Gendered Pathologies (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory) Book

Sondra Archimedes' enthralling and detailed study presents new ways of thinking about the female body and Victorian society. Discussing novels by Charles Dickens, H. Rider Haggard and Thomas Hardy, it examines nineteenth-century literary representations of the pathologized female body in relation to biomedical discourses about gender and society in Victorian England. Considering Foucault's notion of perverse sexualities and Herbert Spencer's model of the social organism, she argues that the pathologized female body displaces or resolves -- on a narrative level -- larger cultural anxieties concerning the health of the British race. Exploring female sexual deviance in the Victorian novel as a marker of social decay, the book pays particular attention to issues of sibling incest, racial stereotyping and neurasthenia, shedding light on the way in which biological thinking permeated British culture in the second half of the century. "Gendered Pathologies" employs Spencer's model of the 'social body' to analyze the connections between Victorian society and gendered science. Using the model in this way not only highlights larger social anxieties about the longevity of the British species, but also issues relating to reproduction. These ideas form a conceptual framework for the entire book.Read More