the female malady women madness and english culture 1830 1980

Further references are given in the text by page number in this edition.Īlex Owen, ‘The Other Voice: Women, Children and Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism’, in Language, Gender and Childhood, eds Carolyn Steedman, Cathy Urwin and Valerie Walkerdine (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), pp. Michèle Roberts, In the Red Kitchen (London: Methuen, 1990). This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors.

In its examination of the genesis of depth psychology with its gender politics, erotic drives and occluded relationship to Spiritualism, In the Red Kitchen is a continuation of feminist research challenging, but not pretending to replace, traditional history. 2 Specifically feminist histories, these sources mark a new development in the historical novel as the products of feminist academic research of the 1970s and 1980s becomes absorbed into fictional writing. Only the Victorian portion of In the Red Kitchen is assigned historical sources in the ‘Author’s Note’, which cites Alex Owen’s essay in Language, Gender and Childhood and Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady. Jung who were both concerned to theorize upon the unruly bodies of women a medical discourse of hysteria, defining as ‘the unconscious’ what had earlier been attributed to the occult. By depth psychology I refer to the theories of Sigmund Freud and C. The novel hinges upon imagining together two related nineteenth-century issues: Spiritualism with its preponderance of female mediums, and its implications in the succeeding discourse of depth psychology.

1 Its two other temporal sites are Ancient Egypt and London in the grim 1980s where ‘Victorian values’ have restored homelessness and poverty. In the Red Kitchen by Michèle Roberts is a contemporary feminist novel partly set in the Victorian London of female Spiritualist mediums.

The female malady women madness and english culture 1830 1980