E.S. Thomson's books subject of scientific papers

Since 2016, Elaine Thomson writes a series of mysteries featuring a apothecary in mid-Victorian London called Jem Flockhart. Jeremiah Jemima Flockhart is disfigured by a port-wine stain that covers her eyes and nose like a mask. Born biologically female, Jem is raised as male to fill the role of the twin brother, who died at birth along with the siblings’ mother.

The character of Jem Flockhart is obviously based on James Barry (1789-1865), who was born as Margaret Bulkley, a woman who disguised herself as a man to study medicine at Edinburgh University in the 1810s and later spent her life as a doctor in the army. She was only discovered to be a woman when she had died.

Both Barry and Flockhart were not cross-dressing (in a sexual sense) nor were they hermaphrodites (in a biological sense), but simply resourceful women who wanted to achieve their dream in a male dominated world, where women were not deemed psychologically fit to become doctors or apothecaries.

Elaine Thomson even honoured James Barry by using his father's name, Jeremiah, as the 'original' name of Jem Flockhart.

The novels of Elaine Thomson have recently been the subject of research in the field of heterotropic spaces[1][2]. Heterotropic spaces are a concept to describe certain cultural, institutional and discursive spaces that are somehow 'other': disturbing, intense, incompatible, contradictory or transforming. Heterotopias are worlds within worlds, mirroring and yet upsetting what is outside. Examples are ships, cemeteries, bars, brothels, prisons, gardens of antiquity, fairs, and many more.

As Jem Flockhart and his friend and partner William ('Will') Quartermain encounter and fight crime in the Victorian world, where filth, grime, and depravity were rife, it is quite understandable that they often find themselves in heterotropic spaces like hospitals, prisons, asylums, brothels, prostitutes’ rooms, physic gardens, ships, anatomy schools, museums, exhibitions, graveyards, slums, and even colonies.

Marie-Luise Kohlke tries desperately to formulate a conclusion for the heterotopic spaces in Elaine Thomson's world, but rather fails to find one. Indeed, heterotopic spaces are used by almost every writer of crime novels: from Agatha Christie to Alistair MacLean. All use the idea of heterotopic spaces to keep insiders in and outsiders out of their stories.

And that's the crux of many social studies: there are hardly any hard facts that can be molded into a comprehensive theory.

Whatever my misgivings about these two papers, you really should read all the books of E.S. Thomson, including those of Elaine di Rollo, her alter ego. All are reviewed on this weblog.

[1] Marie-Luise Kohlke: Heterotopic Proliferation in E. S. Thomson's Jem Flockhart Series in Humanities – 2022. See here.
[2] Marie-Luise Kohlke, Elizabeth Ho, Akira Suwa: Heterotopic and Neo-Victorian Affinities: Introducing the Special Issue on Neo-Victorian Heterotopias in Humanities - 2022. See here.