Weir Mitchell and the Genteel Romance

Abstract

RITICS TODAY VIEW S. WEIR MITCHELL'S psychological as his main contribution to the development of American fiction.' Mitchell's world-wide preeminence as a neurologist and analyst of psychological disorders emphasizes this contribution. He drew upon his medical experience to create such characters as Constance Trescot, a widow neurotically obsessed with revenge; George Dedlow, a quadruple amputee who loses his sense of identity; and Octopia Darnell, whose schizophrenia results from her latent lesbianism.' Yet chroniclers of popular literature place Mitchell within the tradition known as the romance, which blossomed ephemerally from about I890 until I9IO. This mode of fiction included such writers as Anthony Hope, Richard Harding Davis, George Barr McCutcheon, James Lane Allen, Charles Major, F. Marion Crawford, Mary Johnston, Maurice Thompson, Emerson Hough, Owen Wister, and Winston Churchill.3 Mitchell himself, although very much aware of the realism in his work, said that he hated per se. He would take his only so far as his sense of decorum would let him. Beyond that point, he was a writer of Few critics have tried systematically and thoroughly to idefine his romance or, for that matter, the genteel romance. Most critics who place the genteel romance in literary history concentrate on its form. And admittedly form is a blatant characteristic of it. The average genteel romance was set in the past, usually during the American Revolution or Civil War, or during the chivalrous European Renaissance. The hero usually began the romance dispossessed of his estate