Gendered pathologies: The female body and biomedical discourse in the nineteenth-century English novel (Thomas Hardy, H. Rider Haggard, Charles Dickens)

This dissertation examines nineteenth-century literary representations of the pathologized female body in relation to biomedical discourses about gender and society in Victorian England. Beginning in the late eighteenth century and continuing throughout the nineteenth, science and medicine gave particular attention to the female body, connecting bourgeois ideas about social transgression to scientific concepts. The woman who did not conform to the dictates of gender ideology was, biologically speaking, aberrant: a deviation from the norm. Yet, as I am arguing, the “deviant” woman was not a marginal figure but symbolically central as a literary and cultural trope. In the novels I am examining here—by Charles Dickens, H. Rider Haggard, and Thomas Hardy—the pathologized female body stands in for a social sphere threatened with cultural, moral, or physical decline.; In approaching this issue, I examine the convergence of gendered science with a biological model of human society used in the social sciences. Within the context of evolutionary thought and the emergent field of the social sciences, the social sphere was envisioned as a biological system—literally, a “social body.” This social body was linked metaphorically to the individual human organism, leading on the one hand to theories about the “natural” organization of the social world, and on the other to a view of the British people as a race or species. My study looks at the way in which ideas about the female body and the social body merged in literary works of the second half of the nineteenth century, providing imaginative resolutions to vexing social problems. In Dickens's Hard Times, Haggard's She, and Hardy's Jude the Obscure the deviant female body represents problems in the larger social domain which are then resolved, contained, mapped, or simply displaced through an implied diagnosis of female sexual pathology. In each of these texts, I trace the varying ways gender and biological paradigms adapt themselves to different cultural circumstances.