Ashplant

Related topics:

Bodies
Irish History Transformed
Native and Foreign
Maternity
Medicine
Reproduction
Science

Link to citation page: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25473911

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Harris argues that both Ulysses and The Satanic Verses present orthodox medical practice as a tool of imperial coercion. Harris first establishes how state control over the female body serves as a powerful representation of colonial control over political territory - both as a metaphor for imperial domination of the colonial subject and as a literal means of population control. Harris then charts how, by pathologizing the bodies of Irish women, the British medical establishment gradually placed more and more aspects of Irish reproduction under medical control. For example, throughout the 1870s, doctors argued that women needed medical assistance to survive childbirth - thus the rise of the use of forceps during childbirth (forceps, ironically, often spreading disease to the uterus in unsanitary hospital conditions). Because medical institutions were inextricably linked to British imperial power (with their protocols and training determined by the London medical establishment), this patriarchal intervention into women's reproductive capacity doubled as imperial intervention. Harris argues that the Oxen of the Sun episode (U 14) in general and Buck's fertilization scheme in particular embody this imperial control of reproduction: Buck as doctor would control when and by whom Irish women were fertilized (U 14.1671-1658). Harris then examines the rise of the social hygiene and eugenics movements within British medicine, explaining how 'medical' concerns over racial vitality and urban cleanliness were used to justify medical intervention into the bodies and reproduction of the urban poor across the British Empire. Control over Irish and Indian population in this way was constructed as mandated by public health. Conversely, the extreme poverty and poor quality of life in Ireland and India were attributed to poor hygiene rather than imperial domination. Harris identifies Buck's attribution of Ireland's problems to degenerate hygiene as prototypical of this form of imperial control (U 14.1245-1254). How to resist medical coercion? Harris presents Molly's rejection of medical discourse as a possible solution (U 18.1149-1157). But the narrative arc of both Ulysses and The Satanic Verses, in which native men regain control over colonial women, leads her to suggest that the colonial woman is a "captive signifier," with control of her body perpetually contested between native and foreign men (396). In other words, the overthrow of imperial control may yet entrench patriarchy.

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