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SENTIMENTAL MEDICINE: OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF MASCULINITY Bryce Traister University of Western Ontario In his 1861 novel Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny, Oliver Wendell Holmes brings snakes and doctors together in a story that links the plight of a young snake-girl to the construction of a modern-day physician. As readers of what Holmes would later call his "medicated novel" will recall, the heroine of the story, poisoned in utero by rattlesnake venom, is a hybrid of snake and human, and the novel theatrically keys her depiction to this unusual biological constitution.1 Elsie, "an apparition of wild beauty," psychologically fascinates and physically repulses her onlookers in much the same way that snakes charm their stupefied prey. At a party designed to introduce the reader to the novel's significant players, for example, Elsie makes a rare and remarkable social appearance: "On her wrists she wore bracelets: one was a circlet of enamelled scales; the other looked as if it might have been Cleopatra's asp" (99). In the chapter entitled "Family Secrets," the narrative coyly refers to the "cold glitter" of Elsie' s eyes, the "cold lips" of her mouth, and "that faint birth-mark" which caused even her own mother to swoon (194). Although the sustained obviousness of Elsie's serpentine iconography seems theatrical (or evenjust lame), its casual presentation in the narrative elicits what we might call a diagnostic curiosity; that is, the narrative teases the reader (with the tantalizingly vague effects of the hideous birthmark) into wanting more information about its eponymous heroine. The text solicits a readerly interest in a literary figure remarkable because biologically enigmatic in much the same way that a sick person presents a puzzle for an attending physician to piece together. Consider the engraving that accompanies the dinner party in the 1893 edition of the novel (fig. 1). Although critics of the novel have argued that Elsie is a post-Keatsean Lamia or, more typically, that her serpentine origins locate her in the familiar demonology ofJudeo-Christianity , the engraving trades as much in an iconography of illness as of health.2 Her right arm, that is to say, mimics the appearance of the caduceus, the staff entwined by the snake persistently associated with Elsie Venneb Figure 1 Studies in American Fiction207 Asclepius (or Aesculapius), the demi-God physician of Greek mythology whose cult flourished in second-century Rome.3 The asp-like bracelet twining around Elsie's wrist iconically recollects the caduceus, an icon widely associated in the antebellum period with the profession of medicine.4 The image, and the novel it accompanies, position the story's heroine neither solely in the territory ofthe phallic woman, nor merely in the space of cultural deviance, but also in the precinct of medicine. In the engraving, as in the novel, Elsie Venner elicits both a fascination with the peculiar as well as a clinical interest in the sick; she solicits interpretation and diagnosis. At the party, Dr. Kittredge performs this clinical function, undertaking a surreptitious examination ofElsie, who makes him feel "very oddly" just by returning his gaze, to the point that he must force a "pleasant professional smile" before retreating from her (100-101). Here the patientrejects the doctor's medical interest , a refusal also of the reader's developing interest in this mysterious heroine whose biological secrets so unmistakably drive the novel's narrative voice by refusing, as is always the case with "Family Secrets ," to disclose themselves fully. Elsie sustains by denying not just the medical curiosity of Dr. Kittredge and the interpretive interest of any reader, but the compassion that informs the benevolent medical perspective the novel dramatizes and celebrates. In so doing she wavers ambiguously between the two identities she inhabits throughout the novel—freak ofnature and sentimental heroine—an oscillation the novel sustains in order to analyze the interaction of scientific and sympathetic epistemologies. As this novel (and the 1893 engravings) would have it, the possibility that the female "speciman" and the "normal" girl might inhabit the same alluring body presents a problem primarily for the masculine understanding of strange femininity. Elsie Venner, both heroine and text, presents a male fantasia of...
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