Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 100

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Popular Culture Review

Just as the military aspects of Hester’s experience in the Crimea constantly
remind readers of her liminality, so do the professional ones— for Perry’s immersion
o f her tales within the history o f nursing are perhaps the most powerful in
constructing a transgressive, and therefore more successful, sleuth. As a nurse in
the 1850s, Hester drifts in a space that is uncertain, somewhere between amateur
and professional status. Perry’s books are rife with references to this instability
and the conflict it creates, issues which are in fact themes or sub-themes in three of
her novels: A Dangerous Mourning, which dramatizes Hester’s confrontations with
and dismissal by a physician of the old school; A Sudden, Fearful Death, which
centers around the murder of a fellow Crimean nurse who seeks to be a physician;
and Sins o f the Wolf in which Hester is accused of murdering a patient and must be
defended as a new kind of nurse by Florence Nightingale herself. In these and
other novels, there is a familiar refrain of Hester’s desire to be, and sometimes of
her acceptance as, a professional “lady” nurse who exceeds even Nightingale in
her aspirations. A typical passage explains that Hester “wished particularly to see
[nursing] become a profession which was respected and remunerated accordingly,
so women of character and intelligence would be attracted,” wishing “to exercise
medical judgment, change dressings herself and give medicines when the surgeon
was absent, and...to assist in operations” ( Dangerous 33)—having in fact already
performed all of these latter tasks. In fact, though she does not explicitly claim to
want it herself, Hester defends other women’s capability and entitlement to study
and practice medicine as physicians {Sudden 391-2). Nevertheless, though she is
sometimes accepted in these elevated terms, she is more often reminded of the
“uncrossable g u lf’ between professional medical status—reserved for male
physicians—and the nurse’s conventional role as amateur {Sudden 361). “Miss
Nightingale and all her helpers, including you,” she is told by Dr. Pomeroy in A
Dangerous Mourning, “are amateurs and will remain so. There is no medical school
in the country which admits women, or is ever likely to” (32). After she treats a
patient with her own medicines, against Pomeroy’s orders, he commands her to
obey him and cease in her “attempts to practice an art” for which she has “no
training and no mandate”; he then outlines nurses’ limited and unskilled duties, an
event which occurs at least once in every novel. Nurses, he tells her shrilly, “fetch
and carry and pass bandages and instruments as required. They keep the ward
clean and tidy; they stoke the fires and serve food. They empty and dispose of
waste and attend to the bodily requirements of patients....That is all!.. .They do not
under any circumstances exercise their own judgment!” (121). Through Hester’s
professional frustrations, readers are reminded constantly that nursing is considered
a trade for which no training—indeed no intelligence or even constant sobriety—
is required.
Hester negotiates between the extremes of amateur and professional identity,