Dr. Bramwell and Her Prototypes: Victorian Ideas of Gender, Class, Culture, and Morality in the Masterpiece Theatre Bramwell Series

The PBS Masterpiece Theatre series Bramwell, which aired through more than sixteen episodes in the late 1990s,1 starred Jemma Redgrave as the intrepid woman doctor in 1890s London, and David Calder as her curmudgeonly but affectionate father, also a doctor. The series emphasizes Eleanor Bramwell's perseverance in the medical profession in the face of severe criticism and hostility not only from some of her male counterparts, but from male patients as well. In addition to the novelty of being a woman doctor, Eleanor is portrayed to some degree as a "new woman," a gender stereotype of the 1890s associated with women doing things that were previously considered taboo for women: riding bicycles, smoking and drinking, dressing more sensibly and comfortably, getting university educations, going into professions, and generally being more independent. In its negative version, promoted by satirical magazines such as Punch, the new woman appeared as "the unsexed, terrifying Amazon ready to overturn the world" (Schaffer 39). In the real-life struggle for the admission of women into medical school and of being licensed as practicing physicians, pioneers Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, Dr. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, and Dr. Sophia Jex-Blake embodied various strategies for women breaking into a hitherto all-male profession: the maternal/moral strategy of Elizabeth Blackwell, the feminine or "womanly" strategy of Elizabedi Garrett Anderson, and the more aggressive "new woman" or militant approach of Sophia Jex-Blake. Eleanor Bramwell embodies the best of these strategies: she is independent and strong and partakes of "new woman" activities, such as bicycling, but she also has a feminine side and can be very Victorian to the point of being prudish in her morality. She can also be interested in men. Though the series focuses primarily on Eleanor and her father, several Victorian themes or issues are reflected in the series, including ideas of class, gender, morality, the science-versus-faith debate, scandals that threaten respectability, and Victorian genres, such as the sensation novel. In the first episode, Eleanor experiences the condescending and even hostile attitude that women often experienced in the latter half of the nineteenth century as they were trying to break into the medical profession. Eleanor, as we find we find out in a later episode, has been licensed by the London School of Medicine for Women, which at the time would have been under the deanship of Dr. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. Eleanor is apprenticed as a kind of intern in East London Hospital under the supervision of Sir Herbert Hamilton. She is shocked by his brutal tactics and his nonchalant attitude as he loses women patients in performing ovariotomies. In her objections to these ovariotomies, she follows Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, who objected to them on the grounds diat such genital mutilation unsexed women (Bland 68-69). In her objections to this method and to Sir Herbert's insistence on cutting off die entire foot of a patient in a case of gangrene rather than simply getting rid of some toes, she is ridiculed not only by Sir Herbert but by her male co-interns as well. She is eventually fired by Sir Herbert for her insubordination and founds her own East End free clinic, the Thrift. The pattern Eleanor follows is consistent with die historical treatment in which women physicians often found themselves working in dispensaries in working class areas because they were not welcome in more established hospitals (Blake xv). Such treatment and worse was actually experienced by Sophia Jex-Blake and other women as they tried to gain full student acceptance into the school of medicine at Edinburgh University, where at one point dieir male counterparts locked the gates on them and heaped them with scorn, as well as dirt and rotting vegetation (Bell 77). In fact, the physician JexBlake identifies some of the medical school professors who were most hostile to women going into the medical profession at the Edinburgh School of Medicine as possibly being responsible for inciting some of the male students to their hostile actions. …