ENG32880

With the advent of modern medicine, women’s bodies and minds have been subject to attempts to control and contain their emotions and behaviours. Since the eighteenth century, literature has both reflected on and contributed to this process, especially in its exploration of stereotypes associated women's mental health, such as the sexualised young woman, the nervous mother, the hypochondriac middle-aged spinster, and the diseased crone, which had been redefined in medical terms as a danger to the health of the population. On this module, students will learn how the literature of this period challenges, reinforces and rewrites these stereotypes in its engagement with the medicalisation of femininity.

With representations of trauma, aging, disease, disability, mental disturbance, disruptive emotionality, bodily shame and physical degeneration the writers on the module offered new perspectives on the major debates that were reshaping conceptions of womanhood across the period. Students on this module will trace how medical theories and concepts informed how women understood the societal forces that sought to control their experience of health and embodiment in works such as: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria; or the Wrongs of Women, Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman, and selections from the poetry of Anne Sexton.