Doctoring the text: Therapeutic realism in nineteenth-century American literature (Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, S. Weir Mitchell, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Henry James)

Focusing on American narrative fiction and medical discourse from 1850 to roughly 1900, “Doctoring the Text: Therapeutic Realism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature” examines the immodest claim that writing produces corporeal effects—indeed, that it is powerful enough to extend life or hasten death—made by nineteenth-century writers. Arguing against critics who censure American realism for its naive positivism, this dissertation establishes that certain works of fiction by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, S. Weir Mitchell, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Henry James participated in an epistemological reorientation, in which representations came to be evaluated not on mimetic terms, for their adequacy to some external reality, but for their efficacy—in particular, for their ability to register themselves on the physical body.; Rather than making an exclusively literary argument, this dissertation falls into the genre of what historian Lorraine Daston has termed “historical epistemology” or “the history of the categories that structure our thought.” Through close examination of the narrative strategies of fictional texts and the epistemological stakes of a series of medical debates (over disease etiology, contagion, medical statistics, hysteria, and voodoo death), “Doctoring the Text” contends that the problem of realism in late nineteenth-century American culture was shaped by ongoing argumentation between two stories about the human body: the physiological and the psychotherapeutic. This dissertation reveals how “thick” narrative depictions of human experience, excised from an increasingly scientific medicine, make a powerful reappearance in the turn-of-the-century literary domain and in the nascent discipline of psychotherapy, both of which reconstitute narrative as a diagnostic epistemology and a form of therapeutics.; In recent years, the notion that literature harbors healing power has gained in institutional legitimacy, both in the medical terrain of alternative therapies and within literary and cultural studies. “Doctoring the Text” engages with and critiques current theoretical arguments about the therapeutic value of narrative by providing a historical exegesis of the idea that (to quote a recent medical researcher) imaginative writing is “just as important to treating patients as are drugs and machines.”...