Bestselling Bodies: Mourning, Melancholia and the Female Forensic Pathologist

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Notes

¹The female forensic pathologist is also at the centre of a number of recent TV drama series, for example Silent Witness, Waking the Dead and Bones. The latter is ‘inspired by the life and work of Kathy Reichs’, the novelist and forensic anthropologist.

²Both women and men are subject to the pressure to produce an ‘ideal’ or at least ‘appropriate’ body. The extent to which the attempt to construct such an ‘ideal’ body can be interpreted as an empowering process has been much debated in feminist cultural criticism. Paula Black offers a wide-ranging discussion of this issue (Black 2006: 143–59). See also Sandra Bartky's assessment of the ‘disciplinary’ power of the beauty industry. She argues that ‘To have a body felt to be ‘feminine’—a body socially constructed through the appropriate practices—is in most cases crucial to a woman's sense of herself as female and, since persons currently can be only as male and female, to her sense of herself as an existing individual. To possess such a body may also be essential to her sense of herself as a sexually desiring and desirable subject. Hence, any political project that aims to dismantle the machinery that turns a female body into a feminine one may well be apprehended by a woman as something that threatens her with desexualisation, if not outright annihilation, (Bartky 1997: 105).

³The link between Scarpetta's choice of career and her feelings about her mother is, however, established in Post Mortem, pp. 295–6, as Scarpetta reflects on loss in personal and professional contexts.

⁴As already noted, Scarpetta's name seems to allude to scarring of the body. Tempe Brennan's name, although technically shorthand for Temperance, invokes the concept of time (tempus), and can be read as alluding both to the external passage of time and to the internal dynamics of memory which are foregrounded in post-mortem fiction. Maura Isles's name seems to flag up both ‘mourning’ (echoed in the sound of Maura) and isolation (Isles—island—isolated).