It's the Little Things

My paper on Delia's Doctors was accepted on a Science and Literature panel at the RMMLA (a regional branch of the Modern Language Association) and this will serve as my only conference for the year. Though I am always happy to have a paper accepted at a professional conference, I am particularly excited about this one because 1. I need all the ego perks I can get right now 2. it forced me to distill my argument about Delia's Doctors/medical imperialism/sentimentality/transparency down to 250 words. In case any of you are interested in what my second chapter will (roughly) be about, I've pasted a copy of the abstract I sent to the RMMLA panel. Please keep in mind that paper abstracts are meant to be succinct, so this is just a sliver of the broader argument about the novel I present in the full chapter. Of course, and according to Erika, this could simply be renamed: "Bajinga Imperialism in the Hizzy."

Title: “Transparent Health: Sentimentality and Medical Discourse in Hannah Gardener Creamer’s Delia’s Doctors.”

Hannah Gardner Creamer’s 1852 novel, Delia’s Doctors, traces the allopathic and homeopathic diagnosis and treatment of “invalid” Delia Thornton, highlighting the strengths and failures of medical theory and praxis. In so doing, Creamer locates the assessment of Delia’s “diseased” body within the family’s parlor space, with each doctor’s visit attended by Delia’s family and friends, who in turn argue about a woman’s place in politics and the public sphere at large. Throughout the novel, Delia’s medically constructed body, or, rather, the failure of medicine to construct her body, becomes the vehicle or mouthpiece for broader political issues as they relate to American women. This paper argues 1. domesticity and sentimentality are distinctly different narratives constructions that in turn reflect and facilitate representations of the transition from medical practice within the home to medical practice in public spaces; and 2. the Thornton parlor itself becomes an appropriate geographic space to then discuss medicine, politics, and literature as interrelated narratives. As we have seen, the parlor serves as an intermediary space between the public and private, male and female, political and domestic spheres and itself reveals the ideological difference between domesticity and sentimentality. In Delia’s Doctors, the conversations and medical exams in the parlor trace the trajectory of American medical practice and its affect on how American women are then represented narratively and corporeally in literature and medicine. I am invested in how these two narrative practices form a discursive project that then muddles the illusory, rigid boundaries between public and private, interiority and exteriority, science and fiction.