Racial hysteria: female pathology and race politics in France Harper's 'Iola Leroy' and W.D. Howells's 'An Imperative Duty.'

African American Review, Spring, 1999 by Michele Birnbaum

The feminization of race (and with it a limited refiguration of the terms of womanhood) makes possible the mulatta's status as representative Woman - and simultaneously establishes her as model patient. Mitchell's feminine infinitive ("to be ill") linguistically grounds the female body as a site of unrest, and the American Medical Association increasingly intervened in such forms of physical and social dis-ease, legislating women's bodies in the 1880s and '90s by successfully working to ban abortion, restrict birth control, and require forced gynecological exams for prostitutes (see Smith-Rosenberg 24). As the AMA's involvement suggests, much of the "business of the physician," as Mitchell called it (Doctor 131), involved plotting the body to establish a position of cultural authority from which to narrate social change.(15) In his own writings (both fictional and nonfictional), Mitchell diagnoses the social as well as physical body - dispensing medical judgments, literary advice (he was "offended" by the realism of Norris and Dreiser), and rules about public etiquette. Howells's literary correspondent and his daughter's erstwhile physician, Mitchell represented the vast cultural and moral arbitration of the doctor.(16)

With what he called his "clinic in every book," Mitchell assumed the influence of the literary intellectual at the turn of the century: The physician becomes the literary realist, the "Editor's Study" now at bedside. In turn we witness the realist cum diagnostician in the extraordinary sketch of Howells which appeared in an 1886 edition of Tid-Bits [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. Howells may hold the surgical instrument like a butter knife, and stare off as if preoccupied, but the "Demonstrator of the American Girl" clearly illustrates the suturing of literary arena and medical theater. Posed as though in one of Eakins's clinics, scalpel in lieu of pen in hand, Howells prepares an incision/inscription on the woman prone and exposed beneath him.

Because their female, racial bodies are the most epistemologically contested, Rhoda and Iola become the patients most in need of such aid. All the physicians - Drs. Gresham, Latrobe, and Latimer in Iola Leroy, and Dr. Olney in An Imperative Duty - offer both medical intervention and a moral therapeutics to heal their off-color patients. Combining "the functions of the priest and the leech, especially in the case of nervous ladies" (24), Dr. Olney seeks to protect the sacred mysteries of Rhoda's birth by keeping them within a decidedly genteel gynecological domain, explaining the "cross in her blood" (100) as a "woman's problem." When the doctor is consulted about Rhoda's "future" - that is, her marital prospects - he "perceived as never before that there was an inherent outrage in the submission of such questions to one of the opposite sex; there should be women to deal with them" (31). Her racial past incites both desire and indignation in the doctor because of his unspoken association of miscegenation with interracial rape and illicit relations: Seeing Rhoda's aunt's desire to disclose the girl's "anomalous origins" as "impertinent" and "squalid" (31), he reacts to her racial "stain" (30) as though he'd lifted her skirt - "getting red with shame at what he's been told against his will" (38). As Hortense Spillers puts it, the mulatta allows white society "to say without parting its lips that 'we have willed to sin' "(168). Thus, out of a stimulated, if embarrassed, sense of willing complicity in white sexual violation, Olney finds that it is "atrocious for Mrs. Meredith to have allowed her hypochondriacal anxieties to dabble with the mysteries of the young girl's future in that way" (31). Professing superior discretion as a physician, Olney decides to keep in confidence what women like Mrs. Meredith will not.