Heather A. Love’s “Feminized Healthcare Infrastructures: Teaching the Rhetoric of Medical Agency” tracks how medical institutions play a significant role in delineating protagonists’ foreclosed agency in both Sophie Treadwell’s 1928 play Machinal and Sylvia Plath’s 1963 autobiographically-inflected novel The Bell Jar. The presentation triangulates these two literary examples with the case study of the New England Hospital for Women and Children, a private care facility that opened in Boston in the mid-nineteenth-century, which was run not only for but also by women—the entire medical staff was comprised of women doctors and nurses. Focusing on how hospital spaces are represented in literary texts and in the hospital’s Annual Reports, Love explores how discursive representations of explicitly feminized care spaces can serve as sites for both promoting and foreclosing women’s agency. The argument considers the influence of surrounding medical and media discourse that links maternal and mental health (i.e., eugenics-inflected arguments about the negative effects of modernity on white women’s capacity to endure childbirth with intact mental health). Drawing from experiences teaching aspects of these case studies to students in both upper-level American modernism and lower-level medical humanities courses, the talk emphasizes how trans-historical, cross-disciplinary analysis offers a rich site for engaging students.
In “‘Mad Girl’s Love Song’: Teaching Plath in a Narrative Medicine Curriculum,” Emily James argues for her writings as a midcentury case study in the emerging pedagogy of narrative medicine. Across Plath’s remarkable and varied body of work, her writings persistently acknowledge and attend to the body, shed light on the unwell mind, and lay bare the midcentury medical establishment’s inequitable treatment of young women. In short, Plath was practicing narrative medicine avant la lettre, long before the practice had been termed and codified, and long before its formation as an interdisciplinary field of study. Narrative medicine seeks to incorporate an ethos of listening and storytelling into medical study and practice. To rebuild public trust in medicine, we need clinicians and caregivers trained in what Dr. Rita Charon terms “narrative competence,” or the skills borne from reading and writing. “From the humanities, and especially literary study,” explains Charon, medicine can learn “not so much a new specialty as a new frame for narrative work”—meanwhile gaining “access to a large body of theory and practice that examines and illuminates narrative acts” (“Narrative Medicine: A Model for Empathy, Reflection, Profession, and Trust.” JAMA: Journal of the American Medical Association 286 [15]: 1898). Some of these narrative acts specifically illuminate the mind as well as its attendant illnesses, disabilities, and crises. This paper locates Plath’s work in the narrative medicine classroom, examining exercises and assignments organized around the theme of mental illness.
Elizabeth J. Donaldson in “A Plague of Plath: Semantic Contagions and Mental Health on Campus” situates Plath’s contested presence in the college classroom within a longer cultural history of anxiety about reading’s dangers—particularly the danger of texts to vulnerable, feminized readers. Taking as its contemporary provocation the recent discourse around disability accommodation in elite universities, including fears of malingering and the “Accommodation Nation” (Horowitch), this paper argues that anxieties about academic disability culture are inseparable from older, gendered panics about contagious feeling. The figure of the susceptible undergraduate—overwhelmed, yet demanding—is haunted by a prior figure: the impressionable woman reader, undone by dangerous fiction. The presentation traces how the concept of “semantic contagion”—the idea that exposure to clinical language can precipitate imitative behavior—has shaped the appearance and disappearance of Plath from syllabi, particularly in the wake of campus mental health crises. Reading The Bell Jar has been treated less as an interpretive act than as an epidemiological event, with Plath’s work functioning as vector rather than text. Drawing on disability studies scholarship on the social construction of vulnerability and the politics of accommodation, as well as the history of moral panics around novel-reading, Werther-effect discourse, and contemporary safe-messaging guidelines, this paper examines what is at stake—institutionally, epistemically, and politically—when literature is managed as a public health risk. It asks, finally, what kinds of reading subjects are produced, and who gets to be legible in an ecosystem of psychiatric harm.