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Summary

ILLNESS

Susan Sontag argues that in nineteenth-century literature, tuberculosis (TB) was ‘the preferred way of giving death a meaning – an edifying, refining disease’. Because it involves progressive emaciation, it lent itself to aesthetic treatment as a gradual transfiguration of the body. Tubercular children feature in Dickens (Smike in Nicholas Nickleby (1839), Paul in Dombey and Son (1848)), whereas in the French literature of the period, the victims tend to be young women: Alexandre Dumas's La Dame aux camélias (1852) and the Goncourt brothers’ Renée Mauperin (1864). The rise of modern medicine in the late nineteenth century, combined with the spread of Social Darwinism, led to scientific attempts to improve public health via public baths and sanitation. In Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons (Ottsy i dety, 1862) Basarov dies of septicemia. In the dramas of naturalism, illness serves as a metaphor for inherited or moral guilt, for example Ibsen's Ghosts (Gengangere, 1881), where Oswald Alving's syphilis reflects his own illicit SEXUALITY and that of his father, and in An Enemy of the People (En folkefiende, 1882), where the contamination of the baths indicates the corruption of the townspeople. Gerhart Hauptmann's Before Sunrise (Vor Sonnenaufgang, 1889) examines hereditary alcoholism, and Elsa Bernstein's Twilight (Dämmerung, 1893) features a girl with a chronic eye condition, which becomes a metaphor for moral blindness. Max Nordau's cultural case history DEGENERATION (Entartung, 1892) denounced the decadence of the modern age in general and of modern artists in particular. This work's influence was so great that Bernard Shaw was compelled to publish a polemical response to Nordau (The Sanity of Art, 1908).

Modernist fiction often bears comparison with medical case histories. Franz Kafka's illness, TB, came to define his sense of self, and his short stories are littered with diseased bodies, as in Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung, 1915), where Gregor Samsa's insect body is diseased, and A Hunger Artist (Ein Hungerkünstler, 1922), which alludes to the emaciation of TB patients. PSYCHOANALYSIS relates physical symptoms to disturbances of sexuality. This same connection is evident in André Gide's The Immoralist (L’Immoraliste, 1902), in which the main protagonist's tubercular problems are gradually alleviated by his homoerotic encounters in Tunisia.