(P)rescription Narratives
Feminist Medical Fiction and the Failure of American Censorship
From the series Interventions in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture.
(P)rescription Narratives reveals how the act of narrative creates the subjects of disability, race, and gender during a period of censorship in American history. In a Crip Affect reading of woman-authored medical fiction from the Comstock Law era, Stephanie Peebles Tavera argues that women writers of medical fiction practice storytelling as a form of narrative medicine that prescribes various forms of healing as an antidote to the shame engineered by an American culture of censorship.
The woman-authored medical fiction of Louisa May Alcott, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, among others, exposes the limitations of social construction and materiality in conversations about the female body. These multiple failures—to censor, to resist, to interpret—open a space for negotiating how we engage the world with greater empathy.
