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This book investigates how popular American literature and film transformed the poisonous woman from a misogynist figure used to exclude women and minorities from political power into a feminist hero used to justify the expansion of their public roles. Sara Crosby locates the origins of this metamorphosis in Uncle Tom's Cabin where Harriet Beecher Stowe applied an alternative medical discourse to revise the poisonous Cassy into a doctor. The newly "medicalized" poisoner then served as a focal point for two competing narratives that envisioned the American nation as a multi-racial, egalitarian democracy or as a white and male supremacist ethno-state. Crosby tracks this battle from the heroic healers created by Stowe, Mary Webb, Oscar Micheaux, and Louisia May Alcott to the even more monstrous poisoners or "vampires" imagined by E. D. E. N. Southworth, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Theda Bara, Thomas Dixon, Jr., and D. W. Griffith.
List of contents
Chapter 1. Introduction. Making the Medicinal Poisoner.- Chapter 2. A Quarrel of Poisons: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Homeopathic Poisoner.- Chapter 3. Playing Poison: Mary Webb's Antidote to the Tom Shows.- Chapter 4. With Friends Like These: E. D. E. N. Southworth and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes's Pathological Poisoner.- Chapter 5. The Lady Doctor and the Vamp: How Louisa May Alcott, Theda Bara, and Thomas Dixon, Jr., Killed the Poisonous Woman.- Chapter 6. Conclusion and Coda. A Presidential Election, My Cousin Rachel, and the Lingering Effects of the Medicinal Poisoner.
About the author
Sara L. Crosby is Associate Professor of English at the Ohio State University at Marion, USA, and author of
Poisonous Muse: The Female Poisoner and the Framing of Popular Authorship in Jacksonian America (2016).
Summary
This book investigates how popular American literature and film transformed the poisonous woman from a misogynist figure used to exclude women and minorities from political power into a feminist hero used to justify the expansion of their public roles. Sara Crosby locates the origins of this metamorphosis in Uncle Tom’s Cabin where Harriet Beecher Stowe applied an alternative medical discourse to revise the poisonous Cassy into a doctor. The newly “medicalized” poisoner then served as a focal point for two competing narratives that envisioned the American nation as a multi-racial, egalitarian democracy or as a white and male supremacist ethno-state. Crosby tracks this battle from the heroic healers created by Stowe, Mary Webb, Oscar Micheaux, and Louisia May Alcott to the even more monstrous poisoners or “vampires” imagined by E. D. E. N. Southworth, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Theda Bara, Thomas Dixon, Jr., and D. W. Griffith.
