Introduction-Reconstructing Scientific Pasts

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.1 —MURIEL RUKEYSER Graduate work in both physics and history taught me to use highly specialized research methods to rigorously search out truth and eradicate myths. In spring 2012, I brought this mindset with me as I sat down for lunch with physicist Pierre Hohenberg at the Apple Restaurant near Manhattan’s Washington Square Park. Pierre was a brilliant physicist and a family friend. Toward the end of his life, he was particularly invested in work on the foundations of quantum theory....

2. Global apprenticeship

‘Global apprenticeship’ discusses how Henry James pursued a global apprenticeship, during which he produced formidable reviews of European and American writers. He schooled himself deliberately in the methods of an international array of masters, including Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Émile Zola, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Ivan Turgenev. James’s early heroines from this apprenticeship period include Eugenia Münster, Daisy Miller, and Catherine Sloper, of, respectively, The Europeans (1878), Daisy Miller (1879), and Washington Square (1880). By making complexly imagined young women the engines of these stories, these narratives show how riveting the question of what the young woman will do, and why, can be.

Our Lady of Art

Chapter 5 examines Willa Cather’s neglected story, “Coming, Aphrodite” in light of her fascination with the bodily presentation that Camille Paglia would later call “sexual personae”—for which Cather develops her own Marian interpretive sensibility, half Roman Catholic and half Pagan, as a deliberate counterforce to the Puritan heritage deflating U.S. artistic and expressive culture. In her twenties, Cather was a prodigious journalist fascinated by the radiant figurae of statuary, painting, drama, poetry, and fiction both home and abroad—which she interrogated in explicitly religious terms, with a particular affinity for both Marian-Catholic dissent from the Puritan denial of the senses and its alternative of graced intercession. Cather learns to invite readers to the redemptive power of forbidden love: sex for its own sake, adultery whether intermittent or sustained or only imagined, same-sex beatings of the heart and meetings of the mind. Then, in “Coming, Aphrodite!,” in a way more literal that her readers could possibly have expected, Cather stages the male gaze of an avant-garde, sexually disciplined and romantically impervious, young painter in Washington Square, Don Hedger, who finds himself in thrall—through a closet peephole!—to the artful exhibitionism in body and song of an equally ambitious, alternatively brilliant ingénue, Eden Bower. Their pas de deux produces a profound, profoundly mutual, yet never-to-be domesticated, sexual intimacy, non-reproductive but dually procreative—all of it conducted under signs of Roman Latinate and Indo-Latino Catholicism, including a story within the story entitled “The Forty Lovers of the Princess.”

Realism and Medicine

Exploring the relationship between literature and medicine, this chapter analyzes how three novels from the American realist period—Henry James’s Washington Square (1880), Sarah Orne Jewett’s A Country Doctor (1884), and Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901)—represent the medical profession during its rise to what Paul Starr has called “professional sovereignty” in the United States. Although today we may take medicine’s elite status in our society for granted, together these novels reveal that its turn-of-the-century consolidation as a profession in which society would ultimately invest unique forms of authority and prestige was anything but uncontested. Through the fictions they created, realist writers offered nuanced critical perspectives on the modes through which medicine asserted its sovereignty and also probed underlying gendered and racial tensions, even violence, that the profession’s own self-representations sought to occlude.