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American Literature 76.2 (2004) 307-337



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Engineering Womanhood:

The Politics of Rejuvenation in Gertrude Atherton's Black Oxen

University of Washington
We cannot . . . perform the comic opera bouffe of transmuting an old hag into a giddy young damsel. . . . But, under certain conditions, we can stretch the span of . . . usefulness, and enable the patient to recapture the raptures, if not the roses of youth.
—Eugen Steinach

In her autobiography, Gertrude Atherton pronounces her novel Black Oxen (1923) a "miracle [that] gushed out like a geyser that had been ‘capped' down in the cellars of my mind, battling for release." According to Atherton, she finished this novel in record time, typing at a speed she "had never commanded before."1 The geyser propelling the completion of what would become one of Atherton's most successful and controversial books was nothing less than a "modern scientific fountain of youth"—the result, she claims, of a course of anti-aging treatment that gave her "renewed mental vitality and neural energy" (A, 556, 562). In Atherton's case, this therapy consisted of eight sessions of X-rays directed at the ovaries. Known as rejuvenation (or reactivation, the term Atherton preferred), the treatment was promoted in the 1920s by scientists, physicians—and Atherton—as a means for restoring sexual and mental potency.

Rejuvenation therapy was big news in the 1920s when Viennese physiologist and biologist Eugen Steinach published the results of his early vasoligature operations. First performed on rats in 1910 and later on humans in 1918, the procedure tied off the sperm ducts, which purportedly had the effect of reversing the internal and external signs of aging.2 Steinach claimed that attacking the aging process "at its roots"— [End Page 307] the sex organs—regenerated both the body and the mind, resulting in increased physical and "psychic alertness" (SL, 11). Steinach was not the first scientist to explore rejuvenation. In experiments carried out between the 1860s and 1930s, scientists reported that altering physical appearance also produced marked effects on instinctual and social behavior. For Steinach, the result was a wholly rejuvenated subject, the entire "erotization . . . of the individual" (SL, 6).3 According to Steinach and the retinue of scientists marketing rejuvenation as a cure for mental as well as physical senescence, the hormonal interaction of the sex glands with other ductless endocrine glands both regulated physical growth and determined individual personality.4 This link between biology and behavior was important in a eugenics-laden culture concerned that social degeneration was due largely to the continued propagation of the biologically unfit. In the rhetoric of eugenics, sex (as in sexuality and sex instincts) determines individual and social behavior. Social purity campaigns aimed at combating prostitution, male promiscuity, and venereal disease also focused on curing insanity, feeblemindedness, and degenerative criminal behavior by controlling and regulating sexual reproduction. Sterilization and castration were thought to prevent propagation of the unfit and, as a consequence, to change undesirable social behavior. Rejuvenation discourse emerged in the 1920s and 1930s as another solution for social decline, but Steinach's treatment, rather than focusing on birthrates and breeding, offered a way to restore the "fittest" stock to physical and mental health. For a maturing population who had come of age in the Victorian era and were now witnessing the deterioration of its social ideals and laws of decorum, rejuvenation therapy seemed an appealing means of regaining a competitive edge in the youth-obsessed culture of modernist values.5

Atherton's Black Oxen represents a collaboration between literature and science that both registered and shaped American attitudes toward science as a means of restoring the individual and the nation to health. The novel, along with Atherton's promotion of her own treatment, demonstrably influenced cultural attitudes in the United States about scientific intervention in the enhancement and prolongation of human life. By legitimating fiction as fact—the mythic fountain of youth was not only possible but verifiable—Atherton changed the direction of scientific and cultural discourse on rejuvenation, endorsing it not only as a strategy to ward off aging...

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