THE " GENUS MEDICAL WOMAN": REPRESENTATIONS OF FEMALE DOCTORS AND NURSES IN AMERICAN FICTION FROM THE CIVIL WAR INTO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.
Contributors: Princeton University.
Published: 1994
Number of pages: 327
Subjects: Literature, American.; Women's Studies.
Description: During the latter decades of the nineteenth century, professional women in medicine came to signify the newest of New Women, and in American literature the woman doctor became a symbolic double for the female writer. Literary representations of medical women emerged after the Civil War as women began to enter medicine in substantial numbers. This same period was a transitional age for American women writers during which they no longer conceived of themselves as literary handmaidens, but as professional artists. For woman writers, female healers inspired a reconsideration of women's relationship to authority and, by extension, authorship.

In Hospital Sketches (1863), Louisa May Alcott initiates the identification of healer and writer by employing the figure of the Civil War nurse to represent her professional ambition and her desire to cure cultural and personal discord. In the early 1880s, after women physicians had established a professional foothold, the twin texts of William Dean Howells's Dr. Breen's Practice (1881) and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's Doctor Zay (1882) debate women's right to authority and authorship. The realist portraits of the New Woman by Alcott, Howells, and Phelps acknowledge her intellect, economic status, and political significance, but they are also enigmatic and troubled. The healers in these texts internalize unresolved cultual wars over the nature of gender, knowledge, and authority and thus remain confined by the conventional definition of the woman as invalid. By contrast, in A Country Doctor (1884) and The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), Sarah Orne Jewett expresses confidence in women as healers and equates literary and medical arts. In the early twentieth century, as female doctors were again excluded from the medical profession, Edith Wharton reexamines the relationship of medicine and literature in The Fruit of the Tree (1907) and The Spark (1924), but rejects the metaphor of the writer as healer that has developed in American women's fiction. The work of contemporary author and physician Perri Klass demonstrates, however, that the medical woman remains a double for the female writer and a site of negotiation over gender convention, authority, and authorship.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-02, Section: A, page: 0553.

Thesis (PH.D.)--PRINCETON UNIVERSITY, 1994.

School code: 0181.