Conspicuously Silent: The Excesses of Religion and Medicine in Emma Donoghue’s Historical Novels The Wonder and The Pull of the Stars

Abstract

This chapter explores Emma Donoghue’s The Wonder (2016) and The Pull of the Stars (2020) as texts that address the wrongs of the male-dominated institutions of religion and medicine, silently complicit of various kinds of female invisibility. As will be discussed from a cultural memory approach, The Wonder, a story tinted with religious fervour and scientific scepticism, probes into the so-called fasting-girls phenomenon and ultimately exposes a diseased culture nurtured by toxic practices of silence. Similarly, The Pull of the Stars, a novel set in a Dublin ward during the 1918 Great Flu pandemic which depicts the struggles of several female characters and their attempts to save the lives of labouring women, is analysed as a text concerned with retrieving the historically suppressed female body, controlled by male regulatory practices of health care and religious morality.