%0 Journal Article
%T Spectral Sterility in Bucknill and Tuke¡¯s A Manual of Psychological Medicine and Bulwer Lytton¡¯s A Strange Story
%J Humanities | An Open Access Journal from MDPI
%D 2019
%R https://doi.org/10.3390/h8010059
%X This essay identifies and examines a narrative structure¡ªhere called the sterility plot¡ªthat is shown to recur in British mid-19th century psychiatric texts and imaginative literature engaging mental science. Treating physicians Bucknill and Tuke¡¯s A Manual of Psychological Medicine and novelist Bulwer Lytton¡¯s A Strange Story as influential case studies, it explores in particular the Gothic-styled spectralisation used by both Victorian medical and literary authors to characterize females whose mental disorders are depicted as bound with a short- or long-term inability to reproduce. The narratives thereby gender, pathologise, and suspensefully dramatise the plot trajectory of mentally ill patients¡¯ clinical and fictional case histories, which, taken together, is argued to reveal mid-century medico-cultural anxieties about the health of Britain¡¯s imperial future being threatened by potentially sterile Englishwomen. View Full-Tex
%U https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/8/1/59