From Hilary Mantel to Irenosen Okojie, contemporary writers are rewriting the story of illness and the female body
“I am fascinated by the line between writing and physical survival,” Hilary Mantel wrote in her 2010 essay “Meeting the Devil”. After an operation for endometriosis, she was writing about the need to express pain on the page. With her notebook always within arm’s reach,even in her morphine-fuelled fug she wrote incessantly, recording the hallucinatory and the real, inventing stories and gathering almost enough for a collection during her time as an in-patient.
A notebook by the bedside is hardly revolutionary, but in the hands of an ill woman, and especially one with a gynaecological illness, its symbolism speaks to the past. Women over the centuries have not always expressed their own pain in art and literature. More often, they have had it expressed for them by men, in what Susan Sontag calls “sentimental fantasies” of suffering. Those fictions reflect the medicalised notion of the female body as inherently infirm and incapable of articulating its pain with any degree of reliability. For so long, women were advised even against reading or writing by their 19th-century doctors for fear it would inflame their maladies. Their physical survival was apparently contingent on their silence, not their testimonies.
Related: ‘It’s infuriating and shocking’: how medicine has failed women over time
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