Women in Medicine in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

From Poisoners to Doctors, Harriet Beecher Stowe to Theda Bara

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by Sara L. Crosby

Type

Essays

Subject

Silent Cinema

Keywords

silent cinema, women, representation

Publishing date

2018

Publisher

Palgrave MacMillan

Collection

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Hardcover • 274 pages
6 x 8 ¼ inches (15 x 21 cm)

ISBN

978-3-319-96462-1

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Book Presentation:
This book investigates how popular American literature and film transformed the poisonous woman from a misogynist figure used to exclude women and minorities from political power into a feminist hero used to justify the expansion of their public roles. Sara Crosby locates the origins of this metamorphosis in Uncle Tom’s Cabin where Harriet Beecher Stowe applied an alternative medical discourse to revise the poisonous Cassy into a doctor. The newly “medicalized” poisoner then served as a focal point for two competing narratives that envisioned the American nation as a multi-racial, egalitarian democracy or as a white and male supremacist ethno-state. Crosby tracks this battle from the heroic healers created by Stowe, Mary Webb, Oscar Micheaux, and Louisia May Alcott to the even more monstrous poisoners or “vampires” imagined by E. D. E. N. Southworth, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Theda Bara, Thomas Dixon, Jr., and D. W. Griffith.

About the Author:
Sara L. Crosby is Associate Professor of English at the Ohio State University at Marion, USA, and author of Poisonous Muse: The Female Poisoner and the Framing of Popular Authorship in Jacksonian America (2016).

Press Reviews:
"Crosby provides a fascinating, beautifully researched look at how American literature and culture defined and redefined the woman poisoner from early in the 19th century to early in the 20th. At the center of this story connecting writers and performers as different as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Theda Bara is Harriet Beecher Stowe’s poisonous woman in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the defiant enslaved healer, Cassy. This is scholarship at its best―lucid, provocative, totally engaging. " (Elizabeth Ammons, Harriet H. Fay Professor of Literature, Tufts University, USA)

"Provocative and persuasive, Women in Medicine introduces us to the nineteenth century’s poisonous woman who becomes either her polar opposite, the heroic doctor, or the newly pathologized vampire. Ranging from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Cassy to Theda Bara’s film vamp, Sara Crosby’s portrayal of this quintessential figure is as much a page turner as the popular texts Sara Crosby interrogates. " (Mary Kelley, Ruth Bordin Collegiate Professor of History, American Culture and Women’s Studies, University of Michigan, USA)

See the publisher website: Palgrave MacMillan