Summary:

This poem is about how the mentally ill (especially those who are women/elderly) are pushed out of sight. No one wants to deal with them, so they are put away somewhere. Sometimes this punishment is more than usually unreasonable. One person in the poem is locked up because she refuses to do the dishes. Another's crime is asking the wrong person for help. This treatment is compared to witch burning and to cutting off the hands of thieves. Many think these practices are barbarous, yet they participate in hiding away suffering men and women.

View full annotation

Summary:

Fausto-Sterling is a biologist who challenges various experiments meant to prove the biological bases of sexual difference. The first chapter is a brief introduction describing the interdependence of modern social structure and biology. Chapter Two is called "A Question of Genius: Are Men Really Smarter Than Women?" She is partly concerned here with arguments that women are simply less intelligent than men. More interestingly, she takes on scientists who claim that women have a different sort of intelligence than men (more verbal than visual or spatial). Such claims, argues Fausto-Sterling, simply provide a rationale for sexism in education and employment. Fausto-Sterling questions both the techniques used in the experiments meant to prove these differences and the scientists' objectivity.

Chapter Three, "Of Genes and Gender," similarly critiques theories that suggest humans are totally controlled by genetic information. Particularly, she argues that the binary genetic sex model under which biology works is not nearly as obvious or secure as it seems. The author also points out that studies of "sexual development" are almost always about men. This chapter contains discussions of medical views of menstruation and menopause. The author ridicules positions that see menstruation as a disease or sick-time.

Chapter Four moves the discussion to testosterone, arguing against the equation of testosterone with aggressivity and natural superiority. Chapter Six takes on socio-biology.

View full annotation

Summary:

Armadale is of interest for several reasons. First, the novel centers on issues of fate. Are our destinies determined, or can they be altered? The two heroes of the novel, Ozias Midwinter and Allan Armadale, are born under a curse. Midwinter's father murdered Allan Armadale's father. On his death bed, Midwinter's father warns that if these two sons ever meet, tragedy will occur. Midwinter learns the story and is uncertain whether to leave Allan or to work at changing their fate. Collins does not offer a solution, but provides plenty of opportunity for discussion.

Second, there is a doctor in the novel whose behavior is unethical to say the least. When the reader is first introduced to him, he is running a clandestine abortion clinic. When that operation is shut down by the police, he opens a private sanitarium. He privately confesses to being utterly uninterested in his patients' health. He only wants their money.

When the local ladies come to tour the facilities he espouses a system of liberal care, including dances, fine meals, and edifying concerts on Sunday evenings. However, the building is laid out with an intricate system of pipes that allow the doctor to keep his patients continually sedated. At the novel's end, the doctor helps plan a murder using those pipes.

View full annotation

Summary:

Nnu Ego is the daughter of a great Nigerian chief. She is expected to have many sons. With her first husband who beats her, she has no children. She leaves him and is married to a man who works on the coast in a British colony. Her life there is miserable. She and her husband slowly lose their village values and begin a daily battle for food and money.

Nnu Ego nevertheless becomes pregnant. Her infant son dies suddenly and she nearly goes mad. She recovers and produces many children, including two sons. Her eldest son goes to school in America, marries a white woman, and rarely contacts his mother. Certainly, he does not financially support her as village ethics demand. Her younger son follows in his brother's footsteps. Nnu Ego is considered a success in her village, but she dies alone. Her eldest son returns to Nigeria and pays for a big funeral in order to prove what a good son he is.

View full annotation

Summary:

Edna Pontellier, an aristocrat from late nineteenth-century New Orleans, goes on vacation with her husband and children. There she meets and falls in love with Robert Lebrun. She also learns to swim, returns to her painting, and listens to the passionate piano playing of eccentric Mademoiselle Reisz. For the first time, Edna feels alive.

When she returns to New Orleans, she is unable to fit herself back into her social role. She defies her husband and ignores her friends. When her husband leaves town, she sets up her own house with money she has earned from her increasingly adept painting. She has an affair with the town seducer.

When Robert returns from a trip abroad, they passionately embrace. But Robert can not bear the stigma of adultery. He leaves her again. Edna returns to the vacation site and drowns herself.

View full annotation

Summary:

Doctor Richard Diver is a young neurologist already gaining great respect for his work. One day, he visits his friend Franz in Zurich. Franz is treating a young American girl, Nicole Warren, who was sexually abused by her father and has suffered a breakdown. Nicole is attracted to Diver and writes him letters after he leaves the clinic. When she is almost cured, Diver returns to the clinic and decides, rather haphazardly, to marry her. Nicole comes from a wealthy family and the couple begin to travel around Europe.

They settle briefly in a cabin by the French Riviera and aim to live quietly so that Dick can finish his great treatise. Nevertheless, Dick's easy-going, giving nature attracts a band of followers. When Rosemary, a budding American film star visits their town, she too is drawn to him. She tells him she loves him but Dick remains true to Nicole.

Several years pass during which Dick still does not finish his writing and indeed does very little towards that end. Nicole suffers several relapses. When Dick runs into Rosemary again, they have an affair. Nicole also takes a lover and finally leaves Dick who has become increasingly dissolute. He drinks most of the day and does nothing.

View full annotation

Summary:

Shelley compares man's ability to stay alive to the flickering light of a passing meteor. Our light of life is wavering and brief. He urges man to strive on and live life fully nevertheless.

In the third stanza, he compares earth to a mother and a nurse; it is that which comforts and sustains us and we are afraid to leave it. Again, however, Shelley argues that life must be lived anyway. Indeed, he argues that life (and poetry) is enhanced by its close relationship with death. The hopes of what will be after death must be united with the love for the here and now.

View full annotation

Summary:

Reade was known for writing "novels with a cause." Here, as in several other of his novels, his cause is the deplorable condition of mental hospitals in the early to mid-nineteenth century. Until late in the century, many considered the mentally ill untreatable. Hospitals were more like prisons than places for treatment. Admission policies were also fairly lax. Reade records a common fear that healthy people would be incarcerated.

In Hard Cash, a father incarcerates his son in order to cover up a crime. The doctors who admit him have a kickback scheme worked out with the hospital--they get money for each patient admitted. Once in the hospital, the hero tries to prove his sanity but finds it impossible to battle against doctors who refuse to look past the diagnosis that caused his admission to his actual mental condition. He also must negotiate with the head of the hospital, a woman who is madly in love with him and refuses to allow him out of her sight.

He cannot prove his sanity and only escapes when there is a fire in the asylum. There is one "good" doctor in the story who refuses to bleed patients, deny them food, or admit the sane to mental hospitals. The other doctors think him a quack, but he saves several lives.

View full annotation

Summary:

Jordanova posits that medicine and science "contain implications about matters beyond their explicit content." Namely, they have historically made assumptions about women and their relation to science/medicine. Jordanova explores this relation through seven chapters.

Particularly interesting is Chapter Three, "Body Image and Sex Roles." Here Jordanova discusses the wax models used by medical students in the nineteenth century to learn about anatomy. These models were almost always female and sometimes even had flowing hair, pearl necklaces, and other realistic details. Jordanova argues that this gendering was no accident. The route to knowledge is historically associated with looking deep into the bodies of women.

Chapter Five pursues this theme, commenting on how nature is often configured as a female whose secrets will be revealed by masculine science. The final two chapters address twentieth century representations, including the gendered nature of drug advertisements in in-house medical magazines.

View full annotation

Summary:

The narrator reflects on her mother's death through four sections. In the first, she recalls the moment her mother collapsed and died. Her father heard the crash but refused to get up from his nap to see what had happened. The narrator hears the crash fifteen hundred miles away and feels her mother's pain. This stanza also speaks about the Jewish funeral, held in Florida while Christmas carols play out over palm trees.

In the second section, the narrator is sorting through her mother's things. She dreams of her mother at seventeen, full of hope. The third section speaks about how much of the mother remains alive in the daughter. The same hips and thighs have cushioned grandmother, mother, and now daughter. The narrator feels as if she carries her mother inside her, just as her mother once carried her.

Section four brings out issues over which the mother and daughter disagreed. The narrator was once eager to create a life separate from her mother's. Now, though, she and her mother are one and the mother can live her life through the body of her daughter.

View full annotation