TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction - Maria H. Frawley
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226261225.003.0001
[Florence Nightingale, invalidism, identity, invalids, productivity, fatigue, waste, confinement, sickness]
Responding to an admirer who had written to ask after her health, Florence Nightingale once wrote, “I am an incurable invalid, entirely a prisoner of my bed (except during a periodical migration) and overwhelmed with business.” This book queries the complex set of assumptions underlying Nightingale's statement and many others like it. It investigates the capacity of the nineteenth-century invalid to embody productivity and at the same time be emblematic of fatigue and waste. Unique in its capacity to denote at once experience of sickness and response to it, invalidism in its nineteenth-century manifestations simultaneously shaped and was shaped by just such determinants of (or influences on) identity as those delineated in this book. The book considers the conditions under which confinement could be experienced as liberating, asking: if incurable but still at work, relegated to bed but still capable of travel, was the invalid something of an impostor? It examines the peculiar and distinctive features of nineteenth-century culture that made it not only possible but relatively common for people to identify themselves or others as invalids. (pages 1 - 10)
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“All My Afflictions”: Invalids and Authority in Nineteenth-Century Britain - Maria H. Frawley
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226261225.003.0002
[invalid, public visibility, history, stasis, chronic illness, Convalescent, Charles Lamb, inertia, progress]
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the figure of the invalid assumed a kind of public visibility unparalleled in earlier periods of English history. Charting the conditions that promoted this ascendancy, this chapter argues that the invalid assumed prominence because the figure apotheosized stasis. However “blessed” was the “borderland” that the invalid occupied, extended or chronic illness could also signify stagnation, immobility, and, in a broader sense, all that could be considered inconclusive. In “The Convalescent,” Charles Lamb evocatively likened his condition to a “flat swamp.” Epitomizing inertia, the invalid expressed the culture's profound skepticism not simply about the inability of scientific medicine to cure, but also about other social movements, institutions, and ideologies premised on the notion of progress—the economic progress of the nation, the spiritual progress of the pilgrim. (pages 11 - 63)
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“Beyond Hope, Help, or Remedy”: Confession, Cure, and the Hypochondriac's Narrative - Maria H. Frawley
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226261225.003.0003
[invalid authors, confessional mode, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Hypochondriac, John Addington Symonds, Memoirs, manhood, sexual health]
This chapter explores the use that invalid authors made of the confessional mode and studies how its conventions aided their self-fashioning as particular kinds of patients. Edward Bulwer-Lytton's “Confessions and Observations of a Water Patient,” the anonymous Confessions of a Hypochondriac, and, much later in the century, John Addington Symonds's Memoirs reveal a variety of ways that the confessional mode served especially well those invalids who believed the source of their debility was deeply rooted in Victorian ideologies of manhood, particularly those that linked sexual health to industry. To begin an inquiry into these issues, the chapter examines rhetoric deployed in the opening pages of Confessions of a Hypochondriac, describing the symptoms that led the author on a long and difficult journey of medical and personal discovery. (pages 64 - 112)
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“In Search of Health”: Invalids Abroad - Maria H. Frawley
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226261225.003.0004
[invalid authors, Henry Matthews, Diary, identity, Albert Denison, John Addington Symonds]
This chapter uncovers and assesses the rhetorical strategies that invalid authors use in their efforts to represent themselves as English men, as travelers, and as invalids. Henry Matthews's popular Diary of an Invalid provides an especially compelling look at the confluence of these three dimensions of identity, and they converge as well in Lord Albert Denison's Wanderings in Search of Health, issued in 1849 for private circulation, W. B. Aspinall's San Remo as a Winter Residence (1865), and C. Home Douglas's Searches for Summer, published in 1874. Later in the century, John Addington Symonds's essays on his experiences at the Swiss health resort of Davos, collected in the volume Our Life in the Highlands, reveal critical differences between Symonds's public identity as an invalid tourist and his more private understanding of himself as invalid that occupied his attention in the more confessional, unpublished autobiography. (pages 113 - 155)
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“Sin-Sick Souls” Christian Invalids and the Literature of Consolation - Maria H. Frawley
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226261225.003.0005
[representations, attitudes toward invalidism, suffering, incurable, self-help, spiritual literature, sickroom, Christian dogma]
This chapter examines representations of and attitudes toward invalidism inscribed within a range of literatures directed to or written by the Christian afflicted, exploring the ways that Evangelical ideas about suffering, medical assumptions about what constituted the incurable, and an ideology of self-help converged to encourage invalid authors to use the conventions of conduct and commonplace books, and thus to produce a powerful model of Christian invalidism. To delineate the features that made this model distinct, one must look both at literature directed to the Christian “treatment” of invalids—for example, hymnals, prayer books, devotional manuals, and services for the sick—and at a substantial counterpart of spiritual literature written by invalids throughout the century and addressed to their fellow afflicted. These literatures combine to suggest not only the remarkable appeal of sickroom submission, but also the surprising ways in which invalids were empowered by Christian dogma. (pages 156 - 199)
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“The Range of Our Vision”: Self, Surveillance, and Life in the Sickroom - Maria H. Frawley
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226261225.003.0006
[sickroom, spiritual sanctuary, invalid authors, invalidism, Charles Lamb, Convalescent, Harriet Martineau, microculture, domesticity]
Deemphasizing the sickroom's status as spiritual sanctuary, and downplaying (but not entirely eradicating) the ethereal nature of the invalid, invalid authors might be said to have domesticated invalidism. In a range of ways, which this chapter discusses, their inquiries into the invalid's mind, habits of self-contemplation, and distinctive subjectivity simultaneously mobilized a critique of key assumptions underpinning that very domesticity. Charles Lamb's “The Convalescent”, Harriet Martineau's Life in the Sick-Room, and several essays from later in the nineteenth century provide particularly detailed and compelling models, but to appreciate the ways that these very different works represented the invalid's mind, one needs to situate them within the broader canvas of “life in the sickroom” writing. For many invalid authors, the subject of life in the sickroom was best broached via observations on the invalid's external environment and daily routine, and their essays present themselves as ethnographic studies of the microculture of the sickroom. (pages 200 - 244)
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Afterword Centers, Margins, and Vanishing Points: Locating Invalidism in the Nineteenth Century - Maria H. Frawley
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226261225.003.0007
[invalid, social life, Elizabeth Gaskell, invalidism, Round the Sofa]
If the invalid occupied a prominent position in nineteenth-century medical understanding and social life, does it necessarily follow that this figure—capacious enough to contain so many extremes, slippery enough to defy precise definition—should assume a similarly privileged position in a literary and cultural analysis of the period? Elizabeth Gaskell—the Victorian novelist who perhaps made most frequent use of the invalid in her writing—can help begin to answer this question. This chapter turns to Gaskell, a fiction writer, in part to affirm its emphasis on the invalid as a preeminent figure of the nineteenth-century medical, social, and literary landscape. The most useful evidence with which to summarize its argument about the invalid's position, function, and symbolic significance in nineteenth-century Britain is to be found, however, at the margins of Gaskell's canon. One of her works, Round the Sofa, reveals her trademark interest in the pressures exerted by new world change on old world sensibilities and standards, and recapitulates many of this book's most central claims about the “story” of invalidism. (pages 245 - 254)
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Works Cited
Index
