Unwomanly intellect: melancholy, maternity, and lesbianism in Olive Moore's spleen

Abstract

This article examines Ruth, the cerebral protagonist of Olive Moore’s novel Spleen, and how her processes of rumination affect the ways she interacts with modern gendered ideologies. These interactions, the article argues, suggest not only a ferocious feminism, but also a kind of homoeroticism or lesbianism extant in the protagonist. In order to make these arguments, the study first analyzes the title of the book, Spleen, mapping out the term’s use in medicine and how it is associated with the gendered neurological problem of hysteria approaching the early twentieth century.