RESOLUCIÓN N.° 647/AGC/

Contrary to the recent lack of engagement with her work, Meade’s Strand serials were so successful that theywere reprinted in book collections. One of these short stories – “Silenced” holds particular significance for considerations of a feminist voice in Meade’s writing because, unlike many of her other Strand stories, the narrator of the co-authored “Silenced” story was a woman. Written with Robert Eustace between their “Adventures of a Man of Science” and “Brotherhood of the Seven Kings” serials in 1897, the importance of this storyto the thematic concerns of the later book is explicit from the outset. “Silenced” is both the first story of the collection and its namesake, and its feminist implications are also clearly gleaned in the plot, in which the protagonist Nurse Petrie is “silenced” from betraying the fact that her mentor plans to neurologically damage his fiancé’s long lost love during surgery. The surgeon

achieves this by operating on Nurse Petrie, leaving her with an “external opening” in her skull, one which is positioned “just over the centre which controls the powers of speech” (39, emphasis added).

The feminist implications of silenced, in which a first-person narrator is deliberatelydisempowered when their voice is usurped, form just one example of how the interplay between silence and agency become central to the Silenced corpus. Indeed, rather than forming a collection of individual stories, both Silenced and The

Sanctuary Club are contextualised under one umbrella story: that of a doctor who has

used new-found wealth in order to create a utopian space within which to nurse psychologically-troubled patients. Furthermore, the introductions to these two books both seek to situate the short stories within the same loci: that of a scientific utopia – even the title words “sanctuary” and “silenced” convey a sense of howutopian spaces are simultaneously defined and destroyed by the power of voice. Indeed, the “Sanctuary Club” is just that: it is a segregated space in which individuals are able to find sanctuary. Likewise, how the stories’ protagonists are “silenced” is actually revealed to be part of a process in which the exclusion and silencing of voices within scientific spaces is challenged. This is because each individual narrator is given a first- person narrative voice, whatever their gender or social position. This means that

Silencedcan be seen as a literary space wherein what has been silenced about the abuse

Where we men of science would have been afraid to tread : L.T. Meade s fin-de-siecle Eye/I of Reason

The narrator is also keen to emphasise that the utopian space of sanctuary has been created as a newscientific environment. Rather than portraying an anti-scientific attitude, the “victims” of scientific criminals recuperate through the means of an innovative scientific atmosphere. Similarly to the ethos of Millenium Hall (see Chapter Two), in both the Sanctuary Club and of Sherwood Towers “[e]very appliance that art or science could suggest for the alleviation of suffering humanity would be worked” (The Sanctuary Club 9). This is especially true for the Sanctuary Club, in which climatic control and the manufacture of mineral water form the basis of the infrastructure of the sanctuary.

This great institution, of which I had dreamed of for so long, was for the treatment of all sorts of disease on a hitherto unattempted scale. Here myfriend Chatwynd and I could put into execution the boldest and most recent theories that other medical men, either from lack of means or courage, could not carry out. One of the chief features of the place was to be a special department where the latest and most up- to-date scientific theories could be realized, one in especial being an attempt at the production of artificial climates [...] At the Sanctuary Club, we had, by virtue of our modern scientific knowledge, the means of producing such

conditions artificially. Mineral waters of the exact composition of those at the springs of Continental spas could be reproduced in our laboratory. (9)

To add to this ethos of a scientific – yet nurturing – utopian space (two ideas which are often seen as anathema to one another), each individual’s story has its own introduction by the first-person narrator who introduces the book. The affect of this encompassing narrative is that we automatically contrast the individual narrators’ pejorative experiences with the backdrop of the utopian sanctuary from which it is “voiced.”

After the initial introduction by the narrator, the short stories all continue from the perspective of the “patient”, who has also been a “scientist” or expert of scientific knowledge of some form, such as the “silenced” neurosurgical attendee, Nurse Petrie. Just as the narrators are often extraordinarily talented women in terms of their scientific know-how and propensity for voicing their ethical concerns regarding the use and abuse of knowledge (the latter being a role which is traditionally associated with men), the role of nurturer (a role traditionally associated with women), is performed by the narrator doctors. In the same way that Lady Studley subverted the role of the doctor/detective Halifax, the testimony of the “I” of the patient and the “eye” of the scientist is blurred because the idea that the role of the “Doctor” is the onlylegitimate scientist to possess an “I”/eye of authorityis refuted.

Where we men of science would have been afraid to tread : L.T. Meade s fin-de-siecle Eye/I of Reason

How the complex narrative shifts subvert the gendered nature of authority is most clearly seen in the short story “The Blue Laboratory.” The narrator introduces the story in the first person and then shifts to speak in the third person, whereupon this omniscience is interrupted by the phrase “TOLD BY MADELINE” and the narrative perspective then changes completely to that of Madeline’s first-person account of her experiences (Silenced 267). More significantly, this particular story destabilises the usual motifs of women as the object or victims of science and not its authors. “The Blue Laboratory” is set in 1895 in St. Petersburg, and describes the experiences of an English tutor who has recently been employed by a prolific Russian scientist, Dr. Chance. Whilst the depiction of a Russian optical scientist during a period in which there was competition between Britain and Russia in this field is of significance, the story is mainly concerned with the gendering of scientific knowledge. When she informs him that she has “studied chemistry a good deal for a girl, and [that she] took science tripos at Girton”, he asks her to help him write his new experiment in English for submission to the Science Gazette, a journal that Madeline has also “studied for many years” (270). Like Nurse Petrie’s description of the neurosurgeon, Madeline describes Dr. Chance’s attitude to his work as “a scientist who had not a scrap of soul about him” (284). This, of course, reflects the attempt to distinguish the irresponsible scientist from the responsible one, which can be gleaned in Shelley’s juxtaposition of the caring Clerval as he nurses the irresponsible Frankenstein.

When Madeline challenges Dr Chance’s negligent attitude, they begin a dialogue about the gendered nature of scientific knowledge, in which Chance tells Madeline that she is: “full of curiosity. That which ruined your mother Eve is also your bane” (292). When he asked her: “What has a young uninformed creature like you to do with science?”, Madeline replies: “I love science […] I respect her; her secrets are so precious” (292), inverting the idea that nature is female by describing

scienceas female as well, just as Loudon genders progress as female in The Mummy! (see

Chapter Three). Increasingly worried by Chance’s inhumane and misogynistic attitude towards scientific endeavour, Madeline formulates a plan to uncover his experimental secrets. She discovers that Chance himself has made a ground-breaking discovery, that: thought can be photographed, wherein “[s]ubjective impressions of thought cause molecular changes in the cells of the brain [which] then give a distinct impression on a negative” (313). Furthermore, he has even imprisoned a man as a test subject. “[F]asten[ing] back his eyes with a specula”, Dr Chance induces vivid visions with the use of drugs in order to capture the “visual purple” of the test subject’s thoughts (312-3). The denouement of the story is that by using great scientific canniness and courage, Madeline is able to “rescue” herself and the experimental subject (who is, significantly, another example of a male test subject), and she escapes to the scientific sanctuaryof Sherwood Towers.

Where we men of science would have been afraid to tread : L.T. Meade s fin-de-siecle Eye/I of Reason