Women in Medicine in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

From Poisoners to Doctors, Harriet Beecher Stowe to Theda Bara

Sara L. Crosby

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319964621
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319964638
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

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. 

 

© The Author(s) 2018

S. L. CrosbyWomen in Medicine in Nineteenth-Century American LiteraturePalgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicinehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96463-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Making the Medicinal Poisoner

Sara L. Crosby¹

(1)

The Ohio State University at Marion, Marion, OH, USA

End Abstract

In February 1869, the Waverley Theatre surprised New Yorkers. Once a defunct minstrel hall, it had been renovated and domesticated into a playhouse that catered to the emerging mainstream tastes of middle- and working-class audiences. The city, however, was already saturated with similar venues, and, as one critic expressed it, “When the opening of the Waverley Theatre was announced the theatrical public generally looked upon it as an adventurous, fool-hardy undertaking.” Yet, against all reasonable expectations, the first night proved “a felicitous success,” with “the little theatre…crowded by an audience which was really and genuinely entertained and pleased.”¹ Grounded by that solid opening, the Waverley persisted as a busy theatrical venue and remains a vital part of the city’s popular culture as an IFC cinema.

According to our contemporary critic, the magic formula for such an unexpected triumph was quite clear: “The success is owing to the engagement of a very clever burlesque company and the selection of a burlesque really much more witty and funny than any now on the stage.”² The Elise Holt Troupe, headed by a youthful British actress, had performed Lucretia Borgia, M. D., a cross-dressed parody of Gaetano Donizetti’s 1833 opera Lucrezia Borgia.³ For the better part of two decades, the overheated tragedy in its various forms—as the opera and as Victor Hugo’s play Lucrezia Borgia (1833) or J. M. Weston’s Americanized Lucretia Borgia (1844)—had been fascinating both European and American audiences with its tale of the notorious poisoner’s struggle to redeem herself by winning the affections of her long-lost son Gennaro.⁴ Sadly, these “straight” versions of the narrative indicate that a woman, once poisonous, remains fundamentally and irreversibly poisonous. Borgia simply cannot change, and the play ends with her accidentally dosing her beloved Gennaro with a fatal concoction.

One might expect that the burlesque of this already misogynist narrative would have taken an even more degrading form. Featuring an actor in drag playing Borgia, the comedy could have mimicked the minstrel show’s portrait of the “wench” (also played by white men) and produced a buffoonish humiliation of the proud Lucretia that would have depicted her as more evil, more venal, and stupid. But the Waverley had left its rowdy and boozy minstrel hall days behind, and bald misogyny no longer “genuinely entertained and pleased” its current patrons. Instead, while Holt’s Gennaro “charmed” the audience, “Mr. Lewis” played Lucretia with respect, in “admirable” makeup and in a manner that while “droll” managed to be “indescribably genteel.”⁵

This respectful performance dovetailed with an even more notable shift in Borgia’s characterization: the tragedy’s monstrous victim was transformed into an impressively competent doctor. In the original, Gennaro and his friends recoil in disgust from Lucretia’s reputation as a poisoner. In the burlesque, their outrage also stems from her facility with poisonous substances, but only because Dr. Borgia’s doses have become medicinal and so have saved the lives of their wealthy relatives. The young men thus begin her list of “[c]rimes that should freeze the blood” with silly things like selling “some shaving soap that would not lather” and end with the most horrific crime:

You saved my father’s life; my father who

Had left me everything, as well you knew,

With one small dose. Why didn’t he reject it?⁶

This complaint does not depict a dangerous, unnatural monster, doomed to destroy what she loves along with herself. Rather, Lucretia is a doctor. Her poison is in fact medicinal, and, while the play pokes some fun at doctors in general and at Lucretia’s zeal for “science” in particular, what gets parodied here are not her supposed professional pretensions or her poison knowledge but rather men’s hysterically vaporous reactions to them. For all the play’s silliness, then, its version of Lucretia Borgia moves her narrative in a surprisingly feminist direction—critiquing men’s fear of women and portraying those women not just as misunderstood but as heroic and competent professionals whose actions in the public sphere are a boon not a bane.

Such a revisionary portrait of Lucretia Borgia, however , was more than just an isolated reinterpretation of a random historical personage. It also signaled a wider departure in the depiction of the poisonous woman. As Coramae Richey Mann observes , “the name of Lucretia Borgia is considered synonymous with the appellation ‘woman poisoner,’” and so a revision of Borgia, especially one that plays well to large audiences in the nation’s most popular medium, indicates that the female poisoner may have been undergoing a parallel transformation in America’s popular imagination.⁷ In this case, that metamorphosis was both a medical and an almost unprecedented feminist shift.

I say almost unprecedented because the most fundamental, nigh-untouchable, intractable, and enduring thesis of misogyny is the equation between women and poison.⁸ Poison has long served as a particularly effective tool of patriarchal and authoritarian propaganda. While those patriarchs and authoritarians have often characterized poisoning as the weapon of the rebellious disempowered—servants, slaves, women—a classic tool of the oppressed, far more often “poison” as fact and metaphor has served the oppressor and the interests of the powerful.⁹ Accusations of “poison!” have fueled pogroms, lynchings, witch hunts, and the judicial repression of restive populations of poor workers.¹⁰ This control can be exerted directly by persecuting an accused minority or indirectly by encouraging a populace to fear the poison of the chosen other and so to cleave to an authoritarian father figure, such as a king or system of elites, for protection, while they embrace a supremacist group identity.¹¹

This othering and cleaving is most effective if it can be made to fall along clear and highly visible lines of identity—say gender and/or race and ethnicity. These others are typically feminized in some way, their bodies coded as abject and dangerously sexual in conjunction with their supposed poison.¹² Women, not surprisingly then, have been the group singled out most consistently for association with poison.¹³ This connection has been made in multiple ways: identifying women’s bodies, gazes , and voices as toxic; accusing women of having a peculiar predilection for poisoning; or associating women with venomous animals. These poisonous conflations have permeated the western literary tradition, oral and written: from the Hebrew tale of Eve and the snake to the ancient Greek snake-woman lamia to the potion-stirring Roman venefica ; from the Indian virgin apocryphally sent to murder Alexander the Great with her envenomed flesh to Aristotle’s and Albertus Magnus’s warnings about the toxic glance of menstruating women; from Snow White’s poison-apple-wielding queen to the comic book super-villain Poison Ivy’s toxic kiss; from pop songs wailing “that girl is poison” to the still-prevailing idea that “women in all ages…have been the first inventers, and the greatest practisers of poisoning , and more naturallie addicted and given thereunto than men,”¹⁴ in spite of decades of criminal statistics to the contrary.¹⁵

Unfortunately, statistics have often failed to counter centuries of ideological certainty.¹⁶ That women are poisonous is just one of the things that people “know.” For women, the effect of this association with poison has often proved physically and psychologically damaging, even deadly, but its most particular and lingering, if subtle, effect has been political: an undermining of women’s right to access the public sphere as active citizens and empowered leaders. Poisoning is often considered a crime of domesticity, toxins slipped into food served at the family table or suffusing bodies offered for intimacy in a man’s bed, but, somehow in spite of women’s ostensible penchant for toxicity, men have continued to allow them to serve in the home preparing food, caring for children, and providing sexual services.¹⁷ Instead, the connection between women and poison has primarily impacted the role allowed women in public. As Margaret Hallissy points out , “the image of the woman who uses poison or is venomous is, above all, an image of female power and male fear of it.”¹⁸ If poison signifies women’s power, so the logic goes, then women’s power can only be poison. Allowing women to gain power allows them to become dangerously toxic. Therefore, women must be excluded from the place where power is acquired: the public sphere.

Particularly in a modern capitalist nation, power—political, economic, and cultural authority—is gained and exercised in the public sphere.¹⁹ It is the world of remunerative work or productive labor, political and civic engagement, and full aesthetic and discursive expression. The domestic or private sphere, by contrast, is reserved for unpaid, unproductive female work: housework, emotional work, and reproductive labor, work that was supposedly “pure” because it is untouched by power. The ideology of separate spheres that evolved in the nineteenth century rested upon the notion that women could maintain their purity as long as they remained sequestered, but exposure in the public arena would contaminate them.²⁰ Behind this paternalist protection lurked the old misogyny: not just the fear of the “public” woman’s potential sexual license, but the fear that she might gain power, and once contaminated with power, women would become contaminating and so debilitate men and their homosocial order.

The nineteenth century was—supposedly—no exception to this dull drumbeat affirming women’s special, socially debilitating connection to poison. According to current popular percepti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Making the Medicinal Poisoner
• 2. A Quarrel of Poisons: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Homeopathic Poisoner
• 3. Playing Poison: Mary Webb’s Antidote to the Tom Shows
• 4. With Friends Like These: E. D. E. N. Southworth and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Pathological Poisoners
• 5. The Lady Doctor and the Vamp: How Louisa May Alcott, Theda Bara, and Thomas Dixon, Jr., Killed the Poisonous Woman
• 6. Conclusion and Coda: A Presidential Election, My Cousin Rachel, and the Lingering Effects of the Medicinal Poisoner
• Back Matter