“A Malady of Interpretation”: Performances of Hypochondria in Jane Austen (original) (raw)
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Odd Complaints and Doubtful Conditions: Norms of Hypochondria in Jane Austen and Catherine Belling
In her final fragmentary novel Sanditon, Jane Austen works with a theme that pervades her work from her juvenilia onward: illness, and in particular, illness imagined, invented, or self-inflicted. While the "invention of odd complaints" is characteristically a token of folly or weakness throughout her writing, in this last work imagined illness is both a symbol and a cause of how selves and societies degenerate. In the shifting world of
THE ATTITUDE TOWARDS THE SICK PERSON IN JANE AUSTEN'S NOVEL EMMA
International Journal of Recent Academic Research, 2019
The sick person, both real and imaginary, has been present in literature since its inception and has been approached from different perspectives. In Jane Austen's novels, we find frequent references to diseases and discomforts, which pervade them with realism. Austen often resorts to hypochondria to characterize some of her characters in several of her novels. One of the most representative cases is Mr. Woodhouse, Emma's father. By means of this character, health and illness have an almost constant presence in the story and, for this reason, several articles have been published that revolve around Mr. Woodhouse as a hypochondriac. In the present article we will approach this question from a different perspective of great relevance: the attitude of the different characters towards the sick person and how this attitude entails a greater knowledge of each character on the part of the readers. Austen's books are novels of characters, in which the main thing is the study of the personality of all those who appear in the plot. By introducing a sick person into a leading role, Austen provides contrasts that allow readers to discover personality traits of the protagonists that otherwise would have gone hidden. In this novel, therefore, the patient can be considered as a resource to show the truth of each character, a "Magic Mirror" as we find in the novel The Neverending Story, which shows not only the exterior, but also the interior of each person, confronting them with their true personality. In this article, we offer an analysis of the attitude of the various characters towards Mr. Woodhouse, we also explain how this attitude provides new information about his personality. In addition, we assess the consequences of each attitude and, finally, we offer some reflections on how the attitude towards a sick person can lead to self-knowledge.
"What! Is Fanny Ill?" -Disease as a Means of Telling the Self in Jane Austen's Narrative
The present paper, placing its focus on three of Jane Austen's canonical texts: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma is aimed at evaluating the function of disease states inside the narration. Consequently, the disease state highlights characters, relational and linguistic elements that seem to act as a communicative model that leads up to modifying the social relationships themselves and the fate of the characters. This is the area that is explored in the present paper, utilizing a methodology oriented to shed light, by means of text analysis, on the implications located between those places of the text in which the disease state actively enters and becomes part of the narration. The disease state is able to communicate those most authentic and universal feelings that are at the basis of domestic life narrated in the extraordinary Jane Austen's microcosm, and as the internal uneasiness is dissolved so is the disease.
Brontë Studies, 2007
Many Victorian medical theorists shared the notion that the will functions as an intermediary, holding the mind and body in tension. Psychosomatic illnesses, physiological ailments rooted in mental distress, figure prominently in both Sir Walter Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. Where Scott regards sickness as the product of a weakened will, Emily Brontë's characters exercise their wills to facilitate illness, thereby exerting power over their circumstances. Scott depicts a society breaking its members, forcing them to lapse into illness and madness, troublesome and tragic symbols of disorder. Emily Brontë, in contrast, interprets illness not as a collapse, but rather an exertion of the will's strength.
The use of language in health and illness narratives On Being Ill-Virginia Woolf
Hektoen International Journal, 2021
Malta "While I was as busy as anyone on the sunny plain of life, I heard of you laid aside in the shadowy recess where our sunshine of hope and joy could never penetrate to you."-Harriet Martineau Literary works can illustrate the loneliness and social isolation experienced by people when they are sick. In 1925, Woolf's record of her confinement to a bed for months, with "all writing forbidden" showed readers the harsh reality of illness. The days in the sickroom were very distressing-a state, however, "not only imposed by illness itself, but also the undulations of the mind as an inevitable corollary." Woolf later wrote that "[a] great part of every day is not lived consciously" but in a state of "non-being" that unfolds as "a stream of dream-like thoughts, covering not only illness, but language, literature, the cinema, human nature, and life as a whole." Woolf argues that illness is inadequately represented because suffering cannot be adequately expressed. The inner experience of the invalid is purely subjective and cannot be expressed through language. Rather than accurately conveying the actual message, the subjective experience only "serves to wake memories in his friends' minds." The true experience is not transferable: once it enters "the symbolic register of language, it gets distorted and thus rendered void." The healthy being outside the orbit of the sick individual cannot truly sympathize; "without the shared experience or mutual knowledge it is predicated upon, the so-called sympathy is no more than a masquerade, behind which nothing exists." The opening sentence of "On Being Ill" asks why illness and the sick person are marginalized in literature given "how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings." "Novels, one would have thought," Woolf writes, "would have been devoted to influenza." The implied absurdity of a novel devoted to influenza sets the tone for the essay and takes on sinister undertones when one compares and contrasts the ravishing destruction caused by the global 1918 influenza pandemic with World War I. Compared to the estimated nine million that died in the war's four years, the gargantuan estimates of deaths related to the 1918 pandemic-fifty million worldwide and probably closer to 100 million in less than two years-implies that the body's failings have not only stripped our language of expressive nuance but also foreclosed opportunities to inhabit, or even imagine, the private pain of others. Woolf suggests that a "recourse to language and story can foster empathy, self-awareness, and sensitivity" toward others.
In the prefatory note to his definitive edition of the Fable of the bees, 1 Frederick Kaye claimed that he had 'not passed these last years in Mandeville's company without an ever-deepening certainty of his literary greatness', leaving future generations of scholars the opportunity to expound on this aspect of Mandeville's work. Notwithstanding the intricate composition of the Fable of the bees itself, published in three successive phases and featuring a long poem, a set of philosophical remarks and a dialogue, the best example of the literary qualities mentioned by Kaye is certainly -and perhaps surprisingly -Mandeville's Treatise of the hypochondriack and hysterick diseases, the only medical work ever written in English by the Dutch physician. When, in 1711, the first version of what was then entitled A Treatise on the hypochondriack and hysterick passions appeared, 2 Bernard Mandeville had already published a translation of La Fontaine (Some fables after the easie and familiar method of Monsieur de La Fontaine), Typhon, or the Wars between the gods and giants: a burlesque poem in imitation of the comical Mons. Scarron (1704), The Grumbling hive -the first version of the text which was reissued in 1714 with a set of philosophical remarks as The Fable of the bees -and The Virgin unmask'd, a dialogue upon love and marriage between an old woman and her niece. 3 The initial version of the Treatise was reprinted in 161 1. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the bees, ed. Frederick B. Kaye, 2 vols (Oxford, 1924). 2. B. Mandeville, A Treatise on the hypochondriack and hysterick passions, vulgarly call'd the hypo in men and vapours in women, in which the symptoms, causes, and cure of those diseases are set forth after a method entirely new, the whole interspers'd, with instructive discourses on the real art of physic itself, and entertaining remarks on the modern practice of physicians and apothecaries, very useful to all, that have the misfortune to stand in need of either, in three dialogues (London, Dryden Leach, 1711). 3. Some fables after the easie and familiar method of Monsieur de La Fontaine (London, 1703) followed by an enlarged version (AEsop dress'd, London, R. Wellington, 1704), this edition contains Mandeville's translation of La Fontaine's 'Les membres et l'estomac', which heralds the passages on the supremacy of digestion included in the Treatise and hints at the body as a metaphor of government used in The Fable of the bees (see vol.1, p.3). Typhon, or the Wars between the gods and giants (London, J. Pero, 1704); The Grumbling hive, or Knaves turn'd honest (London, S. Ballard, 1705); The Virgin unmask'd (London, J. Morphew, 1709). 1715 with no changes by the same publisher. 4 Fifteen years later, a second edition 'corrected and enlarged by the author' was printed; Mandeville altered the title, added about a hundred new pages and took out certain parts. 5 With the Treatise, Mandeville returned to medical literature, which he had somewhat neglected since his university years in Leyden, where he matriculated in philosophy in 1685 and graduated in 1691 with a doctoral degree in medicine. Indeed, apart from this larger work, his only forays into medical writing had hitherto been limited to his production as a student. He wrote his inaugural thesis in 1685 (Bernardi à Mandeville de medicina oratio scholastica), followed by another philosophical dissertation on animal functions in 1689 (Disputatio philosophica de brutorum operationibus). Finally, in 1691, he defended his medical thesis on the subject of digestion (Disputatio medica inauguralis de chylosi vitiata) and substantial portions of this text were later incorporated in the Treatise.
Fictional narrative and psychiatry
Advances in Psychiatric Treatment, 2004
This article addresses how mental illness and psychiatry are dealt with in fictional narrative. The starting point is Charlotte Bronte's novel Jane Eyre. The characterisation of madness in that novel provides the basis for exploring how the physical and psychological differences of mentally ill people are portrayed, and how violence and the institutional care of people with mental illnesses are depicted. It is also argued that the fact that in Jane Eyre, Bertha Mason, the madwoman in the attic, is rendered voiceless is not accidental but emblematic of the depiction of mentally ill people in fiction. A number of novels are used to illustrate these issues.
Jane Austen and the Paradox of the ‘ Sensible ’ Body : A Reading of Select Novels
2018
While it is undeniable that Jane Austen's characters constitute a unique literary demographic, often providing critics with promising subjects for diverse socio-literary case studies, it is perhaps equally important to register and acknowledge the unidimensionality of gender representations in her novels, marked by a striking lack, absence and erasure of the physical body. The gendered, sexual body appears for the most part to be completely invisibilized or, at best, politely ignored in Austen’s novels. The only explicit documentations of the body found in her scrupulously sanitized narratives centre around the detailed and often humorous listings of psychophysical disorders plaguing her characters which are, more often than not, deftly transformed into comic fodder for her readers. Partially drawing upon the Enlightenment discourses on the body, contemporary vitalist medicine and examining select characters from Austen's literary menagerie, this paper attempts to explore an...
Mind-Body Enigma: Hysteria and Hypochondriasis at the Edinburgh Infirmary
New Medical Challenges During the Scottish Enlightenment, 2005
During the eighteenth century, hysteria and hypochondriasis were considered fashionable 'neuroses' caused by an affluent, civilised life-style. In a most unique way, both disorders entwined biological and mental, environmental, social and cultural aspects, creating representations of considerable medical complexity and uncertainty. This essay examines a paradoxical transfer of these traditional nosological labels to a new environment: the voluntary hospital. As observed at the Edinburgh Infirmary, physicians attempted to contextualise both diseases 'from below', branding famished women as hysterics while lethargic men became hypochondriacs. Their institutional progress and management expose the equivocal effects of hospitalisation and contingent nature of medical classifications.