\u27A Slight Hysterical Tendency’: Performing Diagnosis in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper\u27

In the beginning of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”(1892), the unnamed female protagonist writes disobediently in her journal: “If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency—what is one to do?” 1 Gilman famously wrote this semi-autobiographical short story to criticize her doctor, Silas Weir Mitchell. Mitchell diagnosed Gilman with hysteria and treated her with his famous “rest cure”—a treatment that kept women confined to their beds, restricting their bodily and mental freedoms. Gilman then wrote the “Yellow Wallpaper”, featuring a narrator who similarly was put on the rest cure. Insistent that she is ill—but with something more than a “slight hysterical tendency”, a diagnosis which she seems to find unsatisfactory—the narrator of Gilman’s story hints at a question that dominates her experience in the text.“What is one to do” with diagnosis, its consequences and its fallibility? -chapter excerpt-https://scholar.dominican.edu/books/1177/thumbnail.jp

Early American Disabilities Studies: Teaching (and Confronting) Internalized Abelism

How might college instructors introduce students to disabled people in an earlier America who expressed negative views about disability? How can we discuss ableism and internalized ableism in the classroom without chastising or shaming? -article excerpt

“Of the Woman First of All”: Walt Whitman and Women\u27s Literary History

This thesis contemplates Walt Whitman\u27s role in the lives of 19th and 20th century women writers and his significance to early American feminism. I consider the ways women inspired him to develop pro-feminist ideas about maternity, womanhood, and female liberation

Graduate Student Interviews -- Vivian Delchamps and Disability and Medical Diagnosis in 19C American Lit

The editorial staff hopes you had a relaxing Thanksgiving. Today we start our Graduate Student Interview series back up with Vivian Delchamps, a Ph.D. Candidate in English at the University of California, Los Angeles. Delchamps studies and teaches 19th-century American literature and is interested in disability studies, bioethics, dance, and the medical/health humanities. Her dissertation, The Names of Sickness\u27: Disability and Medical Diagnosis in Nineteenth-Century American Literature,” draws upon key theories from disability studies and the health humanities to transport diagnosis out of a medical framework and assert its importance for literary scholarship. Her research has been partially supported by a 2020-2021 UCLA Graduate Division Dissertation Year Fellowship, a 2019-2020 English Department Dissertation Year Fellowship, a 2018 Emily Dickinson International Society Graduate Student Fellowship, a 2017 Andrew W. Mellon EPIC Fellowship in Teaching Excellence, and a 2017 UCLA Graduate Summer Research Mentorship. Delchamps is also the Disability Studies Advisor for the Disability Law Journal at UCLA and a member of the C19 Ad Hoc Committee on Disability and Accessibility. You can follow Vivian on Twitter (@VivianPhDancer

Rattlesnake Kinship: Indigeneity, Disability, Animality

No abstract available

Invisible Illness Narratives in the United States

“Illness narratives” and “invisible illness” have already been usefully defined; this entry defines “invisible illness narratives,” specifically examining narratives on social media by twenty-first century Americans that reflect upon the experiences of pain and illness. This entry asserts that such narratives invite scholars of the health humanities to better appreciate the value of community and the importance of combatting stigma. When invisible illness narratives are circulated widely on social media platforms, they teach physicians and the general public about the embodied and social realities that may accompany life with invisible illnesses. These perspectives are highly significant in today’s political-medical moment, for they communicate symptoms and combat ableism in formats that are easily accessible and shared. -article excerpt-https://scholar.dominican.edu/books/1183/thumbnail.jp

Review of: Walker Gore, Clare. Plotting Disability in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. Edinburgh University Press, 2020

In the opening pages of her excellent book, Plotting Disability in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, Clare Walker Gore states her goal to demonstrate the potential that disability holds for literary criticism: not just what novels have to offer scholars of disability, but also what attention to disability has to offer the literary critic. Walker Gore explores the work disabled characters perform to allow authors to experiment with the formal qualities of literary texts. She emphasizes that close attention to embodiment and characterization may help literary scholars interested in disability studies avoid the straightforward alignment of person and character. With this argument, Walker Gore makes an important intervention in Victorian studies, literary scholarship, and disability studies. -article except

The Names of Sickness: Writing Disability and Revising Diagnosis in Nineteenth-Century America

While the word “diagnosis” can be traced back to the seventeenth century, the verb “to diagnose” does not appear in written works until 1861, when American writers began to contend with new methods of medical examination. Literary texts soon resonated with an underlying fear of “undiagnosable” conditions (1873) and condemned the “evil” of “self-diagnosis” (1883); they began to mimic emergent medical techniques used to define discrete “Names of Sickness,” to use Emily Dickinson’s phrase. This dissertation, "The Names of Sickness: Writing Disability and Revising Diagnosis in Nineteenth-Century America," analyzes texts by women writers from the Civil War through Reconstruction to argue that literature transforms diagnosis from an alienating process of labeling into a tool for social critique. Drawing upon contemporary scholarship in critical feminist and intersectional disability studies, I assert that literature articulates disability even if we cannot—or will not—diagnose authors themselves. The dissertation asks how diagnostic methods can be redirected away from individual bodies and minds and towards systemic issues such as racial prejudice and gender violence—a question that attests to the value of humanistic inquiry during times of political and medical crisis. This first book-length study of disability in American women’s writing is divided into three primary chapters. I first argue that Emily Dickinson defied diagnostic labels while she shaped pain’s expansiveness into poetic form. Chapter Two asserts that Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story “The Yellow Wallpaper” embraces the chaos created by patriarchal medicine to energize collaborative resistance. Finally, Chapter Three argues that Frances E.W. Harper’s novel Iola Leroy figuratively “diagnoses” systemic conditions, such as the “virus of slavery and injustice.” Significantly, Harper does not advocate for the eradication of disability; instead, she asserts the power of community for disabled and chronically ill women. My project thus emphasizes the transformative power of writing and community as it explores the ways women resist and revise diagnostic methods to challenge ableist violence. Ultimately, I assert that literary inquiry is imperative to grappling with crisis for which there is no immediate cure, and advocate for a humanistic approach to interpreting the names we give to sickness

Rattlesnake Kinship: Indigeneity, Disability, Animality

This essay attends to diverse meanings of rattlesnakes by first examining historical Western practices of exclusion and extermination and then (a few of many) Indigenous perspectives with an emphasis on Hopi communities\u27 interrelationships with disabled, animalized beings. Such perspectives may invite (especially non-Native) disability scholars to embrace kinships with beings that Western culture has deemed pestilent, pitiful, and dangerous to human life but that many Indigenous cultures have understood to be empowering. -article excerpt

Review of Plotting Disability in the Nineteenth-Century Novel by Clare Walker Gore

No abstract available