ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how fears about medicine, surgery, dissection, and the vulnerability of the pathologised body manifest throughout Malet’s oeuvre, not just as a metaphor for the process of writing, but in objects, events, and characters. Rooms of illness, surgery, and death are the extreme realisation of Malet’s impulse to materialise medical fears about bodily rupture, impairment, and disfigurement. The metaphorical moral dissecting-room is invoked in spaces ostensibly for healing, but which reveal themselves to be spaces of pathology, destruction, and death. The combination of desire and repulsion that she feels for Colthurst is embodied in this simultaneous dilation and shuddering. Mary attempts to hide the part of her body that betrays her emotions, covering her eyes in a repetition of positioning herself “face downwards” as a child. Post-war, the mind-body relationship was redefined as soldiers returned from the front, often wounded physically, but also by the invisible wounds of trauma.
