Diagnosing Desire: Imaginative Experiments with Sexuality and the Nerves

Abstract: American fiction often tells us that there is something sick about romantic desire. But the writers who I discuss in this article told their readers this even as they critiqued the medical profession's pathologization of women's desires and non-normative sexual subjectivities. In particular, this article looks at two literary responses to the medical notion that marriage was a cure for hysteria and other nervous disorders: Oliver Wendell Holmes's A Mortal Antipathy (1885) and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's Doctor Zay (1886). While the medical rhetoric of nervous pathology could be repressive and stigmatizing, these fictions sought to reclaim and reimagine the medical treatment of nervous desire in subversive ways.