Intracorporeal Narratives: Reading Internal Biology in Women’s Literature, 1880s-1930s

Project Information

INTRARIB

Grant agreement ID: 101023059

DOI

10.3030/101023059

Project closed

EC signature date 17 March 2021

Start date 1 September 2021

End date 31 August 2023

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 166 320,00

EU contribution

€ 166 320,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITEIT GENT
Belgium

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - INTRARIB (Intracorporeal Narratives: Reading Internal Biology in Women’s Literature, 1880s-1930s)

Reporting period: 2021-09-01 to 2023-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

This project examined a selection of British and American women’s fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for its depictions of internal anatomy: organs and systems, circulatory, nervous, reproductive, and digestive. Traditional scholarship tends to read mentions of the internal body and organs as purely symbolic and metaphorical, especially in women’s writing. My focus on corporeality in women’s fiction has demonstrated that running through it there is a profound concern with the medical body, a fascination with flesh, blood, and biological processes.

The aim of the project was to demonstrate how an imaginative, descriptive approach to the internal body is used by women writers to communicate experiential illness, disorder and pain, and to claim ownership of corporeal experience. The objectives included investigating relationships, divergences and shared languages between literary and medical depictions over the period 1880s-1930s; investigating the nature and degree of assertions of ownership over the body through women’s depictions of the body’s internal anatomy and how this challenges critical narratives that see mentions of internal anatomy as exclusively metaphorical; examining the link between internal processes and mental health: the persistence of an organ-based understanding of psychological disorder, and how systems such as hormones and the microbiome are thought to impact the mind; centralising the body as a method of reading literary texts, to ask new questions about the body’s interior; considering how medical texts describe the body and its workings and how this plays into wider social narratives about gender.

The project demonstrated the persistent desire to find a physiological rationale, to map pain internally, even when that pain has an emotional or psychological source. I also explored how changing conceptualisations of the body interact with gendered notions of pathology and disorder.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

During the project, I studied and closely analysed a corpus of seven texts by four authors of fiction – Sarah Grand, Lucas Malet, Radclyffe Hall, and Emily Holmes Coleman – who lived and wrote across the period 1880s-1930s, alongside representative medical texts from the same period. I compared relationships between these literary and medical texts by analysing the language they used – whether shared or divergent – and also the gaps, feints, slippages of language which reveal hidden narratives about medical authority and patient bodies. Each of the first four work packages examined the work of a different woman writer –– alongside contemporary medical texts and popular reading material. In the analysis of each of these fictional texts I identified and catalogued moments – scenes, sentences, descriptions – in which the body’s internal anatomy appeared in the text, for example the nervous system, the heart, the liver. I considered whether these representations of the biological interior were largely figurative instances, or more often in the form of medical realism. I then considered whether these instances were in line with social and medical norms, and with how organs like the heart tend to be understood in literary criticism about women writers. I read medical texts and newspaper articles from the 1880s to the 1930s, to discover how medicine and society thought about the link between biology and mental health, and how this understanding evolved through this period with the development of new theories of bodily process, and technologies which enabled a deeper understanding of the body, such as increasingly powerful microscopes, the final victory of cell theory over miasma theory, the discovery of vitamins and hormones, increasing use of X-rays. This exploration led to the development of a Senior Postdoc proposal, which successfully obtained funding for three years from Research Foundation Flanders (FWO).

This research has led to four international conference presentations and five invited talks; four workshops both public-facing and for fellow academics, and several forthcoming open-access journal articles in interdisciplinary titles, including one award-winning article in the Journal of Literature and Science.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

This study contributes to the field of medical humanities: the development of an analytical process of body-centred reading, and presents new analysis of how women’s writing communicates bodily experiences and depicts the ‘intracorporeal’, narrative journeys through concealed and invisible organs. It also contributes to the recovery and rediscovery of lost and little-known works of female authors, highlighting the work of forgotten and long out-of-print women’s writing. Finally, the project brings attention to women writers’ engagement with medicine and the adoption of the role of medical authority, building on and challenging established readings of the role of medicine. It productively troubles accepted truths about narratives of the female body in both fiction and medicine, tracking the gendering of pathology and disorder, bodily metaphors, and medical authority, relevant and relatable to contemporary contexts and society today.

INTRARIB poster