The Opaque Aesthetics of ‘Gyno-Psychiatry’: Body Horror and Affective Tensions in Joyce Carol Oates’s Butcher

Abstract

Joyce Carol Oates’s latest novel, Butcher (2024), makes use of opaque aesthetics for a retelling of early gynecological experimentation that gives voice to the women muted and mutilated in this historical moment. In its exploration of the life and works of Dr. Silas Aloysius Weir, the self-proclaimed ‘Father of Gyno-Psychiatry,’ the novel employs a multiplicity of voices, including Weir’s own medical diary, his son’s editorial commentary, and the poeticized autobiography of one of his survivors—or patients. The ensuing polyvocal biography renders his research through an aesthetics of body horror that includes graphic depictions of surgical experiments, mutilations and reassembled body parts. I argue that both the polyvocal narration and the embodied tensions of surgical horror make for a narrative opacity that is inherently affective in its disturbing and resistant potential. Specifically, drawing on Édouard Glissant’s “right to opacity,” (2010, 190) I seek to highlight the novel’s lack of narrative transparency as a textual form of resistance. Firstly, while the Butcher’s pseudo-medical/scientific voice threatens to silence his victims, the polyvocality of the novel and the patients’ own illegible speech allow for the negotiation of their collective trauma, so that the multifaceted narrative becomes itself resistance to the Butcher’s practices. Secondly, while his surgical experiments physically reduce his patients, further silencing them and attempting to make them invisible, their opened-up bodies become hypervisible sites of narrative resilience: they are dangerous, monstrous bodies that destabilize the narrative through the tension that arises between in- and hypervisibility. In its interwoven opacities, the novel becomes heavily charged with affective tensions—and, thereby, an ethical site of resistance.

Keywords

Opacity, Body Horror, Gyno-Psychiatry, Abject, In-/Hypervisibility

Introduction: On the Origins of ‘Gyno-Psychiatry’

Joyce Carol Oates’s Butcher (2024) recounts the life story and medical experiments of Dr. Silas Aloysius Weir, a medical practitioner who comes to redefine modern gynecology through gruesome and violent surgical experiments. Through the frame narrative of the ‘editor’—Weir’s estranged son—the doctor’s life is pieced together via fragments of his autobiography, spanning from his early years of apprenticeship in rural Pennsylvania to his employment at the New Jersey State Asylum for Female Lunatics. In his efforts to cure vesicovaginal fistula, Weir becomes obsessed with his young patient, Brigit, who later succeeds in a writing career. Her account complements Weir’s autobiography, narrating the patients’ insurrection that will set fire to the asylum and leave the doctor himself maimed and mutilated. In a clear expression of the ambiguity of his position, Weir is nicknamed “the Butcher” by his patients and “The Father of Gyno-Psychiatry” by himself. His character is openly based on the historical figures of J. Marion Sims (1813–1883), the so-called ‘Father of Modern Gynecology,’ and Silas Weir Mitchell (1829–1914), ‘The Father of Medical Neurology,’ medics who pioneered in their respective disciplines, however often with ethically questionable methods. The former famously conducted grisly surgical experiments on Black, enslaved and disabled women; the latter is particularly renowned for the invention of the ‘rest cure,’ the prohibition of any and all intellectual occupations prescribed to hypochondriacs, ‘hysterics,’ and neurasthenics; this he famously prescribed to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, at the time suffering from postpartum depression but diagnosed with hysteria (see Bassuk 1985; Siegel 1997), who would go on to tell her story of medical abuse and usurped agency in The Yellow Wallpaper (1892).

Like the character that bears parts of their names in Oates’s novel, both men perpetrated physical and psychological violence against the women in their care in the name of scientific progress. Inspired by their vicissitudes, Oates’s novel creates a narrative of surgical horror that builds around a real history of abuse and resilience. As Aldana Reyes (2014) highlights in an informed critique of the genre, “power-hungry…men of science ready to bend a few rules” (146) are often at the center of such narratives, epitomizing real patterns of misogyny within scientific research and the concomitant attacks on women’s bodies. Similarly, mixing Frankenstein-like egotistical ambition with systemic patriarchal oppression and the sadistic enjoyment of unethical practices, the Butcher effectively embodies the historical maltreatment of vulnerable subjects under the guise of scientific advancement.

As it revisits the dark history of nineteenth-century gynecology in the U.S. specifically, the novel is set within the context of rising women’s rights movements: although it first offers an insight into Weir’s early years as a practitioner (1835–1846), the main events of the novel extend into the 1850s and 60s, right around the first Women’s Rights Convention of 1848. In this context, the novel explores a historical moment in which women’s emancipation movements started to threaten the patriarchy’s stronghold, leading to repression efforts. As Barker-Benfield (1972) argues, this included the rise of a “medically materialistic therapy of gynecological surgery” (54), entailing a multiplicity of medical practices in which women’s bodies were reduced to mere material substance to be utilized in the scope of research, as a tool to even more strictly control a female body that was threatening self-liberation.

These practices included gruesome surgical experiments, (genital) mutilation, sterilization, and amputations, mostly performed without anesthesia—not to speak of patients’ consent (see Barker-Benfield 1972). Building around this historical moment, Oates’s novel also stresses a crucial aspect of this era of medical misogyny: modern gynecology was often built on the lives and bodies of Black women, enslaved or indentured persons, and women with disabilities. Weir’s choice of test subjects accordingly shows some remarkable intersections of female, non-white, enslaved, and disabled bodies. His experiments at the “Asylum for Female Lunatics” in Trenton, New Jersey, effectively enact what has been termed by Barker-Benfield (1972) “a cycle perpetuated by gynecologists who created and cured ‘their’ own symptoms” (60): medical practitioners resorted to coining pathologies based on perceived non-compliance with the patriarchal norm and to presenting its repression as a ‘cure.’ In the novel, for instance, women’s propensities “for disobedience & insolence in church” are cured by surgical removal of the clitoris—a “slight bit of flesh cut out & tossed away like garbage amid medical waste” (Oates 2024, 63); the “pursuit of so-called ‘higher’ education among white women”—an affliction dangerously “likely to shrivel a woman’s ovaries & prevent her from discharging her motherly duties”—is alleviated via “a methodical plan, to surgically remove female organs” (Oates 2024, 247); a multitude of medications are administered by the doctor “to gauge their effects upon the patient”: trial and error “reduced the patient’s heart arrhythmia, which had (possibly) been accelerated by the Saint John’s wort, unless it was a small dose of black cohosh, or the cocaine drops”—the doctor is not quite sure (Oates 2024, 131). As Oates notes in the Acknowledgements at the end of the novel, such gruesome surgical attacks are directly based on J. Marion Sims’s autobiography, pointing to the horrifying truth behind the fiction. Whether turning failure to comply with patriarchal ideals into physical ailments or creating symptoms by arbitrarily administering medication, Weir repeatedly invents (or causes) pathologies to legitimize his own practices, drafting solutions to self-made problems.

Yet, in this essay I argue that the novel performs a moment of reclaimed agency. Much like Gilman’s short story enacts non-compliance with her own prescribed rest cure in an act of writing prohibited by her doctors, I believe Oates’s novel performs resistance by giving a voice to those made voiceless. I thus suggest that, while the account of medical malpractice construes resistant action within the diegesis, the text itself becomes a powerful tool for representing marginalized agency. I argue that, by exploring a history of patriarchal medical abuse that, like Sims’s amputations and Mitchell’s rest cure, consistently reduced and silenced its victims, Butcher effectively reclaims a voice for the silenced—and embodies it in an opaque narrative that is inherently affective.

Drawing on affect theories that highlight the liminal, dynamic, and flowing forms of affects, I critically read the negotiation of trauma through formal ambiguity and the focus on bodily precariousness as strategies to engage the reader’s moral sense and produce an embodied affective reaction. First, I show that the multifaceted narration lacks the transparency of denunciation and instead presents events through multiple perspectives so that it does not simply witness the women’s suffering but instead lets their voices speak for their collective trauma. Furthermore, I argue that the aspects of body horror present in the novel enact an unusual flow of affects, allowing readers to respond in ways beyond abjection and, thereby, create a liminal space of disturbance through resilient, always in-flux bodies. In the following, I thus aim to show that both the lack of transparency in the polyvocal narration and the surgically rearranged bodies that claim their own “right to opacity” (Glissant 2010, 190) make for a productive method of resistant writing, performing reclaimed agency and unfolding as an embodied narrative of resilience.

Narrative Opacity: Polyvocality and Illegible Speech

The Butcher’s experiments are rendered through a polyvocal narrative, as the novel announces itself as “a biography comprised of divers voices” (Oates 2024, 3). Epigraphs to the novel already include both Weir’s voice and that of his favorite patient, and longest abused victim, Brigit. The prologue contains an excerpt from Brigit’s own account, “An Orphan’s True Story Told by Herself,” (Oates 2024, 257) which will take over the narration of the patients’ insurrection towards the end of the novel. The multiplicity of voices, all called into question and juxtaposed to and within each other, makes for a narrative that is inherently opaque. Here, overlapping claims make for a blurry delineation of the facts, enacting a type of narrative opacity by which “events and characters…are constituted by the modes of their presentation” (Lamarque 2014, 3; original emphasis). In this sense, the aesthetic form of the novel becomes a murky surface on which plot and characters are constituted rather than a transparent glass through which we see them. The characters’ very identity is then determined by their aesthetic representation, and content is constructed by the narrative perspective, which in this case is diversified and contradictory. This makes for a type of polyvocal unreliable narration that, like a cloudy glass, blurs the factuality of the events—and, as contrasting viewpoints highlight the novel’s equivocality, the reader’s attention is drawn towards the “mechanisms of discursive power” (Riedelsheimer and Ries 2021, 306) hidden under an obfuscated veil of contrasting truths.

Thus, the polyvocality of Butcher makes for an ambiguous account that denounces the power structures at work in the novel. First, Weir’s autobiography is called into question by his son’s commentary as he “much exaggerated his surgical ‘successes’ and deliberately failed to record his most egregious failures” (Oates 2024, 5). His speech is the pseudo-scientific jargon of a medic who wishes to speak to “fellow physicians” and treats the reader as a “layman” (Oates 2024, 130, 168, 198), thus even giving opaque evidence for his claims, as he administers to moral philosophers’ warning against claims that present themselves as the truth without providing the appropriate evidence (see McGrath 2019, 89). The Butcher’s research is then an obscure pseudo-scientific ‘truth’ based on the assumption of his non-medic readers’ ignorance of medicine for their blind belief in his expert view. Further, Weir holds himself to the position of “God’s chosen,” suffering as he is of “sacred monomania” (Oates 2024, 198): this exhalted view of the self as divine marks his account with the opaque quality of self-assigned “divine signification” (see Todd 1986, 165), so that the doctor himself comes to embody the ambiguity of his words. Brigit’s voice is also uncertainly rendered: her later published poetry is interspersed throughout the novel, and her account narrates the revolt and fire at the Asylum (Oates 2024), but she is introduced as deaf and mute—after the traumatic death of her mother, she cannot hear and does not speak. And yet, after treating her, Weir believes he can hear her voice, “a murmur deep in the throat which only [he] could hear” (Oates 2024, 156). Thus, before Brigit gains her actual narrative voice, we are presented an imagined silent speech through the Butcher’s narration, who speaks over and for her, while her own account of the insurrection is then questioned as “clearly biased” and impossible to corroborate (Oates 2024, 5).

Here, rather than unveiling structures of oppression through transparency, the novel denounces them through opacity. Instead of a clear, transparent, moral condemnation of the Butcher’s experiments, the multiple perspectives and overlapping voices create a narrative uncertainty that is central to the ethical questioning of the Butcher’s dominant account. Re-enacting its moral concern on a formal level, the novel invites readers’ engagement with perspectival ambiguousness. And herein lies the affective potential of narrative opacity: it is the lack of certainty that prompts a morally aware engagement with the novel, presenting “richer opportunities for exercising our ethical sensibilities” (Grønstad 2020, 13), so that an equivocal, multilayered narrative such as that of the Butcher and his patients can force readers into ethical reflection. In fact, “opacity’s dizzying effect impels us to engage” (Simek 2015, 369): the novel’s blurred, dizzy surface challenges readers to reflection and compels an ethically aware reading. The denouncing force of the novel is then intensified by its ambiguous aesthetics, as “it does not simply present the nature of oppression, but in fact reenacts—and actively challenges it—through form itself” (Clark 2016, 50). The novel’s narrative opacity may in this case then be even more effective than a transparent account of the beginnings of gynecology, as Butcher not only shows structures of oppression, but becomes itself resistance to these structures. The polyvocal narrative of the novel invites the reader to reflect on patriarchal oppression and power structures by reenacting them, creating an indeterminate account that allows it to indirectly negotiate women’s trauma in the early stages of gynecological experiments. By contrasting the hegemonic narrative of the medic to that of his victims, the novel becomes itself an affective site of resistance to patriarchal oppression, giving a voice to those muted and mutilated by its sovereignty.

Another key element of the novel’s opacity is the patient’s illegible speech. This is partly caused by the Butcher, as a considerable number of his surgeries focus on the mouth, the center of speech, self-expression, and individuality. The extraction of teeth to supposedly prevent hysteria and other sorts of ailments, mangled attempts at harelip surgery, and tongue mutilation thus threaten to further silence his patients. And yet the resulting speech becomes an illegible linguistic mode by which the oppressed elude the oppressor. Here, it is necessary to trace opacity back to its origins in the context of the postcolonial Caribbean (Glissant 2010), where specific speech patterns could become tools of resistance. Advancing the “right to opacity” (2010, 190), Glissant calls into question the Western demand for transparency and instead stresses the irreducibility of identity to standards of understanding. In this sense, opacity is a productive tool to expose the limits of representation and visibility, defining an excess that is unquantifiable by claims to clarity. As Anna T. (2020) more recently elaborates, forms of opacity have also been productively employed in the context of queer and minority communities, where not only silence itself but also specific idioms have been seen to answer to the need for representation. At the intersection of identity theories, opacity indicates idioms and terminologies that purposefully perform incomprehensibility. Brigit’s “mute speech,” (Oates 2024, 167) a “heathenish sort of music” (199) sung by the German midwife, the “garbled, incoherent speech” and “gibberish of female lunatics” (293, original emphases) similarly function as cryptic speech of resistance. The women’s illegible speech effectively eludes the Butcher’s oppression: “the more intensely [he] listened, the less [he] could hear” (Oates 2024, 185, original emphasis). One woman’s garbled speech then “ma[kes] her a sister” to the other (2024, 200), as their only partly legible voices contrast the Butcher’s reign of violence in an obstinately impenetrable form of expression. I argue that it is through their elusive voices that the asylum inmates claim their own right to opacity—here, an ethical claim to illegibility.

Both polyvocality and illegible speech then contribute to an opaque form that allows for the indirect negotiation of unspeakable trauma through the fragmentation of truth. Furthermore, the patients’ resistant, enigmatic speech foregrounds the same aesthetics of illegibility found in ruined or damaged images that make for “a precarious aesthetics, the inscription of vulnerability into the formal affordances” of the work of art (Grønstad 2020, 4). In fact, Butcher highlights a similar precariousness: from the medical records being destroyed in the insurrection fire, to the illegibility of the patients’ incomprehensible speech, precarious aesthetics foreground a formal vulnerability that replicates the Butlerian ‘precariousness’ (see Butler 2004) of the victims’ bodies. In this sense, narrative opacity is localized in the illegible speech of the patients, which is in turn a formal extension of their bodily vulnerability. Thus, opacity in the novel is not only a question of form: it also extends to the patients’ bodies as sites of affectivity.

Opaque Bodies: Between In-and Hypervisibility

For the second part of my argument, which highlights the patients’ bodies as resilient and irreducible, I put forward a notion of opacity as the tension between invisibility and hypervisibility—in this specific case, rendered through the aesthetics of body horror. While Gothic and horror modes have always incorporated corporeality, body horror specifically works with its “abnormal states…or from an attack upon the body” (Aldana Reyes 2014, 52). In its focus on physical alterities, the aesthetic forms of body horror “slice, gouge, and chop into…flesh” (Talairach 2019, 113) just like the Butcher doctor scrapes, cuts, amputates and burns; his victims recount how he “scraped [them] raw with his curette, cut away [their] lives with scissors…. Amputation of toes, fingers, feet, legs…stumps cauterized” (Oates 2024, 293). Here, it is only appropriate that a novel on the origins of gynecology, when women were completely reduced to their physical existence in the hands of a materialistic medical practitioner, should rely on bodily tensions. In its depiction of precarious corporeality and blurred boundaries, the novel takes advantage of the suggestive potential of affects as a condition of embodiment.

In the novel, the patients’ corporeality is reduced to an incarnation of the Gothic body: a “body-as-thing,” “an object…to be utilized without particular care” (Weinstock 2023, 72). Their bodies are turned into objects, laboratory ‘things’ that are only valued insofar as they serve the purpose of science. The careless surgical utilization of their bodies then turns the maimed women into nameless “wretches” (Oates 2024, 302), animal-like, “null” deaths “to be recorded nowhere” (Oates 2024, 138)—butchered bodies of which the Butcher will have no memory. In this, the novel mirrors a central feature of the subgenre of surgical horror, in which “attacks on the flesh are tantamount to the disintegration of the subject” (Aldana Reyes 2014, 165). It is through the aesthetics of surgical horror that the asylum’s patients lose visibility as embodied subjects—or, as the Butcher puts it, “the identity of the subject is irrelevant; for the patient is but the material upon which the physician-surgeon labors” (Oates 2024, 162). Thus, when the Butcher’s patients are reduced to test subjects, they are not only deprived of their agency, but also stripped of their identity. In a Gothic, surgical-horror tradition, the (male) medic’s ego overpowers the women’s existence, reducing them to a body that is then mistreated and carelessly discarded once it served its purpose. Further, unnecessary amputations and the constant removal of “offending organ[s]” (Oates 2024, 85) physically take away from the women’s corporeal visibility: as more body parts are taken away, the patients increasingly fade out of sight. And yet by the same process they are opened up, turned inside out—put on full display: the same surgical horror that destroys their visibility by removing body parts also makes them hypervisible. Graphic descriptions of puncturing eardrums accompanied by “burnt & sizzling flesh” (Oates 2024, 217), messily drained “boils, cysts & goiters” (132) and amputated “bits of flesh” (63) help expose their bodies outwards, foregrounding the corporeal existence of those women that are otherwise being erased and thus creating a tension between in-and hypervisibility that harbors the affective potential of opacity.

Here, opacity arises as the in-between. Similarly to Seigworth and Gregg’s claim that affects arise “in the midst of in-between-ness: in the capacities to act and be acted upon,” (2010, 2) opaque bodies occupy the in-between space in the midst of in- and hypervisibility: they are acted upon, damaged, amputated—slowly disappearing. But by the very same process they simultaneously (re)act, rearrange themselves, in a hypervisible manner. Thus arise “stubborn shadows” (Glissant 1989, 4) that refuse to be reduced and are narratively exploited for their subversive affective potential. To put it simply, they refuse to become invisible no matter how much of their body is removed—and, narratively, they refuse to be silenced no matter how many of their tongues are cut off. Their Gothic, surgically utilized bodies are then productive in bringing to light the hegemonic structures at work in their destruction, as their resilience serves as a counter-narrative to the Butcher’s exploitation.

In the tension between exploitation and critique, acting and being acted upon, these ambivalent bodies become affective sites of narrative resistance. Reacting to amputation and surgery, the patients’ bodies become human hybrids: Oates (2024) articulates this hybridity, writing patients that, at times, look like “some species of wild boar with a single miniature tusk on one side of her face” (207), serpentine “coiled figure[s]” (253) or a “wizened bat, weighing no more than seventy pounds yet ferocious with nails grown as long & sharp as a rodent’s nails” (303). In their uncanny, dehumanized alterity, the mutilated patients appear as incarnations of monstrosity, specifically of a “monstrous feminine” (Creed 2007) in which, gender, specifically the female gendered body, plays a crucial role in the construction of the abject figure. Here, embodying a monstrosity that recreates itself, the patients’ opaque bodies, surgically attacked but actively rearranging themselves in altered, more-than-human forms, are not only passive, maimed and destroyed, but also active and resilient, creating new constellations—again, occupying the affective in-between amidst acting and being acted upon. The patients’ bodies then become sites of affectivity, as the narrative encounter with their corporeality embodies the potential of body horror to “destabilize, distort, or discomfit viewers’ experiences of their bodies” (Hawkins 2020, 17, original emphasis). Their resilient existence incarnates the typical shock-value of horror aesthetics, by which the reader is made to feel the medical attack through the gory descriptions of altered physicality.

In this sense, they also embody what Julia Kristeva famously defined as abject, that which “walks the boundary of what is assimilable, thinkable” (Kristeva 1982, 18)—the violence of their surgical alterations is barely cognizable, challenging notions of fixed corporeality and arousing a reaction of interested disgust. One of the clearest instances in which their abjection is explicitly stated is connected to the Butcher’s first and most significant achievement, namely the treatment of a vesicovaginal fistula, a tear in the bladder that makes the women incontinent. This is often a result of pregnancy and/or rape—and, possibly, another way by which the doctor “creates and cures his own symptoms,” as it is alluded to and finally confirmed by Brigit’s account that Weir sexually abuses his patients. The afflicted women then become incontinent, and their existence abject, being repeatedly described as “repugnant,” “shame[ful]” and “repel[lent] (Oates 2024, 87–88). This specific ailment foregrounds the leakiness (Shildrick 1997) of the female body: that leaky, abject corporeality which, in contrast to the “ideal body of biomedicine”—male, intrinsically masculine, fixed—embodies the marginalization of women in the medical field (Shildrick 1997, 49). It is the leakiness of fistula that makes these women “[f]ilthy, abominable, accursed” (Oates 2024, 88, original emphasis), their punctured corporeality crossing the boundaries of embodiment and effectively making them abject figures. And this is the ultimate way in which the patients’ bodies become hypervisible, literally leaking their insides out, soaking the narrative with abjection—in stark contrast to the Butcher’s attempts to reduce them to invisibility.

In their physical irreducibility, the mutilated patients are then comparable to a Deleuzo-Guattarian (2000) body without organs, unregulated by social structures: a body without organs “presents its smooth, slippery, opaque, taut surface as a barrier” (9, my emphasis), meeting instances of persecution with resilience. Here in a very literal sense, the butchered bodies of the patients, having suffered actual dismemberment and removal of organs, are presented in the novel as the fragmentary surface on which the narrative denunciation of the Butcher’s persecution apparatus is built. The inherent opacity of the mutilated bodies is then exploited in the novel as a tool of narrative resistance, as their lengthy, detailed descriptions refuse to let them disappear. Painting a vivid picture of the appalling violence inflicted in semi-secret in the name of medical research, the novel testifies to the suffering of those made invisible by history. Thus, the same aesthetics of body and surgical horror that make the Butcher’s patients invisible and take away their agency also make their bodies a site of narrative affectivity, a productively monstrous body without organs rearranged in a hypervisible manner. The patients’ abject monstrosity is the hypervisible reaction to being reduced—a reaction that embodies their resilience in the face of the Butcher’s oppression. In-between their capacities to endure and react, to become invisible and yet reappear in new hypervisible forms, to affect and be affected, these bodies perform a narrative opacity that inscribes the novel with the affective potential of in-betweeness.

Conclusion

To conclude, I go back to Glissant’s (2010) recognition that different “opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics” (190): not one single form of opacity but rather multiple tactics of illegibility propagate from his account, making for a productive ground on which postcolonial, feminist and queer theories of representation can proliferate. It is in this context that my essay is situated, as I attempt to contribute to the field of inquiry into the affective potential of opaque strategies. As I have argued, in Butcher different opacities interact to create a polyvocal narrative of body horror that is inherently affective in its lack of transparency. The multiple voices allow for an opaque narrative that forces the reader into ethical reflection: rather than transparently denouncing the patriarchal oppression of early gynecological experimentations, the novel reenacts them in its narrative form, giving a voice to both the oppressor and the oppressed and calling their collective credibility into question. The dizzying effect of this polyvocal narration invites the reader to pay particular attention to the power structures implied in the narrative, inviting them to come up with their own conclusions on the morality of the events and thus becoming itself a site of resistance to the oppressive powers it restates. Narrative opacity thus contributes to the affective force of the novel, impelling readers’ engagement and moral questioning.

The opacity of the entire narrative is then localized in the illegible speech of the Butcher’s patients, who, creating their own cryptic speech practices, counteract his attempts at silencing them. Here, linguistic illegibility is but a reiteration of their physical precariousness, which is highlighted through the ambivalent aesthetics of body and surgical horror. Evolving from carelessly utilized Gothic bodies to dangerous, monstruous bodies without organs, the Butcher’s patients become the narrative surface on which patriarchal oppression slips. The aesthetics of mutilation—cuts, amputations, burns—threaten to make the patients’ bodies invisible, yet paradoxically render them hypervisible. Both diegetically and formally, the novel then enacts the claim to opacity that Glissant infers in his own writing of resistance, performing the right of the oppressed to make themselves unavailable to persecution. Ultimately, the patients’ resilient, monstrous forms become affective sites of narrative resistance that expose power structures. For all the blatant medical misogyny, graphic description of women’s pain and surgical attacks on the female body, different opacities come together in the novel to allow the patients, Oates and all readers to “bear…witness” (Oates 2024, 291, original emphasis) to the horrors of gyno-psychiatry.¹

^Notes

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