Medical Imperialism

Diane Price Herndl points out 19th century medicine's ability, as a "cultural power," to "divert political dis-ease into an overwhelming attention to the individual body and away from the body politic...[and] discourages our focusing on exterior sources as the cause of misery, encouraging us to direct our energies inward." Hannah Gardener Cream, in Delia's Doctors, negotiates and tempers an assessment of the indiviual body and the body politic: she both calls for a turn inward but also includes, as part of this process, engaged conversation about public education as well as women's work and political presence in the public spheres (and chiding any character who disagrees with this). The sentimental model she offers, which as been previously constructed as an evacuation of interiority, is actually a bodily legibility that protects as well as reveals interiority. In Delia, there is both the evacuation of interority and and agencied expression of self-contruction--this is her character arc. Creamer seems to argue that the two are not mutually exclusive and actually offer a powerful hybrid that would allow women to both work and politic in the public sphere while at the same time deflect or temper the expectations of a "truly" transparent, and thefore non-malleable, body (and its iconic relationship to the nation as a whole). Women's health can be regulated and maintained, she seems to suggest, in such a way that refuses medical imperialism, or the infiltration of women's bodies, as wholly constructed or signified spaces (evacuated of their interiority and filled with medical discourse). By locating political conversations in the Thornton parlor (Delia's family's home) and using Delia's health as a vehicle for discussing separate spheres ideologies and their failures, Delia's body itself becomes the site wherein the individual body and the body politic, health and illness, the public and private, men and women, domesticity and sentimentality can be hashed out. Her body becomes the metaphoric parlor space: a series of negotiations between assumed binaries, revealing the issues not as bifurcated but rather revealing the ephemeral boundaries between construction and agency, interiority and exteriority, etc. In so doing, the tenets of sentimentality and transparency are (no pun intended) revealed and used, but are rescripted as a powerful space for potential political reform.

On the other hand, Delia is bodily and nosologically constructed throughout the novel and it ends with her recovering at Adelaide's hands, who falls on Franklinian tenets of self-control. Yet, the novel is structurally dependent on performance...so how much of health, Creamer can also argue, is simply a performance that aids and abetts the dominant cultural power--the illusion of self-regulation and reliance, the illusion of agency....