The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being IllIn this exploration of the significance of illness in the Victorian literary imagination Miriam Bailin maps the cultural implications and narrative effects of the sickroom as an important symbolic space in nineteenth-century life and literature. Dr Bailin draws on non-fictional accounts of illness by Julia Stephen, Harriet Martineau and others to illuminate the presentation of illness and ministration, patient and nurse, in the fiction of Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens and George Eliot. She argues that the sickroom functions as an imagined retreat from conflicts in Victorian society, and that fictional representations of illness serve to resolve both social conflict and aesthetic tension. Her concentration on the sickroom scene as a compositional response to insistent formal as well as social problems yields fresh readings of canonical works and approaches to the constituent elements of Victorian realist narrative. |
Contents
varieties of pain | 48 |
impossible existences | 79 |
separateness and communication | 109 |
Afterword | 137 |
Bibliography | 159 |
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Common terms and phrases
assertion becomes Bleak House body Carol Christ Caroline Caroline's characters Charles Dickens Charlotte Brontë conflict consciousness convalescence cultural cure Daniel Deronda death debility delirium Dempster desire Dickens's disease Eros and Psyche Essays Esther Eugene Eugene's experience expression father female fever feverish figure Florence Nightingale George Eliot Harriet Martineau Helstone Hereafter cited husband ideal identity illness imaginative impulse infirmity inner instance invalid Jane Eyre Janet Janet's Repentance Jenny Lady Little Dorrit lives Lizzie London Lucy male marriage Martineau Master Humphrey Master Humphrey's moral mother narrative narrator nature Nell's Nineteenth-Century Fiction novel numbers nurse and patient Old Curiosity Old Curiosity Shop one's Oxford University Press pain passion physical Pryor realism relations representation represented restless Robert role romance Romola seems sense separation sexual Shirley sick sickroom scene social society suffering tenderness Tennyson Victorian fiction Victorian sickroom Villette wandering woman women York