Female Physicians in American Literature by Margaret Jay Jessee

Female Physicians in American Literature by Margaret Jay Jessee

Female Physicians in American Literature traces the woman physician character throughout her varying depictions in 19th-century literature, from her appearance in sensational fiction as an evil abortionist to her more well-known idyllic, feminine presence in novels of realism and regionalism. "Murderess," "hag," "She-Devil," "the instrument of the very vilest crime known in the annals of hell"—these are just a few descriptions of women abortionists in popular 19th-century sensational fiction. In novels of regionalism, however, she is often depicted as moral, feminine, and self-sacrificing. This dichotomy, Jessee argues, reveals two opposing literary approaches to registering the national fears of all that both women and abortion evoke: the terrifying threats to white, masculine, Anglo-American male supremacy.

Margaret Jay Jessee, PhD (University of Arizona, 2012) is Associate Professor of English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham where she is also Director of the Undergraduate Program. She guest edited a special issue of Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Theory, and Culture on medical women in 19th-century American literature and her essay "'Cutting Up Dead Babies': The Literary Legacy of the Woman Physician as Abortionist" appears in Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Her other work has appeared in The Journal of Modern Literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, South Atlantic Review, and in various essay collections.