Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women's Popular Novels

218 Pages·2005·11.979 MB·English

by  Pamela K. Gilbert

Popular fiction in mid-Victorian Britain was regarded as both
feminine and diseased. Critical articles of the time on fiction and on
the body and disease offer convincing evidence that reading was
metaphorically allied with eating, contagion, and sex. Anxious
critics traced the infection of the imperial, healthy body of
masculine elite culture by "diseased" popular fiction, especially
novels by women.
This book discusses works by three novelists - M. E. Braddon,
Rhoda Broughton, and "Ouida" - within this historical context. In
each case, the comparison of an early, "sensation" novel against a
later work shows how generic categorization worked in the context
of social concerns to contain anxiety and limit interpretive possibili-
ties. Within the texts themselves, references to contemporary
critical and medical literatures resist or exploit mid-Victorian
concepts of health, nationality, class, and the body.
Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2009
Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2009
CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY
LITERATURE AND CULTURE II
DISEASE, DESIRE, AND THE
BODY IN VICTORIAN WOMEN'S
POPULAR NOVELS
Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2009
CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY
LITERATURE AND CULTURE
General editors
Gillian Beer, University of Cambridge
Catherine Gallagher, University of California, Berkeley
Editorial board
Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck College, London
Terry Eagleton, University of Oxford
Leonore Davidoff, University of Essex
D. A. Miller, Harvard University
J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine
Mary Poovey, The Johns Hopkins University
Elaine Showalter, Princeton University
Nineteenth-century British literature and culture have been rich fields for
interdisciplinary studies. Since the turn of the twentieth century, scholars and
critics have tracked the intersections and tensions between Victorian literature
and the visual arts, politics, social organization, economic life, technical innova-
tions, scientific thought — in short, culture in its broadest sense. In recent years,
theoretical challenges and historiographical shifts have unsettled the assump-
tions of previous scholarly syntheses and called into question the terms of older
debates. Whereas the tendency in much past literary critical interpretation was
to use the metaphor of culture as "background," feminist, Foucauldian, and
other analyses have employed more dynamic models that raise questions of
power and of circulation. Such developments have reanimated the field.
This series aims to accommodate and promote the most interesting work
being undertaken on the frontiers of the field of nineteenth-century literary
studies: work which intersects fruitfully with other fields of study such as history,
or literary theory, or the history of science. Comparative as well as interdisci-
plinary approaches are welcome.
A complete list of titles published will be found at the end of the book.
Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2009
DISEASE, DESIRE, AND THE
BODY IN VICTORIAN WOMEN'S
POPULAR NOVELS
PAMELA K. GILBERT
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2009
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521593236
©Pamela K.Gilbert 1997
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 1997
This digitally printed first paperback version 2005
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Gilbert, Pamela K.
Disease, desire, and the body in Victorian women's popular novels / Pamela K. Gilbert.
p. cm. - (Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture; 11)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0 521 59323 9 (hardback)
1. English fiction — 19th century — History and criticism.
2. Women — Great Britain — Books and reading — History — 19th century.
3. Literature and diseases — Great Britain — History — 19th century.
4. Literature and society - Great Britain - History - 19th century.
5. Women and literature - Great Britain - History - 19th century.
6. Popular literature - Great Britain - History and criticism.
7. English fiction — Women authors — History and criticism.
8. Sensationalism in literature. 9. Body, Human, in literature.
10. Diseases in literature. 11. Desire in literature. I. Title.
II. Series.
PR878.W6G55 1997
823'.8099287-dc21 97-7584 CIP
ISBN-13 978-0-521-59323-6 hardback
ISBN-10 0-521-59323-9 hardback
ISBN-13 978-0-521-02207-1 paperback
ISBN-10 0-521-02207-X paperback
Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2009
Contents
Acknowledgments page viii
Introduction i
1 "In the body of the text": metaphors of
reading and the body 15
2 Genre: the social construction of sensation 58
3 M. E. Braddon: sensational realism 92
4 Rhoda Broughton: anything but love 113
5 Ouida: romantic exchange 140
Afterword: the other Victorians 182
Notes 189
Bibliography 198
Index 206
Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2009
Acknowledgments
I am happy to have the opportunity to thank some of the many people
who have made this book possible. James Kincaid, its first reader, has
given ample encouragement and profoundly useful criticism. Ronald
Gottesman has also been a sharp-eyed and helpful critic. My colleagues
at the University of Wisconsin, Parkside have been generous in their
support of my research. Of my email and conference correspondents, I
would particularly like to thank Talia Shaffer, Devoney Looser, and
Marlene Tromp. Many more public fora of collegial discussion have
contributed also to my thinking; I would like especially to thank all the
participants in VICTORIA-L and the participants in Mary Poovey's
summer seminar at West Virginia in 1994. After the principal work on
this project was completed, there was also the material, emotional and
intellectual support of the NEH, the Center for Twentieth Century
Studies, Michael Levenson and the participants in the 1995 NEH
seminar, which helped me through the demanding process of readying
the work for publication; in this, I would also like to thank Ann
Cvetkovich and Gillian Beer. Finally, family and friends have all kept
me healthy and happy, including Angela Geitner, Dana Loewy, and
John Whalen-Bridge. Thank you all, and especially Meryl Strichartz.
Portions of this book have been published elsewhere in different form.
Part of chapter 3 appeared in Essays in Literature (1996) and passages from
chapter 1 appeared in LIT: Literature/Interpretation/Theory (1997).
Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2009
Introduction
Hayden White, among others, observes that the narration of history is
determined more by the needs of the historian than intrinsic properties
of historical data.1 Regarding the burgeoning critical fascination with
transgression and boundaries, as evidenced by the work of Peter Stally-
brass and Allon White, Donna Haraway and many others,2 it is justifi-
able to ask, not only why boundary transgression is such a central
metaphor in the periods we study, but why it is such a central - almost
obsessive - concern to us now. We see it, most obviously, in the
discourse on AIDS. Yet it is prevalent everywhere, from abortion rights
(where does the individual body end and the social body begin?) to
information security (in what consists the boundary between private and
public?). In the rapidly shifting international political climate, as in the
multicultural US, we see it in the obsessive attempts to categorize and
rename, adding strings of adjectives in an attempt to "get it right," only
to discover that identity is fluid and multiple, and resists naming. From
national boundaries under dispute to the attempts of multinational
corporations to disentangle their agendas from other interests, from
feminist attempts to speak for "all women" to the efforts of women of
color and lesbians to be heard as distinct, but still collective voices,
identity politics consist of a quest to distinguish the Self from the Other,
only to discover a multitude of others and a myriad of selves. In a global
economy and ecology, wherein cultural and communicative structures
become ever more immediate and diffuse, the terms "national" and
"individual" lose meaning as rapidly as do terms like "private" or
"woman." Perhaps this is why such labels are so highly charged. In the
loss of these "clear" definitions (which after all were never really all that
clear), we fear the loss of an identity that, however inadequately, worked
for many of us. As these easy distinctions are divested of their perceived
clarity, and therefore, their utility, they are invested with all the energy
of a nostalgia for a loss not yet fully actualized, but dimly foreseen.
Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2009