2004 Homburg 2005)-was therefore warily signalled more than declared in mid-19th century Britain. The biological inability or diminished ability to have offspring-what today is often called “infertility,” though the struggle to standardize terms in reproductive medicine persists ( Habbema et al. As a result, the English physicians’ repeated references to menstrual and reproductive irregularities as symptoms or possible causes of female mental pathology carry their own haunting charge, with the implicit diagnosis of temporary or permanent sterility recurring throughout the text in troubling, unnamed glimpses.
#A strange story by sir edward bulwer lytton manual#
Moreover, Bucknill and Tuke compiled their seminal Manual in 1858, a decade before any fixed notion of sterility came into regular clinical use.
Matthews Duncan set out classifications of “fecundity,” “fertility,” “relative sterility,” and “absolute sterility” in 1866, some of his distinctions created confusion in the medical field before becoming generally accepted ( Cole 2000, p. Within the professionalizing discourse of mental science, therefore, when psychiatrists like Bucknill and Tuke reported on the menstrual cycles of patients in relation to mental instability, they had to do so without clear clinical terminology to identify the correlation frequently insinuated between insanity and a suppressed or impaired reproductive capacity. Medical writers, on the other hand, simply had no standard nomenclature for reproductive health and ill health until the late 19th century. This reliance on rhetorical signs and allusion does not surprise for Victorian fiction, especially for the melodramatic, heavily symbolic works Bulwer tended to produce, including A Strange Story, serialised in All the Year Round in 1861–1862 and published in book form in 1862. The spectral sterility of the female figures in question further gains a foreboding, Gothic force of narrative suspense by being implied rather than named outright.
As this essay will explore for two popular British mid-century texts, A Manual of Psychological Medicine by John Charles Bucknill and Daniel Hack Tuke and A Strange Story by Edward Bulwer Lytton, the ominously ghostly status afforded such “deranged” females thus conveys a pervasive Victorian sociomedical apprehension of sterility as a form of cultural as well as physiological destabilization and potential erasure. Narrative focus often falls, however, on the suspension of the woman’s ability to reproduce as much as her suspended ability to reason-a plot twist that suggests Victorian authors across disciplines treated disordered or depleted fertility as an equivalent, if not more significant, threat. These female subjects, whether patients in psychiatrists’ clinical case histories or characters in novels by literary writers alert to contemporary alienist discourse, ostensibly present cases of dementia, mania, hysteria, and other pathological mental conditions. What can be called the sterility plot refers to a narrative, or subnarrative, incorporating elements of suspense and the supernatural that draws attention to disruptions of the period’s normative biological and romance trajectory toward childbirth (within wedlock) by portraying women of childbearing age who experience mental illness in spectralised terms. For Victorian fiction, this plot line can be seen to coincide with the familiar marriage plot, yet its Gothicised obverse also appears in both medical and imaginative literature of the 19th century. Bringing affective science to bear on narratology, Patrick Colm Hogan has defined “the fertility plot” as a narrative category in which the protagonist aims to achieve sexual congress in order to produce offspring ( Hogan 2011, p.
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