Lea Heiberg Madsen, ‘Medicine and Female Monstrosity in Neo-Victorian Fiction ...’

Victorian medical advances, along with Darwinian science, triggered an increasingly medicalised understanding of Human, which pervaded all spheres of 19 th century culture and came to play a crucial role in the Victorians’ perceptions of the body and mind. The medico-scientific differentiation between ‘complete’ and ‘incomplete’ subjects provided the backdrop for a wide range of pathological categories whereby to distinguish the deviants. This resulted particularly deleterious for women: medicine worked in tandem with the Victorian gender codes, and as the medical discourses on female corporeality became intertwined with Victorian popular culture, the notion of women’s bodies as unstable, abnormal and monstrous was reinforced. Belinda Starling’s The Journal of Dora Damage (2007) recalls how medical science both excited and relieved the Victorians’ anxieties, and how medical and cultural intertextuality worked to impose social control over the outsiders. However, Starling skilfully subverts those discourses that pathologised and defined women’s bodies as monstrous, and offers a representation of the female figure. In addition, through its disruption of the Victorians’ constructions of female monstrosity, the novel simultaneously questions the influence of today’s medical-scientific discourses on popular perceptions of the woman and her body.