5 - Afterword

Summary

The fate of the sickroom scene as literary convention and code was tied to the generic exigencies of the realist mode that made it requisite – the obligation to find and assert affirmative links between circumstance and consciousness, between self and society, between beginnings, middles, and ends. Illness and its succor provided a fragile organic link between felt oppositions, while doubling as the sign of what in fact could neither be accommodated nor redressed within the moderating tonalities of realist discourse. The explanatory malady conjured by Mr. Utterson in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde could provide shelter from the exorbitant alarms inscribed in Hyde's baffling deformities by yielding itself to known remedies and consolations. The unendurable agonies of loss, of self-estrangement, of alienation, or even of physical pain itself could be figured within the sickroom and then assuaged by the hallucinated appurtenances of cushioned beds, basins of weak tea, familial intimacies, and lavish kindness. If there was pain, there was reward, if there was loneliness, there was sanctuary, if there was loss there was restitution, if there was confusion, there was clarification – but until inner necessities conformed with outer circumstances – a realist requirement – the sickroom remained the necessary venue for the representation of such harmonies.

According to Harriet Martineau, her own emergence from the sickroom was enabled by a newly discovered law of nature which restored the harmony between her constitution and its environment. During the course of the century, however, the search for the grounds of continuity sanctioned by natural law ended in the exploration of inevitable disjunction. Separation, which in the sickroom scenes was a provisional condition pending a cure, became itself the newly discovered law of nature.