Engineering womanhood: The politics of rejuvenation in Gertrude Atherton's Black Oxen

American Literature

Volumn 76, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 307-337

  Prebel, Julie ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949947126     PISSN: 00029831     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00029831-76-2-307     Document Type: Review

References (17)

1. Gertrude Atherton, Adventures of a Novelist (New York: Liveright, 1932), 559; further references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically as A
2. See Eugen Steinach, Sex and Life: Forty Years of Biological and Medical Experiments (New York: Viking, 1940), 6,136; further references will be cited parenthetically in the text as SL
3. On the evolution of scientific rejuvenation from the 1860s to the present, see Susan Squier, "Incubabies and Rejuvenates: The Traffic between Technologies of Reproduction and Age-Extension," in Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations, ed. Kathleen Woodward (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1999), 88-111
4. Paul Kammerer, introduction to Rejuvenation and the Prolongation of Human Efficiency: Experiences with the Steinach-Operation on Man and Animals (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923), vii-viii; further references will be cited parenthetically in the text as R
5. Gertrude Atherton, Black Oxen (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923), 124, 42,112,116. Further references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically as B
6. Bauer, Brave New Politics, 89
7. and Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1991)
8. Some women's groups, for example, pressured their local politicians to ban the sale of the book and remove it from public libraries. For further reading on the civic reception and subsequent censorship of the novel, see "Censorship up in Far Monroe," New York Times, 4 October 1923, 22
9. Woodward, "Inventing Generational Models," in Figuring Age, ed. Woodward, 150
10. Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna Politics and Culture (New York: Knopf, 1980), 13
11. Dr. Peter Schmidt, The Theory and Practice of the Steinach Operation, With a Report on One Hundred Cases (London: William Heinemann, 1924), 135. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text as TPSO
12. Morris, Modern Rejuvenation Methods, 4
13. Morris, introduction to Modern Rejuvenation Methods, xix
14. I have argued for the importance of Atherton's work in the context of women's writing from 1890 to 1930, as well as for her engagement with cultural concerns from U.S. expansionism to racial and gender ideologies; see my Ph.D. dissertation, "Domestic Mobility in the American Post-Frontier, 1890-1900" (Seattle: University of Washington, 2000)
15. Woodward, Aging and Its Discontents, 16
16. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Knopf, 1985), 282
17. See Squier, "Incubabies."