earticle

영어

This paper aims to examine how the radical transformations of the conception about woman’s role and professionalization of medicine in the late 19th-century America are reflected in Elizabeth Stuart Pehlps’s Doctor Zay. Throughout her career, Phelps challenged the notion that a woman’s place was in the home. She provided a variety of potential role models by depicting women as succeeding in traditionally male-dominated professions, such as business, medicine, and the ministry. She also tried to promote women’s rights by claiming the importance of woman’s education and woman’s work in the public sphere.
Doctor Zay features a strong-minded woman doctor, “a new kind of woman,” who is dedicated to a life of a professional doctor in preference to a married life of a “true woman.” Waldo Yorke is entrusted to her care after a carriage accident. In contrast to the stereotypical notion that woman is defined as an “invalid” by male doctors, the relationship of the male patient and the female doctor exemplifies an inversion of traditional male-female roles. Yorke is confounded by this inversion at first, but gradually gets attracted to Doctor Zay. She, however, refuses his proposals twice before she finally accepts him. Nonetheless, the ending, in effect, does not guarantee that the marriage will be happy, rather it generates serious reservations on the part of readers. Thus the novel undermines the happy marriage plot of domestic novels by presenting, in the course of the novel, the inversion of gender roles and a subversively reconceptualized new woman exerting powerful agency over a man in courtship as well as in medical treatment.