Hystoriographic Metafiction: The Victorian Madwoman and Women’s Mental Health in 21st-Century British Fiction

Abstract

At the turn of the new millennium British fiction obsessively returns to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this revisiting, authors often show a special interest in medical discourses and narratives surrounding women and madness and the ways in which these contemporary discourses were informed by constructions of gender and sexuality. Hence, mad doctors, madwomen and lunatic asylums have become popular characters and settings for these hystorical metafictions, which thematise doctors’ misreadings of patient narratives, that is, of both women’s physical symptoms and their own descriptions of them. Medical discourses and narratives surrounding madness are, then, exposed as reflections of the male doctor’s rather than the female patient’s anxieties, and in a wider context they thus signify society’s deepest fears and ideologies. Through a textual analysis of Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (2002), Sebastian Faulks’ Human Traces (2005) and Maggie O’Farrell’s The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (2004), this article points up that these recent examples of British historical fiction can themselves be read as gendered case histories of twenty-first-century British society and that, hence, they do not only critically explore past but also reflect present gendered issues concerning women’s mental health.