Melancholia, medicine, and the machine: Health and healing in the works of Charles W. Chesnutt, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Kate Chopi

Representations of health, healing, and healers in African American literature from the very late nineteenth century to the Harlem Renaissance intervened in the prevailing medical discourse about the black community's medical care and health. Rather than pathologize black bodies and minds, the works in this study reveal the complexities of living with illness, particularly mental and emotional disorders, and in many cases counter the dominant medical profession's views of black people as both patients and care providers. Additionally, the novels raise important questions about citizenship, agency, access, and treatment.;Jessie Redmon Fauset's The Chinaberry Tree focuses on community care as integral to the restoration of emotional stability when individuals do not access professional medical support. Nella Larsen, however, suggests that the absence of community nurture can have deleterious effects on an emotionally decompensating individual. The earliest novel in the study, Charles Chesnutt's Marrow of Tradition, frames the entire discussion by foregrounding Reconstruction-era medical care within the black community amidst increasing political flux, and strongly rebukes medical hegemony within white southern culture by revealing its hypocrisy and shortcomings.;Finally, Kate Chopin interrogates white womanhood's historic vulnerability to emotional distress as a product of connubial life by locating Edna Pontellier's pursuit of independence alongside an earlier cultural construct available to creole of color women.