(P)rescription Narratives: Feminist Medical Fiction and the
Failure of American Censorship
AVAILABLE NOW! ORDER HERE. Use discount code NEW30 for 30% launch discount. (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 Francis Ellen Watkins Harper,
among others, exposes the limitations of social construction and
materiality in conversations about the female body since subject
formation relies upon multiple force relations that shape and are shaped
by one another in ongoing processes that do not stop even in our efforts
to interpret cultural artifacts. These multiple failures – to censor, to
resist, to interpret – open up a space for negotiating how we engage the
world with greater empathy.
Part of the Interventions in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture series, edited by Christopher Hanlon, Sarah Ruffing Robbins, and Andrew Taylor.
"Brimming with heart and intelligence, (P)rescription Narratives turns to the fascinating topic of women’s medical fiction to stimulate vital new conversations between medical humanities, disability studies and affect theory. The result is an invigorating diagnosis of the full slipperiness of the body as it appeared in the late nineteenth century: partly plastic, the result of social life impressing upon it and partly the product of the rigid molds of race, sex and ability. Tavera brilliantly locates women writers at the frictional space where these two paradigms collide, revealing how the materiality of language and the affective dimensions of narrative become their therapeutics to expose the contradictions of their era while attempting to free themselves from them." ~ Kyla Schuller, Rutgers University, New Brunswick
Part of the Interventions in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture series, edited by Christopher Hanlon, Sarah Ruffing Robbins, and Andrew Taylor.
"Brimming with heart and intelligence, (P)rescription Narratives turns to the fascinating topic of women’s medical fiction to stimulate vital new conversations between medical humanities, disability studies and affect theory. The result is an invigorating diagnosis of the full slipperiness of the body as it appeared in the late nineteenth century: partly plastic, the result of social life impressing upon it and partly the product of the rigid molds of race, sex and ability. Tavera brilliantly locates women writers at the frictional space where these two paradigms collide, revealing how the materiality of language and the affective dimensions of narrative become their therapeutics to expose the contradictions of their era while attempting to free themselves from them." ~ Kyla Schuller, Rutgers University, New Brunswick
Helen Brent, M.D. by Annie Nathan Meyer (1892)
Hastings College Press, 2020. Edited and with an Introduction by Stephanie Peebles Tavera. WINNER OF HONORABLE MENTION, 2021 SSAWW BOOK EDITION AWARD. Annie Nathan Meyer’s 1892 novel Helen Brent, M.D. narrates one woman’s struggle for public acceptance as a doctor and a lady among the New York City elite. Unlike earlier works of medical fiction, Helen Brent M.D. does not offer just a marriage-or-career narrative but also a treatise on sex education. Dr. Brent is a skilled surgeon, a New Woman, who also deals with the negative effects of venereal diseases and other social ills of the urban elite on women’s health. Purchase on Amazon or Barnes & Noble