Patienthood and the Female Body in US Cold War Literature

Abstract

This thesis examines portrayals of the female body in texts by Sylvia Plath, Erica Jong, Richard Yates, Toni Morrison, Ira Levin, Jack Finney and Thomas Pynchon. It approaches these depictions from both a literary studies and medical humanities perspective, exploring what they tell us about Cold War culture during the 1950s and 1960s in the United States. It argues that these writers present female characters that occupy positions of patienthood. Through drawing on work across the medical humanities, literary studies, history and cultural studies, this thesis extends the use of the term patienthood to include medical and non-medical experience, drawing a connection between the treatment of the female body under a medical gaze and Cold War culture in the United States. It approaches the female body as a site upon which the ideological conflict of the Cold War was written, and, as such, argues that presentations of the female body in literature of the Cold War period are important in broadening understanding of Cold War culture in the United States.