd’s position is distinctly less radical than Kenealy’s. Although she allows that “modern” women seem unusually subject to nervous conditions, Todd does not, like Kenealy, read the neurotic young woman as the inevitable, evolved result of excessive education and “manly” ambition. Rather, Todd argued along with other ameliorant feminists that advanced women suffered because individuals were not prepared to cope with the enormous strain of rapid social change. The “evolution of the medium” — of women’s opportunities and responsibilities—had outstripped the “evolution of the individual.”27 Intergenerational support and communities of women such as appear in her fiction were, for Todd, essential to the success—and eventual evolution—of the New Woman. Through the course of the novel, we see Mona learning to appreciate these networks of support and growing into a “large-souled woman” herself. Mona comments upon the value of such relationships when her young cousin, Evelyn, expresses the wish early in the novel that Mona would marry and have children: Oh, my dear, at the romantic age of seventeen you cannot even imagine how much I prize my liberty; how many plans I have in my head that no married woman could carry out. . . . O Maternity, what crimes are perpetrated in thy name! Mothering is woman’s work without a doubt, but she does not need to have children of her own in order to do it. (I.85–86)

With its explicit critiques of marriage and maternity, this is perhaps the most radically feminist statement of Mona Maclean. Such moments in the text go far toward subverting the inevitability of the novel’s marriage plot by celebrating female independence and providing positive alternatives to marriage. Despite her avowals of prizing liberty and all of her rich and supportive female friendships, however, Mona does marry. Mona Maclean is finally a marriage-plot novel, and thus must assert that Mona’s relationship with Dudley is her most fulfilling. After Mona’s “awakening” 27. Todd, “Some Thoughts on the Woman Question,” 689.

144


at Borrowness, the novel concentrates upon Mona earning her degree— which she does quickly and brilliantly—and upon turning the muddled romance with Dudley into a marriage of equals. The lovers lose contact for some months while both prepare for Intermediate Examinations, though only Mona knows that they are both studying medicine in London. Dudley first sees Mona again as she walks up the aisle at an awards ceremony to accept the gold medal in physiology for her examination. He is stunned, but not from jealousy—he has taken the gold in anatomy—nor because he opposes women doctors, but because he thinks Mona intentionally deceived him at Borrowness. After the machinations of several mutual friends, the stubborn couple marry to form a personal and professional partnership, doctoring the poor of London. The final scene of the novel, a repetition of the Maggie episode, shows Dudley calling to his wife to attend a young girl whom his practiced eye perceives to be pregnant and who bursts into “hysterical tears” when she tries to speak to him: “‘Mona, dear,’ he said quietly, ‘here is a case for you’” (III.285). This ending is significant for several reasons. It is, for one, a re-affirmation of Mona’s pledge at Borrowness to care for needy women, but here we see for the first time Mona acting as a registered physician, empowered by her greater knowledge and the legitimacy of her degree. And, of course, Dudley’s resignation of this patient to his wife signals his respect for her and for the mission she has taken up, as well as the common assumption that women doctors should specialize in the care of women and children. But perhaps most interesting is that Todd here revises the nearly obligatory “baby scene” of many marriage-plot novels. It is not Mona who is pregnant, but her unfortunate patient. And Dudley’s “heart glowed” when he sees his wife’s “bright, strong, womanly face,” but he feels pride because of her professional ability to treat her patient rather than in her ability to bear him a child (III.285). Mona’s early assertion that one need not bear children in order to mother—that, in other words, a woman’s profession can provide adequate outlets for human sympathy—is thus verified despite her marriage. The novel’s message about medical women, then, is that they should be afforded an equal though distinct place within the profession. Despite the optimism of her novel, Todd was not naïve about the politics


145

surrounding the medical-woman movement or the basic conservatism of her readers. She therefore treats controversial professional issues with great care, often using the even-handed Mona to temper the more radical statements of her friends. Never does the narrator nor any of the characters question that women doctors should only practice on women; on the contrary, the dramatic events of the novel from Mona’s feminist awakening to the supportive community of medical women, underscore the importance of same-sex medical care. In addition, the text provides plenty of narration and dialogue to support the separatist medical politics of its dramatic events. Urging Mona to continue with her medical work, for instance, Doris discusses yet another of the novel’s victimized young women. Unlike the others, however, this woman has been violated by male medics: A young girl in my Bible-class went into the Infirmary a few weeks ago— only one case among many—and you should have heard what she told me! . . . She said she would rather die than go there again. . . . Young men, [Doris] said, scarcely above a whisper, and all those students—mere boys! It drives me mad! (I.140)

Both Doris and Mona feel great sympathy for seduced women such as Maggie, but because Doris’s chaste protégé loses her “bloom” at the hands of male doctors, this situation is doubly horrible to them (I.140). Because of her professional training, Mona voices a more practical view of the matter than Doris. Though Mona “feel[s] the force” of Doris’s position, she has learned “to be silent,” and assures her friend that many male doctors are “truly scientific” and have “infinite kindness of heart” (I.141). Yet here, and in other instances when the two friends debate women’s issues, the text suggests that it is Doris, with her “pure passion for an abstract cause,” who is the more admirable. Mona thinks to herself that Doris is a woman “whose shoe-latchets I am not worthy to unloose” (I.141). “‘Dearest,’” she tells her, “‘you are the preux chevalier of your sex, and I love you for it with all my heart’” (I.141). Doris, then, serves as the text’s “pure feminist” to complement the professionally modified practical feminism of the medical women. Her close friendship with Mona and her interest in and dedication to the cause of women doctors is a projection of the inter-relation of medical and nonmedical women in late-Victorian feminism.

146


This incident is an excellent example of how a literary text can enrich historical analysis of a particular issue. In essence, this young girl’s story is a dramatically rendered protest against male-administered gynecological examinations, and particularly the exposed and involuntary nature of such examinations in public hospitals. The Contagious Diseases Acts had been defeated in Britain in 1888, but the novel implies that the misguided medical ethics underlying the Acts still exist, and still might be countered by women doctors gaining power within the profession. Otherwise reliable feminist and medical histories report simply that, with the exception of Elizabeth Blackwell, Victorian women doctors supported the Contagious Diseases Acts.28 Technically, that is true. But this fictional episode and Mona’s ambivalent response to it suggest that the Acts and the issues of medical power and sexuality related to it were not as clear-cut for women such as Jex-Blake or Elizabeth Garrett Anderson as historians assert. One must always be careful, of course, when treating fiction as historical evidence or, in this case, of asserting complete agreement between Todd’s fictional representation of a medical woman and the women themselves. But Mona’s solution to the problem of sex and medical ethics—her resigned silence in the present balanced against her dedication to the future—provides a more complex and comfortable explanation for the seemingly contradictory public positions that most women doctors took on questions such as the Contagious Diseases Acts. Doris’s feminist enthusiasm for the cause of women doctors is balanced against the very different position taken by Mona’s worldly uncle, Sir Douglas. His “conversion” to the Cause provides the text and its heroine with the opportunity to address common objections to “cultivated” women such as Mona becoming doctors. Sir Douglas tells Mona that he is “torn asunder” on the question of woman doctors (I.36). He acknowledges fully the “terrible necessity”—“It makes me mad to think how a woman can allow herself to be pulled about by a man”—and yet he cannot accept the “sacrifice” involved (I.36–37). Sir Douglas’s principal objection is a sophistication of the “unsexing” charge that we saw in the fiction of chapter three: he assumes that womanliness is 28. See Susan Kingsley Kent, Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860–1914; and Jo Manton, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson.


147

“sacrificed” to medical education and that otherwise cultivated, marriageable types such as Mona should not study or practice medicine. With medical education, asserts Sir Douglas, “A woman loses everything that makes womanhood fair and attractive. You must be becoming hard and blunted?” (I.37). But Sir Douglas’s greatest horror, like that of many Victorians, is that Mona might want to practice on male patients: “You women are . . . wading through seas of blood to right a terrible evil. . . . If you deliberately and gratuitously repeat that evil by extending your services to men, the sacrifice has all been for nothing, and less than nothing,” (I.41). In other words, women doctors save other women from sexual victimization at the hands of male practitioners. But women doctors who “extend their services to men,” position themselves either to seduce or be seduced by their patients. By implication, once “blunted” by medical study, women doctors may even desire such a position. Like Wilkie Collins’s doctress-seductress Sophia Pillico in “Fie! Fie!, or the Fair Physician,” women doctors with male patients are no better, and perhaps worse, than prostitutes. Again, then, the right of women to practice medicine, and the need for women doctors, were no longer viable issues by the 1890s. Sir Douglas and the Victorian public require convincing that women doctors may retain their womanliness, may dissect bodies and yet be engaging dining companions or competent wives and mothers. Mona Maclean asserts that not all women doctors need be as unconventional as Rhoda Gale, Alice Bateson, or Sophia Jex-Blake. They may wear gloves and even, like Mona, care for fashion “qua fashion.” From our point of view, such concerns seem trivial and, in its more serious moments, the novel betrays its agreement. Mona realizes that because he is not a scientist her uncle is incapable of understanding “the wonder and beauty” of her life’s work: “How cruelly she would be misunderstood if she talked here of the passionate delight of discovery, of the enthusiasm that had often made her forgetful of time and of all other claims?” (I.39–40). Yet, converting Sir Douglas to the cause meant nullifying the most sophisticated objections of the public. Mona Maclean includes among its ideological tasks, therefore, persuading Sir Douglas and the reader that Mona herself is proof against any charge that medical study unsexes a charming woman. Indeed, Douglas admits that he can discover “not a trace” in Mona’s face “that is not perfectly womanly,”

148


and he finds that her education makes her all the more “piquant” a companion (I.38). Mona sings and paints and converses delightfully, but Sir Douglas is only finally won over when he sees how handsome she appears in the undergraduate gown that he bought for her. If Sir Douglas does indeed represent the typical Victorian’s response to medical women, Todd’s treatment of him implies a decided cynicism toward her audience. Yet, in contrast to the confrontational sensationalism of Kenealy’s Dr. Janet, Mona Maclean, Medical Student ultimately conciliates its readers with a largely comedic, propitiatory treatment of the medical woman and her relation to feminist politics at the end of the century. This does not make the novel’s treatment of feminist issues simplistic or unthinking however. For instance, Mona’s thoughts on women’s suffrage, expressed in a conversation with Dudley late in the novel, typify the text’s politics. Mona fears the responsibility of being a registered woman physician because, unlike in her days as an irresponsible student, she must now “have a hand to show, and show it” on women’s issues and suffrage in particular (III.267). Mona’s position on women’s suffrage and feminism generally resembles her ameliorative stance on male doctors treating young women. As she explains herself to Dudley: [I]t seems to me . . . as if we women had gone half-way across a yawning chasm on a slender bridge. The farther shore, as we see it now, is not all that our fancy pictured; but it still seems on the whole more attractive than the one we have left behind. Que faire? We know that in life there is no going back; nor can we stand on the bridge for ever. . . . Only the future can show how the woman question is going to turn out, and in the meantime the making of the future lies in our own hands. (III.268)

What Mona doubts here is the strength of the “slender bridge” or, in other words, the ability of the women of the present to bridge the gap between woman’s traditional sphere of the past and her hoped-for role of the future. Despite the superlative examples of fin-de-siècle women in Mona Maclean, Todd expresses doubts in this narrative and elsewhere about the innate superiority of women and their supposed role as “the conscience of the race.” In an 1894 essay, “Some Thoughts on the Woman Question,” Todd argues that for the time being women’s opportunities have been sufficiently well-developed and now women must “rise to the


149

full stature of the advantages we possess . . . not to develop the medium, but to develop the woman.” Todd quotes Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s assertion in Aurora Leigh that women should work quietly and well rather than “prating” of “woman’s mission, woman’s function.”29 Todd’s lukewarm attitude toward women’s suffrage is disappointing, but not terribly surprising. Women doctors of the 1880s and 1890s had a great deal of difficult labor to perform simply to establish themselves respectably within the medical profession. Once medical schools for women were established, they needed to perform at a level of excellence equal to men’s programs. Women medical students, as Mona is continually remarking to her friend Lucy, needed to out-perform male students in order to earn equal respect. And as the lives of the early women doctors and the experiences of medical women in fiction attest, practicing women physicians needed excessive energy and dedication to win patients and public support for their work. Nor does Todd, like so many of the authors in chapter three, use woman’s lack of strength in the present to fall back to the reactionary stance that opposes their education and professional work. Happily, Todd’s later writings suggest that she, like Jex-Blake and Garrett Anderson, grew more radically feminist over time and wholeheartedly supported women’s suffrage and other feminist causes.30 If we return to Mona’s discussion with Dudley and her metaphor of the slender bridge, we see that Mona Maclean at least allows for this possibility. “It would be a terrible thing,” Mona concludes, “for the leaders of any movement to lose faith in the middle of the bridge, and, if we cannot strengthen their hands, we are bound at least not to weaken them. . . . If we try to make the girls over whom we have any influence stronger and sweeter and sounder, we cannot at least be retarding the cause of women” (III.269–70). Insofar as Mona’s actions throughout 29. Todd, “Some Thoughts on the Woman Question,” 692, 690–91, 692. 30. Todd’s 1918 biography of Jex-Blake warmly praises the older woman for becoming increasingly involved in women’s political issues as she grew older, particularly after both she and Todd retired in 1899. Garrett Anderson was persuaded to join the militant campaign for women’s suffrage by her daughter, Louisa Garrett Anderson, and in 1908 at the age of seventy-two only avoided arrest because a friend had secretly contacted the Home Secretary (Manton, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, 341–43).

150


the novel have made the young women around her stronger and sweeter and sounder, she has already been fortifying the slender bridge to the future and contributing to the cause of women.

Dr. Janet of Harley Street Arabella Kenealy’s Dr. Janet of Harley Street features types of characters who are remarkably similar to those in Mona Maclean and who also question the relation of love and marriage to work, and what it means to be an “advanced” woman. Both novels announce themselves as New Woman fiction by their concerns with woman’s “nature” and sexuality, and by their questioning of the social roles traditionally prescribed for women in Victorian culture. Their considerable differences from one another, on the other hand, suggest the heterogeneity of New Woman writing as a literary and ideological form, particularly since both choose to explore the condition of the New Woman through the rather unusual figure of the woman doctor. A British physician specializing in the care of women and children, Kenealy preached the dangers of excessive exercise and education to woman’s true vocation of motherhood. After graduating from the London School of Medicine for Women, Kenealy practiced among the poor of the city. When diphtheria caused her to give up medical practice, Kenealy devoted herself to writing popular fiction and essays that forwarded her eugenic theories. With best-selling fiction as well as articles in serious journals such as the Eugenics Review, the Nineteenth Century, and the National Review, Kenealy was both prominent and respected, not least because of her medical credentials. Despite her obscurity today, Kenealy is, according to Bram Dijkstra, “still a bedrock of our own sense of sexual identity.” Jeffrey Weeks cites Kenealy’s Feminism and Sex Extinction as “the classic case against the disruptive effects of women claiming equality with men.”31 Like other New Women, doctors or not, Kenealy sought to redefine female sexuality and the proper place of woman in society. And like 31. Bram Dijkstra, Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood, 134; Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics, and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800, 162.


151

other scientifically informed feminists of her period, Kenealy thought of woman’s function in evolutionary and therefore maternal terms. However, her specific prescriptions for woman’s social role differed dramatically from those of Todd or other feminists such as Olive Schreiner and Mona Caird. As we have seen, Todd believed that women could fulfill their “maternal instincts” through work instead of biological mothering. In contrast, Kenealy tended to side with male eugenicists such as Karl Pearson who argued that racially healthy motherhood required more traditionally feminine behavior in women: “Nature had no vainglorious ambitions as to a race of female wranglers or golfers; she is not concerned with Amazons, physical or intellectual. She is a one-idea’d, uncompromising old person, and her one idea is the race as embodied in the Baby.”32 Dr. Janet differs from Mona Maclean formally as well as ideologically. Though clearly a first novel, Mona Maclean was received by most reviewers as the work of a serious novelist. Todd’s later fiction shows artistic development, with increasingly complex characters and a more serious tone than in Mona. As a reviewer for the Bookman commented, after Mona Maclean “It remained to be seen whether [Todd] could write . . . not merely a ‘nice’ book, but a strong book—write literature.” With the publication of her second novel, Windyhaugh, the reviewer discovered “new proof of her steadily developing power.” In contrast, a reviewer of Dr. Janet of Harley Street finds the “absurd” story so poorly told that he accuses Kenealy of lacking any “share of the novelist’s instinct.” Undoubtedly, one reason for these very different receptions is that Todd wrote within the conventions of Victorian realism with rounded characters and relatively seamless plots while Kenealy’s fiction is more in the popular vein of sensation fiction. By choosing a more respectable style of fiction, Todd garners greater respect from critics. Even so, reading their various works, one senses that Todd was by temperament and inclination an artist who also studied medicine whereas Kenealy was temperamentally scientific but found fiction and science writing a convenient outlet through which to communicate and popularize her theories. Kenealy’s fiction serves as a vehicle for her eugenic theories just as her medical writings often read like short stories. For instance, her 1890 essay, “The Talent of Motherhood,” which appeared 32. Kenealy, “Woman as Athlete,” 642–43.

152


in the National Review, is a comparative case study of two pregnant women that resembles a short story and that, says Kenealy, bears “impressively upon the question of woman’s education.” “It is a terrible pity,” she wrote elsewhere, “that public opinion sets its face against the discussing of physiological questions in any but medical journals. For physiological questions are of incalculable importance to all persons, seeing that physiology is the science of life.” Quite intentionally, Kenealy blurred the generic distinctions between medical guides and popular fiction, and seemed happy to let the originality of the fiction suffer in the interests of her medical point. Kenealy has not fared well in the recent resurgence of interest in late-Victorian women writers, no doubt because her sexual politics are less attractive than those of Schreiner, Mona Caird, and Sarah Grand. Nevertheless, she was identified in her own time and in current scholarship as a New Woman writer whose work made important contributions to New Womanly debates.33 At center, Dr. Janet of Harley Street is a critique of British marriage customs that sanction and encourage loveless marriage in the interests of money, and of British marriage laws which bind such unions and erase the wife’s autonomy. On the morning of her wedding, seventeenyear-old Phyllis Eve is repulsed by the violently passionate kiss she receives from her husband, the Marquis De Richeville, “a handsome man of sixty, who concealed a very graceless character beneath a very graceful manner” (7). Under “no consideration whatsoever” will the pure Phyllis live with her husband, “her true instinct, having detected moral leprosy, shrank from the terrors of contamination” (293). Plots that questioned the “cultural mythology” surrounding marriage in this way were a distinguishing mark of the New Woman novel. In 1888, Mona Caird had placed marriage at the center of New Woman writing with an essay in the Westminster Review entitled “Marriage,” which grew into 33. Review of Windyhaugh, “Novel Notes,” Bookman 9, no. 3 (May 1899): 280; review of Dr. Janet of Harley Street, Dial (Nov. 1, 1894): 266; Kenealy, “The Talent of Motherhood,” 446; Kenealy, “Woman as Athlete,” 643. The plot of Kenealy’s 1908 novel, The Whips of Time, is clearly derived from Dickens’s Great Expectations even though she gives the story a eugenicist twist. Both novels center on young men who wish to marry beautiful but morally corrupt young women who, it turns out, are the daughters of “criminal” women.


153

a series of articles finally published together in 1897 as The Morality of Marriage and Other Essays on the Status and Destiny of Woman. Caird explains in her introduction to that volume that her purpose is to show how the “custom of woman-purchase” produced the “greatest evils of modern society,” and that “this system still persists in the present form of marriage and its traditions . . . [that] are holding back the race from its best development.” As we shall see, Kenealy also finds the “future of the race” to be at stake in the “immoral” marriage which she paints between Phyllis and De Richeville.34 Further, Kenealy clearly represents the Marquis’s profligacy as a contagious disease. In literal terms the Marquis’s immorality manifests itself through drunkenness and its consequent hallucinations, irrationality, and general dissipation. Metaphorically, however, the Marquis’s love of drink signals his sexual immorality and the possibility that he will literally infect his wife and children with venereal disease. This implication would have been clear to most late-Victorians, who had learned to associate the evils of alcohol with those of sex: “I am prepared to term alcohol the evil genius of modern sexual life,” claimed Dr. Iwan Block, because “it delivers its victims to sexual misleading and corruption, to venereal infection, and to all the consequences of casual sexual intercourse.” Thus, like many other New Woman writers, Kenealy reverses the “terms of male scientific discourse” by making the (sexually) diseased male (rather than the prostitute or otherwise criminally sexual woman) the threat to the “health and continuance of the race.” New Woman writers, asserts Lynn Pykett, “compounded the irony of this reversal by using doctors—especially specialists in women’s ailments— as bearers of disease and disorder, rather than their curers.”35 It is worth noting how closely these rhetorical strategies resemble those employed in both the campaigns to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts and to establish women doctors. The similarities suggest, of course, the well-established connection between the purity campaigns and New Woman writing. What is interesting in the present context is how 34. Kenealy, Dr. Janet of Harley Street; Ardis, New Women, New Novels, 72; Mona Caird, The Morality of Marriage and Other Essays on the Status and Destiny of Woman, 1. 35. Block’s statement, from Sexual Life in England, quoted in Frances Swiney, “Alcohol,” 262; Pykett, The Improper Feminine, 155.

154


both Dr. Janet and Mona Maclean, like those campaigns and other New Woman novels, blame sexual disease and corruption upon men, but offer women doctors as protectors of women and positive alternatives to male doctors. Fin-de-siècle women writers imagined many “cures” for the problem(s) of sex, from the pragmatic, such as education and birth control, to the utopian and visionary.36 These two novels are productive sites for investigating how the sexuality debates could be addressed from a feminist perspective but from within scientific discourse. In part, this explains the role of Dr. Janet Doyle who, like “large” and unfeminine women doctor characters before her, might seem peripheral to the (anti) marriage plot of this novel. Before her marriage is consummated, Phyllis escapes to London and spends a night on the streets before she is taken in by Dr. Janet, senior physician at the Minerva Hospital for Women. Dr. Janet determines to support Phyllis while the younger woman trains to become a doctor. In this act of charity, Dr. Janet is variously motivated. In part, she feels real pity and sympathy for Phyllis, but she is also attracted to the idea of having a beautiful young woman living with and depending upon her. “Overwhelmed” by Dr. Janet’s kindness to her, Phyllis kisses the older woman’s hand, an act of affection that “rather put [Dr. Janet] out of countenance” (102): “‘Don’t be a simpleton,’ she protested. . . . ‘I do it to please myself’” (102). Janet conceives “a violent affection” for Phyllis and refuses to part with her, even when the latter’s mother comes to London (103). Finally, Dr. Janet is motivated by the professional and idealistic desire to shape Phyllis into a woman doctor who does not lose her natural feminine feeling: “I’ve made up my mind,” Janet tells her cousin, Dr. Paul Liveing, “that child shall be one of the first doctors in London. She has fine abilities. . . . [Y]ou will see what the true woman-mind, properly educated, will bring to your materialistic science” (142). However, Liveing has other ideas, and suggests to Janet, “I am more likely to see what the true woman-mind, properly educated, will bring to some fellow’s home. . . . A woman like that is made for love and home and children. She isn’t meant for skeletons and pharmacopoeias” (142–43). Predictably, Liveing and Phyllis fall in love. In this way, Dr. Janet replicates the erotic triangle 36. Sheila Jeffreys’s volume, The Sexuality Debates (Routledge, 1987) provides excerpts from a number of perspectives.


155

common in much New Woman fiction—especially of the antifeminist sort—in which an older New Woman competes against a man for the love of a young heroine. Dr. Janet, though, is a more gracious loser than James’s Olive Chancellor or even Reade’s Rhoda Gale, for Janet accepts the eugenic imperative of Phyllis’s match with Liveing. The happiness of the lovers is blocked by the Marquis, who inconveniently continues to search for his wife. After many months, he finally finds her, intuits the situation between her and Liveing, and rather than releasing her from her wedding vows, takes her to court for desertion. When he cannot persuade Phyllis to live with him, the Marquis fakes his own death (with a letter written in vanishing ink) so that Phyllis and Liveing will enter into a bigamous marriage. As outrageous as the Marquis’s actions sound, this part of the plot engages a cultural and legal debate over conjugal rights that was “the sensation of the day.” A year before Dr. Janet’s publication, the Court of Queen’s Bench ruled that Edmund Jackson had the right to hold his wife Emily against her will because “though generally the forcible detention of a subject by another is prima facie illegal, yet where the relation is that of husband [and] wife the detention is not illegal.” Three days later, the Court of Appeals reversed the decision, causing the conservative Eliza Lynn Linton to declare, “Marriage, as hitherto understood in England, was suddenly abolished one fine morning last month!”37 As one of the “wild women” whom Linton despised, Arabella Kenealy undoubtedly felt more in accord with the opinion that Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy expressed in the Manchester Guardian: “It is a declaration of law which is epoch-making in its immediate consequences, and its ultimate results reach far into the future, involving indeed the establishment of a higher morality of marriage.”38 Kenealy, though, pushes the issue of morality and marriage a step farther by defending Phyllis’s and Liveing’s bigamous or adulterous cohabitation before the Marquis’s death as more natural and moral than the original marital relationship. 37. Mary Lyndon Shanley, Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England, 177; Shanley, Feminism, Marriage, and the Law, 180; Eliza Lynn Linton, “The Judicial Shock to Marriage,” Nineteenth Century 29 (May 1891): 691–700, quoted in Shanley, Feminism, Marriage, and the Law, 182. 38. Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, “The Decision in the Clitheroe Case, and Its Consequences: A Series of Five Letters” (Manchester, 1891) 4, quoted in Shanley, Feminism, Marriage, and the Law, 182–83.

156


When the Marquis reveals himself to the couple and asserts his rights as Phyllis’s husband, Phyllis replies simply, “Oh, I am only his [Liveing’s] wife. Nothing could ever make me yours” (286). And when Liveing insists that Phyllis return to live with Dr. Janet for the time-being, she asks him, “Ah, my husband, need we care what the world says? Is not our love higher than that?” (291). Kenealy supports consistently the natural love Phyllis feels for Liveing over the Marquis’s legal claims; more significantly, the novel does not represent Phyllis as in any way fallen or impure despite the bigamy which she commits. Such a stance is consistent with Kenealy’s belief in the fundamental importance of biology over culture, natural law over human law. Because it is more “natural,” the eugenic marriage, even if adulterous or bigamous, takes precedence over the merely legal marriage. This radical stance on natural marriage is undercut, however, by what follows. Though Liveing persuades Phyllis to return to Dr. Janet for the sake of “law and custom,” she is already pregnant with his child. The baby is born prematurely and dies, Phyllis becomes temporarily insane from puerperal fever and anxiety, and Dr. Janet tries to persuade the Marquis to kill himself to make amends. He does so, not heroically, but during a sick hallucination. Phyllis and Liveing are free to marry, and Dr. Janet, setting her lips “firmly, and in their wonted strong placidity,” tells herself, “I am a wicked woman . . . but I thank God that he did it” as two tears fall upon her “large” hands (340). In the moral universe of this novel, Dr. Janet is not, of course, a “wicked woman.” But neither is she the heroine that one might expect in a novel named for her and written by a graduate of the London School of Medicine. The pure Phyllis is by all rights the heroine of the novel, just as she is its principal concern; and in their competition for her, the progressive Janet loses to Liveing, with his beliefs in home and motherhood. Janet exists in their lives and in this novel as a facilitator of plot, a conduit between the lovers, and a spokesperson of certain “scientific” notions of New Womanhood that, paradoxically, define her as sexually and evolutionarily degenerate. I would suggest two factors that contribute to the marginalization of this woman doctor in her own novel. First, like the antifeminist representations of women doctors which I discussed in chapter three, Dr. Janet is defined primarily in terms of her own sexuality and in relation to external sexual threat the Marquis poses to Phyllis. Janet’s sexuality


157

is aberrant in the old manner, for she resembles the unsexed type established in Reade’s Rhoda Gale. Kenealy writes, “The forehead was large and massive, the chin broad and resolute. He would be a bold man who opposed the firm and fiery will of this big woman” (87). But, as Janet herself explains to a room full of dinner guests, she is also sexually aberrant according to new eugenic-feminist notions of evolution. Her argument is that “sex is the acme of development” and so the “lower we are in the scale of evolution, the less difference is there between the sexes” (124). The current degeneration of the race can be seen in the speedy devolution of many women into “neuters,” of which Janet offers herself as an example: “Will anyone kindly observe me carefully and disinterestedly, and tell me if there is anything distinctly womanly in my appearance? . . . I tell you, with but a few exceptions, there is not a man in the room as muscular, rational and energetic—in a word, what you call masculine—as I” (123–24). Janet would have her guests believe that the exercise of “masculine” mental traits and of the body in athletics causes women to degenerate to neuters, or quasi-men. Thus, Janet tutors Phyllis to study only moderately and—more important—to hold on to her higher, more evolved womanly “instincts” and emotions despite the rational, masculine nature of her work. Only then can Phyllis become a (literal) mother of the race. Kenealy, following Durkheim, Agassiz and others, believed that primitive humans were bisexual; bisexuality lurks in us still and must be repressed for the good of the race since the “sex is more highly differentiated as the type evolves.” In a perversion of Mendelian genetics, Kenealy argued that humans carry dominant male traits and recessive female traits; proper mothers will preserve their male traits for the production of masculine sons; “masculine” women will only be able to have girls or “emasculated” and “neurotic” boys.” One way that New Woman writers subverted male scientific discourse was to form a “counterideology in which the male of the species was figured as less highly evolved than the female, and hence closer to brute nature.” To counteract the continuing association of maternity with nature, however, many New Woman writers “spiritualized” and “moralized” maternity and womanhood the ideology of “True Womanhood.”39 39. Kenealy, “Woman as Athlete. A Rejoinder,” 917; Kenealy, Feminism and Sex Extinction, 77; Pykett, The Improper Feminine, 155, 156.

158


Because entry into true womanhood depends upon mothering, Dr. Janet, no matter how noble, is designated sexually and emotionally neuter. When a dinner guest suggests that Janet “grows romantic” on the topic of love as the test of true womanliness and manliness, the doctor replies: “No, my dear lady, I do not. . . . [I]t is a sentiment of which my neuter-nature is incapable, though it is conscious of its missing faculty” (127). Resembling other “large,” unconventional, and woman-loving figures such as Rhoda Gale and Sophia Jex-Blake, Janet is clearly an example of what we now call the protolesbian New Woman.40 In later work, Kenealy will label this “type” of woman a “human hermaphrodite” or “sex-intergrade,” terms that suggest Kenealy’s affinity to sexologists such as Havelock Ellis and Krafft-Ebing.41 In this early work, though, Kenealy neatly sidesteps the issue of Janet’s homosexuality by calling her a “neuter,” a term that renders her a harmless character— asexual, unromantic — by eliminating any threat of sexually deviant behavior. At the same time, however, by giving her this pseudoscientific label, Kenealy pathologizes Janet in a way that Reade’s Rhoda Gale or Todd’s Alice Bateson were not. Phyllis is saved from this degenerate neuterdom by her love for Liveing and, eventually, motherhood. She earns her M.D., but there is no indication that she intends to practice medicine. Her highest function is in reproducing and mothering. Paradoxically then, Dr. Janet propagates a scientific feminism at the expense of the woman doctor, the figure who represents the pinnacle of female scientific achievement in nineteenth-century Britain. Moreover, in so doing, the novel tends to reify misogynist attitudes toward intellectual women even as it attempts to reorder scientific notions of female sexuality. It seems more than a little ironic for a novel written by a New Woman doctor to proclaim as the highest example of “womanliness” a teenager who barely passes her medical examinations. The distinction between feminism and maternalism can be usefully applied to the ideological differences between Margaret Todd and Arabella Kenealy. Looking at the rhetoric surrounding early women’s hospitals in England and Australia, Bashford explains that the pioneering women doctors such as Jex-Blake, Elizabeth Blackwell, and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson justified their work through explicit or implicit cri40. Ledger, The New Woman, 128. 41. Kenealy, The Human Gyroscope, 218.


159

tiques of male medicine and masculine sexual abuse. This “feminist” generation of women relied upon “female collectivity” to advance women’s medical education. By the turn of the century, however, “feminism and the work of women doctors were largely co-opted by. . . eugenic-driven maternalism” by which “women’s health” came to mean “reproductive health.” Because of her strong personal and professional identification with Jex-Blake and the other pioneers, her ameliorant stance on women’s issues, and even her Eliotlike aesthetics, Todd was a classic “feminist.” In contrast, with her intense interest in eugenics, maternity, and the theories of male sexologists, Kenealy was an early example of “maternalist” woman doctors. Though Bashford cautions that the “boundaries between feminism and maternalism” were complex and “often unclear,” the rhetoric surrounding women doctors in the early twentieth century focused increasingly upon healthy motherhood and reduced woman’s function to that of “mother of the race.”42 This shift within the relatively narrow sphere of women’s medicine was paralleled in the broader woman’s movement, which also focused increasingly on issues of maternity and the future of the race and grew skeptical of the liberal politics that characterized mid-Victorian feminism. For instance, Deborah Nord contrasts feminist and maternalist ideologies in the work of “female social investigators” who, at the end of the century, brought statistical and investigative techniques of social science into the working-class home. “A maternalistic perspective,” writes Nord, “competed with the feminist perception that the rights of woman, whether middle-class or working-class, were not always answered in a rhetoric” of her “role as mother” and “an assessment of her duties toward home.”43 The relatively clear and stable contrasts between Todd and Kenealy can thus help us to negotiate the often selfcontradictory views of other New Women such as Olive Schreiner and Sarah Grand whose writings advocated increased freedoms for women but also asserted the primacy of race-motherhood in women’s lives.44 As the term race-motherhood suggests, British imperial holdings were particularly rich sites of eugenic investigation and intervention. Not 42. Bashford, “Separatist Health,” 203, 209, 210, 212, 213. 43. Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets, 234. 44. For a sense of the complex relationship between feminism and eugenics in New Woman writing, see “The Eugenic Plot: From New Woman to Brave New World,” in Mangum’s Married, Middlebrow, and Militant, 192–218.

160


coincidentally, India, China, and Africa were also important workspaces for Victorian and Edwardian medical women and those who wrote about them. However, the stories of Western medical women in those areas, wrapped up as they are in overpowering discourses of race and empire, tend to obfuscate rather than clarify distinctions such as feminist vs. maternalist women doctors; they tend, as well, to complicate the essentially progressivist and triumphalist narrative of the previous four chapters. It is to these stories of imperial medical women that I next and finally turn.

Chapter Five

6d8 Medical Women and Imperial Fiction

As the optimism of Mona Maclean, Medical Student implies, by the end of the nineteenth century, public feeling in Britain toward women doctors had taken a markedly positive turn. However, one supporter of the medical-woman movement, novelist Hilda Gregg, suggests rather cynically that the public’s approval did not extend to its own medical care: “That the feeling has changed in most places we are well aware,— wide as is the difference between approving the despatch of lady doctors to India (the heathen being charitably supposed to be so badly off that nothing could make them much worse) and consulting a lady doctor for your own ailments, or welcoming her as one of your family.”1 Gregg’s remark suggests that although the medical-woman movement, like the woman’s movement generally, has traditionally been treated as an event that occurred within Great Britain, concerning British law and British people, its ultimate success depended upon the empire. British novels of empire, as well as the Crimean-era fiction which I discussed in chapter one, substantiate this claim and provide examples of how “metropolitan” fiction helped Victorians imagine themselves upon the large stage of empire. 1. Gregg, “The Medical Woman in Fiction,” 109.

161

162


From its beginnings, British fiction represented the empire as a social safety valve and, more immediately, a convenient site in which to discard or reform characters. Similarly, Victorian culture represented its colonies as places where respectable men might find fortune and adventure, where respectable women might find husbands, and where “criminals” of both sexes might find respectability. For medical women of Victorian fact and fiction, the colonies offered the added bonus of providing plentiful and honorable labor that was undervalued at home. In Grant Allen’s novel, Hilda Wade (1899), for example, the nurse-heroine who is treated with little respect in a London hospital becomes, in plagueinfested India, an indispensable companion to an aristocratic stranger, Lady Meadowcroft. Recent critics have shown how imperial concerns pervade even Victorian fiction that had previously been thought “purely” domestic.2 Just as Crimean-era fiction featured romantic heroines who rushed off to nurse lovers at Scutari, other imperially tainted novels often represent woman’s “natural” affiliation with caring for the sick and needy. One thinks, for instance, of St. John Rivers’s expectation that Jane Eyre should assist his missionary work in India, or of the scene in the same novel when Jane replaces the drunken working-class Grace Pool as nurse when Bertha (the hot-blooded and vicious colonial) nearly murders her own brother.3 A less subtle example, and one that confirms the association between fallen and medical women discussed in earlier chapters, is Wilkie Collins’s The New Magdalen (1873), whose prostituteheroine assumes a new and respectable identity while nursing with the Red Cross during the Franco-Prussian War. Less sensationalistic changes became possible for women through the many British and American missionary societies that sent out women trained as nurses and doctors to all parts of the colonized world. And imperial military conflicts, from the Boer War to World War I, provided British women with ever greater opportunities to nurse and doctor overseas. By the end of the century, then, the medical woman movement and the cause of empire had become literally and literarily dependent upon one another. 2. In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said discusses the imperial “structure of attitude and reference” not only of Heart of Darkness and Kim, but also of such works as Mansfield Park and Great Expectations (62). 3. For an in-depth discussion of nursing in Jane Eyre see Catherine Judd, Bedside Seductions: Nursing and the Victorian Imagination, 1830–1880, 55–79.

Medical Women and Imperial Fiction

163

Of the first generation of women doctors educated in Britain, many practiced in Indian, African, Australian or Chinese hospitals and missions.4 Edith Pechey, the student whose loss of the Hope Scholarship helped spark the “Battle of Edinburgh,” became head of the Cama Hospital for Women and Children in Bombay, and Mary Scharlieb, educated at the London School of Medicine in the late 1870s, founded the Royal Victoria Hospital for Caste and Gosha Women in Madras before returning to serve as a surgeon at the New Hospital in London. These and other women’s hospitals served as training sites for European and Eastern women studying medicine at affiliated medical colleges; they also provided newly arrived British women doctors with the “local” experience they needed before setting up hospitals and clinics in more remote parts of the colonies. In contrast to the difficulties women doctors faced establishing themselves in Britain, opportunities for work in the colonies abounded and received support from the highest public figures. British women doctors were not united on this question of practicing in the colonies. Though they all understood the publicity value of medical missions, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Jex-Blake were both less than enthusiastic about them. On the other hand, Elizabeth Blackwell argued that it was the “imperative duty” of European women physicians to aid not just Indian women in purdah but especially those suffering from venereal disease under the Contagious Diseases Acts. Often, women physicians who wanted to practice medicine had little choice but to seek employment overseas. For instance, Miss Annette Matilda Benson became in 1894 “First Physician in the Cama Hospital, Bombay” after “great difficulty” obtaining hospital appointments in England.5 Nevertheless, from the 1870s until World War I, the cause of women’s medicine and medical education in the East grew steadily. Early on, women’s medical care was funded primarily by missionary and charita4. Percival Turner, Guide to the Medical and Dental Professions, with a Chapter on Lady Doctors by Miss F. M. Strutt-Cavell, 149. 5. See Todd, The Life of Sophia Jex-Blake; and Garrett Anderson, “The History of a Movement”; Blackwell, “The Responsibility of Women Physicians in Relation to the Contagious Diseases Acts,” 2; souvenir booklet from the 5th All-India Obstetric and Gynaecological Congress, Bombay, Dec. 1947. Wellcome Library Archives, C.146 [INDIA], Box 16: Medical Women Overseas, SA/MWF: Medical Women’s Federation; part c [historical], 10.

164


ble groups or by individuals, both foreign and native. As late as 1927, over half of the women’s hospitals in India were still “missionary controlled”; however, the trend was distinctly toward secularization and government support of women’s medicine. The most notable example of this trend occurred with the “Dufferin Fund” in India. In 1883 Lady Dufferin, wife of the Indian viceroy, arrived in India with “instructions from the Queen” supporting the creation of a fund to bring British women doctors to India to care for women in “purdah” and to train Indian women medical students. The Countess of Dufferin Fund established secular women’s hospitals and training institutions that supplemented those of the mission groups and supplied female doctors to staff both sorts of hospitals. Despite its clear connection to British officials, the Dufferin Fund operated as a private secular organization sustained by private donations. Indeed, Kumari Jayawardena points out that because the British government considered social reform in India a “potential cause of unrest,” reform movements during this period were largely in the hands of wealthy high-caste Indians and Western women. However, the Dufferin Fund hospitals were of quasiofficial status and in 1913 began receiving a government subsidy.6 The secular approach to medicine espoused by the Dufferin Fund and many women doctors received criticism from powerful missionary societies and some sectors of the British public. But Lady Dufferin asserted stoutly that “There can be no doubt that there is plenty of room for all that we can do, and all that missions can do in India.” Despite the assertion of “plenty” for religious and secular medical groups, the 6. See Louisa Martindale, The Woman Doctor and Her Future, 101–8; Kumari Jayawardena, The White Woman’s Other Burden: Western Women and South Asia during British Rule, 75–90; Wendy Alexander, First Ladies of Medicine: The Origins, Education and Destination of Early Women Graduates of Glasgow University, 60; “The Countess of Dufferin’s Fund: Fifty Years’ Retrospect: India 1885–1935,” booklet held in the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine Library Archives (London), box 16: medical women overseas, C.146 (India); Mary Ann Lind, The Compassionate Memsahibs: Welfare Activities of British Women in India, 1900–1947, 29, 32–33. Kumari Jayawardena explains that although “Indian opinion and British officials agreed in principle about the need for women doctors in India, government funds . . . were often not available for ‘special interests’ ” of this sort (The White Woman’s Other Burden: Western Women and South Asia during British Rule, 88, 67, 89).


165

advent of such government-supported institutions signaled a basic shift in official attitudes toward women’s medicine in the colonies. Her work, Lady Dufferin claimed, “does immense good where missions could not enter . . . and it has roused the native princes to care for their women as no private effort could do.” In other words, government-sanctioned medicine was more effective than private efforts; it reached more patients and coerced the participation of reluctant “natives.” This is the language of what medical historian Roy Macleod terms “medical imperialism,” by which Western medicine became “an imperializing cultural force itself,” extending “western cultural values to the non-western world.” Just as Florence Nightingale used Crimean military rhetoric to deploy her army of nurses among the working classes in Britain, colonial officials used Western medicine as one way to control India following the Mutiny. India was represented as “unhealthy,” its citizens were “sickly child[ren],” and the English government, represented by Victoria and Lady Dufferin, became the caring, instructive mother-nurse or lady doctor. The London School of Medicine for Women did its part in contributing to the Countess of Dufferin’s project; its Magazine reported, for instance, that from October 1895–1896 the school had placed graduates at medical missions in Dera Ismail Khan, Ratnapur, Bangalore, Ludhiana, Tarn-Taran, Lucknow, and Gujerat. According to the Magazine, by 1893 there were “no less than sixty-five hospitals and dispensaries” affiliated with the Dufferin Fund, which had treated 601,574 dispensary patients and 13,058 in-patients. Thus, the professional successes of Western medical women and the professional opportunities for Eastern medical women in the colonies depended upon the centrality of British medicine to British imperialism.7 Most Victorians apparently did not recognize the ironic parallel between the custom of “purdah” for Eastern women and the “modesty” of women in Britain that created the “need” for women doctors in both places. Parama Roy points out the connection between the separate 7. Mrs. Gardiner, “A Five Years’ Retrospect of the National Association for Supplying Female Medical Aid to the Women of India,” 222, 223; Roy Macleod and Milton Lewis, Disease, Medicine, and Empire: Perspectives on Western Medicine and the Experience of European Expansion, x, 2; Poovey, Uneven Developments, 197; “Appointments,” The Magazine of London School of Medicine for Women and Royal Free Hospital, 246–47; Gardiner, “A Five Years’ Retrospect,” 221.

166


spheres ideology in Britain and the Indian distinction between “ghar (home) and bahir (world)” during the late nineteenth century: the “fashioning” during the early nationalist period of the “new bhadramahila (bourgeois woman or, more fittingly, proper lady),” says Roy, was “curiously analogous to the making of a Victorian angel in the house.”8 Westerners assumed as well that Eastern women who studied Western medicine would naturally assimilate the values of Victorian womanhood in the process. Victorian narratives concerning Eastern women who become nurses and doctors focus overwhelmingly upon the cultural enlightenment that Western education brings to the women. The particular nature of the enlightenment is complicated, however, by the unevenness of Victorian womanhood itself by this point in the century, an unevenness to which, as previous chapters have shown, the confusing gender traits of medical women contributed greatly. This final chapter examines the discursive figure of the British medical woman out in the empire. My shift in focus is at once a logical next step, anticipated in metropolitan medical-woman texts, and a return to the context of “imperial need” or “crisis,” discussed in chapter one, in which Victorians initially accepted medical women during the Crimean War. I am interested here in the ways that “empire” opens up the category of the medical woman, and how “medical women” alter and force a reconsideration of the “Orientalist framework” of British imperialism. Many Victorian assumptions about health, medicine, sex and morality that I have traced through previous chapters as subtexts requiring elucidation become “exteriorized,” as Said would say, in the Orientalist medical project. The “manifest destiny” of British militarism and imperialism sustained by the “new” medicine that I first examined in relation to the Crimean War achieves its fullest flowering in British India and Africa. Again, we see the confluence of the medical and the religious in the medical missions that dominated health care in the colonies. And the elitism of Victorian medicine and middle-class feminism toward the working classes in Britain appears in an extreme, racialized form in the interactions between Western medics and Eastern patients. 8. Parama Roy, Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India, 129.


167

Traditional historians of empire have viewed British women as at best a passive and at worst a “destructive” force in maintaining British hegemony in the East.9 According to Percival Spear, for instance, “As women went out in large numbers, they brought with them their insular whims and prejudices, which no official contact with Indians or iron compulsion of loneliness ever tempted them to abandon.” As Spear’s comment implies, the “myth of the destructive female” asserts that the domesticity of British women ruined the male colonizer’s camaraderie with indigenous men and his sexual contract with indigenous women.10 Feminist scholarship has challenged this formulation. Besides doubting the complacency of the colonized under those supposed earlier arrangements, they have established British women as significant agents within imperial culture, whose presence is affirmed through writings of their travel, domestic arrangements, observations on colonial society and politics, and of their work as missionaries, nurses, and doctors.11 Even more recently, scholars have reassessed such feminist readings in light of postcolonial theory. Although Western reformers and professional women influenced the growth of feminism — not to mention basic human rights for women—in Asian and African countries, Western scholars have too often glossed over the Orientalisms and imperialist assumptions of their subjects.12 My reading of Victorian medical women in the colonies suggests that, however passive some British women may have been while their husbands and fathers were extending an 9. Margaret Strobel describes this view as the “myth of the destructive female” in her study, European Women and the Second British Empire, 1. See also, Claudia Knapman, White Women in Fiji 1835–1930: The Ruin of Empire? 7–15. 10. Percival Spear, The Nabobs, 140, quoted in Strobel, European Women, 1; see also Mark Nadis, “Evolution of the Sahib,” 430; Charles Allen, ed., Plain Tales from the Raj: Images of British India in the Twentieth Century; Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex, and Class under the Raj; Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience. 11. For essays which balance feminism against imperialism see Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel, eds., Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance. 12. This is a basic critical premise of Western Women and Imperialism. See also Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism, 33, 34. Kumari Jayawardena seeks to complicate the historiographical representations of women reformers in The White Woman’s Other Burden. She points out that foreign women in India have been placed too neatly into either the category of “white goddesses” or of “foreign devils” (2).

168


empire, nurses and women doctors were energetic and generally patriotic contributors to the cause of the empire. This revisioning of women’s participation in the colonies requires, as well, a rethinking of the models by which we analyze colonial discourse. The colonial discourse analysis pioneered by Edward Said in the late 1970s has been until recently too homogeneous to account for many colonial texts and, particularly, too masculinist to account for much European women’s writing of the period.13 When women’s texts fail to “fit” the prescribed model, they are too readily viewed as outside of colonial discourse. Though it is true that British women’s Orientalisms often assumed different shapes from and even undercut masculinist forms, they cannot be justified as “innocent” or even, I think, as ultimately subversive of Orientalism. If most medical women worked conscientiously to support the British Empire, however, they also undermined certain of its fundamental ideas. In particular, medical women dealt a severe blow to the imperialist project’s ideology of gender complementarity, which posited women as biologically inferior to men, incapable of the very mental and physical acts that women were actually performing in the colonies.14 Such is certainly the case with the women’s texts that I analyze in this chapter. Far from wishing to claim innocence, ignorance, or passivity, Dr. Mary Scharlieb’s autobiography and Hilda Gregg’s medical-woman adventure novel, Peace with Honour, assert the female imperialist’s knowledge, competence, and agency, all of which grow from the legitimating power of her medical study and degree. Despite this power, however, representations of medical women in the empire lack the threatening overtones that dominated those of medical women within Britain from the 1860s. The physical, mental, and emotional traits that characterize the new nurse and the New Woman doctor in metropolitan fiction remain largely unchanged in colonial texts. Nurses, in other words, remain paragons of nurturing femininity (and thus objects of sexual desire) in relation to highly independent and unfeminine women doctors. But colonial settings effect a shift in the significance of these same traits and, in particular, render benign what posed a threat to the social order in Britain. Textual repre13. Mills, Discourses of Difference, 63. 14. Helen Callaway and Dorothy O. Helly, “Crusader for Empire: Flora Shaw/ Lady Lugard,” 93.


169

sentations of medical women might thus be read as participating in the heavy recruitment of nurses and women doctors for overseas work during the period when Victorians staunchly supported female “medical missions” while remaining wary of women’s hospitals at home. They also participate in the cause of populating the colonies with Western children. When women who, in metropolitan settings, seemed either unsexed or sexually threatening are rendered acceptably feminine by a colonial context, they also become “marriageable.” Ironically, though, the same factors that allowed women greater freedoms in the colonies also allowed texts to impose a conventional marriage plot upon a broader range of otherwise subversive women. In short, the British medical woman in India or East Africa, or, indeed, anywhere in the empire, is represented as fundamentally (i.e., biologically) an “English lady” upon whom is grafted the fortifying and empire-building power of medical knowledge with its concomitant traits of self-reliance, rationality, and altruism. This is true of representations of colonial nurses as well as women doctors. The difference between these two roles was much less rigid in colonial settings than in Britain, where professional distinctions were enforced by stringent education and registration requirements absent in India or Africa. And the active presence of relatively untrained medical missionaries in the colonies muddied the waters even more. Textual representations tended to inscribe and enforce the basic homogeneity of the Western medical woman in the East. The professional distinctions (which is to say, distinctions of class and education) between the nurse and the woman doctor seemed much less important than the great differences of race, religion, and culture which separated Western from Eastern women. For this reason, in this chapter I will use “medical woman” as a general term to designate Western (and occasionally Indian) women, with more or less medical training, who practiced medicine in the colonies. However, after spending several chapters arguing for the rhetorical significance of professional status, I will not begin here to ignore it. Distinctions that colonial texts made between physicians and nurses, and between paid and unpaid medical women, retain rhetorical implications even if they did not matter to government officials or to the people who received medical aid. An author’s decision to write his or her medical woman as a nurse rather than a doctor implies a great deal about the sexual politics of the text precisely because the decision is a matter of choice.

170


These texts represent Eastern peoples and their cultures with even greater homogeneity than their portraits of Western women. I do not wish to reinscribe this homogeneity of colonized cultures and colonial discourse;15 however, it is important to emphasize that despite differences of setting, genre, sex and ideology of author, Western medicalwoman texts represent colonial subjects with stereotypical uniformity. As one might expect, in 1890s British literature, Africa is generally treated as a frontier whose “natives” act more violently toward the British than do the people of India, where the British had been long established.16 But these distinctions within and among the texts seem merely colorful cultural variations which do not disturb the assumed basic (again, biological) difference between Western colonizer and Eastern colonized. The globe-trotting nurse-heroine of Grant Allen’s Hilda Wade, for example, observes quite different “native” behaviors as she moves from South Africa to India and finally to Tibet. But in each country, Hilda extricates herself from a sticky situation by “out-smarting” the childlike natives with her superior mind and knowledge. Hilda, like other Western colonizers of this chapter, relies upon the power to dominate conferred by Orientalist “knowledge” of the East.17 Perhaps the most consistently stereotypical representations within these texts are of Eastern women who, whether Muslim or Hindu, Ethiopian or Indian, are portrayed as infantilized, hedonistic women who are either victims of male repression or who wield illegitimate and evil power. “Harem intrigue,” notes Gavin Hambly, is one of the “most frequent motifs in novels with a Middle Eastern setting.”18 Because the Western medical woman’s principal contribution to empire was to treat these women, such representations will be a central concern of this chapter. 15. Mills, Discourses of Difference, 51–53. Mills blames such reinscription by other historians and critics upon “Saidian analysis” (by which she means that of Orientalism, in particular) followed by later critics such as Rana Kabbani in Europe’s Myths of Orient: Devise and Rule. 16. Gavin R. G. Hambly suggests, “Islam was seen . . . as offering a more uncompromising opposition to westernisation” than nineteenth-century India or China, and ties nineteenth-century representations of Muslim wickedness to European press reports of specific historical events (“Muslims in English-Language Fiction,” 41). 17. This relation of knowledge to power is, according to Said, central to Orientalism and Western imperialism. See Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism. 18. Hambly, “Muslims in English-Language Fiction,” 39.


171

Despite my concern with Orientalist generalizations in these medicalwoman texts, I have attempted to structure this chapter to allow also for the emergence of “potentially more numerous, counter-hegemonic and multiply determined voices.”19 The first half of the chapter will focus on how medical women were represented in Western colonial fiction from standard “male” narratives such as Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1886) and Kipling’s The Naulahka (1892) to Hilda Gregg’s Peace with Honour (1897). The last of these is a curious hybrid of the New Woman doctor novel and imperial adventure fiction, which treats with stunning clarity many of the issues concerning women’s independence and sexuality which I have followed through the last four chapters. The second half of this chapter will look at how many of the same tropes and patterns appear in nonfictional texts concerning medical women in the East as well as in the first autobiographical novel written by a Hindu woman, Krupabai Satthianadhan’s Saguna (1887–1888).

Adventure Fiction and Medical Women Rider Haggard’s first novel, King Solomon’s Mines, epitomizes British imperial adventure fiction and bears such a resemblance to Peace with Honour that it is almost certainly a model for that novel as well as for many later African adventures, both real and imaginary. Reviewer Horace G. Hutchinson claimed in 1926 that Haggard’s South African romances had “aided far more than we can ever know in bringing British settlers and influence into the new country.”20 For our purposes, the novel demonstrates the possibilities for Eastern and Western “femaleness” in male-dominated imperial discourse from which women such as Hilda Gregg, Krupabai Satthianandhan, and Mary Scharlieb were forced to work. King Solomon’s Mines concerns the quest of three Englishmen to find a lost friend and an ancient treasure in the uncharted region north of Natal. Unlike the 1950 Hollywood film starring Deborah Kerr, Haggard’s novel explicitly excludes Western women, though it provides 19. Mills, Discourses of Difference, 58. 20. Horace G. Hutchinson, quoted in Wendy R. Katz, Rider Haggard and the Fiction of Empire: A Critical Study of British Imperial Fiction, 1.

172


representations of African women that graft racialist theory onto familiar tropes of Victorian womanhood.21 The result typifies the contradictory representations of Eastern women in British colonialist discourse. The following passage, taken from narrator Allan Quartermain’s introduction to his “history,” establishes the text’s attitude toward the female characters it excludes as well as those it represents: I am going to tell the strangest story that I know of. It may seem a queer thing to say that, especially considering that there is no woman in it — except Foulata [the African love interest]. Stop, though! there is Gagaoola [the witch doctress], if she was a woman and not a fiend. But she was a hundred at least, and therefore not marriageable, so I don’t count her. At any rate, I can safely say that there is not a petticoat in the whole history. (243)

One notes immediately the sarcasm toward Western women that Quartermain will maintain—despite the lack of any visible target—throughout the narrative. At the same time, however, this passage establishes an implicit hierarchy between Western women and the Eastern women who are included among their sex only as an afterthought. As Quartermain tries to explain his meaning, he further refines his definition of “woman” to include only those females who are “marriageable,” though, interestingly enough, he does not completely reject the possibility that a “woman” might also be a “fiend.” Nor is “marriageable” quite honest, for that is precisely what Foulata, despite her beauty and virtue, cannot be to the Englishman who falls in love with her. Finally, Quartermain reduces what he means by “a woman” to the metonymical category of “a petticoat,” thus disposing of her humanity and subjectivity altogether. In this way, the narrative need not trouble with the humanity or subjectivity of its African female characters who are even less than petticoats. Both Foulata and Gagool serve to illuminate the superiority of the three Englishmen to their African counterparts, and then are conveniently killed by one another. 21. A longer comparison between the Victorian adventure novel and the Hollywood film would, I believe, shed interesting light upon the gender and racial politics of both. In the movie, Kerr’s character replaces the novel’s Sir Henry Curtis as the initiator of the quest. She is a guilty wife searching for her husband, whom she has mistreated. In the novel, Sir Henry wishes to find his brother, George Curtis, whom he has meanly cut out of the family inheritance.


173

As does much of Victorian fiction, Haggard’s novel establishes its range of possibility for femaleness by depicting two opposing female characters. Foulata and Gagool are types familiar both to Orientalist fiction and to imperialist medicine. Gagool, the witch doctress, represents native medicine, which uses magic and poisons and plays upon the superstitions of the people in the service of “savagery.” In this she is no different from the local midwives decried in Western missionary accounts and fiction. From an English male perspective, Gagool’s power and authority are illegitimate; she controls the Kukuana people through the king she put into power after initiating a “palace coup.” It takes the three Englishmen who associate primogeniture and “law” with legitimate authority to restore the rightful king to the throne of the Kukuanas. Powerful Eastern women in Orientalist discourse are nearly always corrupt, since Eastern cultures were defined by the West as providing no legitimate, lawful routes for women to gain power. Nor is this characterization a simple function of misogyny; British feminists from Mary Wollstonecraft to Mary Scharlieb and, as we shall see, Hilda Gregg, used images of the corrupt seraglio or purdah to argue for Western women’s education as a legitimate means to self-determination and social influence. Foulata, the Eastern girl who seems physically and morally European and thus worthy of “rescue,” is an equally familiar Orientalist type. Foulata is described as the fairest of a race of women whose hair is “rather curly than wooly,” whose “features are frequently aquiline,” and whose “lips are not unpleasantly thick, as is the case in most African races” (310). Once back in England, Captain Good laments that he has not yet seen her equal. But, significantly, the text finally allows Foulata to be a “woman”—to be worthy of English love and admiration—not because of her Western beauty but because of her “natural” ability to nurse. Indeed, to define its indigenous women, Haggard’s text adopts the distinction between the proper nurse and the improper, even threatening, woman doctor that grew out of Victorian medical discourse in Britain. Unlike Gagool, who as a “doctress” uses “medicine” to destroy men, Foulata makes them whole by her feminine care. While Gagool and her subordinate witch doctresses operate independently of any male interference, even from the king, Foulata is the Englishmen’s “handmaiden,” and the medical assistant to Good, “a very decent [amateur] surgeon” (372).

174


In keeping with Crimean-era and later medical romances, sickroom intimacy produces love in both the nurse and patient. When Good, who has gallantly saved her from virgin sacrifice at the hands of her savage king and culture, is wounded in battle, Foulata nurses him until she “had to be carried away—her limbs were so stiff that she could not move them” (376). “Women are women, all the world over,” concedes Quartermain, “Yet somehow it seemed curious to watch this dusky beauty bending night and day over the fevered man’s couch, and performing all the merciful errands of the sickroom as swiftly, gently, and with as fine an instinct as a trained hospital nurse” (375). Here, Foulata transcends the limitations of race by what appears to be the more essential category of womanliness, which the text equates with the by-now familiar traits of the Nightingale nurse. The transcendence of gender over race is only temporary, though; King Solomon’s Mines does not seek to emancipate the almost-Englishwoman. The virgin finally is sacrificed for the good of her people. This Western-style martyrdom, however, is treated as noble in contrast to the futile savagery of African sacrifices to the gods. After Foulata’s death at the hands of Gagool, Quartermain remarks: her removal was a fortunate occurrence, since, otherwise, complications would have been sure to ensue. The poor creature was no ordinary native girl, but a person of great, I had almost said stately, beauty, and of considerable refinement of mind. But no amount of beauty or refinement could have made an entanglement between Good and herself a desirable occurrence; for, as she herself put it, “Can the sun mate with the darkness, or the white with the black?” (405)

Love, devotion, and feminine virtue in the service of Western medicine all fall before the irrevocability of racial difference. If King Solomon’s Mines is the seminal adventure novel for Anglo Africa, then Kipling’s The Naulahka (1892) solidifies the genre of British imperial fiction in India. D. A. Shankar has argued that “almost the entire post-Kipling British fiction on India either borrows or improves or offers new dimensions to the characters, incidents and attitudes present in this novel. . . . [T]he pattern and direction are set out here.”22 In particular, both the male and female “encounter” narratives, which 22. D. A. Shankar, “The Naulahka and Post-Kipling British Fiction on India,” 71.


175

depict Western “modernity” confronting and attempting to change an imperturbable and ancient culture, prefigure such works as Forster’s A Passage To India (1924) and Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet (1966–1975) as well as imperial fiction on Africa and the Americas such as Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness and Nostromo. Like Haggard, Kipling pits Western science and technology against inferior native practices and superstitions. However, he adds a “petticoat” to the equation, thereby complicating the imperial novel’s masculinist adventure plot with the parallel plot of womanly social reform. The nurse-heroine of The Naulahka, Kate Sheriff, becomes an archetype for the idealistic Western heroine who, like Forster’s Adela Quested and Scott’s Daphne Manners, confronts the East face-to-face and is repulsed. The Naulahka concerns two young lovers from Topaz, Colorado, each of whom travels to Rhatore, India upon a separate quest. The idealistic Kate Sheriff determines to run a hospital for women. Nicholas Tarvin, who epitomizes the entrepreneur and self-made man of the American West, decides to follow Kate to win her back and to buy or steal a priceless religious necklace called the Naulahka with which he plans to enrich Topaz and himself. These quests, like the visions of imperialism that they represent, are contradictory: one of conquest and plunder, the other philanthropic and constructive. In Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, these visions will be represented more pessimistically as that of the manager of the Central Station, who seeks only profit from imperial holdings, and as that of the young Kurtz, an emissary of “pity, and science, and progress” (30). Yet in The Naulahka, as in Conrad’s later and darker tale, the imperialist with fine intentions is finally no more successful than those who simply seek treasure. Kate’s noble aspirations are misguided, misunderstood, and ultimately even destructive. It is not surprising that medical reform should be Kipling’s way of introducing a Western “New Woman” into his plot. On one level, of course, it is a matter of realism—medical care and teaching were the principal ways that Western women came into meaningful contact with Indian women. And Kipling was well aware of the efforts and goals of the Dufferin Fund. In 1888, he published in the Pioneer Mail “The Song of the Women,” dedicated to the Fund.23 The speakers in the 23. Kingsley Amis reproduces a facsimile of the original printing of the poem in Rudyard Kipling and His World, 46.

176


poem are Indian women, trapped behind walls of the zenana, who ask the wind to carry their message of gratitude to “she” (Lady Dufferin or, perhaps, Queen Victoria) who “sent her servants [medical women] in our pain” (l.31). The Indian women bless the Englishwoman and catalogue the horrors of life before Western medicine reached them: By hands uplifted to the Gods that heard not, By gifts that found no favour in Their sight, By faces bent above the babe that stirred not, By nameless horrors of the stifling night; By ills foredone, by peace her toils discover, Bid Earth be good beneath and Heaven above her! (ll.25–30)

Kipling’s poem endows the Western medical woman with power over life and death, and makes her the defender of universal “Motherhood” (l.36). And like other medical-woman narratives, Kipling’s poem assumes that Western medical women will bring medical and social “enlightenment” to Indian women: Say that we be a feeble folk who greet her, But old in grief, and very wise in tears; Say that we, being desolate, entreat her That she forget us not in after years; For we have seen the light, and it were grievous To dim that dawning if our lady leave us. (ll.13–18)

Familiar Victorian and Orientalist images abound in this passage. India is an old and wise but now enfeebled civilization; its people, and especially its helpless women, are “desolate” and grieve to think that the light of the British Empire might leave them. The desperate plight of Indian women is also what sets the plot in motion in The Naulahka, though Kipling’s attitude toward Western medical reform is substantially more pessimistic in the novel than in the earlier poem. Kate dedicates her life to bettering the condition of women in India after hearing a lecture at her St. Louis school by the Indian reformer, Pundita Ramabai. Ramabai was an important historical figure who studied in England and then toured the United States in 1887–1888 lecturing on the “discriminatory practices of Hinduism” and requesting money to educate high-caste Hindu women such as herself and her cousins — the novelist and medical student Krupabai Satthianadhan


177

and Dr. Anandabai Joshee. In her lectures, Ramabai “made an emotional appeal to Americans” to contribute to her educational fund and thereby to free women from “life-long slavery and infernal misery.” “Let the cry of India’s daughters reach your ears and stir your hearts,” she urged in her 1887 publication, The High-Caste Hindu Woman.24 Kate’s initial thoughts about her new-found mission replicate Ramabai’s own language: “how the cry of her sisters out of that dim misery. . . tugged at her heart, how the useless horror and torture of their lives called on her by night and day” (9–10). As she continues to define her plans, however, Kate assumes the unmistakable air of the Western imperialist: “Above all, she wanted to be competent, to be wise and thorough. When the time came when those helpless, walled-up women should have no knowledge and no comfort to lean on but hers, she meant that they should lean on the strength of solid intelligence” (14–15). Though on a conscious level her goals are altruistic, Kate desires a position of authority and superiority over “inferior” people who, she assumes, need her help more desperately than do self-sufficient, independent Americans in Colorado. Moreover, Kate’s assumptions of superiority stem from her belief in the power that knowledge of the “other” confers, a basic tenet of Western imperialism. Kate’s medical training enables her imperial encounter by providing a respectable excuse for a Western woman to become intimately knowledgeable about Indian women’s lives, bodies, and sexual activities. Because Western medicine tended to define Eastern women’s illnesses in terms of sexual activity and reproduction, and because these almost inevitably required knowledge of male sexuality and marital relations, Kate becomes the novel’s “expert” on these matters with a medical sanction to pass judgment on them. The prior figure of the Western medical woman thus provides Kate and, by extension, the fictional heroines who follow her, with a great part of their “shape.” Most significantly, like the medical woman who sees her own distorted reflection in the prostitutes or the zenana women she treats, these characters are defined by visions of their own sexuality which they discover in Indian culture. Although we are encouraged to admire as indications of her soulfulness Kate’s efforts to practice medicine in India, those efforts are never24. Jayawardena, The White Woman’s Other Burden, 54, 55; Pandita Ramabai, The High-Caste Hindu Woman, 142.

178


theless destined to fail. From the point of view of “Kipling” (or, rather, the high-imperialist and masculinist ideology represented by his novel), Kate’s mission and its concomitant assumptions about Indians are perfectly correct, but her feminine sensibilities have become warped by the unnatural desires for worldly knowledge and independence advocated by Victorian feminism. Though, like Nicholas Tarvin, the typical Kipling hero is ennobled by work and gritty independence, these same qualities appear selfish and unnatural in Kipling’s women. The description of Kate’s departure from Topaz, for instance, implies that she desires the “life of men” and that, more shockingly, her work will displace her sexual function as a woman: She was launched; it made her giddy and happy, like the boy’s first taste of the life of men. She was free at last. . . . Nothing could keep her from the life to which she had promised herself. . . . In her dreams piteous hands of women were raised in prayer to her, and moist, sick palms were laid in hers. The steady urge of the ship was too slow for her; she counted the throbs of the screw. Standing far in the prow, with windblown hair, straining her eyes toward India, her spirit went longingly forth toward those to whom she was going; and her life seemed to release itself from her, and sped far, far over the waves, until it reached them and gave itself to them. (115)

Later in the novel, Kate explains to Tarvin her belief that for a woman marriage means a loss of self, “to be absorbed into another’s life,” to live “not as your own, but as another’s” (297). In this sense, Kate identifies with the women of India whose suffering, she believes, originates in marriage. By giving herself to the women of India, then, Kate seeks to avoid similar suffering. Yet, Kipling’s audience would have felt the truth of the novel’s ultimate marriage-plot imperative: all else must give way before the seemingly biological and racial need for white men and women to marry and reproduce. Though it portrays Kate’s intentions as misguided, the novel does not deny or dismiss the suffering of Indian women. Indeed, if Kipling had become more cynical about the ability of Western medicine to reach Indian women, he had also become more strident about the wrongs that they suffer. At the head of chapter ten of The Naulahka, Kipling places “A Song of the Women,” apparently a reworking of his 1888 poem. Unlike the earlier poem, this is spoken from the third person to an Indian parent. The tone is harsher, and the speaker is more


179

condemnatory of Indian culture. As in other texts of medical imperialism, religious beliefs and practices that ignore Western sanitary and medical rules are blamed for unnecessary death and suffering: Ye know the Hundred Danger Time when gay with paint and flowers, Your household gods are bribed to help the bitter, helpless hours;— Ye know the worn and rotten mat whereon your daughter lies, Ye know the Sootak-room unclean, the cell wherein she dies. Dies with the babble in her ear of midwife’s muttered charm, Dies, spite young life that strains to stay, the suckling on her arm— Dies in the four-fold heated room, parched by the Birth-Fire’s breath, Foredoomed, ye say, lest anguish lack, to haunt her home in death.

The poem presents as the culture’s most egregious mistreatment of Indian women and as a symbol of its corruption a new mother and child, dying because of the unsanitary customs of Indian midwives and priests and the neglect of the family. The Naulahka, too, judges the whole of Indian culture by its shameful treatment of women, from the Queen Mother of the province down to the lowliest desert woman. It is this mistreatment that Kate has come to correct, but what she discovers is that no amount of Western medicine nor any amount of money can repair a system that willfully subjects its women to the overwhelming power of fathers and husbands. Kate learns this lesson most forcefully at Rhatore’s State Hospital, which she has come to run. Under the supervision of the local doctor, the hospital has fallen into scandalous disrepair so that Kate enters “foul, undrained, uncleaned, unlighted, and unventilated rooms . . . one after another” (149). Sounding much like a midcentury sanitationist’s tract describing the homes of the British urban poor, the novel thus equates morality with sanitation, the metaphorical health of the empire with the literal health of its colonized peoples. The worst ward is that of maternity, where a local midwife has been placed in total control. Hearing of this, “Kate flung the door open wrathfully,” to find “clay and cowdung images of two gods, which the woman in charge was besprinkling with marigold buds. Every window, every orifice that might admit a breath of air, was closed, and the birth-fire blazed fiercely in one corner, its fumes nearly asphyxiating Kate as she entered” (148). As in “A Song of the Women,” the birthing customs of Indian midwives are portrayed as the most offensive of Indian medical practices, but also as a

180


representative perversity of the larger culture. When Kate throws out the midwife and begins to deliver babies in a Western manner, she challenges fundamental forms of Indian life. It is precisely this challenge that causes the ultimate failure of Kate’s reforms at the hospital. When the Maharajah’s evil wife, Sitabhai, wishes to make Kate leave the province, she incites an “ash-smeared, longhaired, eagle-taloned, half-mad, wandering native priest” (316) to persuade the hospital’s female patients and their husbands that Kate’s “magic” will cause the children born there to “have tails like camels, and ears like mules” (318). Kate persuades many of the women that she means them no harm, “but,” says the narrator, “the answer from all was the same. They were sorry, but they were only poor women, and they feared the wrath of their husbands” (321). That the fault lies with the system of marriage at all ranks of Indian society, regardless of wealth and position, Kate learns from her work among the Maharajah’s women. The Maharajah is exceedingly rich and lavishes great wealth upon his zenana women, and yet their lives seem to Kate a kind of gothic horror. The women’s quarter of the palace is a labyrinth of passages, court-yards, stairs, and hidden ways, all overflowing with veiled women . . . who thrust their children before her and bade her bring colour and strength back to these pale buds born in the darkness; and terrible, fierce-eyed girls who leaped upon her out of the dark, overwhelming her with passionate complaints that she did not and dared not understand. Monstrous and obscene pictures glared at her from the walls of the little rooms, and the images of shameless gods mocked her from their greasy niches above the doorways. . . . Plainly it was one thing to be stirred to generous action by a vivid recital of the state of the women of India, another to face the unutterable fact in the isolation of the women’s apartments of the palace of Rhatore. (132–34)

Kate pictures this “vast warren” as a literal breeding ground where sexual function defines a woman’s life and her illnesses. Woman’s function, in turn, is dictated by the “monstrous” and “obscene” Indian social and religious customs. When Kate leaves the palace with “her eyes full of indignant tears,” the narrator comments simply, “She had seen” (135). Kate’s privileged view into the life of the court allows her to see what no other Westerner can: that behind the rich and royal façade is a corruption whose depth not even the most cynical of Englishmen suspects.


181

India’s marital traditions, and particularly the practices of child marriage and polygamy, are to blame for the reigning terror of the Maharajah’s court: his newest wife, Sitabhai, a gypsy and a “murderess, convicted of poisoning her former husband” (81). The system under which many women are crushed makes Sitabhai devious and ruthless, qualities that attract the jaded Maharajah to her. Sitabhai understands that as long as she pleases her husband, she may wield all the power she desires from “behind the curtain.” Later in the novel when she bargains with Tarvin for the Naulahka (which she wears around her waist), she tells him, “I, and I alone, command this state” (272). As in King Solomon’s Mines, this text signals a woman’s evil by the illegitimacy of her power, particularly over men and male affairs, which she enforces with female magic and poison—“native” medicine. With Sitabhai’s ascendancy, the mother of the king’s oldest son falls out of favor and becomes a “widow in life,” ignored and neglected by everyone at the palace (331). It is the Queen Mother to whom Kate retreats after her hospital collapses, and it is she who explains to Kate the fundamental error of the medical mission. Kate had thought to help her Indian “sisters” by her “competence, knowledge, and thoroughness.” But the queen explains that these traits, so valued by Western science, are not enough; Kate must first become a “woman” herself to earn the trust of other women. “From all, except such as have borne a child,” the queen tells her, “the world is hid. . . . And they taught thee in a school . . . all manner of healing, and there is no disease in life that thou dost not understand? Little sister, how couldst thou understand life that hast never given it?” (341, 342). Speaking of the women patients who left Kate’s hospital, the queen asks, “And upon what should a maiden call to bring wavering women back again? The toil that she has borne for their sake? They cannot see it. . . . There was no child in thy arms. The mother look was not in thy eyes. By what magic, then, wouldst thou speak to women? . . . Thou hast given thy life to the helping of women. Little sister, when wilt thou also be a woman?” (342–43). Kate’s education, hard work, and sympathy are all for naught in the East, where women are defined and define themselves by their ability to reproduce. As in “The Song of the Women,” motherhood assumes here a magical power that binds women across racial and class boundaries. However critical the novel is of most Indian religious and social beliefs, the myth of motherhood to which the Indian women cling not

182


only remains intact but is exalted as the fundamental source of human sympathy. In effect, the Queen Mother advises what Tarvin has been telling Kate all along: a woman’s place is in the home, and her energies and sympathies should be devoted to her family. As for helping suffering Indian women, “It’s like trying to scoop up the ocean with a dipper,” says Tarvin (58). After her hospital fails, Kate concedes. She marries Tarvin and allows him to take her back to Colorado, for “the yearning of homesickness . . . lay strong upon her, and she would fain have remembered her plunge into the world’s evil as a dream of the night” (376). Finally, then, Kate accomplishes very little for “her” women and gains very little wisdom beyond what she could have learned at home. Nor, we are to believe, would any other Western woman fare better. With Kate’s failure the text asserts the futility of Western women’s efforts in the East. Though Kate’s failure at the hospital and marriage to Tarvin are as inevitable as any Indian marriage, the irony of making Kate join in sisterhood with the Queen Mother and other victimized Indian women is not commented upon. Kipling assumes that motherhood connects women, but does not acknowledge that marriage as he portrays it in both the East and West situates women similarly. This is precisely the question that Hilda Gregg’s Peace with Honour (1897) takes up when rewriting the marriage plot of Kipling’s novel. Like Haggard and Kipling, Hilda Gregg (“Sydney C. Grier”) was best known as a novelist of empire. Her published works besides Peace with Honour include In Furthest Ind (1894), His Excellency’s English Governess (1896), and The Great Proconsul (1904). Unlike the novels of Haggard and Kipling, however, Peace with Honour expresses a commitment to late-century feminism as well as to empire; these dual commitments make her writings productive sites for examining how the two discourses work upon one another. Though, like Kipling, Gregg prefers Western to Eastern marriage customs and ultimately marries off her New Woman heroine, she nevertheless puts forth a strongly feminist revision of Kipling’s sexual and marital politics. Gregg’s dual commitments in the novel are paralleled by dueling plots. The novel’s first chapter establishes its New Woman marriage plot when Major Dick North is reintroduced to Dr. Georgia Keeling, a woman who had scorned his love fifteen years earlier. In the same chapter, we learn that both North and the woman doctor will accompany a


183

small but prestigious diplomatic mission to Kubbet-ul-Haj, the capital of Ethiopia to establish a British trade alliance ahead of the Scythians and Neustrians (the Italians and French). Despite internal unrest in Ethiopia, the European powers are vying for the king’s attention because it “contains vast grain-producing districts and enormous mineral wealth, which only needs being worked. Hence it offers a wide field for the employment of capital, as well as a practically untouched market for manufactured goods” (26). Thus, the best and brightest of Britain’s diplomatic corps, the foreign service, the military, and the medical profession venture their lives in the service of British “capital.” The mission becomes, in other words, a sort of allegory of late-century British imperial expansion, as well as a more specific fictional rendering of British policy toward Ethiopia. Though the novel’s descriptions of Africa and European-African politics are partly historical and partly fantastical, Gregg’s choice of an Ethiopian setting is no accident. Ethiopia was the only African state besides Liberia to resist European occupation during the “Scramble for Africa” between 1880–1900. Ethiopia’s King Menelik had gone to war with Italy in 1894 over a treaty dispute and had by January, 1896 distinguished himself as the “only African ruler who had got the better of the white man in war.” After the Italian failure in Ethiopia the French and British both sent treaty missions to the country. Peace with Honour, in fact, may be an imaginative rendering of an early 1897 mission led by Rennell Rodd. If so, Gregg’s judgment that the mission will bring Britain “peace with honour” is rather too optimistic, for as historians Robinson and Gallagher put it, “The failure of the British mission was inevitable.”25 More important than its factual inaccuracy, though, Gregg’s novel captures a prevalent British attitude toward imperial expansion and those countries, such as Ethiopia, which resisted it. However misguided, the optimism of Peace with Honour’s adventure plot is typical of imperial adventure fiction that, like so many other texts from King Solomon’s Mines to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, places a small band of resourceful Westerners within a hostile Eastern setting. After 25. Adu Boahen, African Perspectives on Colonialism, 27; Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism, 359; see also Boahen, African Perspectives, 53–55; Robinson and Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians, 361.

184


two palace revolutions and several cases of “Borgia-like” poisoning, the British manage to get their version of the trade agreement signed and to escape Ethiopia with only the loss of their male doctor. They win, in other words, “peace with honor.” The novel’s title also applies to its marriage plot that, with the help of empire, unites a New Woman and an “Old Man.” The mission’s dangers, combined with the lovers’ rocky past and North’s vocal disdain of New Women and women doctors, make for a good deal of sexual tension and combative courtship before Major North and Dr. Keeling declare an honorable peace and, inevitably, marry. By enforcing intimacy and providing crises whose resolutions require both lovers’ expertise, the “quest for empire” enables the Victorian marriage plot even as it vies with it for the reader’s attention. During the course of their tumultuous courtship, Georgia’s profession comes to represent all that stands between her and Dick North, for Dick equates all that is wrong with the New Woman with women doctors. Above all, Dick is disturbed to find that his old sweetheart has been “spoilt by her medical training” (29). “These lady doctors are not womanly,” Dick tells his sister, “No one wants a woman to be brave and self-reliant. Now Miss Keeling’s manner—it implied that she could look after herself, and had no need of a protector. . . . That’s all very well, but it isn’t what I like in a woman. And she looked me over, just as a man might. It made me feel quite queer” (12). Gregg plays quite overtly upon the Victorian stereotype of women doctors as sexually ambiguous throughout her narrative. While studying for her medical exams, for example, Georgia — familiarly known as “Georgie”—cuts off her hair, so that in the photograph of her that Dick has carried for the past fifteen years Georgia looks “like a very nice boy” (16). The women of Ethiopia continually question the “doctor lady’s” status as a woman, and one young girl assumes that Georgia is a man because her “open coat and cotton blouse” resemble an Englishman’s “dress-coat and shirt-front” (354). Gregg’s use of the sexually ambiguous woman doctor differs significantly, however, from that of earlier woman-doctor novels by treating it as a misguided stereotype. Unlike Reade’s A Woman-Hater, for instance, which defines Dr. Rhoda Gale by her sexual ambiguity, Peace with Honour suggests that Georgia’s gender identification is a problem only for Dick. Only he of all the major characters, including Georgia herself, feels uncomfortable about Georgia’s gender. The novel makes


185

several references to the “New Woman” and treats objections to her as archaic and unnecessarily combative. Quite aware of its multiple connotations in Victorian culture, Georgia sometimes accepts the label and sometimes does not. But she does claim the rights of the New Woman because, she feels, she has earned them by her accomplishments. Because Dick equates one with the other, Georgia’s commitment to her profession comes to signify her commitment to “New Womanliness” and particularly to self-reliance, rationality, and work. Unlike Mona Maclean’s more pliable male acquaintances, Dick will not be “charmed” into accepting women doctors, even one with whom he is in love. “You say that you love me,” Georgia tells him, “but how do you treat me? . . . [Y]ou have done nothing but parade your contempt for me, and for everything I care for. What do you know about the New Woman? What do you know about me? and yet you have persecuted me continually with the name, which you, at any rate, meant to be one of reproach” (252). In contrast to Kate Sheriff, who accedes to her lover’s masculine obstinacy, Georgia refuses to abandon her profession or her principles for marriage and, instead, seeks Dick’s “subjugation, or conviction, or conversion” (260). Georgia hopes that her ability to contribute to empire—in effect, to Dick’s life’s work — will bring about this conversion. As in Kipling’s novel, the heroine’s medical profession provides her with “real work” and a privileged view within the empire. Gregg, who apparently felt sympathy for missionary work in the colonies, shows how Georgia works alongside missionaries with the conscious motive of making it easier for them to win Christian converts. Like the Dufferin Fund doctors, she goes “where [Christian] missions could not enter.” At Kubbetul-Haj, it is only through Georgia’s eyes and because of Georgia’s profession that the reader gets any view of Ethiopian domestic life or of internal affairs at the palace. Doctoring not only “opens up” the East to Georgia, but also makes her an invaluable member of the British mission. After Dr. Headlam is poisoned by the king’s vizier, Fath-Ud-Din, Georgia becomes the sole doctor for the mission. When Sir Dugald falls into a coma after drinking coffee with Fath-Ud-Din, Georgia realizes that the “honour” of the mission depends upon her ability to cure him. A “completely secondary” but “sufficiently weighty” motive, Georgia admits to herself, is that “she longed to be able to do something that might justify her in

186


Dick’s eyes, might bring him to acquiesce of his own free will in her continuing the practice of her profession, and thus avert the crisis she foresaw and feared” (260). From her allies within the palace, Georgia learns that an old witch doctress, Khadija, has supplied Fath-Ud-Din with the poison used on Sir Dugald and that only she knows the proper antidote. In order to win the antidote, Georgia travels with only her Khemistani maid to Khadija’s fortress, and there pits her Western medical knowledge against the witch doctress’s ancient arts. Georgia promises to perform surgery on the crushed foot of Fath-Ud-Din’s young daughter in exchange for the antidote and instructions for its use. Georgia’s confrontation with Khadija stands for the larger confrontation between West and East, which is portrayed here, as in King Solomon’s Mines and The Naulahka, through opposing female characters and their uses of medicine. As a sign of her unenlightened Eastern view of medicine, Khadija is presented as “cherish[ing] a strong preference for muddle and dirt over cleanliness and order”; her rooms, Georgia notes with disgust, are filled “with the dust and the rags of ages” (350), and the patient’s foot is wrapped in a “mass of dirty rags” (355). Georgia, in contrast, carries a neat medical kit with chloroform, sanitary bandages, and a variety of surgical instruments which her maid polishes diligently. With these appliances, “such as had never been seen in Ethiopia before,” Georgia operates on her patient “speedily and successfully,” and thus earns the antidote to cure Sir Dugald. Khadija is a familiar type: like Kipling’s Sitabhai and Haggard’s Gagool (whom she resembles remarkably), this woman controls affairs of state through illegitimate power, intrigue, and poison. Georgia, however, shows distinctly feminist developments over her corresponding female antagonists of the earlier novels. She need not martyr herself like Foulata, nor rely on male help like Kate, in order to save male lives; rather, she trades upon her intelligence and medical skill to overcome the evil Khadija. Unfortunately, even this feat does not “convert” Dick completely; in fact, in his anger over the risks she has taken, he seems to forget that Georgia has saved Sir Dugald’s life. But Dick falls conveniently into a fever and so appreciates Georgia’s medical care that he tells her, “impose your conditions on me while I am in this softened state” (399). Finally, the two do marry with the understanding that Georgia will employ herself in “doctoring women and children” and “leaving the house to take care of itself” (401).


187

Despite this apparently happy ending, though, marriage remains in the novel an uncertain, even ominous, institution from the woman’s point of view. Georgia and Dick fight violently enough during their engagement to imply that their married life will be anything but placid. And Lady Haigh, who seems to have a remarkably happy Victorian marriage, admits to Georgia that she and Sir Dugald were “never a sentimental couple . . . though I would have liked a little—just a little— more expression, don’t you know?” (403). As in Kipling’s The Naulahka, where Indian marriages serve as foils for the imminent union of Kate and Tarvin, the Ethiopian setting of Peace with Honour allows Georgia to consider marriage to Dick North in relation to the Muslim marriages she encounters at the royal palace. Further, here as in Kipling’s text, the treatment of women within marriage becomes a metaphor for the condition of the larger culture. Gregg does not paint the Eastern zenana as darkly as does Kipling: the Ethiopian women are merely bored and idle, prompting them to conduct petty intrigues against one another. When the queen and her daughter-in-law, Nur Jahan, learn of Georgia’s engagement to Dick, they take pity on her. “I thought thou wert free and happy,” Nur Jahan tells Georgia (264). The queen instructs the younger woman to be quiet: “Knowest thou not that the caged birds should entice the wild ones into the trap, and not warn them away? Hath the lot of all women overtaken thee at last, O doctor lady? I would have thee give God thanks that it comes so late” (264). One might read the queen’s claim of common female “lot” as simply ignorant of English marriage customs, and Gregg’s point to be the superiority of Western over Eastern marriage, except for the disruptive presence in the novel of Nur Jahan and her father, Jahan Beg (“John Bigg”), an English expatriate and Muslim convert. Jahan Beg, the principal British ally in the Ethiopian government, left “civilization” behind after a disappointment in love. In Ethiopia, he married the king’s cousin and rose within the government. Jahan Beg did not love his Ethiopian wife, and though he does not practice polygamy, he is cruel and tyrannical to her. She also warns Georgia against marriage: “If it is true that thou art free to act in the matter according to thine own will, consider what thou doest before it is too late. My daughter tells me that thou hast no fear, since thy betrothed is an Englishman; but I know too well that all husbands are alike, for I also am married to an Englishman” (270). Western narratives of this period largely assumed that an inferior Eastern

188


culture was the product of an inferior racial biology—that, for instance, an Indian woman even when taken out of her cultural matrix would remain a racially inferior doctor. But by providing a cross-cultural critique of marriage, Peace with Honour, however unintentionally, disturbs the neat Victorian association of race and culture. The imperial politics elsewhere in the novel imply strongly that Gregg has no intention of questioning English racial and cultural superiority. But this is one consequence of strident feminism operating within a blatantly imperialist text: the novel disrupts the association of race and culture because Gregg is so interested in privileging (Western) women’s rights and criticizing (Western) marriage that she briefly allows gender to transcend race as a category of analysis. The character of Jahan Beg’s daughter provides evidence both of the novel’s complication of these categories and its essential racialist Orientalism. Nur Jahan, though Muslim and married to the king’s son, nevertheless possesses English moral and physical traits—presumably a sign of their hereditary dominance. Because Jahan Beg assumes that his daughter is “happy with her husband and her baby,” he asks Georgia not to tell her of “English life and the Christian position of women, and all those other luxuries of civilization of which you are the culminating product. . . . It could do no possible good, and it certainly would do a great deal of harm, for things of that kind are absolutely unattainable here” (96). Jahan Beg believes, in other words, that Eastern acculturation will override the Western blood in his daughter—even though it has not in him. But Georgia learns that this is not the case. Nur Jahan is not happy in the zenana, and the women all recognize that though her life will follow a pattern similar to theirs, Nur Jahan is constitutionally different from them. During her treatment of the queen’s eyes, Georgia relies upon Nur Jahan to act as nurse. She notes sadly that the young woman would make a fine doctor, but reflects that “a medical career would be an impossibility for her” because of Ethiopian customs (134). Georgia blames Jahan Beg for condemning his daughter to an Eastern life: “It is his spirit she inherits. . . . I can see that she is pining for outside interests, though she doesn’t know it. In a man of English blood this would seem quite natural and proper to every one, and why should it be different for a woman?” (110–11). In her zeal to vindicate the rights of an “English girl” trapped in a zenana, Georgia asserts that “blood” is more basic and defining than culture or even sex. In this


189

way, the text undercuts its own cross-cultural critique of marriage that unites Eastern and Western women against male dominance. Nur Jahan is an unusual figure in British imperialist discourse of this period in that she exhibits so explicitly the seams of racial and cultural hybridity. The lives of prominent and educated Eastern women provide less blatant but no less powerful examples of such hybridity. Once again, medicine plays an imperial, Westernizing role. The importance of women’s medicine to empire and the prominence of the woman doctor as the new, modern woman, meant that Western medical practice became the goal of many Eastern women, especially in India. Representations—and even self-representations—of such women incorporate many of the same narrative patterns and character traits as those found in the fiction of Haggard, Kipling, and Gregg.

Indian Medical Women Mary Scharlieb’s Reminiscences (1924) recounts the experiences of one of the earliest Western woman doctors in India. Scharlieb had studied midwifery at a lying-in hospital in Madras, where she had gone with her husband in 1865, before returning to England in 1878 to earn her M.D. at the London School of Medicine for Women. In 1883, Scharlieb returned to India, where she practiced among Indian and European women until ill health forced her to return to England permanently four years later. Scharlieb’s most detailed anecdote of her Indian medical practice concerns a “young Mahommedan woman of good birth” who eventually becomes a physician (100). This anecdote shows not only how Western medical women interpreted the illnesses of their indigenous female patients through their own cultural grid, but how even the most progressive Western reformers applied racialist categories to their Eastern “sisters.” Scharlieb describes the patient as she might a sympathetic English girl who has been repressed by her parents: “The girl was strictly purdah, very pretty. . . [with] a loving heart, as well as more intelligence than is possessed by the average well-born Mahommedan girl” (100). Scharlieb diagnosed and treated the girl’s “hysteria” with cold and hot water and even electric shock, though to no avail (101). The girl’s ultimate cure resulted from her desire to emulate the nurses and women doctors who cared for her in the hospital.

190


“Lying on her cot” interprets Scharlieb, “she began to realize something of the usefulness, beauty, and dignity of a nurse’s life” and wished to “carry to other Mahommedan ladies something of the comfort and help that had secured her own recovery” (102). Scharlieb’s anecdote resembles other Victorian feminist narratives that insist that women’s “nervous” illnesses result from social repression and inactivity and may be cured through meaningful work. In this way, her Muslim patient reenacts and justifies the careers of Scharlieb and other Victorian women who work outside the home. Though Scharlieb does not question the ability of Western medicine and Victorian womanhood to effect a cure for her “hysterical” Muslim patient, she is skeptical of the young woman’s ultimate abilities: After a time the girl became an efficient and kindly nurse: she was of great service to me . . . in the management of the many hysterical and nervous women who attended. She would often exclaim “Oh, hysteria, that my old trouble! I bring cold water, hot water and battery, that doing plenty good.” If the hysteria took the form of inability to walk, she would vigorously seize the sufferer, and . . . endeavor to induce the patient to use her powers of locomotion. (102)

The childish dialect that Scharlieb represents matches the Muslim woman’s unimaginative repetition of a treatment that had failed to cure her own “hysteria.” Moreover, she is represented as unconsciously brutal. Scharlieb notes only briefly and unenthusiastically that the woman “must have made an efficient and acceptable doctor.”26 Scharlieb’s desire to help Eastern women and the sacrifice of her time, energy, and health do not displace the veiled racism of her text and her assumption that the Muslim woman is constitutionally and racially an inferior doctor to herself. The message of Maud Diver’s biographical sketch in Pioneer Women of India (1909) of Dr. Anandabai Joshee, the first Hindu woman to receive a Western M.D., is much like that of Scharlieb’s anecdote.27 In 1883, Joshee traveled to the United States and enrolled in the Philadel26. Mary Scharlieb, Reminiscences, 103. 27. Maud Diver, “The Englishwoman in India” and “Pioneer Women in India.” Diver’s sketch, I have discovered, is lifted more or less word for word from Sketches of Some Distinguished Indian Women by Mrs. E.F. Chapman.


191

phia College of Medicine. In 1886, Joshee received the degree and returned home to India, having accepted a post in a hospital at Kolapur (231). She died soon thereafter, however, from tuberculosis—apparently contracted during her stay in Philadelphia. In Diver’s retelling, the heroism of Anandabai Joshee’s career is marred by two distinctly Indian difficulties. First, because of his Hindu beliefs, Joshee’s husband lacked sympathy for his wife’s endeavors. “He wrote slightingly of woman and all her works; sceptically of her mental prowess; while readily accepting all he could get from his wife and her friends,” writes Diver, “[T]he position was a new and unpleasant one for an Eastern husband, whose wife—according to India’s code—should have been incapable of living successfully and contentedly apart from himself” (229–30). Diver’s criticism of this “Eastern husband” is amusing for its cultural amnesia: it is difficult to imagine that the typical Western husband, even in “these days of the ubiquitous professional woman” (i.e., 1909), would have relished the idea of his wife “living successfully and contentedly apart from himself” (218). Nevertheless, Diver blames Gopal Vinyak Joshee’s displeasure at his wife’s independence upon his being “too innately a Hindu” (230). But even more important to Joshee’s ultimate failure than her husband’s opposition were “physical” and “racial” forces (219). In an interesting reversal of the stories of many Englishwomen in India, the climate and hard work that Joshee encountered in Philadelphia ruined her health. “[H]er strenuous spirit was too vigorous for her fragile body” (229), writes Diver, “Consumption had laid hold of her, and her life could only be counted by months” (231). As if to distinguish between Joshee’s death by overwork and that of European women who met similar fates, Diver resorts to a social Darwinist and racialist explanation: “more than one generation must pass away before the undeveloped brains and bodies of India’s women can safely be subjected to the ruthless strain put upon them by spirits athirst for knowledge” (230). This explanation is particularly ironic since Diver had introduced Joshee as a member of a “dominant” and elevated Indian race, a “race renowned for pluck, hardihood, and strength of character” whose women were “allowed more freedom” and “held in high esteem” (219). In other words, even the brightest and most progressive of India’s women are constitutionally unfit for the rights and privileges which Victorian feminists claimed for middle-class British women. The sexologists’ and social

192


Darwinists’ assertions that women’s education endangered the English race, so strenuously denied by Victorian feminists, are here applied by an “advanced” British woman to her Indian “sisters.” Both Scharlieb’s and Diver’s accounts mark them as middle-class British feminists who, in the words of Antoinette Burton, “constructed ‘the Indian woman’ as a foil against which to gauge their own progress,” despite “both their genuine concern for the condition of Indian woman and the feminist reform activities of prominent Indian women.”28 Standing in complex opposition to these Western representations of the Indian New Woman is the fictionalized autobiography of Krupabai Satthianadhan, Saguna: a story of a native Christian (1887–1888).29 Satthianadhan, the daughter of Brahman converts to Christianity, was encouraged to study by her intellectual older brother, and later attended a mission school for Indian girls in Bombay. She was so far advanced beyond the other students at the school that the teachers suggested she study medicine under an American woman doctor there. Though Satthianadhan eventually won the opportunity to earn a medical degree in England, the head of the Mission insisted that because of her fragility she must stay in India. After one year of study at the Madras Medical College, where she distinguished herself by winning several prizes, Satthianadhan was forced by ill health to quit medical school. Soon after, in 1881, she married the Rev. Samuel Satthianadhan. From then until her death in 1894 (apparently from complications of childbirth), Satthianadhan taught in the zenanas and in schools for Indian girls, wrote Saguna and a novel, Kamala: a story of Hindu life (1894), and contributed articles on Indian life to various journals. Saguna develops a portrait of a young woman who is caught between an old and a new order for Indian women and between the cultural forces of East and West; Saguna’s is an “Indian identity struggling 28. Antoinette M. Burton, “The White Woman’s Burden: British Feminists and ‘the Indian Woman,’ 1865–1915,” 137. 29. All citations are to the 1998 reprinting of the novel: Krupabai Satthianadhan, Saguna: The First Autobiographical Novel in English by an Indian Woman, ed. Chandani Lokugé (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998). Lokugé explains that “Saguna was first published serially in the Madras Christian College Magazine in 1887–1888. It was published posthumously as a book by Srinivasa, Varadachari and Co., Madras, in 1895” (ix). Lokugé chose to change the original subtitle, perhaps to suit a contemporary audience.


193

to home in cross-cultural currents.”30 Like her father and influential older brother, Bhasker, Saguna asserts that one can be both a devoted Christian and a patriotic Indian. Bhasker tells Saguna that he is “a Brahman to the backbone, and he would show his countrymen what it was to be a real patriot to live and die for one’s native land” (25). This same brother, however, compares the dawn on an Indian landscape to the “sunbeams of Christianity” which “dispel the darkness of superstition in a land” that had been “shadowy, dark, mystic, weird” (23). Saguna does struggle with her faith at key points in the novel—particularly when it comes into conflict with her intellectual ambitions at the mission school. But the victory of Christianity over Hinduism is inevitable from the beginning of this tale, first published as a serial in the Christian College Magazine, and so creates little suspense.31 Saguna feels a similar ambivalence toward the rest of Western culture. She becomes angry with “England-returned” Indians who affect British accents and who now call England “home” and slight their families as old-fashioned (147). Yet she longs to study in England, and revels in the freedoms that Western culture provides for women. To be a good Christian woman, Saguna must reject what Westerners viewed as the savage customs enforced upon Indian women—the most dramatic being child marriage, utter subjugation to the husband and his family, and suttee. And yet, when Saguna does reject the traditional Indian role for women and choose instead a Western education and career, she comes perilously close to resembling the New Woman, an impious and frighteningly androgynous figure who threatened even Western notions of man’s superiority and woman’s properly submissive role. Above all else, the opportunity to study and practice medicine represents for Saguna the advantages of Western culture: [N]ow what a world of untried work lay before me, and what large and noble possibilities seemed to open out for me. I would now throw aside the fetters that bound me and be independent. I had chafed under the restraints and the ties which formed the common lot of women, and I longed for an opportunity to show that a woman is in no way inferior to 30. Chandani Lokugé, “The Cross-Cultural Experience of a Pioneer Indian Woman Writer of English Fiction,” 105. 31. Noted in a review of the first edition, Harvest Field (Mar. 1890), quoted in Satthianadhan, “Opinions of the First Edition” (appendix), iv.

194


a man. How hard it seemed to my mind that marriage should be the goal of woman’s ambition. (131)

Such passages prompted some contemporary reviewers to emphasize the text’s feminism rather than its Christianity, and to label Krupabai a New Woman. Saguna shows “the native ‘new woman’ beside the old,” noted The Queen; it is “a study of the ‘New Woman’ as she is in Indian surroundings,” remarked Miss Billington of the Daily Graphic. Though Saguna never questions her Christian faith—indeed, Lokugé calls the text Christian propaganda—she does reject the anti-intellectual piety espoused by the teachers at the zenana mission school who, like proponents of Indian orthodoxy, believed that women should not become overly learned.32 Saguna’s feminist individualism conflicts with both traditional Indian life and with Western Christian forms throughout the text. Just as Saguna finds in her brother Bhasker a model for harmonizing Christian faith and Indian nationalism, she discovers in the American woman doctor a model of a Christian New Woman. “The lady doctor was . . . the radical element in the institution,” remarks Saguna, “Peculiar in manners, she set at nought all its ordinances. . . . She was the only one [of the ladies] that went to whatever church she liked” (140). Saguna describes the woman doctor as the antithesis of what was considered womanly in both Indian and Western culture; she was “abrupt and unattractive in manner” with a “massive, firm-built form,” and yet a “strange power seemed to emanate from her” (138, 140). Saguna’s mentor resembles strongly other Victorian representations of Victorian women doctors. She seems nearly indistinguishable from the fictionalized portraits of Sophia Jex-Blake in Mona Maclean or A Woman-Hater, which presented androgynous, domineering doctors taking charge of young women. “I began to love this strange lady, who was an enigma to others” says Saguna, “Her influence upon me was unbounded. . . . Her interest and love were shown not in words nor in the display of emotion of any kind. They were only felt—felt in the firm grasp of the hand, in the flashing look of inquiry, in the abrupt, unceremonious way in which she gave me books to read, and in the unlimited free32. “Opinions of the First Edition,” Saguna, i, v; Lokugé, “The Cross-Cultural Experience,” 104.


195

dom which she allowed me in the choice of subjects and books” (140). Although the doctor’s tutelage of Saguna might be read as a form of “cultural imperialism,” an attempt to make her “Western” and to rescue her from Indian bigotry, Satthianadhan does not represent it in these terms. Rather, the doctor provides Saguna with the “freedom” to develop intellectual interests and personal impulses that already existed in her, and to elude Western as well as Eastern bigotry. By providing an alternate version of Western womanhood, the doctor opens up for Saguna the possibility of an alternative to the traditional Eastern womanhood against which she rebels. She allows Saguna to develop a sense of self that, however vexed, incorporates certain aspects of feminism, Western culture, and Indian patriotism. Finally, however, critics who wish to read Saguna primarily as a feminist text and Satthianadhan as a feminist champion must ignore the story’s end. Saguna (like the author) withdraws from medical school because after a year of hard intellectual labor “a feeling of complete prostration came over me. What was it? I was frightened, and I feared a breakdown” (155). Saguna does not, in fact, “break down,” but rather meets and marries Samuel Satthianadhan; she abandons her medical studies and from this point until her death, bends her work and her life to complement his. Just as Diver’s sketch of Anandabai Joshee asserts that medical school caused death by consumption, Saguna and other accounts of Satthianadhan’s life impute blame to one year of medical study for her death some thirteen years later. One might suggest that a physically fragile woman would have done better not to have borne a child. But by blaming medical study, Krupabai’s life conforms more neatly to the discursive pattern of Indian women whose “eager spirit” and intellectual ambition exceeded the biological limitations of sex and race. This same pattern proves particularly useful to British colonial fiction, especially when it seeks to contrast Eastern to Western women in the interests of empire. The texts in this chapter demonstrate how medicine facilitated the complex relationship between Victorian feminism and imperialism. Though the writings of Maud Diver, Mary Scharlieb, and Hilda Gregg posit a very different relation of “woman” to “empire” than do those of Kipling and Haggard, their feminisms tend rather to strengthen than subvert Victorian imperialism. Moreover, the figure of the medical woman, held up in metropolitan and colonial texts as the epitome of

196


the New Woman, derives her power from and subjects her patients to the same medical “science” which upheld the sexual and racial hierarchies of Victorian patriarchy and the empire. Antoinette Burton, for one, has argued persuasively that “liberal bourgeois feminism” was “if not predisposed toward imperialism, then at least compatible with and easily fueled by an imperial ethos.”33 Textual representations of the medical woman in the empire provide explicit, concrete examples of this fundamental theoretical connection between Victorian feminism and imperialism. The universalizing tendency of contemporary feminism implies that this “Victorian” bias remains a problem. For instance, Judith Butler might be critiquing Hilda Gregg’s novel when she writes: “The political assumption that there must be a universal basis for feminism, one which must be found in an identity assumed to exist cross-culturally, often accompanies the notion that the oppression of women has some singular form discernible in the universal or hegemonic structure of patriarchy or male domination.” This feminism, Butler adds, attempts “to colonize and appropriate non-Western cultures to support highly Western notions of oppression,” and “to construct a ‘Third World’ or even an ‘Orient’ in which gender oppression is subtly explained as symptomatic of an essential, non-Western barbarism.”34 The degree to which such “attempts” proved successful at the end of the last century can be judged not only by texts of the colonizers, but by those of the colonized as well. Krupabai Satthianadhan’s story, though not representative of all Indian women, reflects a “double-consciousness” or “schizophrenic imagination” that grew out of her desire to accommodate Western feminism to traditional Indian womanhood.35 This “double-consciousness” is illustrated succinctly by Saguna’s description of a childhood friend whose social position and intellectual ambitions she shares: “Her mother wore a saree. But she attended an English school, and her thoughts were influenced by those with whom she mixed” (97). Saguna exhibits the continuities and mutual influences across metropolitan and colonial constructions of femaleness and 33. Antoinette M. Burton, “The White Woman’s Burden,” 138. 34. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 3. 35. W. E. B. Du Bois used the phrase double-consciousness to describe the African American experience. I intend to imply Krupabai’s situation as analogous, though not identical.


197

woman’s relation to medicine. Is it a coincidence that Georgia Keeling’s relation to her “native” female patients resembles that of, for instance, Mona Maclean to London street girls and ignorant matrons? Is it a coincidence that authors as different as Mary Scharlieb and Rider Haggard “raise” deserving Eastern women by writing them as nurses, just as Elizabeth Gaskell “raises” the fallen Ruth and the “Lady with the Lamp” rose out of the former image of the nurse as a prostitute? I would suggest that these are not matters of chance, and that the same configurations of power, knowledge, and gender which operate in the metropolitan construction of Victorian womanhood also operate, or perhaps have analogues, out in the empire. The metropolis and the empire, as sites that shaped the particular forms of the configurations, work off of one another dialectically and textually to establish common and relatively stable representations of proper and improper womanhood.

d Conclusion d

It is common for histories of Victorian feminism such as this to project well into the twentieth century. Were I to follow this pattern, I might achieve a triumphant and seemingly organic effect by ending the story of British medical women after World War I, which made nursing a widespread and broadly accepted phenomenon and which saw women doctors organizing in force to help the war cause. I might even have pointed to the suffrage victory in 1918, which has so often been linked to women’s war service, as the culmination of women’s participation in health care since the Crimean War. Though satisfying, such an ending would be rather misleading. Historians such as Ray Strachey, Martha Vicinus, and Anne Summers agree that British women over thirty received the right to vote in 1918 because of their war contributions, but all are quick to point out how those contributions were fueled more by patriotism than feminism and how the backlash against independent working women after World War I was as virulent as after the Crimean War. Summers, for instance, comments that despite its logic, “in practice there was no inevitable connection between female war service and female political equality” (273). Wartime hospitals in Britain, admits Strachey, were organized and staffed by women doctors only because the War Office had rejected their offer of help in 1914; the first British women’s medical corps during the war was sponsored by the French and Belgian governments.1 1. Strachey, The Cause, 350; Vicinus, Independent Women, 282; Summers, Angels and Citizens: British Women as Military Nurses, 1854–1914, 273; Strachey, The Cause, 338; A. H. Bennett, English Medical Women: Glimpses of Their Work in Peace and War.

198

Conclusion

199

Moreover, nurses and women doctors themselves did not necessarily believe that their wartime (or peacetime) work justified political or social equality. The leaders of voluntary nursing organizations such as the Voluntary Aid Detachments and the Red Cross, notes Summers, were “some of the most vocal anti-suffragists of the period” (273). At the same time, prominent women physicians such as Mary Scharlieb and Louisa Martindale were, like Arabella Kenealy, advocating a eugenic approach to women’s medicine and public health that makes claiming their work as feminist problematic. Kenealy herself published in 1920 her best-known work, Feminism and Sex-Extinction, a postwar polemic advising women to return to domestic femininity for the good of the race. If the story of Victorian women and medicine does not achieve a neat, feminist ending with World War I—or, indeed, at all in the twentieth century—it nevertheless marches forward. Or, rather, they march forward for, increasingly, the professionalization of nursing, the integration of women into male-dominated medical professions, the missions bringing Western health services and training to colonies and developing countries all assume narrative trajectories of their own. Similarly, one problem in tracing the representational strands of nurses and women doctors very far into the twentieth century is that they become increasingly fragmented along lines that I have already identified. Just as Lytton Strachey makes orthodox a split vision of Florence Nightingale, it becomes perfectly natural to recognize an array of contradictory stereotypes of the nurse as “nurse,” and the woman doctor as “doctor” without recognizing their relation, their contradiction, or even the very little they have in common with the men and women who work in health-care facilities. Today in London, advertisements for nasty nurses are stuck in phone booths outside of the Florence Nightingale Museum and the Imperial War Museum, both of which succeed in portraying that eminent Victorian as an entirely noble protofeminist crusader who saved thousands of “common men” in the Crimea and devoted her postwar years to making life more bearable in Britain’s colonies and industrialized cities. It is easy to recognize the relation between this figure and that of the imperial medical woman whose image has been revitalized and reworked again and again in British and American postcolonial literature,

200


movies, and even interactive computer games.2 These contradictory images of the nurse and woman doctor also contribute to the nostalgia surrounding what Salman Rushdie calls the “raj revival” in Western culture since the 1970s.3 By portraying the English or American woman as a nurse or a woman doctor, such texts can depict her presence in imperial settings as benign and even salutary, and use her metonymically to imply a benign and salutary empire. “At home,” the culture of sex and violence surrounding the nurse is exploited in many thriller or slasher films and fictions. And, not incidentally, nurses are among the most popular figures of soft and hardcore pornography, featured in films such as The Candy-Stripers (1978), Nasty Nurses (1983), and Nurses in Heat (2003). The sadistic nurses in films such as One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) and High Anxiety (1977) are latter-day versions of Charles Reade’s insane-asylum nurses. Contemporary crime and detective fiction has found in the Nightingaletype nurse a suitably ambiguous figure who can play medical sleuth, romantic heroine, sexualized victim, or crazed murderess. For instance, Anne Perry’s series set in Victorian London features nurse Hester Latterly, a Crimean War veteran. Hester teams up with (and later marries) police inspector William Monk to catch typically Victorian murderers such as a dominating patriarch who stabs his beautiful daughter after raping her (A Dangerous Mourning [1990]). In the Nightingale nurse, with her keen skills of observation and her medical training, Perry seems to find an antecedent for more modern female sleuths. But, more important, historicizing the social and professional discrimination against entirely noble Nightingale nurses enables Perry’s feminist critique of the sexual politics of the 1990s. In A Sudden Fearful Death, for instance, Nurse Prudence Barrymore is strangled after she attempts to blackmail a society doctor who refuses to help her train to become a doctor. The nurse’s image continues to evolve with changing social and cultural conditions and with the media’s manipulation of it. There is some indication, for instance, that the nurse may be losing her sexual allure and gaining more professional respect. The Times of India proclaimed 2. “Heart of China” (Dynamix, 1991). 3. Nupur Chauduri and Margaret Strobel discuss this phenomenon in their introduction to Western Women and Imperialism.

Conclusion

201

recently, “Nurses not so sexy anymore,” reporting the results of a Nursing Standard magazine survey of 2,154 British men, of whom only 5 percent found nurses “sexy,” down from 10 percent twenty years ago. Nursing Standard interprets these results to mean that nurses “are being taken more seriously for the important job that they do.” However, the continued proliferation of sexy-nurse media, from real-time web-cam broadcasts to daytime television and even greeting cards, suggests that the gap between the reality of nursing and its popular image is as wide as it was in the nineteenth century.4 Women doctors play a smaller range of roles in twentieth-century texts. Nonfictional accounts of early women doctors—on the frontier, in exotic lands, or in urban hospitals—recount the heroics of these pioneers.5 Women doctors in twentieth-century fiction are exceptional figures who represent a feminist agenda, if only implicitly. Most significant, perhaps, is Virginia Woolf’s Peggy Pargiter from The Years, whose consciousness is one of the centers of the novel, and whose character and concerns are shaped by her Victorian feminist predecessors. More commonly, women doctors play minor roles in fiction, often as serious, careerist types who guide or protect younger heroines. The romantic potential of the woman doctor, unlike that of the ever-erotic nurse, remains largely untapped even in popular genres. The few exceptions to this rule, such as Elizabeth Wesley’s woman doctor series in the 1950s, focus on the same sex and fair play issues that defined woman doctor fiction in the 1880s and 1890s. “A great career in medicine lay before her—would she sacrifice it for the man she loved?” is the question facing Dr. Nora Meade.6 Similarly, though they have become common figures only since the 1990s, women doctors on television and in film generally appear as 4. “Nurses Not So Sexy Anymore,” Times of India, Wednesday, Mar. 24, 2004; Linda S. Smith, “Image Counts—Greeting Cards Mail It in When It Comes to Accurately Portraying Nurses.” 5. Among the many such texts are Dr. Caroline Matthews, Experiences of a Woman Doctor in Serbia (London: Mills & Boon, 1916); Ruth Matheson Buck, The Doctor Rode Side-Saddle (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1974); Eva Shaw McLaren, Elsie Inglis: the Woman with the Torch (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge; New York, Macmillan, 1920). 6. Elizabeth Wesley, Nora Meade, M.D. (New York: Bantam, 1957).

202


heroic, earnest, and sometimes sexy despite themselves. Television’s popular Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, for instance, is a frontier America version of Victorian quasi-feminist medical-woman romances such as Dr. Victoria or Peace with Honour. Overwhelmingly, women doctors in film have been psychiatrists, a specialization that allows the film to exploit the sexual tension between male patients and their female doctors.7 Only occasionally do films pick up on the perverse potential of the woman doctor. In the rare instances of women starring as prison doctors or evil scientists in B movies or adult films, the doctors’ perversions are linked to their lack of traditional femininity. Either their ambitions or their bodies are unwomanly.8 Of course, neither the sensationalized nor the heroic representations of medical women in twentieth-century culture are “natural” or historically inevitable. Many of my examples contain disruptive elements that expose the constructedness of the nasty or too-pure nurse and the unfeminine woman doctor, figures that grew out of the particular cultural conditions and related discourses surrounding women, sexuality, medicine, and textual representation in Victorian culture. I suspect that the fragmentation of the cultural idea of the medical woman has been enhanced during the late twentieth century by the proliferation and availability of media in which she can be and is represented. I would expect, therefore, for my subject to become even more splintered. But, of course, among the central claims of my book is that the Victorian medical 7. For example, in The Flame Within (1935) Ann Harding plays Dr. Mary White, a psychiatrist who falls in love with a patient but fights her feelings for him out of professional duty; Ingrid Bergman plays Gregory Peck’s heroic and lovestruck psychiatrist in Hitchcock’s 1945 thriller Spellbound; Anne Baxter plays the psychiatrist Dr. Anne Dyson in Mix Me a Person (1962); most recently, HBO’s hit television series The Sopranos exploits the sexual tension between a mobster and his female psychiatrist, Dr. Jennifer Melfi. 8. Reviewers of Chris Cassidy’s portrayal of a woman doctor in the highly popular adult film Talk Dirty to Me (1980) note that the actress, who is “far from beautiful,” looks appropriate for a “prim doctor” who lets “her hair down.” (http: //www.rogreviews.com/207.html). A second reviewer elaborates, “Chris is, as usual, simply delightful: no makeup, circles under eyes (she’s supposed to be a doctor— hence no makeup at work—at the end of a long day—hence the eyes). . . . Chris belongs to that select group of women, like Sharon Kane and Nina Hartley, whose primary appeal is not beauty per se, but personality” (http://www.rame.net/reviews/ imperator/part27.html).

Conclusion

203

woman, even during the reign of Victoria, was always and already fragmented. The unsexed woman doctor did not emerge after the sensation nurse, but alongside her. British medical women did not evolve into imperial medical women; they had always been imperialist. Finally, then, although this project has moved more or less chronologically, it has not been a linear chronology of the British medical woman. Rather, I have attempted to chart the array of her cultural representations and of how those representations can be read as discursive intersections and productive sites of the Woman Question, medicine, and fiction during the Victorian period. These sites did not stop producing on January 22, 1901, but they were by that date substantially established.


d Bibliography d

Primary Sources Alexander, G. G. Dr. Victoria. London, 1881. Anonymous. Dr. Edith Romney. London, 1883. “Appointments.” Magazine of London School of Medicine for Women and Royal Free Hospital 3 (Oct. 1896) 246–47. Armstrong-Hopkins, Salini. “Within the Purdah.” Also “In the Zenana Homes of Indian Princes”; and “Heroes and Heroines of Zion.” Being the Personal Observations of a Medical Missionary in India. New York: Eaton & Mains, 1898. Arnold, Miss. “Our Medical Work in Furreedpore.” Our Indian Sisters: A Quarterly Magazine of the Ladies’ Zenana Mission, in Connection with the Baptist Missionary Society 142–43, no. 6 (Oct. 1886): 142. London: Elliot Stock. Barraclough, George. “On Nursing as a Career for Ladies.” Fraser’s Magazine 99 (Apr. 1879): 468–70. Bateman, Thomas. A succinct account of the contagious fever of this country, exemplified in the epidemic now prevailing in London; with the appropriate method of treatment as practised in the House of recovery. To which are added observations on the nature and properties of contagion, tending to correct the popular notions on this subject, and pointing out the means of prevention. London: Longman, 1818. Blackwell, Elizabeth. The Responsibility of Women Physicians in Relation to the Contagious Diseases Acts: Address Given to a Medical Meeting in London, April 27, 1897. Privately printed, 1897. Braddon, Mary E. Lady Audley’s Secret. 1862. New York: Penguin Books, 1987.

205

206

Bibliography

Broughton, Rhoda. Second Thoughts. London, 1880. Bushnan, J. S., M.D. “Private Asylums.” Daily News. Reprinted in Charles Reade, Hard Cash, in The Works of Charles Reade. Boston: De Wolfe, Fiske, 1910. Butler, Josephine, ed. Woman’s Work and Woman’s Culture. London, 1869. Caird, Mona. The Morality of Marriage and Other Essays on the Status and Destiny of Woman. London: George Redway, 1897. Chapman, Mrs. E. F. Sketches of Some Distinguished Indian Women. London, 1891. Cobbe, Francis Power. “Workhouse Sketches.” History of Nursing Source Book. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1957. 156–57. Collins, Wilkie. The New Magdalen. London, 1873. ———. The Woman in White. 1860. New York: Penguin, 1985. Conan Doyle, Arthur. “The Doctors of Hoyland.” Idler 5: 227–38. “The Countess of Dufferin’s Fund: Fifty Years’ Retrospect: India 1885– 1935.” Booklet, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine Library Archives (London). Box 16: Medical Women Overseas, C.146 (India). Curwen, Henry. Dr. Hermione. Edinburgh: Blackwood & Sons, 1890. Davies, Emily. “Medicine as a Profession for Women.” In Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and the Langham Place Group, edited by Candida Ann Lacey, 410–14. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987. Davis, Elizabeth. The Autobiography of Elizabeth Davis. Edited by Jane Williams (Ysgafell). Introduction by Deirdre Beddoe. Cardiff: Honno, 1987. Dickens, Charles. “Bedside Experiments.” All the Year Round 3 (Mar. 31, 1860): 537–42. ———. Martin Chuzzlewit. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. ———. “The Nurse in Leading Strings.” Household Words 17, no. 429 (June 12, 1858): 602–6. Diver, Maud. “The Englishwoman in India” and “Pioneer Women in India.” Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1909. Ellis, Sarah. Education of the Heart: Woman’s Best Work. London, 1869. “An Episode of the War.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 10 (Dec. 1854): 508–11. Gardiner, Mrs. “A Five Years’ Retrospect of the National Association for Supplying Female Medical Aid to the Women of India.” Maga-

Bibliography

207

zine of London School of Medicine for Women and Royal Free Hospital 3 (Oct. 1896): 221–23. Garrett Anderson, Elizabeth. “The History of a Movement.” Fortnightly Review 59 (Jan.-June 1893): 404–17. ———. “Sex in Mind and Education: A Reply.” Fortnightly Review 15 (May 1874): 582–94. ———. “Volunteer Hospital Nursing.” Macmillan’s 15 (1867): 494–99. Gaskell, Elizabeth. The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell. Edited by J. A. V. Chapple and A. Pollard. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1966. ———. Ruth. 1853. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Green, Evelyn Everett. Barbara’s Brothers. London: RTS, 1888. Greg, W. R. “Prostitution.” Westminster Review 23 (July 1850): 448–506. Gregg, Hilda. “The Medical Woman in Fiction.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 164 (July 1898): 94–109. ———. Peace with Honour. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1897. Griffen, G. Haxton, and Violet A. Penrose Coghill, eds. Women Students’ Medical Magazine 1. Edinburgh: William Bryce, June 1902– 1904. Gull, Sir W. “On the Nursing Crisis at Guy’s Hospital.” Nineteenth Century 7 (May 1879): 884–91. Hall, Radclyffe. The Unlit Lamp. 1924. New York: Dial Press, 1981. Howells, William D. Dr. Breen’s Practice. A Novel. 18th ed. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1970. James, Henry. The Bostonians. 1886. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. James, P. D. Shroud for a Nightingale. New York: Warner, 1971. Jewett, Sarah Orne. A Country Doctor. 1884. Sarah Orne Jewett: Novels and Stories: Deephaven / A Country Doctor / The Country of the Pointed Firs / Dunnet Landing Stories / Selected Stories and Sketches. New York: Library of America, 1994. Jex-Blake, Sophia. Medical Women: A Thesis and a History. Edinburgh, 1886. New York: Source Books, 1970. ———. “Medical Women in Fiction.” Nineteenth Century 33 (Feb. 1893): 261–72. Kenealy, Arabella. Dr. Janet of Harley Street. London: Digby, Long, 1893. ———. Feminism and Sex Extinction. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1920. ———. The Human Gyroscope. London: John Bale, Sons & Danielsson, 1934.

208

Bibliography

———. “The Talent of Motherhood.” National Review 16 (1890): 446– 549. ———. The Whips of Time. London: J. Long, 1908. ———. “Woman as Athlete.” Nineteenth Century 45 (Apr. 1899): 636–45. ———. “Woman as Athlete: A Rejoinder.” Nineteenth Century 45 (Jan./ June 1899): 915–29. Kingsley, Charles. Two Years Ago. 1857. London: Ward, Lock, 1901. Lewes, George Henry. Review of “Ruth: A Novel.” Westminster Review 59, no. 116 (Apr. 1853): 474–91. Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. “Santa Filomena.” Atlantic Monthly. 1857. Lonsdale, Margaret. “Doctors and Nurses.” Nineteenth Century 7 (June 1880): 1105–8. ———. “The Present Crisis at Guy’s Hospital.” Nineteenth Century 7 (Apr. 1880): 677–84. Maudsley, Henry. “Sex in Mind and Education.” Fortnightly Review 15 (Apr. 1874): 466–83. Meade, L. T. The Doctor’s Children. Edinburgh: W & R Chambers, 1894. ———. A Sister of the Red Cross: A Tale of South Africa. London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1901. Meade, L. T., and Clifford Halifax. “The Wrong Prescription.” Stories from the Diary of a Doctor. 1895. New York: Arno Press, 1976. Meyer, Annie Nathan. Helen Brent, M.D. New York: Cassell, 1891. Nightingale, Florence. Cassandra. New York: Feminist Press, 1979. ———. Ever Yours, Florence Nightingale: Selected Letters. Edited by Martha Vicinus and Bea Nergaard. London: Virago Press, 1989. ———. Notes on Nursing: What It Is and What It Is Not. In Selected Writings of Florence Nightingale, edited by Lucy Ridgely Seymer, 123–220. New York: Macmillan, 1954. ———. “Nursing the Sick.” In Selected Writings of Florence Nightingale, edited by Lucy Ridgely Seymer, 334–52. New York: Macmillan, 1954. ———. “On Trained Nursing for the Sick Poor.” In Selected Writings of Florence Nightingale, edited by Lucy Ridgely Seymer, 310–18. New York: Macmillan, 1954. ———. Subsidiary Notes as to the Introduction of Female Nursing into Military Hospitals. In Selected Writings of Florence Nightingale,

Bibliography

209

edited by Lucy Ridgely Seymer, 1–122. New York: Macmillan, 1954. ———. “Suggestions on the Subject of Providing, Training, and Organizing Nurses for the Sick Poor in Workhouse Infirmaries.” In Selected Writings of Florence Nightingale, edited by Lucy Ridgely Seymer, 271–309. New York: Macmillan, 1954. “The Nightingale’s Song to the Sick Soldier.” Punch 27 (1854): 184. Osborne, Sidney Godolphin. “An Eye-Witness Account.” In Florence Nightingale: Saint, Reformer or Rebel? edited by Raymond G. Herbert, 87–101. Malabar, FL: Robert E. Krieger Publishing, 1981. ———. The Letters of S. G. O. 2 vols. Edited by Arnold White. London: Griffith, Farran, Okeden & Welsh, n.d. Our Indian Sisters: A Quarterly Magazine of the Ladies’ Zenana Mission, in Connection with the Baptist Missionary Society no. 8 (Apr. 1887). London: Elliot Stock. Perry, Anne. A Dangerous Mourning. New York: Ivy Books, 1990. ———. A Sudden Fearful Death. New York: Ivy Books, 1993. Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart. Doctor Zay. 1882. New York: Feminist Press, 1987. Ramabai, Pandita. The High-Caste Hindu Woman. Philadelphia: George Bell, 1887. Reade, Charles. The Bloomer. London, 1857. ———. Hard Cash. 1863. In The Works of Charles Reade. New York: Peter Fenelon Collier, n.d. ———. A Woman-Hater. 1877. In The Works of Charles Reade. New York: Peter Fenelon Collier, n.d. Review of Dr. Janet of Harley Street. By Arabella Kenealy. Dial (Nov. 1, 1894): 266. Review of Mona Maclean, Medical Student. By Graham Travers (Margaret Todd). Athenaeum (Dec. 3, 1892): 774. Rivington, Walter. The Medical Profession. 1st ed. London: Ballière, Tindall, 1879. Satthianadhan, Krupabai. Saguna: A Story of a Native Christian, 1887– 1888. Madras: Srinivasa, Varadachari, 1895. Scharlieb, Dr. Mary. Reminiscences. London: Williams & Norgate, 1924. Schreiner, Olive. The Story of an African Farm. 1883. London: Penguin, 1987.

210

Bibliography

Seacole, Mary Jane. Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands. 1857. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Shore, A. and L. War Lyrics. London: Shoberl, 1855. “Sister Joan.” The Wards of St. Margaret’s. In Girls’ Own Paper, London, 1894. Souvenir booklet from the 5th All India Obstetric and Gynaecological Congress, Bombay, Dec. 1947. Wellcome Library Archives, C.146 (INDIA), Box 16: Medical Women Overseas, SA/MWF: Medical Women’s Federation; part c (historical). Sprigge, S. Squire. “The Medicine of Dickens.” Cornhill Magazine 35 (1877): 258–67. Sturges, Octavius. “Doctors and Nurses.” Nineteenth Century 7 (June 1879): 1089–96. Swiney, Frances. “Alcohol.” 1917. In The Sexuality Debates, edited by Sheila Jeffreys, 260–70. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987. Todd, Margaret. “After Many Days.” In Fellow Travellers, 1–54. Edinburgh: Blackwood & Sons, 1896. ———. Mona Maclean, Medical Student. Edinburgh: Blackwood & Sons, 1892. ———. “Some Thoughts on the Woman Question.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 156 (Nov. 1894): 689–92. Trollope, Anthony. Orley Farm. 1861–1862. London: Trollope Society, 1993. Turner, Percival. Guide to the Medical and Dental Professions, with a Chapter on Lady Doctors by Miss F. M. Strutt-Cavell. London: Bailliere, Tindall, & Cox, 1895. Ward, Mrs. Humphrey. Marcella. New York: Penguin, 1984. Wesley, Elizabeth. Nora Meade, MD. New York: Bantam, 1957. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989. ———. The Years. 1937. London: Hogarth Press, 1990.

Secondary Sources Ackerknecht, Erwin H. “Anticontagionism between 1821–1867.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 22 (1948): 562–93.

Bibliography

211

Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens. New York: Harper Collins, 1990. Alexander, Wendy. First Ladies of Medicine: The Origins, Education and Destination of Early Women Graduates of Glasgow University. Glasgow: Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Glasgow, 1987. Allen, Charles, ed. Plain Tales from the Raj: Images of British India in the Twentieth Century. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976. Altick, Richard. Deadly Encounters: Two Victorian Sensations. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986. ———. Victorian Studies in Scarlet. New York: Norton, 1970. Amis, Kingsley. Rudyard Kipling and His World. London: Thames & Hudson, 1975. Anderson, Louisa Garrett. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. London: Faber, 1939. Anderson, Olive. A Liberal State at War. London: Macmillan, 1967. Ardis, Ann L. New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990. Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Auerbach, Nina. Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982. Ballhatchet, Kenneth. Race, Sex, and Class under the Raj. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980. Baly, Monica E. “Florence Nightingale and the Establishment of the First School at St. Thomas’s —Myth v. Reality.” In Florence Nightingale and Her Era: A Collection of New Scholarship, edited by Vern Bullough, Bonnie Bullough, and Marietta P. Stanton, 3– 22. New York: Garland Publishing, 1990. Bashford, Alison. “Separatist Health: Changing Meanings of Women’s Hospitals in Australia and England, c. 1870–1920.” In Women Healers and Physicians: Climbing a Long Hill, edited by Lilian R. Furst, 198–220. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997. Bennett, A. H. English Medical Women: Glimpses of Their Work in Peace and War. London: Pitman & Sons, 1915. Blake, Catriona. The Charge of the Parasols: Women’s Entry to the Medical Profession. London: Women’s Press, 1990. Boahen, A. Adu. African Perspectives on Colonialism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.

212

Bibliography

Boone, Joseph. Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Boyle, Thomas. Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead: Beneath the Surface of Victorian Sensationalism. New York: Viking Penguin, 1989. Burns, Wayne. Charles Reade: A Study in Victorian Authorship. New York: Bookman Associates, 1961. Burton, Antoinette M. “The White Woman’s Burden: British Feminists and ‘the Indian Woman,’ 1865–1915.” In Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance, edited by Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Caine, Barbara. Victorian Feminists. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Callaway, Helen, and Dorothy O. Helly. “Crusader for Empire: Flora Shaw/Lady Lugard.” In Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance, edited by Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel, 78–97. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Carpenter, Mick. “The Subordination of Nurses in Health Care.” In Gender, Work and Medicine: Women and the Medical Division of Labour, edited by Elianne Riska and Katarina Wegar, 95–130. London: Sage, 1993. Cartwright, F. F. A Social History of Medicine. London: Longman, 1977. Chapple, J. A. V. Science and Literature in the Nineteenth Century. London: Macmillan, 1986. Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940. New York: Basic Books, 1994. Chaudhuri, Nupur, and Margaret Strobel, eds. Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Colloms, Brenda. Charles Kingsley: The Lion of Eversley. London: Constable, 1975. Cvetkovich, Ann. Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992. Davidoff, Leonore, and Catherine Hall. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Bibliography

213

Davies, Celia. “A Constant Casualty: Nurse Education in Britain and the USA to 1939.” In Rewriting Nursing History, edited by Celia Davies, 102–22. London: Croom Helm, 1980. Dean, Mitchell, and Gail Bolton. “The Administration of Poverty and the Development of Nursing Practice in Nineteenth-century England.” Rewriting Nursing History, edited by Celia Davies, 76– 101. London: Croom Helm, 1980. Dijkstra, Bram. Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood. New York: Knopf, 1996. Eby, Cecil Degrotte. The Road to Armageddon: The Martial Spirit in English Popular Literature, 1870–1914. Durham: Duke University Press, 1987. Finkelstein, David. “A Woman Hater and Women Healers: John Blackwood, Charles Reade, and the Victorian Women’s Medical Movement.” Victorian Periodicals Review 28, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 330–52. First, Ruth, and Ann Scott. Olive Schreiner. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1980. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. New York: Random House, 1975. ———. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Random House, 1979. ———. History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction. New York: Vintage, 1990. Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. In The Freud Reader, edited by Peter Gay. New York: W. W. Norton, 1989. Froula, Christine. “The Daughter’s Seduction: Sexual Violence and Literary History.” Signs 11, no. 4 (Summer 1986): 621–44. Furst, Lilian. “Halfway Up the Hill: Doctresses in Late NineteenthCentury American Fiction.” In Women Healers and Physicians: Climbing a Long Hill, 221–38. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997. ———. “A Shocking Discovery! An Introduction to Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Doctors of Hoyland.’” In Medical Progress and Social Reality: A Reader in Nineteenth-Century Medicine and Literature. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. Gamarnikow, Eva. “Sexual Division of Labour: The Case of Nursing.” In Feminism and Materialism: Women and Modes of Production,

214

Bibliography

edited by Annette Kuhn and AnnMarie Wolpe, 96–123. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978. Gérin, Winifred. Elizabeth Gaskell: A Biography. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976. Goldie, Sue M. “I have done my duty”: Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War, 1854–56. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987. Haldane, Elizabeth. Mrs. Gaskell and Her Friends. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1931. Hambly, Gavin R. G. “Muslims in English-Language Fiction.” In Asia in Western Fiction, edited by Robin W. Winks and James R. Rush, 35–52. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990. Heller, Tamar. Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Huxley, Elspeth. Florence Nightingale. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1975. Hyam, Ronald. Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990. Jayawardena, Kumari. The White Woman’s Other Burden: Western Women and South Asia during British Rule. London: Routledge, 1995. Judd, Catherine. Bedside Seductions: Nursing and the Victorian Imagination, 1830–1880. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998. Kabbani, Rana. Europe’s Myths of Orient: Devise and Rule. London: Macmillan, 1986. Kalikoff, Beth. Murder and Moral Decay in Victorian Popular Literature. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1986. Kalisch, Philip, and Beatrice Kalisch. “‘The Birth of Modern Nursing.’ Florence Nightingale: Pioneer.” In Florence Nightingale: Saint, Reformer or Rebel? edited by Raymond G. Herbert, 129–39. Malabar, FL: Robert E. Krieger Publishing, 1981. ———. The Changing Image of the Nurse. Menlo Park, CA: AddisonWesley, 1987. Katz, Wendy R. Rider Haggard and the Fiction of Empire: A Critical Study of British Imperial Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Kent, Susan Kingsley. Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860–1914. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. Knapman, Claudia. White Women in Fiji 1835–1930: The Ruin of Empire? Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1986.

Bibliography

215

Lansbury, Cora. Elizabeth Gaskell: The Novel of Social Crisis. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1975. Ledger, Sally. The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997. Levy, Anita. Other Women: The Writing of Class, Race, and Gender, 1832– 1898. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Lind, Mary Ann. The Compassionate Memsahibs: Welfare Activities of British Women in India, 1900–1947. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988. Loesburg, Jonathan. “The Ideology of Narrative Form in Sensation Fiction.” Representations 13 (Winter 1986): 115–38. Lokugé, Chandani. “The Cross-Cultural Experience of a Pioneer Indian Woman Writer of English Fiction.” From Commonwealth to PostColonial. Ed. Anna Rutherford. Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 1992. 102–16. Macleod, Roy, and Milton Lewis. Disease, Medicine, and Empire. Perspectives on Western Medicine and the Experience of European Expansion. London: Routledge, 1988. Maggs, Christopher. The Origins of General Nursing. London: Croom Helm, 1983. Mangum, Teresa. Married, Middlebrow, and Militant: Sarah Grand and the New Woman. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. Manton, Jo. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1965. Martindale, Louisa. The Woman Doctor and Her Future. London: Mills & Boon, 1922. Miller, D. A. The Novel and the Police. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Mills, Sara. Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism. London: Routledge, 1991. Mitchell, Sally. The New Girl. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Monteiro, Lois A. “Nightingale and Her Correspondants: Portrait of the Era.” In Florence Nightingale and Her Era: A Collection of New Scholarship, edited by Vern Bullough, Bonnie Bullough, and Marietta P. Stanton, 40–59. New York: Garland, 1990. ———. “On Separate Roads: Florence Nightingale and Elizabeth Blackwell.” Signs 9 (Spring 1984): 520–605. Morantz, Regina Markell. “Feminism, Professionalism, and Germs: The Thought of Mary Putnam Jacobi and Elizabeth Blackwell.” American Quarterly 34 (1982): 459–78.

216

Bibliography

Morantz-Sanchez, Regina. Conduct Unbecoming a Woman: Medicine on Trial in Turn-of-the-Century Brooklyn. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. ———. Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. More, Ellen Singer. Restoring the Balance: Women Physicians and the Profession of Medicine, 1850–1995. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Morris, Timothy. “Professional Ethics and Professional Erotics in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ Doctor Zay.” Studies in American Fiction 21, no. 2 (Autumn 1993): 141–52. Mort, Frank. Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England since 1830. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987. Murphy, Patricia. Time Is of the Essence: Temporality, Gender, and the New Woman. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. Nadis, Mark. “Evolution of the Sahib.” Historian 19, no. 4 (Aug. 1957). Nestor, Pauline. Female Friendships and Communities: Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985. Nettles, Elsa. “‘Leaving the Private House’: Women Doctors in Virginia Woolf’s Life and Art.” In Women Healers and Physicians: Climbing a Long Hill, edited by Lilian Furst, 239–58. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997. Nord, Deborah Epstein. Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995. Parry, Noel, and José Parry. The Rise of the Medical Profession: A Study of Collective Social Mobility. London: Croom Helm, 1976. Pelling, Margaret. Cholera, Fever and English Medicine, 1825–1865. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978. Peterson, M. Jeanne. “The Victorian Governess: Status Incongruence in Family and Society.” In Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age, edited by Martha Vicinus. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972. Phillips, Walter C. Dickens, Reade, and Collins, Sensation Novelists. New York: Columbia University Press, 1919. Poovey, Mary. “Speaking of the Body: Mid-Victorian Constructions of Female Desire.” In Body/Politics. Women and the Discourses of Science, edited by Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sally Shuttleworth, 29–46. New York: Routledge 1990.

Bibliography

217

———. Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in MidVictorian England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Prochaska, F. K. Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. Pykett, Lyn. The “Improper” Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing. London: Routledge, 1992. Rappaport, Erika Diane. Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Rivington, Walter. The Medical Profession. 1st ed. London: Balliäre, Tindall, 1879. Roberts, Shirley. Sophia Jex-Blake: A Woman Pioneer in NineteenthCentury Medical Reform. London: Routledge, 1994. Robinson, Ronald, and John Gallagher. Africa and the Victorians. The Official Mind of Imperialism. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan, 1981. Rosenberg, Charles E. “The Cause of Cholera: Aspects of Etiological Thought in Nineteenth Century America.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 34 (1960): 331–54. ———. “Florence Nightingale on Contagion: The Hospital as Moral Universe.” In Healing and History: Essays for George Rosen, edited by Charles E. Rosenberg, 116–36. New York: Dawson, Science History Publications, 1979. Roy, Parama. Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Rubenius, Anna. The Woman Question in Mrs. Gaskell’s Life and Works. Uppsala: A.-B. Lundequistska Bokhandeln, 1950. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993. Schuyler, Constance B. Introduction to Notes on Nursing, by Florence Nightingale. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1992. 3–17. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Shankar, D. A. “The Naulahka and Post-Kipling British Fiction on India.” Literary Criterion (Mysore) 22, no. 4 (1987): 71–79. Shanley, Mary Lyndon. Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980. New York: Penguin, 1985. ———. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.

218

Bibliography

———. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle. New York: Penguin, 1990. Shryock, Richard H. The History of Nursing: An Interpretation of the Social and Medical Factors Involved. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1959. Skilton, David. The Early and Mid-Victorian Novel. London: Routledge, 1993. Slater, Michael. Dickens and Women. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983. Smith, Elton E. Charles Reade. Boston: Twayne, 1976. Smith, F. B. Florence Nightingale: Reputation and Power. London: Croom Helm, 1982. ———. The People’s Health, 1830–1910. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1979. Smith, Linda S. “Image Counts—Greeting Cards Mail It in When It Comes to Accurately Portraying Nurses.” Nursing Spectrum (Oct. 1, 2003), [http://community.nursingspectrum.com/ MagazineArticles/article.cfm?AID10528]. Spear, Percival. The Nabobs: A Study of the Social Life of the English in Eighteenth-Century India. London: Oxford University Press, 1963. Stevenson, Lionel. The Pre-Raphaelite Poets. New York: W. W. Norton, 1972. Stoneman, Patsy. Elizabeth Gaskell. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987. Strachey, Lytton. Eminent Victorians. New York: HBJ, 1918. Strachey, Ray. The Cause: A Short History of the Women’s Movement in Great Britain. London: Virago Press, 1989. Strobel, Margaret. European Women and the Second British Empire. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Summers, Anne. Angels and Citizens: British Women as Military Nurses, 1854–1914. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1988. ———. “Pride and Prejudice: Ladies and Nurses in the Crimean War.” History Workshop Journal 16 (Autumn 1983): 32–56. Swenson, Kristine. “Evolution, Entropy, and the Construction of Empire in Kipling’s The Naulahka.” Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 8, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 45–58. ———. “Intimate Sympathy and Self-Effacement: Writing the Life of Sophia Jex-Blake.” A/B: Auto/Biography Studies 14, no. 2 (Winter 1999): 222–40.

Bibliography

219

———. “The Menopausal Vampire: Arabella Kenealy and the Boundaries of True Womanhood.” Women’s Writing, vol. 10, no. 1 (2003): 27–46. ———. “Protection or Restriction? Women and Labor in Mary Barton.” Gaskell Society Journal 7 (1993): 50–66. ———. “Teaching a ‘highly exceptional’ Text: Krupabai Satthianadhan’s Saguna and Narratives of Empire.” In Teaching 18th and 19th Century British Women Writers, edited by Jeanne Moskal and Shannon Wooden. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. Thompson, Christine. “Disruptive Desire: Medical Careers for Victorian Women in Fact and Fiction.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 15, no. 2 (1991): 181–96. Todd, Margaret. The Life of Sophia Jex-Blake. London: Macmillan, 1918. Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Vicinus, Martha. “Distance and Desire: English Boarding School Friendships, 1870–1920.” In Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, edited by Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr., 211–29. New York: NAL Books, 1989. ———. Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850–1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. ———. “What Makes a Heroine? Girls’ Biographies of Florence Nightingale.” In Florence Nightingale and Her Era: A Collection of New Scholarship, edited by Vern Bullough, Bonnie Bullough, and Marietta P. Stanton, 90–106. New York: Garland, 1990. Vicinus, Martha, ed. Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972. Vicinus, Martha, and Bea Nergaard. Introduction to Ever Yours, Florence Nightingale: Selected Letters. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990. Walkowitz, Judith. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. ———. Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Webb, R. K. Modern England. 2nd ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1980.

220

Bibliography

Weeks, Jeffrey. Sex, Politics, and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800. London: Longman, 1981. Welch, W. H. Public Health in Theory and Practice. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1925. Witz, Anne. Professions and Patriarchy. London: Routledge, 1992. Wohl, Anthony S. Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain. London: J. M. Dent, 1983. Woodham-Smith, Cecil. Florence Nightingale: 1820–1910. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951.

d Index d

Academy, 130 Achilles, 110–11 Ackerknecht, Erwin H., 22n19 Ackroyd, Peter, 58 Adventure fiction: Gregg’s Peace with Honour, 182–89; Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, 9, 171–74, 181, 183, 195; Kipling’s The Naulahka, 9, 93, 174–82, 195 Africa, 10, 163, 167, 169, 170–75, 183–89 “After Many Days” (Todd), 142 Agassiz, 157 Alcohol use, 153 Alcott, Louisa May, 105 Alexander, George Gordon, 7, 107–8, 202 Allen, Grant, 61n12, 83, 162, 170 All the Year Round, 57–58 Altick, Richard, 72n27 Amazons, 110–11 Amis, Kingsley, 175n23 Androgyne, 4, 71, 99, 102, 115, 194. See also Lesbianism; Unsexed women Anglican Church, 46–47 Anticontagionist theory of disease, 21– 25, 22n19, 29–30, 32 Ardis, Ann, 11, 127, 129n8, 132 Armstrong, Nancy, 3, 11, 106–7 Atalanta, 110 Atlantic Monthly, 104 Aurora Leigh (Browning), 149

Austen, Jane, 162n2 Australia, 163 Bailin, Miriam, 11 Barbara’s Brothers (Green), 60n11 Barraclough, George, 54–55 Bashford, Alison, 89n8, 104–5, 126n5, 158–59 Bateman, Thomas, 32 Baxter, Anne, 202n7 Bedford-Fenwick, Ethel, 83 “Bedside Experiments” (Dickens), 57–58 Benson, Annette Matilda, 163 Bergman, Ingrid, 202n7 Beth Book, The (Grand), 125–26 Bigamy, 52–53, 94, 155–56 Billington, Miss, 194 Bisexuality, 157 Blackwell, Elizabeth: and Contagious Diseases Acts, 146; on female sexuality, 91n12, 132; feminism of, 8, 158–59; on gynecological surgery, 87n4; on medical missions, 163; medical practice of, in U.S., 79n32; and Medical Register, 79n32; in Reade’s The Woman-Hater, 97; on womanliness and medical women, 111n36 Blackwood, John, 103 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 93, 93–94n15, 101, 103 Blake, Catriona, 138

221

222 Blake and White, 130 Bleak House (Dickens), 26, 108 Bloch, 101n26 Block, Iwan, 153 Bloomer, The (Reade), 95n19 Bodichon, Barbara, 64n17, 90nn9–10 Boer War, 162 Bolton, Gail, 56n7, 65n18 Bookman, 151 Bostonians, The (James), 98n21, 105, 115, 155 Boucherett, Jessie, 90n9 British Empire. See Imperialism British Medical Journal, 88 Brontë, Charlotte, 30, 162 Broughton, Rhoda, 6, 49–50, 60–61 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 149 Buck, Ruth Matheson, 201n5 Burns, Wayne, 100n25 Burton, Antoinette, 11, 192, 196 Butler, Josephine, 8, 90n9, 91–92, 196 Caine, Hall, 61n12 Caird, Mona, 151, 152–53 Caird, Thomas, 129 Canning, Lady, 48n52 Carpenter, Mick, 71 Cassidy, Chris, 202n8 Cather, Willa, 132 China, 163, 170n16 Cholera, 21, 22n19, 24, 28n27, 39, 43–45, 56n7, 63n15 Christian, The (Caine), 61n12 Christian College Magazine, 192n29, 193 Cixous, Hélène, 124 Clothing. See Dress Cobbe, Frances Power, 90n9 Collins, Wilkie: and Dickens, 72n27. Works: “Fie! Fie! the Fair Physician,” 109, 147; The New Magdalen, 61n12, 162; No Name, 53n1; The Woman in White, 4, 6, 67–74, 77, 99 Colonialism. See Imperialism “Complementarity of the sexes” argument, 65, 83, 90, 168 Conrad, Joseph, 162n2, 175

Index Contagious Diseases Acts: campaign to repeal, 4, 12, 64, 87, 89, 91, 92, 95, 153; and male doctors, 91, 125; and moral sanitarianism, 27, 81; and Nightingale, 82n35; and prostitutes as unsexed, 87; provisions of, 81–82; public debates on, 2, 55n5; repeal of, 146; support for, 55, 67, 95; and women doctors, 11, 92, 146, 163 Country Doctor, A (Jewett), 102n27, 105, 126 Craik, Dinah, 55n6, 136n18 Cranford (Gaskell), 27 Crimean War: in “An Episode of the War,” 39–41; improved sanitation at Scutari hospitals during, 36n39; in Kingsley’s Two Years Ago, 43–49; in medical romances, 39–41; newspaper coverage of, 34, 36–39, 44, 46–47; Nightingale and other nurses in, 5, 6, 9, 10, 14, 15, 16– 17n6, 18, 19, 24, 27, 34, 36–38, 40n45, 41–43, 46–47, 52–53; Woolf on, 50; and Yelverton Marriage Case, 52–53, 58–59 Curwen, Henry, 114, 124 Daily Graphic, 194 Daily Review, 88 Daily Telegraph, 130 David, Deirdre, 12 Davies, Celia, 65 Davies, Emily, 90n9 Dawes, Richard, 40n45 Dean, Mitchell, 56n7, 65n18 Destructive female, myth of, 167 Dial, 123 Dickens, Charles: clergy in fiction of, 45; disease in fiction of, 26; on Nightingale, 57, 58n8; nurses in fiction of, 1, 5, 58; on nursing, 57–58; reformism of, 58n8. Works: “Bedside Experiments,” 57–58; Bleak House, 26, 72n27, 108; Great Expectations, 152n33, 162n2; Little Dorrit, 99n23 Dijkstra, Bram, 150

Index Diseases. See Medicine and health care; and specific diseases Diver, Maud, 190–92, 195 Dixon-Jones, Mary, 87n4 Doctor Zay (Phelps), 102n27, 105, 109–11, 116, 126 Doctors. See Male doctors; Women doctors; Women doctors in fiction Doctor’s Children, The (Meade), 60n11 “Doctors of Hoyland, The” (Doyle), 7, 102n27, 115–17 Domesticity: in Broughton’s Second Thoughts, 49–50, 60; in Collins’s The Woman in White, 73–74; in Gaskell’s Ruth, 30–31, 54; in Kingsley’s Two Years Ago, 48–49, 53, 54, 57; and nurses’ image, 56–57; in Reade’s Hard Cash, 79–81; in Trollope’s Orley Farm, 59–60; in Ward’s Marcella, 49–50, 61. See also Marriage Doppelgänger, 74, 78 Double-consciousness, 196–97 Doyle, A. Conan, 7, 102n107, 115– 17, 124n2 Dr. Breen’s Practice (Howells), 105, 109, 114 Dr. Edith Romney, 110–14, 115, 126 Dr. Hermione (Curwen), 114 Dr. Janet of Harley Street (Kenealy): Dr. Janet as protolesbian New Woman, 154–58; marginalization of woman doctor in, 156–58; Marquis De Richeville’s immorality in, 152–56; marriage in, 152–56; as New Woman doctor novel, 8, 123–27, 150–60; relationship between Phyllis and Dr. Janet in, 154–56; relationship between Phyllis and Liveing in, 154–56, 158; reviews of, 123–24, 151; sensationalism of, 148, 151; suicide in, 156 Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, 202 Dr. Victoria (Alexander), 7, 107–8, 202 Dress: dress reform for women, 12, 91, 95n19; for working-class women, 134–35 Du Bois, W. E. B., 196n35

223 Dufferin, Lady, 164–65, 176 Dufferin Fund, 164–65, 175–76 Du Pre, Ursula, 137, 138n19 Durkheim, Émile, 157 East Africa, 169 East Lynne (Woods), 53n1 Edinburgh Medical School for Women, 131, 137, 139 Education for women: higher education for women, 63, 88, 89; and hysteria, 114; Kenealy on, 152; and Langham Place Group, 64n17; support for, by women doctors, 91, 92n13. See also Medical education Egerton, George, 124, 129n8 Eliot, George, 8, 55n6, 94n17, 131 Ellis, Havelock, 8, 91, 101n26, 129, 158 Elmy, Elizabeth Wolstenholme, 155 “Episode of the War, An,” 39–41 Ethiopia, 183–89 Eugenics, 97–98, 143, 150–52, 156, 157, 159–60, 199 Eugenics Review, 150 Fallen woman: duality of angel versus, 14, 16; in Gaskell’s Ruth, 5, 16, 19, 25, 26, 27–28, 30, 31, 55; relationship of medical women to, 3, 20, 54; and venereal disease, 26, 81–82. See also Prostitutes Fawcett, Millicent Garrett, 90n9 Felski, Rita, 130 Feminism: and gender complementarity, 65, 83, 90, 168; and hysteria, 114–15; and imperialism, 9, 11, 167, 182, 195–97; of Kenealy, 8; and maternalism, 8, 159; and New Man, 110, 111; and New Woman, 90; and Nightingale, 90n10; and nursing, 90; Reade on, 95; and repeal of Contagious Diseases Acts, 64; in Satthianadhan’s Saguna, 193– 95; and women doctors, 8, 89–92, 117, 149, 158–59; and woman suffrage, 11, 64, 90, 91

224 Feminism and Sex Extinction (Kenealy), 150, 199 “Fie! Fie! the Fair Physician” (Collins), 109, 147 Films, 171, 172n21, 200, 201–2 Finkelstein, David, 93–94n15, 100n25, 142n25 Flame Within, The, 202n7 Forster, E. M., 175 Foucault, Michel, 2, 71, 72n26, 91 Franco-Prussian War, 162 Freud, Sigmund, 14, 101–2n26 Furst, Lilian, 103, 115, 116 Gallagher, John, 183 Garrett Anderson, Elizabeth: and Contagious Diseases Act, 146; feminism of, 8, 149, 158–59; and Jex-Blake, 100, 101n26; on medical missions, 163; and Medical Register, 79n32; medical training of, 79n32, 128n7; motivations of, for becoming a doctor, 7, 90–91; in Reade’s The Woman-Hater, 97; on women’s education, 92n13 Garrett Anderson, Louisa, 149n30 Gaskell, Elizabeth: Christian morality of, 25; daughter of, 16–17n6; and dress for working-class women, 135; and Nightingale, 17–20; on nursing, 28; on prostitution, 31n31; reformism of, 25, 26, 27. Works: Cranford, 27; Mary Barton, 5, 27; Ruth, 1, 4, 5–6, 15–16, 18–20, 23–33, 54, 55, 197 Gaskell, Meta, 16–17n6 Gaze, 71, 135 Gender complementarity, 65, 83, 90, 168 Gérin, Winifred, 30n30 Governesses, 35n36 Grand, Sarah, 8, 124, 125–26, 129n8, 152, 159 Great Expectations (Dickens), 152n33, 162n2 Great Proconsul, The (Gregg), 182 Green, Evelyn Everett, 60n11

Index Greg, W. R., 54, 59 Gregg, Hilda: feminism of, 182; on medical-woman fiction, 104, 106; on medical-woman movement, 161; novels of empire by, 182; on women’s education, 173; work, Peace with Honour, 5, 9, 10, 168, 171, 182–89, 202 Gull, Sir William, 66 Haggard, Rider, 9, 171–74, 181, 183, 195, 197 Haldane, Elizabeth, 17–18 Halifax, Clifford, 83–84 Hall, Radclyffe, 85, 118 Hambly, Gavin, 170 Hard Cash (Reade), 6–7, 67–68, 74– 81, 82, 94–95, 99n23 Harding, Ann, 202n7 Hardy, Thomas, 129 Harper’s Magazine, 39 Health care. See Medicine and health care Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 162n2, 175 Heavenly Twins, The (Grand), 125 Helen Brent, M.D. (Meyer), 105, 126 Heller, Tamar, 70n24 High Anxiety, 200 Higher education. See Education for women Hilda Wade (Allen), 61n12, 83, 162, 170 Hill, Octavia, 137, 138 Hinduism, 190–91, 192–93 Hippomenes, 110 His Excellency’s English Governess (Gregg), 182 Hitchcock, Alfred, 202n7 Homosexuality. See Lesbianism Hospitals for women, 89n8, 158–59, 163–65, 169 Household Words, 58n9 Howells, W. D., 104, 105, 109, 114, 124 Hurst, Lea, 18 Hutchinson, Horace G., 171 Hysteria, 114–15, 123–24, 189–90

Index Illegitimacy, 30, 31, 32, 108 Illnesses. See Medicine and health care; and specific diseases Imperialism: adventure fiction and medical women, 171–89; and Allen’s Hilda Wade, 61n12, 83, 162, 170; in British fiction generally, 162; and Diver’s Pioneer Women in India, 190–92, 195; and eugenics, 159–60; and feminism, 9, 11, 167, 182, 195–97; and gender complementarity, 168; and Gregg’s Peace with Honour, 5, 9, 10, 168, 171, 182–89; and Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, 9, 171–74, 181, 183, 195; and Indian medical women, 189–97; and Kipling’s The Naulahka, 9, 93, 174–82, 195; medical imperialism, 165–66; and myth of the destructive female, 167; and nurses, 162; and nurses in fiction, 162, 169, 173–74, 175–82; and Satthianadhan’s Saguna, 192– 97; and Scharlieb’s Reminiscences, 9, 10, 168, 189–90, 192, 195, 197; and stereotypes of colonized cultures, 170–71, 173; and women doctors, 4, 9–12, 137, 159–71, 189–97; and women doctors in fiction, 169, 171–97; and women’s hospitals in colonies, 163–64. See also Crimean War India: in Allen’s Hilda Wade, 170; in Brontë’s Jane Eyre, 162; cholera treatment in, 22n19; in Diver’s Pioneer Women of India, 190–92, 195; foreign women in, 167n12; in Kipling’s The Naulahka, 174–82; marriage in, 180–81, 193; medical missions in, 10, 163–66, 176; opposition to “westernisation” in, 170n16; purdah in, 163, 165–66, 173, 189; in Satthianadhan’s Saguna, 192–97; in Scharlieb’s Reminiscences, 189–90; in Todd’s Mona Maclean, Medical Student, 137; women doctors in, 163–66, 169, 170, 176, 189–97

225 Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, 183 In Furthest Ind (Gregg), 182 Insane asylums, 6–7, 67–81 Irigaray, Luce, 124 Irish College of Physicians, 104 Islam, 170 Jackson, Edmund, 155 Jackson, Emily, 155 Jacobi, Mary Putnam, 87n4, 97 Jacobus, Mary, 10 James, Henry, 98n21, 105, 115, 155 James, P. D., 2 Jameson, Anna, 22n19, 64n17 Jane Eyre (Brontë), 162 Jayawardena, Kumari, 11, 164, 167n12 Jewett, Sarah Orne, 8, 102n27, 105, 126 Jex-Blake, Sophia: as basis for character in Reade’s A Woman-Hater, 93– 97, 101, 106, 131; as basis for Todd’s Mona Maclean, Medical Student, 131, 141, 194; and campaign for medical education for women, 86, 88–89, 91–97, 101, 106, 163; and Contagious Diseases Act, 146; as doctor, 93, 96n20, 128n7, 132, 139; and Edinburgh Medical School for Women, 131, 137, 139; feminism of, 8, 117, 149, 158–59; medical education of, 95–96; on medical missions, 163; personality of, 100–101, 111n36, 141n24; sexual orientation of, 101, 129, 131, 137– 38, 158; and Todd, 100, 101, 129, 131, 138, 139, 141–42, 159; will of, 138; on woman-doctor fiction, 98n21, 104, 116, 130–31, 141 Jo’s Boys (Alcott), 105 Joshee, Anandabai, 177, 190–92, 195 Joshee, Gopal Vinyak, 191 Judd, Catherine, 11, 23n20 Kabbani, Rana, 170n15 Kalikoff, Beth, 63 Kalisch, Philip, 61

226 Kamala: A Story of Hindu Life (Satthianadhan), 192 Keller, Evelyn Fox, 10 Kenealy, Arabella: as doctor, 8, 123– 26, 150; and eugenics, 150, 151– 52, 156, 157, 159, 199; literary career of, 150, 151–52; on motherhood, 8, 150–52, 159; on natural marriage, 156; on neurotic women, 143; reviews of novel by, 123–24, 151; on woman question, 150–51. Works: Dr. Janet of Harley Street, 8, 123–27, 148, 150–60; Feminism and Sex Extinction, 150, 199; “The Talent of Motherhood,” 151–52; The Whips of Time, 152n33 Kent, Susan Kingsley, 10–11 Kerr, Deborah, 171, 172n21 Kim (Kipling), 162n2 King Solomon’s Mines (film), 171, 172n21 King Solomon’s Mines (Haggard), 9, 171–74, 181, 183, 195 Kingsley, Charles: Two Years Ago, 5, 6, 43–49, 53, 54, 57; Westward Ho! 37 Kingsley, Henry, 88 Kipling, Rudyard, 9, 93, 162n2, 174– 82, 195 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 101n26, 158 Lady Audley’s Secret (Braddon), 53n1 Lady with the Lamp image, 6, 13, 14, 15, 18–19, 36–38, 39, 40, 45–46, 55, 58, 61, 197 Langham Place Group, 64n17 Lansbury, Cora, 27 Ledger, Sally, 11, 127, 130 Lesbianism: in Cather’s My Antonia, 132; in Kenealy’s Dr. Janet of Harley Street, 154–58; and New Woman fiction, 8; protolesbian overtones in Collins’s The Woman in White, 70–72, 99n23; in Reade’s A Woman-Hater, 99–102, 117, 139, 155, 157, 184; in Todd’s Mona Maclean, Medical

Index Student, 132; women doctors as homosocial and homoerotic figures in fiction, 7, 88, 99–102, 117, 118 Lewes, G. H., 16 Liberia, 183 Life for a Life, A (Craik), 55n6, 136n18 Linton, Eliza Lynn, 155 Little Dorrit (Dickens), 99n23 Loesberg, Jonathon, 55n5, 68n22 Lokugé, Chandani, 192n29, 193 London School of Medicine for Women, 104, 150, 163, 165, 189 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 38 Lonsdale, Margaret, 66 Macleod, Roy, 165 Male doctors: and Contagious Diseases Acts, 91, 125; gynecological examinations by, 146; legislation protecting, 63, 64n17; Nightingale on, 65, 66n19; and nurses’ role, 48, 63–67, 73, 83, 84, 90; overreliance of, on drugs for patients, 66n, 97; poisoning by, 62–63, 185; sexual exploitation of women patients by, 91, 145– 46, 147, 153, 154, 159; threats to status of, 63–64 Manchester Guardian, 155 Mangum, Teresa, 126n4 Manning, Maria, 72 Mansfield Park (Austen), 162n2 Marcella (Ward), 49–50, 61 Marriage: Mona Caird on, 152–53; court cases on, 52–53, 58–59, 155; in Gregg’s Peace with Honour, 182, 184–89; in India, 180–81, 193; in Kenealy’s Dr. Janet of Harley Street, 152–56; in Kingsley’s Two Years Ago, 48–49, 53, 54, 57; in Kipling’s The Naulahka, 178, 180–81; in New Woman fiction generally, 125, 152; in Todd’s Mona Maclean, Medical Student, 139–40, 143–44. See also Domesticity Martindale, Louisa, 199 Martineau, Harriet, 19n12, 90n9 Mary Barton (Gaskell), 5, 27

Index Maternalism, 8, 150–52, 157–60 “Mathew v. Harty,” 74–75 Matthews, Caroline, 201n5 Maud (Tennyson), 37 Maudsley, Henry, 92n13 McClintock, Anne, 11 McDonald, W. M., 34 McLaren, Eva Shaw, 201n5 Meade, L. T., 60n11, 83–84 Medical education: cost of and preliminary examination for, 128n7; for Hindu woman, 190–92; in Howell’s Dr. Breen’s Practice, 105; in India, 192, 195; Jex-Blake’s campaign for medical education for women, 86, 88–89, 91–97, 101, 106, 163; medical schools for women, 96n20, 104, 131, 137, 139, 149, 150, 163, 165, 189; in Reade’s A Woman-Hater, 95–96; in Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm, 128; in Todd’s Mona Maclean, Medical Student, 133, 136, 137, 140–41, 144, 147–48, 149; in United States, 190–91; and unsexing of women, 118, 146–47 Medical ethics, 125–26, 146 Medical imperialism, 165–66 Medical Registration Act (1858), 63, 64n17, 86 Medical romances: Broughton’s Second Thoughts, 6, 49–50, 60; Curwen’s Dr. Hermione, 114; Doyle’s “The Doctors of Hoyland,” 115–17; Dr. Edith Romney, 110–14, 115, 126; “An Episode of the War,” 39–41; Kingsley’s Two Years Ago, 43–49, 53; Nightingale’s criticism of, 57; Phelps’s Doctor Zay, 109–11, 126; Trollope’s Orley Farm, 58–60, 74, 82; Ward’s Marcella, 49–50, 61; women doctors in, 106–7, 109–14 Medical women. See Nurses; Women doctors Medicine and health care: and anticontagionism, 21–25, 29–30, 32; and germ theory, 21, 25; and hysteria, 114–15, 123–24, 189–90;

227 immorality and disease, 22, 23–24, 25, 26; and imperialism, 10, 163– 66, 176–77, 179–80, 186, 189–97; and neurotic women, 142–43; and poverty, 21, 22, 23, 24–25, 27; same-sex medical care for women, 109, 118, 144–45; and sexuality, 91, 101–2n26, 129, 158. See also Hospitals for women; Male doctors; Nurses; Women doctors; and specific diseases Menelik, King, 183 Meyer, Annie Nathan, 105, 126 Midwives, 64, 65, 173, 179–80, 189 Miller, D. A., 68, 70n24, 71 Mills, Sara, 170n15 Milnes, Richard Monckton, 35–36 Mix Me a Person, 202n7 M’Laren, Agnes, 96n20, 138 Mona Maclean, Medical Student (Todd): Alice Bateson in, 141, 158; Doris Colquhoun in, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 145; Dudley’s relationship with Mona in, 133, 136, 139, 140, 143– 44; and equality for women doctors, 132–33, 144–45, 148–50; female friendships in, 137–43; feminist issues in, 132–33, 139, 143–45, 148; heterosexuality in, 132, 139– 40; Jex-Blake as basis for, 131, 141, 194; Lucy Reynolds in, 137–41, 149; marriage in, 139–40, 143–44; Mathilde Cookson in, 137; medical education in, 133, 136, 137, 140– 41, 144, 147–48, 149; Mona’s “masquerade” as shop girl in, 133– 35; Mona’s medical care of women in, 136, 144–45; Mona’s nursing of Maggie in, 135–36; and Mona’s womanliness, 147–48; as New Woman doctor novel, 4–5, 8, 92– 93, 123–50, 154, 194; optimistic tone of, 129–30, 132, 161; publication of, 131; realism of, 8, 130–32, 151; reviews of, 123–24, 130–31, 141, 151; sexual exploitation of women in, 135–36, 145;

228 Sir Douglas’s objections to women doctors, 146–48; variety of female “types” in, 140–43 Morality of Marriage and Other Essays on the Status and Destiny of Woman, The (Caird), 153 Moral sanitarianism, 22, 24–25, 27, 33–36, 45, 65, 70, 81 Morantz-Sanchez, Regina, 87n4, 102n27 Motherhood, 8, 150–52, 157–60, 175–76, 178–79, 181–82 Murder. See Poisoning Muslims. See Islam My Antonia (Cather), 132 Myth of the destructive female, 167 National Review, 150, 152 Naulahka, The (Kipling), 9, 93, 174– 82, 195 Nettles, Elsa, 117 Neurotic women, 142–43 New Magdalen, The (Collins), 61n12, 162 New Man, 110, 111 New Woman: coinage of term, 98; and feminism, 90; and hysteria, 114–15; in Satthianadhan’s Saguna, 193–94; and sexuality, 7, 117–18; Todd on evolution of, 143; women doctors as, 9, 11, 90, 92–93, 117–18. See also New Woman doctor novels; New Woman fiction New Woman doctor novels: compared with earlier women doctor novels, 125–27; Gregg’s Peace with Honour, 5, 9, 10, 168, 171, 182–89, 202; and imperialism, 195–97; Kenealy’s Dr. Janet of Harley Street, 8, 123–27, 148, 150–60; Phelps’s Doctor Zay, 109– 11; presumed hysteria of authors of, 123–24; Reade’s A Woman-Hater, 98–104; and Satthianadhan’s Saguna, 192–97; Todd’s Mona Maclean, Medical Student, 4–5, 8, 92–93, 123–50, 151, 154, 158, 161, 194; and “womanliness” of doctors, 147–48

Index New Woman fiction: critics of, 124, 127n6; critique of femininity and marriage in, 125, 152; female friendships in, 137; female sexuality in, 8, 125, 154–55; by Grand, 125– 26; heroines in, 109, 125–26, 132; heterogeneity of, 150; on male inferiority, 157; male sexuality in, 153; narrative and formal innovations in, 129n8; and race-motherhood, 159; Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm as, 127–28; and True Womanhood, 158–59; variety of female “types” in, 140 Nightingale, Florence: and anticontagionist theory of disease, 24; behavior of, after Crimean War, 14n2; on cholera epidemic, 45; on classless society, 24, 72n26; and Contagious Diseases Act, 82; Crimean military rhetoric used by, 165; in Crimean War, 5, 6, 14, 15, 16n6, 18, 19, 24, 27, 34, 36–38, 40n45, 42–43, 46–47; detractors of, 39, 46–47; Dickens on, 57, 58n8; and feminism, 90n10; and Gaskell, 17–20; heroism of, 36–38; influence of, 6, 10, 14–15, 50–51; as Lady with the Lamp, 6, 13, 14, 15, 18–19, 36–38; on male doctors’ overreliance on drugs for patients, 66n, 97; marriage refusal by, 35– 36; and Martineau, 19n12; on moral qualities of nurses, 33–36, 41, 42–43, 56–57, 60, 73; and moral sanitarianism, 22, 24–25, 27, 33–36, 45, 65, 70, 81; museum portrayal of, 199; newspaper coverage of, 34, 36–39, 46–47; Notes on Nursing by, 50, 56–57, 62, 65, 70, 71, 73; on poisoning trials, 62– 63n15; and professional training for nurses, 41, 53, 58n8; on prostitutes, 18, 19, 27, 33, 82nn34–35; and reformed nursing, 16–17, 24–25, 33–36, 41–42; religious beliefs of, 47; religious controversy

Index surrounding, 46–47; on role of nurses compared with male doctors, 48, 65, 66n19, 73, 83; on romanticization of nursing, 50; self-image of, as savior or female Christ, 47; on sick poor, 24–25; Strachey’s portrait of, 10, 13–15, 50, 199; and training for nurses at St. Thomas’s Hospital, 53, 80n33; in Trollope’s Orley Farm, 59; Woolf on, 50–51 Nightingale, Parthe, 45 Nightingale nurse. See Nurses; Nurses in fiction “Nightingale’s Song to the Sick Soldier, The,” 38 Nineteenth Century, 66, 130–31, 150 No Name (Collins), 53n1 Nord, Deborah, 159 Nostromo (Conrad), 175 Notes on Nursing (Nightingale), 50, 56–57, 62, 65, 70, 71, 73 Nurses: arguments against paid nursing as career for women, 54– 55; compared with women doctors, 106, 169; and Crimean War, 5, 6, 9, 10, 14, 15, 16–17n6, 18, 19, 24, 27, 34, 36–38; domesticity and image of, 56–57; dual associations of, with nun and prostitute, 7, 54, 55, 82; and feminism, 90; and imperialism, 162; moral qualities of, 33–36, 41, 42–43, 56–57, 60, 73; and natural nursing by women, 54, 56, 58, 60, 61, 65, 79–81; Nightingale as, 5, 6, 10, 13–20; nuns as, 46–47; poisoning by, 62–63, 83; professional training for, 41, 50, 53, 56, 58, 80n33; reformed nursing, 17–20, 24–25, 33–36, 41–42; role of, compared with male doctors, 48, 63, 65–67, 73, 83, 84, 90; romanticization of nursing, 50; sensationalization of, 52–53, 58–59, 62–67; sexual harassment of, 34–35, 42; social class of, 33–34, 41–43; state registration of, 83, 84; stereotypes of, 28; and woman suffrage, 199;

229 and Yelverton Marriage Case, 52– 53, 58–59. See also Nurses in fiction Nurses in fiction: Allen’s Hilda Wade, 61n12, 83, 162, 170; as angels of mercy, 4, 6, 13–51; Broughton’s Second Thoughts, 6, 49–50, 60; Collins’s The Woman in White, 4, 6, 67–74, 99n23; in Crimean War, 39– 41; Dickens’s fiction, 1, 5, 58; as fallen woman, 3, 4–5, 14, 16, 25, 26, 27–28, 30, 31; Gaskell’s Ruth, 1, 4, 5–6, 15–16, 18–20, 23–33, 54, 55; for girls, 60; Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, 173–74; and imperialism, 162, 169, 173–74; introduction to, 1–5; James’s A Shroud for a Nightingale, 2; Kingsley’s Two Years Ago, 5, 6, 43–49, 53, 54, 57; Kipling’s The Naulahka, 175–82; in medical romances, 39–41, 43– 51, 57; Reade’s Hard Cash, 6–7, 67–68, 74–81, 82, 94–95, 99n23; redomestication of, 30–31, 54, 55– 56, 61, 73–74; in sensation fiction, 2, 6–7, 11, 62, 67–84; sexualization of, 1–2, 6–7, 11; trivialization of, 6, 49–50, 56, 60–61; Trollope’s Orley Farm, 58–60, 74, 82; in twentieth century, 199–201; Ward’s Marcella, 49–50, 61. See also Nurses Nurses in films, 200 Nursing Standard, 201 One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 200 Orientalism, 10, 167, 168, 170–71, 173, 176, 188–89. See also Imperialism Orley Farm (Trollope), 58–60, 74, 82 Osborne, S. G., 24, 48 Our Miss Gibbs, 133–34 Parkes, Bessie Rayner, 90n9 Parry, Noel and José, 20 Passage to India, A (Forster), 175 Peace with Honour (Gregg), 5, 9, 10, 168, 171, 182–89, 202 Pearson, Karl, 8, 91, 129, 151

230 Pechey, Edith, 88, 163 Peck, Gregory, 202n7 Penthesilea, 110–11 Perry, Anne, 200 Peterson, Jeanne, 35n36 Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, 102n27, 104, 105, 109–11, 126 Philadelphia College of Medicine, 190–91 Phillips, Walter, 94n17 Physicians. See Male doctors; Women doctors Pioneer Women in India (Diver), 190– 92, 195 Poisoning, 62–63, 72, 83–84, 112, 184, 185–86 Poovey, Mary, 6, 10, 24, 35n36, 72n26 Pornography, 6, 15, 48, 200 Poverty and disease, 21, 22, 23, 24– 25, 27 Prostitutes: and Contagious Diseases Act, 27, 81–82, 87; in Gaskell’s Ruth, 28; Greg on, 54, 59; Nightingale on, 18, 19, 27, 33, 82nn34–35; nurses’ association with, 7, 54, 55, 82; as nurses of British soldiers, 41; scholarship on, 10; and venereal disease, 26, 81–82; Victorian discourse on, 2, 4, 16, 31n31; women doctors’ association with, 88. See also Fallen woman Public health. See Medicine and health care Punch, 38, 119–22, 130 Purdah, 163, 165–66, 173, 189 Pykett, Lyn, 11, 31n31, 124, 129n8, 153 Queen’s University of Ireland, 104 Race-motherhood, 159–60 Raj Quartet (Scott), 175 Ramabai, Pundita, 176–78 Reade, Charles: on feminism, 95; fiction of, compared with New Woman doctor novels, 124; and medical education for women, 88,

Index 93–94, 97; popularity of, 94n17. Works: The Bloomer, 95n19; Hard Cash, 6–7, 67–68, 74–81, 82, 94– 95, 99n23; A Woman-Hater, 7, 79n32, 92–107, 117, 139, 155, 157, 158, 184; as writer of feminine texts, 124n2 Realism, 8, 109, 130–32, 151, 175 Religious orders, 17 Reminiscences (Scharlieb), 9, 10, 168, 189–90, 192, 195, 197 Roberts, Shirley, 141n24 Robinson, Ronald, 183 Rodd, Rennell, 183 Roman Catholic Church, 46–47, 52 Romances. See Medical romances Romola (Eliot), 55n6 Rosenberg, Charles, 22, 24 Rossetti, Christina, 16–17n6 Roy, Parama, 12, 165–66 Royal British Nursing Association, 83 Rushdie, Salman, 200 Ruth (Gaskell): Bellingham’s seduction of Ruth in, 26, 31, 32; biblical references in, 25, 30; as Christian narrative, 16, 30–31; compared with Kingsley’s Two Years Ago, 43– 45, 46; death of Ruth in, 23n20, 30–31, 36; fallen woman image in, 5, 16, 19, 25, 26, 28, 30, 31, 55, 197; feminine propriety in, 29; hypocrisies of wealthy in, 25–26; Leonard’s illegitimacy in, 30, 31, 32; and Nightingale, 18–20; nurse in, 1, 4, 5–6, 15–16, 18–20, 23–33, 54, 55; payment for nursing services in, 29; redemption plot of, 23–33; redomestication of Ruth in, 30–31, 54; Ruth’s nursing of Bellingham/ Donne, 31–32; sexuality in, 26, 31– 32; typhus epidemic in, 23–32, 43– 44, 69 Saguna (Satthianadhan), 192–97 Said, Edward, 10, 162n2, 166, 168, 170n15, 170n17 “Santa Filomena” (Longfellow), 38

Index Satthianadhan, Krupabai, 9, 171, 176, 192–97 Satthianadhan, Samuel, 195 Scharlieb, Mary: and eugenics, 199; feminism of, 173; medical education for and medical career of, 163, 171; Reminiscences, 9, 10, 168, 189–90, 192, 195, 197 Schreiner, Olive, 127–30, 151, 152, 159 Scotsman, 89 Scott, Paul, 175 Second Thoughts (Broughton), 6, 49– 50, 60 Sedgwick, Eve, 139n22 Sensation fiction: Alexander’s Dr. Victoria, 107–8; Collins’s The Woman in White, 4, 6, 67–74, 77, 99n23; dual function of nurse in, 62; James’s A Shroud for a Nightingale, 2; Pykett on, as feminine, 124n2; Reade’s Hard Cash, 6–7, 67–68, 74–81, 82, 94–95, 99n23; theft of identity in, 67–68 Sewell, Lucy, 138 Sexual harassment and exploitation of women, 26, 31, 32, 34–35, 42, 91, 135–36, 145–47, 159 Sexuality: in Alexander’s Dr. Victoria, 107–8; bisexuality, 157; Blackwell on, 91n12, 132; in Collins’s “Fie! Fie! the Fair Physician,” 109; double-standard in, 91; Freud on, 101–2n26; in Gaskell’s Ruth, 26, 31; in Kenealy’s Dr. Janet of Harley Street, 152–58; medical profession on, 91, 101n26, 129; of New Woman, 7, 117–18; in New Woman fiction, 125, 132, 154–55; Nightingale on need for chastity of nurses, 41, 42–43; in Reade’s Hard Cash, 6–7, 74–81, 99n23; in Reade’s The Woman-Hater, 99–102, 117, 157, 184; and sexual inverts, 87–88, 101; sexualization of nurses in fiction, 1–2, 6–7, 11; in Todd’s Mona Maclean, Medical Student, 132;

231 and unsexed women, 7, 87–88, 117–18, 134, 146–47, 157–58, 203; and Yelverton Marriage Case, 52–53, 58–59. See also Fallen woman; Lesbianism; Prostitutes Shaen, Emily, 18, 19n12 Shankar, D. A., 174 Shop Girl, The, 133–34 Shore, L. and A., 38 Showalter, Elaine, 11, 115, 127n6 Shroud for a Nightingale, A (James), 2 Shuttleworth, Sally, 10 Sister of the Red Cross, A (Meade), 60n11 Small, Hugh, 14n2 Smallpox, 21, 26 Smith, Elton, 95, 100n25 Smith, F. B., 19n12 “Some Thoughts on the Woman Question” (Todd), 148–49 “Song of the Women, The” (Kipling), 175–76, 178–79 Sopranos, The, 202n7 South Africa, 170, 171–74 Spear, Percival, 167 Spectator, 88 Spellbound, 202n7 Stoneman, Patsy, 32 Story of an African Farm, The (Schreiner), 127–28, 129n8 Strachey, Lytton, 10, 13–15, 50, 199 Strachey, Ray, 90n10, 198 Strobel, Margaret, 167n9 Suffrage. See Woman suffrage Summers, Anne, 41–42, 198 Surgeons, 102, 116, 122, 163 Syphilis, 26 “Talent of Motherhood, The” (Kenealy), 151–52 Talk Dirty to Me, 202n8 Television, 201–2 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 37 Thompson, Christine, 138n19 Tibet, 170 Times, 34, 37–41, 44, 48, 53nn1–2 Times of India, 200–201

232 Todd, Margaret: childhood of, 128; death of, 129; as doctor, 8, 123–26, 129, 139; and dress for workingclass women, 135; feminism of, 149, 151, 159; and Jex-Blake, 100, 101, 129, 131, 138, 139, 141–42, 159; literary career of, 142, 151; on neurotic women, 142–43; reviews of novel by, 123–24, 130–31, 141, 151; on woman question, 148–49, 151. Works: “After Many Days,” 142; Mona Maclean, Medical Student, 4–5, 8, 92–93, 123–50, 151, 154, 158, 161; “Some Thoughts on the Woman Question,” 148–49; Windyhaugh, 151 Tompkins, Jane, 11 Trojan War, 110–11 Trollope, Anthony, 58–60, 74, 82 True Womanhood, 158–59 Tuberculosis, 191 Turner, Rev. William, 28n27 Two Years Ago (Kingsley): cholera epidemic in, 43–45, 69; compared with Gaskell’s Ruth, 43–45, 46; Crimean War in, 43–49; Grace as nurse in, 5, 6, 43, 45–48, 53, 54; religious beliefs of Ruth in, 47–48; romance between doctor and nurse in, 43, 48; Valentia as nurse in, 49; Victorian marriage plot and domesticity in, 48–49, 53, 54, 57 Typhus, 23–32, 43–44, 68, 69–71, 73 University of Edinburgh, 86, 88–89, 93–94, 96, 163 Unlit Lamp, The (Hall), 85 Unsexed women, 7, 87–88, 117–18, 134, 146–47, 157–58, 203 Venereal disease, 21, 26, 55n5, 81–82, 153, 163. See also Contagious Diseases Act Vicinus, Martha, 6, 10, 35, 80n33, 100n24, 198 Virago, 96, 98, 103, 106, 113 Vivisection, 92

Index Voting rights. See Woman suffrage Vrettos, Athena, 11 Walkowitz, Judith, 10, 11, 64n17 Ward, Mrs. Humphrey, 49–50, 61 Wards of St. Margaret’s, The (“Sister Joan”), 60n11 War Lyrics (Shore and Shore), 38 Weeks, Jeffrey, 150 Wesley, Elizabeth, 201 Westminster Review, 152 Whips of Time, The (Kenealy), 152n33 Whitfield, Richard, 34–35 Wilson, Catherine, 83 Windyhaugh (Todd), 151 Winkworth, Catherine, 19n12 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 173 Woman-Hater, A (Reade): androgynous nature of women doctor in, 99, 102; homoeroticism in, 99–102, 117, 139, 155, 157, 184; Ina Klosking in, 96, 98, 99–102; JexBlake as basis of character in, 93– 97, 101, 106, 131; New Women doctor in, 98–103; publication of, in Blackwoods’ Edinburgh Magazine, 93, 101, 103; publication of, in U.S., 104; sanitary and medical reform in, 96–97; types of women in, 112–13; virago in, 96, 98, 103; woman doctor in, 7, 79n32, 92– 107; Zoë in, 100, 102 Woman in White, The (Collins), 4, 6, 67–74, 77, 99 Woman suffrage, 11, 64, 90, 91, 148, 149, 198–99 Women: dress reform for, 12, 91, 95n19; education of, 63, 64n17, 88, 89, 91, 92n13, 115, 152; as governesses, 35n36; gynecological surgery for, 87; homoerotic friendships of, 100–101; identity of Victorian woman, 48, 56–57; as midwives, 64, 65; as natural nurses, 54, 56, 58, 60, 61, 65, 79–81; neurotic women, 142–43; as objects, 2–3; poisoning by, 62–63, 72, 83–

Index 84; same-sex medical care for, 109, 118, 144–45; sexual exploitation of, 26, 31, 32, 91, 135–36, 145, 147, 159; superiority of, 22, 148–49; and True Womanhood, 157–58; unsexed women, 7, 87–88, 117–18, 134, 146–47, 157–58, 203. See also Lesbianism; New Woman; Nurses; Prostitutes; Women doctors Women doctors: compared with nurses, 106, 169; and Contagious Diseases Act, 92, 146, 163; defense of powerless women by, 73, 89, 92, 95, 147; and feminism, 8, 89–92, 117, 149, 158–59; and imperialism, 4, 9–12, 137, 159–71, 189–97; in India, 163–66, 169, 170, 176, 189–97; introduction to fictional treatment of, 1–5; in journalism, 7; legislation against registration of, 63, 64n17, 86; lesbianism and prostitution associated with, 88; and male patients, 147; medical education for, 86, 88–89, 93–96, 104, 105, 106, 118, 128, 131; motivation of, 7, 90–91; as New Women, 7, 8, 9, 11, 90, 92, 98; pro and con arguments on, 7, 85, 86– 93; public image of, 119–22; and rejection of nursing as career, 7, 90– 91; and same-sex medical care for women, 109, 118, 144–45; surgery by, 102n27, 122, 163; in United States, 79n32, 87n4, 104–5; as unsexed, 7, 87–88, 117–18, 134, 146–47, 157–58, 203; and vivisection, 92; and woman suffrage, 11, 198–99; and “womanliness,” 111n36, 147–48; during World War I, 198–99. See also Women doctors in fiction; and specific doctors Women doctors in fiction: Alexander’s Dr. Victoria, 7, 107–8; American

233 versus British publications, 98n21, 103–6; and British Empire, 9–10; Collins’s “Fie! Fie! the Fair Physician,” 109, 147; Curwen’s Dr. Hermione, 114; Doyle’s “The Doctors of Hoyland,” 7, 102n27, 115–17; Dr. Edith Romney, 110–14, 115, 126; Gregg’s Peace with Honour, 5, 9, 10, 168, 171, 182–89, 202; as homosocial and homoerotic figures, 7, 99–102, 117, 118; and imperialism, 169, 171–97; Kenealy’s Dr. Janet of Harley Street, 8, 123–27, 148, 150–60; Kipling’s The Naulahka, 9, 93; as New Woman, 7, 8, 92–93, 98–104, 109–11, 117–18, 123–60; Phelps’s Doctor Zay, 102n27, 105, 109–11, 116, 126; and protection of women from sexual dangers, 94, 95, 102, 107–8, 147, 154; Reade’s A Woman-Hater, 7, 79, 92– 107, 117, 139, 155, 157, 184; Reade’s Hard Cash, 79; romanticization of, 106–14; scientific knowledge of, 97–98; surgery by, 102, 116; Todd’s Mona Maclean, Medical Student, 4–5, 8, 92–93, 123–50, 151; in twentieth century, 199–203; as virago, 96, 98, 103, 106; Woolf’s The Years, 117. See also New Woman doctor novels; Women doctors Women’s hospitals, 89n8, 158–59, 163–65, 169 Women’s Work and Women’s Culture (Butler), 91–92 Woods, Mrs. Henry, 53n1 Woolf, Virginia, 50–51, 117, 201 World War I, 162, 198 “The Wrong Prescription” (Meade and Halifax), 83–84 Years, The (Woolf), 117, 201 Yelverton Marriage Case, 52–53, 58–59

Medical Women And Victorian Fiction

Women and Victorian Theatre

History and cultural memory in neo-Victorian fiction: Victorian afterimages

Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, Readers

Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women

Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women

Chromosome 6 Medical Fiction

Seizure Medical Fiction

Fated Genes (Medical Fiction)

Mortal Fear Medical Fiction

Violent Women and Sensation Fiction: Crime, Medicine and Victorian Popular Culture

Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction

Women, Science and Fiction: The Frankenstein Inheritance

Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy:

Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy

Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press

Romancing God: Evangelical Women and Inspirational Fiction

Novel Violence: A Narratography of Victorian Fiction

The Final Diagnosis Medical Fiction

Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past

Novel Craft: Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction

Anna Lombard (Late Victorian and Early Modernist Women Writers)

Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England

Women Writers and the Dark Side of Late Victorian Hellenism

FUTURE EVES: Classic Science Fiction About Women By Women

Japanese women writers: twentieth century short fiction

African American Women Writers' Historical Fiction

Victorian Literature and Finance

Victorian Literature and Finance

Victorian Literature and Finance

Victorian literature and finance

Medical Women And Victorian Fiction

Women and Victorian Theatre

History and cultural memory in neo-Victorian fiction: Victorian afterimages

Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, Readers

Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women

Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women

Chromosome 6 Medical Fiction

Seizure Medical Fiction

Fated Genes (Medical Fiction)

Mortal Fear Medical Fiction

Violent Women and Sensation Fiction: Crime, Medicine and Victorian Popular Culture

Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction

Women, Science and Fiction: The Frankenstein Inheritance

Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy:

Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy

Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press

Romancing God: Evangelical Women and Inspirational Fiction

Novel Violence: A Narratography of Victorian Fiction

The Final Diagnosis Medical Fiction

Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past

Novel Craft: Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction

Anna Lombard (Late Victorian and Early Modernist Women Writers)

Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England

Women Writers and the Dark Side of Late Victorian Hellenism

FUTURE EVES: Classic Science Fiction About Women By Women

Japanese women writers: twentieth century short fiction

African American Women Writers' Historical Fiction

Victorian Literature and Finance

Victorian Literature and Finance

Victorian Literature and Finance

Victorian literature and finance

Recommend Documents