Illness, Nursing, and Affect in Victorian Literature and Culture Ba~ak Demirhan A THESIS SUBM

272 Pages·2012·4.29 MB·English

RICE UNIVERSITY
Food for Sympathy:
Illness, Nursing, and Affect in Victorian Literature and Culture
by
Ba~ak Demirhan
A THESIS SUBMITTED
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE
REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE
Doctor of Philosophy
APPROVED, THESIS COMMITTEE:
Helena Michie, Professor of English, Agnes
Cullen Arnold Chair in Humanities
~
Robert L. Patten, Lynette S. Autrey
Professor in Humanities
in History
HOUSTON, TEXAS
MAY 2010
ABSTRACT
Food for Sympathy:
Illness, Nursing, and Affect in Victorian Literature and Culture
by
Basak Demirhan
The profuse illness and nursing narratives in Victorian texts frequently feature
sympathy for physical suffering as a major cultural and literary trope. In a wide
variety of texts ranging from social reform writing to autobiographies, from novels to
poetry, physical suffering was often closely associated with a specific cultural form of
affect called sympathy. While earlier epistemologies of sympathy developed by
Scottish Enlightenment writers defined it as a free agent that autonomously flowed
through individuals, toward the mid-century, this model left its place to formulations
of sympathy as an alignment of affect between clearly separated subjects that could be
achieved through sympathetic imagination. This epistemological and cultural shift is
strongly apparent in both fictional and nonfinctional depictions of sympathy for the
sick. Critical works on the nineteenth-century culture of illness and medical care have
tended to focus on the community-building functions of the sickroom. However, the
illness-nursing dyad constitutes an affective structure through which some less
examined aspects of sympathy for physical suffering, such as the alterity and abjection
of bodies in pain, can be explored. Descriptions of physical suffering usually followed
certain narrative conventions that positioned the sufferers and their nurses as objects
or subjects of sympathy. This particular object-subject relationship facilitated the
construction, negotiation, and redefinition of collective identities like nationality,
gender, and class. While nursing memoirs and conduct manuals adhered to
conventional ideals of femininity, they also expanded definitions of feminity and
maternalism to include competence. In their war nursing memoirs, unprivileged or
marginalized women who worked as nurses were able to inscribe themselves as
professional women and national subjects by contributing to the national narratives of
the war with soothing narratives of their nursing experience. In Bildungsromans, their
sympathy for disabled male companions enabled socially and economically
disenfranchised male protagonists to reconstruct wounded masculinity as a hegemonic
masculinity model. Destabilized social identities, on the other hand, culminated in
novelistic examples of resistance to sympathy on the level of character or narrative,
which the authors used as a representational strategy to approach dilemmas for which
there are no solutions.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
There are many people who made this dissertation possible and because of
whom my graduate experience has been one which I will cherish forever.
lowe my deepest gratitude to my advisor Helena Michie for her unfailing ability
to engage directly with the core issues in my writing, for having faith in my project,
for her practical approach to writing and research, her sense of humor, her patience,
and her genuine kindness. I am truly blessed to have her in my life.
I am grateful to Robert L. Patten and Martin Wiener for being such insightful
and helpful readers. Professor Wiener is the historian that any historicist literary
scholar would want to have as a reader. Professor Patten deserves special thanks for
his dedication, enriching comments, and personal encouragement which helped me
greatly during each stage of my project.
This thesis would not have been possible without the academic excellence and
generous support of Rice University English Department. The first two chapters of my
dissertation took shape as a result of my archival research at the Well come Library of
History of Medicine which was made possible by the Margaret Ostrum Research
Grant. I would also like to acknowledge the Victorian Studies Seminars, the Dickens
Project, and the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexualities for
contributing significantly to my intellectual and academic development.
My parents Cigdem Demirhan and Izzet Demirhan have been a source of
encouragement, guidance, and inspiration all my life. I warmly appreciate their
support and understanding.
It is a pleasure to thank my graduate student cohort for making graduate school a
very special period of my life with their love and wit. I am especially thankful to
Elizabeth Womack, Victoria Ford Smith, Joy Pasini, Jeffrey Jackson, and Michael
Meeuwis for generously sparing their time to copy-edit my chapters; to Ayse
Celikkol, Amelia Scholtz, Sophie Weeks, Molly Slattery, Vica Papp, Ipek Martinez,
and Linda Evans for always being ready with a listening ear, stimulating conversation,
good advice, and delicious food.
CONTENTS
Introduction ..................................................................................... 1
Chapter 1 Suffering and Sympathy in the Crimean War Nursing Memoirs .......... 32
Chapter 2 The Politics of Sympathy: Mary Seacole and the Other "Other" Nurses 106
Chapter 3 Wounded Masculinity and the Power of Sympathy in Nicholas Nickleby
and John Halifax, Gentleman .............................................................. 145
Chapter 4 Hidden Sickrooms and Resistance to Sympathy ........................... 212
Bibliography ................................................................................. 250
Introduction
In Life in the Sickroom (1844), Harriet Martineau wrote that: "[i]f sorrow
teaches us that nothing is more universal than sympathy, long and irremediable
sickness proves plainly, that nothing is more various than its kinds and degrees; or it
may be, than the manifestations of the sympathetic grief which is shared by all".l
Martineau makes an important claim that sympathy for someone in physical
suffering-whether pain, illness or disability-manifests complex interpersonal
interactions. Sympathetic identification with someone in pain can prompt one to
cringe at the sight of bodily damage, or it could evoke humanitarian feelings for the
sufferer. It can signify middle-class sensibility, point to the permeability of the
boundaries between self and the other, be imagined as a channel for contagion of
disease and feeling, or function in consolidating social hierarchies between the
sufferers and their caretakers. The nature of sympathy can be debated, but there is no
doubt that manifestations of sympathetic emotions are shaped by medical training,
expectations of the sufferers or their families, and larger social forces. So are the
sufferers' responses to sympathy.
The abundant scenes of sickness and sympathy in nineteenth-century fiction
attest that illness and sympathy presented a lens through which social forms and
individual identities could be negotiated. Illness scenes are often pivotal points in
novels. A nursing plot can overthrow or reconsolidate the existing power dynamics
within a family. An episode of illness can initiate an adoption plot or finalize a
marriage plot in a novel. The physical proximity involved in nursing enables
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characters to express their suppressed sexual desires or create a language for
homoerotic desire.
In this project, I will analyze fictional and nonfictional narratives of physical
suffering and sympathy which acknowledge these components. I examine canonical
and non-canonical texts written between 1830 and 1880, including nursing manuals,
memoirs, and novels. I develop a new language to talk about sympathy that accounts
for alterity, abjection, apathy, and resistance to sympathy as inherent components of
these affective structures. Rather than instinctive and spontaneous compassion for a
sufferer, sympathy meant, for Victorians, a conscious process of achieving emotional
alignment by overcoming negative components of affective relationships such as
alterity, apathy, and abjection. This distinction has significant implications in terms of
the power of affect in forming subjectivities. These relational structures, which I will
call structures of sympathy, position individuals as objects and subjects of sympathy.
My individual chapters show how objects or subjects of sympathy construct their
masculinity, national identity, class identity.
One of the overarching goals of this project is to locate our contemporary
understanding of sympathy in the Victorian period. Victorian sympathy can be placed
in a historical trajectory of emotions ranging from Early Modern passion to
eighteenth-century sensibility. Like "passion" and "sensibility," it is a cultural
framework for describing affect, and it is reflective of its period's understanding of
subjectivity, alterity, and intersubjective relations. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
writings on affect manifest a change in the definition of sympathy. These writings
show that David Hume's notion of moral sentiment as a free agent that flows from one
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individual to another left its place to Adam Smith's formulation of sympathy as an
alignment of affect that is achieved between clearly separated subjects, through the
sympathetic imagination.
Illness, pain, and disability create a specific alienation between the sufferers
and their observers, as well as self-alienation in the sufferers. While writings on
sympathy for the sick elaborate on the compassion evoked by others' suffering, texts
written by invalids aver that severe illness or long-term suffering endows the sufferers
with a distinct epistemological and empirical perspective, which is not available to
healthy people. In contrast to categories of subjectivity like class, illness and pain pose
boundaries that can only be crossed with the help of the imagination and culturally
determined forms of affective responses.
Galenic medicine, which privileged direct observation of the body and
dissection in medical training, construed the human body as an object of medical
study. This further affirmed the sick body's alienation and isolation. In the late
eighteenth century, Scottish physicians in Edinburgh, a major center for medical
research at the time, developed principles of medical ethics that valued sympathy for
the sick. In "Medical Ethics' Appropriation of Moral Philosophy: The Case of the
Sympathetic and the Unsympathetic Physician," Robert Baker and Laurence
McCullough show that the physicians who promoted the image of the sympathetic
physician were in direct conversations with David Hume himself. A Professor of
Medicine at the University of Edinburgh named John Gregory (1724-1773), who also
gave moral philosophy lessons, developed Hume's model of trans personal sympathy
as a model of medical ethics and disseminated these ideas through his lectures and
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books. "Gregory shared with Scottish philosophers the view that morality was
grounded not in reason or the intellect, but in the human capacity of sympathy with
one's fellows- i.e. our ability, in some sense, to feel the suffering of others" (Baker
and McCullough, 9). The writers claim that "by the mid-nineteenth century,
Gregory's medicalized Scottish moral philosophy had become the conventional
wisdom of the British medical school lecturer and of British medicine generally." This
new medical ethics was disseminated in the U.S. by his student Benjamin Rush and all
over the European continent through translations of his works (Baker and
McCullough, 12). These physicians' endeavors to reintroduce sympathy into medical
practice point to the prevalence of Galenic medicine and the distance it created
between the medicalized body and the scientific community.
Philosophical theories of moral sentiment underlie some practices in
professional nursing as well. I devote a large space to Florence Nightingale, who was
a pioneer and cultural icon of professional nursing. I show how her principles of
nursing manifest the contemporary theories of affect. I also discuss the narratives of
nurses, who adopted alternative approaches to nursing and sympathy for the sick,
through which they reaffirmed or reconstructed their patients' and their own
subjectivities. Then, I turn to novels and discuss how fictional representations of
physical suffering incorporate the complexities of sympathizing with the sick. I show
how structures of sympathy enable characters to reestablish their identities at the
intersection of class and gender.
In response to critical works on the nineteenth-century culture of illness and
medical care, which have tended to focus on the community-building functions of the
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