Chapter 4 - Illness and the Novel Aesthetics

Summary

For nineteenth-century British novels, illness did not exist just within the individual body; illness occurred at the level of communities. Responding to and building upon contemporary medicine’s focus on the social contexts of disease, novels of this era enlarge their plot structures to include more characters, more relationships, and more scopes of action than existed in novels before this century. In nineteenth-century novels, the collective experience of illness can be as intimate as the bonds between a sufferer and a caregiver or as diffuse as a global pandemic. In any case, illness revealed one’s embeddedness in larger structures of meaning. The formal characteristics of Victorian novels offer ways for critical medical humanities today to envision the social ties involved in the illness experience.