Introduction

Summary

The art of being ill is no easy one to learn, but is practised to perfection by many of the greatest sufferers.

Julia Duckworth Stephen

This study takes as its point of departure the pervasive presence of the sickroom scene in Victorian fiction and claims for such scenes a crucial therapeutic function within Victorian realist narrative and within the society such narratives represent. At their most familiar, scenes of illness are employed as registers of emotional tumult, as crucial stages in self-development, and as rather high-handed plot contrivances to bring events to their desired issue. I hope to demonstrate that for all their predictability these scenes serve, in themselves and in their relations to larger narrative structures, as an adaptive strategy to encode and mediate competing personal, social, and aesthetic imperatives. The sickroom scene, I argue, is staged to call forth (in the breach) the conditions under which both the intelligibility of realist aesthetics and the viability of realism's social ethics of cohesion could be affirmed. It is an essential concern of my study to explore the narrative effects and the cultural implications of a cure for self and narrative incoherence that is repeatedly, often obsessively, figured by the private intensities of a deviant state.

The first chapter suggests the range of meanings conveyed by illness and ministration in early and mid-Victorian England and situates the sickroom scene within the context of contemporary mores and aesthetic preferences. The next three chapters concentrate on the narrative effects of the sickroom strategy as they intersect with the particular concerns and emphases of individual authors. And a final chapter briefly traces the ways in which late Victorian fiction reshapes the sickroom for its own purposes and in the process undoes its recuperative compromise.