Katharine Cheston katharine.a.cheston@durham.ac.uk
PGR Student Doctor of Philosophy
Staying with Narrative: Stories of Shame and Gynecological Pain
Cheston, Katharine
Authors
Abstract
Storytelling is good for us—or so we are told. This article examines two memoirs, by Hilary Mantel and Susanna Kaysen, in which narrating experiences of gynecological pain provokes shame and deepens pain. By attending to shame as a textual presence, I intervene in a longstanding debate about how to make sense of pain and illness. Shame, I argue, reveals the presence of multiple (and often contrasting) illness narratives; I analyze these narratives, and their interplay, across Mantel's and Kaysen's memoirs. As scholarship moves beyond, past, or post-narrative, I urge us to stay: to interrogate the ways in which illness narratives interact—amplifying some stories and storytellers whilst fragmenting or silencing others—and to examine the responsibility we all have within this collective sense-making.
Citation
Cheston, K. (2023). Staying with Narrative: Stories of Shame and Gynecological Pain. Literature and Medicine, 41(2), 391-415. https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2023.a921569
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Acceptance Date | Aug 10, 2023 |
Online Publication Date | Mar 12, 2024 |
Publication Date | 2023-09 |
Deposit Date | Mar 21, 2024 |
Publicly Available Date | Mar 21, 2024 |
Journal | Literature and Medicine |
Print ISSN | 1080-6571 |
Publisher | Johns Hopkins University Press |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 41 |
Issue | 2 |
Pages | 391-415 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2023.a921569 |
Public URL | https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/2334628 |
Files
Accepted Journal Article
(398 Kb)
PDF
Licence
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Copyright Statement
This research was funded in whole, or in part, by the Wellcome Trust [Grant number 217840/Z/19/Z]. For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.
You might also like
(Dis)respect and shame in the context of ‘medically unexplained’ illness
(2022)
Journal Article
Downloadable Citations
About Durham Research Online (DRO)
Administrator e-mail: dro.admin@durham.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
SheetJS Community Edition
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
PDF.js
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Font Awesome
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2024
Advanced Search