Fanny Burney: A Mastectomy: Surgical Treaty and Sentimental Fiction

Turn away now if you're squeamish.

For my other class this semester, Regency Women Writers, we have been looking at the issues facing female authors in the Regency Period, in terms of their literary heritage and production.  

This week our female of focus was Fanny Burney, who was interestingly born in Kings Lynn Norfolk (near me in Norwich) and later moved to Bath in Somerset (where I grew up). 

Burney was somewhat of a celebrity in the Georgian period and was part of King George III's inner circle. 

In 1811 she underwent a mastectomy in France to remove a cancerous tumor, without anesthetic, which doesn't even bare thinking about. The pain would have been absolutely excruciating, but she somehow managed to survive to tell the tale. 

This week I had to read the account of that operation, which Burney details in a letter to her sister. 

The letter reveals the interesting power dynamics at play in the operating room. Burney had to quite literally give her body over to the seven male surgeons performing the operation, stating that her room was "entered by seven men in black", whilst on the other hand, they would not have wanted her to die in their hands, the notable figure that she was in high society. 

Burney's private body is violated and made public through the invasive act of surgery and her narrative forms a reclamation of the agency lost during the operation. It narrates the act of violence through the construction of sentences, organising the fear through words. Writing in this way becomes a form of therapy, something that is widely credited today with being a way to interpret and come to terms with traumatic events. 

The mastectomy, which is described in gruesome detail by Burney (the knife she feels scraping against her chest bone is one particularly haunting image), becomes a symbol for the position of women at this time and the forced loss of control the female sex are faced with as part of a patriarchal Georgian society.

Burney's essay is one of the first to put scientific medical treaty into conversation with sentimental confessional letter, thus creating an interesting juxtaposition between female and male realms of writing. 

A narrative of mutilation and disfigurement, Burney's account of her mastectomy is not easy reading, however it is an incredibly important piece of literature in terms of female writers at this time, presenting, as it does, the intersection of medicine and  literature. It is inconceivable how someone could have gone through an operation like this with nothing to limit the pain at all and it certainly makes me thankful for the advancements that have been made in medicine and science since then. What an incredibly brave woman.