Frances Burney's Mastectomy and the Female Body Politic

Abstract

When critics mention Frances Burney's mastectomy, their accounts often ahistoricize her predicament and overlook her agency. This essay foregrounds the historical context – the French Revolution and its aftermath – of Burney's surgery as well as Burney's intentionality and self-consciousness. I argue that by depicting a female patient capable of sealing her emotions in and by allowing the men present at the surgery to give free rein to their emotional reactivity, Burney blurs the gender lines that in the late eighteenth century underscored the theoretical definition of the body politic. Burney simultaneously rejects the strictures of sensibility and embraces Stoicism, the main male political ethos of the Revolution. By choosing to exemplify the possibility of a female Stoic body in a narrative on mastectomy, Burney ironically demonstrates that the very specificity of women's bodies can become the site of political empowerment and agency.

Keywords:

• Frances Burney
• French Revolution
• mastectomy
• The Wanderer
• Dominique-Jean Larrey
• stoicism
• body politic
• literature and medicine
• eighteenth-century women writers
• sensibility

Notes

1. Letter 595. The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney , vol. 6, 596–616.

2. Doody argues that in The Wanderer Burney puts for the first time society as a whole in sharp historical focus:

Instead of making us see the young woman's behavior as the foreground, with an adventitious background of circumstantial events, the novelist wishes us to keep focused upon what is more usually thought of as background, so that we see the conditions that make for “female difficulties” and for other difficulties. For the first time in Burney's works, society itself is presented as an historical phenomenon. (319)

3. The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney , vol. 6, 600, note.

4. Heidi Kaye reads Burney's answer (to Larrey's “Who will hold this breast?”), “C'est moi,” as both “I will” – as I do – and as “This breast, it's me” (49). This reading seems far-fetched and contradicts Kaye's claim that Burney regains agency by turning her gaze on her doctors and by resisting being seen by them as an objectified body. With “This breast, it's me,” Burney would seemingly invite a synecdochic reading of her gendered body as well as undermine the agency implied in the reply “I will.”

5. Journal entry of 3–5 May 1802. The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney , vol. 5. 302.