‘It smelled like death’: medical horror in Heather Parry’s Orpheus Builds a Girl

The paper explores Heather Parry’s novel Orpheus Builds a Girl through the lens of medical horror. Parry’s novel is a tale of sexual and scientific obsession, using a real life story of a radiographer who spent 7 years living with the stolen corpse of a young woman after she died of tuberculosis, in order to showcase the universal power structures upholding the relationship between physicians and patients, as well as their rootedness in patriarchal matrices. Starting from the premise that medicine and horror have always been close friends, the analysis proposed here will approach Parry’s novel through a historical lens, drawing on the Gothic figure of the resurrectionist and the changing status of anatomy as a source of knowledge, the metaphors and meanings associated with tuberculosis, as well as the dark history of medical procedures and experiments which denied the humanity of the patients subjected to them. The sinister doctor von Tore of Parry’s novel seeks not only to bring his beloved Luci back from the dead, but also to step beyond the frontiers of medical knowledge, and the two endeavours are impossible to separate. Highlighting the centrality of the female corpse to Parry’s narrative, the analysis also considers its status in the novel through the various cultural meanings associated with the dead female body and the rich history of its representation in art. Using these interpretive frameworks, the paper offers a reading of Parry’s novel as a complex exploration of cultural attitudes towards death, medicine and gender, as well as the power relations that underlie them.